Yrsa Sigurdardottir - Ashes To Dust

‘Could you go into a little more detail?’ said Thóra. ‘I don’t want to pry, but I have to understand what was going on in the neighbourhood if I want to help Markus. I’m fairly certain that whoever put the bodies there was known locally.’

Klara looked at Thóra without saying anything at first, then raised her eyebrows and let out a low moan. ‘I don’t see how this piece of ancient history could possibly matter today.’ She cleared her throat. ‘But nor do I see why I shouldn’t entrust you with the information.’ She sat up straighten‘After listening to Dadi shouting and Valgerdur sobbing for six months, I decided to speak to her and offer her a shoulder to cry on, because she seemed so lonely. All her relatives lived in Reykjavik and in those days people didn’t carry around their telephones, ready to discuss things wherever and whenever it suited them. I spoke to her confidentially and told her that she wasn’t the only one with a domineering and drunken husband, that it was only too common, and she could turn to me if she needed any help.’ Klara tapped her nose meaningfully.‘She thanked me by repeating the names I had told her, of the other abusive husbands, to anyone who would listen – the men as well as their wives. It took me many months to win back the trust of those women.’

‘Could she have been so desperate to make friends that she sacrificed you on the altar of popularity?’ asked Thóra, trying to imagine being the newcomer in a close-knit community.

‘That may well be the case,’ said Klara crossly. ‘But it was still unforgivable. She couldn’t expect simply to jump into the inner circle here, and after I had cleared up the mess she was as isolated as before. It was most unwise of her.’ Klara folded her hands demurely on her broad thighs.

Thóra decided there was little to be gained from continuing this line of questioning. ‘Do you know if the couple lost any children?’ she asked instead, although she knew that Bella was at that moment working hard to dig up that information.

‘No,’ replied Klara. ‘They had no children while they lived here. They tried for a long time, but with no luck. Valgerdur miscarried at least twice and that just made her more bitter. Of course back then there weren’t all those psychiatrists people run crying to now, but there’s no doubt that her sheer delight in our children’s failures was due to her childlessness. She was always ready to spread stories about the kids in the neighbourhood, and my boys were no exception because they were quite mischievous.’

‘There’s a child’s room in their house,’ said Thóra, hoping that no one would wonder how she knew this. ‘Could the people who lived there before Valgerdur and Dadi have had a child?’ Again, Bella was hopefully finding out the answer to that very question as she spoke.

‘They built that house, so no one lived there before them. The neighbourhood was the newest part of town, so some of the houses weren’t completely finished even after everyone moved in,’ said Klara. ‘I went to their house extremely rarely, only if I couldn’t avoid it.’ She rolled her shoulders gingerly, as if they were sore.

‘I never saw a children’s room but they may well have set one up. Actually, I heard they had a son not long after the evacuation, so maybe she was pregnant but hadn’t told anyone, in the light of her previous experiences. They might have been preparing for the birth of that child. But I can’t imagine it, because I heard from a woman I know that rumour had it Valgerdur showed little motherly affection for her newborn at first. It sounds like there were some issues there.’

‘Did you keep in touch with them after they moved to the mainland?’ asked Thóra. ‘No,’ said Klara indignantly. ‘Why would I? I just told you, they weren’t much to my liking. A lot of good people moved away from here and didn’t return, and 1 had enough trouble keeping in touch with them.’‘

‘I understand,’ said Thóra politely. ‘Do you think Dadi and Valgerdur were connected in any way to the bodies found in your basement?’

‘I wouldn’t know anything about that,’ replied the woman, still bristling. ‘I’ve already told the police I have no idea how this could have happened, and I’ve said over and over that I had nothing to do with it.’

Thóra noticed that the old woman said‘I’ and not ‘we’. This was something she’d also noticed in the police report – the briefest one in the entire file, written up by Gudni Leifsson. In it Klara had been asked a few questions, and had answered as succinctly as possible. Thóra suspected that Stefán and his colleagues would not be quite so considerate if and when they came to interview her. ‘But did they have connections to any foreigners here in the Islands?’ asked Thóra hopefully.

‘Well, yes – Valgerdur worked at the hospital, of course, besides serving as school nurse two afternoons a week,’ replied Klara. ‘In school there were no foreign teachers or staff, but the hospital sometimes admitted wounded foreign fishermen, as well as other foreigners, I imagine. You couldn’t really call that a connection, though, her taking care of their injuries. As for Dadi, he worked for one of the smaller fishing companies in the Islands. Only Icelanders worked there, to my knowledge. Beyond that it’s probably better to direct the questions to their son; I’m sure he could tell you more than I can, since I have never had any interest in them.’

‘Has Dadi passed away?’ asked Thóra. ‘I know Valgerdur died recently, but I have yet to check on him.’

‘As far as I know, he died of cirrhosis of the liver a couple of years ago,’ said Klara crisply. ‘But I think their son is alive.’

‘Do you know his name?’

‘No, I don’t remember. I heard it once but forgot it a long time ago.’

Thóra nodded. Maybe Bella would find it in the archive. She had managed to loosen the woman’s tongue, so now it was time to change gears again; in any case, she had run out of questions about the neighbours.

‘There is something else,’ she said. ‘On Friday the nineteenth of January 1973, the weekend before the eruption, there was a school dance here in town that got out of hand. Markus was picked up by his father, since he’d had too much to drink with his friends and schoolmates.’ She gazed levelly at the woman. ‘Do you remember that evening?’

From Klara’sreaction, you would have thought Thóra had asked for permission to rummage through the family’s dirty laundry. ‘I vaguely remember that,’ she replied, though she clearly remembered the evening in question quite well. ‘It wasn’t just Markus but the whole class, as I recall. Markus never drank, unlike the other teenagers, so it came as a shock to us.’

‘I have no interest in Markus’s drinking, but I was wondering if you might remember anything else unusual from that evening,’ said Thóra. ‘Do you remember whether your husband went out after he brought Markus home, perhaps down to the harbour?’

Klara paled. ‘Magnus didn’t go anywhere,’ she said. ‘He brought the boy home and that’s all. Magnus wasn’t in the habit of wandering off in the middle of the night, and he’d hardly have been in the mood to do so after seeing the state his son was in.’ She fiddled with the large gold rings on two fingers of her left hand, and looked away.

Thóra didn’t believe a word of this. For the first time in the conversation, the woman wore a hunted expression, and she was clearly no actress. She appeared to be just as poor a liar as her son when under pressure. ‘How about you, Leifur?’ Thóra asked.‘Do you remember anything from that night?’ She smiled brightly at Klara. ‘Maybe Magnus went out after you were asleep.’