Meltwater (14 page)

‘But I know I’m innocent,’ said Franz.

‘In which case you’ll be let out eventually. Although sometimes I wonder about Iceland’s record with foreigners. It’s just so much easier to blame them for crimes.’

‘So you are threatening me.’

‘You got it.’

Franz’s expression was unchanged. But Magnus could see he was thinking it over.

‘Is it something to do with the US?’ Magnus asked.

Franz didn’t respond. But his eyes locked on to Magnus’s. Encouraging him perhaps?

‘France?’

No movement.

‘Switzerland?’ After all, Franz
was
Swiss. After Icelandic banks and German banks, the Swiss made sense next.

Nothing. But Franz’s eyes were steady.

Magnus ran through the other volunteers in his mind. Then it came to him. The Israeli student Zivah Malach did not seem like your average computer hacker. What the hell was she doing with these people?

‘Israel?’

Franz’s eyes dipped downwards in a kind of ocular nod. ‘Actually, I can’t help you any more,’ he said.

‘That’s no problem.’ Magnus smiled. ‘You have been very cooperative.’

CHAPTER TEN

J
ÓHANNES PULLED UP
outside the Hotel Búdir and switched off his engine. It was mid-afternoon; it had taken him two hours to drive up here from Reykjavík. The hotel was situated on the south side of the Snaefells Peninsula, a long, slightly crooked finger that stretched eighty kilometres out into the Atlantic from the west coast of Iceland. It was named after Snaefellsjökull, a smooth round glacier, fifteen hundred metres high at the western tip.

The glacier was free of clouds, its ice cap gleaming in the low afternoon sun. Beneath it slept a volcano that hadn’t erupted for eighteen hundred years, but the glacier retained an aura that had inspired Icelanders and others for generations. Jules Verne had chosen Snaefellsjökull as his entrance to the centre of the earth. There were tales about a half-man, half-troll named Bárdur, who had been one of the first settlers in the area and given the glacier its name, ‘Snow Fell’, before disappearing into the glacier himself. More recently, New Age types had designated it one of the seven energy centres in the world and a frequent landing site for aliens.

Jóhannes preferred his tales medieval, but he couldn’t deny the power of the glacier on the imagination. He had been transfixed by it when he had stayed at the Hotel Búdir on family holidays as a boy, as, of course, had his father, who had frequently taken two-week trips up here alone to write.

The hotel was all that was left of what once had been a thriving trading post, apart from the isolated black church a couple of hundred metres away. The hotel was perched at the mouth of a small river, with the glacier on one side and a broad sweeping beach on the other. A group of half a dozen horses and their riders were gliding across the sands in a
tölt
: the rapid smooth trot known only to the Icelandic horse. To the north, stretching eastwards from the glacier, was a ridge of forbidding mountains, and on the other side of those was Hraun, Jóhannes’s father’s childhood home.

The air was fresh and crisp and the sea sparkled blue, tossing gentle waves on to the sand. There were clouds dashing about the sky, but for the moment they were not obscuring sun or mountain.

Jóhannes entered the quiet hotel lobby and asked for the manager, to whom he had spoken after he had received the letter from his former pupil. Hermann, the head groom, was out with some guests on the sands, but would be back soon.

Jóhannes strolled outside to wait for the horses. After ten minutes they were back at the stables and Jóhannes waited another ten minutes until the guests were dismounted and the horses returned to their stalls.

A broad-shouldered man in his forties with a thick dark beard seemed to be in charge. Jóhannes approached him.

‘Hermann?’

‘Yes?’ The voice was gruff, but the blue eyes were friendly.

‘My name is Jóhannes Benediktsson. My father Benedikt Jóhannesson used to be a regular visitor here.’

‘Yes, yes, I remember him,’ said the groom. ‘Although that was a long time ago.’

‘And you remember Halldór Laxness, no doubt?’

‘Yes.’ Hermann lifted up a saddle and took it into a tack room. Jóhannes followed him. He avoided Jóhannes’s glance.

