66 Degrees North

CHAPTER SEVEN

‘H ERE THEY COME!’

Sindri looked up at the mountainside and saw a stream of white burst over the ridge, as first a few dozen, then a hundred, and then more than a thousand sheep hurried down the slopes towards the pens. On either side of the flow were the black shapes of the dogs darting, crouching and running to keep control. In a moment a horseman appeared, and then another, and then some more.

It was a magnificent sight.

The crowd, mostly made up of the families of farmers in the dale, pointed and waved. The drovers had been away for three days scouring the highlands for sheep who had spent the summer roaming wild over the fells, gorging themselves on sweet grass. It was the annual réttir, or sheep drive, one of the biggest events in the farming calendar. It was the first time Sindri had attended since he had left the farm at sixteen, but the memories came flooding back.

He himself had been a drover three times from the age of fourteen. The first couple of times he had been filled with excitement as he had followed his father and his neighbours on horseback over the fells, looking for the ewes and lambs. The third time had been a disaster. The weather was bad, he had got horribly drunk in the rest hut on the last night, and his father had shouted at him for not pulling his weight on the drive.

Two weeks later he had left home to go to Reykjavík. Music, drugs and alcohol, and later London and more drugs and alcohol. His father’s disappointment in him was deep and unyielding. Which wasn’t quite fair. At twenty, Sindri had been the charismatic lead singer of the band Devastation, whose jumbled anarchic screams had reached number two in the UK charts. He was a sensation in his home country and in Europe.

But it lasted less than a year. The money meant the drugs were endlessly on tap. The songs lost any semblance of tune, and Sindri returned to Reykjavík.

He lost a decade of his life. Eventually he managed to pull himself together and got a steady job in a fish factory. He channelled the urge to rebel, tamed it and gave it focus. He joined environmental groups in Iceland opposed to the exploitation of the Icelandic landscape for economic gain. He wrote a book, Capital Rape, which contrasted the simple hard-working life of the Icelandic farmer who nurtured his resources and lived with nature, with the exploitation by the desk-bound urban capitalists who extracted resources and destroyed nature. Capital raped the world around it.

The book was big in Germany, and Sindri earned a bit more money. His father disapproved and Sindri very rarely came home. The truth was that Sindri was as distant from the farm of his childhood as the urban capitalists he ranted against.

Sindri scanned the familiar hills, resplendent in their golds and browns glistening in the September sunshine. The sky was a soft pale blue, dotted with jaunty puffs of white. Horses and dogs were fanning out around the giant flock of sheep, channelling them towards the communal pens. He saw his youngest niece, ten-year-old Frída, jumping up and down in anticipation of seeing her own pet lamb again.

It was nice to see the little girl so happy. She had had a tough year.

Sindri sighed. Frída might not be reunited with her pet lamb for very long.

It turned out that the financial difficulties that his younger brother was suffering over Christmas were not the result of a banker-induced squeeze on agricultural incomes as Sindri had supposed. It was worse than that, although it was still the fault of the bankers. Matti had taken over the family farm when their father had died. For three years, he had been investing in the stock market. With astonishing success, at least initially. He had trebled his money. It was easy.

He had borrowed from the bank against the farm and invested more. And doubled his money. He had bought a new Land Cruiser and taken the whole family on safari to Africa. And invested more. With his new-found expertise, Matti had identified Ódinsbanki as the most promising of the banks. He had first invested two years before. As prices had dipped Matti had recognized a buying opportunity, and ploughed all his profits into the bank stock.

Then of course, it all went horribly wrong.

Matti had never told his wife, Freyja. Oh, she knew that he had invested some of their savings in the stock market, and she knew he was worried about how tight money was, but she had no idea how dire the situation had really become, until one morning in March she had woken up early to find the other side of her bed empty. She was unable to get to sleep herself, and had gone looking for her husband. She had found the back door open and footprints in the snow.

She pulled on boots and a coat and followed the footprints out into the darkness, until she found her husband at his favourite spot at the bottom of the slope down from the home meadow where the brook tumbled over the rocks into a pool.

