66 Degrees North

CHAPTER NINE

MAGNUS WAS IN a good mood as he parked the Game Over on Njálsgata, opposite his house, or rather Katrín’s house. ‘Game Overs’ were what they were calling Range Rovers these days: Magnus had bought his at a knockdown price from a bankrupt lawyer who owned two, but couldn’t really afford one. It was a gas guzzler, but once you got outside Reykjavík a good four-wheel-drive was a must.

The quick couple of beers he had had at the Grand Rokk were partly responsible for his mood. The Grand Rokk was a bar just off Hverfisgata. Warm, scruffy, populated during the week by men and women who liked to drink, it reminded Magnus of the places he and his buddies would unwind after a shift in Boston. That kind of thing was much less common in Reykjavík, except on the weekends when everyone went crazy. In fact, weekday drinking was frowned upon. Which kind of added to the allure of the Grand.

On occasion when he had first arrived in Iceland a couple of beers had turned into many more, plus uncounted chasers, which had got him into trouble. But these days he had things under control.

It wasn’t just the beer, though. It felt good to be doing straightforward police work again. And the case was piquing his interest. He wasn’t sure whether they would find an Icelandic link to Óskar’s death, but if they did he was willing to bet that it would be through Harpa. It was to be expected that she should be upset after her ex-boyfriend topped himself. But Harpa’s agitation was more complicated than that: she was hiding something.

And Gabríel Örn’s suicide didn’t make sense. So far they had found no signs of suicidal thoughts or actions, or of extreme depression. And if he did want to commit suicide, walking three miles to the sea and jumping in seemed a very strange way to do it, especially on a cold night. Why not drive? Take a taxi? Or just stay at home and take some pills?

It may be that further investigation would reveal a suicidal side to Gabríel Örn that would make sense of it all.

But Magnus wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t.

As he took out his house keys, the door opened and his landlady appeared, in full regalia.

Katrín was tall with short dyed-black hair, white make-up, and metal sprouting from her face and ears. She was wearing black jeans, T-shirt and coat. She looked a little like her brother Árni, but where Árni’s features were weak, hers were strong. Under her arm was a tiny bird of a girl with short blonde hair.

‘Hi, Magnus,’ Katrín said in English. She had spent some time in England and liked to speak to him in that language. ‘We’re just going out. This is Tinna, by the way.’

‘Hello, Tinna,’ said Magnus. ‘How you doin’?’

Tinna nodded, smiled, and leaned into her taller companion’s side.

Magnus wasn’t yet familiar enough with the conventions of female friendship in Iceland to be sure of what exactly he was witnessing.

Katrín noticed his confusion. ‘I’ve gone off men, Magnus. They smell and they lie. Don’t you think so?’

‘Well…’ Magnus said.

‘Tinna is much nicer,’ Katrín said, squeezing the small blonde.

Tinna smiled up at her friend and they kissed each other quickly on the lips.

‘Oh, don’t tell Árni, will you, Magnus? I wouldn’t mind, but it will only upset him.’

‘I won’t,’ said Magnus. One of the reasons Árni had installed Magnus with his sister was so that Magnus could spy on her. This was something Magnus was not prepared to do. He liked Katrín, she made a good house mate, even if they didn’t see very much of each other. Perhaps because they didn’t see very much of each other.

As he entered the hallway, he smelled cooking. He checked the kitchen, wondering if Katrín had left something on the stove. There was Ingileif, pushing some scallops around a frying pan with a wooden spoon.

‘Hi,’ she said, leaving the stove and coming towards him. She gave him a long, lingering kiss.

‘Hi,’ said Magnus, smiling. ‘This is a bit of a surprise.’

‘You’ve been to the Grand Rokk, haven’t you? I can smell it on your breath.’

‘Does it bother you?’ said Magnus.

‘No, of course not. I think that dive suits you perfectly. Just don’t try and drag me in there. Do you like scallops?’

‘I do.’

‘That’s lucky.’

