66° North (11 page)

‘Yes. Yes, that’s right.’

‘The one who told you about your father screwing your mother’s best friend?’

‘Yes.’ Magnus’s voice was hoarse. ‘Do you mind if we don’t talk about it? I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I don’t want to think about it.’

‘OK,’ said Ingileif, and squeezed his hand.

But Magnus
was
thinking about it. Until the age of eight Magnus had had an idyllic childhood. His mother taught at school, his father at the university and he and his brother Óli played in the garden of their little house with its bright blue corrugated metal roof, only a short distance from where Magnus was living now in Thingholt.

But then things had changed, changed horribly. His father had announced he was leaving to go to a university in America. His mother, alone in charge of the boys, began to drink. The two boys were sent to stay with their grandparents on their farm at
Bjarnarhöfn on the Snaefells Peninsula. That period of his life Magnus had blanked from his memory, but he knew that the scars were still there, buried deep under his skin.

The scars were more obvious in the case of Óli. He had never really recovered from his time at the farm.

Then one day their mother killed herself in a car crash. She was drunk. Finally, the two boys’ father, Ragnar, came over from America to rescue them and take them back with him to Boston. Magnus was twelve, Óli ten.

As Magnus had grown up and begun to understand more about alcoholism, he had developed his own way of making sense of his parents’ lives. His mother, his alcoholic mother, not the beautiful woman he dimly remembered from his childhood, was the villain, his father the hero.

That was until he had bumped into Sigurbjörg in the street four months before. She had shattered Magnus’s idea of history by telling him that his father had had an affair with his mother’s best friend. That’s what had driven her to drink. That’s what had caused him to run away to America. That’s what, ultimately, had led to her death.

It was this knowledge that Magnus had tried to cram back into its box.

‘You’re still thinking about Sibba, aren’t you?’ Ingileif said. ‘I can feel it.’

Magnus sighed. ‘Yes.’

‘You know you should face up to it. See her. Find out what really happened between your father and your mother’s friend.’

‘I said I didn’t want to talk about it.’

Ingileif ignored him. ‘I remember when you decided that you were going to stay on in Iceland. One of the reasons was that you thought there might be an Icelandic link to your father’s death.’

Magnus shook his head. ‘Ingileif…’

‘No, listen to me. You’ve obsessed about how your father was murdered and who by all your adult life. That’s why you do what you do, it’s who you are. Isn’t it?’

Reluctantly Magnus nodded. It was why he had joined the police, why he had become a homicide detective, why he was so relentless in tracking down the killer of every victim he came across.

‘OK. So you are all excited about spending time trying to find the Icelandic angle to Óskar’s death, which you admit is very unlikely, yet you won’t find out more about an Icelandic angle to your own father’s murder. That doesn’t make sense.’

‘It’s different,’ Magnus protested.

‘Why?’

‘Because.’ He struggled to conjure up a plausible reason, but then settled on the truth. ‘Because it’s personal.’

‘Of course, it’s personal!’ Ingileif said. ‘And that’s exactly why you have to deal with it. Just like I had to find out how my own father died even though the answer was so painful to me. And don’t tell me that that wasn’t personal!’

Magnus stroked her hair. ‘No. No, I won’t tell you that.’ Ingileif’s pain had been real, was real. She was right. It had been important for her to find out the truth. So why wasn’t it important for him?

‘You’re scared, Magnús. Admit it, you are scared of what you might find out.’

Magnus closed his eyes. He hated being called a coward. It was not his self-image at all. Since his youth he had been an avid reader of the Icelandic sagas, the tales of medieval revenge and daring. There were heroes and cowards in those stories, seekers of justice and hiders from it, and Magnus saw himself as one of those heroes. He smiled to himself. There were also women urging their men-folk to get off their asses and go avenge the family honour. Women like Ingileif.

‘You are right,’ he said. ‘I am scared. But… Well…’

‘Well, what?’

‘You know I told you I spent four years at my grandfather’s farm when my father left us?’

‘Yes.’

Magnus swallowed. ‘Those are four years I don’t want to remember.’

‘What happened?’ Ingileif asked, touching his chest. ‘What happened, Magnús?’

Magnus exhaled. ‘That’s something I really don’t want to tell you. That memory has to stay in its box.’

