Dís took it and handed Thóra the stapled pages. ‘And then there’s this. Who knows, it might be important. At the time I found it I still believed Alda had killed herself, and even thought that this might have been something to do with it.’ She looked at Thóra. ‘It was so strange – Alda was unusually happy the day before all this happened. That didn’t seem to fit in with the idea of suicide, and I’ve been racking my brain trying to understand. Now that it turns out to have been murder, these papers might be irrelevant. I’d be happy for you to look at them, since I have no idea what to do with them.’
‘What are they?’ asked Thóra, looking down at the pages.
‘It’s an autopsy report on an older woman who died six months ago,’ replied Dís.‘I’ve never heard of her, so I don’t know how she’s connected to Alda. I thought she might be a close relative and her death might have sent Alda over the edge.’
Thóra looked at the top page and read the name of the deceased. Valgerdur Bjolfsdottir. She had recently come across this name. But where? ‘May I take a copy of this?’ she asked.
Chapter Twenty
Thóra found the woman’s name as soon as she returned to her office. She typed the name into an Internet search engine, and a link came up to a website about the houses that had disappeared in the Westmann Islands eruption, the same site Thóra had looked at out on the Islands. There she found the name on the autopsy report that Alda had kept in her drawer. Thóra read her biography on the site: she had lived with her husband, Dadi Karlsson, in the house next to Markus’s childhood home. Thóra read through the whole page about this couple, but all she found out was that Valgerdur Bjolfsdottir had worked as a nurse at a hospital in the Westmann Islands, and her husband had been the captain of a fishing boat. Neither of them had moved back to the Islands after the disaster, and Thóra could see no particular connection to Alda other than their nursing careers. Perhaps Alda had looked up to this woman so much that she had decided to study nursing, but it could just have been a coincidence. At that time it was less common for young women to educate themselves in different fields, but nursing was very popular. The couple appeared to have been childless – at least there were no children accounted for on the website. This meant that Alda could not be connected to Valgerdur as a friend of her daughter. Clearly Thóra wasn’t going to find an answer on the Internet, so she decided to call Leifur and ask him about the couple.
When she’d spoken to him after the detention ruling Leifur had repeated that he wanted to help, and she had promised to let him know if he could assist her in any way.
Leifur answered on the second ring. Thóra allowed him to ask her all about the appeal to the High Court before she turned to the task at hand and asked about their ex-neighbours. His reply surprised her: ‘Ugh, those old bores.’ He heaved a sigh. ‘Why are you asking about them?’
‘Valgerdur’s name came up in connection with Alda and I’m trying to find out what they had to do with each other. Were they related, perhaps?’ she asked.
‘Not that I know of,’ he replied.‘They were our neighbours, but I don’t know much about them. Valgerdur was from out of town and I don’t know how she met Dadi, but he was from here. They stayed on the mainland after the evacuation, so I don’t know how you can track them down if that’s what you’re after.’
‘Actually, she’s dead,’said Thóra. ‘But I don’t know about him. As a matter of fact I didn’t call to try to get in touch with him, but I was wondering whether there had been any contact between Alda and this Valgerdur. What crossed my mind first was that they were related, but maybe it was something entirely different.’
‘I don’t know whether there was much contact between the two households,’ said Leifur. ‘Valgerdur was no particular friend of Alda’s mother, as I recall, nor were the husbands friends. That pair were so tedious that I can’t imagine any sane man seeking out their company willingly. Dadi was never called anything other than Dadi Horseshoe – with good reason. Picture one upside down on his face. And Valgerdur was nicknamed Horseshoe Two after she entered the picture.’
‘I see,’ said Thóra, baffled. ‘I was thinking Alda might have become a nurse to follow in Valgerdur’s footsteps, but that seems unlikely in the light of what you’re saying.’
‘Valgerdur was a school nurse among other things, and I doubt she aroused any great passion for the job in any of the students. She was famous for refusing to send kids home; they actually had to faint right in front of her or puke on the floor to be considered sick. If Alda did know her, I very much doubt she would have been the inspiration for her future career.’
This didn’t help explain Alda’s interest in the woman’s death. ‘There’s one more thing you might be able to help me with,’ said Thóra. ‘It’s to do with some files I’m having trouble getting hold of.’ She wished she didn’t have to ask Leifur for help. ‘I’ve been trying to see a copy of the log of objects removed from the excavated houses.’
‘And who has those records?’asked Leifur briskly, sounding confident that he would be able to get hold of them.
‘The archaeologist in charge of the excavations is named Hjortur Fridriksson,’ she replied. ‘He was going to see if he could get them for me, but I haven’t heard from him since.’
‘I’ll take care of it,’said Leifur, and Thóra had no doubt that he would.
However, she was no closer to a connection between Alda and Valgerdur. She went through the autopsy report Dís had copied for her, but understood almost none of it, other than that Valgerdur had been admitted to the hospital in Isafjördur with a severe streptococcus infection and had been given antibiotics intravenously, causing a bad allergic reaction which had led to her death the very same night. Alda had neither marked the text nor made notes in the margins, making it difficult to see what had sparked her interest in the death of this woman.
Once again Hannes came to Thóra’s mind. He might be able to see something in this that she couldn’t. She knew she would have to seek out his help sooner or later, although she would have preferred it to be later. It would have to wait until evening, though, as Hannes didn’t take his mobile to work and she didn’t feel like having him paged just to listen to him complain that she’d called him out of an operation.
One person she could call during office hours was the sex therapist Alda had been seeing. Of course she was unlikely to tell Thóra much, but it was worth a go. After calling and trying unsuccessfully to get the woman to tell her about Alda, Thóra gave up. All she got for her pains was a vehement denial that Alda had been a sex addict, as the websites had suggested, and the claim that she had been looking at them on the therapist’s recommendation. The woman could not be enticed to reveal what purpose this might have served, and the phone call ended at that.
Next, Thóra decided to go to the police station in the hope of seeing which photos had been shown to the leaflet delivery boy who’d fingered Markus as the man at Alda’s house on the night of her murders. Hopefully the police would also give her a log of the phone calls between Markus and Alda that same night.
‘You’ve got to be joking’,said Thóra, as she put down the photos. She prodded the one resting on top. ‘This appears to be a woman, and I can’t be sure but it looks as though at least two of these people are over ninety, and one is barely out of adolescence.’
Stefán picked up the stack, his face thunderous. As he flicked through it the flush on his cheeks darkened.‘These photos were chosen at random, apart from the one of Markus, of course.’ He put pile the down again. ‘And this is a man, not a woman,’ he said, pointing at the photo of the person of indeterminate gender.