She hadn’t heard the shot. Or maybe she had. Maybe that was what had woken her up.

She was devastated. But she was a strong woman, a farmer’s daughter from a neighbouring dale, and determined not to let Matti down, despite what he had done to her. Blow after blow fell on the family. The bank threatened foreclosure unless its loans were repaid. The kids were a mess. And there was still a farm to run.

Sindri had felt terrible. He liked Freyja, a blonde woman now in her forties with a strong jaw and a bright eye. He had been fond of his little brother Matti, who had done his duty and taken over the farm from their parents. Matti was the strong, hard-working, slightly unimaginative farmer that over the years Sindri had begun to idolize as the real hero of Iceland.

But perhaps it was Freyja who was the real hero.

As he watched the sheep squeeze into the network of communal pens on the valley floor, Sindri thought again of Bjartur. The man was never far from his thoughts. He had always admired Bjartur, but over the last twelve months the tough crofter had become an obsession.

Bjartur wasn’t real: he was a fictional character, the hero of Nobel Prize winning writer Halldór Laxness’s book Independent People written in 1935. But he was real to Sindri, what he stood for was real, what he represented. Bjartur was a farm labourer who had saved enough to buy his own property, a croft called Summerhouses. He was strong, resilient, proud and above all independent. Through the years in which the book unfolded, he put up with appalling hardship, the death of his wives and children, the ruining of the harvest and consequent shortage of hay for his sheep, the patronizing of his more prosperous neighbours, the curses of the local ghosts.

But Bjartur of Summerhouses never gave up. The First World War came, the ‘Blessed War’ that brought high prices and prosperity to Iceland’s sheep farmers. Improvements were made, the old turf-walled crofts gave way to modern concrete farmhouses.

At first Bjartur resisted, but eventually he too took out a loan from the local Cooperative Society run by Ingólfur Arnarson, a neighbour’s son named after the famous first settler of Iceland, and built himself a house.

The bust followed the boom, as night follows day. Money was scarce. Farmers defaulted. Ingólfur Arnarson left the area for Reykjavík where he soon became Governor of the National Bank and later Prime Minister. Bjartur’s new concrete house was cold, draughty and almost uninhabitable. In the end, he couldn’t keep up with the payments either. The house and the land at Summerhouses was sold off at auction, and Bjartur trudged off over the heath to start all over again, carrying his sick daughter in his arms.

But even at the end, when he had not a króna to his name, he still had his pride, his independence.

In the aftermath of the kreppa, Iceland needed to remember Bjartur.

Unfortunately, it had turned out that Matti wasn’t Bjartur. Matti had succumbed to the bankers, the borrowing, the easy money. Like the rest of Icelandic society, they had destroyed him.

‘Sindri! Will you give us a hand sorting the sheep?’ Freyja was walking rapidly towards him. ‘If you remember how.’

‘I’ll remember,’ said Sindri, and followed her towards the pen.

Once the sheep had been corralled into the communal pens, each farmer’s family went in to sort out their own animals. They were clearly identified by tags, but of course the farmers recognized many of their own animals and had given them names. Frída soon found her Hyrna, much bigger and stronger after the summer in the hills. Sindri was amazed how they could do it; he could dimly remember in his youth that one sheep looked very different from another, but now they all looked pretty much the same. Apart from the odd black one, of course. Sindri had always preferred the black ones.

‘Come on!’ Freyja called to him. Sindri entered the fray. He got butted a couple of times early on, but the technique of straddling the sheep, avoiding their horns, and dragging them off to the correct pen soon came back to him. It was hard work, but there was an air of exhilaration among the farmers of the dale. They were happy to have their sheep back. The animals would graze the home meadows for a month or so, before many of them would go off to slaughter. The rest would spend the winter indoors, pampered by their masters.

After two hours it was all done.

‘Thanks, Sindri,’ said Freyja. ‘That was a great help. The réttarkaffi is at Gunni’s house. Are you coming?’

