66 Degrees North

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

HARPA LOOKED NERVOUS as she sat in the interview room. One hand was tugging and twisting the curls in her hair.

Magnus had called Vigdís, who was still on duty, and asked her to bring Harpa in and take her photograph. A copy had already been sent by e-mail to Piper in London.

Magnus and Vigdís had hatched a plan for the interview.

‘Hi, Harpa, thank you for coming in,’ Magnus said. ‘Have you been offered some coffee?’

Harpa shook her head.

‘Would you like some?’

‘No thank you.’ Harpa glanced at both detectives suspiciously. ‘Why am I here?’

Magnus smiled. ‘We’ve got a couple more little questions to ask you. Things come out in an investigation like this, and we have to go back and check them out with witnesses. Sorry, but that’s just the way it works.’

Harpa seemed to relax a bit. ‘OK. What do you want to know?’

‘Have you travelled abroad in the last few months?’ Magnus asked.

Harpa didn’t answer right away. At that moment, Magnus was sure that Harpa was the woman that Claudia had seen. Magnus and Vigdís waited expectantly.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I went to London in July. Just for a couple of days.’

‘Ah, I see. And why did you go?’

‘Oh, you know, shopping.’

‘Shopping?’ Magnus raised his eyebrows. ‘That might have made sense a year ago. But now? Everything is so expensive abroad now, isn’t it? And you can’t have very much money or you wouldn’t be working in a bakery. In fact how many weeks’ wages did the trip cost?’

‘It’s true. It was expensive,’ Harpa said. ‘But I needed a holiday really badly.’

‘I’ll bet,’ said Magnus.

‘What did you buy?’ Vigdís asked.

‘Oh, um, nothing in the end,’ Harpa said, trying to sound casual. ‘You are right. I hadn’t realized how expensive things are there until I was actually in the shops.’

‘Did you visit any friends?’ Magnus asked.

‘Er. No,’ said Harpa.

‘So you didn’t see any other Icelanders?’

Harpa glanced at the two detectives. Magnus could see that she understood the trap. She didn’t know how much they knew. How far she would have to tell the truth in order to avoid being caught out.

‘I did see one Icelander,’ she said, carefully.

‘And who was that?’ Magnus asked innocently.

‘Óskar,’ Harpa said. ‘Óskar Gunnarsson.’

‘Huh.’ Magnus didn’t mention the fact that Harpa had left that information out of their previous discussions. Not yet. ‘And what did you talk with Óskar about?’

‘Er, well, I don’t remember. I suppose I was a bit lonely in London and I wanted to see an old friend.’

‘And how long did you spend with him?’

‘Twenty minutes. Half an hour. He was busy, he had somewhere to go.’

She must have figured out that Claudia had seen them together.

Magnus leaned forward. ‘How much money did you ask him for?

‘What? I, er, I didn’t ask him for money.’

‘Yes you did, Harpa. How much? A million krónur? Ten million? Perhaps something every month?’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about. Why would I ask him for money?’

‘To pay for his son, Harpa. To pay for his son.’

‘No, no that’s not right,’ Harpa said, her voice rising. ‘He never knew Markús was his son. He never knew that. I told you that.’

‘You told us a lot of things, Harpa, and frankly I don’t believe many of them. Now, how much did you ask for?’

Harpa was breathing heavily. ‘Am I under arrest?’

‘Not yet,’ said Magnus. ‘But we can fix that if you like.’

‘I won’t say anything more unless I have spoken to a lawyer. I have a right to speak to a lawyer, don’t I?’

‘You do,’ said Vigdís, nodding towards the tape recorder. Magnus understood. This all had to be done according to the book, if the evidence was going to be admissible. It was just a slightly different book than he was used to. ‘Do you have one in mind, or would you like us to call one for you?’

‘Um, I have a friend who is a lawyer. Can I call her?’