‘Um. How did you get in here, Ingileif?’

‘Katrín let me in. Oh, by the way, did you meet Tinna? Cute, isn’t she?’

‘Um. Possibly,’ said Magnus. He wasn’t quite sure what he thought about Ingileif talking herself into his house without asking him.

‘I’ve been invited to a party on Friday night. Jakob and Selma. Do you want to come?’

‘Is he the little guy with the big nose?’

‘More of a big guy with a little nose. You have met him. They are two of my best clients.’

Ingileif ran a fashionable gallery. Ran it very well. Her clients were some of the wealthiest citizens of Reykjavík, beautiful people, who owned beautiful art and dressed beautifully. They were all perfectly friendly to Magnus, but he didn’t fit. For a start he didn’t have the right clothes, there was not a designer T-shirt or a designer suit in his wardrobe. His two favourite shirts were by LL Bean, but he didn’t think that counted, and neither did his suit from Macy’s. The main thing, though, was that all these people had known each other since they were kids.

‘I don’t know,’ said Magnus. ‘I expect I’ll have work to do on the Óskar Gunnarsson case.’

‘OK,’ Ingileif said. She didn’t seem bothered. She never seemed bothered that she went out without him.

He never quite knew where he stood with her. But it was kinda nice when she showed up in his home, right in the middle of his life, unannounced, uninvited.

She glanced at him. ‘You know, these scallops can wait.’

Magnus smiled as he looked down at Ingileif. She was snuggled under his arm, her head resting on his chest, her blonde hair bunched up under his chin. Her eyes were closed, but she wasn’t asleep. He noticed the familiar little nick above one of her eyebrows. There was a small smile on her own lips.

‘I fit very nicely in here,’ she said. ‘Am I just the right size, or are you?’

‘I guess we both are,’ said Magnus. ‘We fit.’

‘We do.’

It was true, Ingileif was one of the good things about Iceland, a reason to stay. Magnus had had a girlfriend in the States for several years, a lawyer named Colby. She was smart, she was attractive and she knew what she wanted. And what she wanted was for Magnus to quit the police force, go to law school, get a decent job and marry her. That wasn’t what Magnus wanted, which is why they had broken up.

That and the fact that Colby didn’t like being shot at by hoodlums with semi-automatic rifles on the streets of Boston.

Ingileif seemed to have no intention of marrying him, or changing him. They had met in his first week in Iceland, she had been a witness and then a suspect in the murder case he had worked on. They had gone through a lot together. Like Magnus, her father had been killed when she was a child. Magnus had discovered how that had happened, a discovery that had been very difficult for Ingileif to take.

He had supported her, talked to her, understood her pain, helped her come to terms with it, or at least accept that she could never completely come to terms with it. It was a bond between them.

She shifted in his arms. ‘So, have you solved Óskar’s murder yet?’

‘Not yet,’ said Magnus.

‘That’s pathetic. You’ve had all day.’

‘It might take me more than a day,’ Magnus said.

‘Even for CSI Magnús?’

‘I think you mean CSI Boston?’

‘Do I? I never watch those programmes. But I bet I can solve your crime.’ Ingileif disentangled herself from Magnus and sat up in bed. ‘Give me your clues.’

‘It doesn’t really work like that,’ said Magnus. ‘We haven’t found an Icelandic connection. The murderer probably lives in London. That was where Óskar was killed, after all.’

‘Huh. Well, have you sorted out Óskar’s sex life?’

‘Do you know about Óskar’s sex life?’

‘Not personally, you idiot. But I have come across him. Kamilla, his wife, or rather his ex-wife, was one of my clients. Nice woman. Pretty. A bit dull.’

‘Vigdís interviewed her,’ Magnus said. ‘She didn’t think there was much animosity there now.’

‘Probably not,’ said Ingileif. ‘But there was for a bit. Especially when María was involved.’

‘María?’

