Ashes to Dust (2 page)

Shortly afterwards the woman’s
visitor gently closed the bedroom door, showing far more courtesy than he had
previously displayed.

Monday 9 July
2007

‘You’re trying to tell me Markus
is just tidying the basement? You can’t possibly believe that a pile of
rubbish is the reason that he didn’t want anyone to go down there before
him?’

The lawyer Thóra Gudmundsdóttir
smiled politely at the man addressing
her,
an
archaeologist called Hjortur Fridriksson, but did not answer his question. This
was getting out of hand. She was very uncomfortable; the smell of smoke and the
ash hanging in the air was irritating her eyes and nose, and she was scared
that the roof was going to collapse at any moment. On their way through the
house to the basement door the three of them had had to make their way
around a huge pile of ashy debris where the roof had collapsed onto the
intricately patterned carpet, at which point Thóra had adjusted her
helmet’s elastic chin-strap to ensure that it was fastened tightly. She
shuffled her feet and looked embarrassedly at the clock. They heard a dull thud
from the basement. What exactly was the man up to? Markus had said that he
needed a little time, but neither she nor the archaeologist could guess
what his definition of ‘a little’ was. ‘I’m sure
he’ll reappear soon,’ she said, without much conviction, and stared
at the crooked door in the hope that it would be pushed open and this business
concluded. She glanced instinctively at the ceiling, ready to jump away if
it appeared likely to crash down on them.

‘Don’t worry,’ said
Hjortur, pointing upwards. ‘If the roof was going to split apart it would
have done so a long time ago.’ He heaved a sigh and stroked his unshaven
chin. ‘Do you know what he’s doing down there?’

Thóra shook her head, unwilling to
discuss her client’s plans with someone unconnected to the case.

‘He must have at least hinted,’
said Hjortur. ‘We’ve been dying to find out about this.’ He
looked at Thóra. ‘I’ll bet this has something to do with
pornography. The others think so, too.’

She shrugged. That thought had certainly
occurred to her as well, but she did not have a sufficiently fertile
imagination to guess what kind of thing would be too embarrassing or disgusting
to show to a stranger.
A film of the homeowner’s sexual
adventures?
Unlikely.
Few people had video
cameras in the 1970s, and she doubted that the type of film used back then
would have survived the destruction that had rained down on the Islands.
Besides, Markus Magnusson, who was down in the basement, had been only fifteen
when the house had disappeared beneath lava and ash, so he probably
hadn’t been ready for much in that area. Nevertheless, there was something
down in the basement that he’d been desperate to get to before them.
Thóra sighed. How did she keep ending up with these characters? She
didn’t know any other lawyer who attracted such strange cases, and such
peculiar clients. She resolved to ask Markus what had inspired him to call her
little legal firm instead of one of the larger ones when he decided to demand
that the excavation be legally blocked.
If he ever returned
from the basement.
She pulled the neck of her jumper up over her mouth
and nose and tried breathing through it. That was a little better. Hjortur
smiled at her.

‘You get used to it, I promise,’
he said. ‘Hopefully you won’t have to, though - it takes several
days.’

Thóra rolled her eyes. ‘Damn it,
it’s not like he’s going to move in down there,’ she muttered
through her jumper. Then she pulled it down to smile at Hjortur. It was thanks
to him that things had gone so well until now, in that they’d been able
to get by without demanding the injunction. In any case, that would only have
been a temporary measure since Markus and his family no longer had any claim on
the house. The Westmann Islands owned it along with all its contents, and there
was little point in fighting this fact even though Markus had made a concerted
attempt to do so. He had focused particularly on Hjortur Fridriksson, the man
now standing next to Thóra; Hjortur was the director of a project
entitled
Pompeü
of the North, whose task it was
to excavate a number of houses that had been buried by ash in the eruption
on Heimaey Island in 1973. Thóra had had considerable contact with
him by telephone and email since the case had begun, and liked the man well
enough. He was inclined to be long-winded, but seemed reasonable and was not
easily provoked. Hjortur had been seriously tested, since Markus so often acted
like a total ass. He had refused to give even the slightest clue as to why he
was opposed to his parents’ house being excavated, had gone on and on
about invasions of privacy, and had generally complicated the matter for
Thóra in every conceivable way. After trying to reach an agreement but
getting nowhere due to Markus’s pigheadedness, in defeat she had asked
Hjortur whether he couldn’t just dig up some other house instead. There
were certainly enough to choose from. But that was out of the question, since
Markus’s childhood home was one of the few houses in the area built of
concrete, and thus was more likely than the others to have withstood the
cataclysm in any significant way. The purpose of the excavation was not to
dig down to a house that was now simply rubble.

Thóra had already started reading up
on how she might best obtain an injunction against the excavation when it transpired
that Markus was only concerned about the basement of the house. Finally they
could discuss solutions sensibly, and Hjortur had proposed this arrangement:
the house would first be dug up and aired out, and then Markus would be the
first person allowed down into the basement, where he could remove anything
that he wanted. After some consideration he agreed to this compromise and
Thóra breathed easier. Markus had no trouble at all bearing the cost of
endless litigation, since he was anything but badly off financially. His family
owned one of the largest fishing companies in the Westmann Islands, and even
though Thóra would never complain about being paid well for her work,
she was upset about working against her better judgement, and towards a goal
that would never be reached. She was immensely relieved when Markus agreed to
Hjortur’s proposal; now she could start putting the final touches to the
fine details of the agreement over how Markus’s visit to the
basement would be conducted, how they could guarantee that others would not be
allowed to sneak in before him, and so on. The agreement was then signed, and
they only had to wait for the end of the excavation.

