‘I would have thought so.’ Matthew looked underneath the box but there was nothing. ‘There’s no visible connection to a tank here, though there are lines behind the box. There must be an equipment room somewhere where it’s stored. I expect we’ll find it if we look through the whole place.’
They completed their tour of the apartments without discovering much more. They were all very similar and had long ago been stripped of anything personal or individual, first by the fire and then by the clean-up. The very few things left behind told Thóra and Matthew nothing: broken window shutters on the floor, a pot lying on its side in the kitchen. Thóra hadn’t really expected to find anything of much signifi-cance, but they continued inspecting the house. In the night watchmen’s duty room they found nothing but an open key cabinet and a dirty whiteboard that was surprisingly undamaged compared to everything else they’d seen. They also looked in a large, empty room whose function was difficult to determine. The floor material seemed different to elsewhere in the house, and by dragging her toes along the surface Thóra noticed regular stripes that indicated it was tiled; the floor elsewhere had been smooth, probably carpeted. ‘Maybe this was a storage room.’ Matthew moved around the space, examining the walls. ‘Well, it wasn’t the equipment room. There aren’t any sockets here besides two standard ones.’ They left the building without working out what the room had been for, and looked into a few rooms which were accessed from outside: a cleaning cupboard with a bent steel basin that hung at an angle on the wall, and another smaller storage room.
It was still snowing, and they continued their circuit of the outside in a hurry. But they were forced to slow down when they came to three doors at the front of the house that had not been closed. One of them turned out to lead to the rubbish room, and another to an exterior storage area where a rusty, dirty lawnmower stood in one corner along with some broken garden tools, also rusty. The petrol had no doubt been stored here, and Thóra took a moment to examine the lock on the door, which appeared not to have been tampered with. It wasn’t locked, although that didn’t mean anything given that a long time had passed since the fire.
The third door led to what was indisputably the equipment room. On the wall were connective hoses with melted labels, and steel frames that could have supported canisters or tanks. Matthew shuffled his feet to preserve the tiny bit of warmth left in them. ‘Of course, this wouldn’t have been accessible from the house due to the risk of fire. Maybe other, more dangerous materials were stored here.’
‘This door has taken a real hit.’ Thóra tried to nudge the heavy steel slab that stood half open. It was so twisted that one of the four powerful hinges had broken and it wouldn’t budge. ‘Could this indicate an explosion?’
‘Yes, I would have thought so. Also, you can see that the plaster has fallen off in several places in here.’ He shone his torch on a large cracked patch of wall where the bare concrete showed through. ‘This could be from a canister that exploded.’
‘That must have made an incredible noise.’ Thóra stood up on tiptoe to see how close they were to the family home they’d driven past. She thought she caught a glimpse of its roof. ‘Why didn’t those people hear anything? Is it possible to sleep through an explosion but wake up to the smell of smoke?’
‘Who knows?’ Matthew turned off the torch. ‘Shall we get back to the car before our toes drop off from frostbite? I’m sure you’ll find out something about this explosion in the case files. There’s nothing more we can do here.’
Thóra nodded. They turned away from the house and walked towards the car. ‘I forgot to tell you a little detail I found in the reports.’ She looked sadly back at the ruins of the house. ‘One girl who died in the fire was pregnant.’
‘And?’ Matthew didn’t seem surprised. ‘Bad things can happen to anyone.’ He gave her a puzzled look. ‘You mean you find that strange because the woman was disabled? People are people, Thóra, regardless of whether or not their bodies are fully functioning.’
Thóra rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, do you think I’m that easily shocked?’ She exhaled irritably, but her annoyance quickly turned to sadness again. ‘The woman – or girl, rather – was comatose. That’s not what I call consensual sex.’
Matthew said nothing. He opened her door and Thóra climbed into the car. He hurried to the driver’s side, started the engine and turned the heater all the way up, then scrunched his fingers together and blew on them. When the warm air blowing from the heater started to inch its way over Thóra’s feet, it created a burning sensation that was almost worse than the cold. ‘Did the files say who the father was?’
‘No, it never came out and there wasn’t a single word about it in the verdict.’
‘Do you think whoever got the woman pregnant started the fire to cover it up?’ Matthew sounded highly sceptical. ‘That’s pretty drastic.’
‘I don’t know, damn it. But it could have been Jakob who did this.’
‘Started the fire? Or had sex with the woman?’ Matthew started backing out of the car park.
‘Either. Or both.’ Thóra leaned back in her seat and stared at the building in her wing mirror until it disappeared from sight.
CHAPTER 6
Friday, 8 January 2010
Thóra put down her pen and proudly looked over her drawing of the residence’s floor plan. It certainly wouldn’t win any architectural awards but she was enormously proud of the outcome all the same, since what mattered to her was to mark each apartment with the name of its resident. That had proved extremely difficult, because more often than not she’d been forced to use the testimonies of many different individuals to place each one. She would find out in due course whether her hard work would be of any use. Contemplatively, she ran her index finger along the plan of the house, through all the apartments, vaguely feeling the tiny indents that the pen had left in the paper. Rather like the tracks those young people had left behind, she thought – tracks in the memories of those who loved them, that would become less and less noticeable over time and would disappear completely as the residents’ relatives died. Thóra lifted her finger from the paper and cleared her mind. These melancholy thoughts would be of no help to her in solving the case and she had already spent more time on the drawing than she could afford. This wasn’t the only case that she was working on; of course it was highly unusual, but it was complicated enough without her losing herself in its emotional aspects.
One of the things that troubled her was that Jakob had occupied the apartment next to Lísa Finnbjörnsdóttir, the young pregnant woman. Although even the furthest apart flats weren’t that far from each other, Thóra still felt this was a bad omen; Jakob would have been able to get to the woman’s apartment in a matter of seconds. To make matters worse, there were very few other residents who could possibly have been the child’s father; five out of six apartments had been occupied, with only three men: Jakob, Natan Úlfheiðarson and Tryggvi Einvarðsson. Natan had been the heavily medicated epileptic, and Tryggvi had been severely autistic and, according to the court records, generally never left his room. Neither seemed likely to have had intercourse with the girl, although Thóra knew this assessment might be completely wrong. Hopefully someone would be able to answer this question unequivocally. Perhaps the paternity had been determined but not mentioned in the records out of respect for the deceased and her family; perhaps she’d had a boyfriend; perhaps she’d been impregnated by someone who came to visit her. The possibilities were endless; what mattered was to find the right explanation and pray that it had nothing to do with Jakob.