House of Evidence(32)

There was a large bookcase on the inner wall of the room, all but one of whose shelves was filled with old ring binders and books.

“Here you can find all the data relating to the railroad,” Matthías said, “in case anyone should be interested in it.”

On one shelf were two old surveying instruments, and Halldór picked one of them up and peered into its eyepiece.

“That is a theodolite; the other is a leveling instrument. You’ll probably see everything upside down.”

“I don’t really see anything at all,” Halldór said.

“The lenses need to be focused,” Matthías said, taking the instrument from Halldór. He held it briefly up to his eye before replacing it on the shelf. “I helped Jacob Senior with some of the surveying in the summers before I emigrated; for instance, I helped with the route east through the Threngsli Pass.”

There was a rack on the wall in which a number of thin plywood curves of different radii were arranged.

“What is that?” Halldór asked.

“When they were designing railroad tracks or roads, they used these curves to plot the shape of bends,” Matthías replied. He pointed to some thick books with German titles in the bookcase. “These are tables of coordinates for shapes like these, and were used to calculate transition curves.” He took out one of the books and flipped through it, revealing pages covered in columns of numbers printed in tiny characters.

“And this is where the drawings are kept,” Matthías said, pointing to a three-foot-high cabinet with wide, shallow drawers, standing on an eight-inch-high plinth to make it a comfortable level to work at. Matthías opened a drawer labeled “Birkihlíd and other houses” and took out a large drawing, placing it on top of the cabinet. “This is a ground plan of the main floor of the house. There are also drawings of the other floors with all the elevations.”

“We might perhaps borrow them at a later date to copy them. It could be useful for the investigation to have an overview like this,” Halldór suggested. “Now let’s see the basement.”

The basement was reached by a staircase from the kitchen, leading to a short corridor, which, unlike that in the upper floor, was dark, cold, and dirty. Since the house was built on a slope, the basement extended only under the front half of the home.

“Jacob Junior had completely given up trying to keep the basement clean,” Matthías said. “Dear old Sveinborg couldn’t manage any more than what she did upstairs.”

He opened the door into a small bathroom that stunk of sewage.

“The trap has dried up; it is never used and thus the unpleasant smell,” he said, flushing the toilet before shutting the door again. “It would have been a really good idea to make a cozy apartment here for Sveinborg, but nothing was allowed to be changed, and she was supposedly only working half a day anyway.”

Along the corridor were two small rooms, mainly empty and smelling of damp.

“These were staff living quarters in earlier days; they were a bit more comfortable then,” Matthías said, apologetically.

At the end of the corridor was the entrance to a large laundry room, where there were big wooden tubs, drying racks and clotheslines, and a large open fireplace.

“Jacob Senior had this fireplace bricked up a little while before he died. He probably wanted to modernize the laundry room. On the other hand, Jacob Junior had it opened up again after his mother died, using it to store some old housekeeping tools he had collected. The idea was to show what laundry facilities were like in an affluent home at the turn of the century.”

At the far end of the laundry room, a door led to the boiler room. “This is where the coal was shoveled in,” Matthías said, pointing to a hatch covering an opening on the outside wall next to a coal store containing a few remnants of fuel. The majority of the space was dominated by a massive old boiler. “The house was connected to the hot-water main in 1943, but there is still some coal here, even so.”

They returned to the corridor through the laundry room. There was yet another door into an empty larder, beyond which was a room that Matthías said was a wine cellar.

“My father was a very moderate user of alcohol, but he enjoyed being a generous host. Before prohibition took effect in 1915, he filled this room with bottles of wine, which lasted throughout the prohibition years. Now it is a very meager cellar.”

The main floor, while chilly, felt rather pleasant to Halldór after their visit to the basement.

“We have finished here for today, sir,” Halldór said, “but we might need to talk a bit more to you later.”