Ashes To Dust

Chapter Five

Markus dragged his hands frantically through his hair. This was not the first time that Thóra had sat in her office with a desperate client, so she knew how to deal with it. It was of little use to tell him everything would be all right, that he needn’t have any worries, this would soon be finished, and so on. Such talk was often far from the truth and only postponed the inevitable. They had just come from being questioned by the police, whichcould have gone worse, but it could also have gone better. Markus had responded frostily when they’d requested biological samples from him, but in the end he calmed down and gave the police samples of both saliva and hair.

‘The positive side of this, Markus, is that they asked you very little about your previous relations with this Alda. Either they think her death occurred naturally, or else they don’t suspect you of having caused it.’ She looked at him sternly. ‘The negative side, on the other hand, is that now Alda cannot substantiate your explanation of the head in the box.’

‘You don’t say,’ growled Markus.

Thóra paid no heed to his sarcasm.‘Are you absolutely certain that you two never discussed this by email or in others’ hearing? For instance, your co-workers’?‘

Markus managed a company that dealt in components for ship engines and machinery, and although Thóra did not understand anything about how such businesses worked, she knew it was going well and that he had several people working for him. They seemed to be very conscientious employees, because Markus appeared to be anything but indispensable, and had never had to postpone or cancel a meeting with Thóra or anyone else involved in the case because of work.

‘No one heard anything,’ answered Markus determinedly.

‘Alda and I spoke mainly by phone and I do that in private. We met fairly irregularly, almost never with anyone else present, and we didn’t discuss this topic in the few instances when there were others around. And I only use email for work. I’m not one of those people who gets emails with jokes or pictures of kittens.’

It had never crossed Thóra’s mind that he was. ‘And there were no witnesses to your conversations?’

Markus shook his head, disgruntled.‘No.’

‘When you told the police that Alda had rung you the night In lore we went to the Islands, they were extremely excited. Considering how much they asked you about that telephone call, it must have occurred shortly before she died.’Thóra flicked through the copy of Markus’s statement that she’d been given following the questioning. ‘You said that Alda had sounded peculiar, was unusually bad-tempered and distracted, and you’d thought she’d either been anxious about your visit to the basement the next morning or that someone was with her, making it impossible for her to speak freely with you. besides that, you were driving, so you weren’t able to speak to her for very long.’

I just got that feeling. She didn’t say anything to suggest that there was someone with her – it just sounded a bit as if there was.‘

‘The reason I’m asking is that perhaps someone overheard this final conversation of yours and could confirm she’d mentioned your visit to the basement. That could help us, especially if she mentioned the box and said something about having given it to you.’ Thóra smiled encouragingly at Markus.

He scowled. ‘Of course I don’t remember the conversation in detail, but I’m fairly sure she didn’t say any such thing. She asked me not to mess this up and said that I should take a bag with me in case the box had rotted.’ He shuddered. ‘She could have given me a better idea of what it was that I was going down there to get. I don’t know how she ever thought I could put the head in a bag and walk out of there with it as if nothing had ever happened. I wouldn’t have even been able to touch it.’

‘Considering how much you’d done for her already, without asking any questions, she doubtless thought you’d just continue in the same vein,’ replied Thóra.

‘I was just a kid,’ said Markus heavily. ‘Things have changed since then.’ He straightened up in his chair, and she could not deny that he did not look like anyone’s fool. He undeniably possessed a degree of masculine charm. His face was anything but delicate, its strong lines almost coarse. Thóra suspected that he dyed his hair, since there was not a single grey to be seen even though he was nearly fifty years old. This suggested he was preoccupied with his appearance, which fitted with the impeccable and obviously expensive clothing he always wore.

‘Yes, I understand that,’Thóra said. ‘But maybe she hadn’t actually ever realized it.’ She put down the report. ‘I’m going to ask the police department if they have any information about whether Alda had visitors that night. Maybe we’ll be lucky.’ She looked at Markus. ‘Of course the fact remains that you say you didn’t know about the corpses down there. What are we supposed to do about that?’ She leaned back in her chair. ‘The only person who objected when they were going to excavate the house was you. One would assume that whoever put the bodies there would have tried to prevent the excavation in one way or another.’ She thought carefully about how to phrase what came next. ‘It’s my understanding that your parents are still alive. Could one of them have encouraged you in your efforts to block the excavation?’

Markus stared silently at Thóra for a moment. ‘If you’re suggesting that they had something to do with this, you’re out of your mind.’

‘You didn’t answer my question,’ Thóra said calmly. ‘Did they encourage you or not?’

Markus smiled bitterly. ‘My father has Alzheimer’s. He’s in no shape either to encourage or discourage anyone. Mum, on the other hand, has all her spark-plugs firing, and her feelings about the excavation were the opposite of mine. She was even really excited about it. She was hoping to recover some fine dinnerware from the house. Even though Dad had managed to get most of what we owned out of the house before it disappeared, he still left quite a few things behind. He hadn’t given much thought to the dinnerware.’

