66 Degrees North

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

MAGNUS’S SPIRITS ROSE as he drove north from Reykjavík. The clouds were blown away and the sun shone out of a pale blue sky. It felt good to fly along the open road, away from the people and the bustle of the city, the grey sea shimmering to his left, the mountains looming on his right.

The road plunged deep under Hvalfjördur, Whale Fjord, one of the deepest fjords in Iceland, swung through a valley between two fells and then crossed Borgarfjördur, its surface creased by strong currents. Just beyond the little town of Borgarnes, the road forked to the left. A couple of kilometres outside the town was the church of Borg, where Egill had lived, the hero of one of Magnus’s favourite sagas.

The sagas were like the great architectural monuments of other countries. In a land with no great settlements and precious few sizeable buildings, Icelanders looked to their literature for a sense of their identity, of their past. During his adolescence in America, and then later into adulthood, Magnus had read and reread these medieval tales obsessively, conjuring in his mind’s eye the heaths and fjords of Iceland in the tenth century.

They had become a refuge for a lone Icelandic kid who found himself overwhelmed by his big American Middle School. Egill was one of the most extraordinary characters from the sagas: a brave and cruel warrior, who fought against great odds in Norway and England, before returning to his farm at Borg. But he was also a poet, whose elegy to his drowned son Magnus knew by heart. It was kind of cool to be driving past his farm now.

It was a good road, almost empty of traffic. The flanks of the fells glowed orange and gold in the low autumn sun, and the sheep were rounded balls of wool, ready for the oncoming winter. Soon the Snaefells Peninsula approached, a backbone of ragged mountains with the Snaefells glacier itself a white dome at the western end capping a slumbering volcano. The entrance to the Centre of the Earth in Jules Verne’s book. Magnus took the turning at Vegamót up the pass and into the mountains. The road wound upwards, until he cleared the pass and Breidafjördur opened out before him.

He pulled over.

Beneath him was the Berserkjahraun, a frozen stream of rock spilling down towards the sea in dramatic folds of grey and green. In the foreground Swine Lake twisted around the edge of the lava, its water level low at this time of year. Then down by the seashore was the farm of Hraun, and on the other side of the little cove, nestling under its own huge fell, Bjarnarhöfn.

Magnus’s good spirits evaporated as he felt icy fingers clutch at his chest. The fears of childhood never left you. Just over the mountain to his right was the parallel pass where the Kerlingin troll stood, the stone sack of babies over her shoulder. Down in the lava field, the murdered Swedish berserkers roamed. On the heath over to the east strode the ghost of Thórólfur Lame Foot, killed by his neighbour Arnkell a thousand years before.

And in that farm down there, right now in the twenty-first century, lived Hallgrímur, Magnus’s grandfather.

Magnus shook his head. How could he, a fit thirty-three-year-old who had got through many a tough situation, be afraid of an old man in his eighties?

But it wasn’t just the man. It was the memories.

Magnus looked over to the right, beyond the mole that was Helgafell, to Stykkishólmur, a white splatter of dots by the sea. Among those dots somewhere was Unnur Ágústsdóttir with answers to other questions.

But in the meantime, he had to find Björn.

Grundarfjördur was twenty kilometres further west along the coast from the Berserkjahraun. It was a compact fishing village of white houses, a church and large sheds dedicated to processing fish, squeezing around a crescent-shaped harbour. Behind it a heath of browned grass and waterfalls led up to mountains. To one side, thrusting out of the sea, was a tower of green-and-grey hooped rock known as Kirkjufell or Church Fell.

Björn’s house was a small one-storey affair on the western edge of town, right by the shore, in the shadow of the rock.

No one was at home. His neighbour said that she hadn’t seen Björn for a couple of days.

Magnus drove back to the harbourmaster’s office. The harbour-master, a tall man with thinning sandy hair and glasses, knew Björn Helgason well. Over a cup of coffee he explained that Björn had sold his boat a few months before to pay off his loans, and now crewed for other captains either in Grundarfjördur, Stykkishólmur or some of the other ports along the north coast of the peninsula. There were three fishing companies in town that Magnus should try.

This he did, without success. As far as they knew, Björn was on none of their boats.

Damn! It was a risk of course, it was always a risk to interview a suspect without calling ahead first to ensure they were there, but it was a risk Magnus often took. He liked to catch them by surprise. You could tell a lot from the look on a guilty man’s face when he answered the door to the police when he hadn’t been expecting them.

