66 Degrees North

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

ANNA ÖSK SET her little pony off at a canter around her bedroom. She had had the pony for three weeks now, since her birthday, and she still liked to play with it all the time.

Her mother said she could have a real one when she was nine. Her daddy wasn’t so sure. He was worried about money. He was always worried about money. Silly man. Mummy had told her that they were rich. It was obvious: they had a really big house right in the middle of Reykjavík by the lake.

But when she got her pony they couldn’t keep it at home. Apparently their garden wasn’t big enough. Which was also silly. Their garden was really big, much bigger than the one belonging to Anna Ösk’s best friend Sara Rós.

Anna Ösk lifted up her pony to the window to look at the garden. Her bedroom was on the second floor, high up, and she had a good view. She could see exactly where you could put a stable, right in the corner where the little tree was. Easy-peasy.

As she was planning the exact positioning of the structure, Anna Ösk noticed some movement in the next-door garden. Someone was crawling through the bushes at the back. It was a man. He was really difficult to see, but Anna Ösk could tell it wasn’t the man who lived in the house next door. She wondered if he was playing hide-and-seek.

He must have been because he crawled right up to the neighbour’s car, which was parked at the top of the driveway, and then slid until he was halfway underneath.

Anna Ösk looked around for a child. As a rule, grown-ups didn’t play hide-and-seek by themselves. She couldn’t see one, but she was sure there must be one somewhere. Probably at the front of the house, the man was well hidden from the front or the road.

Very strange. She would tell her mummy what she had seen.

‘Anna Ösk!’ Her mother’s voice crashed up the stairs. This didn’t sound good.

‘Anna Ösk, come downstairs this minute! How many times have I told you to pick up your toys from the kitchen floor when you have finished playing? I’ve had enough! No TV this afternoon, do you hear me?’

Anna Ösk began to cry.

Magnus pulled up outside the wooden police station in Grundarfjördur and stepped out of the Range Rover.

‘Magnús!’

He turned to see the burly figure of Páll in his black uniform walking rapidly towards him from the direction of the harbour.

‘That was quick,’ Páll said.

‘Not much traffic.’

Páll smiled.

‘Any trace of Björn?’ Magnus asked.

‘None so far. No one has seen him for a couple of days in the harbour. It’s unlikely he took a boat out: certainly no one saw him if he did. The harbourmaster said he would check whether any small boats were missing that hadn’t been reported. I stopped in quickly to talk to his parents and his sister. They say they haven’t heard anything from him either. Same at the café the fishermen often use. The police in Stykkishólmur and Ólafsvík are looking for him too. They’ve set up road blocks on every route out of the peninsula.’

That at least was possible: there were no more than a couple of routes out of the Snaefells Peninsula. But the peninsula itself was big, perhaps eighty kilometres long and fifteen wide, and full of mountains. Impossible to search thoroughly.

Magnus wondered about a helicopter. But although sun shone along the shoreline, the mountains themselves were enveloped in cloud.

Of course if Björn had left the area the night before he could be over the other side of Iceland by now. But if he was planning to hide Harpa he might choose somewhere he knew. Somewhere close to home.

‘So what’s next?’

‘I thought shops and petrol stations,’ said Páll. ‘He may have stocked up with supplies or fuel. There aren’t many of them in town: do you want to split up or come with me?’

‘Let’s do it together,’ Magnus said. ‘You know the town and the people. I’ll just waste time.’

‘Good,’ said Páll moving towards his white police car. ‘Jump in. And you can tell me what’s really going on.’

Ísak drove his mother’s poor Honda off what was left of the track, and round the back of a large conical rock. Miraculously the axle didn’t break. He scuffed the tyre marks in the dirt with his foot. He didn’t want Björn to notice the car should he decide to drive back up the pass.

He took the knife he had bought in Borgarnes out of the plastic bag and thrust it into the pocket of his coat. Then he crept back to the boulder. The hut was about two hundred metres from where the road emerged into the open. There was virtually no cover, but only one of the windows in the hut faced that way, and that was high up, probably a little higher than eye level.

He noticed that the cloud was thickening and creeping down the walls of the valley.

On the other side of the building was a cliff about thirty metres high, with a waterfall cascading down it. There seemed to be a vertical crevice in the rock there big enough for a man to squeeze and still have a view of the hut.

Ísak gave it a try. He ran, crouching, around the hut, keeping himself out of the field of vision of the bigger windows at the side of the building. He pressed himself into the crevice. His view of the hut was indeed clear, and he was pretty sure that Björn wouldn’t be able to see him. The only problem was that water from the cascade was constantly splashing on to him, and it was cold. Very cold.

He would wait until Björn left the hut again. Then he would slip inside and deal with Harpa. Wait until Björn came back and as he discovered her body, slash a tyre of Björn’s truck and run up the road to his own car.

Leave it to Björn to dispose of Harpa’s body.

But then, if Björn was subsequently caught, which he probably would be, he would talk.

No. Ísak would just have to kill Björn as well as Harpa. Either wait until Björn left the hut and surprise him when he returned, or if Björn didn’t leave, creep into the hut after night fell and they were both asleep. If Ísak wasn’t frozen to death by then.

It wasn’t ideal, but he was committed now.

Magnus waited in the car as Páll went into Samkaup, the main supermarket in town. He called Baldur and told him that there was no sign of Björn. He had already passed on Sharon’s message about Ísak’s disappearance.

Baldur was businesslike. Sindri wasn’t talking. Not a word. Wasn’t even bothering with a lawyer. Magnus wasn’t surprised. If there was one more hit still to come, Sindri would be happy to bide his time.

Árni had checked with Ísak’s parents. Ísak had left home at nine o’clock the previous evening in his mother’s car, a small Honda, loaded with camping stuff. She said that the family had been on a number of camping trips to Thórsmörk, a hundred and fifty kilometres to the east of Reykjavík.

They had struck lucky. Calling around campsites, they had discovered that Ísak had been spotted at a site near Hveragerdi, to the south-east of Reykjavík, on the way to Thórsmörk. Although Baldur and Magnus agreed that Ísak wasn’t going on a little holiday jaunt, it was possible that if he was looking for wilderness to hide in, he might choose an area with which he was familiar.

Or he might be in the Snaefells Peninsula with Björn and Harpa.

Magnus suggested that they pull Gulli in. Perhaps somehow he had travelled from Tenerife to London and Paris and then back to Tenerife. Unlikely, but they didn’t want to take any chances: if he was in custody he couldn’t assassinate anyone. Baldur agreed. He had given up condemning Magnus’s wilder ideas. The stakes were too high.

Páll returned to the car. ‘Nothing. Let’s go on.’

Grundarfjördur was a small, compact town and it didn’t take long for Páll to get from place to place. They checked Vínbúd, the state liquor store, and then went on to the petrol station.

The kid behind the counter knew Björn Helgason but hadn’t seen him since he had filled up his red pickup the morning of the day before.

‘That was probably to get down to Reykjavík,’ Magnus said. As an afterthought, just as he was leaving, he paused.

‘You haven’t seen a young guy in here have you? A student, twenty-two years old, neatly dressed, about one seventy-five tall, fair hair, little dimple on his chin? Driving a small blue Honda?’

‘Yes,’ said the kid. ‘A guy like that was in here about an hour ago. Asked me where a mountain pass was with a hut. I told him about the Kerlingin Pass. He’d never even heard of the troll. Can you believe it? These guys from Reykjavík don’t know anything.’