Meltwater (26 page)

‘See you later,’ said Ollie.

‘Oh, Katrín,’ said Magnus. ‘Can Ollie use your spare bedroom tonight? I thought he could sleep on my floor, but with Ingileif in town . . .’

‘I’m sure I can find room for your cute little brother,’ she said with a quick glance at Ollie, and left the kitchen.

‘Come upstairs, Ollie,’ said Magnus.

‘Katrín and I became quite well acquainted,’ Ollie said, following Magnus up the stairs. ‘She’s very friendly, you know?’

‘Yeah. I knew you’d get along, I just didn’t think you’d get along that well.’

Ollie did well with women, always had. He had a mixture of cockiness and vulnerability that seemed to appeal to some of them; why, Magnus wasn’t quite sure.

‘Nice view,’ said Ollie, looking out of the window and up the hill at the swooping spire.

‘Yeah, it’s not a bad place,’ said Magnus. ‘Katrín doesn’t charge me too much.’

‘And Ingileif is back? I remember you talking about her. Will I get to meet her?’

‘Probably later. She’s out with clients this evening. And she’s not staying in Iceland very long. She’s still working in Hamburg.’

‘What is all that?’ Ollie exclaimed looking at Magnus’s wall. ‘Is that all about Dad’s death?’

‘Yes,’ said Magnus. ‘And the death of Benedikt Jóhannesson the author. I told you about that.’

‘You’re seriously strange, you know that?’ said Ollie staring at the wall. ‘Hey, that’s a photo of me! What am I doing there? Where do I fit in?’

‘You don’t, really,’ said Magnus.

‘Too right, I don’t. Hey, can we go out to a bar or something?’

The words
I don’t want to stay in a room with that on the wall
were unsaid, but Magnus understood them.

‘Sure,’ he said.

Magnus’s regular hangout, the Grand Rokk, had closed a couple of months before, much to his sorrow – yet another victim of the credit crunch. So they went to a bar down the hill, Kaffibarinn. It was just a small black-painted building with a London Underground sign above the door. It was empty on a Wednesday evening, cosy and civilized. It was difficult to imagine the seething crowd of drink- and drug-fuelled bodies heaving to the music that crammed into the place on a Friday or Saturday night.

Magnus bought his brother another beer.

‘How are things going?’ Magnus asked.

‘Not good,’ said Ollie. ‘I keep on thinking that the market’s coming back, but then it goes dead on me. And the rent isn’t quite enough to cover the mortgage payments.’

‘The students are still coming though?’

‘Yeah. But as you know the plan was always to make capital gains.’

Ollie had purchased half a dozen houses in Medford, a suburb of Boston near Tufts University. They were the kind that students liked to rent. He had borrowed heavily to do it, hoping to flip them as prices rose. It was something he had been doing for several years, and he had made some good money, all of which he had ploughed back into more properties. He had urged Magnus to join him, but Magnus had resisted. Then the crash came, house prices fell, but the debt Ollie owed to the banks only got bigger.

Perhaps Ollie was more of an Icelander than he realized.

‘Maybe things will get better in the summer,’ Magnus said.

‘Yeah, maybe. Maybe. Hey, any chance I can get to see this volcano? That sounds cool.’

‘The pretty one has stopped erupting,’ Magnus said. ‘There’s a big ugly one going at it now.’

He described his morning drive out to Skógafoss and the
jökulhlaup
. And then his evening entertainment with the guy with the knife.

‘And you told me life here is dull,’ Ollie said.

‘It is most of the time. And then something happens, and an interesting case crops up. I guess I should just be more patient. I’m used to a couple of murders a week.’

‘Yeah, but those are on the streets of Southie, not on the edge of a friggin’ volcano.’

‘That’s true,’ said Magnus.

‘Another beer?’ said Ollie. He went up to the bar and bought them from a girl with green hair and a ring through her nose. Magnus couldn’t hear what Ollie said to her, but he did hear her laugh. Turned out she was from New Hampshire, Ollie announced when he returned with the drinks.

‘Speaking of murders in Boston . . .’ Magnus said.

