Meltwater (9 page)

It had been worth a fortune before the crash. He could probably still sell it for a reasonable price even in the current depressed market. Maybe one day he would have to, but not yet.

He pulled out his pipe and sat in his favourite armchair. It felt strange to be at home during the day in school term-time. Very strange.

He felt a wave of depression sweep over him. If Jóhannes wasn’t a teacher, what was he?

His father, who was indeed a great novelist, superior to Halldór Laxness in Jóhannes’s opinion, was at the height of his powers at Jóhannes’s age. He did a quick calculation. At fifty-five, Benedikt had had four more years to live, four years until Jóhannes found him right there in the hallway, stabbed.

What a strange, inexplicable way for such a good and talented man to die.

Jóhannes had dropped in unannounced early one evening to return a book. The front door was unlocked, as it sometimes was. He had shouted a greeting, walked in and found his father lying in a pool of his own blood out there in the hallway.

The case had never been solved, but not for want of trying. Jóhannes had himself been interviewed a number of times, as had all Benedikt’s friends. Suspicion had flitted from one to the other of them, even resting briefly on Jóhannes’s shoulders, but no one had been arrested. A burglar was perhaps the most likely candidate, but no one really knew.

The irony was that the autopsy had revealed a tumour in Benedikt’s brain that would have killed him in a few months anyway. Benedikt’s doctor confirmed that Benedikt had known about it for almost a year, a knowledge that he had decided not to pass on to his children.

Jóhannes had tried, but he found it difficult to forgive his father for that.

Benedikt had taught Jóhannes everything he knew: his love of language; his love of literature; his respect for other people, especially the young. Teaching, in Benedikt’s eyes, was a noble profession and one that Jóhannes had been proud to follow all these years. And he was good at it, really good. It was one of Jóhannes’s greatest regrets that his father had never been inside one of Jóhannes’s classrooms, never seen how enraptured those thirteen-year-olds could be with Vermundur and Styr and Arnkell and Snorri and all those other colourful characters who beckoned from the tenth century.

Of course Jóhannes’s teaching career wasn’t necessarily over. He could fight to keep his position. Or he could look for another: times were very tough and teachers were being laid off all over Iceland, but there might be a job for him somewhere else. It would be a long struggle, a very long struggle and it might end in failure.

Or . . .

Or perhaps this was one of those opportunities dressed up as disaster. For years Jóhannes had been collecting all the information he could on his father. His books and manuscripts, of course, letters both to and from him, articles written by him and about him, and in recent years the dissertations on his life and works that various literature students had produced. They were lying in a series of untidy piles next to his desk. One day, Jóhannes had promised himself long ago, one day he would write a biography of his father.

Perhaps that day was now.

CHAPTER SEVEN

M
AGNUS STOPPED OFF
at Hvolsvöllur police station where he reported back to Chief Superintendent Kristján. He decided not to wait for the press conference at nine, but to head straight back to Reykjavík. He wanted to get at that house on Thórsgata.

He switched to his own car and offered to give Ásta a lift back with him. He could hardly leave her stranded in Hvolsvöllur.

It was an hour-and-a-half’s drive to Reykjavík, but Ásta swiftly fell asleep in the seat beside Magnus. He considered trying to grill her, but he doubted that there was much more he could get out of her. The countryside of south Iceland sped past: clumps of sodden yellow grass with the odd horse looking cold, wet and hungry. The area was renowned in Iceland for its rich soil, and the horses for their cheerful hardiness, but it all looked a bit miserable to Magnus.

As they reached the steep bank just beyond Hveragerdi and climbed the switchbacks on to the snow-covered heath above, Ásta woke up.

This was an active geothermal area, with steam leaking out of fissures in the rock, and indeed there was a power station to the right fed by the heat bubbling up from the centre of the earth. Pylons marched across the bleak landscape a short distance from the road, channelling all that energy towards the light and heat of Reykjavík. Lava, congealed after an eruption thousands of years ago, rippled under the snow.

