Yrsa Sigurdardottir - Ashes To Dust

‘Isn’t it exactly the right time to do it?’ asked Bella, flicking her cigarette into a barrel a short distance away. ‘She’s sure to be vulnerable after losing her daughter, and ready to open up.’

Thóra shook her head. ‘No, that’s no use. If she’s in shock she might refuse to speak to me. I’ll ask Markus’s brother about Alda’s family tomorrow evening, and if he knows anything he can maybe tell me how I ought to proceed. Hopefully he’ll know how her mother is holding up.’

Bella didn’t seem to be listening to her. ‘Do you remember the cemetery we drove past?’ she asked suddenly. ‘With the arched gate?’

‘Yes,’ replied Thóra, wondering where Bella was going with this. Did she want to go and look around the graveyard?

‘Could the bodies be from there?’the other woman asked. ‘Maybe a relative or someone else had been trying to save the bodies from disappearing in the eruption? The cemetery was buried and dug up later. Maybe whoever disinterred the bodies wasn’t sure that would happen?’

Thóra looked at her secretary in surprise. ‘Digging up corpses just to put them in the basement of a house that was going to go the same way as the cemetery? I highly doubt it.’

Bella shrugged. ‘Maybe whoever did it regretted it, or didn’t have a chance to move the bodies again.’

Thóra wanted to put a stop to this idle speculation, but couldn’t think of any clever way, so she just said,‘Shouldn’t we get going? I’m happy to get an early night, so that we can get plenty done tomorrow.’

Bella looked at her watch, thenregarded Thóra quizzically. ‘Are you kidding? I haven’t gone to bed this early since I was three years old.’

Thóra’s cheeks reddened slightly. ‘I’m not necessarily talking about going to sleep right away. I need to phone my children and a few other people first.’

Bella shrugged again. ‘Suit yourself.’ She looked around. ‘I’m going to go for a wander and see if I can’t find a bar or two.’

Thóra thought this was a bad idea, but knew perfectly well that she had no say in how her employees spent their free time. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ she said with false cheer. ‘Tomorrow I’m going to visit the archaeologists overseeing the excavations, and then we should stop by the archive. And then you never know what might come up. In other words, we’ve got a busy day.’

‘Don’t worry about me,’said Bella, as she set off in the opposite direction from their hotel.‘I’m not the one who’s always late.’

Thóra couldn’t help letting Bella’s retort get under her skin. You could say what you liked about her secretary, but she always got to work on time. Thóra, in contrast, was usually late because it took so long to get herselfand the children ready in the mornings. Although the situation was far from ideal when she only had her own children at home, it was a sight worse when her grandson and future daughter-in-law were added to the mix. ‘You realize that you can’t count this pub crawl as a company expense,’ she called after the girl. ‘The accountant will refuse to pay it.’ No sooner were the words out than she regretted them deeply. Could she have thought of a more ridiculous comeback?

Bella did not turn around, but as she walked away she lifted one hand in the air and gave Thóra the finger.

Thóra was furious to find Bella at breakfast ahead of her. The secretary had taken a seat by the window and on the table in front of her were plates piled up with high-calorie foods. She had such a smug look on her face that Thóra briefly considered taking a seat elsewhere, but she swallowed her pride and sat down opposite Bella.

‘Well,’ she said as she pulled the coffee pot towards her, ‘did you have fun last night?’ She herself had gone straight to her room and phoned home, since her parents had gone out of their way to house-sit and babysit in her absence. This arrangement was much less trouble than taking the whole gang over to their house, including Orri and his mother. Thóra’s father was in high spirits having set up camp in her garage, which he’d been itching to fix up for a very long time although her mother hadn’t been too keen on the idea. In her opinion everything at Thóra’s had gone to the dogs: the filter in the washing machine was blocked, a flood of clothing poured from the wardrobes every time she opened them in search of an outfit for Sóley, and in the farthest corner of the fridge there was a jar of jam that had expired last century. Thóra therefore had to endure a half-hour lecture about what a terrible housewife she was, but she didn’t need her mother to tell her that. At the end of the call she’d been allowed to speak to Sóley, who told her happily that she was wearing Gylfi’s huge socks because

