Yrsa Sigurdardottir - Ashes To Dust

Thóra moved closer. ‘January 1973. The eruption started on the night of the twenty-third. Why?’

‘This is an old report,’ said Bella. ‘It’s dated the twentieth of January 1973. Don’t you find it a bit odd that he’s got such an old report on his table?’

‘What does it say?’ asked Thóra anxiously. She looked over at the doorway but there was no one to be seen. How long did it take to photocopy ten pages? ‘Quickly!’she whispered.

‘Wait,’ said Bella, as she picked up the page to get a better look. ‘It’s a report about signs of a fight or injury at the pier. The police were called out by the harbour-master, who found a lot of blood on the pier on the morning of Saturday the twentieth of January. He couldn’t think of any natural explanation for it and called the police, thinking that a crime might have been committed. He said the harbour had been unsupervised from midnight on Friday evening until he turned up for his next shift, at eight o’clock on Saturday morning.’ Bella ran her finger down the page. ‘The police officer examined the evidence, which was compelling, and asked the harbour-master what ships had been moored there. It turned out that no boat had been moored there for several days. The police also checked whether anyone had gone to the hospital with injuries that night, but no one had been admitted after midnight except a married couple with a sick baby.’ Bella looked up at Thóra. ‘Couldn’t this be linked to the bodies?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’Thóra half whispered. ‘Quickly, keep reading.’ She glanced at the door out of the corner of her eye, but all was quiet. ‘The police interviewed several people in the wake of this, and two witnesses reported seeing Dadi Karlsson up and about early in the morning. One of them said that he’d been docking in a dinghy, and the other that he’d been at the place where the blood was found. The police officer spoke to Dadi but he denied this and said he hadn’t been there. He claimed he’d been at home sleeping and said his wife could verify that, which she did. The officer then boarded the trawler that Dadi piloted but found nothing unusual there. The case was considered unsolved, but plans were made to investigate whether the blood could conceivably have come from an animal or an illegal catch that had been landed under the cover of night.’ Bella looked up from the report.‘That’s all there is.’

‘Which police officer wrote the report?’ Thóra asked hurriedly, and waved her hand to indicate that their time was running out. Footsteps could be heard approaching in the corridor.

‘Gudni Leifsson,’ said Bella, and hurried to put the paper back in its place. No sooner had she done so than they heard Gudni walking through the door behind them.

Thóra turned to him, trying to look innocent. She couldn’t be certain, but if this report wasn’t connected to the case, why would he be looking at such an old document? She also had a feeling that Gudni was not investigating a cold case in cooperation with his colleagues from Reykjavik, but working on it alone. Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing for Markus, she’d have to wait and see.‘Well,’ she said, and walked up to Gudni. He handed her a copy of the medical examiner’s report and looked inquisitively at Bella, who was still standing very close to the desk.

‘Do you need something?’ he asked her coldly.

Bella looked back at him, equally impassive.‘No, why do you ask?’ Her glare dared him to accuse her of prying.

Gudni did not fall into her trap, but frowned for a second before turning back to Thóra. ‘There’s more there that will catch the attention of the media if and when the report’s contents are made public,’ he said. ‘It’s about the head, and the evidence is indisputable.’ He smiled nastily. ‘Which comes as a surprise in a case I thought had already reached its dramatic peak.’

‘There are a lot of surprises still to come in this case, it seems to me,’ said Thóra, against her better judgement. There was something about this man that ruffled her feathers. However, she avoided glancing at the papers on his desk as she said this. It was better to leave him wondering what she meant.

Thóra put down the papers and drummed her fingers as she tried to gather her thoughts. She’d finished going through three of the four sections; a specific report had been written for each of the bodies, as well as for the head. The sections she had read concerned the three bodies, which turned out to be of two men in their thirties and a man of around fifty. The men were Caucasian and all the bodies were extremely well preserved, owing to the unusual conditions in which they had been stored. The heat of the eruption was thought to have played a large part in protecting them, along with the lack of humidity in the basement and the fact that heavy toxic gases had destroyed all insect life down there.

Even though the text was hard to read, every other word being an incomprehensible medical term, it was clear that the men had not been killed by toxic gases. Although no conclusion was reached on the exact cause of death, it was strongly suggested that the three men had all been victims of violence. They all had peculiar wounds on their hands that appeared to have healed long before, and which were therefore unconnected to the events that had led to their deaths. They seemed to be scars from deep scratches whose origin was unclear, but it was considered unlikely that they had been made by tools or knives because of the irregularity of their shapes. Two of the men were thought to have died from head injuries, since their skulls had been smashed, seemingly by the same unidentified blunt weapon. The nose of one of them had been so badly broken that the cartilage had been driven into his brain, although the medical examiner could not determine whether he had died from this injury or from his fractured skull. The report further stated that while the third man’s head injuries were minor, he had both a broken back and three broken ribs, which had punctured one of his lungs. The report concluded that the latter injury had caused bleeding into the chest cavity and lungs, which would eventually have caused the man to drown in his own blood. Thóra shuddered, but it was clear to her that a teenage girl on her own could not have done so much damage to a group of men.

The examiner’s conclusion concerning the men’s nationality was supported by various factors. It was noted that each taken on its own would not be enough to determine the men’s origin, but together they lent sufficient weight to the hypothesis that the men were British. It was also noted that the person or persons who had transported the bodies to the basement had seemed not to expect them to be found, since no attempt had been made to remove the dead men’s clothing or anything else that could be used to identify them. This had proved useful in determining the men’s nationality, since the brand labels on their clothing and shoes were still partly legible and turned out to be mostly from British companies; the brands of the oldest man’s clothing were more expensive than those of the younger men. The material in the younger men’s fillings turned out to be the one British dentistshad used around 1960, and one of them also had a steel pin in his ankle from an old injury, stamped with the trademark of a British manufacturer. Other things were taken into account;

the two younger men were both tattooed with the initials HMS, which if taken to stand for Her Majesty’s Service would suggest that they could have served in the military for a time and had wished to commemorate this in ink on their skin. Two of the men also had British pound notes in their pockets, and one had an elderly packet of British cigarettes.

Thóra wondered if the tattoo that Alda had mentioned to her sister could conceivably have been the same as the ones mentioned in the report. What had she said again? Under what circumstances would you get a tattoo? Could she have been talking about entry into the military? Thóra shook her head instinctively – it couldn’t be that. She was sure it had nothing to do with the case, but marked the text to make it easier to recall that particular detail if tattoos came up again.