‘Sorry about that,’ said Ásta, yawning. ‘It’s been a long night. And a strange one.’

‘How did you say you got caught up with these people?’ Magnus asked.

‘Through my uncle. Viktor – the man you made friends with last night.’

‘Nice guy,’ said Magnus. ‘Did you hear what he called my colleague?’

Ásta winced. ‘That was bad. But he is a good guy really. He’s an idealist, and our country needs more of those.’

‘I should know who he is, but I’ve only been back in Iceland a year,’ Magnus said. ‘Which party is he?’

‘The Movement. He was elected in 2009. He’s ambitious: I’m sure he’d like to be a minister.’

‘Well connected?’

‘I think so. Well, he’s good friends with the Prime Minister.’

‘So, I’ll take that as a yes.’ Magnus sighed. A bad enemy to make. He had hoped that there would be less politics in Reykjavík than Boston. Silly idea. The politics were just different.

‘What’s this Icelandic Modern Media Initiative?’ he asked.

‘It all started when Freeflow came here last year. Erika was on TV saying that Iceland should become a kind of offshore centre for free speech and a haven for investigative journalists worldwide. Viktor was watching and got very excited. He and some other MPs believe that Iceland’s troubles during the credit crunch of 2008 are the result of secrecy among the establishment of bankers and politicians. So he got in touch with Erika and Nico the next day.’

‘So it’s all Freeflow’s idea?’

‘That’s where it started,’ said Ásta. ‘But my uncle is the driving force behind it here in Iceland. The initiative itself is a resolution before Parliament to amend Iceland’s laws to make all this happen. It’s a good idea, actually.’

‘So has he kept in touch with Freeflow?’

‘Oh, yes. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was involved in the Ódinsbanki leaks. Oh!’ Ásta paused. ‘I shouldn’t have said that to a policeman.’

‘I think there’s a lot more you should be saying.’

‘I have to keep a confidence.’ Her voice was firm.

‘Look, Ásta. When I get to Reykjavík I will go to the District Court and get a warrant to search the house those people are staying in, and their computers. By lunchtime I will know what they are working on. It would help me a lot if you could tell me now. In a murder investigation every hour counts.’

Ásta turned away from him and looked out across the snow-covered moor.

‘Suit yourself,’ said Magnus.

Magnus was expecting silence for the rest of the trip, but after a minute, Ásta spoke. ‘Are you really in the CIA?’

‘Of course not,’ Magnus said. ‘Erika Zinn is paranoid. That’s an absurd idea.’ He glanced across at the priest in the seat next to him, whose big blue eyes were watching him closely. ‘Don’t you believe me?’

‘I believe you,’ she said. ‘But even I could tell that your English accent was very good. Or rather American accent. And you said just now that you came back to Iceland a year ago?’

‘I was born here. My dad was an academic – he taught mathematics at the University of Iceland, and then he got a job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. My mother died when I was twelve and so I went over there to live with him. Went to the local high school, went to college. Then, after he was . . . after he died, I decided to become a cop. I ended up as a homicide detective in Boston. But no, I never joined the CIA.’

‘Are you glad to be back? In Iceland?’

Magnus hesitated before replying. ‘It’s hard to say.’

‘Do you think of yourself as an Icelander?’

Magnus smiled ruefully. ‘That’s probably why it’s hard to say.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean in the States I definitely saw myself as an Icelander. I read and reread all the sagas, I kept up with the language, I loved coming back here with my father on vacation: this was my homeland. My younger brother was completely different, he became an American through and through and was happy to do that, but I felt I was
different
from the other kids, and I liked that.’

‘So what was the problem?’

‘When I came back I felt like a foreigner here as well. I spoke Icelandic with a bit of an American accent when I arrived – I don’t know if you can still tell?’

‘Barely.’

