‘I didn’t plan for her to die the way she did. She threw up the drugs, so they didn’t work. I didn’t have much time and I had to take desperate measures. It was supposed to look like suicide, and I hoped the Botox in her tongue wouldn’t be discovered. I left it on her bedside table as a back-up – if the drug was found in her body, people might well believe Alda had decided to kill herself that way. Her fingerprints were on the bottle and the syringe. Of course I made sure I wore gloves.’
in other words, you went to her house with the sole intention of ending her life?‘ asked Gudni deliberately.
‘Yes, I did. I had no choice. I had already tried other things. It was her own fault. Of course I was disappointed when the Botox didn’t work, but I had to do something. I just wanted to paralyze her tongue. One always hears of people choking on their own vomit. It was supposed to look like that. She was still retching. I knew about the Botox at her house, because she’d got me to try it a few months before. I came that night under the pretence of wanting more. She injected me before I… you know.’
Thóra closed her eyes. Would this never end? She leaned out to get a view of the corridor, where Orri was asleep in the pushchair and Sóley was sitting playing cards with the police officer assigned to take care of her during the interrogation. Soon Sóley would be too tired to keep playing, and Thóra had decided to leave at that point, no matter what. She had had enough, and the man at her side appeared not to need legal protection. He had decided to confess everything, which meant that there was little use for her. No lawyer could help him now.
There did not appear to have been any mitigating circumstances. Thóra was feeling a little overwhelmed by it all; she felt as though she’d been betrayed and made a fool of. What she wanted most was to drop the case, but her conscience wouldn’t let her. Gudni did not appear to feel any better. He had also been deceived, and very publicly. The murderer seemed to have played everyone, except perhaps Detective Stefán. But now the day of reckoning had arrived.‘Markus, could you wind this story up?’ said Thóra, not looking at him. ‘I have to go soon.’ She was still stunned at how easily he had manipulated her.
‘Yes, let’s tie this up,’said Gudni. ‘Did the estate agent lie for you? Did you pay him to say he’d recognized your voice on the phone?’
‘No,’ said Markus. ‘He really did hear my voice.’
‘Now the phone, or the Sim card in it, was traced and found to have been located in the region of the town of Hella, as I recall. You couldn’t have been there, Markus, if you’re telling us the truth now. So clearly this estate agent didn’t speak directly to you. Why did this man lie for you? Because you or your brother are good customers of his? And who answered the phone?’
‘I’m telling the truth, and so is the estate agent. I did not have my phone with me,’ said Markus. He was starting to sober up and kept licking his dry lips. ‘My son drove my car east to the summerhouse and he had my phone with him. I was hoping that someone would remember having seen my car during the trip, to make my alibi more credible. Actually, no witness to the road trip could be found, but that didn’t really make any difference. In any case, I had borrowed my son’s car.’
‘I still don’t understand this business with the phone call,’ said Gudni. ‘Does your son’s voice sound like yours?’
‘No, not at all,’ replied Markus.‘I’d prepared everything really well. I bought two mobile phones and put untraceable pay-as-you-go Sim cards in them, which I bought at a petrol station. Then I gave Hjalti two phones, mine and one of the ones I’d bought, while I kept the other one myself. That evening I called my mobile phone from Alda’s home phone, pretending to have left it at work so that she wouldn’t suspect anything. Hjalti answered and we exchanged a few words. Then we said goodbye and I got down to business.’ Markus paused for a moment and Thóra wondered whether his conscience was troubling him or if he was simply resting his voice.
He continued: ‘I’d made a rather low bid on an apartment that I’d chosen randomly, with an estate agent I know a little. I had to be sure that he could tell whether it was me on the phone or someone else. It wouldn’t have done me any good to use someone who couldn’t confirm it was me he’d spoken to. I let the bid stand until eight o’clock and had the estate agent promise to call me on my mobile immediately afterwards to let me know the result. Just before eight Hjalti used the pay-as-you-go phone I’d given him to call the one that I had, and we kept the connection open until the estate agent finally called. Then Hjalti answered my mobile there near Hella, and put the phones together so that the speaker of one touched the microphone of the other. That’s how I could talk to the estate agent without my real whereabouts being traceable at all. There were some glitches in the connection but I told him that it was because I was on the road near Hella. He accepted that. I’d already tested it out so I knew it would work.’
Thóra gaped at Markus. Naturally she wanted to ask him about everything, but Gudni would have to take care of that for the moment. Markus’s position was equally dire, whether Thóra attended his interrogation or not. Her job was to support Markus, though it was unclear what advice she could give him at that moment. The only thing she could think of was to try to prove that Markus was unfit to stand trial, although he appeared determined to tell the entire story to save Hjalti.
‘Did your son have any knowledge of what was going on?’ asked Gudni.
‘No, all he knew was that if he did me this favour, I would buy him an apartment out on the Islands. It’s been a dream of his for a long time. I’m afraid he won’t get the chance to enjoy his new place as he should have. He’s been a complete wreck, the poor kid, since he realized what I was up to.’
‘But why did you do this, Markus? We thought you were in love with Alda. You seemed to be the last person who would wish her any harm.’ Gudni’s question was sincere.
