Magnus would not go back down into his own basement.
Thora realized she and Gudni were both slowly nodding their heads in response to Markus’s last statement.‘Yes, it must be easy to lose track of these things,’ said Gudni, and Thora had to bite her cheeks so as not to start laughing. For a moment Gudni seemed too stunned to think of any more questions, but then he said: ‘What about the excavation? Why was Alda so worried about it?’
Markus shrugged. ‘Actually, she wasn’t. I made that up,’ he said, shutting his eyes. He was clearly getting tired of their questions. ‘It was like this: during the evacuation to the mainland, Alda and I spoke. She was still in shock, both from the rape and the murders, and it also seemed that seeing the head had scared her. She asked me what had become of it, and I told her; I’d taken the box back home and hidden it in the basement, intending to get rid of it the next day. Her parents had told her the whole story that weekend, and she was understandably afraid that her father would go to jail.’Thora could picture the scene only too well; Alda’s parents describing the night’s events, persuading her to sacrifice herself to save her father from prison.
Markus had more to say. ‘No one had mentioned the head, since Geiri didn’t know about it until Dadi told him on Monday, and nor did Alda. She never told her parents about it. I suppose she wanted to destroy those memories, and she felt as if she’d got me into trouble. She blamed herself lot everything that happened. When we met at Reykjavik Junior College we never talked about it, and it didn’t come up again until they were about to excavate the house. Of course I tried to stop the excavation from the first day, but Alda acted as though it didn’t matter until a few months ago. Then she said she was going to spill the beans, so I didn’t need to pursue the injunction against the excavation. The truth would all come out. I tried to talk her out of it, but it didn’t work. I asked her to wait until I had gone down into the basement, and she agreed to that, thank God. Then I made one last attempt to get her to change her mind the night before I had to resort to my final option. I went to her house and begged her to let sleeping dogs lie; I would go down into the basement, get the head, and no one would need to know anything about it. But she wouldn’t budge.’
Alda had made the decision to confess everything after meeting her son. She wanted to tell the truth because she had nothing to lose. She had just been a pawn in this series of events, a victim. Thora realized that she herself had believed Markus blindly, and everything he had told her about Alda. She had never doubted him.
‘How did you actually think this would work?’ asked Gudni.
‘I was just going to get the head and get rid of it. Everyone would think Alda had committed suicide, and no one would connect it to the Westmann Islands. Lots of women kill themselves at that age, and she had no family or friends to speak of. I also had an alibi if it came to a murder investigation.’ Markus sat up straighten it all went wrong with the discovery of the bodies. I didn’t expect them to be down there, since they weren’t in the basement the night of the eruption. I would never have got them past the archaeologists.‘
‘So you turned the story round to pin it all on Alda?’ said Gudni.
‘Yes, I suppose I did,’ replied Markus. ‘I didn’t have much time to think; I was down in the basement and I had to come up with something. I don’t think it was a bad plan, in light of the circumstances.’ He looked almost proud of his cunning, and Thora was convinced at that moment that he was out of his mind. ‘I decided to say that Alda had given me the box, and years later asked me to remove it from the basement when the house was going to be excavated. She wasn’t going to be around to defend herself, so it should have been foolproof. I knew that any investigation of what happened would bring the rape to light, sooner or later. I had to be sure I wouldn’t be caught, and make suspicion fall on Alda.’
‘But why didn’t you tell us about the phone call from the estate agent when you were taken into custody?’said Gudni. ‘You’d had the foresight to prepare an alibi, and then you didn’t use it.’
Markus grinned. ‘Of course, I knew the estate agent had an unlisted number. When that was discovered, I didn’t want to arouse any suspicion by immediately remembering who had called me. I waited, to make my story more credible. I think it worked beautifully. Also, I didn’t want to talk about anything in connection with that night years ago, since I was supposed to have been drunk and unconscious.’
‘What about the biological samples?’ asked Gudni. ‘The hair that was found on Alda’s genitals? Did you forget about that?’
‘I loved Alda,’ said Markus, and therewas no doubting his conviction. Thora gulped.‘I always have. But she barely knew I was alive. I just lost control, and I was going to force her – I’d waited for decades, this was my last chance. I pulled down her underwear, but I stopped at the last minute when I realized what I was doing. I put her clothes back on, but the hair must have fallen off me.’ He looked from Thora to Gudni. ‘I swear she was alive when it happened. She was drifting in and out of consciousness, but she wasn’t dead. I would never do that.’
Gudni did not respond to this, but instead turned off the little tape recorder on the table. ‘Did Leifur know about the murders?’ he asked, looking as though he hoped this was not the case.
‘He was aware of them. Dad called him home from Reykjavik for support. He didn’t really come to tell me off for drinking, since I never would have listened to him back then. I told him about this thing with Alda afterwards. He wasn’t very pleased with me.’
Gudni nodded, it doesn’t matter what he knew, as long as he didn’t take part in any criminal activity. In that case, we don’t need to bring him into this.‘He turned the machine back on and Thora stared open-mouthed at the blinking light on its side. It must be nice to hold all the cards for an entire community. Good for the one who does, not so good for others. As she processed this new information, Gudni took her silence as consent.
‘Aren’t we finished here yet?’ she asked, ‘I’m not sure I can endure any more right now, and I’m sure Markus has had enough too.’ In the hallway she could see Soley yawning widely. ‘You know where I am if you need me.’ She wanted to ask Markus about Alda’s hair, whether he was the one who’d cut it from Alda’s head as she slept in the gym, but decided to let it wait. It seemed a rather trivial detail in the light of other events, and the answer was obvious anyway. Now that she thought about it, the hair in the storeroom that had sickened Bella so much must have been Alda’s. Thora suspected that Markus had been driven to do it by jealousy and anger towards Stebbi, the boy that Alda liked. He had wanted to teach Alda a lesson and show her what happened if she rejected him.
Gudni stood up. ‘Yes, I think that’s all for now. There’s a plane on its way from Reykjavik to fetch you, Markus, and I doubt very much you’ll be back here in the Islands any time soon. You might want to take the opportunity to admire the view of the cliffs from my window, before you leave.’
Thora walked out without looking back at Gudni and Markus. Thanking the card- playing police officer for his patience, she helped her daughter to her feet. Orri was still sleeping soundly in the pushchair, and she was able to pull up his hood without waking him. The three of them then headed out into the August night in search of a tourist truck to drive them back to their apartment.
‘Did the police catch the bad guy?’ asked Soley sleepily, as they walked down the spotless street. They could hear the noise from the festival at Herjolfsdalur, carried on the breeze.
‘Yes, sweetheart,’ said Thora, trying to look pleased that the case was solved. She still felt she’d been made a fool of.
‘And who was the bad guy?’ her daughter asked eagerly. In her simple, childish world criminals were easy to spot, like Robbie Rotten or the Beagle Boys in the books Thora read to her.
‘It was the one that I thought was the good guy,’ replied Thora, smiling down at her. ‘People sometimes make mistakes.’ They waved down a truck and sat on a bench among a group of festival- goers, who were all smiles. She wondered if she could get a babysitter for the following night and allow herself some fun. Maybe she, like Bella, could find herself a handsome sailor and forget everything for a while.
It sounded nice, but Thora knew it would never happen.
Yrsa Sigurdardottir is an award-winning author of five children's novels who is also a leading Icelandic civil engineer directing one of the largest hydro construction