Harpa stared out of her window at the blinking lights of Reykjavík across the bay, waiting for Björn to come. He had a big powerful motorbike, and she knew she could trust him to get down to her as fast as he could. It was a hundred and eighty kilometres, but the road was good all the way and, with the exception of the last stretch through the Reykjavík suburbs, empty.

She had been agitated since the interview with the two detectives. The big one with the red hair and the slight American accent had got under her skin. He was smarter than the skinny one she had spoken to in January. There was something about his eyes, blue, steady, understanding, that seemed to miss nothing, to see through all her protests and posturing. He knew she wasn’t telling the truth. They had no link between Gabríel Örn’s death and Óskar’s, the Gabríel Örn case was firmly closed by the authorities, but that detective knew there was something wrong.

He would be back.

Harpa had been mean to Markús, snapping at him for not tidying up his trucks. Later, when they were reading one of the poems in
Vísnabókin
, favourites from her own childhood, Markús had had to point out that she had read the same verse twice.

After he was in bed she had paced around the house, desperate to go for a walk on the beach at Grótta at the end of the Seltjarnarnes promontory, but unwilling to leave Markús alone in the house. She thought of calling her mother to babysit, but she couldn’t face the explanations, the small lies hiding the much bigger lie.

So in the end she had poured herself a cup of coffee and sat at the kitchen table staring out of the window, watching night settle
over Faxaflói Bay, forcing herself to remain still. She was in a kind of a trance. Inside she was screaming. Outside she was motionless, frozen.

Gabríel’s death would never leave her. In some strange way, his death, or her part in it, had lodged itself somewhere inside her. It had bided its time for a few months, but now it was growing like some ghastly tropical parasite, eating her up from the inside.

That evening, she had been unable to look Markús directly in the eye. Those big, trusting, honest brown eyes. How could she tell him that his mother was a liar? Worse than that, a murderer?

How could she live her life never being able to look her son in the eye?

She wanted to throw back the kitchen chair and scream. But she didn’t move. Didn’t move a muscle. Didn’t even raise the cup of cold coffee in front of her to her lips.

Where the hell was Björn?

She stared out into the gathering darkness, at Gabríel Örn lying there on the ground in the car park just off Hverfisgata, blood from his skull mingling with dirt in the slush.

She heard her own screams.

‘Shush, Harpa, shush.’ Björn’s voice was calm, and authoritative. Harpa stopped screaming. She sobbed instead.

He crouched down beside Gabríel. ‘Is he dead?’ Harpa whispered.

Björn frowned. By the way he moved his fingers around Gabríel’s throat, pressing on one spot and then another, Harpa could tell that he couldn’t find a pulse.

Harpa pulled out her phone. ‘I’ll call an ambulance.’

‘No!’ Björn instructed her, his voice firm. ‘No. He’s dead. There’s no point in calling an ambulance for a dead person. We’ll all end up in jail.’

‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Frikki.

‘No. Wait! Let me think,’ Björn said. ‘We need a story.’

‘No one will know it was us,’ said Sindri. ‘Let’s just go.’

‘They’ll know Harpa called him just before he came out,’ Björn said. ‘Phone records. The police will interview her. Perhaps someone was with him, someone who knows he was going to meet her.’

‘Don’t tell them anything, Harpa,’ Frikki said.

‘Oh, God,’ said Harpa. She knew she would tell the police everything.

‘Quiet!’ Björn urged. ‘Let’s calm down. We need a story. An alibi for everyone. First let’s get him out of the way. And try not to get his blood on your clothes.’

Sindri, Frikki and Björn dragged Gabríel into the small car park and laid him between two parked cars.

‘Harpa needs to go to B5,’ Ísak said. The others looked at him. ‘She needs to go to B5 right away. She needs to make a fuss about something so they remember that she is there. Start an argument with someone. Me perhaps. There is no connection between us, the police won’t suspect anything.’

‘But where was she before?’ Sindri asked.

‘With me,’ Björn said. ‘We met at the demonstration. She came back with me to my brother’s place. Things went wrong: she called her old boyfriend, wanted to see him.’

‘She waited at the bar for him and he never came,’ Ísak said.

‘What are we going to do with the body?’ Sindri asked.

‘I can move it somewhere,’ said Björn.