Magnus dropped in on the local police station, a brown wooden building just behind the harbour. There he met an affable constable in his forties with a full moustache, named Páll. Another cup of coffee. It was clear that Páll was excited by a visit from the Reykjavík Violent Crimes Unit, although he pretended not to show it. He knew Björn well, of course. Although not from Grundarfjördur originally, Páll had been stationed there for ten years and he liked the place.

Times were tough, though, for the fishermen, both the independent operators and the fishing companies with their fish factories in town. Too much borrowing. Even here, two hundred kilometres from Reykjavík, people had borrowed too much. It was those damn bankers and that arrogant son-of-a-bitch Ólafur Tómasson.

Magnus humoured the constable as he went through the traditional kreppa litany, and asked him to keep an eye out for Björn over the next few days. He left Páll his number, and told him that he wanted to see Björn in connection with Óskar Gunnarsson’s murder.

Then, after stopping at a café in town for a late lunch, Magnus decided to take a slight detour to Stykkishólmur. Perhaps Björn was working on a boat out of there. And if he wasn’t? Well, Magnus might drop in on Unnur.

Magnus sped through the Berserkjahraun without glancing left towards his grandfather’s farm. A little further on a sea eagle heaved itself into the air, its distinctive white tail fanned out behind it, and beat a path towards a knoll. This little hill, a familiar sight from the farm at Bjarnarhöfn, was only two hundred feet high and was known as Helgafell, or Holy Mountain. One of the first settlers in those parts, Thórólfur Moster-beard, had decided that this little mountain was in fact holy and that he and his kinsmen would be swallowed up by it when they died. To preserve the sanctity of the place he insisted that no man should do their ‘elf-frighteners’ on the hill, on pain of death. Of course his neighbours did just that, defecating in full view of Thórólfur’s men, and started the first of countless feuds.

And in the church under the hill, Magnus remembered, was the grave of Gudrún Ósvifsdóttir, the heroine of another great saga, the Laxdaela.

This landscape, that had changed so little over the last thousand years, brought those sagas that Magnus had read and reread two thousand miles away to life. Each of the farms mentioned in the sagas was still there, still farmed. Bjarnarhöfn, his grandfather’s farm, was named after Björn the Easterner, Styr had lived at Hraun, Snorri the Chieftain at Helgafell, Arnkell at Bolstad just over the mountain. The farms then would have housed more people than they did now. Most of the time, just as now, they would have taken their sheep up to the fells, tended to their horses, cultivated hay in the home meadow. Except in those days every now and then the Norse farmers would stomp back and forth across the lava plain clutching swords and battleaxes to beat the shit out of each other. Magnus’s grandparents had told Óli and him some of these stories. But they had added a veneer of darkness to them that had at first thrilled and then terrified the boys.

Magnus drove into Stykkishólmur, past his old school and on to the harbour, surrounded by a jumble of multicoloured houses clad in corrugated iron, some of them quite old. At first glance the town hadn’t changed much. The large white hospital and a Franciscan convent dominated one side of the harbour. It had been strange to see the nuns, many of them from southern European countries, around town. Iceland was emphatically not a Catholic country, so the nuns and their unfamiliar ways had seemed exotic to the local kids.

The hospital was called St Francis’s, and Magnus’s Uncle Ingvar was a doctor there. It brought back memories too. Visiting Óli. Magnus’s own brief stay for an arm broken, ostensibly while falling off a haystack. The lies. The nurse who didn’t believe him. The fear of being found out.

Forcing himself back to the present, Magnus asked around at the offices of the local fishing companies. They knew Björn Helgason, but hadn’t seen him for a couple of weeks. They were pretty sure that he wasn’t on a Stykkishólmur boat.

As he walked out along the quay, Magnus considered what to do next. He could drive back westwards along the peninsula to Ólafsvík and Rif to ask around for Björn. Or he could drive back home. Or…

Or he could see Unnur.

He knew deep down he had already taken the decision. That was one reason why he had driven all the way up here to look for Björn. That was why he had checked Stykkishólmur rather than Ólafsvík. Who was he kidding? He was here to see his father’s mistress.

Tracing someone in a small Icelandic town is not difficult. He returned to the fishing office, borrowed a phone directory, and looked under ‘U’ for Unnur – the Icelanders listed people under their first names.

