66 Degrees North

CHAPTER ELEVEN

MARÍA HALLDÓRSDÓTTIR LIVED in a quiet street in Thingholt, on the other side of the hill from Magnus’s place, facing the City airport. The houses were bigger here, grander by Icelandic standards. The little street was full of Mercedes and BMW SUVs, Land Rover Discoveries and outside María’s house, a white Porsche Cayenne. Magnus’s Range Rover looked quite at home.

The wind had picked up, and Magnus and Vigdís had to lean into it on the short walk from the car to the front door. Magnus rang the bell and María answered in just a few seconds. She was tall, slim, with long dark hair and long legs clad in tight jeans and tan boots.

‘Come in,’ she said. ‘Ingileif is here.’

‘Ingileif?’ Magnus said, surprised.

‘Hi, Magnús.’ Ingileif appeared from a sitting room and kissed him. ‘Oh, hello, Vigdís. You don’t mind me being here, do you, Magnús? María is my friend.’

‘Well, it would probably be more appropriate if you weren’t present while I spoke with María.’

‘More appropriate? I remember how you ended up interviewing me. I wouldn’t want you to use the same techniques on María.’ She exchanged a glance with María, and burst out laughing.

Magnus, as usual, was wrong-footed. Although the first time he had interviewed Ingileif things had been very professional, and in fact Vigdís had been with him at the time, it was true that later he had been friendlier with a witness than he should have been.

He glanced at Vigdís. She was trying not to laugh.

‘OK,’ Magnus said. ‘But don’t interrupt.’ As soon as he had said it he knew how pointless it was.

María showed them into the living room. It was large, elegant in an Icelandic minimalist way, with white walls, blonde polished wood floors and furniture that was made as much of glass as wood. Smooth abstract sculptures twisted and turned as they posed for visitors. The art on the walls was bright, eye-catching and original. Tropical flowers in ones and twos stood proudly out of their vases.

A good client for Ingileif, no doubt.

Magnus quickly took in the family photographs. There were a couple of María with a gaunt man with greying temples, wearing a well-cut suit. Husband. And successful, given the price of the house.

Magnus, Ingileif and Vigdís sat down while María poured coffee. There was a catalogue on the coffee table, open at nursery furniture. María and Ingileif had obviously been looking at it. Magnus surreptitiously checked for a bulge above María’s jeans, but couldn’t see one.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Ingileif, nodding towards the catalogue. ‘It’s not for us, Magnús.’

‘I didn’t think it was,’ said Magnus.

‘Yes you did,’ said Ingileif, with an amused smile.

‘It’s me,’ said María. ‘I’m three months pregnant.’

‘Congratulations,’ said Magnus. He cleared his throat in an attempt to gain some control over proceedings. ‘So, María, tell me how you knew Óskar?’

María took a deep breath. ‘Óskar. He was quite a few years older than me. I’m not sure where we met, but I remember first getting interested in him at a dinner at a friend’s house – Birta, you know her, Ingileif?’

Ingileif nodded.

‘It was 2003, six years ago. We all went out later as a group, we danced: I could tell he liked me.’

‘He was still married at the time?’

‘Oh, yes,’ María said. ‘But it was never going to work.’

Magnus raised his eyebrows.

‘Óskar and Kamilla had been going out since high school,’ Ingileif said. ‘Those marriages never last. It’s just a matter of time.’

Magnus threw a glance of disapproval at Ingileif.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘Ingileif is right,’ María said. ‘He was on the lookout, I could tell. We ended up sleeping together. It went on a couple of years.’

‘Did his wife know?’

‘I don’t think so. Óskar didn’t think she did, at any rate.’

‘So your relationship was serious?’

‘Yes, it was.’ María faltered for the first time. ‘I really liked him. He was an attractive guy. And he was funny, lively. He had that air of success about him, you know? Everything he touched turned to gold.’ She smiled.

‘I remember he took me to the South of France for a weekend. We stayed in this wonderful hotel high up on the Corniche, with an amazing view of the Mediterranean. We went gambling in one of the casinos in Monte Carlo. I had been making small bets on red and losing mostly. He split my stake into three and slid a third on to number fourteen, my birthday. He lost. So then he pushed the second third on that number and lost again. He raised his eyebrows at me for permission to place the last third and I nodded. I trusted him. And he won! Over a thousand euros. That would never happen to me, but it seemed kind of inevitable with him. He was a winner, you know?’

