Meltwater (4 page)

‘I told you it would be worth coming,’ said Nico, grabbing her hand.

They reached the top and the view was even better. The volcano itself was only a hundred yards away. They couldn’t get any closer: the lava was too soft.

‘It looks powerful from here, but this is actually a small eruption,’ Nico said. ‘It’s what’s called an effusive eruption. They’re the pretty ones. Basalt lava gets thrown up into the air and then flows down the side of mountain.’

‘What’s the other type?’ Erika asked.

‘Explosive eruption. That’s when the magma explodes into ash and is flung way up into the atmosphere. They are nasty: you don’t want to be anywhere near one of those.’

‘My, aren’t we the expert?’

‘Told you,’ said Nico with a smile. ‘They say there’s a chance that Katla will blow, that’s a big volcano under the Mýrdals Glacier back there. If it does there could be a real mess – massive floods.’

‘Floods?’

‘Yeah. The eruption melts the ice in the glacier, and the meltwater surges down the mountain in a series of powerful flash floods.
Jökulhlaup
, I think the Icelanders call it – “glacier leap”. You really don’t want to be in the way of one of those.’

They stared at the convulsions of the volcano in awe.

‘You know what? I’ve thought of a code name for this Gaza video project,’ said Nico. ‘
Meltwater
.’

‘Not bad,’ said Erika.

They stared a bit longer. ‘It’s amazing to finally see an eruption for real,’ Nico said. ‘Come on! Let’s take a closer look at the lava flow.’ He led Erika along the rim.

Ásta was impressed. She had seen Hekla erupting before from a great distance, but she had never seen a volcano this close. She had meant to join the thousands of inhabitants of Reykjavík who had flocked up to Fimmvörduháls over the previous three weeks, but had just never got around to it. Although she thought Dúddi was an idiot to drive up on to the glacier without checking the weather, she was very glad she had come.

As she watched the volcano thrashing and writhing in front of her, she thought of the line in Genesis: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.’ Well, that was what she was witnessing: God creating the earth. You could do that here in Iceland. And it was a magnificent sight.

It was beginning to get dark. The setting sun slipped behind the volcano, blushing pink across the whiteness of the Mýrdalsjökull behind them and stroking the underside of the cloud just above it. A few flakes of snow bit into her cheek.

She was excited to be working with Freeflow. She liked the look of Erika. It was good to meet another woman who believed in something and had the energy and drive to make a difference. To Ásta’s disappointment, there weren’t many people like that in the Icelandic Church.

She could learn from Erika. She would need all the inspiration she could muster if she was to go ahead with her own plans to shine light into dark corners.

The snow thickened ahead of her, horizontal flakes obscuring the volcano. The sun had disappeared. She turned to Dúddi. ‘Do you think we had better get back?’

A blizzard on a glacier was a really bad idea. Especially at night.

Dúddi nodded. ‘Time to go, guys. Where are the others?’ The visibility was deteriorating rapidly. Dieter, Dúddi, Zivah and Ásta were all in a group together, but the other three were out of sight.

‘I think Nico and Erika are just along there,’ said Dieter, pointing along the rim. ‘Don’t know about Franz.’

‘Can you get Nico and Erika and tell them to come down?’ said Dúddi. ‘The rest of you, follow me. We’ll keep an eye out for Franz.’

They could no longer see their jeep below them. Scrambling down the pile of cooled lava was unpleasant: the wind seemed to be blowing harder and colder and the stones slipped underfoot. It was a relief to get back to their vehicle, and to find Franz waiting inside. The jeep they had parked next to was gone; only the two snowmobiles remained, as far as Ásta could see.

They piled into the car and waited for Dieter and the others. Dúddi switched the engine on: the warmth and the shelter from the wind was a relief. Ásta saw two figures climb on to the snowmobiles and zoom off. The mess of tyre tracks was still visible, but it wouldn’t be long before they would be covered in snow. She hoped Dúddi knew how to operate his GPS.

They could no longer see the volcano, save for a fuzzy orange glow through the whiteness. But they could hear it.

