Authors: Michael Ridpath
He heard a door bang and looked up. ‘Finally!’ Ollie said as he saw Jóhannes approaching him down the corridor. ‘How did it go?’
‘Wait till we are outside, Ólafur,’ said the schoolteacher. He looked calm. It can’t have been too bad, thought Ollie.
They left the station and crossed the car park to Jóhannes’s car. ‘All right, how did it go?’
‘Satisfactorily, I think,’ said Jóhannes, as they got into the car. ‘I stuck to the script. There was just one difficulty.’
He looked disapprovingly at Ollie from under his thick white eyebrows.
‘What did I say?’ said Ollie, getting the message.
‘That you didn’t know why we left Reykjavík so early. That you were just doing what I told you.’
‘So?’ said Ollie. ‘My mind went blank. I knew you’d have an answer.’
‘Well, I did. But I said we discussed it on the way up and it was only then we realized that we were too early to see Hallgrímur, and that’s why we took a diversion to Arnarstapi.’
‘Did the fat guy spot the discrepancy?’
‘He did. I said I’d initially told you what we were doing, but then we had discussed plans once we were on the road.’
‘Sounds good,’ said Ollie. ‘Hey, I think I did well. It could have been a lot worse.’
‘Yes,’ said Jóhannes, smiling. ‘Yes, you did well, considering.’
That cheered Ollie up. It was weird how he sought praise from this man he hardly knew. ‘Where to now?’
Jóhannes started the car and turned towards the centre of
town. ‘I’ll drop you off at a hotel in Stykkishólmur. Then I’ll head back to Reykjavík.’
‘Reykjavík? Wait a minute. How come I have to stay here and you get to go home?’
‘Because tomorrow’s Monday. I have a class to teach. And they don’t want you flying off to the States in case they have to interview you again. You are Magnus’s brother, after all.’
Ollie looked anxiously out of the car window at the houses lining the road. This was going to be tough, abandoned in Stykkishólmur without Jóhannes. And it sounded like Magnus wouldn’t be much help either.
As if reading his mind, Jóhannes soothed him. ‘Don’t worry. Act helpful. Stick to our story. Don’t go off on any digressions. They’ll let you go tomorrow.’
‘OK,’ Ollie said. ‘OK. I’ll call you and tell you what happens.’
‘All right, but keep it short. Remember, they might be listening.’
‘You mean bugging my phone?’
‘I doubt it, but possibly. We can’t take any chances, now can we, Ólafur?’
‘No,’ said Ollie.
They stopped outside a green building halfway down a low hill leading towards a harbour. Ollie could see the sea and islands ahead of him.
He hoisted his bag out of the trunk, and watched as Jóhannes turned his car around and drove off, south towards to Reykjavík.
He took a deep breath and entered the small hotel, feeling very alone.
Jóhannes was not even sure he would go in to school the following morning, but he was glad of the excuse to leave Stykkishólmur. After thirty years’ teaching, he had been sacked the week before. The principal had said it was because of government spending cuts, but had made clear that Jóhannes
had been chosen because he had refused to follow the national curriculum. Jóhannes had thought he was untouchable; he knew himself to be without doubt the best Icelandic teacher the school had ever had.
It was the shock of his sacking that had prompted Jóhannes to go back to a biography of his father he was planning, and led him to get in touch with Magnus and his brother. The principal had given Jóhannes only the afternoon off; he was supposed to continue teaching until the end of term. Jóhannes had just not turned up at school for the rest of the week. But given the day’s events, it might be a good idea to show his face again.
He took a small detour on his way back to Reykjavík. A few kilometres south of Stykkishólmur he turned right on to Route 577, a rough road that ran along the southern shore of Breidafjördur. He passed several large prosperous farms, until he came to the one he was looking for: a collection of buildings on a knoll looking out over the sea towards the West Fjords.
Hraun. The place where his father was born. Not just his father, but his grandfather and his great-grandfather.
Jóhannes pulled over to the side of the road by the track that led up to the farm. He had no idea who lived there now, but whoever it was kept the place in good nick. The fences were standing straight and intact, a row of white hay bales ran along the bottom of the home meadow, and there was none of the junk lying about that you usually saw on an Icelandic working farm.
