back door. Swallowing her pride, she dialled her ex-husband’s number.
As Dis listened to the message on the answering machine the smile she usually wore after a successful operation vanished. Now what? A lawyer who wanted to speak to them about Alda? Not the police, as she had feared, but the lawyer of some childhood friend of Alda, someone Dis had never heard of before. She listened to the message again and tried to read more into it, but without success. The voice was soft and courteous, seeming to suggest neither that the speaker felt Dis and Agust were hidingsomething nor that this was a formality unrelated to who they were. Dis wondered whether she should fetch Agust, who was finishing up a consultation with the last patient of the day: yet another young man who wanted to have a scar from a fight removed. She decided not to. Agust tended towards the melodramatic, and she had no desire to nourish her own anxiety with his paranoia. She felt sick thinking of the one court case their work had involved them in. Agust had rendered himself almost incapable of working with the stress of the case and his wild flights of fancy about what might happen. By the time a settlement was finally reached, Dis was on the verge of offering up her soul along with the damages they were ordered to pay. It would be a small price to pay for peace of mind at work.
Dis scribbled down the lawyer’s number then erased the message, resolving to phone and arrange to meet her tomorrow, when Agust would not be at the office. This was undoubtedly something unimportant, probably concerning her estate; whether Alda had had life insurance from the office, or some such. Dis could take care of this herself, and in the unlikely event it was about something else, she would get Agust involved – but not until she had to.
She went over to Alda’s tidy desk, which was conveniently located behind a partition separating it from the waiting room. Alda hadn’t had an office of her own like Dis and Agust, since she mainly assisted them in the operating room and only a tiny bit with paperwork. Dis looked over the well-ordered workspace, which in that sense resembled Agust’s office. However Alda, unlike Agust, had given her little area a tiny bit of personality: on the table was a framed photograph of a woman whom Dis recalled was Alda’s younger and only sister, and there was also a little daintily painted flowerpot containing a cactus which seemed to be thriving. Poor little thing, thought Dis. Neither she nor Agust had the ability to keep so much as a weed alive, and it would take a lot for the receptionist to tear herself away from Facebook to look after a plant. Dis was about to throw the plant into the rubbish bin to avoid having to watch it wither away, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it, for Alda’s sake. She would try to remember the plant and nurse it as best she could. At least she would have tried, even if the cactus died. Out of respect for Alda, she didn’t want to throw out something she had cared about.
Pleased with her noble thoughts, Dis sat down and started to scrutinize Alda’s desk and computer. It didn’t occur to her that such a thing was inappropriate. She owned the company that owned the computer, like everything else in the office, and if Alda kept any secrets that she wouldn’t have wanted to come out at work, then it was best if it were Dis who uncovered them. Agust was a gossip and the receptionist, at best, a simpleton. Both of them lacked the maturity to respect others’ privacy.
As the computer was firing up, Dis looked through Alda’s desk drawers. In the top drawer the stationery had been so tidily arranged that Dis wouldn’t have been able to recreate the layout if her life depended on it. In Dis’s top drawer everything was a jumble: pens, paperclips, stamps and anything else that ended up there for want of its own particular place.
The other two drawers had little in them, although there were some files that Dis had trouble understanding. Among them was the autopsy report of an older woman who had died in the hospital in Isafjordur. She skimmed through it and could see nothing in it connected to Alda or to her work in the office. She didn’t recognize the woman’s name, and when the computer was ready she tried running it through their database. The woman hadn’t been one of her or Agust’s patients. She shrugged, assuming the woman was a relative or friend of Alda’s, although the age difference between them did not suggest the latter. Dis put the report on the table so it wouldn’t end up in a box with other things for disposal or storage. Maybe she could find an explanation for this somehow. The death had occurred quite recently, so perhaps it would help explain why Alda had killed herself. Dis suppressed a shudder at the thought that the cause of death might be something other than suicide. Although suicide was awful, there were many things worse, and Dis wouldn’t hesitate to share any information that supported Alda’s having died by her own hand.
The drawer also contained a photograph of a young man Dis did not recognize. The photo was very artistic, and the subject clearly wasn’t aware of the photographer. He sat slouched on a chair, looking out into space, solemn but not scowling. He had the look of someone who wasn’t scared of anything. Dis couldn’t tell where the photograph had been taken, as all you could see was the man, a yellow wall and the chair, but something made him look very distinguished. Before Dis put the photo down she frowned and tried to figure out what it was she found so attractive about him. She couldn’t, but wondered whether Alda had kept this photo because she felt the same.
She shut the drawer and turned to the computer, smiling when she saw what Alda had chosen as her desktop wallpaper. It was a kitten that had been photoshopped and now smiled idiotically at her with a set of human teeth. Dis thought she’d have nothing against owning a kitten if it were possible to make it look like that, and idly wondered whether she could use her expertise to do the work. She was obviously tired after a long day.
She quickly gave up reading through the files on the computer, which were countless. After opening several at random she found nothing that drew her attention, so she went online and out of curiosity checked which pages Alda had bookmarked as favourites. As she read the list her mouth dropped open in amazement.
She clicked on one link after another in the hope that they wouldn’t be what their names suggested, but unfortunately they were. A succession of pornographic sites popped up. Dis gaped. Alda had been a completely different person than she appeared. Could this be connected to her work at the A &E, and the rape cases that they sometimes had to deal with? The more Dis saw, the clearer it became that this explanation didn’t hold up. Here she saw the entire spectrum of sexual relations: sado-masochism, homosexuality, conventional sex between a man and woman, and numerous other variations. Dis breathed easier when she had ascertained that children were not included. What had Alda got herself into? Was this the reason she wasn’t in a steady relationship: that she didn’t know what she wanted?
She logged off the Internet and felt almost abused herself, although it had been her choice to look at the material and she had known what she was getting into. It wasn’t the contents of the pages that upset her so much as the fact that she’d looked through a door into a part of Alda’s world that she hadn’t known existed. Ugh, it would be very difficult to write the obituary now, and Dis cursed herself for not having even started it. She exhaled and considered whether she should just leave well enough alone and turn off the computer. But curiosity overruled her better judgement, and she went into Alda’s email. She vowed to herself she wouldn’t open any message that could possibly be connected to Alda’s sex life, but she allowed herself to arrange the messages according to the senders and recipients in order to see what had gone on between Alda and the people she knew.
Messages from Agust were at the top of the list, and Dis only had to open a few of them to realize what had been going on. She leaned back in her chair. The websites were nothing compared to this. She fervently hoped that whatever this Thora Gudmundsdottir wanted, it didn’t have anything to do with this.
Chapter Seventeen
The booklet about rape was certainly informative, but it did not hold Thora’s interest for long. There was no other reading material in sight, and after rearranging everything in her handbag there was nothing else for Thora to do. She was sitting with her legs crossed in an uncomfortable chair in an empty hallway in the old City Hospital, and had started to swing her feet to and fro in boredom. She couldn’t read the booklet a third time. Hannes had arranged for her to meet a nurse who had known Alda, but the problem was that the woman wasn’t certain when she could get a break and had suggested that Thora come and take her