‘Come on,’ muttered Dúddi to himself as he sat in the driver’s seat. ‘We can’t hang around much longer. I’m going back to get them. You wait here.’

He climbed out of the jeep and Ásta watched him bend into the wind towards the slope of lava.

‘I hope they’re OK,’ said Zivah, nervously.

‘Of course they are,’ said Ásta.

‘You don’t think they could have fallen into the volcano or anything, do you?’

‘No,’ said Ásta, peering into the bitter white gloom. ‘Don’t worry. They’ll be fine.’

CHAPTER THREE

S
ERGEANT MAGNUS JONSON
sipped from his bottle of Viking beer and stared at the wall of his studio apartment. He was still tingling from his after-work swim, and the soak in the geothermally heated hot tub at the Laugardalur baths. He had been in Reykjavík nearly a year now, had graduated from the National Police College five months before and was now well into the routine of the Violent Crimes Unit of the Metropolitan Police. That afternoon, he had investigated a suspected domestic violence case: a woman had supposedly fallen down the stairs, bruising her shoulder and getting herself a black eye. Magnus had goaded her hung-over but abusive boyfriend, hoping for an opportunity to slug him, but Vigdís, a fellow detective in the unit with a bit more patience than Magnus, had defused the situation. Bummer.

His room was right downtown in Reykjavík’s 101 district, on the first floor of a small house on Njálsgata owned by the sister of one of his colleagues. Through his window Magnus had a great view of the sweeping floodlit spire of the Hallgrímskirkja. But he wasn’t looking at the church.

He was looking at the wall.

He had only started sticking up the photographs when his girlfriend Ingileif had disappeared to Germany five months before. He had felt a little self-conscious at first, and he knew she would have laughed at him. But he was a detective, a detective with an unsolved crime. He had tried hiding from it for years, but he hadn’t succeeded. So he pinned it up on his wall.

He had started with just photographs, but now there were copied pages of reports, newspaper articles and multicoloured Post-its. He would occasionally rearrange everything to look at the evidence from different angles. Sometimes the fiddling revealed a new insight, but it had never revealed the solution. At least not yet.

At the moment his father, Dr Ragnar Jónsson, was smiling down from the top left section of the wall. Beneath him were photographs of Duxbury, Massachusetts, the town outside Boston where Ragnar had been stabbed to death fourteen years before in 1996. The photograph had been taken by Magnus in the back yard of the house there where Magnus, his brother Ollie, Ragnar and Magnus’s stepmother had spent a month that summer. Beneath it were notes about the case, many scribbled by Magnus when, as a twenty-year-old student, he had tried to figure out what had happened. One page, highlighted, described how his father had been stabbed once in the back and twice in the chest.

On the far right of the wall was a cutting from a newspaper showing a photograph of the famous Icelandic novelist Benedikt Jóhannesson, and another describing his murder in the winter of 1985 at his house in Reykjavík. Next to it was a photograph of Hraun, the farm in the Snaefells Peninsula a couple of hours north of Reykjavík where Benedikt had been born. Underneath was a photocopy of the forensic patholo-gist’s report describing how he had died: a stab wound in the back and two more in the chest.

In the middle of the wall, connecting these two murders in some way as yet unknown to Magnus, was Magnus’s family, or more specifically, his mother’s family.

There were two photographs of his mother. One of her in her twenties, leaning against his father, sitting in a café on holiday somewhere in Italy, looking relaxed, happy and beautiful: light tan, blond hair falling down over her eyes, warm smile. The other, taken ten years later, of the same woman only different: puffy eyes, lined face, pursed lips. That was a couple of months before she drank half a bottle of vodka and drove herself into a rock.

