Yrsa Sigurdardottir - Ashes To Dust

‘Let’s not start accusing the police of torture,’ said Thóra evenly. She knew how to handle children by now, since she had all sizes and shapes of them at home. The boy needed to hear an adult tell him that everything would be all right; that his father would be released from prison, come home shortly, and buy Hjalti an apartment in the Islands, as he had planned. ‘These cases are very tough while they’re going on, and often those who least deserve it end up caught in the slipstream. I have no doubt that your father is one of those. If he didn’t murder any of those people, he won’t be convicted. I’ll make sure of it.’ She was going to add something about the truth always coming out, but the boy interrupted her.

‘But what if someone didn’t commit a murder himself, just helped the murderer? What then?’ he asked frantically.

Thóra knew that this‘someone’ was the boy’s father, and that Hjalti had realized that Markus might be tied to the murderer or murderers. He was, in other words, not completely clueless, poor boy, although he was deeply troubled.‘In my opinion there’s nothing to suggest that your father did anything that makes him an accomplice. He might have helped the murderer unknowingly, but that’s not a crime.’ She hoped he wouldn’t start asking what she meant, since she didn’t want to talk to the boy about the severed head in the box.

‘Okay,’ said Hjalti, his voice still tinged with nervousness. ‘Maybe I’ll come tomorrow at two o’clock. Is that all right?’

‘I don’t think you’ll get to see your father, if that’s what you’re hoping,’ said Thóra. ‘But you can always come and wait outside, if you want. Then I could meet you afterwards and tell you how it went, which might make you feel better.’ The boy agreed to this, although she wished he hadn’t. They said goodbye.

The phone rang again, and this time it was Bella. ‘I’ve found the tattoo,’ she said. ‘You’d better come and see this.’

The recent smoking ban hadn’t reached the tattoo parlour; Bella blew a thick cloud of smoke in Thóra’s direction. The multicoloured man who owned the parlour also had a burning cigarette between his lips, so Thóra couldn’t scold Bella. She settled for a glare, wondering what she was actually doing here: Markus was pretty much absolved of all suspicion in Alda’s murder, and the Love Sex tattoo wasn’t linked to the bodies in the basement. However, she didn’t want to make light of Bella’s investigation of the tattoo’s origin, so she acted as though nothing were out of the ordinary. ‘So you think it’s unlikely that this tattoo was put on anyone else?’ asked Thóra.

‘That would be a pretty fucking huge coincidence,’ said the man, without removing the cigarette from the corner of his mouth. He took a puff and blew out the smoke, still without touching the cigarette. In the light of Bella’s prowess with the men in the Islands, Thóra wondered for a moment whether they’d just been up to something. ‘A girl made it up from two tattoos I’ve got in this folder.’ He lifted his foot and kicked at a tired old folder on the couch in front of Thóra. His black army boot shoved it across to her.

Thóra smiled politely and reached for it. ‘Why do you remember this so well?’ she asked, looking around. Every wall was hung with drawings or photos of tattoos. ‘It looks like you do a lot of these. You can hardly be expected to remember each and every one.’ Unless he was a modern version of the old farmers who were said to be able to recognize every sheep marking in the country, she thought.

‘Nah,’ said the man, crossing his muscular arms. When Thóra had first walked into the tiny, dilapidated tattoo parlour she had thought he was wearing a garish fitted T-shirt beneath his leather waistcoat. She was wrong. His arms were covered with colourful pictures from the backs of his hands up: tigers and rainforest foliage that rippled as though in the wind when he flexed or contracted his muscles.‘I actually remember a lot of them. Usually the most beautiful ones, but also the really lame ones.’

Thóra cleared her throat. ‘And which group does this belong to?’ she asked, pointing at the photocopy of the Love Sex tattoo Bella had brought with her.

The man looked at Thóra with disdain.‘That’s fucked up, Grandma. Absolutely fucked up.’

Thóra wanted to keep the man in a good mood, so she didn’t waste any time objecting to being called grandma- after all, she was one, albeit prematurely. ‘And you remember this, even though it’s been six months since you… did it?’she asked, uncertain which verb one used for tattooing. ‘I don’t see a picture of it anywhere on your wall,’ she added, though it was impossible to rule out a picture of this particular tattoo being hidden there somewhere.

‘I’m not about to hang that on my wall, any more than I would the hundreds of butterflies I’ve put on girls’ ankles over the years,’ said the man, and he curled his lip in disgust. ‘If I had to say which I hate most, the butterflies or this disaster, then I would actually say this one. It’s one of the saddest ones I’ve ever done – that girl was an absolute nutter, away with the fairies.’

Thóra smiled to herself, thinking she had made a similarly hasty judgement of him just a few seconds earlier.‘Did she explain what this was supposed to mean?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t ask, either. I tried to talk her out of it, but she wouldn’t listen. I even spent some time showing her other, much cooler illustrations, but it was like throwing pearls at swine.’

Thóra thought about pointing out that one cast pearls before swine and not at them, but changed her mind. Instead she asked: ‘Did a woman by the name of Alda Thórgeirsdóttir ever ask you for information about this same tattoo? She was a nurse.’

The man nodded his head. ‘Like I told her…’ he pointed at Bella. ‘It’s mental that more than one person has contacted me to ask about this horrible thing. I’ve never had the same reaction to any of the tattoos I’m actually proud of. If you want me to put the same one on you, the answer is no.’

‘Did Alda want to get the same tattoo?’ asked Thóra.

‘No,’ he replied, and smiled to reveal large teeth, stained brown by tobacco. ‘She wanted to know whether the tattoo had been done here, and when I said yes she wanted to know when.’

‘And could you answer her?’

‘Yeah, yeah, I keep records of my tattoos so I just looked it up. The woman was so incredibly excited about it, I’d never seen anything like it. She said she was working on an investigation for the A &E, and this tattoo had turned up.’ The man stubbed out his cigarette, which had burned all the way down to the filter. ‘She pointed out that the investigation wasn’t connected to me or my working methods in any way, not that I thought it would be, since I’m really careful with hygiene here.’

‘I’m sure you are,’ said Thóra, avoiding looking at a dirty spot on his black leather waistcoat.‘Was it long ago that she called?’

‘No, not really,’ replied the man. ‘Several weeks, two months at most. She said she’d been searching for the origin of the tattoo before but hadn’t known about my parlour, since it wasn’t in the phone book. She’d recently heard about me from a boy who wanted to get rid of a tattoo that I did.’ Again the man snarled in disgust. ‘The little tosser.’

‘Could we have that same information?’ asked Thóra. ‘We won’t use it against you, any more than the other woman did.’

‘As long as you don’t let it get around where this crappy tattoo was done,’ grinnedthe man. ‘Apart from that it’s no skin off my nose, provided I can find it quickly. I’m closed now, and I’d rather be on my way home.’