Yrsa Sigurdardottir - Ashes To Dust

‘No,’ replied Hjortur. ‘I don’t remember any such thing. Nor have I given it much thought.’

‘I expect you log and store everything that you find,’ said Thóra. ‘Is there any chance of us being allowed to have a look at those things?’

He shook his head. ‘No, I can’t imagine we’d allow you to do that. The plan is to let the owners of the houses go over the items with us in the later stages and try to reach an agreement on what happens to them,’ he said, pushing his empty coffee cup aside.‘The idea is to set up an exhibition of these items on the site of the excavations, and hopefully in the houses themselves. As you know, the Westmann Islands Municipality owns everything that comes out from under the ash, on the other hand we would certainly want to try to appease the original owners of these items. Something that might mean nothing to us could be invaluable to its former owner, for sentimental reasons.’Hjortur took a deep breath. ‘Many people have contacted us because of this, mainly looking for photo albums and such like, although there have been some enquiries about things like graduation caps, trophies and wristwatches. We do log everything that’s found, and it’s stored in such a way that it’s easy to trace which item came from each house. It would be a huge undertaking to go through all that, so we can’t allow it at this stage.’

‘Haven’t the police made a request to search through the items?’ asked Thóra. ‘One would think they would at least have some interest in whatever was found in Markus’s house.’

Hjdrtur shook his head. ‘Not yet, and hopefully they won’t want to. A lot of work has gone into our system and it would be a huge pain to have to tamper with the boxes.’

‘Do you have anything against my going through the item log?’ asked Thóra. ‘That might be of some help to me.’

Hjortur’s lips thinned.‘I’ll have to check,’ he said tightly.

Thóra decided to back off a little.‘Might someone have had access to the basement before Markus?’ she asked. ‘Was the door open or closed while the ground floor was cleaned?’

‘Are you asking whether the corpses were put there before or after the house was excavated?’ said Hjortur.

‘Yes, actually, I am,’ replied Thóra. ‘It would certainly increase the number of people who could have links to the case.’

‘I believe we shut the basement door as soon as we reached it, and you were quite satisfied with how we did it, as I recall,’ he said, stony faced. ‘It wasn’t more than a couple of hours from when we dug out the door until it was nailed shut. Everything was in accordance with our agreement. Of course anyone who wanted to go down there could have, but it’s out of the question that anyone took a corpse down into that basement since the excavation.’

‘But how can you be sure?’ asked Thóra. ‘Don’t get me wrong – I’m not suggesting that you or your people had anything to do with it.’

‘I went down there with the police after the corpses were found, and it didn’t take much archaeological expertise to realize that they’d been lying there for years or even decades, rather than several days.’

‘Wouldn’t it be possible to make it look that way?’ persisted Thóra. ‘To throw dust over the corpses, or something, making it appear as though they’d been lying there untouched for years?’

‘No,’ said Hjortur resolutely.

‘Do you have any guesses as to who the people lying there were?’ she said. ‘You’re from here, aren’t you?’

Hjortur smiled into his beard. ‘The volcano erupted on my third birthday, so I can’t tell you anything about the event or the people who lived here,’ he said. ‘However, I think it’s out of the question that these are men from the Islands. Everyone escaped the eruption, so four people couldn’t have disappeared.’

Thóra decided not to mention the man who had suffocated in the basement of the pharmacy.

‘Still, you must have thought about it?’ she said. ‘Who those people were? As an archaeologist, you must be curious about your own dig?’

‘Of course I’ve thought about it,’ agreed Hjortur. ‘But I don’t have much imagination so I didn’t really get anywhere. I can tell you one thing, though,’ he added. ‘Just out of curiosity I looked over the newspapers from that time period – we have them here on old-fashioned microfilm – and I found nothing about missing persons, either Icelandic or otherwise. So they appear not to have been missed, which is very odd.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I don’t know how well you could see when you were down there but they’d set up floodlights by the time they came to get me. It looked to me as if at least two of the men were wearing wedding rings. What sort of men were they if their wives didn’t even look for them?’

An unpleasant thought about her ex-husband crossed Thóra’s mind, but she pushed it away. ‘Good question,’ she settled for saying. Then she asked: ‘Did you notice anything that would indicate the men were sailors? I was sort of toying with the notion that this could be related to the Cod War.’

Hjortur shook his head slowly. ‘As far as I could see and can remember, they weren’t wearing waterproofs, or anything else you’d expect to see on sailors at that time,’ he said. ‘That’s not saying much, though, since sailors aren’t always dressed in their work clothes, any more than anyone else is.’ He smiled and looked down at his scruffy jeans.

‘I understand,’ said Thóra, who had been hoping for a different answer, perhaps even that the men had been holding ropes and nets. She thought for a moment before continuing. ‘Do you think someone might have got confused and put the bodies in the wrong place?’ she asked. ‘Was the eruption bad enough at any point to make visibility that poor?’

Hjortur shrugged. ‘Well, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It seems unlikely, but I can’t be a hundred per cent certain.’ He scratched his head. ‘There’s also the possibility that the house where the bodies were supposed to have been put had already disappeared, and Markus’s house was chosen instead. There’s an excellent website about the houses that disappeared, both the ones in the area the lava swallowed and those that were buried in ash that we’re digging up. Maybe you’ll find something useful there.’

Thóra smiled at him as he scribbled down the web address. He had made an excellent point; it was possible that the corpses were not supposed to have ended up there at all, and the whims of the volcano had determined where they could be buried. Why would a man put bodies in his own basement if there were numerous other houses available? Had the bodies and the head ended up in the same place by accident? This riddle about the bodies was starting to infuriate Thóra. She had to uncover the story behind them. Mostly for Markus’s sake, but also to satisfy her own curiosity.

Thóra sat with a steaming cappuccino in the same restaurant that she and Bella had eaten in the night before. She had noticed they had computer access for customers, so she could kill two birds with one stone by having a cup of coffee and looking online. They had split up their to-do list: Bella would visit the archive, while she looked at the website

Hjortur had recommended. Thóra knew her task was nicer than Bella’s – she got to sit in a cosy environment with a cup of coffee while Bella searched through dusty files for two names – but she felt this division of labour to be a small come-uppance for the uneven distribution of luck with men the night before. Although Thóra had in part sent Bella away to get her out of her sight, she really hoped her secretary would accomplish her task, although the chances of this were slim. Thóra had sent her to the archive without first checking to see whether files transferred to Reykjavik the night of the eruption even existed there, but since Bella hadn’t contacted her it seemed she’d found something to rummage through. Either that or the archivist happened to be a man, and Bella had seduced him.