Authors: Michael Ridpath
Afi had kept his anger under control during the reception after the funeral at the farmhouse, but once everyone had left, he yelled at Óli and Magnús, ordering them to ignore their father if he ever made an attempt to contact them. Óli had quickly agreed, but Magnús had said nothing and received a couple of hard clips around the ear as a result.
That night, in their bedroom, Magnús and Óli had talked. Since the dreadful time when they had been moved up to Bjarnarhöfn from their little white house with its blue roof in Reykjavík, Magnús had been firm in his belief that their father would come and rescue them eventually. Óli had believed him for a year, and then another year, but then he gave up. Magnús was an optimist; Óli was a realist. You couldn’t fight Afi and the life they were now living at the farm; you just had to learn to live it as painlessly as possible.
Their mother had been an intermittent visitor over those four years. They had been told that she couldn’t look after them because she was ill. After a year or so, Magnús had figured out it was because she was drunk. Then, that summer, she had finally moved up to Bjarnarhöfn to join them. The boys had been overjoyed, and for moments they did seem to have their mother back. But only moments. When their grandfather had told them, with tears in his eyes, that she had had a terrible car accident, Óli was shocked, but not surprised. It was as if he had always known something dreadful was going to happen to her. He remembered her face when he had seen her lying serene in her coffin three days before. Calm, less puffy than usual. Sober in death.
Now Óli knew he and his brother were alone.
After seeing his father at the funeral, Magnús was full of hope. He believed he had been vindicated, that their father hadn’t forgotten them after all. But Óli knew that Afi had scared him away. No one stood up to Afi. No one.
It was dusk. The sun dithered over the horizon beyond Cumberland Bay, its rays skimming off the surface of the grey fjord and throwing long shadows across the farm. Óli climbed
into the shipping container and picked out an egg from one of the other hens to place under Indiana, who was sitting in her straw clucking gently to herself. He eased his hand underneath her body and, to his great surprise, his fingers touched something warm and round.
‘Yes!’ He grinned. ‘Well done, Indiana, clever girl!’ He risked a quick kiss on her crest, and dodged the resulting peck. Indiana squawked and settled herself proudly over her egg. Óli felt a surge of happiness run through him. Indiana could rely on him to look after her.
As Óli returned to the farmhouse with his basket of eggs, including the prize from Indiana, he heard the sound of a car. It was getting dark now, and he scanned the lava field in the evening gloom until he spotted two headlights and the shape of a vehicle. The approach to Bjarnarhöfn was across several kilometres of congealed lava that had been spewed over the landscape a few thousand years before. The nearest neighbouring farm, Hraun, lay on the other side of the field, and so if you saw a car, you knew it was coming to Bjarnarhöfn.
Óli waited. He didn’t recognize the car. It was a large blue estate, a Ford probably, and it pulled up right outside the farmhouse. But he did recognize the man who climbed out.
‘Hi, Óli, how are you?’ his father called to him, with a smile.
Óli took a step back and didn’t respond. But his heart was pounding with a mixture of joy and fear, and that warm feeling that had seeped through him at the funeral.
The farmhouse door flung open, and Afi stormed out. ‘Ragnar! What the hell are you doing here? I told you never to come here again!’
‘I’ve come to collect my sons,’ said Óli’s father calmly.
‘And as I told you yesterday, I forbid it,’ Afi said. ‘Now get off my land, you murdering fucker!’
‘I didn’t kill her, Hallgrímur, you know that,’ Óli’s father replied quietly. He reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a piece of paper. ‘After you refused to let me speak to my children yesterday, I went to the magistrate in Stykkishólmur.
I have an injunction here compelling you to let me take them.’ He handed over the paper.
Afi grabbed it and started to read, the paper dancing in his shaking hands. Óli knew he wouldn’t be able to make out the words without his glasses.
‘Svenni gave you this! I’ll have a word with him. He’ll soon change his mind.’
‘He can’t. The law is very clear, Hallgrímur. I am their sole surviving parent. I have a legal right to take them.’
‘Bullshit! Anyway, where are you going to take them? To America?’
‘That’s right,’ said Óli’s father. ‘They are coming to live with me in Boston. There are good schools there. They are ten and twelve; I can look after them.’
‘But they are good Icelandic children. You would be making them Americans! That must be illegal.’
