‘Do you need something?’ he asked her coldly.
Bella looked back at him, equally impassive.‘No, why do you ask?’ Her glare dared him to accuse her of prying.
Gudni did not fall into her trap, but frowned for a second before turning back to Thóra. ‘There’s more there that will catch the attention of the media if and when the report’s contents are made public,’ he said. ‘It’s about the head, and the evidence is indisputable.’ He smiled nastily. ‘Which comes as a surprise in a case I thought had already reached its dramatic peak.’
‘There are a lot of surprises still to come in this case, it seems to me,’ said Thóra, against her better judgement. There was something about this man that ruffled her feathers. However, she avoided glancing at the papers on his desk as she said this. It was better to leave him wondering what she meant.
Thóra put down the papers and drummed her fingers as she tried to gather her thoughts. She’d finished going through three of the four sections; a specific report had been written for each of the bodies, as well as for the head. The sections she had read concerned the three bodies, which turned out to be of two men in their thirties and a man of around fifty. The men were Caucasian and all the bodies were extremely well preserved, owing to the unusual conditions in which they had been stored. The heat of the eruption was thought to have played a large part in protecting them, along with the lack of humidity in the basement and the fact that heavy toxic gases had destroyed all insect life down there.
Even though the text was hard to read, every other word being an incomprehensible medical term, it was clear that the men had not been killed by toxic gases. Although no conclusion was reached on the exact cause of death, it was strongly suggested that the three men had all been victims of violence. They all had peculiar wounds on their hands that appeared to have healed long before, and which were therefore unconnected to the events that had led to their deaths. They seemed to be scars from deep scratches whose origin was unclear, but it was considered unlikely that they had been made by tools or knives because of the irregularity of their shapes. Two of the men were thought to have died from head injuries, since their skulls had been smashed, seemingly by the same unidentified blunt weapon. The nose of one of them had been so badly broken that the cartilage had been driven into his brain, although the medical examiner could not determine whether he had died from this injury or from his fractured skull. The report further stated that while the third man’s head injuries were minor, he had both a broken back and three broken ribs, which had punctured one of his lungs. The report concluded that the latter injury had caused bleeding into the chest cavity and lungs, which would eventually have caused the man to drown in his own blood. Thóra shuddered, but it was clear to her that a teenage girl on her own could not have done so much damage to a group of men.
The examiner’s conclusion concerning the men’s nationality was supported by various factors. It was noted that each taken on its own would not be enough to determine the men’s origin, but together they lent sufficient weight to the hypothesis that the men were British. It was also noted that the person or persons who had transported the bodies to the basement had seemed not to expect them to be found, since no attempt had been made to remove the dead men’s clothing or anything else that could be used to identify them. This had proved useful in determining the men’s nationality, since the brand labels on their clothing and shoes were still partly legible and turned out to be mostly from British companies; the brands of the oldest man’s clothing were more expensive than those of the younger men. The material in the younger men’s fillings turned out to be the one British dentistshad used around 1960, and one of them also had a steel pin in his ankle from an old injury, stamped with the trademark of a British manufacturer. Other things were taken into account;
the two younger men were both tattooed with the initials HMS, which if taken to stand for Her Majesty’s Service would suggest that they could have served in the military for a time and had wished to commemorate this in ink on their skin. Two of the men also had British pound notes in their pockets, and one had an elderly packet of British cigarettes.
Thóra wondered if the tattoo that Alda had mentioned to her sister could conceivably have been the same as the ones mentioned in the report. What had she said again? Under what circumstances would you get a tattoo? Could she have been talking about entry into the military? Thóra shook her head instinctively – it couldn’t be that. She was sure it had nothing to do with the case, but marked the text to make it easier to recall that particular detail if tattoos came up again.
The report made for melancholy reading as a whole, but Thóra was pleased to read that the bodies had probably been put there after the eruption started. This was based on the discovery of traces of ash on the back of the men’s jackets – the corpses had been lying on their backs. The fine layer of ash that slipped in through the chinks in the house and covered all the surfaces in the basement could not have got in underneath the bodies after they’d been laid on the floor. In addition, there were tiny burn holes in the men’s clothing, which indicated that they’d either been alive and walking around during the eruption and been hit by the small embers that had rained from the sky during that time, or that the same had happened while the bodies were being carried to the house. No embers could have got into the basement, since its few windows had been boarded up, though fine ash had managed to slip in through all the cracks. In other words, the men had been on the move during the eruption, alive or dead. This meant, to Thóra’s great relief, that Markus could not have taken the corpses there.
When she started reading the section of the report that focused on the head, she was even more relieved. It began by describing the box Markus said had contained the head, and it concluded that the evidence indicated this had indeed been the case. Long-dried-out remains of blood and other biological matter at the bottom of the box indicated that the head had been inside. There were also no traces of ash in the hair, which was taken as an indication that the head had been enclosed in something and had not got dusty like everything else in the basement. This, too, strengthened Markus’s defence, and Thóra took a moment to mark this section in the margin. Unfortunately, analysis of the fingerprints on the box revealed nothing of significance except that only one set could be distinguished. The prints in question were recent, and at the time the autopsy report was written they had not been compared with Markus’s prints, which were not yet on file. Thóra knew that he would now be called in for fingerprinting, but was unconcerned as his prints on the box would fit perfectly with the sequence of events he had described. These were the only legible prints: any others that may have been on the box had not been deliberately erased, but rather had faded due to the unusual conditions and to the time that had passed before the box was discovered. This was unfortunate, since Alda’s finger prints on the box would have been particularly useful. These results were not considered conclusive, so the report stated that the box would be sent to a laboratory overseas that was better equipped to analyse such things. There were similar plans for the analysis of the men’s back molars. Thóra hurriedly scribbled a note to herself to remind her to phone and request that fingerprints be taken from Alda’s body if more prints were found on the box, although she imagined that would happen as a matter of course.