‘No, my dear,’ replied Kjartan, stepping up one more stair with great effort. ‘I’ve done this and that from the time I became a landlubber. I’ve only been here for five years.’
‘And you can’t get an office on the ground floor?’ she exclaimed, surprised that a partially handicapped man should be forced to hobble up the stairs.
‘Yes, I’m sure I could,’replied Kjartan. ‘But I don’t care about that. This bother with the stairs is worth it.’ He opened the door to a small office. ‘I have to have a sea view,’ he said, and pointed out of the window to where the harbour and Heimaklettur Peak appeared. ‘I’m like a puffin. I can’t take off unless I’ve got the sea in my sight.’ He waved his hand around the room. ‘I’d get nothing done.’
It seemed to Thóra from the piles and scraps of paper covering the room that the man’s accomplishments were scarcely exemplary, despite his view of the sea. ‘I live by the sea, too, and I know the feeling,’ she said, lifting a strange- looking device from the nearest chair. ‘Can I put this somewhere else?’ she asked, looking around to find a secure place. Although it looked like it might be a piece of junk, it could just as easily have been valuable, henceits place on a chair rather than on the floor like most other things in the office.
‘Just throw it on the floor,’replied Kjartan as he took his own seat. Thóra placed the object down carefully and sat in the chair. Bella pulled another chair over to Kjartan’s desk and also sat, after removing a plastic bag that appeared to contain some glasses or cups. She put the bag down quite roughly, and Thóra had to wait until the glasses stopped clinking before she started to speak. ‘I hope we’re not dragging you away from home to meet us,’ she said. ‘Markus said that you would be here, but since it’s Sunday I wasn’t sure.’
‘My dear, don’t worry about it,’ replied Kjartan. ‘I needed to work this weekend. There’s only the two of us here trying to catch up with everything because of the reports that need to be done this week. Yet another ridiculous inspection is about to begin.’
Thóra relaxed a bit, but at the same time sympathized with the man, who certainly appeared to have a lot of work to do, considering the condition of the office. ‘Okay, good,’ she said, then turned to the matter at hand. ‘Markus has perhaps explained to you my business, which is to say, I am assisting him in a case that appears to be connected to the eruption,’ she began. ‘He told me that you knew everything about everything.’ She added quickly, hopefully:‘and everyone…?’
‘Is that what they say?’ said Kjartan, with a pleased smirk. ‘I don’t know about that, but I am familiar with this case of Markus’s.’ He did not take his eyes off Thóra. ‘This is a small place. Every single person here knows pretty much everything about the discovery of the bodies, both what’s been written about in the papers and the aspects that aren’t being discussed in public.’
Thóra smiled reluctantly. It was to be expected. The Westmann Islands were inhabited by nearly four thousand people in approximately thirteen square kilometres, so the story must have circulated very quickly. Now she just had to hope that the same had occurred with the story behind the corpses. ‘What exactly happened here in the Islands the night of the eruption, and the day before Markus’s home was buried by ash? Markus has told me what he remembers, but naturally he was just a teenager, so he was sent to the mainland straight away that night. I understand that he didn’t return to the Islands until some time had passed, and by then his house was gone.’
‘I suppose you’re hoping to hear that someone besides Markus went down into the basement?’ asked Kjartan. He rocked back and forth on his office chair, which creaked.
‘I’m interested in knowing whether it might be at all possible to rule out such a thing,’ answered Thóra cautiously. She had to be careful not to let the old man turn the meeting into an opportunity to satisfy his own curiosity. ‘If you could perhaps explain to me how all this happened, and try to remember anything that might be important for Markus’s case?’
‘I don’t know whether what I remember could help Markus in any way.’ Kjartan leaned forward quickly. His chair creaked again. ‘I would hope so – I like the boy. His father and I were great friends. He was never called anything other than“Krusi krona” here in the old days, since he used to go on and on about money.’
Thóra smiled. It had been decades since Markus had been a boy, but in the mind of this man he seemed to have stayed at that age. ‘Still, it would be good to hear your side of the story. One never knows what details will be revealed,’ she said. ‘How did it start? As far as I know, the eruption began without warning.’
Now it was Kjartan’s turn to smile.‘The eruption on Surtsey was a clear warning, in my opinion.’ He reached out to the wall behind him and took down a framed map of the Islands. The map was faded and dusty; Kjartan blew most of the dust off, then pointed at Surtsey and ran his finger along the islands that lined up in a horseshoe from Surtsey to Heimaey itself. ‘It doesn’t take a genius to realize that the volcanic belt is located here. It isn’t a great distance,’he said, placing his little finger on Heimaey and his thumb on Surtsey. ‘About thirteen, fourteen nautical miles.’ He laid the map on the desk in front of him. ‘The Surtsey eruption began in 1963, and Eldfell blew in 1973. Ten years is a short time on the scale of geological history.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Thóra.‘But it’s still quite a long time for human beings. So the inhabitants of the Westmann Islands stopped worrying about eruptions sometime after the upheaval on Surtsey ended?’
‘Yes, yes, that’s right,’said Kjartan. ‘Actually the only warning that people got was several small earthquakes the evening before the eruption started. No one paid much attention to them, since people thought the tremors came from the area where they’d recently finished constructing the Búrfell power plant. Now I’m no specialist in quakes, but I was told that one of the three seismographs set up to record the movements of the earth’s crust was broken, making it impossible to determine their epicentre with any great precision. Not a single person put two and two together when they felt the tremors.’ Kjartan paused. ‘There were actually various other signs that no one paid any attention to,’ he added, avoiding her eyes.‘A woman who lived on the edge of town, at the place where the eruption began, was amazed to see that the elves were packing up and moving out two days before it started.’
‘Elves?’ repeated Thóra carefully. ‘I see.’ She decided to keep her opinion to herself where elves were concerned.
‘Yes, and several days earlier, a little girl told her parents that an eruption was about to happen at the place where the fissure was formed.’ Kjartan shrugged. ‘There are other stories like this, about unexplained events just prior to the disaster, but one never knows how much store to set by them. An amateur painter, for example, did a painting of the area showing the volcano and lava before these events occurred. I actually believe that some people can somehow sense catastrophes before they happen – just as animals seem to. However, I’m not one of them.’
Thóra silently thanked God for that small mercy. ‘Then the eruption started in the middle of the night?’
‘Yes,’ said Kjartan, seemingly relieved that Thóra didn’t want to talk about the supernatural.‘The fissure opened at two o’clock in the morning and started spewing lava. It wasn’t more than two hundred metres from the nearest farm, so it’s a miracle that everyone was saved.’
‘People must have been terrified,’ said Thóra. ‘I’ve never been near an eruption, but the noise must have been incredible.’