‘Quite a catch.’

‘I thought so,’ said María. ‘I guess I fell for that classic mistress mistake. I hoped he would leave his wife and marry me.’ She sighed. ‘Then I heard that he had gone off with some slut from his bank’s London office at a party there. I confronted him, he said it would never happen again, but of course it did.’

‘With the same woman?’

‘No, a different woman. I think the first one was genuinely a one-night stand. This other one was in London too. This was before he bought his house in Kensington, but he used to travel there a lot. I realized that that was where he messed around. With two women to hide from in Reykjavík, his wife and his mistress, I guess it made some sense.’

‘When was all this?’

‘About four years ago.’

‘So you dumped him?’

‘I did. And then six months later I met Hinrik.’ She glanced at a photograph of the gaunt man behind her shoulder.

‘Who was a much better bet,’ said Ingileif.

‘Since then you haven’t seen Óskar?’

‘No. I mean I’ve bumped into him at one or two social occasions, but never alone.’ Her lower lip began to quiver. ‘He was a good man. I don’t know whether he committed any technical financial crimes, but I am quite sure he did nothing wrong. He was honest, you know, you could trust him.’ She stared at Magnus, daring him to contradict her. It struck Magnus that a man who could be unfaithful to his wife and then his mistress and still give the impression of being trustworthy, must have had some charisma.

It was strange with murder victims. You never got to meet them, obviously, but you came to know them better and better as the case went on. Óskar was more intriguing the more Magnus found out about him. Was he really the evil banker that the press made out?

Whoever he was, he hadn’t deserved to die.

Vigdís had been taking notes. ‘Do you know the name of this woman?’

‘No, I don’t. He never told me.’

‘Was she Russian?’ Vigdís asked.

‘No. No, she was English. A lawyer, I think.’

‘I see. And the first one? The one-night stand?’

‘The slut? Oh, she was Icelandic all right. She was an employee of Ódinsbanki in London. She’s back in Reykjavík now.’

‘And do you know her name?’ asked Magnus.

‘Yes. Harpa. Harpa Einarsdóttir.’

Frikki stood in the arrivals hall at Keflavík Airport staring at the screen, shifting from foot to foot in impatience. Where the hell was she? The plane from Warsaw had arrived twenty minutes ago. It couldn’t take her that long to pick up her bags and go through customs, could it? Frikki had never flown before, in fact this was his first time at the airport, so he had no idea what happened on the other side of the double swing doors. Perhaps Customs had stopped her? Oh, God! Perhaps Immigration hadn’t let her in to the country?

He couldn’t bear that thought. He bit his thumbnail. Where the hell was she?

He had been overjoyed when Magda had messaged him on Facebook that she had bought a cheap ticket to come and see him. She had been a chambermaid at the Hotel 101 where he had been an assistant chef. He had been distraught when, like him, she had lost her job, because in her case it meant she had to go back to Poland. That had been in early January, just after New Year. Since then they had managed to keep their relationship going, through the wonders of Skype and Facebook. She was a year older than him, and much more sensible. He was a different person when he was with her, calmer, happier. Better.

And in a few minutes he would see her again. If the immigration people didn’t stop her.

At the same time, he was nervous. Since he had lost his job he had let things slip, and she would pick up on that. He had always been a bit of a wild kid, getting himself into all kinds of trouble, until he had gone on that cooking course. He was a natural. More than that, cooking calmed him down, channelled his energy away from getting drunk and causing trouble. He had been so proud to get his job at 101, the trendiest hotel in Reykjavík. And he had done well there. He was a good-looking kid and had no trouble pulling girls, but he was aware that it was his new self-confidence that had attracted Magda.

It was an inevitable result of the kreppa that one of the hottest places to hang out in the good times would slow down. It wasn’t their fault that he and Magda were sacked, he knew that.

Life since then had been difficult. He lived with his mother, an office cleaner, in Breidholt, a mostly poor suburb of Reykjavík. His existence had become desperately boring. He had started doing drugs again. He had gone back to stealing. It had started when his laptop had suddenly died on him. With that went his means of communicating with Magda. Try as he might, he hadn’t been able to fix it. So then he had nicked another one some idiot had left lying around on a car seat.

And then, unbidden, memories of that dreadful night in January forced themselves to the front of his brain. Yet again.

That was something he absolutely mustn’t tell Magda. She would never understand.

‘Frikki!’

