Yrsa Sigurdardottir - Ashes To Dust

Thóra had to admit her partner couldn’t enter a hotel without going to the bar, whether he was staying there or not.

‘Don’t you want to know what I found in the archive?’ asked her secretary, sucking at her straw thirstily. ‘They opened it for me. That Leifur clearly has the town in his pocket. All I had to do was say his name and they pulled out the keys.’

‘Yes, it’s in everyone’s interest to keep him happy,’ Thóra said. ‘So, what did you find? It’s good that one of us is making progress, because meeting Markus’s parents did me little good. His father was away with the fairies and his mother was such a dry old stick that she sucked all the moisture out of the air. The only thing I got out of it was some gibberish about a falcon and a child, and a headache from the old woman’s perfume. There wasn’t anything about a falcon in the files?’

‘No,’ said Bella. ‘Nothing that I saw, anyway. There are a million files in that archive. You’ve got to know what you’re looking for, and I wasn’t thinking about birds.’

Thóra sighed. ‘Oh, they were probably just the ramblings of a senile old man,’ she said. Suddenly she thought of Maria, Leifur’s wife, who acted as a kind of care assistant for her father-in-law. She must have heard him say all sorts of things. Maybe at some point he’d said something significant, but she hadn’t realized. Thóra decided to try to meet her again before they left, and see what she knew. It was entirely possible that he’d come out with something about a falcon or ‘that poor child’, but phrased it in a way that made it easier to determine if it meant something for the case. Her headache was getting worse. She raised a hand to her forehead.

‘Guess what?’ said Bella, putting down her glass. ‘I found out that Dadi and his wife Valgerdur built their house, so no one lived there before them.’

She seemed surprised when Thóra hardly reacted, but carried on: ‘And they had no children while they lived there.’ She watched Thóra, whose face still betrayed nothing.‘But after the eruption they had a son, who they christened Adolf.’

‘Adolf?’ muttered Thóra.‘Who calls a child Adolf?’

Bella appeared relieved that Thóra was finally showing some interest in her findings. ‘Well, they did, for starters. He lives in Reykjavik, and when I tried looking him up online I pulled up a blog where there’s a warning about him – for being a rapist. It was really hard to piece together – there were a lot of threats made against him in the comments section, by other bloggers who said that they were friends of the victim. In another entry several weeks later the blogger announced that he’d finally been charged.’

Thóra began rubbing her forehead, trying to dispel her headache. ‘Rape?’ she said. ‘Who did he attack?’

‘It didn’t say, but I figured out when it was supposed to have happened by looking at the date of the first entry. I searched in Morgunbladid’s archives and came across an article that seemed to tie into this. It wasn’t interesting enough to deserve much scrutiny, but something rang a bell when I read the article, because the rapist had slipped the girl an emergency contraceptive afterwards to stop her getting pregnant.’

‘What?’ exclaimed Thóra, dumbfounded. ‘Do you mean like a morning-after pill? I don’t remember reading about that.’

‘The case didn’t really get much attention, judging by the size of the article, and I doubt the papers would have reported it at all if it hadn’t been for that weird detail. It must have been on the news as well, since I recognized it and I never read the papers.’

Thóra waved to a passing waitress and ordered a Pina Colada. To hell with her headache, and to hell with the accountant. ‘Tell me,’ she said to Bella after the girl had taken her order, ‘what did the article say?’

‘This Adolf supposedly raped the girl at his house after they met at a bar downtown,’ said Bella. ‘She was drunk but she put up a fight, which was clear from the bruises on her body when she went to the A &E a day later.’

‘A day later?’ said Thóra, trying to fight the suspicion she immediately felt. ‘Why didn’t she go there right away, or to the police?’

‘The article said she’d been so devastated that she originally planned not to bring charges against the man at all. When she started to bleed heavily although it wasn’t her time of the month, she went to the hospital, where the story all came out. The bleeding turned out to be caused by the contraceptive, and when hospital staff pressed her she told them the whole story. She said that she hadn’t taken the pill herself, so the rapist must have stirred it into a drink he gave her.’

‘That wouldn’t hold up in court,’ said Thóra. ‘How could you prove that she didn’t take the pill herself when she regretted having slept with him?’

‘Because the drug was found at the man’s home when it was searched,’ said Bella. ‘In large quantities, according to the report. What’s a bachelor doing with contraceptive pills?’

‘I see,’ said Thóra.‘I wonder if Alda was connected to this somehow?’ she wondered aloud. ‘When did it happen?’

‘The rape itself took place about seven months ago,’ Bella replied. ‘It was a Saturday night, but the girl didn’t go to A &E until the Monday evening.’

Alda was still working weekend and evening shifts at the hospital then, and may well have helped treat the victim. Had she perhaps recognized the name of the attacker because of her ties to the Islands? Thóra didn’t see how this could help Markus. This was of course extremely unlikely, but it was hard to be choosy when there was nothing else on offer. ‘Did you happen to find out where Valgerdur and Dadi moved to after the eruption?’ she asked Bella.

‘They moved to the Westfjords,’Bella said. ‘The woman in the archive pointed me towards a summary of the new residences of all the Westmann Islands evacuees from about a year after the eruption. She knew who they were, and she thought a relative of Valgerdur’s had owned an empty house there that they’d moved into. I also saw in the file that Dadi worked on a trawler outfitted from Holmavik, but his wife hung around the house, since she’d just had a baby.’

Thóra smiled at Bella and decided to skip telling her that you didn’t simply ‘hang around the house’ when you had a baby. ‘Alda moved west with her parents, too,’ said Thóra. ‘Maybe they got to know Valgerdur better there. Ex-Islands residents probably stuck together during that period. That might explain why she was interested in the woman’s death.’

‘There was nothing written about the A &E staff in the article, though. All it said was that the girl he raped checked in there.’

‘It should be possible to find out more. I’m wondering whether this could be related to the trouble Alda had at work; she shouldn’t have assisted the victim if she knew the perpetrator.’

‘Are you sure she knew this Adolf?’ asked Bella.

‘No,’ replied Thóra.‘I have no idea. Neither Leifur nor his mother remembered his name, so it seems likely that he didn’t maintain any ties to the Islands.’Thóra sighed pensively. ‘I don’t know the legal ramifications of such a situation, either. Alda probably just took something from the A &E’s drug cabinet or something, but maybe it’s nothing her fellow nurses want to discuss. The chances are this Adolf has nothing to do with it. He was born after the eruption, so the bodies in the basement can’t be connected to him, but I suspect all these things have a common thread.’

‘Or the two cases could be entirely unrelated,’ suggested Bella. ‘Stranger things have happened.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Thóra, even though she had little to support her hunch. ‘The worst of it is, I suspect Markus’s family isn’t telling me the whole truth. One would expect a mother to put her children’s interests before her husband’s, especially if the man in question is at death’s door while Markus has half his life yet to live.’