Also in this section of the wall were photographs of Bjarnarhöfn, the farm on the Snaefells Peninsula just a couple of kilometres from Hraun where Magnus’s grandparents lived, and where Magnus and Ollie had spent the four most miserable years of their lives. There was a photograph of Hallgrímur, Magnus’s grandfather and the farmer of Bjarnarhöfn, who had made the two boys’ lives so miserable. They had been sent there after their father had moved to Massachusetts, leaving their mother, swiftly becoming an alcoholic, in Iceland. She couldn’t cope and so the boys had been sent to their grandparents’ farm. It was a time Magnus wanted to forget and his little brother Ollie had blanked out entirely.

So what linked the family in the middle with the unsolved murders on the left and the right? Magnus didn’t know.

No matter how long he stared at the wall, he didn’t know.

There were clues.

A promising line of inquiry had emerged the previous autumn, when Magnus had called up the old file on Benedikt’s murder and discovered that the writer had died in exactly the same way as his father. He had also discovered there was a feud between Benedikt’s family and Hallgrímur’s. And Magnus knew, of course, that Hallgrímur hated Magnus’s father, although apparently the old man had been happy to see his son-in-law leave the country and Magnus’s mother.

Magnus was a detective; he wanted to investigate. Ollie, his brother back in America, begged him not to.

Magnus had flown to Boston for a couple of days in January. Visited Duxbury, spoken to the detective who had worked the case fourteen years before, stayed with Ollie, tried to talk him round, but with no success.

For the sake of his damaged little brother, Magnus had held off asking more questions in Iceland. He had felt a sense of duty towards Ollie ever since they were kids together at their grandparents’ farm, a duty that had only increased after their father had died. And Ollie had needed Magnus’s help many times over the years as he had got himself into trouble with women, with drugs and with money. Magnus was happy to give it: he didn’t really hold his brother responsible. If anyone was to blame, it was their grandfather Hallgrímur.

But for once Magnus had decided to put his own interests before his brother’s. Ollie was coming to Reykjavík to stay with him in a couple of days and this time Magnus would insist that he carry on digging.

He took a swig of his beer, hauled himself up out of his armchair and examined the photos of Ollie lying on his desk. There were two: one of Ollie, or Óli as he was then known, taken at Bjarnarhöfn: a curly-haired blond kid in Iceland, a nervous smile under anxious brows. The other picture was of Ollie as a thirty-year-old failed real-estate investor, hair a little darker but still curly, smile cocky. Magnus picked up the second print and examined the wall.

He never knew where the hell to put Ollie.

His phone rang.

‘Magnús.’

‘Hi, it’s Vigdís. There has been a murder in the Hvolsvöllur district. Niccolò Andreose, thirty-eight, Italian national. They want our help. I’m coming to pick you up with Árni.’

Magnus’s pulse quickened. Murders in Iceland were few and far between, unlike his old beat in South Boston where every week brought several. But most homicides in this country were quite straightforward to solve: one drunk hitting another too hard. The role of the detective was merely to get the paperwork right. He had been transferred to Iceland from the Homicide Unit of the Boston Police Department at the request of the National Police Commissioner to help out the local cops with the more complex big-city crimes that the Commissioner feared would become more common. Magnus had worked the odd interesting case in his first year; perhaps this would be another one. ‘Are there any suspects?’

‘Not yet,’ said Vigdís. ‘They’ve rounded up the witnesses at the Hvolsvöllur Police Station. That’s where we’re going now.’

‘What about the scene of the crime?’

‘That’s a little inaccessible at the moment. It’s on the rim of the Fimmvörduháls volcano. And there’s a blizzard blowing.’

It was past midnight by the time they reached Hvolsvöllur, a small agricultural town on the broad floodplain to the south-east of Reykjavík. With Magnus were two other detectives from the Violent Crimes Unit: Vigdís, one of the few female detectives in Reykjavík and certainly the only black one; and Árni, who was young, keen and error-prone. It was Árni’s sister who was Magnus’s landlady. Vigdís had left her car outside Magnus’s place and the three of them had piled into Magnus’s Range Rover, which was better suited to the terrain outside Reykjavík. Magnus was glad he had only had a few sips of his beer; it would have been a shame to miss the case because he had had a skinful.

The police station was a square modern building opposite the Saga Centre on the edge of town. Inside, lights were on.