He looked around and there she was! How could he possibly have missed her?

‘Oh Frikki!’ She rushed up to him, flung her arms around him, kissed him, and hugged him tight.

All thoughts of that January night melted away.

Magnus brushed past the two kids embracing in the Arrivals Hall and looked out for someone who might be Detective Sergeant Piper. He had no idea what she looked like and he hadn’t brought a sign with her name on it. But he should be able to recognize a cop, even a British one.

His phone rang. It was his cousin Sibba.

‘I called Uncle Ingvar. I’ve found out who the “other woman” was.’

Magnus took a deep breath. ‘Tell me.’ But he still wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

‘Unnur. Unnur Ágústsdóttir. As I thought, she was a friend of Margrét’s from school. They went off together to do teacher training in Reykjavík and then both got jobs in the city.’

The name was familiar. Magnus could remember a presence from his early childhood, a friendly blonde woman who used to come to their house sometimes. She was called Unnur, wasn’t she?

‘So Dad met her through Mom?’

‘I guess so.’

‘Did Uncle Ingvar tell you where she is now?’

‘Apparently she moved back to Stykkishólmur about ten years ago. She’s teaching at the school there. Her husband is one of his colleagues at the hospital.’

‘Thank you, Sibba. Thank you very much.’

‘Are you going to see her? It might not be such a good idea.’

‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’

The box was opening. The box where he had crammed all the unpleasant stuff. The four years in Bjarnarhöfn. His father’s infidelity. It was all oozing out.

He couldn’t shut that box.

For most of his adult life Magnus had been obsessed with later events, events from several years after he had settled in America. His father, Ragnar, had been murdered when Magnus was twenty, at a house that Ragnar was renting from a fellow MIT professor for the summer. The house was in Duxbury, a small town on the shore to the south of Boston. Ragnar’s new wife, Kathleen, was out, ostensibly checking on a plumbing problem at their own house back in town. Ollie, as Magnus’s brother called himself in the States, was at the beach with his girlfriend, and Magnus himself was waiting tables in a restaurant in Providence over the college vacation.

Someone had walked into the house through the unlocked front door, stabbed Ragnar in the back, and finished him off with a couple of thrusts to the chest.

The police had struggled to find a killer. The only forensic evidence was a single strand of sandy-coloured hair from which it had been possible to recover a partial DNA sequence. Magnus had been convinced that his stepmother was responsible, but she had turned out to be in bed with a local air-conditioning engineer at the time. After the police had given up, Magnus himself had spent long hours trying to solve the crime. He had eventually managed to locate a mysterious bearded birdwatcher who had been seen poking around near the house. But the new potential witness hadn’t seen or heard anything, nor did he have any conceivable link to Ragnar.

Another blind alley.

Magnus had never really given up. But he had always focused on America, where Ragnar seemed to have no real enemies.

But his father did have enemies in Iceland. If Hallgrímur held Ragnar responsible for his daughter’s alcoholism, for her eventual death, then he would certainly count as an enemy.

Which was why Magnus would have to go and speak to Unnur Ágústsdóttir, and open the lid of that box just a little wider.

‘Magnus?’

‘That’s me.’ He looked down at a short woman with blonde hair, a worn face but a friendly smile.

‘Sharon Piper.’ She held out her hand and he shook it.

‘Flight OK?’

‘Bumpy landing in all that wind. Do you have any trees on this island? I thought we were coming down on to the moon.’

‘They used to tell the GIs before their posting here that there was a blonde Viking virgin tied to every tree.’

‘Is that what persuaded you to come?’

‘I am actually Icelandic,’ Magnus said. ‘I’ve lived in the States since I was twelve. But even for me it takes some getting used to. Are you OK to go straight to police headquarters or do you want to go to your hotel first?’

‘Let’s get down to work.’

As Magnus drove Piper along the thirty kilometre stretch of straight road from the airport at Keflavík to Reykjavík he kept two hands firmly on the steering wheel as gusts of wind buffeted the Range Rover.

‘Is the whole country like this?’ asked Piper, staring out of the window at the brown volcanic rubble.

‘Not all of it,’ said Magnus. ‘There was a big eruption around here a few thousand years ago. You can see where the moss is beginning to eat away at the lava. Eventually, in a few more thousand years, it will become soil and grass will grow.’

‘Do you really think the human race won’t have permanently screwed up the earth in the next few thousand years?’

