Meltwater (23 page)

She walked past Magnus and sat down in front of her computer.

‘Erika?’ Magnus said.

Erika paused, closed her eyes. ‘Yes?’

‘You didn’t tell me anything about your relationship with Nico. I specifically asked you about it.’

‘I didn’t think it was relevant to your investigation,’ Erika said. ‘And I didn’t want to cause his widow distress. Although it looks like I needn’t have worried about that.’

‘Can you tell me about it now?’

‘What do you want to know?’ Erika said. ‘Yes, we had an affair. Yes, I slept with him. Yes, I am upset that he is dead. What do you want? The dates? Let me see . . .’ She tapped on some keys. ‘Yes, just checking my calendar. The last time I slept with him was two months ago. February fourteenth. Valentine’s Day. Stockholm. Got that?’

There were tears in her eyes. Finally, there were tears in her eyes.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

‘W
OW,’ SAID RANNVEIG,
once they were outside. She took a deep breath of fresh air.

‘Yeah. Wow.’

‘Lucky we’ve got someone watching the house. I wouldn’t want to be unprotected if I was Erika with that woman on the loose.’

‘No,’ said Magnus. He was glad Ásta had informed Teresa: it was something that he should really have done himself. But just then Baldur’s words came back to him. The first place to look was always the husband or the wife or the boyfriend. It was true in Boston. It was true in Reykjavík.

Something to think about.

‘See you later, Rannveig,’ Magnus said, and he trotted over to Ásta’s small Peugeot. She had just started the engine.

He stooped down on the passenger’s side. Teresa was weeping. Ásta pressed a switch to wind down the electric window. ‘Signora Andreose,’ Magnus said. ‘I know you are upset now, but I would really like to speak to you at the police station.’

The woman nodded. Magnus glanced across to Ásta, who nodded also, mouthing in Icelandic, ‘I’ll bring her when she is ready.’

Ásta drove off and Magnus looked down the hill to where the guy was still reading his paper on the bench. Magnus nodded at the cop in the police car and strolled down towards him. The bench was in front of a tiny grass playground, with swings and a multicoloured little elf house.

The man lowered his paper. It
was
the
International Herald Tribune.

‘Hi, Magnus, how are you?’ he said in English. ‘My name’s Tom. Tom Bryant. I’ve got my car here. Do you want a ride?’

‘Can’t we just talk here?’

‘It’s a bit cold. It might be better to be in the car.’

Magnus shrugged and followed Bryant to a bland saloon crammed into a space between a van and a BMW four-by-four.

Bryant started the car. He was about forty, neatly dressed in a bland kind of a way: jeans with a belt, decent shoes, plain zip-up jacket. Not really a businessman, but not a tourist either.

‘I take it you work for the CIA?’ Magnus said.

Bryant smiled. ‘I’m temporarily attached to the US Embassy here in Reykjavík.’

‘I’ll take that as a yes. Are you following Erika Zinn?’

‘No.’

‘She says the CIA is following her.’

‘Well, she’s wrong,’ said Bryant.

‘Really?’

Bryant smiled. Good American teeth. ‘Yeah, really. It’s not the CIA. Different department. It’s actually the Diplomatic Security Team.’

‘Oh, right. That’s OK, then.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘We are just driving around. I thought we should have a little chat.’

‘I’m not sure there’s any point in that,’ said Magnus in Icelandic.

‘What?’

‘Don’t you speak Icelandic? What’s the CIA doing sending a spy to Iceland who doesn’t speak Icelandic? I saw through your disguise, by the way.’

‘I know you’re a good detective, Magnus. And no, I don’t speak the language. I am more of a Freeflow specialist than an Iceland specialist. We have other people who work for the government who speak Icelandic.’

‘Ah.’

‘Yes. People like you.’

Magnus turned to the driver. They had passed the Hallgrímskirkja on top of the hill and were driving down the other side towards Snorrabraut. ‘What do you mean?’

‘You work for the government, don’t you?’

‘Not the American government. I’m attached to the National Police Commissioner’s Office in Iceland.’

‘Yeah, but you’re still on the BPD payroll. And you’re getting your pension contributions; I know, I checked. Come on, you’re a cop, you know it’s all about the pension rights.’

‘Hey, I’m thirty-four, what do I care about pensions?’ But Magnus knew that while that was true for him personally, a lot of his colleagues in the BPD became fixated on their earliest retirement date years in advance.

‘I’m just saying,’ said Bryant.

‘Saying what?’

‘That you are a US citizen.’

Magnus sighed. ‘So what do you want?’

‘I want to know what Freeflow is working on right now.’

‘No,’ said Magnus.

Bryant drove on. They were down to the bay now, and he turned eastwards on Saebraut. Mount Esja was free of clouds, its rocky ramparts gleaming full of sprightly spring promise. ‘Nice town, Reykjavík,’ Bryant said. ‘Very pretty. This reminds me a bit of Maine, you know. I used to go there on vacations when I was a kid.’

‘More trees in Maine,’ Magnus said.

‘True,’ Bryant said. ‘I know it has something to do with Israel.’

‘You watch TV in Icelandic, then?’

‘I have people to do it for me. Have you been following the peace negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians?’

‘Not really,’ said Magnus.

‘Well, even if you had you wouldn’t know that they are at a crucial stage. The Palestinians have indicated that they might show some flexibility if the Israelis do. There’s a chance that we could get an agreement in the next month or so. A real agreement. The State Department is cautiously optimistic.’

‘That’s good.’

‘It’s very good, Magnus. This is
the
most intractable problem in the world today. But the main difficulty that both sides have isn’t with each other, it’s with their own people – the right wing in Israel that believes in the God-given right of Jews to settle the occupied territories, and the Palestinian terrorists who want to see an end to the state of Israel.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I am saying that if a leak came out that harmed the reputation and good faith of either Israel or the Palestinians, it could disrupt the negotiations at a delicate stage.’