Thóra nodded. The man had no doubt put a lot of effort into saving the home’s stereo system and such like. Of course, Markus’ mother’s excitement about the excavation did not rule out her husband as a suspect; he could very well have put the bodies there without his wife knowing. ‘Someone put the bodies there, that much is certain. Does anyone come to mind?’

Markus shook his head. ‘I don’t actually remember every single person who lived on the Islands at that time, but it’s completely ridiculous to think that any of the people I do remember could have killed those three. Everyone here was normal; just your typical Icelandic fishermen’s families.’Markus started running his hands through his hair again. ‘My best memories are of my friends, and naturally they were all just dumb kids like me.’

‘Are you absolutely certain your father couldn’t have had something to do with this?’ asked Thóra.‘It was at your home, and I find it unlikely that someone would have broken in there to hide bodies.’

‘Broken in?’ echoed Markus.‘They wouldn’t have needed to break in. It was all unlocked. People were asked to leave their houses open so that the rescue crews could go in and out of them as they needed.’ He brightened. ‘Naturally, the place filled up with people arriving from the mainland after the night of the eruption. I don’t know any figures, but the rescue crews needed a lot of manpower and the majority of those who lent a hand weren’t from the Islands. Our house wasn’t buried immediately.’

Thóra considered this for a moment.‘So you think it more likely that one of those people put the bodies there?’

Markus shrugged. ‘What do I know? The only thing that’s completely clear to me is that I had nothing to do with it.’

Thóra hoped that this was indeed the case. It was always more comfortable to fight for a just cause. ‘We might be getting ahead of ourselves with this kind of speculation. We should wait for the results of the forensic autopsy on the bodies and head.’ She smiled weakly at Markus. How was an autopsy performed on a head? ‘Who knows, maybe these people simply died of natural causes or suffocated in the basement. Wasn’t that what happened in the only death to occur during the eruption?’

‘No one died in the eruption,’said Markus angrily, almost as if he were defending the eruption’s good name.

‘Really?’ said Thóra.‘I always thought that one person died. And in a basement, no less.’

‘Oh, him,’ said Markus.‘That doesn’t count. He was an alcoholic.’

The confused look on Thóra’s face forced him to explain this a little better.‘He went down into the pharmacy basement looking for spirits. The eruption had nothing to do with it.’

Except that the poison gases which killed him came from the eruption – but Thóra had no desire to waste time explaining this. She picked up the report again and leafed through it.‘This is odd. Am I right in thinking that you’ve never been asked whether you thought you’d seen any of the dead people before?’

Markus jerked his head to one side in surprise. ‘They didn’t ask me that because the bodies are hardly in a condition for anyone to be able to identify them. And I couldn’t really see very clearly there in the basement.’

In other words, you think you’ve never seen them before?‘ If it were possible to identify these people, it would be easier to determine what happened to them.

Markus shook his head slowly. ‘No, I’m almost sure I haven’t,’ he said. ‘But as I said, it’s possible that they’re people I knew. I would have to be able to see them again under better conditions, although I doubt that would make any difference.’

Thóra thought of the dried-out, dusty corpses and knew that it would be difficult to identify them except in the lab of a forensic pathologist.

‘They must be foreigners. Even though there are cases of Icelanders vanishing without a trace, it’s out of the question that three people disappeared at the same time without attracting attention.’ She hurriedly corrected herself: ‘Four, I mean.’The head was still so unreal to her that she kept forgetting to count it along with the bodies. She thought for a moment. ‘Maybe they were sailors?’ she asked. ‘They could have belonged to the crew of a wrecked ship.’

‘And how would that crew have ended up in our basement?’ asked Markus, puzzled.

‘Well, that’s another question,’ said Thóra, and smiled at him. ‘We should wait for the autopsy. I suppose the police will call you in again for questioning after that, and after they’ve gone over the medical examiner’s report. Until then I’ll try to find some witnesses or anything else that could possibly support your statement about Alda and the box.’

Markus stood up and snorted. ‘Like that’s going to happen,’ he said sulkily as he left. ‘She was the only one who could possibly have backed me up.’

Thóra tried unsuccessfully to look encouraging. This looked bad; the only hope of Markus getting off scot-free now was if it turned out that the people in the basement had suffocated. Again she had forgotten the head. How in the hell was it possible to explain that?

Stefán put down the phone, closed his eyes and counted to ten. He shook himself. ‘That was the medical examiner,’ he said to the policeman sitting across from him, and pinched himself to keep calm. ‘He doubts that Alda committed suicide. The autopsy revealed several details that need further explanation.’ He paused for a moment. ‘How could you possibly not have investigated anywhere but the bedroom? Are you completely useless when I’m not there?’ He tapped the stack of papers on the table with his index finger for emphasis. The young officer reddened and Stefán wondered whether it was from shame or anger. He continued: ‘How did you leave the scene? Is the house marked in any way that would let the relatives of the deceased know they can’t go roaming about in there, or did you just shut the door and drive away?’