‘Fake a suicide,’ said Ísak. ‘I don’t know, a fall? Hang him somewhere?’

‘That’s horrible,’ Harpa said. ‘I think I am going to be sick.’

‘I’ll take him down to the sea for a swim,’ said Björn. ‘Sindri, you can help me. OK, give me your phone number, Harpa. You go to B5 with Ísak, but make sure you arrive separately. Make a fuss, but try not to get thrown out; we need you there as long as possible. I’ll get rid of the body now and call you in an hour or two. Then you can come back to my brother’s place with me. We can go through the details of your story then.’

Harpa nodded. She pulled herself together and set off for Bankastraeti and the bar, Ísak following by a different route.

Even though the plan was made up on the spot and there were plenty of holes in it, it worked. Harpa could never have thought of it. It took Ísak’s brains and Björn’s calm.

She had coped with the police questioning well. If it hadn’t been for Björn she would have cracked. He gave her the strength and determination to stick with her story. And now she was going to have to go through it all again, but this time she wasn’t sure she would be able to do as good a job.

She heard a motorbike approaching fast along Nordurströnd. She heard it come to a stop outside the house.

Her heart leapt. She ran out of the house and threw herself into the arms of the driver even before he had a chance to take his helmet off.

‘Oh, Björn, I’m so glad you are here.’ She began to sob.

He slipped off the helmet and stroked her hair. ‘There, there, Harpa. It’s all going to be OK.’

She pulled back. ‘It’s not going to be OK, Björn. I killed someone. I’m going to hell. I’m
in
hell.’

‘There is no hell,’ Björn said. ‘You feel guilty, but you shouldn’t. Of course killing people is wrong, but you didn’t mean to kill him, did you? It was an accident. People die in accidents.’

‘It wasn’t an accident,’ said Harpa. ‘I attacked him.’

‘The whole thing happened because Sindri and that kid egged you on. They were the ones who made you call him up and get him to come out and meet you. What we both did wrong was to go along with them. Look at me, Harpa. You’re not a bad person.’

But Harpa didn’t look at him. She pressed herself into Björn’s leather-clad chest. She wanted to believe him. She wanted so desperately to believe him.

H
ALLGRÍMUR LOOKED OUT
over the snow as he made his way to the barn where the sheep were huddled together for the winter. He had to check on the hay.

It was ten o’clock and just getting light. The snow, which had fallen a few days before, glowed a luminescent blue, except at the top of the far mountains where the rising sun painted it red. He could still see the dark shapes of the twisted rocky waves of the Berserkjahraun. The warmth of the lava stone meant that the snow always melted there first.

A cold wind whipped in from the fjord. Hallgrímur saw a small figure tramping his way across the snow towards the little church. Benni.

Hallgrímur hadn’t seen much of his friend over the past few weeks, but he felt sorry for him. Benedikt’s father’s disappearance had taken everyone by surprise. His mother had not the faintest clue where her husband might have gone. Search parties went out everywhere: over the Bjarnarhöfn Fell in case he had been looking for a lost sheep, along the shore in case he had fallen into the sea, over the Berserkjahraun, into the towns of Stykkishólmur and Grundarfjördur. When nothing turned up, the search went further afield: over the mountains to the south and the Kerlingin Pass, along the coast to Ólafsvík, the sheriff down in Borgarnes was informed.

There was no sign of him anywhere.

Hallgrímur had joined in the search parties, sticking closely to his father wherever he went. He was amazed and impressed by his father’s determination to help, the long hours he spent on the fells looking for a body he knew lay at the bottom of a lake only a few kilometres away.

The atmosphere at Bjarnarhöfn was awful. His father and mother didn’t talk. The hatred was palpable. Hallgrímur’s brother and sisters assumed it was grief and shock. Only Hallgrímur knew the real reason.

The boy hated his mother for what she had done with Benni’s father. And, although he knew it was wrong, he couldn’t help admiring his father for doing something about it.

Of course things were much worse at Hraun. Benni’s mother had been demented with worry, but she was a strong woman and she didn’t let the farm slip. Neighbours were eager to help.

Where had Benedikt’s father gone? The theories became more and more wild. The two wildest were that he had emigrated to America with a woman, and that the Kerlingin troll had got him.