The only guests at the prizegiving that Saturday morning were the children who had won and their parents. Sóley sat between her mother and her brother Gylfi, smiling broadly. The competition had been part of the Arts Week at the City Library and involved drawing pictures of home appliances that made a family’s life easier, and Sóley had spent an entire afternoon conscientiously drawing and colouring. To Thóra’s great surprise her daughter had won; up until that point Sóley had displayed limited talent in the arts. The girl who had won in the oldest age group walked back to her seat with a little bouquet and a cheque from the sponsors of the competition, one of the largest electrical equipment companies in the country. The city librarian called Sóley, who took her place next to the woman, red-cheeked.
‘Congratulations on your victory,’ said the librarian, taking Sóley’s small hand. She pointed at the girl’s picture, which was hanging in a special display along with the other illustrations that had been entered in the competition. There were actually not very many of them, just as Thóra had suspected when she received the news that Sóley had won. ‘I have to say, this is a very artistically drawn picture of a steam iron that you’ve done,’ said the librarian as she handed Sóley a large envelope and bouquet.
Thóra knitted her brow. Why had Sóley drawn a picture of an iron? Her ex-husband had taken it with him when they separated, because none of Thóra’s clothing required ironing. She doubted that Sóley knew what it looked like, but it seemed she’d done a decent job even without a model. Thóra looked proudly from the picture to her daughter, whose cheeks were even redder than before as she stood there next to the librarian with the prize in her arms, staring at her toes. Sóley seemed on the verge of tears, but she clenched her teeth.
‘It’s a snowmobile. Not a steam iron,’ said Sóley, chewing her bottom lip.
Now it was the librarian’s turn to blush slightly, but to Thóra’s great relief she resolved the problem successfully by saying that she’d misread her notes. On the other hand, Gylfi’s burst of laughter did not help, and as they stood there afterwards in front of the picture he continued to giggle.
‘It looks exactly like an iron,’he said. ‘How did you ever get the idea of drawing a snowmobile? Do you think it’s a household appliance?’
Thóra leapt to her daughter’s rescue. ‘Of course it is. In the countryside snowmobiles count as home appliances.’ She tightened her grip on her daughter’s hand, while Sóley hung her head. ‘Don’t listen to him. He has no idea what snowmobiles look like.’ The same actually went for Sóley. ‘I’m going to buy you ice cream in honour of your win.’ She looked from the snowmobile to the other pictures. ‘Sóley. Yours is by far the most beautiful. Stands head and shoulders above the rest.’
‘No, it’s ugly,’ said the child. ‘I should have drawn a door, like I was going to at first.’
Thóra realized that she would have to explain to her daughter at a better time what the words household appliance meant. ‘There there,’ she said.‘You won and that was no accident.
You drew the most beautiful picture. Steam iron and snowmobile both start with the letter “s”.That’s why the woman got mixed up.‘ She kissed Sóley on the cheek and gave her son the evil eye, since he appeared to be on the verge of bursting into laughter again. ’Do me a favour and find me a book about the eruption in the Westmann Islands,‘ she said to him. This would get Gylfi thinking about something other than the snow-mobile-steam iron and she would benefit from reading up on the events of 1973, which she actually knew very little about. While he went to find the book Thóra used the opportunity to cheer up her daughter, although she didn’t actually smile until they were sitting down with huge glasses full of ice cream with whipped cream on top. Thóra’s mobile phone rang just as she was finishing her ice cream, but she decided not to answer for fear the world would crumble around her daughter. She changed her mind when she saw on the screen that it was Markus calling. His world truly was crumbling around him, and ice cream would do very little to improve his situation.
Thóra hung up on Bragi, her partner in the legal firm, and sighed. She was exhausted after a long day, which had gone differently than she’d planned. Markus had been called in for yet another round of questioning, now under suspicion of involvement in the untimely death of Alda and of being party to the death of the people in the basement. The phone call from Markus had been urgent, so Thóra ended up at the police station after finishing her ice cream, instead of going to the cinema or doing something else with her children. She had had to listen to the same questions put to her client as in the previous interviews, along with a few additional questions about Alda. They all concerned whether he had been at her home on the Sunday evening when she was thought to have died. Markus had denied this and stuck to his story that they had only spoken on the phone. At first he absolutely denied having gone to her house for weeks, but later admitted that he had in fact been there – not on the night they were asking about, but the night before. He had stopped there for a short time and had a glass of wine.
Thóra felt like screaming when Markus let this slip. She was disappointed in him, mainly for trying to keep quiet about his visit, especially since his meeting with Alda had occurred outside the time in which the police were interested. As such, this only increased their suspicion towards him. Thóra thought it likely that he’d been so stubborn about not admitting his visit because he feared being charged with drink-driving. This was not unusual – many people hid insignificant details from the police if they involved illegal actions, and tended to focus on keeping them secret even if they were suspected of much more serious crimes. The police’s attempts to tie Markus to a murder didn’t seem to bother him, but he was like a cat on a hot tin roof when attention turned to his possible motor vehicle violation. He was obviously clinging to the childish belief that in the end his name would be cleared of the murders without his needing to put any great effort into it.