She lived in a neat white house on top of a cliff overlooking the harbour. It was just beside Stykkishólmur’s modern church, which was an extraordinary edifice: a cross between a white Mexican adobe church and a space ship. It had been under construction the whole time Magnus lived around there. It was a different kind of interplanetary rocket to the Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík, but it made Magnus wonder if there was some kind of strange intergalactic theology behind Icelandic church design.

Weird.

Magnus sat outside the house for a couple of minutes. Perhaps, finally, he was getting close to understanding why his parents had split up. And maybe, just maybe, why his father had been murdered. He took a deep breath, got out of the car and rang the doorbell.

It was answered by a grey-haired woman with blue eyes, fine cheekbones and pale, translucent skin. Magnus had calculated that if she was the same age as his mother Unnur would be fifty-eight. She looked about that age, but she had a graceful beauty about her. Magnus couldn’t reconcile her with the woman he dimly remembered from his childhood. She must have been a stunner in her time. In Magnus’s father’s time.

‘Yes?’ She smiled hesitantly.

‘Unnur?’

‘That’s me.’

‘Do you mind if I speak with you for a few minutes? My name is Magnús Ragnarsson.’ Magnus waited a beat for the name to register. ‘I am Ragnar Jónsson’s son.’

For a moment, Unnur seemed confused. Then her lips pursed.

‘Yes, I do mind,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’

‘I want to speak with you about my father.’

‘And I don’t want to talk to you about him. That was a long time ago and it has nothing to do with you.’

‘Of course it has something to do with me,’ Magnus said. ‘I have only just found out about the affair. It explains things about my childhood, about my mother and my father. But there is still a lot I don’t understand.’

The woman hesitated.

‘I know it will be painful for you, and for me too. But you are the only person who can help me. I don’t talk to my mother’s family any more, or rather they won’t talk to me.’

Unnur nodded. ‘That doesn’t surprise me.’ She took a deep breath. ‘All right. But my husband is due back soon. He works at the hospital. When he returns, we change the subject, OK?’

‘OK,’ said Magnus.

Unnur led him into the living room, and disappeared to get some coffee. Despite her initial hostility, she couldn’t skip on this basic prerequisite of Icelandic hospitality. Magnus scanned the room. It was comfortable and, like every Icelandic living room, it had the full complement of family photographs. One wall was lined with books in Icelandic, Danish and English. Through a big picture window there was a magnificent view over the grey waters of Breidafjördur, dotted with flat islands, and the silhouettes of the mountains of the West Fjords on the far side.

Unnur moved a pile of exercise books off the sofa to make room for Magnus. ‘Sorry. Marking.’

He sat down.

‘I think I could just about recognize you,’ Unnur said. ‘Your hair’s a bit darker, it used to be really red. You must have been seven or eight then.’

‘I don’t really remember you,’ said Magnus. ‘I wish I recalled more of that time in Reykjavík.’

‘Before everything went wrong?’ Unnur said.

Magnus nodded.

‘So, what can I tell you?’ she asked as she poured Magnus some coffee. Her face was hard and firm, almost defiant.

‘Can you tell me something about my mother?’ Magnus said. ‘What she was really like? I have two different memories of her. I remember warmth and laughter and happiness in our house in Reykjavík. Then distance – we didn’t see her very much, my brother and I stayed up here with my grandfather and she was in Reykjavík a lot of the time. At the time I thought she was always tired; now I am pretty sure she was drunk.’

Unnur smiled. ‘She was good fun. Really good fun. We were at school together, here in Stykkishólmur.’

‘I went to school here as well,’ Magnus said.

‘It was a good school,’ Unnur said. ‘It still is. I teach there now – English and Danish. Anyway we became best friends when we were about thirteen, I suppose. Margrét was smart. She loved to read, as did I. And the boys liked her. We both spent a summer together in Denmark at a language school, which was fun. And we decided we wanted to go to Reykjavík and become teachers.’

Unnur was warming up. ‘We had a blast. We shared a flat together in 101; we had a great time. We both qualified and started teaching in schools in Reykjavík, different schools. Margrét met your father, they fell in love, got married, and I moved out to make room for him. We got along very well, the three of us. We were all good friends.’

Unnur paused. ‘Are you sure to want to hear this?’ she asked Magnus.