‘A letter has just come to my attention from Halldór to a friend of his. Apparently Halldór was staying here in 1985 when he saw my father and a man with a shotgun having an argument. He says you broke it up. He mentions you by name.’

‘Does he now?’ said Hermann. He dumped the saddle and turned towards Jóhannes, his eyes wary.

‘I wonder if you could tell me a bit more about it.’

Hermann hesitated. Then he nodded. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Although there is not much to tell. I was sixteen, something like that. Halldór was very old at that stage. Like your father he had been a regular visitor to the hotel in the past; he used to write some of his books here. I read one of them:
Under the Glacier
. Couldn’t make head nor tail of it.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ said Jóhannes dryly.

‘Anyway, he got it in his head he wanted to get on a horse again. He must have been in his eighties at least, and he hadn’t ridden for years.’

‘Eighty-three,’ said Jóhannes: Halldór Laxness’s date of birth was part of his professional armoury.

‘Sounds about right. It was a real struggle, but I got him up into the saddle in the end, and we rode up to the church and on into the lava field. Just at a walk, you know. We hadn’t gone far when he pointed to a couple of figures in a hollow by the shore. One of them had a shotgun. Their voices were raised, I could hear, although the old man couldn’t. He did a good job to notice them before me.

‘So, I left Halldór there and rode down to see what was going on. One of the men was your father, Benedikt – he had been staying at the hotel for a couple of weeks, writing. The other was a poacher. When the poacher saw me he backed off.’

‘Can you show me where this was?’ asked Benedikt.

‘Sure,’ said Hermann. ‘Follow me.’

They left the stables and walked around the hotel up to the little church. All around them stretched the lava field. This was a broad extent of stone criss-crossed with folds and crevices, in the middle of which, about two kilometres away, rose a large crater. Jóhannes remembered the scene well. There were no berserkers in this lava field, unlike the one near the farm at Hraun, but there were hidden people, that parallel race of invisible beings that Icelanders believed shared their country with them, living in rocks or, in this case, tunnels. A concealed lava tunnel lined with gold and precious jewels was supposed to lead from this spot a hundred kilometres to the mountains to the east. Jóhannes smiled as he remembered clambering around the rocks with his father looking for it.

‘Do you know what the argument was about?’

‘No. Your father didn’t tell me. I was only a boy, remember. I assume that your father had confronted the poacher and asked him what he was doing.’

‘So what happened then?’

‘Your father looked shaken. He went straight back to the hotel and checked out. I went back up to where I had left Halldór.’ Hermann paused. ‘Look, it was down there.’ He pointed down to a grassy hollow in the stone, not far from the shore. It was exposed, but out of sight of the hotel or the road. ‘And in fact Halldór and I were right here when we saw them.’

‘I see,’ said Jóhannes. ‘And the poacher?’

‘Must have gone straight back up to the road, I suppose. I don’t really remember.’

‘You know that my father was murdered a few weeks later?’ Jóhannes said.

‘Yes, I do,’ said Hermann.

‘I wonder if there was any connection. Did the police talk to you about this?’

‘As a matter of fact they did. A tall miserable bastard from Reykjavík. They said that Halldór had contacted them. I told them then what I am telling you now.’

‘And did you recognize the man?’

‘No. Never seen him before. That’s what I told the police.’ Hermann’s voice was firm and strong, but his eyes flicked quickly to one side. Jóhannes raised his eyebrows. Hermann held his gaze but touched his left ear briefly.

There was no ill discipline in any of Jóhannes’s classes. Ever. He had numerous tricks up his sleeve, but one of them was an unerring ability to tell when a child was lying to him. Keeping silent and raising the eyebrows was the clincher. The liars always cracked then.

Hermann might be a grown man in his forties, but Jóhannes knew he was lying.