Grandma couldn’t find any of hers. Gylfi then came on and muttered into the receiver that she had to come home -Grandma was driving him completely crazy and Sigga was depressed. Before hanging up Thóra promised him that she would fix everything; she’d been affected by the thought of her daughter- in-law’s depression. She turned on the television and flicked through the channels without finding anything that appealed to her. She ended up watching men in sunglasses play poker, but finally fell asleep before figuring out how the game worked.

‘Crazy,’ said Bella, and she took a large bite of bread and jam. She’d spread the jam so thickly that it was more like jam and bread, causing one corner of the slice to break off from the sheer weight and leave a purple jam stain on her chin. She was completely unperturbed, wiping off the jam with her index finger and sticking it in her mouth. ‘I met some great people.’

‘Good,’ said Thóra, pouring milk into her coffee. ‘Were these people the same age as you?’

‘I didn’t ask for ID,’ said Bella, lifting her own coffee cup to her lips. She regarded Thóra over the rim and wiggled her eyebrows. ‘I slept with someone.’

Thóra choked on her coffee.‘What did you say?’ she spluttered.

‘You heard,’ said Bella proudly.‘It was brilliant. Sailors really know what they’re doing.’

‘Sailorsf’ said Thóra, still aghast. ‘Were there more than one?’ How could this girl get herself a bedmate, or mates, as if it were nothing, when Thóra felt like she herself would have trouble finding an interested party in a men’s prison? Actually, that wasn’t entirely true: more often than not she was the uninterested one, rather than the men she met. Still, she felt irritated.

‘No, it was just the one,’ said Bella. ‘Not for any lack of opportunity – I certainly could have had two.’

Thóra was speechless, and indeed said nothing for the remainder of breakfast. That hardly mattered, because Bella gave her such a comprehensive account of the events of the previous night that Thóra wouldn’t have been able to get a word in edgeways.

Dís hid her head in her hands.‘What do we do now?’ She was still recovering from the shock of finding Alda’s body. The first night after the discovery she had lain in bed, exhausted but unable to fall asleep. She kept wondering if her colleague Agúst could have overlooked some clue that the nurse had felt ill. All of their interactions with Alda that she could remember had to do with work, the next operation or the state of the little storeroom. If there had been any clues, they weren’t making themselves known. In the early hours of morning, just before sleep was finally merciful to her, she comforted herself with the thought that time healed all wounds. But mental scars took much longer to heal than physical ones, and it wasn’t getting easier to come to terms with Alda’s death as time went by. If anything, Dís thought that she felt worse now than the day she’d discovered the nurse’s body. She knew she’d remember that moment forever; after reporting the death, she had waited in the bedroom. In hindsight it would have been wiser to wait down in the living room or the kitchen, or even out in her car, but at the time she’d felt it would be disrespectful to the deceased, so instead she had sat down at the little dressing table at the end of the bed. Barely ten minutes had passed between the end of the emergency call and the ambulance arriving, but those ten minutes had been the longest of her life. For most of that time she had sat stiffly looking at Alda’s body, at the staring eyes directed at the doorway as if there were some great truth to be found there, the gaping mouth that appeared to be contorted in a scream of anguish. Judging from the evidence on the bedside table this was a suicide, although the appearance of the body suggested otherwise. Dís was not familiar enough with pathology or forensic medicine to know how a body should look after overdosing on the type of drugs by the bed, but if the pills had killed Alda it was clear that she hadn’t chosen well. Her fists were clenched, and to Dís it looked as though her usually flawless cheeks had been scratched deeply enough to draw blood, enough blood to form the dark pool in which her head lay.