‘Yes. She’s an old friend of mine. And she was Óskar’s girlfriend for a couple of years. She was the reason he got divorced. She’s married now, to someone else, but she can tell you all about him.’

‘Hmm.’ Sexual jealousy as a motive for murder was one of the old favourites. Ingileif was right, they should probably find out more about Óskar’s lovers, at least the ones who lived in Iceland.

‘I’ll call her now,’ Ingileif said. ‘We can meet up.’

‘Vigdís can interview her tomorrow.’

‘What do you mean? She’s my witness,’ said Ingileif, rolling out of bed to dig out her mobile phone. ‘Isn’t that the technical expression?’

‘Not exactly.’

Ingileif held up her finger to shush him. ‘María? Hi, it’s Ingileif. Hey, I wanted to talk to you about Óskar. It must be terrible for you.’

Five minutes later Ingileif had fixed up for Magnus to go to María’s house to interview her the following morning. Ingileif was pleased with herself. ‘We’ll have this solved in no time,’ she said. ‘So who did you see today?’

‘My cousin, Sibba,’ Magnus answered.

‘Is she a witness?’

‘No. But she was acting as a lawyer for Óskar’s sister.’

‘Wait. You mentioned her before. She’s the cousin on your mother’s side, isn’t she?’

‘Yes. Yes, that’s right.’

‘The one who told you about your father screwing your mother’s best friend?’

‘Yes.’ Magnus’s voice was hoarse. ‘Do you mind if we don’t talk about it? I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I don’t want to think about it.’

‘OK,’ said Ingileif, and squeezed his hand.

But Magnus was thinking about it. Until the age of eight Magnus had had an idyllic childhood. His mother taught at school, his father at the university and he and his brother Óli played in the garden of their little house with its bright blue corrugated metal roof, only a short distance from where Magnus was living now in Thingholt.

But then things had changed, changed horribly. His father had announced he was leaving to go to a university in America. His mother, alone in charge of the boys, began to drink. The two boys were sent to stay with their grandparents on their farm at Bjarnarhöfn on the Snaefells Peninsula. That period of his life Magnus had blanked from his memory, but he knew that the scars were still there, buried deep under his skin.

The scars were more obvious in the case of Óli. He had never really recovered from his time at the farm.

Then one day their mother killed herself in a car crash. She was drunk. Finally, the two boys’ father, Ragnar, came over from America to rescue them and take them back with him to Boston. Magnus was twelve, Óli ten.

As Magnus had grown up and begun to understand more about alcoholism, he had developed his own way of making sense of his parents’ lives. His mother, his alcoholic mother, not the beautiful woman he dimly remembered from his childhood, was the villain, his father the hero.

That was until he had bumped into Sigurbjörg in the street four months before. She had shattered Magnus’s idea of history by telling him that his father had had an affair with his mother’s best friend. That’s what had driven her to drink. That’s what had caused him to run away to America. That’s what, ultimately, had led to her death.

It was this knowledge that Magnus had tried to cram back into its box.

‘You’re still thinking about Sibba, aren’t you?’ Ingileif said. ‘I can feel it.’

Magnus sighed. ‘Yes.’

‘You know you should face up to it. See her. Find out what really happened between your father and your mother’s friend.’

‘I said I didn’t want to talk about it.’

Ingileif ignored him. ‘I remember when you decided that you were going to stay on in Iceland. One of the reasons was that you thought there might be an Icelandic link to your father’s death.’

Magnus shook his head. ‘Ingileif…’

‘No, listen to me. You’ve obsessed about how your father was murdered and who by all your adult life. That’s why you do what you do, it’s who you are. Isn’t it?’

Reluctantly Magnus nodded. It was why he had joined the police, why he had become a homicide detective, why he was so relentless in tracking down the killer of every victim he came across.

‘OK. So you are all excited about spending time trying to find the Icelandic angle to Óskar’s death, which you admit is very unlikely, yet you won’t find out more about an Icelandic angle to your own father’s murder. That doesn’t make sense.’