‘Look, Hermann,’ Jóhannes said. ‘It was a long time ago, and you were only a kid. You didn’t like the policeman who was asking you questions. So you lied then – I understand that. But this is my father we are talking about now and I need to find out what happened to him. It’s all a long time ago. Halldór Laxness is dead. My father is dead. Maybe the man with the shotgun is dead. But please tell me who he was.’

‘Are you suggesting I was lying?’

Jóhannes raised his eyebrows again.

Hermann sighed and pursed his lips. Jóhannes waited.

‘You’re right,’ the groom said. ‘It was a long time ago. I wondered how I got away with it. This is hardly the most crowded part of the country: of course I knew who it was. I knew who everyone was. And why shouldn’t I tell you now?’

Jóhannes returned his smile. ‘So who was it?’

‘My cousin from Bjarnarhöfn. Hallgrímur Gunnarsson.’

‘Really?’ said Jóhannes. ‘And was he poaching?’

‘No chance. There’s no reason for Hallgrímur to come here to poach. He had his own perfectly good farm.’

‘Bjarnarhöfn, eh? He and my father must have been neighbours when my father was a boy.’

‘At Hraun, wasn’t it?’ said Hermann.

‘Yes. My grandmother moved away to Stykkishólmur in the 1940s some time and my father went on to high school in Reykjavík. So why didn’t you tell the police who he was?’

‘He was family and at that time my family were all pretty angry with your father. And I was scared of Hallgrímur. He came to see me the next day and warned me not to talk to anyone about it.’

‘You were scared of him then, but not now?’

‘I was sixteen then and he was in his fifties. He was a mean bastard, still is, I suspect, but now he’s got to be in his eighties. I haven’t seen him for several years, not since my uncle’s funeral. He is my father’s cousin, that’s the exact relationship.’

‘So this Hallgrímur is still alive?’

‘Oh, yes. I would have heard if he’d died.’

‘You said that your family were angry with Dad?’

‘Yes. He’d written something in a book which seemed to suggest that his father had had an affair with Hallgrímur’s mother, and then Hallgrímur’s father had killed him and dumped him in the lake. I think that’s right.’

‘
Moor and the Man
?’ said Jóhannes.

‘I don’t know. I didn’t read the book. But it got my father very upset, and Hallgrímur, of course.’

‘So that’s why this man Hallgrímur was threatening my father with a shotgun?’

‘Yes. I think he was telling him not to make up any more tales about our family. Wait a moment.’ Hermann paused, running his fingers through his beard.

‘Yes?’

‘I remember now. He said something about some other story Benedikt had written. About how someone had killed someone else.’

‘Really? Can you remember the name of the story?’

Hermann shook his head. ‘No chance. And I can’t remember who had killed who. Maybe Hallgrímur’s father was supposed to have murdered somebody else as well? I don’t know.’

‘Did your family talk about this other story?’

‘No. Just Hallgrímur that once.’

Jóhannes looked down towards the hollow, wondering what that story could be. Benedikt had published a collection just before he died, it might be one of those.

‘Didn’t it occur to you that Hallgrímur might have killed my father?’ Jóhannes said.

‘No, not at the time. I mean, that happened in Reykjavík, didn’t it? And Hallgrímur was family. But you know, he is mean. He always has been. He could have done it, I suppose.’ Hermann grimaced. ‘Killed him.’

‘Would you speak to the police now?’

Hermann scratched his head. ‘Would I get into trouble for lying to them all those years ago?’

Jóhannes shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But if you did do something wrong then, this would be a way of putting it right.’

Hermann sucked through his teeth, and looked up towards the shimmering glacier. ‘I might,’ he said. ‘I’m not saying I would, but I might.’

‘Thanks.’ Jóhannes held out his hand. ‘Thank you very much.’

As Hermann made his way back to the stables, Jóhannes stood outside the lonely little church, his brain racing.

He was getting somewhere! He was genuinely getting somewhere. Halldór Laxness’s letter was dated 14 November 1985, about six weeks before his father had been murdered. What if Hallgrímur had not been merely threatening Benedikt, what if he had been about to shoot him when Hermann had interrupted them?