‘Well,’ she said as she pulled the coffee pot towards her, ‘did you have fun last night?’ She herself had gone straight to her room and phoned home, since her parents had gone out of their way to house-sit and babysit in her absence. This arrangement was much less trouble than taking the whole gang over to their house, including Orri and his mother. Thora’s father was in high spirits having set up camp in her garage, which he’d been itching to fix up for a very long time although her mother hadn’t been too keen on the idea. In her opinion everything at Thora’s had gone to the dogs: the filter in the washing machine was blocked, a flood of clothing poured from the wardrobes every time she opened them in search of an outfit for Soley, and in the farthest corner of the fridge there was a jar of jam that had expired last century. Thora therefore had to endure a half-hour lecture about what a terrible housewife she was, but she didn’t need her mother to tell her that. At the end of the call she’d been allowed to speak to Soley, who told her happily that she was wearing Gylfi’s huge socks because
Grandma couldn’t find any of hers. Gylfi then came on and muttered into the receiver that she had to come home -Grandma was driving him completely crazy and Sigga was depressed. Before hanging up Thora promised him that she would fix everything; she’d been affected by the thought of her daughter- in-law’s depression. She turned on the television and flicked through the channels without finding anything that appealed to her. She ended up watching men in sunglasses play poker, but finally fell asleep before figuring out how the game worked.
‘Crazy,’ said Bella, and she took a large bite of bread and jam. She’d spread the jam so thickly that it was more like jam and bread, causing one corner of the slice to break off from the sheer weight and leave a purple jam stain on her chin. She was completely unperturbed, wiping off the jam with her index finger and sticking it in her mouth. ‘I met some great people.’
‘Good,’ said Thora, pouring milk into her coffee. ‘Were these people the same age as you?’
‘I didn’t ask for ID,’ said Bella, lifting her own coffee cup to her lips. She regarded Thora over the rim and wiggled her eyebrows. ‘I slept with someone.’
Thora choked on her coffee.‘What did you say?’ she spluttered.
‘You heard,’ said Bella proudly.‘It was brilliant. Sailors really know what they’re doing.’
‘Sailorsf’ said Thora, still aghast. ‘Were there more than one?’ How could this girl get herself a bedmate, or mates, as if it were nothing, when Thora felt like she herself would have trouble finding an interested party in a men’s prison? Actually, that wasn’t entirely true: more often than not she was the uninterested one, rather than the men she met. Still, she felt irritated.
‘No, it was just the one,’ said Bella. ‘Not for any lack of opportunity – I certainly could have had two.’
Thora was speechless, and indeed said nothing for the remainder of breakfast. That hardly mattered, because Bella gave her such a comprehensive account of the events of the previous night that Thora wouldn’t have been able to get a word in edgeways.
Dis hid her head in her hands.‘What do we do now?’ She was still recovering from the shock of finding Alda’s body. The first night after the discovery she had lain in bed, exhausted but unable to fall asleep. She kept wondering if her colleague Agust could have overlooked some clue that the nurse had felt ill. All of their interactions with Alda that she could remember had to do with work, the next operation or the state of the little storeroom. If there had been any clues, they weren’t making themselves known. In the early hours of morning, just before sleep was finally merciful to her, she comforted herself with the thought that time healed all wounds. But mental scars took much longer to heal than physical ones, and it wasn’t getting easier to come to terms with Alda’s death as time went by. If anything, Dis thought that she felt worse now than the day she’d discovered the nurse’s body. She knew she’d remember that moment forever; after reporting the death, she had waited in the bedroom. In hindsight it would have been wiser to wait down in the living room or the kitchen, or even out in her car, but at the time she’d felt it would be disrespectful to the deceased, so instead she had sat down at the little dressing table at the end of the bed. Barely ten minutes had passed between the end of the emergency call and the ambulance arriving, but those ten minutes had been the longest of her life. For most of that time she had sat stiffly looking at Alda’s body, at the staring eyes directed at the doorway as if there were some great truth to be found there, the gaping mouth that appeared to be contorted in a scream of anguish. Judging from the evidence on the bedside table this was a suicide, although the appearance of the body suggested otherwise. Dis was not familiar enough with pathology or forensic medicine to know how a body should look after overdosing on the type of drugs by the bed, but if the pills had killed Alda it was clear that she hadn’t chosen well. Her fists were clenched, and to Dis it looked as though her usually flawless cheeks had been scratched deeply enough to draw blood, enough blood to form the dark pool in which her head lay.
‘What do you mean? We can’t do anything. She killed herself,’ replied Agust coldly.‘We’ll bring flowers to the funeral. A wreath or whatever.’ His voice gave no indication that he was upset by Alda’s death, although she had worked for them for a decade.
Dis pulled her hands from her face and sat upright. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she asked sharply.‘A nurse who has worked with us dies before her time and your idea is to say goodbye to her with flowers – or “whatever”. That’s pretty cold.’ She glanced around the room and asked herself why she was surprised. Agust’s office was a reflection of his personality: cold and soulless. Although her own office was not all that interesting, his was so bereft of any luxuries and so tidy that in an emergency an operation could be performed on his desk. There was nothing in it that didn’t have a purpose, not a thing displayed simply because it was attractive or amusing. Even the framed pictures on the walls, which depicted the most common plastic surgery techniques, were there for a purpose. Just after hanging them up Agust had told Dis that they would frighten patients who were reluctant about operations. His logic was that such individuals would thus be forced from the start to determine whether they actually trusted themselves to undergo an operation just to look better. Agust had recently told Dis that after the photos went up, last minute cancellations had decreased noticeably.
Now he rocked backwards in his seat, clearly surprised. ‘Huh?’ he said, then fell silent. He sighed. ‘I know this may sound cold, but I’m not one for public displays of emotion.’ He reached across and took Dis’s hand, which was resting on the edge of the desk. ‘You know how highly I valued her. I just haven’t been able to get my head around this, I think. All I can think of is how we’re going to find a replacement nurse for the operations that we have coming up.’ He smiled sadly. ‘It’s easier to deal with the small things.’
Dis returned his smile sympathetically. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s not as if I haven’t been thinking about that too.’ She pulled her hand away from his and placed it in her lap. She found it uncomfortable to touch his skin, which was silly considering their latex-covered hands touched all the time during operations. ‘This will all be fine,’ she said, and pushed her chair back. ‘Things have a way of working out.’ She stood up. ‘I think I would feel better if I hadn’t been the one who found her.’
‘Of course,’ replied Agust. ‘Try to stop thinking about it. Remember Alda as she was in life. She deserves to be remembered that way.’
Dis nodded. Then she asked: ‘Do you think she might have been murdered?’
‘Murdered?’ asked Agust, flabbergasted. ‘Who would have had any reason to murder her?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Dis thoughtfully. ‘Some rapist out for revenge?’ she added.
‘For God’s sake, I don’t think so,’ said Agust, frowning. ‘I’m sure the rape association keeps better control of things than that.’
Dis smiled. ‘They’re called the Emergency Reception Unit Support Team for Rape Victims, and I’m not entirely sure that they do have things under control. I know Alda had had enough of them when she left her job at the A &E.’
Alda’s decision to give up her part-time job had come out of the blue several months earlier. She had been volunteering in the local A &E several nights a week and on the weekends, and among other things had earned a good reputation for her support and assistance of rape victims. She had seemed to enjoy this work, and perhaps her decision to quit was the clue that Dis had been trying to remember. Who knew, maybe the horrors Alda occasionally witnessed there had finally been too much for her to handle. ‘Maybe it was someone else entirely,’ she said cautiously.