‘It’s different,’ Magnus protested.

‘Why?’

‘Because.’ He struggled to conjure up a plausible reason, but then settled on the truth. ‘Because it’s personal.’

‘Of course, it’s personal!’ Ingileif said. ‘And that’s exactly why you have to deal with it. Just like I had to find out how my own father died even though the answer was so painful to me. And don’t tell me that that wasn’t personal!’

Magnus stroked her hair. ‘No. No, I won’t tell you that.’ Ingileif’s pain had been real, was real. She was right. It had been important for her to find out the truth. So why wasn’t it important for him?

‘You’re scared, Magnús. Admit it, you are scared of what you might find out.’

Magnus closed his eyes. He hated being called a coward. It was not his self-image at all. Since his youth he had been an avid reader of the Icelandic sagas, the tales of medieval revenge and daring. There were heroes and cowards in those stories, seekers of justice and hiders from it, and Magnus saw himself as one of those heroes. He smiled to himself. There were also women urging their men-folk to get off their asses and go avenge the family honour. Women like Ingileif.

‘You are right,’ he said. ‘I am scared. But… Well…’

‘Well, what?’

‘You know I told you I spent four years at my grandfather’s farm when my father left us?’

‘Yes.’

Magnus swallowed. ‘Those are four years I don’t want to remember.’

‘What happened?’ Ingileif asked, touching his chest. ‘What happened, Magnús?’

Magnus exhaled. ‘That’s something I really don’t want to tell you. That memory has to stay in its box.’

Harpa stared out of her window at the blinking lights of Reykjavík across the bay, waiting for Björn to come. He had a big powerful motorbike, and she knew she could trust him to get down to her as fast as he could. It was a hundred and eighty kilometres, but the road was good all the way and, with the exception of the last stretch through the Reykjavík suburbs, empty.

She had been agitated since the interview with the two detectives. The big one with the red hair and the slight American accent had got under her skin. He was smarter than the skinny one she had spoken to in January. There was something about his eyes, blue, steady, understanding, that seemed to miss nothing, to see through all her protests and posturing. He knew she wasn’t telling the truth. They had no link between Gabríel Örn’s death and Óskar’s, the Gabríel Örn case was firmly closed by the authorities, but that detective knew there was something wrong.

He would be back.

Harpa had been mean to Markús, snapping at him for not tidying up his trucks. Later, when they were reading one of the poems in Vísnabókin, favourites from her own childhood, Markús had had to point out that she had read the same verse twice.

After he was in bed she had paced around the house, desperate to go for a walk on the beach at Grótta at the end of the Seltjarnarnes promontory, but unwilling to leave Markús alone in the house. She thought of calling her mother to babysit, but she couldn’t face the explanations, the small lies hiding the much bigger lie.

So in the end she had poured herself a cup of coffee and sat at the kitchen table staring out of the window, watching night settle over Faxaflói Bay, forcing herself to remain still. She was in a kind of a trance. Inside she was screaming. Outside she was motionless, frozen.

Gabríel’s death would never leave her. In some strange way, his death, or her part in it, had lodged itself somewhere inside her. It had bided its time for a few months, but now it was growing like some ghastly tropical parasite, eating her up from the inside.

That evening, she had been unable to look Markús directly in the eye. Those big, trusting, honest brown eyes. How could she tell him that his mother was a liar? Worse than that, a murderer?

How could she live her life never being able to look her son in the eye?

She wanted to throw back the kitchen chair and scream. But she didn’t move. Didn’t move a muscle. Didn’t even raise the cup of cold coffee in front of her to her lips.

Where the hell was Björn?

She stared out into the gathering darkness, at Gabríel Örn lying there on the ground in the car park just off Hverfisgata, blood from his skull mingling with dirt in the slush.

She heard her own screams.

‘Shush, Harpa, shush.’ Björn’s voice was calm, and authoritative. Harpa stopped screaming. She sobbed instead.

He crouched down beside Gabríel. ‘Is he dead?’ Harpa whispered.