‘Yes. And please tell me the truth, however unpleasant it is. Now I am here I want to know.’

‘All right. That was when your mother started to drink. I mean we all drank, although in those days it was mostly spirits, it still wasn’t legal to sell beer in Iceland and wine was almost unheard of. But Margrét began to drink more than us. At the time, I didn’t know why. She wasn’t unhappy with her life, and up till then she didn’t seem to be unhappy with Ragnar.’

‘At the time?’

‘Yes. I’ve thought about it a lot since then, and perhaps I do know the reason.’ Unnur took a deep breath. ‘Her father was a brute. I was scared of him at school, I’ve always been scared of him. And he had a weird relationship with Margrét. He was fond of her, doted on her, yet he was very strict. He had a strong psychological hold over her: that was why she wanted to move away to Reykjavík, I am sure. He messed with her head.’

That didn’t surprise Magnus.

Unnur took a sip of coffee. ‘Anyway, then you and Óli showed up. Your mother was fine most of the time, but then she would get depressed about something, drink a lot and give Ragnar a hard time. A very hard time.’

She bit her lip. ‘And now we come to the difficult bit. Ragnar used to confide in me about her. One time, they had been having a massive fight about him going to America. He had done a fellowship at MIT for a couple of years, before he met your mother, and they wanted him back to teach. It was some strange branch of mathematics, topology or something?’

‘Riemann surfaces.’

‘She changed her mind and didn’t want to go. They had a major row about it. He and I had a drink together, and then, well…’ She hesitated. ‘Well. I had always fancied him ever since I had first seen him. I always wished he had chosen me. I was wrong, very wrong. So was he. We have no excuses.’ She looked straight at Magnus. ‘I’m not going to make excuses to you, of all people.’

‘Thanks for telling me about it,’ said Magnus. His mind was a turmoil of confused judgements, against his father, against his mother, against the woman sitting opposite him. But he wanted to find out the truth, so he suppressed them, at least for now.

‘Then Margrét began to suspect something. Your father thought the best thing to do was to be honest, admit everything. I thought that was a really bad idea, but he didn’t listen to me.’ Unnur shook her head. ‘So he told her. It tipped her over the edge as far as drinking was concerned. She kicked Ragnar out. Ragnar dumped me. He went to America by himself. The whole thing was horrible.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘Margrét wouldn’t speak to me, unsurprisingly. I never saw her after that. Of course I heard about her, the drinking, her parents looking after you and Óli, and then her death.’

Magnus swallowed. He knew his mother had drunk half a bottle of vodka and driven into a rock. ‘Was that suicide, do you think?’ It was a question he had asked himself countless times.

‘I think so,’ said Unnur. ‘But I really don’t know. That’s no more than an opinion. Your grandparents swore that she didn’t crash on purpose. The rumours around Stykkishólmur were that she did. But no one really knows. When someone is that drunk they don’t know what they are doing anyway, do they?’

‘No,’ said Magnus. ‘They don’t.’

They sat in silence for a moment. ‘What about my father?’ he asked. ‘What was he like?’

‘He was a fine man,’ said Unnur. ‘Kind. Considerate. Very smart. Very good-looking.’

That was too much for Magnus. ‘He can’t have been that fine a man,’ he said. ‘Screwing his wife’s best friend.’

Unnur tensed. ‘No,’ she said coldly. ‘He can’t have been.’ She looked directly at Magnus. ‘Perhaps you had better go now. You are right, this is painful for both of us.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Magnus, fighting to control himself. ‘The thing is, I thought he was a wonderful man too, and then I find out he did this to Mom. But I do appreciate you telling me.’

Unnur hesitated. ‘It must be tough for you,’ she said. ‘And I suppose that wasn’t such a wonderful thing that we did, was it?’

‘What happened to you?’

‘I met a doctor in Reykjavík. We got married, had children. I moved back here to teach, and he works in the hospital. I’m OK. No, better than OK, happy.’

‘Unlike my parents.’

‘Unlike your parents,’ Unnur said. ‘It’s not really fair, is it? I mean, it was me who caused all this. I remember them both very fondly, before everything got messed up, before I messed everything up.’

Magnus remained silent. Despite his instincts, who was he to apportion blame? But Unnur’s sense of guilt seemed justified. He wasn’t going to absolve her either.

‘I heard about Ragnar, of course,’ Unnur said. ‘Did they ever find out who did it?’