‘Just wait a moment,’ said Vigdís. She turned off the tape and indicated to Magnus that they should leave the room.

‘So we get her a lawyer, right?’ said Magnus, once they were outside.

‘We speak to Baldur first,’ said Vigdís.

‘But you know what he’ll say,’ said Magnus in frustration. ‘Let her go.’

‘Actually, I don’t,’ said Vigdís. ‘But I do know that if we take this interview any further without discussing it with him he will be seriously pissed off.’

‘Well, let him be pissed off!’ Magnus had trouble keeping his voice down. ‘Someone’s got to crack this case open, and if we don’t do it, no one else will!’

‘Magnús,’ Vigdís said. She looked at him steadily.

‘All right,’ said Magnus, the frustration subsiding to a simmer. ‘You’re right. Let’s go talk to him.’

Baldur was in his office. He listened closely to what Magnus and Vigdís had to report. He was a good detective. He spotted what had been going on at once.

‘How did Sharon know that the dark-haired Icelandic woman who visited Óskar was important?’

Magnus could try bullshitting his boss, but that was never a good long-term strategy. ‘I told her about Harpa. In fact she was with me when Harpa admitted that Óskar was the father of her child.’

Baldur glared at Magnus. ‘I specifically told you to leave Harpa out of it.’

‘I know. I kept it unofficial,’ Magnus said. ‘And Sharon didn’t make a big deal of it at the British end. But she needed to know about Harpa just in case a link came up at her end. Which it did.’

Baldur ran his hand over his bare forehead where his hair had once grown many years before. ‘OK. OK, I take your point. But we know Harpa didn’t actually kill Óskar, right? She was in Iceland at the time.’

‘Yes, it looks that way. Her boss says she came to work early the following morning. We can check out the alibi more thoroughly, but my guess is it will stand.’

‘So what about the boyfriend?’

‘We don’t know where he was. I tried to see him today up in Grundarfjördur but he was out on a boat somewhere.’

‘I didn’t realize you were working today?’

Magnus shrugged.

‘OK,’ said Baldur. ‘You need to check him out.’

‘What about Harpa?’ Vigdís asked.

‘Let Harpa get her lawyer. And then ask her about Óskar and only Óskar. I don’t want you linking this to Gabríel Örn’s suicide, do you understand?’

‘But what if there is a link?’ Magnus protested.

‘There isn’t,’ Baldur said. ‘There is no firm evidence of one. And I don’t want you conjuring evidence out of thin air. ’

‘But the lawyer will tell her to keep her mouth shut,’ Magnus said.

‘Quite possibly,’ Baldur said. ‘And in that case, you let her go.’

Frikki and Magda sat on a stone on Grótta beach and watched the sun set. Despite the recent wind, the sea was calm and quiet, lapping against the black gritty shore. Ducks patrolled the water a few metres out, while along the shoreline a busy little gathering of small grey and white birds scampered in and out in time with the gentle waves.

The sun, a milky yellow ball, was heading for the horizon straight ahead of them. Layer upon layer of creamy clouds reflected its light in orange and gold. Way out to sea, there was nothing. Just the Atlantic.

Frikki and Magda had talked incessantly as they had walked along the beach, with Frikki doing most of the talking. It was strange: before she had come he had decided he would hide the dullness and the misery of his life, the fact that he found it difficult to get up in the morning, the way his whole week was concerned with looking forward to getting smashed at the weekend. But actually he found he wanted to talk to her about it, and she listened.

He didn’t tell her everything, of course. Nothing about the drugs. Or the petty burglary.

And now they sat in silence, watching the sun on its slow, inexorable descent towards the sea.

‘I know you stole that laptop, Frikki,’ said Magda.

‘What!’ Frikki was shocked out of his reverie. He turned to her in fake outrage. ‘I bought it off Gunni. Cheap. I told you that.’

Magda looked at him steadily, her eyes warm, without judgement.

‘Honest,’ he said.