Björn frowned. By the way he moved his fingers around Gabríel’s throat, pressing on one spot and then another, Harpa could tell that he couldn’t find a pulse.

Harpa pulled out her phone. ‘I’ll call an ambulance.’

‘No!’ Björn instructed her, his voice firm. ‘No. He’s dead. There’s no point in calling an ambulance for a dead person. We’ll all end up in jail.’

‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Frikki.

‘No. Wait! Let me think,’ Björn said. ‘We need a story.’

‘No one will know it was us,’ said Sindri. ‘Let’s just go.’

‘They’ll know Harpa called him just before he came out,’ Björn said. ‘Phone records. The police will interview her. Perhaps someone was with him, someone who knows he was going to meet her.’

‘Don’t tell them anything, Harpa,’ Frikki said.

‘Oh, God,’ said Harpa. She knew she would tell the police everything.

‘Quiet!’ Björn urged. ‘Let’s calm down. We need a story. An alibi for everyone. First let’s get him out of the way. And try not to get his blood on your clothes.’

Sindri, Frikki and Björn dragged Gabríel into the small car park and laid him between two parked cars.

‘Harpa needs to go to B5,’ Ísak said. The others looked at him. ‘She needs to go to B5 right away. She needs to make a fuss about something so they remember that she is there. Start an argument with someone. Me perhaps. There is no connection between us, the police won’t suspect anything.’

‘But where was she before?’ Sindri asked.

‘With me,’ Björn said. ‘We met at the demonstration. She came back with me to my brother’s place. Things went wrong: she called her old boyfriend, wanted to see him.’

‘She waited at the bar for him and he never came,’ Ísak said.

‘What are we going to do with the body?’ Sindri asked.

‘I can move it somewhere,’ said Björn.

‘Fake a suicide,’ said Ísak. ‘I don’t know, a fall? Hang him somewhere?’

‘That’s horrible,’ Harpa said. ‘I think I am going to be sick.’

‘I’ll take him down to the sea for a swim,’ said Björn. ‘Sindri, you can help me. OK, give me your phone number, Harpa. You go to B5 with Ísak, but make sure you arrive separately. Make a fuss, but try not to get thrown out; we need you there as long as possible. I’ll get rid of the body now and call you in an hour or two. Then you can come back to my brother’s place with me. We can go through the details of your story then.’

Harpa nodded. She pulled herself together and set off for Bankastraeti and the bar, Ísak following by a different route.

Even though the plan was made up on the spot and there were plenty of holes in it, it worked. Harpa could never have thought of it. It took Ísak’s brains and Björn’s calm.

She had coped with the police questioning well. If it hadn’t been for Björn she would have cracked. He gave her the strength and determination to stick with her story. And now she was going to have to go through it all again, but this time she wasn’t sure she would be able to do as good a job.

She heard a motorbike approaching fast along Nordurströnd. She heard it come to a stop outside the house.

Her heart leapt. She ran out of the house and threw herself into the arms of the driver even before he had a chance to take his helmet off.

‘Oh, Björn, I’m so glad you are here.’ She began to sob.

He slipped off the helmet and stroked her hair. ‘There, there, Harpa. It’s all going to be OK.’

She pulled back. ‘It’s not going to be OK, Björn. I killed someone. I’m going to hell. I’m in hell.’

‘There is no hell,’ Björn said. ‘You feel guilty, but you shouldn’t. Of course killing people is wrong, but you didn’t mean to kill him, did you? It was an accident. People die in accidents.’

‘It wasn’t an accident,’ said Harpa. ‘I attacked him.’

‘The whole thing happened because Sindri and that kid egged you on. They were the ones who made you call him up and get him to come out and meet you. What we both did wrong was to go along with them. Look at me, Harpa. You’re not a bad person.’

But Harpa didn’t look at him. She pressed herself into Björn’s leather-clad chest. She wanted to believe him. She wanted so desperately to believe him.