‘How do you know that what Freeflow is working on would do this?’

‘I don’t, for sure. It’s just a guess. But the balance of probability is that a big leak would screw things up. What do you think?’

Magnus thought of the images of those bullets from the Israeli helicopter thudding into Tamara Wilton’s body. He thought of the chuckles, the jokes. ‘I’d say it might.’

Bryant indicated and pulled over to the side of the road. The car behind hooted; he ignored it.

He turned to Magnus and looked him straight in the eye. ‘If you could disrupt or delay this leak, whatever it is, it might save the peace process.’

Magnus hesitated. ‘No,’ he said.

‘Why not?’ said Bryant. ‘Tell me why not. It’s your duty to your country, the United States. Plus it will help stop one of the worst conflicts of the last fifty years.’

‘It’s true I am an American,’ Magnus said. ‘But I am an Icelander as well. And the job I am doing at the moment is for the Republic of Iceland. If you want the leak disrupted, then you should speak to the Icelandic authorities. It’s up to them to decide what to do. I will simply do what they tell me. Have you spoken to them?’

Bryant didn’t answer.

‘You have, and they said no, didn’t they? The Modern Media Initiative, I’ll bet. My job is to solve a murder. And that I will do. But no more. Now I’m going.’ He reached for the latch of the car door and opened it. ‘Nice talking to you.’

‘Think about it, Sergeant Detective Jonson.’

Magnus slammed the door and crossed the busy road looking for the nearest bus stop.

The man drummed his fingers as he pressed his mobile phone to his ear. He was on hold, and had been for two minutes. His eyes flicked to the statue of Leifur Eiríksson, over to the church spire and then across to the entrance of Thórsgata. He saw a small white car emerge, driven by the guy he had seen hanging around the street for the past hour or so, and the big detective.

Interesting.

He considered whether to follow them, but decided not to. Curiosity was one thing, but it was the Freeflow people he was really interested in. Besides which, he couldn’t afford to break off the call.

‘Hello? . . . Yes, that’s right, fifteen thousand euros . . . And are you quite sure they won’t know where the funds come from? I want this to be an anonymous donation, you see . . . Thank you. Thank you very much. Goodbye.’

The man cut the connection and tossed the phone on to the passenger seat beside him. He turned back to the entrance to Thórsgata and waited.

It was a couple of hours from Stykkishólmur back to Reykjavík. It was a beautiful drive, scarcely another car on the road, lava fields and farmland stretching down to the sea. The capital lurked beneath the horizon, but the hazy grey shape of Mount Esja floated like a distant island in the burnished bay.

Normally, Jóhannes would have felt a sense of euphoria driving through this isolated beauty, especially on a school day. But he couldn’t help turning over in his mind the importance of what he had learned.

If indeed his father had pushed Gunnar into the sea off Búland’s Head seventy years before, he was a murderer.

His father, the man he admired most in the world, was a murderer.

The words that Benedikt had spoken to him while they were both surveying the Berserkjahraun made sense now.
Sometimes they do.
Sometimes people do take revenge for family honour, just as they had done in
The Saga of the People of Eyri
. And
Njáll’s Saga
and
Gisli’s Saga
and all the other sagas.

It was an admission. More than that, it was a justification. Benedikt was justifying to his son what he had done, even if it would take nearly fifty years for that son to appreciate it.

But Jóhannes was surprised to find that the discovery that his father was a murderer didn’t fill him with revulsion. It filled him with a kind of pride. Benedikt knew right from wrong: that was why he was such a good writer. Like some of the sagas, his novels dealt with terrible moral dilemmas. He put his characters in positions where doing the right thing forced them to break the law, to alienate the people they loved, sometimes to destroy their own lives. That was why novels like
Moor and the Man
were so popular.

So if Benedikt had pushed his neighbour Gunnar over the cliff all those years ago, it had been the right thing to do.

And, like the characters in his books, it had eventually destroyed him.

Because although Jóhannes did not know for sure who had killed his father, he now knew why.

Revenge.

If Benedikt could kill Gunnar for murdering his own father, then Gunnar’s family could kill Benedikt for the same crime.

A surge of anger rushed through Jóhannes’s veins. The road was long and straight, and without realizing it, Jóhannes put his foot down. He nearly came off at a corner.

He slammed on the brakes, pulled off the road and jumped out of the car, flinging the door shut behind him.

He was in the middle of a flat plain near the Eldborg crater, an oval-shaped stone circle bursting up from the congealed lava surrounding it.

He kicked the wheel of the car. That was satisfying, but he wanted to kick the car itself.

Stupid. There was a boulder a few metres away. He ran over to it and booted it hard, swearing as he did so. He kicked it again and again and again. Words tumbled out of his mouth. His eyes stung. His face was hot; his whole body was on fire. He gave the stone one last kick and then hunched his shoulders and stomped off across the lava field towards the crater. He tripped and fell over some of the heather, stumbled on some more, fell again, and then a third time; he lay, panting on the grey stone.

The heat left him. His toe hurt like hell. A golden plover fluttered over the mossy lava next to him, peeping its displeasure at the disturbance he had caused.

He sat up, took off his shoe and rubbed his toe, still breathing heavily.

He felt a little scared. He hadn’t done that for years, not since he was a child. He used to lose his temper sometimes then, when he was bullied or when things didn’t go well at school. His father had comforted him, called him his little berserker.

Jóhannes the adolescent had controlled his temper with difficulty at first, but then with more and more ease. In fact one of his main qualities as a teacher was his patience. It was strange how out of nowhere that temper tantrum had hit him.