‘OK,’ she said at last, and turned back to the sea.

The sun slipped further. ‘You’re right,’ said Frikki. ‘I did steal it. Some idiot left it on the front seat of his car. Mine was bust and I needed a computer. I had to keep in touch with you. Do you understand?’

‘I understand,’ said Magda.

She didn’t say: ‘but it was still wrong’. She didn’t have to.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Frikki. ‘Can you forgive me?’

‘Of course, I can forgive you,’ said Magda. ‘But what I really want to do is help you.’

‘What do you mean?’

Magda took hold of his hand. ‘I love you, Frikki. I’m sure this year has been hard for you. I know you’ve been trying to hide it, but I can see you are letting things go. Doing things you shouldn’t do.’

‘You’re right,’ said Frikki, giving her hand a quick squeeze. He took out a cigarette and lit it. Magda didn’t smoke.

‘What did the police want to see you about?’

‘I don’t want to say,’ said Frikki.

‘Was it stealing?’

Frikki didn’t answer. Magda removed her hand. They sat in silence.

‘It was worse than that,’ said Frikki. ‘A lot worse.’

‘Tell me.’

Frikki took a deep breath. And told her.

Magnus went to Ingileif’s apartment that evening. As she cooked supper she talked about her day in the gallery and quizzed him about the case. He told her about missing Björn at Grundarfjördur and about Harpa’s visit to Óskar in London. He mentioned nothing about Unnur.

After dinner he called Sharon Piper in London to tell her about the interview with Harpa. Unsurprisingly, Harpa had said nothing once her lawyer had arrived, and following Baldur’s instructions Magnus had let her go. Magnus also told Sharon about Ísak, the student at the London School of Economics who had had an argument with Harpa the night Gabríel Örn had died. Sharon agreed to talk to him.

When he had finished the call, Ingileif picked up her cello. She was still quite a serious player and practised almost every day. Magnus liked to listen to her, or to read while she was playing. She started on one of her favourites, a piece by Brahms. Magnus knew that whenever he heard that particular piece in future he would think of her.

It was all very domestic. And yet there were things that Magnus didn’t understand about Ingileif. They were not ‘in a relationship’ in the American sense of the word. Ingileif came and went as she pleased, made her own plans. Magnus wasn’t quite sure what his role in her life was. Should they spend time together at the weekend? Should he ask her what she was doing? What was she doing?

Sometimes Magnus wondered whether she was seeing other men. He had asked her once and she had denied it and got angry at him for even thinking it. But he was still suspicious. Perhaps that was because he was a cop, always suspicious.

He dispelled those uncomfortable thoughts from his mind and opened the novel Unnur had given him, Moor and the Man. He decided to read chapters one and two before getting on to chapter three.

It was about a family recently arrived in Reykjavík in 1944. The war and the British and American occupation of Iceland had brought wealth to the country. The man of the title was a young farm labourer named Arnór from an unspecified area of the countryside who had moved to Reykjavík looking for work. The book was well written and the story had gripped Magnus by the time he turned to chapter three, a flashback to Arnór’s childhood.

It was spring, and Arnór and his best friend Jói from a neighbouring farm crept into the barn to play in the hay, something they were strictly forbidden from doing. They heard rustling and grunting. At first they thought that some large animal had found refuge there, or perhaps a tramp. As they crept nearer they recognized the sounds as human, and not just human, but coming from their parents. Arnór’s father was making love to Jói’s mother, the farmer’s wife, right there in the hay.

The two boys ran away without being seen.

A month later, the boys were playing by a secluded lake some distance from the farm. They were on their way home when Arnór realized he had forgotten his knife and returned to the lake. He saw Jói’s father the farmer rowing out from the shore of the tarn, a large sack visible at the bow of the boat. When he reached the middle he paused and shipped his oars. With a fair bit of heaving and cursing, he rolled the heavy sack out of the boat and into the water.