‘Here we go,’ said Ollie, eyeing his brother as he took a gulp of his beer.

‘I did what you wanted,’ Magnus said. ‘I haven’t asked anyone any more questions here about Dad.’

‘Thanks, bro, I appreciate it.’

‘But I want to.’ Magnus leaned forward. ‘You’ve seen the wall in my room. It’s true I want to know what happened to him. I
need
to know. It was why I joined Boston PD in the first place. It’s like I feel every murder I investigate is his murder, except I never get to solve it. Or
re
solve it. So I go on to the next and the next.’

‘I can’t help you with that shit, Magnus,’ Ollie said.

‘But you can, that’s just it. I think finally I might be getting there. When we go back to the house I’ll show you the wall. There is this writer called Benedikt Jóhannesson who was killed in 1985 in Reykjavík with exactly the same MO as Dad.’

‘MO?’

‘
Modus operandi
. Method. A stab wound in the back and two in the chest. Just like Dad.’

‘Except Dad was killed five thousand miles away and ten years later.’

‘Two thousand miles.’

‘Whatever. You get my point.’

‘Yes, but Benedikt was brought up at Hraun, over the lava field from Bjarnarhöfn. You remember the place?’

‘I remember as little as possible of all that.’

‘Well, he was. And they’ve got some kind of family feud going. Grandpa’s father Gunnar killed Benedikt’s father, and then Benedikt killed Gunnar.’

‘So you think Grandpa killed them both?’

‘Not necessarily. He’s left-handed for a start and the killer was right-handed. Also there is no record of Grandpa ever going to America, let alone him being there when Dad was murdered in 1996.’

‘Sounds to me like you’ve got the wrong guy then,’ Ollie said.

‘Perhaps. But I know I can find the right guy.’

‘So what are you saying?’

‘That I’m going to start asking more questions about our family. About Benedikt. About Dad.’

‘But you promised not to!’ Anger flared in Ollie’s eyes.

‘I know, and now I’ve changed my mind.’

Ollie put his head in his hands. ‘Look, I’m just about getting my shit together again, Magnus. This is the last thing I need now. What happened at Bjarnarhöfn was really bad for me. I get nightmares about that potato cellar that Grandpa shoved me into. The dark. The cold. The smell. The slime of those rotten potatoes. It might not sound like much but I was a little kid, my mother was drunk all the time, my father had abandoned me and this horrible man made my life hell.’

‘I was there.’

Ollie smiled. ‘Yeah, you were there for me. You’re always there for me. Which is why I’m begging you to leave all this alone, man.’

‘But what if I don’t tell you what I discover? What difference would that make to you?’

‘Oh, come on. You will tell me. You’ll drag me back to that hellhole one way or another. Come on, man!’ Anger was rising in Ollie’s voice. ‘You know I’ve been to different shrinks over the years. They all say the same thing, and frankly it’s a pretty easy diagnosis. My problems come from those four years at Bjarnarhöfn.’

‘And mine come from the year Dad died.’

‘You can handle it better than me,’ Ollie said, jabbing his finger at his brother. ‘You’ve always been able to handle things better than me.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Magnus. ‘But I am going to do some more investigation. I won’t tell you what I discover, if you like, but I’m going to ask those questions.’

Ollie’s lips were pursed and his head was shaking in anger and frustration. ‘You’re gonna push me over the edge here, Magnus. I’m not kidding you, man.’

Magnus didn’t reply.

Ollie finished his beer. ‘Let’s go back. I’m tired.’

They walked back to Njálsgata in silence. Back at the house, Ollie was just about to go through to Katrín’s room when Magnus touched his arm.

‘Ollie?’

Ollie glared at his brother.

‘Why did you come to Iceland?’ Magnus asked. ‘If you wanted to leave all this behind you?’

‘See the sights. Catch some rays. Spend some quality time with my brother. What do you think?’

His voice was dripping with sarcasm, and before Magnus could reply he had gone through to Katrín’s room.

Magnus had no idea what to think. He stomped up the stairs to his own room.