‘No,’ said Sindri, wiping his brow. ‘I need to get back to Reykjavík.’

‘Why don’t you stay the night with us?’ Freyja asked.

Sindri smiled. ‘I’d like to. But I have some things I have to do tomorrow.’

Freyja looked at him oddly. She clearly didn’t believe that Sindri ever had anything to do that was genuinely important. Which, until recently, was probably true.

‘Well, it was nice to see you. Thank you for your help. And if you ever do have some time and want to stay with us, we could use the extra hands. We couldn’t pay you, but we can feed you well.’

‘Maybe I will,’ said Sindri. ‘Do you know yet when you will have to sell the farm?’

‘The bank are holding off for the time being. But there’s no chance I can ever meet the payments. Why they lent Matti so much money, I will never understand.’

‘I’m sorry about that,’ said Sindri. ‘About what he did.’

Freyja shrugged.

‘What will you do?’ Sindri asked.

‘I’d like to carry on farming if I can, for the girls to have the same upbringing I had. But I don’t know how. My brother works in Reykjavík, he runs a small software company. He thinks he might be able to get me a job. I don’t want to move to Reykjavík, but perhaps we will have to.’

‘Well, let me know what happens,’ Sindri said. ‘Good luck, Freyja.’ He kissed her on the cheek.

As he walked back to his car and the long drive back to Reykjavík he thought that perhaps Bjartur did live on after all.

He felt sick with shame. It was urban dwellers like him who had shafted the farmers; not just the bankers and the politicians like Ólafur Tómasson, but the shoppers in the boutiques on Laugavegur, the easy spenders, the borrowers, the speculators. It was true Sindri had always protested about the capitalist system, but he had abandoned the countryside himself. His brother had succumbed to the allure of easy money.

He liked to blame others for what had happened to Iceland, but the truth was he felt as guilty as the rest of them.

He owed Freyja. And Frída. And he would do something about it.

Back at the station, Magnus phoned Detective Sergeant Piper, with Árni and Vigdís listening in. After seeing Emilía, Magnus and Árni had interviewed Óskar’s younger brother at his house in the Laugardalur district of Reykjavík. He was clearly put out that the family fortune had disappeared, but he was more inclined to praise Óskar for making the money than blame him for losing it.

Vigdís had visited the distraught parents, and searched Óskar’s empty house in Thingholt. Nothing. The banker hadn’t lived there for nine months. The only visitors had been a cleaner every fortnight and a secretary from OBG Investments checking for mail.

Magnus relayed the information, or rather lack of it, to Piper. ‘So no real signs of an Icelandic connection from this end,’ he said. ‘Nor Russian. How about you? Any luck with the motorbikes?’

‘Some. One of the owners is a small-time drug dealer to the wealthy in Kensington. He claims he has never heard of Gunnarsson. We are inclined to believe him. Besides, his bike was a nine-hundred-cc Kawasaki, and one of the witnesses said he thought the killer’s sounded smaller than that.’

Didn’t seem like much of a suspect to Magnus. He was wary of the tendency for policemen the world over to fall upon the nearest small-time dealer and try to pin big crimes on him. At least the British police were resisting the temptation. ‘Anything on any of the others?’

‘Yeah. One of the bikes was nicked last week in Hounslow. A Suzuki one-two-five. We are trying to trace it. Might be something there.’

‘What about the Russian girl?’

‘We pulled her in again. Nothing. She’s cool as a cucumber, though: she could be hiding something. But we have turned up one lead.’

‘What’s that?’

‘A neighbour said a bloke came round a few days ago with a package for Gunnarsson. Didn’t have the right number house. She didn’t know where Gunnarsson lived, but when we asked the other neighbours, one of them remembered pointing him to the right address.’

‘Interesting. Did you get a description?’

‘Yes. Young guy, early twenties, short fair hair. Five-eight or five-nine.’ Magnus was pleased to hear the familiar feet and inches. He still found heights in metres difficult to translate. ‘Broad face, slight dimple on his chin, blue eyes. Black leather jacket, jeans and checked shirt, but neat. Very neat. Too neat for a genuine courier, the neighbour thought. Foreign accent.’