So there they
stood,
archaeologist and lawyer, staring at a crooked basement door while a man who
had still been a teenager in 1973 wrestled with a terrible secret beneath their
feet.

‘Hallelujah,’ said Thóra
when they heard footsteps on the basement stairs.

‘I do hope he found whatever he was
looking for,’ said Hjortur gloomily. ‘We didn’t think about
the possibility of him coming up empty-handed.’

Thóra crossed her fingers and stared
at the door.

They watched anxiously as the doorknob
turned,
then
incredulously as the door was
cracked open only a tiny bit. They exchanged a glance,
then
Thóra leaned forward and spoke into the gap. ‘Markus,’ she
said calmly, ‘is something wrong?’

‘You’ve got to come down
here,’
came
the reply. His voice sounded
peculiar, but it was impossible to tell whether he was excited, disappointed or
sad. The glow from his torch shone through the chink and illuminated
Thóra’s feet.

‘Me?’ Thóra asked,
flabbergasted. ‘Down there?’ She looked back at Hjortur, who raised
his eyebrows.

‘Yes,’ said Markus, in the same
enigmatic tone. ‘I need to get your opinion on something.’

‘My opinion?’ she echoed. When
she found herself speechless she had a habit of repeating whatever was
said to her, giving herself time to ponder her response.

‘Yes, your legal opinion,’ said
the voice behind the door.

Thóra straightened up.
‘I’ll give you all the opinions you want, Markus,’ she said.
‘However, this is how it is with us lawyers: we have no need to
experience for ourselves whatever it is we’re dealing with. So
there’s no reason for me to clamber down there with you. Tell me what
this is about and I’ll put together an opinion for you back at my office
in Reykjavik.’

‘You’ve got to come down here,’
said Markus. ‘I don’t need a written opinion. A verbal one’ll
do.’ He paused. ‘I’m begging you. Just come down here.’
Thóra had never heard Markus sound so humble. She’d only heard him
being haughty and opinionated.

Hjortur scowled at Thóra, unamused.
‘Why don’t you just get it over with? It’s completely safe,
and I’m keen to finish up here.’

She hesitated. What in the blazes could be
down there? She absolutely did not want to go down into even darker and fouler
air. On the other hand, she agreed with Hjortur that they had to settle this
here and now. She roused herself. ‘All right then,’ she conceded,
grabbing Hjortur’s torch. ‘I’m coming.’ She opened the
door wide enough to step through and saw Markus on the stairs, looking pale as
a corpse. His face nearly matched the white helmet that he wore on his head.
Thóra tried not to read too much into it, since the only light was
coming from their torches, giving everything an otherworldly glow. She gulped.
The air there was even more stagnant, dustier. ‘What do you want to show
me?’ she asked. ‘Let’s get this over with.’

Markus set off down the stairs into the
darkness. The beam from his torch was of little use amid the dust and ash and
there was no way to see where the steps ended. ‘I don’t know how to
describe it,’ said Markus in a strangely calm voice, as he went down the
stairs. ‘You’ve got to believe me when I say that this is not what
I came here looking for. But it’s clear now that you have to get an
injunction against the excavation and have the house covered over
again.’

Thóra pointed her light at her feet.
She had no wish to trip on the stairs and tumble into the basement head first.
‘Is there something bad here that you weren’t aware of?’

‘Yes, you could say that,’ he
replied. ‘I would never have allowed the excavation to go ahead if this
was what I wanted to hide. That’s for certain.’ He was standing now
on the basement floor. ‘I think I’ve got myself into a really
bad position.’

Thóra stepped off the final stair and
took her place by his side. ‘What do you mean by
“this”?’ she asked, shining her light around. The little that
she could discern appeared completely innocent: an old sled, a badly dented
bird cage, numerous boxes and miscellaneous rubbish scattered here and there, all
of it covered with dust and soot.

‘Over here,’ said Markus. He led
her to the edge of a partition. ‘You have to believe me - I knew
nothing about this.’ He pointed his torch downwards.

Thóra peered at the floor, but
couldn’t see anything that could have frightened Markus that much, only
three mounds of dust. She moved her torch over them. It took her some time to
realize what she was seeing — and then it was all she could do not to let
the torch slip from her hand. ‘Good God,’ she said. She ran the light
over the three faces, one after another. Sunken cheeks, empty eye-sockets,
gaping mouths; they reminded her of the photographs of mummies she’d once
seen in National Geographic. ‘Who are these people?’

‘I don’t know,’ said
Markus, clearly in shock himself. ‘But that doesn’t matter.
What’s certain is that they’ve been dead for quite some
time.’ He raised one of his hands to cover his nose and mouth, even
though there was no smell from the corpses, then grimaced and looked away.

Thóra, on the other hand, could not
tear her eyes away from the remains. Markus hadn’t been exaggerating when
he said that this looked bad for him. ‘What did you want to hide, then,
if it wasn’t this?’ she asked in astonishment. ‘You’d
better have an answer when this gets out.’ He appeared on the verge of
protesting, and she hurriedly added: ‘You can forget about the house
being buried again as if nothing ever happened. I can promise you that
that’s not an option.’ Why was nothing ever simple? Why
couldn’t Markus just have come up from the basement with his arms full of
old pornographic pictures? She aimed her torch at him.

‘Show me what you were looking
for,’ she said, her anxiety heightened by the nervous expression on his
face. ‘Surely it can’t be worse than this.’

Markus was silent for a few moments. Then he
cleared his throat and shone his light into a nook right next to them.
‘It was this,’ he said, not letting his eyes follow the
torch’s beam. ‘I can explain everything,’ he added nervously,
looking at his feet.

‘Oh, Jesus!’ cried
Thóra, as her torch clattered to the floor.

Monday 9 July
2007