‘Good. But it was more than that. Everyone here knows each other. They have family, friends from school and university. People are friendly enough, but it’s impossible not to feel like an outsider. So I don’t know who the hell I am. And, yes, sometimes that bugs me.’

‘But don’t you have family here?’

‘Not on my father’s side – he was an only child. There are loads on my mother’s side, but they don’t seem to like me very much. It’s a family feud in the best saga tradition.’

‘Oh.’

Magnus laughed. ‘How come you can get me to tell you everything when I can’t get you to tell me anything? We should give you a job in the police department.’

‘I think I’ll stick to the Church, thank you,’ said Ásta.

‘The side of the angels?’

‘Sometimes I wonder,’ she muttered so quietly that Magnus barely heard.

Half an hour later, Magnus pulled up outside the address at Thórsgata. The lights were off and the curtains drawn.

‘Looks like they are asleep,’ he said.

Ásta thanked him for the lift and got out of his car. Magnus left her dithering whether to ring the bell or not, and drove back to the Reykjavík Metropolitan Police Headquarters on Hverfisgata. He summoned Árni and Vigdís into the conference room, and gave the assistant prosecutor, Rannveig, a quick call to join them.

‘So what was the volcano like?’ asked Vigdís.

‘Haven’t you seen it yet?’ asked Árni. ‘I went up there just after it erupted. It’s pretty cool.’

‘It had gone quiet this morning,’ said Magnus.

‘Really?’ said Árni. ‘That’s a bad sign. It means Katla is about to blow.’

Magnus paused a moment. He had heard of Katla and the mayhem it had caused when it last erupted in 1918. In fact he had noticed the posters all over the Hvolsvöllur police station detailing evacuation plans should the volcano erupt again and a
jökulhlaup
flood the local area. ‘Are you sure about that, Árni?’

‘He’s guessing,’ said Vigdís.

‘I saw this guy on TV—’ began Árni.

Magnus held up his hand. ‘The main point is that the overnight snow did a pretty good job of obliterating any signs of what happened last night. Certainly no tyre tracks. If anything was dropped, we can’t see it.’

‘Hey, was Edda leading the forensics team?’ asked Árni. ‘I heard she’s back from Quantico.’

‘Er, yes,’ said Magnus. Quantico was the FBI’s academy in Virginia; presumably Edda had just returned from a course there.

‘Impressive, eh? She’d keep you warm in a blizzard up a mountain.’

‘Oh, please, Árni,’ said Vigdís, rolling her eyes. Whatever those eye muscles were called, Magnus thought, Vigdís got to exercise them a lot working with Árni.

‘I think she has a pretty cold day ahead of her. OK, Vigdís, what did you find out about Freeflow?’

‘They have been very active in the last three years. They started in 2007 publishing leaked United Nations documents which suggested that the United States, Britain and France were holding back from taking action in Darfur because of fears of getting involved in another war. That was followed up with about twenty or so other leaks, some of them big news, some of them less so.’

‘Wait a minute. Was all this information in Icelandic?’ Magnus asked. He was sceptical about Vigdís’s professed lack of English.

‘I’ve got a dictionary,’ said Vigdís. ‘And Darfur is the same word in either language.’

‘OK, OK,’ said Magnus. For Vigdís, life was a battle to prove that she could be black and an Icelander. Not speaking English was the way she had chosen years ago to prove the point, although Magnus was sure she actually understood the language pretty well. But it was a sore point, so he decided to shut up and pretend not to notice. ‘Sorry. What about these other leaks?’

‘Well, there was the publication of Ódinsbanki’s loan book here in Iceland – you probably remember that. Some of the Chinese government’s measures to silence dissidents and a list of the websites they block – the Chinese got
very
unhappy about that. An investigation into Sabine Dumont, the Belgian Finance Minister, and her dodgy past. An Italian corruption scandal—’

‘Is that news?’ asked Magnus.

‘Hey, we Icelanders are hardly in a position to complain, are we?’