Jóhannes knew his family history. It was 1942 when his father Benedikt had left the farm. He had gone to high school in Reykjavík, while his widowed mother and sisters had moved into Stykkishólmur, where his mother had bought a dress shop.
He looked down to the lava field and across to the imposing snow-streaked lower slopes of the fell of Bjarnarhöfn.
Jóhannes knew the history of this place too. His favourite text at school was
The Saga of the People of Eyri
, which described the life and times of the first settlers in this area over a thousand years before. Some time in the ninth century, Björn the Easterner, the son of Ketill Flat Nose and the brother of Audur
the Deep-Minded, had been the first, pitching his sacred wooden pillars into the sea to let the gods determine where he should make landfall. The gods had chosen Bjarnarhöfn.
Jóhannes knew the stories of Björn, his followers and their successors intimately. Most of their farms were still standing a millennium later, including Hraun, which had been the home of Björn’s great-grandson Styr.
Between Bjarnarhöfn and Hraun lay the tossing sea of stone that was the Berserkjahraun. It was this that had given the farm its name: ‘hraun’ meant ‘lava’. Jóhannes was drawn to it. It was the backdrop to a couple of chapters in the saga, which were the favourites of every Seventh Form class he read them to.
He drove on a couple of hundred metres, parked the car and strode off to the edge of the broad channel of ancient lava, which was raised several metres above the ground. The rain had stopped but a thick layer of leaden cloud hung low above the shoreline. There was a breeze, there was always a breeze, but it was relatively gentle, and felt refreshing after the fug of the car.
He found the beginning of the Berserkjagata, the narrow path that the berserkers had cut through the lava between the farms of Hraun and Bjarnarhöfn. He followed it as it twisted through the congealed lava, spattered with grey, green and yellow moss. The path dipped and dived and turned. Strange shapes pirouetted: fists, fingers, arms, beards, tresses of hair, horses, pigs, trolls all caught in mid-movement. Although the lava had frozen three thousand years before, it seemed to be alive, like a still from an action film, just waiting for someone to press ‘play’. There was no sound apart from the wind, and a cormorant calling in the small bay to his right.
The path led upwards for a few metres and then plunged down into a shallow amphitheatre in the middle of which was a noticeably man-made block of stone perhaps four metres by three. This was what Jóhannes was looking for. It was here that the two berserkers had been buried.
He stood still, letting the cool air touch his cheeks and the damp silence settle upon him. He felt at peace.
Berserker
was the term the Vikings used for especially fierce warriors who could whip themselves up into a frenzy of violence in battle where they were no match for any normal man. Vermundur the Lean, who was the farmer at Bjarnarhöfn, had visited Norway and been given two Swedish berserker servants by the king there. He had brought them back to Iceland, but they had proven difficult to handle, so he had passed them on to his brother Styr, the farmer of Hraun on the other side of the lava field, who was famous for his bad temper.
Styr didn’t have much more luck. But he did have a beautiful daughter, Ásdís, to which one of the berserkers took a fancy. The berserker demanded that Styr give Ásdís to be his wife. Styr was unhappy with this idea and, together with his friend Snorri from Helgafell, concocted a plan. He told the berserker that he could marry his daughter if the berserker and his fellow Swede cut a path across the lava field from Hraun to Bjarnarhöfn. The berserkers worked themselves up into a frenzy and did just that.
Afterwards, they were exhausted, and Styr let them bathe in his new bathhouse. While they were in there he closed it up with wet ox hides. The heat became unbearable and the berserkers rushed out, whereupon Styr ran them both through with a spear.
They were buried right where Jóhannes was standing.
There were feuds aplenty in saga times, Jóhannes thought. But from what he had read, and what Magnus the American detective had told him, there were still feuds today. If his calculations were correct, the first death had been in 1934. Followed by 1940. And then 1985. Possibly 1996. And now today, 2010.
He couldn’t deny that there was something inside him that was stirred by the feud, that resonated with all those other feuds of saga times that he knew so intimately.
But they were dangerous, those old feuds, where neighbour slew neighbour. Styr himself had been involved in many, and had been killed as a result of one.
Jóhannes had his heroes from the sagas. Egill, the violent, ruthless warrior who slaughtered enemies from Norway to England to Iceland, and yet whose poetry was so beautiful that
his captor, King Athelstan of England, set him free when he heard it. Grettir the Strong, who had survived as an outlaw for twenty years with his strength and cunning. Leifur Eiríksson who had sailed to Greenland and then on to Vinland, the grape-bearing shore of North America.