Arnór returned home. His father was late back from a trip to the local town. When he failed to return home that night, his mother raised the alarm. Arnór’s father was never seen nor heard from again. The theory was that he had fled to America, but if he had, he never sent word back to Iceland. And Arnór never told anyone what he had seen.

Magnus closed the book. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said in English.

Unnur had claimed that Hallgrímur’s father had killed Benedikt’s father, Jóhannes, who was the farmer at Hraun. If the episode in the novel was based on that, that would mean that Benedikt and Hallgrímur were the two small boys, and Jóhannes’s body was in a nearby lake: either Swine Lake or perhaps the lake next to it, Hraunsfjardarvatn.

Magnus hadn’t heard anything about a neighbour being murdered, or even disappearing. But if it had happened when his grandfather was a child, that would have been in the 1930s. Neither had he heard about a writer living nearby, there certainly wasn’t one there during Magnus’s four-year stay in the 1980s. But Benedikt could easily have moved away years before.

Ingileif paused in her playing. She had noticed the stunned expression on Magnus’s face.

‘What are you reading?’ she asked.

Magnus held up the cover of his book.

‘Oh, I’ve read that. It’s not bad. I like him.’

‘I’ve never read anything he wrote until now.’

‘He’s quite good. A bit like Steinbeck, but not that good. I’ve read most of his books, I think. Why the sudden interest? And why the “Jesus Christ”?’

Magnus told Ingileif about his visit to Unnur. He felt slightly guilty about not mentioning it to her before, but she seemed to understand, and she didn’t dwell on what Unnur had said about her affair with his father, for which Magnus was grateful.

‘I remember that chapter,’ Ingileif said. ‘So this woman thinks that the guy who killed Benedikt’s father was your great-grandfather?’

‘That’s right. Gunnar was his name.’

‘Do you remember him? Was he still alive when you were at Bjarnarhöfn?’

‘No, he had been dead a long time. I don’t know very much about him. Apart from how he died.’

‘And how was that?’

‘Have you heard of Búland’s Head?’

‘It’s on the Snaefells Peninsula somewhere, isn’t it? I’ve never been there.’

‘That’s right. It isn’t too far from my grandfather’s farm. It’s one of those places that has a bunch of folk tales attached to it. The road from Grundarfjördur to Ólafsvík runs along its edge. It used to be very narrow, and it’s still pretty scary, or it was in the nineteen eighties. Apparently my great-grandfather slipped and fell. He was riding his horse.’

‘But no one told you about him being suspected of killing anyone?’

‘No. But then my grandparents would be hardly likely to tell me. As you know, I lived with my father from the age of twelve and he never spoke about my mother’s family. Do you know anything about this guy Benedikt Jóhannesson?’

‘A bit. He wrote in the sixties and seventies. I think that might have been one of his last books.’

Magnus checked the front of the book. ‘Copyright 1985.’

‘There you are. Actually, he died about then. I think he might have been murdered. I’m sure he was. Hold on, let’s google him.’

Ingileif grabbed her laptop and after a certain amount of fiddling about they were on the Icelandic Wikipedia entry for Benedikt Jóhannesson. Born 1926, died 1985. He was born and brought up on a farm on the Snaefells Peninsula. He studied Icelandic at the University of Iceland and lived in Reykjavík. He published a dozen novels, the last of which was Moor and the Man, and several collections of short stories.

‘Those are quite good,’ said Ingileif. ‘I think I prefer them to the novels, although they are not as popular.’

They read on. ‘Look at that!’ exclaimed Ingileif, pointing to the section headed Death.

Magnus was a couple of lines behind her; he skipped a bit, and read the section. ‘Jeez.’

In 1985 Benedikt Jóhannesson was found murdered at his home in Reykjavík. The crime was never solved, but the police assumed it was a burglar.

‘There you are, Mr Detective,’ said Ingileif. ‘There’s something to get your teeth into.’