‘It’s not. It’s what is going to happen, Hallgrímur. Now, can I see my sons?’
Óli ran into the farmhouse to find Magnús and tell him what he had heard. He couldn’t believe it. He was going to leave Bjarnarhöfn, to live with his father.
And he was going to stop being an Icelander. He was going to become an American!
CHAPTER TWO
Sunday, 18 April 2010
‘H
E’S LATE
,
JOE
.’ Ollie looked at his watch. ‘I said eleven-thirty and it’s eleven-forty now.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Ollie’s companion said. ‘Icelanders are always late.’
Ollie looked along the cliff path to the point where the road came to an end above the small natural harbour. They had picked a good spot. The path wound through black lava from the tiny village of Hellnar to Arnarstapi a couple of kilometres away, where he and Jóhannes had parked their car.
They were waiting behind a lava pinnacle, which reared up just above an undulation in the path. From there they had an excellent view of the approach, and could see without being seen. Except perhaps by the hundreds of sea birds that yelled and squawked all around them.
‘I said
hálftólf
, right?’ Ollie said. ‘You heard me.
Tólf
means twelve. You told me that. And you’re sure
hálftólf
is half past eleven, not half past twelve?’
The conversation had been difficult. Ollie had forgotten all his Icelandic, and his grandfather spoke hardly any English. But with the help of prompting from Jóhannes, Ollie had eventually made himself understood on the phone.
‘It does,’ said Jóhannes. ‘I heard you. Eleven-thirty.’
‘You figure it’s an hour to here from Bjarnarhöfn?’
‘About that,’ said Jóhannes. ‘He’ll be here, Ólafur.’
Ollie was having second thoughts. Actually, they were more like third or fourth thoughts. His grandfather might be well into his eighties, but Ollie was still afraid of him. He hadn’t seen him for over twenty years, and he couldn’t rid from his mind the image of himself as a skinny ten-year-old, and his grandfather as a strong farmer. At thirty-two, Ollie was still skinny, but he must be stronger than his grandfather by now.
Ollie glanced at his companion. Jóhannes was probably in his fifties, but he was tall with a broad chest, and a powerful, determined jaw. Plus there was a tyre iron in the carrier bag he was carrying. And they would have the advantage of height and surprise from their hiding place above the cliff path.
He heard his phone beep in his pocket. An SMS. He checked it.
‘Hallgrímur?’ Jóhannes asked.
‘No,’ said Ollie, frowning. ‘Just someone from back home.’
‘You know Snaefellsjökull is up there in that cloud?’ Jóhannes said, pointing to the north. ‘Snow Fell Glacier. We could probably see it from here on a clear day.’
There was blue sky above them, and it was clear to the south over the gleaming sea. In the distance Ollie could make out the mountains they had passed on the drive up from Reykjavík, but to the north the ridge that formed the spine of the Snaefells Peninsula was shrouded in angry grey cloud.
‘The first settler round here in Viking times was a half-man half-troll called Bárdur,’ Jóhannes went on. ‘They say when it was time to die he walked into the glacier at Snow Fell. No one found him. But since then he has guarded the glacier with his magical powers.’
Jóhannes was a schoolteacher, and although Ollie had only known him for a few days, it was long enough to realize that he never stopped lecturing. Which Ollie liked. The two men had slipped into a student–teacher relationship, which Ollie found comforting, encouraging even.
But Ollie wasn’t sure he liked the sound of this Bárdur guy. ‘Does that mean he’s with us or against us, then?’
Jóhannes chuckled. ‘Oh, he’s with us. If there’s one thing those Vikings understood, it was revenge.’
Constable Páll Gylfason grinned to himself as he climbed into his police car. This was the third time he had been called by Gunnhildur to complain about the young couple from Reykjavík who liked to have sex in the living room with the curtains open on a Sunday morning. The couple had pointed out that they were perfectly entitled to do whatever they liked in the privacy of their own home; it was Gunnhildur’s problem if she insisted on spying on them. To Páll’s suggestion that they pull the curtains closed, they replied that in the heat of the moment there wasn’t time. Páll wasn’t convinced by this. It seemed to him that their Sunday morning passion was becoming predictable. The real point he wanted to get across was that in a small town like Grundarfjördur, you didn’t mess with women like Gunnhildur.
