66 Degrees North

CHAPTER TWENTY

FRIKKI SAT IN the back of the church as the priest droned on. Magda had forced him to come with her to the large concrete Catholic cathedral on the hill on the other side of the centre of town from the Hallgrímskirkja. She was sitting next to him now, struggling to make sense of the sermon the priest was giving. Frikki had given up after the first sentence.

She had wanted him to pray for forgiveness. He wasn’t sure how to do that. He closed his eyes. ‘Forgive me, God,’ he muttered to himself. Was that enough? He wasn’t sure. ‘Forgive me, God,’ he repeated. Why should God forgive him, a loser without a job, who stole, who never went to church? Who had killed someone.

The only good thing about Frikki’s life was Magda. If God had any sense he wouldn’t bother saving Frikki, he would save Magda from Frikki.

Frikki closed his eyes again. ‘Please, God, don’t take Magda away from me.’

Frikki thought he would be bored, but he wasn’t. It was a peaceful building with its smooth blue columns. Although he didn’t feel a part of the congregation of earnest worshippers, most of whom were foreign, they did give the place a sense of calm. No one stared at him, although Frikki was sure everyone must know he was the only Protestant in a Catholic church.

He could sort of see why Magda liked coming to places like this every week. He could understand why religion made sense for her. But not for him.

He didn’t really believe in God. And he was quite sure that if there was a God, He didn’t believe in Frikki.

Had he killed the banker? He had no way of knowing whether the man was already dead before Frikki had kicked him. Sometimes, in his better moods, Frikki was convinced he was. At other times, like now, Frikki was pretty sure he wasn’t.

The worst thing was, for those few moments back in January, Frikki had actually wanted to kill him.

Those few seconds would stay with him for the rest of his life. He would always be a murderer, even when he was an old man. And now Magda knew.

But not only did she know, she understood. She said that she would forgive him, and that God would forgive him.

They were all standing up and walking up to the priest to kneel down and take the bread and the wine. The choir sang. Magda bobbed down on one knee, made the sign of the cross, and followed them. There was no way Frikki was going to do that.

Suddenly it came to him. For Magda truly to forgive Frikki, she had to believe God had forgiven him.

He knelt down to pray.

When he got back to Reykjavík, Magnus dropped Ingileif off at her apartment, and drove back to his own place in Njálsgata. He poured himself a beer and flopped into his armchair.

Seeing his grandfather again after all those years had shaken him. He knew he had been wrong to take it out on Ingileif, but she should have realized that it was time to back off.

He sipped his beer and tried to make sense of it all. His father’s affair with Unnur. The series of deaths spanning fifty years. His father’s own death.

He was very tempted just to ignore everything, focus on today, on Óskar and Gabríel Örn.

But Ingileif was right: he, of all people, couldn’t step back now he was beginning to discover so much.

He needed to do two things. Find out whether his grandfather had been in America when his father had been murdered, and look at the file on Benedikt Jóhannesson’s death in 1985.

His phone beeped. He checked it. A voicemail. He called the number and heard his brother’s voice.

‘Hey, Magnus, it’s Ollie. Just checking in. Call me back when you have a moment.’ The message had been left an hour before, probably when Magnus was out of reception somewhere on the way back from Stykkishólmur.

Ollie. Poor Ollie. Unlike Magnus, who had always been drawn by his Icelandic roots, Ollie had denied them. He was an American through and through: America still provided that service it had offered to immigrants throughout its history, the opportunity to stop being who they were and start being who they wanted to be. Ollie had taken up the offer with enthusiasm.

And given the miserable time he had had in Iceland, who could blame him?

Magnus considered calling Ollie back there and then and telling him where he had been. Perhaps it would give Ollie a chance to exorcize some old ghosts.

Or perhaps not. Magnus couldn’t face talking to him that evening. He’d call back tomorrow. Or the day after.

He finished the beer, and turned on his small TV as he went to the fridge for another one.

It was the news on RÚV, the public broadcasting station. There was a story about Julian Lister, the former British Chancellor of the Exchequer. It seemed to Magnus the Icelanders should let that one go. Sure, they had been treated badly, but Lister wasn’t the cause of their problems, nor was he the solution, especially after he had been dumped by his own Prime Minister.

But there was something about the newsreader’s tone that was not quite right. Magnus glanced at the pictures. An ambulance. A hospital in France.

He sat down and watched.

Julian Lister had been shot twice by an unknown gunman at his holiday home in Normandy. He was in a critical condition at a hospital in Rouen. No arrests had yet been made. Speculation focused on a terrorist assassination attempt with Al-Qaeda the first-choice suspects and Irish Republicans second, but the French police were making no comment.

There are going to be some Icelanders that will be happy to hear that, thought Magnus.

Then he thought a little harder.

No. There couldn’t be a link between Gabríel Örn, Óskar and Julian Lister, that was too far-fetched. Besides, Magnus had seen Björn and Harpa in Iceland that weekend, so there was no chance that they had shot anyone in France. He was letting his desire to get involved in an interesting murder case get the better of him.

And yet.