Authors: Michael Ridpath
She checked her phone for Vigdís’s number and found it.
‘Hi, Vigdís, it’s Ingileif.’
‘Oh, hello.’
Vigdís sounded flat, Ingileif thought, as flat as Ingileif felt.
‘How is the evidence against Magnús?’ This was Ingileif’s way of asking whether Vigdís had heard about Magnus’s confession to her.
‘Not good,’ said Vigdís. ‘I have just been talking to the investigating detective. They seem to think they are building a strong case.’
‘Has Magnús himself said anything?’
‘From what I understand he’s refusing to talk,’ said Vigdís. ‘Why, do you have some more information?’
It sounded as if the fat detective, for whatever reason, hadn’t told Vigdís about Magnús’s confession. Good.
‘No, I haven’t,’ said Ingileif. ‘But is there anything I can do to help?’
Vigdís sighed. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘Any news from the detective in America about the lab results?’
‘Nothing. He’s not giving us anything without an official request. Which is a pity. I think that’s our most promising line of inquiry. At any rate, it’s about the only one we’ve got.’
‘Can I try and speak to him?’ Ingileif asked.
‘I don’t see how that will help,’ Vigdís said. ‘Sibba, Magnús’s lawyer, called him and even she didn’t get anywhere.’
‘What was the guy’s name again?’ Ingileif asked.
‘Jim Fearon,’ Vigdís said. ‘But really, there’s no point, Ingileif. Just leave it to us.’
‘All right,’ said Ingileif. But as she walked back to her car through Eyrarbakki, Ingileif had no intention of just leaving it to them.
*
Vigdís walked out of the Police Commissioner’s building and turned left to where she had parked her car, further along the shore of the bay. Her conversation with Emil had depressed her. Although he hadn’t been specific, it was clear that he was pretty certain of Magnus’s guilt. He wasn’t on a fishing expedition; he already had good evidence. Vigdís had been happy to tell him all she could about Magnus, on the theory that the more of the truth Emil knew, the more likely he would be able to figure out that Magnus was innocent.
If he really was innocent.
It was all very well for Ingileif to offer to help, but there was nothing she could do. She would just have to live with her guilt. Vigdís was beginning to worry that there was nothing any of them could do.
The morning had started off early and badly. She had woken at five and when she checked her computer she saw Davíd’s flight had been cancelled. Again. While she was speaking to Emil she had received a text message from him to call her.
She paused, staring out over the bay towards Mount Esja, and selected his number. It was probably only five in the morning his time, but so what? She had had to wake up that early herself.
‘Hello?’ His voice was thick with sleep.
‘Hi, Davíd. I can’t believe your flight was cancelled again! Why was that? Most of the other flights from America are getting through.’
Davíd sighed. ‘The airspace is clear. But apparently all the planes are in the wrong place. It’s going to take days to sort it out.’
Vigdís swallowed. She hardly dared to ask her next question. ‘Can you come tomorrow?’
‘No,’ said Davíd. ‘No, I’m sorry, Vigdís. I’ve got a meeting on Thursday back in New York I can’t miss. It didn’t really make sense to fly over today, and it makes no sense at all tomorrow.’
Vigdís couldn’t say anything.
‘Vigdís?’
‘Yeah. Yes, sorry. OK. I get it. We’ll talk later.’
She hung up. Couldn’t he cancel his damned meeting? Use the
volcano as an excuse? From what she heard on the news the whole world had been disrupted by the volcano, so why couldn’t he disrupt his piddling little meeting?
She knew she wasn’t being fair. It was she who usually cancelled, changed plans, missed trips.
She had to face it – she and Davíd were never going to make it. She would end up like her mother: fifty, alone, picking up fat Polish guys ten years younger than her. Except she wouldn’t have a daughter to scream at her.
What now? She couldn’t really cry off work any longer. She may as well turn around and head back to Hverfisgata and the police station. She called Árni.
‘What’s up, Vigdís?’
‘Davíd’s flight was cancelled. Again,’ Vigdís said.
‘Hey, I’m sorry.’
‘I think I’ll come in this morning,’ she said. ‘I just spoke to Emil. It doesn’t look good for Magnús.’
‘Did he tell you about the confession?’
