‘Still, you must have thought about it?’ she said. ‘Who those people were? As an archaeologist, you must be curious about your own dig?’
‘Of course I’ve thought about it,’ agreed Hjortur. ‘But I don’t have much imagination so I didn’t really get anywhere. I can tell you one thing, though,’ he added. ‘Just out of curiosity I looked over the newspapers from that time period – we have them here on old-fashioned microfilm – and I found nothing about missing persons, either Icelandic or otherwise. So they appear not to have been missed, which is very odd.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I don’t know how well you could see when you were down there but they’d set up floodlights by the time they came to get me. It looked to me as if at least two of the men were wearing wedding rings. What sort of men were they if their wives didn’t even look for them?’
An unpleasant thought about her ex-husband crossed Thora’s mind, but she pushed it away. ‘Good question,’ she settled for saying. Then she asked: ‘Did you notice anything that would indicate the men were sailors? I was sort of toying with the notion that this could be related to the Cod War.’
Hjortur shook his head slowly. ‘As far as I could see and can remember, they weren’t wearing waterproofs, or anything else you’d expect to see on sailors at that time,’ he said. ‘That’s not saying much, though, since sailors aren’t always dressed in their work clothes, any more than anyone else is.’ He smiled and looked down at his scruffy jeans.
‘I understand,’ said Thora, who had been hoping for a different answer, perhaps even that the men had been holding ropes and nets. She thought for a moment before continuing. ‘Do you think someone might have got confused and put the bodies in the wrong place?’ she asked. ‘Was the eruption bad enough at any point to make visibility that poor?’
Hjortur shrugged. ‘Well, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It seems unlikely, but I can’t be a hundred per cent certain.’ He scratched his head. ‘There’s also the possibility that the house where the bodies were supposed to have been put had already disappeared, and Markus’s house was chosen instead. There’s an excellent website about the houses that disappeared, both the ones in the area the lava swallowed and those that were buried in ash that we’re digging up. Maybe you’ll find something useful there.’
Thora smiled at him as he scribbled down the web address. He had made an excellent point; it was possible that the corpses were not supposed to have ended up there at all, and the whims of the volcano had determined where they could be buried. Why would a man put bodies in his own basement if there were numerous other houses available? Had the bodies and the head ended up in the same place by accident? This riddle about the bodies was starting to infuriate Thora. She had to uncover the story behind them. Mostly for Markus’s sake, but also to satisfy her own curiosity.
Thora sat with a steaming cappuccino in the same restaurant that she and Bella had eaten in the night before. She had noticed they had computer access for customers, so she could kill two birds with one stone by having a cup of coffee and looking online. They had split up their to-do list: Bella would visit the archive, while she looked at the website
Hjortur had recommended. Thora knew her task was nicer than Bella’s – she got to sit in a cosy environment with a cup of coffee while Bella searched through dusty files for two names – but she felt this division of labour to be a small come-uppance for the uneven distribution of luck with men the night before. Although Thora had in part sent Bella away to get her out of her sight, she really hoped her secretary would accomplish her task, although the chances of this were slim. Thora had sent her to the archive without first checking to see whether files transferred to Reykjavik the night of the eruption even existed there, but since Bella hadn’t contacted her it seemed she’d found something to rummage through. Either that or the archivist happened to be a man, and Bella had seduced him.
Thora scanned the text on the screen. She quickly found information on Markus’s house and its residents at the time, and recognized the names of his parents and brother. She noted down the names of their nearest neighbours, and then those of the residents of the other ten houses on the street. All the names told her was that Kjartan, whom she and Bella had met at the harbour-master’s office, looked to have lived in the house next to Markus’s. At least, the name of the family head was Kjartan Helgason. There could have been two men with the same name, but no other information on him was to be found on the website.
Thora clicked on the next link, Residents of Sudurvegur Street, and found short biographies of four residents. Luckily, one of these biographical blurbs was about Kjartan Helgason and, even better, the article was accompanied by a photograph. Thora recognized him immediately. On the downside, his biography didn’t tell her much except that Kjartan had had a long career at sea, thenworked in various jobs before taking up his current position as harbour-master. He had married and had four children; they were all adults now. Upon finishing this article Thora skimmed through the other biographies, but found nothing that seemed likely to help Markus. The only thing that drew her attention was how many children there had been in each home. Apart from one couple that appeared to be childless, Magnus and his wife Klara had had the fewest children, just their two sons Leifur and Markus.
Thora finished her coffee and phoned Bella to check on her progress – and set her mind at rest about the archivist’s safety. Her secretary was sullen. The files were obviously in the archive, but Bella hadn’t yet been able to discover which boat Markus had travelled on. Thora regretted not having asked Markus what the boat was called, since the files were arranged by name of vessel. Thora did her best to be encouraging and tell Bella how important her task was, then she said goodbye and informed her secretary that she was going back to the hotel, where they would meet and decide how best to take advantage of the rest of the day until their dinner with Leifur and his family.
The weather was so pleasant that Thora decided to make a detour and enjoy the sunshine. She walked past a souvenir shop and went in to buy a statue of a puffin for Soley, as well as a tiny pair of woollen mittens for her grandson Orri. Just as the saleswoman was ringing up the items, Bella called.
‘Guess what I found out?’ she said proudly. ‘Markus and Alda took the same boat to the mainland.’
Thora thanked her, hung up and smiled happily at the saleswoman as she handed her her credit card. They’d cleared the first hurdle.
Chapter Eleven
‘Could you please pass the salt?’asked Thora, trying to sound nonchalant. On a beautiful porcelain plate in front of her was a light blue egg, flecked with brown, which she had cracked open halfway. Doing so had exposed an almost transparent white, even though the egg was supposed to be hard-boiled. Thora wasn’t very adventurous when it came to food, and a wild bird’s egg wasn’t very high on her list of delicacies. Normally she would have refused it politely and waited for the main course, but at a dinner with unfamiliar hosts she had no other choice but to salt it well, swallow it and smile. Leifur grinned at her and handed her the salt- shaker. ‘It’s not for everyone,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to eat it if you don’t want to.’
Thora smiled back. ‘No, I would really like to try it,’ she lied, and shook the slender shaker over the greyish albumen. Then she handed the salt on to Bella and watched as her secretary did much the same. Bella peered out of the corner of her eye at Thora, clearly suffering the same dilemma.
Maria, Leifur’s wife, was watching them closely from the opposite end of the table. She was visibly displeased. She looked away from the two women and turned to her husband. ‘I don’t know why you always have to force this on your guests, especially as we have visitors so rarely,’ she said, lifting her glass and gulping down her white wine. ‘It stopped being clever a long time ago.’ Her glass banged loudly on the table when she put it down, and it was embarrassingly clear that she’d had a bit too much to drink. She was an extremely good-looking woman who had probably been a great beauty in her youth, but she was painfully thin and Thora would have bet anything she’d had medical assistance to keep herself looking so good. Her clothing was impeccable and appeared to be mostly brand new, although it wasn’t the latest fashion. Her outfit was classic, a knee-length beige skirt and cream silk shirt that matched her pale suede high heels. Since Maria had very fair colouring, she looked so monotone that Thora thought she’d be invisible if she walked in front of a haystack.
