Authors: Michael Ridpath
The only reason that Magnus could think of for Ollie and Jóhannes to drive up to Bjarnarhöfn was to confront the old man. And if that was going to happen, Magnus wanted to be there. It was out of consideration for Ollie that he had held off asking his own questions about the two murders. And now Ollie was blithely blundering in by himself.
Sure, there was emotion involved in Magnus’s frustration, but the policeman in him knew that Ollie’s action was a really bad idea. If anyone was going to ask Hallgrímur questions, it should be Magnus. He knew what to ask, and he would know what to do with the answers. Magnus couldn’t trust Ollie to do that.
Jóhannes seemed an intelligent man. Maybe he could be trusted at least to remember the answers.
It was weird that Ollie had teamed up with Jóhannes. Who had contacted whom? Magnus wondered. It must have been Ollie who had made the first move. Jóhannes’s disapproval of Ollie had been obvious at lunch, and Magnus would naturally be the brother he would call.
But why would Ollie talk to Jóhannes and not Magnus? Perhaps he had tried to, but Magnus was too busy chasing homicidal Belgians.
Strange, very strange.
Magnus was skirting the flank of Mount Esja. The sun glinted off the grey Faxaflói Bay, and Reykjavík was gleaming in the distance. It was a little less than two hours to Bjarnarhöfn from Reykjavík. Magnus had forgotten to ask Katrín what time Ollie had left, but he guessed it was early: Magnus hadn’t heard his brother leave the house. So it was unlikely he would catch them up.
He picked up his phone and called in to the station to tell Baldur he wouldn’t be in until late afternoon. He made an excuse about how it was Ollie’s last day and a problem had come up with his flight home. Which was true; Ollie would be hard pushed to get to Bjarnarhöfn and back in time to catch it.
Baldur didn’t complain. He still had his work cut out. Although the Church wasn’t implicated in Ásta’s murder, Soffía’s allegations were out in the open, or at least halfway out. It was going to be a rough summer for the Church of Iceland.
The car radio cut to the news. The Freeflow video was given prominence and they played a clip of Samantha Wilton’s plea for the criminals responsible to be brought to justice. There was already a comment from the Israeli government, who said that the video was a fake. That was quick, thought Magnus. An Icelandic correspondent speculated that the peace process would be delayed yet again.
Was the video a fake? Magnus had no idea. But it seemed to him that Freeflow was wide open to misinformation, no matter how carefully it said it vetted everything it received. And he wasn’t convinced by Freeflow’s protestation of neutrality. Although it wasn’t overtly commenting on the evidence, the video had been edited and presented for maximum emotional impact. What Magnus didn’t know was whether Freeflow was the manipulator or the manipulated.
The road plunged into the deep twisting tunnel under Hvalfjördur and the radio cut out. As he emerged on to the other side, he switched to a CD. It was a Brahms cello sonata that Ingileif used to play all the time. She had introduced Magnus to classical music and the sonata had become one of his favourite pieces, inextricably mixed up in his mind, in his soul, with her.
Just when he thought he had got used to being without her, she had burst back into his life. For a couple of days, a couple of nights, he had remembered why he loved being with her so much. Fooling around with her was fun, but she meant so much more to him than that, and he couldn’t pretend to himself or to her that she didn’t.
Which was why Kerem pissed him off so badly. She was jerking Magnus around and he didn’t like it.
Presumably she was still in Iceland somewhere, trapped by the ash cloud, staying with her friend María probably. The sooner she was back in Hamburg with her Turk the better.
He ejected the cello, and replaced it with Soundgarden. Much better.
He approached the Snaefells Peninsula along an empty road. While the sky above him was clear and the sea over to the left sparkled, the mountains that formed the knobbly backbone of the peninsula were shrouded in a layer of dark cloud. He climbed the Kerlingin Pass and plunged into the moisture. The cloud pressed down on the north side of the mountains; visibility was poor, and he could see no more than about a mile ahead. He turned left along the main road towards Grundarfjördur, and then right again, through the Berserkjahraun, the Berserkers’ Lava Field. Stone twisted and twirled on either side of the car. Mysterious figures lunged out of the mist to left and right. He had to slow down as he made his way on the rough track cut in the lava field towards the farm.
Cold fingers of long-repressed fear clutched at Magnus’s chest, making it difficult to breathe. The memories reared up like the congealed lava. The beatings that his grandfather had given Magnus and his brother; the humiliation, the loneliness, the desperation. The four years spent at that place from the age of eight to twelve were without doubt the worst of Magnus’s life. And of Ollie’s.