‘Confession? What confession?’
‘There’s a rumour going around that Magnús confessed to the murder. To Ingileif. She told the Dumpling about it yesterday afternoon.’
‘Ingileif?’ Vigdís thought back to her phone call a few minutes earlier and Ingileif’s request to do anything she could to help. ‘I don’t believe it! The bitch.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
J
ÓHANNES STOOD IN
front of the class of thirteen-year-olds and put everything he could into his performance. His ability to transfix a group of teenagers with his readings from the sagas was legendary. Despite that, or in his view because of it, he had been given the sack the week before. The principal was a slave to the national curriculum; Jóhannes wanted to set his pupils free to delight in their nation’s great literature. The principal was a moron.
He was still supposed to see out the term. And he was determined if there was one thing he did in the weeks left to him, it would be to bring the sagas alive to all of his students.
He was reading ‘The Tale of Thorsteinn Staff-Struck’. The piece was off-syllabus, but so what? It was a short saga, less than a dozen pages, but it recounted the feud between two neighbouring farms, Sunnudal and Hof. Thorsteinn, the son of the farmer from Sunnudal, had been struck by the staff of a worker from Hof and had been reluctant to take any action in revenge. But Thorsteinn was goaded on by his old and blind father, and blood flowed.
There was a fault line running between Sunnudal and Hof in the tenth century, just like there was between Hraun and Bjarnarhöfn in the twentieth. And probably the twenty-first.
Jóhannes was coming to one of his favourite passages. He lowered his voice, combining menace with weakness as Thorsteinn’s aged father spoke these words to Thorsteinn: ‘I would rather lose you than have a coward for a son.’
Was that what Hallgrímur’s father had said to Hallgrímur, he wondered? Indeed, Jóhannes remembered how as a child he had once asked his own father why people today didn’t take revenge as they used to in the sagas, and been told: ‘Sometimes they do.’
Jóhannes was immensely proud of his father, whom he considered one of the greatest novelists Iceland had produced, certainly better than that rambling, self-important communist, Halldór Laxness. His father had shown him what was important in life: education, literature, truth, moral self-confidence. In his own novels, and in his response to the sagas they read together, Benedikt had recognized that there was a place for revenge, even in modern Iceland.
Jóhannes realized that his pause for effect had become much more, and he looked up to see his class’s reaction.
The children were transfixed. But standing listening with them, at the back of the classroom, was a very fat man wearing a baggy suit.
Inspector Emil.
‘Can I help you?’ Jóhannes said, lacing the question with disapproval. He had worked hard to build the magic; an interruption would disperse it in seconds.
The man pushed past the desks towards him. Jóhannes glared at him, raising his bushy white eyebrows. Jóhannes’s eyebrow-enhanced glares could stop a child dead in his tracks, and usually had the same effect on adults.
But not this time.
‘Jóhannes, I would like you to come down to the police station with me.’ The combined intake of breath from the class was audible. ‘I have some questions I want to ask you about the murder of Hallgrímur Gunnarsson.’
Adam and Páll made their way towards Páll’s patrol car parked outside Stykkishólmur police station. They were going to pick up Ollie at the small hotel near the harbour where he was staying. Adam’s phone rang.
‘Adam.’
‘It’s Aníta from Bjarnarhöfn. I have something I would like to discuss with you. I think it might be related to Hallgrímur’s murder.’
Adam thought for a second. Ollie could stew in a cell for a bit. It would do him good, get him in the right frame of mind. But Adam wanted to be there when Ollie was picked up, see his reaction. Then he would go on to Bjarnarhöfn.
‘All right. I’ll be with you in an hour or so.’ He hung up and turned to the mustachioed constable. ‘Let’s go.’
Ollie looked down over the cliff edge to a small beach. It was just around the headland from the harbour. A few boats were pulled up on the sand to the grass above the high-water mark. There was very little he remembered from his childhood in Stykkishólmur, but he had the feeling he had been in that exact spot before.
It was amazing how little he recalled of his life before the age of ten. There were things at the farm that his conscious brain had tried to black out, but what was extraordinary was how good a job his unconscious had done of obliterating everything. He had been to school in the town, he’d had friends, but he could scarcely remember them. There was a tall, thin boy with buckteeth, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember his name. Maybe the two of them had stood on that cliff together twenty-odd years before.