‘Er, no,’ said Magnus. An environmental cop. That was a new animal for him, although he suspected there were quite a few in Iceland.

‘You say the eruption was that long ago? It looks more like ten years. Or last year. How can people live here?’

‘They’re a tough lot, the Icelanders. There was a time in the eighteenth century when one of the volcanoes erupted and the whole country was covered in a haze for several years. Crops died, animals died, the population got down to less than thirty thousand. They thought about quitting then, but they stayed.’

‘They?’ Piper said. ‘You said “they”.’

Magnus smiled. ‘You’re right. I guess I meant “we”. I feel a bit like a foreigner in my own country.’

‘Where are you from in the States?’

‘Boston. I worked as a detective in the Homicide Unit. Same kind of thing you do. More guns, I guess.’

‘Probably,’ said Piper. ‘Although there are a hell of a lot of guns in London these days.’

‘Do you feel vulnerable not carrying?’ Magnus asked. It was something he had always wondered about the British police.

‘Most of the time, no,’ Piper said. ‘We do have more and more officers who are firearms trained. I haven’t been threatened with a gun yet. Have you?’

‘A few times,’ said Magnus. ‘That’s one of the things I find difficult here. Cops don’t carry guns.’

‘Do the criminals? That’s the key question, I suppose.’

‘Not until I showed up,’ Magnus said. That was not one of his proudest moments, luring a Dominican hit man from Boston to Reykjavík with a gun that he had managed to plug Árni with. The real problem with guns was when you ended up shooting the bad guys. Magnus had done that twice, once at the start of his career when he was a uniformed officer on patrol, and once earlier on that year when a couple of guys were trying to kill him.

He still had the dreams. A bald fat guy on the street in Roxbury telling him he had some information about a homicide Magnus was investigating. Stupidly following the guy down the alleyway. Too late realizing that the kid on the corner had an out-ofneighbourhood gang tattoo. Diving, turning, shooting. The kid falling. Spinning around, plugging the fat guy on the crown of his bald head. And then doing it all again and again all night.

But Magnus still felt naked without a weapon.

The truck in front wobbled as a gust of wind tried to sweep it off the road.

‘Jesus.’ Piper tensed and reached out for the dashboard in front of her.

Magnus gripped the Range Rover’s steering wheel harder. White spray whipped off the top of the waves skimming the ocean to their left.

‘Any news on the investigation?’ Magnus asked.

‘No real breakthroughs,’ said Piper. ‘We are still pursuing the Russian angle, although that’s looking less likely. A handwriting expert took a look at the script on the Post-It note we found outside Óskar Gunnarsson’s house. He reckons that whoever wrote it wasn’t a native Russian speaker, or should I say, writer.’

‘You mean it was a decoy?’

‘Looks like it.’

‘Did you try out an Icelandic accent on your witness?’

‘Yes. We took her to the Icelandic Embassy and she listened to some of the people there. She thinks the courier she saw could have had an Icelandic accent. But he spoke very good English.’

‘Interesting.’

‘Yeah. Of course he could have been a genuine courier from one of Gunnarsson’s Icelandic contacts in London, but we haven’t discovered anyone who was trying to deliver anything to him at home.’

‘What about the killer himself? Was he speaking Icelandic?’

‘We did try the girlfriend with the Icelanders from the embassy. She thought the language she heard might have been Icelandic, but she was stretching it. She didn’t really know.’

‘And the motorbikes?’

‘Nothing. But we traced the gun: it was used in a gang shooting in Lewisham two months ago – that’s in south London. No one was killed or even injured. But that probably just means the gun was second hand. I’ve brought a list of Icelandic citizens we know that Gunnarsson was in contact with in London. Can we go through that?’

‘Sure. And I have fixed up an appointment with the Special Prosecutor into financial crimes. That might give you an idea of where Óskar and Ódinsbanki fit into the inquiries into the banking crisis last year.’

‘Good. Thank you. Have you turned up anything?’

‘Nothing on a Russian angle,’ Magnus said. He considered telling Piper about Harpa, but Baldur had been quite explicit. The fact that Harpa had once had sex with Óskar about four years ago was not yet a conclusive link. Reykjavík was a small place, and although that didn’t quite mean that everyone had slept with everyone else, that kind of coincidence could not be ruled out.

Four years? Harpa had a three-year old son. Hmm.

‘Magnus?’

Magnus shook his head. ‘Sorry. It’s nothing.’