When the police came to the end of their list of questions concerning Markus’s visit to Alda, Thóra felt that the interrogation had run out of steam and that Markus had withstood the worst of it. She was wrong. Markus responded furiously when the police eventually said they wanted to question his closest relatives. For a time Thóra thought that Markus’s protests would end with his being arrested, but she was finally able to calm him down before it came to a scuffle. After leaving the office Thóra pressed him on the cause of this violent reaction: he said that he was worried about his elderly parents, although they probably weren’t the only ones who would be called in for questioning; the police also wanted to speak to his older brother, Leifur, who ran the family’s fishing company in the Islands. Markus had demanded that Thóra be present during all of the interrogations, and had a hard time understanding that she was prohibited from doing so due to conflict of interest. She also tried to explain to Markus that the police were simply fishing; they weren’t just on the look-out for whatever would tighten the rope around his neck, but also for anything that could cut it loose. The purpose of the investigation was to gain a clear picture of events; this was not a government inquisition aimed at pinning everything on him. She had her doubts that Markus would accept all of this, but in the end he settled for her explanations.
There was something else, however, that was worrying Thóra – her imminent trip to the Westmann Islands. There she planned to search high and low for someone who could shed light on the discovery of the corpses in the basement, and perhaps even bear witness to the exchanges between Markus and Alda in the days before the eruption. Around two thirds of the residents of the Islands had returned home after the eruption, and they formed a group that might conceivably have witnessed something significant. Although this plan was far from fail-safe, it was the only idea that Thóra could come up with at this stage of the case. Markus had agreed to it without objection, and even liked it. He was desperate to free himself from his current situation, and since the case had by now been reported in the media, it was clear to him that it was only a matter of time before his name would be dragged into the discussion. But as things stood now, it appeared that the reporters had received little information from the police, even though the case had naturally aroused a great deal of interest. Thóra felt it her obligation to acquaint herself with the coverage and she could only admire how creatively some reporters had managed to liven up their articles on the case, even without any new information. This, of course, would not last long, and soon the police would have to release information concerning the investigation in order to save face. Markus’s name would not be included in their press releases, but there was a risk they would have to announce that one person was already being questioned as a suspect.
Then the game would be up and finally his name would be leaked. It was therefore imperative to try to clear him of all suspicion, as soon as possible, but Thóra could do little to speed up the investigation before the autopsy report and the findings from the crime scene were available. After she received these reports there would barely be any time to go to the Islands to speak with possible witnesses. So it was now or never. This was why it wasn’t the trip itself that was bothering her – the Westmann Islands were beautiful enough, of course, and it was nice to visit there. No, what annoyed her was that it had turned out that Thór, the firm’s junior lawyer, was too busy to go with her. Thóra thought it important to have a second set of eyes and ears with her in the Islands and the only ones that were available belonged to her secretary, Bella. Bragi had rightly pointed out that it mattered little whether Bella sat at the telephone or was somewhere else, making it convenient to bring her along as an assistant. The others at the firm were actually set on working when they arrived in the mornings – so it was either Bella or no one.
Thóra sighed and scrolled through her contacts list for her secretary’s number. She wished she could phone Matthew and ask him to come to Iceland. He would certainly come if possible, but calling him would break her resolution to leave him in peace while he contemplated the future. An Icelandic bank had recently bought the German one for which he worked, and as a result he had been offered the position of supervisor of security at the main branch in Iceland. Soon he had to make a big decision. The work was similar to what he was doing now, and the pay was much better, which hadn’t surprised Thóra as much as it had him – the banks were locally notorious for paying ridiculous salaries. So the decision was not the job itself, but the move to Iceland. He knew no one there but Thóra and her children, so she didn’t want to interfere with his decision. If she encouraged him to come, she would be morally bound to maintain their relationship. If she discouraged him, he might think she didn’t care. A long time ago she had realized that any potential life partner would have to live in Iceland, so her relationship with Matthew depended on his decision. If Matthew did not come to Iceland, their relationship would be finished. They were hardly ever together, and that simply didn’t work. Thóra blushed at the thought of phone sex, which they had tried unsuccessfully. It seemed clear that for sex she needed a flesh and blood man, in the same room as her, and therefore it was better to be with someone who did not live many thousands of kilometres away. On the other hand, she hoped that he would come; she liked him and enjoyed being with him. There also seemed to be a shortage of attractive men of the right age. She didn’t like any of the ones that had recently tried it on with her, not even after her fifth glass. And that said a lot about them. The men who attracted her attention wereeither far too young, already taken, or gay. Before shaking off these thoughts it struck her that perhaps there was an overabundance of men in the Westmann Islands. One could always dream, and it didn’t hurt to have Bella in tow, especially since compared to her secretary, Thóra resembled a Playboy centrefold. Enough of that for now, she thought, and turning to the matter at hand, she called Bella’s number.