They were a nice couple, though. The woman, who was a new teacher at the school in town, had a foxy look about her, and had complimented Páll fulsomely on his bushy moustache, of which he was very proud.
He started the car and headed back home. The little police station near the harbour was left unoccupied on a Sunday. He turned on the car radio, looking for news on the Eyjafjallajökull volcano, which had erupted the previous week, chucking ash all over farms in the south and causing chaos to anyone trying to travel anywhere by air. Fortunately, because of the direction of the wind, most of Iceland had been spared. There was no sign of any ash on the Snaefells Peninsula.
But the wind direction could always change.
His police radio crackled into life. He recognized the voice of the dispatcher from Stykkishólmur.
‘A body has been reported at Bjarnarhöfn. Suspected homicide. Sergeant Magnús Ragnarsson called it in.’
‘I’m on my way.’
Páll whipped his Hyundai Santa Fe around and hit the accelerator, lights flashing, sirens blaring. A woman preparing to cross the main street, pushing a child in a buggy with another one holding her hand, stopped and stared. Bjarnarhöfn was about halfway between Grundarfjördur and regional headquarters at Stykkishólmur. Since Páll was already in his vehicle, he should get there first. If he hurried.
Páll remembered Magnus well. He was an American homicide detective who had been transferred to the Reykjavík Metropolitan Police, but he had been born in Iceland and spoke good Icelandic. They had worked together on a case involving a fisherman from Grundarfjördur the previous year, and Páll rated Magnus highly. He also knew that Magnus had family at Bjarnarhöfn.
Visibility was poor as mist pressed down on the road from the mountains above. The road was empty on a Sunday morning, and Páll took some risks he probably shouldn’t have. He turned left off the main Stykkishólmur road onto the dirt track that led through the Berserkjahraun lava field to Bjarnarhöfn. Three minutes later, he was rattling over the cattle grid into the farm.
There were a couple of cars parked in front of the nearest building, a cottage with white concrete walls and a red corrugated metal roof. Páll knew that was where old man Hallgrímur lived; his son, Kolbeinn, inhabited the main farmhouse with his family. The front door of Hallgrímur’s cottage was open. Páll slowed and scanned the farm. The cloud stooped low, embracing the lower flanks of the fell, from which fingers of snow stretched down to the fields. A waterfall spurted from a gash in the steep hill, feeding a stream that tumbled down towards the sea, hidden in the gloom. Páll could see one other dwelling – the main farmhouse – a large barn and a number of smaller farm buildings. The gaps between the buildings were cluttered with the usual farming bric-a-brac: machinery, fuel tanks, large circular hay bales wrapped in white plastic, and even a couple of old shipping containers.
Two red-and-white-coated Icelandic sheep dogs with tightly curled tails appeared, barking. But no people.
Then Páll remembered the little church, set a couple of hundred metres to the north of the farm towards the sea. He could just make it out through the mist, and he spotted Magnus, standing at the entrance to the churchyard, waving. A woman stood next to him, holding the bridle of a horse.
Páll considered driving over the field to the church, but common sense prevailed. If it was indeed a homicide, then chewing up the path to the crime scene was not a good option.
So he parked his car a few metres away from Hallgrímur’s cottage and took a direct route to the church. There was no path over the field, but it would be important later to ensure that everyone approached the crime scene by the same way. Páll recognized the woman Magnus was with as Aníta, the farmer’s wife, and therefore Hallgrímur’s daughter-in-law.
‘Hi, Páll, how are you?’ said Magnus. He was a tall, redhaired detective in his mid-thirties with broad shoulders. Last time Páll had seen him he remembered feeling in awe of the tough cop from Boston, with his air of calm competence. But now Magnus’s face was tense.
‘What have we got?’ Páll asked.
‘Take a look.’
The church was little more than a black wooden hut, with its own red metal roof and a small white cross at the peak of the gable above the entrance. The door was open, and Páll looked inside. There were only half a dozen rows of pews. An ancient oil painting hung behind the altar, which was fenced in by an ornate white wooden rail.
In front of the altar lay the body of an old man. Páll recognized him. Hallgrímur.
A pool of blood spread across the wooden floor around the old man’s head, reddening his wispy white hair, and licking his wrinkled face. His blue eyes were open.