He stared at the wall. At the photograph of his father. At the picture of Benedikt Jóhannesson.

He knew Ollie’s fear of what had happened to him at Bjarnarhöfn when he was a kid was real, but he didn’t understand why that meant Magnus couldn’t pursue his own investigations. He had a perfect right to, whatever Ollie said.

Magnus felt the anger rise within him. Once again he was being manipulated by his brother, who was taking on his habitual role of injured victim. Magnus was always being manipulated by his brother. Well, this time Magnus wasn’t going to let him get away with it. He picked up the photograph of Ollie with his cocky smirk, and stuck it dead centre in the middle of the wall.

Ollie was involved, and no amount of whining on his part would change that.

His doorbell rang. He went downstairs to see Ingileif, smiling broadly on the doorstep. She kissed him.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I finally get to see you.’

They went up to his room. ‘Is Ollie here?’

‘He’s downstairs. He said he was going to sleep.’

‘So I won’t get to meet him?’

‘Perhaps not tonight. Although he seems to have made good friends with Katrín.’

‘Really? Last time I saw her, she liked girls.’

‘A passing phase, I think. Ollie and I had a fight.’

‘Already?’

‘Yeah. Over that.’ Magnus nodded to the wall.

‘You want to find out more and he doesn’t?’

‘That’s right.’

Magnus slumped on to the bed. Ingileif flopped next to him, and snuggled into his chest. He put his arm around her and squeezed.

‘At some point you need to do what you need to do,’ Ingileif said. ‘I know you worry about him, but this is important for you too. And maybe once you have figured out what’s going on, you can take all that down.’

‘Maybe,’ said Magnus. ‘Maybe a lot of things would be better.’

‘I hope so,’ said Ingileif. But Magnus could hear the note of doubt in her voice. Perhaps he would never be able to live in peace with the death of his father. But he had to try.

‘How’s the other investigation going?’ Ingileif asked. ‘The guy who died on the volcano?’

‘Not brilliantly.’

‘Tell me about it.’

So Magnus told her about Freeflow and Erika and Teresa. As he talked he unwound, relaxed.

And then they made love.

As Magnus lay in bed staring at the ceiling, his thigh lightly touching Ingileif’s naked, slumbering body, he thought how good it was to have her back.

He smiled.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Thursday 15 April 2010

‘T
HE ASH IS
falling,’ said Árni. ‘Did you see it on TV?’

His eyes were shining. It was eight o’clock and all the members of the Violent Crimes Unit were huddled together in a meeting room to discuss the case. The uniformed inspector was there, as were Rannveig and Chief Superintendent Thorkell Holm, the head of CID and everybody’s boss. And Baldur, of course.

‘Some of us have better things to do in the morning than watch TV,’ said Baldur.

‘Like sleep,’ said Róbert.

‘There was a shot of a farm in Mýrdalur,’ Árni continued. ‘The whole place is covered in this horrible grey stuff, including the sheep. The farmer said he was screwed. The ash will poison his crops and his animals. Fluorine.’

‘Is the eruption getting worse?’ someone asked.

‘It’s still going strong. And there is a
lot
of ash. They have closed some airspace as far away as Scotland. Apparently the ash can ruin aircraft engines.’

‘It looks OK here,’ said Róbert. And indeed it did. In Reykjavík it was a bit cloudy, a bit cold, but no sign of ash.

‘The wind is blowing it all to the east,’ said Árni. ‘Although they say it’s going to blow south today.’

Thorkell cleared his throat. He was a bluff grey-haired man with a shiny good-natured face. Not quite as sharp as Snorri, the Commissioner, but no dummy. And he was Árni’s uncle. ‘Let’s start. We have a lot to get through this morning. Magnús?’

Magnus ran through the attack on Erika the evening before and the attempts to find the attacker. Several witnesses had seen him run across Laugavegur up the hill towards the Hallgrímskirkja, but no one had seen him get into a car. Erika had confirmed that she was pretty sure that he was the same man who had attacked her and Nico on the volcano. She herself had spent a couple of hours in hospital – her cheek had been badly cut – but now she was back at the house on Thórsgata.