Ashes to Dust Read Free

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.

Chapter Two
     
    Monday 9 July 2007
     
     
    ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t
know whether I should be happy or not that your bizarre discovery of human
remains should have occurred before I retired.’ The police officer looked
from one of them to the other. Thóra, Hjortur and Markus all smiled
awkwardly. They were at the police headquarters in the Westmann Islands, where
they’d been made