ones that had recently tried it on with her, not even after her fifth glass. And that said a lot about them. The men who attracted her attention wereeither far too young, already taken, or gay. Before shaking off these thoughts it struck her that perhaps there was an overabundance of men in the Westmann Islands. One could always dream, and it didn’t hurt to have Bella in tow, especially since compared to her secretary, Thora resembled a Playboy centrefold. Enough of that for now, she thought, and turning to the matter at hand, she called Bella’s number.
After Soley had gone to sleep and it was clear there was nothing worth watching on television, Thora decided to have a look in the book Memorable Events 1971-1975, from the series Our Century. She had acquired the collection after her grandfather died, and although she didn’t open the books very often, they had occasionally come in handy. The book wasn’t thick and obviously contained far from all the newsworthy events of the period, but Thora thought that the disappearance of four people must have found its way into the book, assuming it had made the news at the time. She flipped quickly through 1973 until she reached the summer of that year and the eruption in the Westmann Islands was finished. Markus’s childhood home had actually been buried some time during the first month of the eruption; nonetheless Thora wanted to make sure that nothing got past her so she didn’t stop reading until she came to the headline ‘Eruption Finished!’‘ from 4 July.
Upon reading, she found little that could conceivably be connected to the corpses in the basement. The airplane Vor, with five people on board, had crashed at the end of March north of Langjokull Glacier, and in the first article about the incident, the crash site had still not been located. A later article about the accident stated that rescue crews had found it, as well as the plane’s passengers, who all turned out to be dead. Another article that caught Thora’s attention was from the end of January, concerning the loss of the British smack Cuckoo, along with its four-man crew. It had sailed from Thorlakshofn in the middle of the month, but nothing was heard from it or its crew after that. Thora sat up on the sofa as she read this article, but lay back down again when several pages later she read that wreckage from the ship had been driven ashore along with remains of one of the crew’s bodies. The smack was thought to have capsized with all hands in a storm that hit shortly after it left the harbour. Thora’s attention was captured again later in the book when she read that a group of six hikers had got lost after setting out on a trip from Landmannalaugar. The group had consisted of four foreign geologists and two Icelandic guides who were supposed to have been very familiar with the area. Thora did not need to waste any time trying to imagine how part of the group had sought shelter in a basement in the Westmann Islands to get away from bad weather on the mainland, because immediately on the following page there was a report that the men had been found hounded and cold in a little emergency hut in the highlands. They had got lost in the drifting snow and could thank their lucky stars that they had stumbled on the hut. Thora then read one report about people who had disappeared and were never found. In February, the Seastar had sunk southeast of the mainland with a ten-man crew. The passengers boarded two rubber life rafts but were never found. The group had consisted of nine men and one woman: five Icelanders and five Faeroese, and despite repeated searches through the articles Thora could not discover anything about whether the crew had ever been found. The only problem was that Markus’s home had probably already been buried in ash by the time the ship perished, and it was an enormous distance to the Islands from the place where it had sunk.
Despite her disappointment Thora continued reading, then found an article that reawakened her hope. It concerned the huge number of foreign reporters that had come to Iceland to cover the eruption. Of course there was nothing in the article about any of them disappearing, much less four of them. Although it was unlikely that any full-time journalists or reporters had failed to return from Iceland without it ending up in the news, it was possible that things might have been different for freelancers. Some of these reporters might have travelled to Iceland without letting anyone know of their plans. They would perhaps not have been searched for here when their disappearance was discovered later in their homelands.
Little else had occurred in the first part of the year that could shed any light on the identity of the corpses. The Cod War raged, but Thora could find no indication anywhere that anyone had disappeared or been considered lost at sea in connection with the conflict between the British and the Icelanders over the extension of Iceland’s territorial waters from twelve miles to fifty. Several other articles mentioned deaths or disappearances, but they were never groups of people, always isolated individuals. Thora thought it too unlikely that the corpses were a collection of people that had all disappeared or died under different circumstances at different times, so she didn’t read these latter articles in any detail.
She also thumbed through 1972, since there was a possibility that the bodies had been in the basement before the eruption started. That year, however, turned out to be as lacking in significant detail for her purposes as 1973. A photo of a sinking ship raised an eyebrow, but the accompanying article said it was a trawler that was thought to have hit a mine. However, further investigation of the sinking revealed that the ship’s owners had exploded dynamite in its hold in the hope of an insurance pay-off. No one appeared to have died or disappeared in connection with the incident.
Another headline to draw Thora’s attention stated that eighty British trawlers were speeding towards the Icelandic fishing grounds. The article was dated at the end of August 1972, which was a bit early; however, this case involved a huge number of men, making it possible that four of them might have disappeared without being noticed. In fact nothing was mentioned about the disappearance of any of them, but the article succeeded in capturing the tone of relations between the two nations during the Cod War. The end of the article quoted a British trawler captain, who stated that if the Icelanders tried to board a British ship within fifty miles and outside twelve, they would be met with boiling water and sacks of pepper. Thora found the mention of the pepper quite amusing, the boiling water less so, but the statement indicated that those involved had been prepared for anything – even physical injury.
After her reading Thora was little closer to discovering anything than she had been before, except for her feeling that the bodies might be connected to the Cod War in some very vague way. After all, to Thora’s mind the word ‘war’ meant devastation and death.
She slammed the book shut and hurried to pack for her trip the next morning.
Chapter Seven
Thora took her seat next to Bella in the plane. She thanked God that the flight would take only half an hour – she had a terrible fear of having to keep up a conversation with the girl in such close quarters. In the end Bella chattered the entire trip without pause, the gist of her monologue being her desire for Thora to bring a lawsuit against the state for the ban on smoking in public places. Thora smiled uncomfortably but didn’t dare interject. She even nodded non-committally when her secretary said that after smoking was prohibited in aeroplanes the majority of passengers had started to get sick after long-haul flights because the air on board was changed much less frequently. Instead of breathing smoke the passengers breathed germs and bacteria from people who came from all over the world and who therefore, according to Bella, could have the Ebola virus or bird flu. Thora doubted that people who had contracted these diseases travelled much to the Westmann Islands, but nevertheless tried to breathe less than usual. When they landed she gulped down fresh air at the door of the plane and enjoyed the feeling of the warm breeze playing about her face. Bella hurried past Thora and out of the airport to have a smoke.
‘Well,’ said Thora as she dragged their suitcases over to Bella, who stood by the ash bin, enjoying her cigarette, ‘shouldn’t we try calling a cab?’ She looked around but there was no taxi to be seen. She felt worse when she saw that some of their fellow travellers appeared to be getting ready to walk into town. Maybe there weren’t any taxis in the Islands? Just as she was on the verge of going back into the airport to ask about this, a new Range Rover jeep pulled up. Thora had recently been told how much these cars cost, but the figure was so high that she still thought it must have been a misunderstanding. The dark window-pane slid down into its slot and a middle-aged man stretched out through the open window and called to them.
‘Are you Thora?’ he said, looking at Bella. His voice was deep.
‘No, that’s me,’Thora called back quickly, rather displeased that her secretary should be mistaken for her. Although Thora did not consider herselfa great beauty, the difference between their