But Jóhannes knew he didn’t resemble these men. The saga hero he most admired, the one whom he would most like to have been, was Njáll. Njáll was a lawyer and a peacemaker, who advised his bloodthirsty friends how to win their feuds through the annual parliament at the Althing, or by subterfuge or cunning, rather than simply with the sword or axe.
Njáll would have put a stop to this modern-day feud. Prevent it from festering. He would have figured out a way.
Jóhannes looked across at Bjarnarhöfn, where Hallgrímur Gunnarsson had lost his life only hours before, and where his family were at that very moment mourning him.
There should be no more deaths. Jóhannes knew what Njáll would do.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘H
ERE
,
TÓTA
,
TAKE
this out to the policeman,’ said Aníta, handing her daughter some of the
hangikjöt
and rye bread. It had somehow seemed right to serve this traditional smoked lamb dish for dinner. It was one of Hallgrímur’s favourites. Also, they had a lot of it at the farm and there were plenty of people to feed.
As Tóta grudgingly took the plate outside to the poor policeman who was still guarding the crime scene, Aníta took her seat at the table. It was surrounded by her husband’s family – Hallgrímur’s family. Sylvía was there, of course, and Ingvar had driven back to Bjarnarhöfn from Stykkishólmur, with his French wife Gabrielle, whom Aníta liked. Plus one other surprise guest.
Villi.
He had arrived unannounced in the middle of the comings and goings outside Hallgrímur’s cottage. He had flown in from Canada that day. He said that he had received a ticket from a friend in Toronto whose onward trip to Europe had been ruined by the volcano. He had been shocked to learn that Hallgrímur had been murdered that morning, but his arrival was a welcome distraction.
He was the eldest of the three brothers, probably sixty-four, Aníta would guess. She realized that he actually looked like an older version of Magnus. He had Magnus’s broad shoulders and almost his height, but there was also something about the way he held himself, alert, watchful, that recalled his nephew. His hair, which had once been fair, was now a sandy grey.
He had just retired from a career in engineering, which had taken him all over the world from his base in Canada. He had worked for most of that time for mining companies, although he wasn’t a mining engineer. His experience as a young man building roads and bridges in Iceland’s rugged landscape had served him in good stead in the Yukon and Chile and New Guinea.
Aníta was pleased to see him.
‘I didn’t see any sign of ash in Reykjavík,’ Villi said. His voice was a deep rumble. He still spoke perfect Icelandic, with just a hint of a North American accent. Once again, like Magnus.
‘The wind is still blowing from the north,’ said Ingvar. ‘All the farms to the south of Eyjafjallajökull are covered in it.’
‘It will ruin them,’ said Kolbeinn. ‘Once the fluorine gets into the soil, you have to bring all the livestock inside and keep them there. And just before lambing season too.’
‘Did you see Hvolsvöllur on TV?’ Krissi said. ‘I was watching the news just now. It’s pitch black in the middle of the day, just like night-time. And all the fields are covered in ash, and the people and the horses.’
‘It must be horrible for the horses,’ said Tóta. ‘They should have brought them inside. Maybe we should bring ours in, Dad?’
‘I hope to God it doesn’t come this way,’ said Kolbeinn. ‘But I’m glad it brought you over here, Villi.’
‘Hallgrímur will be pleased to see you, Villi,’ Sylvía said. ‘I think perhaps he is at choir practice. He’ll be back soon.’
There was silence around the table. It was at least a decade since Hallgrímur had sung in the local choir. He had once had a fine baritone voice, but eventually ageing vocal chords had forced him out. It was as if Sylvía, unable to face today, was taking herself back in time.
Villi glanced at the others. Each one of them had tried to explain to Sylvía what had happened to her husband and failed.
‘I’m sorry I missed him,’ Villi said, swallowing.
There was a knock at the door.
‘Hello?’ called an unfamiliar voice.
The two dogs, who were lying in their corner of the kitchen, roused themselves and began to bark. Aníta got up and hurried to the front door. Tóta was there with a tall man in his fifties with a shock of thick white hair. Another policeman, perhaps?