‘Uh,’ said the young police officer, his cheeks even redder.

‘Uh,’ parroted Stefán.‘What does “uh” mean?’

‘We didn’t mark the house in any particular way,’ replied the young man. ‘It looked like suicide. I’ve seen several of them,’ he added, in a slightly more confident tone.

‘Don’t you get arrogant with me,’ hissed Stefán. ‘I couldn’t care less whether you’ve seen three suicides or three thousand. It’s this one particular incident I’m unhappy about, and I’m not about to listen to the medical examiner scold me for the working methods of my men.’ He took a moment to calm down. ‘According to him there are various things lacking: you took almost no photos of the scene and your report on the search of the house doesn’t cover any other room but the bedroom. What’s more, he says that blood is never mentioned in the report, even though the corpse’s injuries suggest there must have been blood present.’

‘ There was blood,’ muttered the young officer, his own face blood-red. ‘There were small pools on both sides of the head, from injuries to the woman’s cheeks and neck.’

‘Oh, now you decide to tell us?’hissed Stefán loudly. ‘You maybe want me to fix the report for you? Something like that was certainly supposed to go in it! I’m so bloody amazed, I’m almost speechless.’ Various words could be used to describe Stefán’s state at that moment, but ‘speechless’was not one of them.

‘We were told that the woman’s injuries were self-inflicted. I think there was blood and skin under her nails.’ The young man straightened up. ‘I want it put on record that the doctor who came with the ambulance ruled this asuicide at the scene. It was also him who deduced this about the blood, and that’s why I didn’t feel there was any reason to write it down in the report. We proceeded with our work under the conviction that this was a suicide, since there was nothing to suggest otherwise.’ He looked curiously at his boss. ‘What exactly was discovered in the autopsy?’

Stefán scowled. ‘It appears she didn’t die of poisoning. The doctor tested her blood and stomach contents for the active ingredient in the drugs found on the bedside table. It wasn’t present in any life-threatening amount.’

The young officer raised his eyebrows.‘Then how did she die?’

Stefán had calmed down completely. He was relieved to hear that a doctor had declared it a suicide at the scene, since this mostly cleared his men of any blame for ruining the case. ‘Of course it’ll probably be necessary to conduct further tests before it’s possible to confirm it, but the doctor thought it most likely that the woman suffocated.’

‘Suffocated?’ echoed the young police officer. ‘Choked?’

Stefán shook his head. ‘It’s still uncertain. The examiner hasn’t ruled out illness as the cause, but he says he wants the home of the deceased searched better in order to determine whether a person or persons unknown might have played a part in her death.’

‘I see,’ said the young man, utterly relieved that Stefán’s disposition appeared to have returned to normal. ‘Our shift is finishing – do you want us to go back there first thing in the morning, or…?’

‘Stefán’s eyes narrowed. ’No. You’ll go now. Immediately.‘ He dared the young man to object by staring directly into his eyes. ’You’ll go over every square centimetre and then write a detailed report, as if you were investigating a murder scene. I want a copy of the report waiting for me on my desk tomorrow morning.‘ He waved his hand at the door. ’I would hurry up if I were you, before your colleagues go home – and you’re left in the lurch.‘ The younger man opened his mouth his to object, but stopped. He walked to the door. When he was standing in the doorway, Stefán added: ’Take note of all the calls to or from her home phone and her mobile. Since she probably died on the Sunday evening, calls from that particular time are naturally the most important.‘

‘Will do,’ replied the young man, with a touch of bitterness in his voice. What a fucking mess. He was tired after a long day and completely ready to throw himself onto the sofa and stare at the television. It wasn’t an attractive thought, having to comb through an entire house in search of God knows what.

‘One other thing,’ called Stefán as the door was closing.

‘Sir?’ The young man stuck his head back through the doorway.

‘I am particularly interested in knowing whether Alda called the mobile phone of Markus Magnusson that same night, and how long the phone call lasted. Understand?’

‘Understood.’

The door closed. Stefán stared at it and thought things over. He knew that he should call his colleague in the Westmann Islands and inform him of these developments, but he really had no desire to do so. It could wait. He was going to go down to the National Hospital, meet the examiner, and have a look at Alda’s body. He stood up. He had to admit it wasn’t just because of his job that he wanted to go there: the examiner had mentioned that the woman had been rather significantly enhanced – a word Stefán couldn’t understand until he got a better explanation for it. Stefán’s wife was always complaining that she wanted to get breast enhancements, so he wanted to see some for himself. Who knew, maybe he would give her the green light if he liked what he saw.