After Sóley had gone to sleep and it was clear there was nothing worth watching on television, Thóra decided to have a look in the book Memorable Events 1971-1975, from the series Our Century. She had acquired the collection after her grandfather died, and although she didn’t open the books very often, they had occasionally come in handy. The book wasn’t thick and obviously contained far from all the newsworthy events of the period, but Thóra thought that the disappearance of four people must have found its way into the book, assuming it had made the news at the time. She flipped quickly through 1973 until she reached the summer of that year and the eruption in the Westmann Islands was finished. Markus’s childhood home had actually been buried some time during the first month of the eruption; nonetheless Thóra wanted to make sure that nothing got past her so she didn’t stop reading until she came to the headline ‘Eruption Finished!’‘ from 4 July.
Upon reading, she found little that could conceivably be connected to the corpses in the basement. The airplane Vor, with five people on board, had crashed at the end of March north of Langjokull Glacier, and in the first article about the incident, the crash site had still not been located. A later article about the accident stated that rescue crews had found it, as well as the plane’s passengers, who all turned out to be dead. Another article that caught Thóra’s attention was from the end of January, concerning the loss of the British smack Cuckoo, along with its four-man crew. It had sailed from Thórlakshofn in the middle of the month, but nothing was heard from it or its crew after that. Thóra sat up on the sofa as she read this article, but lay back down again when several pages later she read that wreckage from the ship had been driven ashore along with remains of one of the crew’s bodies. The smack was thought to have capsized with all hands in a storm that hit shortly after it left the harbour. Thóra’s attention was captured again later in the book when she read that a group of six hikers had got lost after setting out on a trip from Landmannalaugar. The group had consisted of four foreign geologists and two Icelandic guides who were supposed to have been very familiar with the area. Thóra did not need to waste any time trying to imagine how part of the group had sought shelter in a basement in the Westmann Islands to get away from bad weather on the mainland, because immediately on the following page there was a report that the men had been found hounded and cold in a little emergency hut in the highlands. They had got lost in the drifting snow and could thank their lucky stars that they had stumbled on the hut. Thóra then read one report about people who had disappeared and were never found. In February, the Seastar had sunk southeast of the mainland with a ten-man crew. The passengers boarded two rubber life rafts but were never found. The group had consisted of nine men and one woman: five Icelanders and five Faeroese, and despite repeated searches through the articles Thóra could not discover anything about whether the crew had ever been found. The only problem was that Markus’s home had probably already been buried in ash by the time the ship perished, and it was an enormous distance to the Islands from the place where it had sunk.
Despite her disappointment Thóra continued reading, then found an article that reawakened her hope. It concerned the huge number of foreign reporters that had come to Iceland to cover the eruption. Of course there was nothing in the article about any of them disappearing, much less four of them. Although it was unlikely that any full-time journalists or reporters had failed to return from Iceland without it ending up in the news, it was possible that things might have been different for freelancers. Some of these reporters might have travelled to Iceland without letting anyone know of their plans. They would perhaps not have been searched for here when their disappearance was discovered later in their homelands.
Little else had occurred in the first part of the year that could shed any light on the identity of the corpses. The Cod War raged, but Thóra could find no indication anywhere that anyone had disappeared or been considered lost at sea in connection with the conflict between the British and the Icelanders over the extension of Iceland’s territorial waters from twelve miles to fifty. Several other articles mentioned deaths or disappearances, but they were never groups of people, always isolated individuals. Thóra thought it too unlikely that the corpses were a collection of people that had all disappeared or died under different circumstances at different times, so she didn’t read these latter articles in any detail.
She also thumbed through 1972, since there was a possibility that the bodies had been in the basement before the eruption started. That year, however, turned out to be as lacking in significant detail for her purposes as 1973. A photo of a sinking ship raised an eyebrow, but the accompanying article said it was a trawler that was thought to have hit a mine. However, further investigation of the sinking revealed that the ship’s owners had exploded dynamite in its hold in the hope of an insurance pay-off. No one appeared to have died or disappeared in connection with the incident.
Another headline to draw Thóra’s attention stated that eighty British trawlers were speeding towards the Icelandic fishing grounds. The article was dated at the end of August 1972, which was a bit early; however, this case involved a huge number of men, making it possible that four of them might have disappeared without being noticed. In fact nothing was mentioned about the disappearance of any of them, but the article succeeded in capturing the tone of relations between the two nations during the Cod War. The end of the article quoted a British trawler captain, who stated that if the Icelanders tried to board a British ship within fifty miles and outside twelve, they would be met with boiling water and sacks of pepper. Thóra found the mention of the pepper quite amusing, the boiling water less so, but the statement indicated that those involved had been prepared for anything – even physical injury.
After her reading Thóra was little closer to discovering anything than she had been before, except for her feeling that the bodies might be connected to the Cod War in some very vague way. After all, to Thóra’s mind the word ‘war’ meant devastation and death.
She slammed the book shut and hurried to pack for her trip the next morning.