‘I told you,’ Markus replied, indignant. ‘I tried to avoid it, and I gave her lots of opportunities to sort this out by some other means. It simply didn’t work out that way.’
‘Sort what out?’ asked Gudni.
‘Oh, this thing with the head,’said Markus, as if that explained everything. He looked from Gudni to Thóra and back, but neither of them knew what he was trying to say. He sighed and explained himself better: ‘I cut off the man’s head. Not Alda. I did it for her, but as usual I got no thanks for it.’
‘You cut off the head,’ repeated Gudni calmly. ‘Weren’t you in a drunken stupor at home when the murders were committed?’
‘No, I wasn’t that bad,’replied Markus. ‘I was drunk, but not as drunk as the others. I crashed on the couch, but the phone woke me up in the middle of the night. It was Geiri, Alda’s father, calling to ask Dad to come over. He wanted to discuss Dadi’s offer to help them cover everything up. My mum also woke up and came out of the bedroom. When she saw the blood on Dad, who’d been sitting like a statue in the kitchen since he got back from the harbour, she asked him what was going on. In the end he told her the whole story. They didn’t know I was there, but I heard everything. I knew Dad and Geiri had killed the men, and I knew what one of them had done to Alda. I also heard Dad say where the bodies were, in a fishing smack tied to the last pontoon in the harbour. I sneaked out and went down there, after Dad had gone to Geiri’s place and Mum had run off crying to the bedroom. I found the boat with the bodies on board, cut off the head and genitals of the one I thought most likely to have raped Alda, and took them with me to show her. I thought it would help her get over it.’
Thóra leaned in towards Markus, although it repulsed her to be close to him, and whispered in his ear:‘You might want to be careful about mentioning your family members by name. Especially those who are still with us. Of course it’s up to you what you say, but you might regret it in the morning.’
‘And is that when you put the head into the box? To take it home?’ asked Gudni.
‘No, the box came later,’ replied Markus. ‘I put it in a bag and just managed to hide behind a pile of nets when Dad and Dadi came back down to the harbour. They discussed something until some old guy turned up, but they got rid of him quite quickly. Dad went aboard, brought out a birdcage and released the bird. He left shortly after that, but I waited to see what Dadi was up to. He went down into the boat and came up afterwards, looking very pale. He’d obviously been startled to see that a head – and more – was missing from one of the bodies. He went and got his pick-up, and hauled the other three bodies into it. He spread a cloth over them and parked the pick-up a short distance away. Then he pulled a little rubber dinghy on board the smack and sailed off in the smack with the fourth body still on board. He sunk the ship and came back to shore on the dinghy. I hurried home and hid the head in a box down in the basement, and I also put the tools I used to cut it off in one of the boxes in the storeroom, under all the other stuff.’
‘Why did you use the salmon priest?’ Thóra blurted out. She could understand his needing a knife, but not a mallet.
‘I took both of them because I thought it might be difficult to cut through the spine.’ Markus stared at the wall behind Gudni.
‘Did you know Dadi had taken the bodies down into the basement?’ asked the inspector, trying to hide his amazement.
‘No, they weren’t there the evening before the eruption. I’m absolutely certain of that. I overheard a conversation between Geiri and Dad on board their ship, Strokkur, when I was helping them after school. They didn’t know I could hear them. According to Geiri, Dadi had contacted him to say he still had the bodies as leverage if Dad and Geiri didn’t keep to their side of the bargain. From what I could understand, Dadi had panicked when he saw the head was missing, and accused Geiri of having removed it in order to pin the murder on him. In other words, Dadi thought that Dad and Geiri were going to bring the head to his house to make it look as if he’d murdered the men. Geiri had no idea what he was talking about, since he didn’t know anything about the disappearance of the head, and neither did Dad. They thought Dadi was making it up. They didn’t know where he was keeping the bodies,and neither did I, but I do know they weren’t in our basement yet.’
It took Thóra a while to digest this. Dadi suspected that the two partners, Magnus and Geiri, were going to betray him, and wanted to secure his position by hanging on to the bodies. She exhaled. Clearly this Dadi hadn’t been the brightest person in the Islands. How could he think that being in possession of the mens’bodies would prove he hadn’t murdered them? Maybe he’d planned to put them in Magnus and Geiri’s ship, since he thought they were going to hide the head at his house. She nearly laughed out loud. This was so ridiculous. These people must have been desperate. It seemed most likely to her that Dadi would have hidden the bodies somewhere in the vicinity of his house, but not actually inside. When the eruption had started he may have thought it best to move them to Magnus’s basement, where they would be buried forever. In the unlikely event that they were found, suspicion would then fall on Magnus, not Dadi.
Maybe he had stored the bodies somewhere they risked being found; the rescuers had wandered freely in and out of all the houses, and someone could easily have stumbled across them. In all likelihood, he had waited until he was certain
Magnus would not go back down into his own basement.
Thóra 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 Thóra 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.’Thóra 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. Thóra 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 Thóra 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. Thóra 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 Thóra 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 Thóra 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 Sóley 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. Thóra 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.’
Thóra 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 Sóley 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 Thóra, 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 Thóra read to her.
‘It was the one that I thought was the good guy,’ replied Thóra, 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 Thóra knew it would never happen.