Things had been so much worse for Ollie. He was younger, and not as tough as Magnus. Their grandfather had picked on him. Ollie had slid into a never-ending cycle of bedwetting at night and punishment during the day.
That was why Ollie had vowed to blank those four years out of his life, and why Magnus was amazed that he should venture back here with a stranger.
Come to think of it, why had Ollie come to Iceland at all? Magnus had asked him the question and he hadn’t really answered it. Maybe it did have something to do with his past after all.
Magnus himself had returned to Bjarnarhöfn six months before, just after he had discovered the similarity between the murder of his father and of Benedikt. He had confronted his grandfather for the first time in thirteen years. It was nothing more than an exchange of threats, but even though the old man was at least eighty-five, Magnus had felt the chill of his power and authority.
Visibility was only a couple of hundred yards as he pulled out of the lava field and up a low hill to the small complex of buildings between a fell and the sea that was Bjarnarhöfn.
The farm was still. Beside the track leading to the farmhouse itself was a small single-storey dwelling with white concrete walls and a metal roof. This is where Hallgrímur now lived with his wife, Magnus’s grandmother: the main house was occupied by Hallgrímur’s son Kolbeinn.
There was an old blue VW Passat station wagon parked just outside the house. Magnus had no idea if it was Hallgrímur’s or Jóhannes’s. He pulled up next to it, and jumped out.
He rapped on the door. No answer. There was no sound of farm activity, but he could hear the noise of the waterfall tumbling off the fell behind the farmhouse. A raven croaked.
Magnus knocked again.
No reply.
He tried the door. It was open. He walked in.
‘Hello!’ he shouted. ‘Grandpa!’
No response. Tentatively at first, and then more quickly, he moved from room to room.
No one. There was a half-full cup of coffee on a table by the sofa in the living room. Magnus stuck his finger in it. Tepid. A Sudoku puzzle book lay open and face down on the table.
He left the building and stood outside the house, wondering where to go next. The farmhouse itself was about fifty yards away. As he walked towards it, he looked down towards Breidafjördur but couldn’t see it in the mist.
What he could see was the tiny black chapel, in its little graveyard. The door was open.
That door was never left open.
He turned and jogged down towards it, opening the gate to the churchyard. He slowed as he approached the entrance to the chapel itself.
‘Grandpa?’ he called. ‘Ollie?’
No reply, save for the croak of a raven.
He pushed the white door more firmly open, and entered the little building, which was not much more than a hut. Inside the walls were freshly painted, a bright shade of light blue. Six short rows of yellow pews led down to an altar fenced in by an ornate white communion rail beneath an ancient painting of Jesus and two of his disciples. All this, Magnus took in in an instant. But his eyes were drawn to the floor in front of the altar.
There lay his grandfather, Hallgrímur, face pressed against the wooden floor, eyes shut. A trickle of fresh blood ran down the old man’s face from his temple, forming a small pool on the wood.
‘Oh, my God,’ said Magnus. ‘Ollie, what have you done?’
AUTHOR’S NOTE
T
HERE MUST BE
dozens of authors who have looked to the
New Yorker
for their inspiration, and I am one of them. An article appeared in that magazine on 7 June 2010 entitled ‘No Secrets’ by Raffi Khatchadourian. It described the visit of Wikileaks to Iceland in March of that year, while the volcano was erupting, to prepare for publication a leaked video of the accidental shooting of journalists by US forces in Iraq.
Freeflow is a similar organization to Wikileaks, but the Freeflow team portrayed in this book do not represent individuals who worked with or for Wikileaks. Neither are Freeflow’s leaks real scandals. While there were a number of controversial incidents in the ‘Gaza War’ of the winter of 2008–9, the shooting depicted in this book is fictional. Controversy also surrounds the late Bishop of Iceland, but Soffía and her experiences are invented. Belgium has its scandals, of course, but my Finance Minister and her past are entirely fictional.
My thanks are owed to the following: Pétur Már Ólafsson at Verold, Superintendent Karl Steinar Valsson, Chief Superintendent Sveinn Runarsson, Audur Möller, Alda Sigmundsdóttir’s Iceland Weather Report blog, Michael Olmsted, Deborah Gavish, Michael Kram, Kim van Poelgeest, Oli Munson at Blake Friedmann, Richenda Todd, Liz Hatherell and Nic Cheetham, Rina Gill, Becci Sharpe and Laura Palmer at Corvus. As always, I am grateful to my wife, Barbara, and my children for their patience and support.