He clambered down the cliff path and perched on a rock a few feet away from the tiny waves nibbling at the sand.
He was scared. So scared. And it was just getting worse.
Uncle Villi just never left him alone. Wherever he went, whatever he did, Uncle Villi would pop up with his veiled threats. And Ollie believed the threats. There were a lot of dead bodies to back them up: Benedikt Jóhannesson, his own father, Afi.
Ollie had the feeling that Uncle Villi was losing patience with him. And when that happened, Ollie would be added to the list.
He couldn’t wait to get on that plane on Thursday. That is, if the police let him go. The police
had
to let him go by then, surely?
Ollie felt the panic rise in him. Maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe Uncle Villi would get him first. He had to get out of this damn town somehow!
Could he hire a car? Stykkishólmur was far too small to have an Avis or a Hertz, but there must be some guy in a gas station somewhere who would rent him a car. And then what? He could drive into the empty interior of Iceland where no one would find him.
He wished Jóhannes was still around. He would know where to hide out, all the places from some damn saga. Who was that outlaw – Gretel the Strong? Something like that.
His eyes fell on the boats. One of them, a twelve-foot skiff, had an outboard motor attached. Perhaps he could just get in that and head out over the Atlantic. The States were thousands of miles away. Greenland was too cold. How about Ireland? How far was Ireland? He had no idea.
He was being ridiculous. He had puttered around the coast of Maine in a motorboat in the past, but he wouldn’t survive a night in an open boat in the North Atlantic.
He hopped off his rock and climbed back up the cliff path. He wished he could talk to Magnus. This was the kind of situation where he really needed his older brother to help him out. Magnus would figure out something. But Magnus had his own problems. The police had taken him away, God knows where. He would be little use to Ollie.
Besides, Ollie had a different fear when it came to Magnus. Not a physical fear, but a fear that his elder brother would one day find out what Ollie had really done.
A short distance beyond the cliff top, Ollie was back in town. As he approached the hotel, he saw a large police four-wheel-drive draw up right outside. A uniformed officer with a big moustache accompanied by a smaller man in jacket and jeans jumped out and strode in through the entrance.
It was clear they were coming for Ollie.
Ollie halted and took a deep breath. Keep calm. Tell them nothing. Tell himself he had nothing to hide and then hide it.
When Ollie had been interviewed before, the knowledge that the big schoolteacher was in the same building had helped calm him, and he had managed to keep quiet. But Jóhannes was gone now and Ollie was in much worse shape. His nerves were frayed. He could almost feel the fear and the panic mingling like an unhealthy fuel mixture deep inside him, combining, expanding, ready to explode.
If the police hauled him back to the station he would tell them everything, he knew it, he could feel it.
And that would be bad. That would be very bad indeed.
Ollie turned on his heel and jogged back towards the cliff path. He scrambled down to the cove, which was still empty. He dragged the skiff down to the water and waded after it. Once it bobbed free of the sand, he jumped in.
It was several years since he had piloted a motorboat, but the engine looked familiar. He pulled the cord. A cough and then nothing. He tugged again. Still nothing.
He sat facing the engine, studying it, trying to remember. The shift lever was in neutral and the throttle on ‘start’. He recognized the primer bulb and squeezed it. He spotted a knob that was almost certainly the choke. Pulled it all the way out. Tugged at the cord.
Success!
He pointed the boat out into the fjord.
‘How are you doing, Magnus?’
Sibba examined her cousin, sitting across from her in the interview room at Number One House in Litla-Hraun. He had shaved and he looked clean. He seemed calm.
‘I’m OK, Sibba. I get time to think in here, which is good. Not much exercise, just one hour a day walking around a little yard. But the prison staff are pretty friendly.’
‘Do you need some more clothes? I can get some from your house if you like.’
‘Yeah. That would be good. Just jeans and T-shirts. And underwear.’ Magnus grinned. ‘Sorry about that.’
‘That’s what lawyers are for,’ said Sibba with a small grin. ‘Sorting underwear. I do it for the children; I can do it for you. No word from our friend Emil?’