‘No,’ said Magnus. ‘They think that a random stranger drove into town, stabbed my father, and then left leaving no trace.’

‘I suppose that happens in America,’ Unnur said.

‘Not really,’ said Magnus. ‘I ended up becoming a homicide detective there. And usually there is a reason why one person kills another. It may be a stupid reason, but there is a reason.’

‘Just not in this case.’

Suddenly the suspicions that had been bubbling deep under the surface of Magnus’s consciousness ever since he had first heard of his father’s infidelity forced themselves into the open. He couldn’t ignore the connections his detective’s brain was making, couldn’t order it to stop doing what it had been trained to do.

But unlike the rush of excitement he usually experienced when things slipped into place, he now felt suddenly cold. His throat was dry, and when he spoke the sound that came out was little more than a croak.

‘I wonder.’

Unnur noticed something was wrong; she was watching him closely. ‘What do you wonder?’

‘Whether Grandpa was in some way responsible.’

Unnur frowned for a moment and then smiled.

This irritated Magnus. ‘What’s so funny?’ ‘There is no chance of that,’ Unnur said. ‘I mean, he’s a nasty old man, for sure, and he had a terrible hold over your mother. And he didn’t like Ragnar at all. But that’s the point. He was glad Ragnar went to the States and left Margrét here. In fact, that was what he wanted all along.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, at first Margrét was very excited about MIT. She had always wanted to live abroad and this seemed like a great opportunity for both of them.’

‘So she intended to go with Dad?’

‘Absolutely. But when she told her parents, they went ballistic, both of them. I don’t know why exactly, they got it all out of proportion. Hallgrímur demanded Margrét stay in Iceland, but she insisted on going with Ragnar. It became a trial of strength. Her parents used every psychological weapon at their disposal. Made her feel guilty, refused to speak to her, that kind of thing. They were difficult people to oppose.’

‘I remember,’ said Magnus.

‘At first Margrét held out. But it was eating her up. She began to drink a lot. She fought with Ragnar, she was just totally unreasonable. And in the end she changed her mind. Said that Ragnar should go by himself, and that she would stay in Iceland with you and Óli.

‘Ragnar was furious. That’s when… well… it happened between me and him.’

Unnur paused. Sighing.

‘So, when Margrét found out about the affair her parents were overjoyed. They had won, Ragnar lost, their daughter and grandchildren stayed in Iceland.’

‘I see,’ said Magnus. But the thought that his grandfather might have been responsible for his father’s murder, once expressed, could not be easily abandoned. ‘That’s not quite the story that I heard from my cousin. She said that it was the affair that caused Margrét to drink. That led to her death.’

‘That’s not right,’ said Unnur. ‘Like I said, she had been drinking seriously for several months before then. I’m sure it’s the story Hallgrímur made up. He was hardly likely to admit that he drove his own daughter to drink, was he?’

‘No,’ said Magnus. ‘But do you not think that later, after my mother had died, and especially after my father took us away from them, my grandfather might have wanted revenge?’

‘Perhaps. I mean, as I said, he certainly didn’t like your father. But I get the impression that there are many people whom your grandfather doesn’t like. And I don’t think he kills all of them.’ She frowned, thinking. ‘And anyway, why wait? I mean it was ten years after your mother died, wasn’t it?’

‘Eight,’ said Magnus. ‘And that is a good point. I don’t know. But I can imagine him capable of it.’

‘That’s true.’

Unnur paused, as if considering whether to say more. Magnus recognized the signs. He waited. Eventually she spoke. ‘Did you know Hallgrímur’s father murdered someone?’

‘What! I never heard anything about that.’

‘Of course you didn’t. It was his neighbour at Hraun. Jóhannes.’

‘How do you know?’

Unnur stood up and searched her shelves. She handed Magnus an old paperback. Moor and the Man by Benedikt Jóhannesson.

‘What’s this?’

‘Read chapter three.’ They were interrupted by the sound of a car pulling up. ‘You’d better go now, that’s my husband.’

Still trying to make sense of all he had heard, Magnus stared dumbly at the book in his hands. Another murder in his family?

‘Magnús?’

‘All right, I’ll go,’ he said. ‘Thanks for the coffee. And for speaking to me so honestly.’

‘Not at all,’ said Unnur. ‘Keep the book. And read chapter three.’