‘What kind of foreign accent?’

‘Ah, that’s the question. The witness is French herself, although she speaks good English. Virginie Rogeon. And she remembered him well. Fancied him, we think, said he was good-looking. She thought the accent might be Polish, but she didn’t know. Northern or Eastern European rather than Italian or Spanish.’

‘Could it be Icelandic?’

‘Is an Icelandic accent distinctive?’

Magnus thought about it. ‘Yes. Yes, I guess it is. You could get some Icelanders to speak to the witness, see if it sounds familiar.’

‘Good thought. We could try the embassy. Or some of Gunnarsson’s friends in London.’

‘So apart from that, no real leads then?’

‘No. It’s early days, but we are struggling a bit. The guv’nor wants me to go to Iceland, if that’s OK with you guys.’

‘Sure,’ said Magnus. ‘Glad to have you. When are you coming?’

‘Probably tomorrow. I’ll let you know when I’ve booked my flight.’

‘Do that. I’ll meet you at the airport.’

‘I’ve never been to Iceland before,’ Piper said. ‘A bit parky is it?’

‘Parky?’

‘You know. Cold. Chilly.’

‘There’s no snow on the ground yet, but the latitude is sixty-six degrees north. You can safely leave the sunscreen at home.’

‘Baldur’s going to love that,’ said Árni when Magnus had hung up. ‘A British bobby on his patch.’

‘I’ll look after her,’ said Magnus. It did seem a bit of a waste of time, but it would be nice to have a native English speaker around.

‘So what now?’ said Vigdís.

Magnus leaned back in his chair and thought. It was quite likely that there was indeed no Icelandic connection, but they had to keep an open mind; more than that, they should operate on the basis that there was a link, otherwise they would definitely miss one if it did exist.

There were still people to talk to, files to read. But he asked himself the key question: from what he had learned so far, what felt wrong?

‘Árni?’

‘Yes?’

‘Tell me more about Gabríel Örn’s death.’

‘I’m sure that doesn’t have any relevance.’

‘Tell me.’

‘OK,’ said Árni. ‘It was last January, right at the peak of the demonstrations. The department was stretched to the limit. We were all out there on the lines, even the detectives, we were working round the clock. We were knackered.

‘Anyway, a body washed up on the shore at Straumsvík by the aluminium smelter. It was naked. The clothes were found ten kilometres up the coast, just by the City Airfield, next to that bike path that runs along the shore. It was Gabríel Örn Bergsson. It turned out he had sent two suicide texts before he went for a swim, one to his mother who raised the alarm, and another to his ex-girlfriend, Harpa Einarsdóttir, who didn’t, or not until the following morning.

‘I went to interview Harpa. She had some story about how she was supposed to meet him at a bar, but he never showed up.’

‘And you didn’t believe her?’

‘She had an alibi. She was seen at the bar, waiting. In fact she got in some kind of argument there. But no, it didn’t seem quite right.’

‘Why not?’

Árni scrunched up his face, frowning deeply, painfully. ‘I don’t know. Nothing I can put my finger on. That’s why I said it was irrelevant.’

‘Were they sure it was suicide?’

‘The pathologist had some slight doubts, I think. As did Baldur. But they were pretty much squashed from on high.’

‘Why?’

‘There was a revolution going on,’ said Vigdís. ‘And up till then it was peaceful. If Gabríel Örn had been murdered on the night of those demos, it would have put an entirely different flavour on the whole situation. The politicians, the Commissioner, everyone was shit scared that things would turn seriously violent. We all were.’

‘Árni, let me tell you something,’ Magnus said. ‘If your gut tells you something, listen to it. It may turn out to be wrong, it often will, but every so often it will be the best evidence you’ve got.’

Árni sighed. ‘All right.’

‘Where does this Harpa woman live?’

‘Seltjarnarnes. I can call her to see if she’s in?’

‘No, Árni. We are going to surprise her.’