this nonsense.
Tinna’s mother had been hysterical on the telephone and insisted that the girl was mortally ill. He didn’t quite agree with that – he was sure that in the end she would be so hungry that she would have to eat something. He did vaguely recall a headline in some gossip magazine about a famous model who’d died of anorexia, but that was different. That woman had starved herself because of work, but Tinna had no reason to do so. In the end, she would come round.
He stood up from the sofa and went into the kitchen to look for coffee, but to no avail. All he found was a little jar of instant granules that had expired several months earlier. Nevertheless, he prepared a large mug of the slop and gulped it down at high speed, black and sugarless. He needed to perk up a bit and be wide awake when he spoke to his lawyer. He found that since he’d lost his job he was paying less attention to the world around him and was generally more apathetic. It was probably because he had too much time on his hands, which meant that he dragged things out until the last minute. He shook himself to speed up the effect of the caffeine in his blood. He didn’t remember who had recommended this method, but it always seemed to work. He phoned his lawyer.
‘Did you know that the nurse who wanted to meet me is dead?’ was the first thing she said.
‘No,’ lied Adolf. He’d seen the death notice several days earlier and had felt relieved. ‘Does it matter?’
His lawyer cleared her throat. ‘I would have thought so, yes,’ she said. ‘It was my understanding that she had information that might have helped you. You needed her, I can tell you that much.’
‘I didn’t rape the damn girl,’ snarled Adolf. This was all bullshit. They’d never pin it on him.
‘You don’t need to keep telling me,’ said his lawyer, with a hint of fatigue in her voice. ‘If this Alda had been able to testify in your favour, it would have meant a great deal. Your position is bad enough as it is.’
‘How can someone be accused of rape after more than twenty-four hours?’ he said heatedly. ‘If I had raped her for real she would have gone straight to the police or the hospital. Not home.’
‘That does work in your favour, but it’s actually not uncommon, and therefore doesn’t suffice in itself. I remember that she had some injuries and unexplained bleeding from her genitals.’ Adolf didn’t feel like saying anything, and she continued, ‘Of course you already know all this, there’s no use going over and over it.’ She paused for a moment but was met by more silence, so she started again: ‘When this Alda called me, she said she wanted to speak to you before she came to meet me. I tried to get her to change her mind, but she insisted. Did she contact you?’
‘No,’ Adolf lied for the second time. ‘She didn’t.’
‘That’s too bad,’ said the lawyer. ‘Are you absolutely sure?’ It was clear from her tone that she didn’t believe him, so perhaps to cover this she added:‘It’s just that Alda treated the girl when she went to A &E, so whatever it was that she wanted to say would probably have made a great deal of difference. As it stands now, the hospital report is very bad for you.’
Adolf knew all this. ‘I told you, Alda didn’t come.’
‘What you actually said was that she hadn’t contacted you, but it doesn’t matter.’ The woman sounded unconvinced. ‘You let me know if you suddenly remember a phone call or a visit from her that slipped your mind.’
Adolf let her question go in one ear and out the other. ‘That’s not going to happen.’ He hesitated slightly but then continued, ‘I’m not in the mood. My daughter is ill and she’s been admitted to hospital. As a matter of fact, her life’s in danger.’ To judge by the silence on the other end of the phone this surprised his lawyer, who was usually imperturbable.‘Still, I’m sure she’ll recover. Maybe she could even testify…’
Chapter Nineteen
Yesterday’s stormclouds had disappeared and been replaced by thin wispy clouds in an otherwise clear blue sky. It was as if God had been puffing on a cigar and exhaled in the direction of Iceland. Thora sat outside on her veranda, enjoying the morning. The pages of the Morgunbladid daily newspaper lying on the table in front of her rustled in the breeze and steam drifted up from her coffee cup. She closed the paper and took a sip of coffee. Mercifully, Morgunbladid had gone easy on Markus in its report on his arrest and the detention order pending trial. This was perhaps no surprise, since the judge had been on the fence. For a while Thora even thought that he would deny the state prosecutor’s request. However, this did not happen, although he did reduce the recommended custody period from three weeks to five days. Thora’s objection and her remarks on evidence that pointed to Markus’s innocence may have helped. For the first time in her life she wanted a cigarette, or at least to smell cigarette smoke. Passive smoke from Bella was probably to blame, unless she was losing her mind. Thora hoped that it was the former. She couldn’t afford to fall apart today, since the High Court would rule on the detention order this afternoon.
Understandably Markus had wanted to appeal the district court’s decision. In fact only three days of the five had remained when the decision was announced, but she did not blame him. Three days felt like a thousand: no innocent man wanted to sit behind bars. She looked at the clock and saw that it wasn’t even eight yet. If she left the house within the next hour she might have time to find something else that could rebut the court’s decision. Yet she had no idea what exactly that might be. Without doubt, it was Alda’s diary from 1973 that had influenced the district court judge’s hesitation over Markus’s guilt. Thora had handed it over to the police immediately after Markus’s interview. Stefan had reacted angrily and accused her of concealing evidence from the police, and Thora had tried unsuccessfully to explain herself. When the prosecutor had tried to devalue the importance of the diary in court, the judge took Thora’s side and said the handover hadn’t been delayed unnaturally in light of the circumstances. Another small victory had been won when the judge had asked numerous questions about the evidence that suggested the three bodies had been placed in the basement after the eruption had been going on for some time, which meant that Markus couldn’t have been there. The police didn’t have much on Markus as far as the bodies in the basement were concerned, if you didn’t count the head.
Alda’s death was a different story. Here there was very little in Markus’s favour: both a witness and evidence suggested that he’d been at the scene. The witness turned out to be a boy who had been distributing flyers for his sports club’s tin- can collection on the evening that Alda was murdered. The police had found one of the flyers in Alda’s house and tracked down the boy, who had given a description of a man who had shown up there at the same time as the boy had been walking away from Alda’s house, around seven thirty. The description fit Markus perfectly, and the boy had then selected a photo of him from a group of several he was shown. The boy said that the man had walked up to the house, but he hadn’t seen him get out of a car, nor did he particularly remember anything about cars on the street that evening. Thora tried to point out that Markus’s car was a model that any normal healthy teenage boy would certainly notice, but to no effect. It was pointed out that Markus could easily have parked elsewhere, especially if he had come there with criminal intent and hadn’t wanted anyone to notice him. Thora’s objection that Markus had an extremely average appearance and that the description could easily have applied to countless other men was also of little use, as, for that matter, was the fact that the boy could have selected Markus’s photo from the stack at random. However, Thora hoped this assertion would find better support after she examined the photos that the boy had been shown, because the police could easily have given him a selection in which Markus alone fit the description. She would be allowed to see them later, and she also hoped that a record of calls to and from Markus’s phone, as well as Alda’s, would be turned over to her at the same time. Thora clung to the hope that this log would reveal that Alda had called Markus as he
