Whale Fjord

Thirty

Magnus was in a good mood when he drove into work the next morning.

Ingileif had said yes. They had managed to get a table at Grillmarkadurinn, one of the best and most expensive restaurants in town, and they had had a wonderful evening. They knew, now that they had both finally made the decision, that it was the right one.

Strangely, it had been Ingileif’s doubts about him that had convinced Magnus that they should get married. Sure, given Ingileif’s track record with other men, it was a risk. But Ingileif had demonstrated that she was willing to take a risk herself, that she was willing to trust him even when the evidence suggested she should not.

If she was willing to take that risk, so should he be.

Having taken it, Magnus found himself suddenly, euphorically, happy.

Ingileif started talking about the wedding. It was going to be big — no surprise there. It was also going to be in a church — a bit more of a surprise. Magnus managed to steer Ingileif away from the tiny chapel at Bjarnarhöfn, the farm on the Snaefellsnes peninsula where he had grown up, which had too many painful memories. But Ingileif quickly fixed on the ‘Black Church’, a slightly bigger building near the Hótel Búdir on the other side of the peninsula, with a wonderful view over lava fields to the majestic Snaefellsjökull volcano.

It was everyone’s favourite wedding location, but Ingileif was sure she could swing it. Of course she could.

Magnus was also feeling confident that he had the murderers of Sir Neville Pybus-Smith and Louisa Sugarman in custody. There were some legitimate questions still to be answered, but he hoped those would all be sorted out that morning.

They weren’t.

There was a buzz of excitement at the meeting Magnus called at eight-thirty, but as various officers reported the results of their different lines of inquiry, the mood deflated.

The fingerprints on Louisa’s bag did not belong to Bjarni. Gudni’s old cancelled passport from the 1980s had been found during the search of his flat. Stamps showed that he had arrived in the United Kingdom on 19 April 1985, but he had not entered the country at all in March. María, Bjarni’s colleague, had seen Bjarni get into a taxi at about 10.30 p.m. at the Indian restaurant. The taxi driver was certain that he had picked up Bjarni from the steps of the restaurant at ten-thirty-four and that at ten-forty-two Bjarni was in his cab, not tossing a phone into the sea. He had records from an app to confirm precise timings.

Magnus was disappointed, but not downcast. He knew from experience the danger of becoming too wedded to a theory, of seeking out evidence which backed up that theory and ignoring anything that disproved it. They had had a hypothesis, it had turned out it was wrong, it was good they knew that now. Time to find a new theory.

‘All right. We’ll let Gudni and Bjarni go; we can always pull them back in if anything new turns up, but I’m not optimistic. Now it’s even more necessary to find out what Louisa had discovered that she wanted to tell me. We need to track her movements, find out where she drove off to. She used a small local rental company — no GPS tracker, so they don’t know where her car went. Someone must have seen her. Cameras will have captured her vehicle. Perhaps she bought petrol?

‘Róbert?’ Magnus asked one of his detectives. ‘Get on to her family in England and check if Louisa mentioned anything about her trip to Iceland and her suspicions about Neville’s murder. Especially if she phoned them or sent them a message in the twenty-four hours before she died.’

Vigdís’s mind drifted as she listened to Magnus. She had registered that Gudni and Bjarni were off the hook and so they were back to square one, or perhaps square one-and-a-half. But she had been up half the night stewing. Her brain was tired, and it kept returning to her mother.

She had gone to bed sure that she would keep quiet and fairly sure that Magnus wouldn’t. So her career would be over. This would be her last case. She guessed she would be suspended immediately, probably within minutes of Magnus telling whomever he decided to tell.

It made her immensely sad. She was a good detective. She enjoyed her work, even if she was occasionally irritated by internal politics and the interminable paperwork, or computerwork as it now was. She liked Magnus and her other colleagues. She didn’t like Thelma, her boss, but then bosses came and bosses went.

That’s who she was, who she had been her whole adult life. A police officer. A detective. She couldn’t imagine doing anything else, being anything else.

Tears came, running down her cheek on to her pillow.

What would she do next? She had rent to pay, food to buy, for Erla as well as herself.

She had no idea.

But she knew she couldn’t shop her own mother.

She had woken up shortly after 2 a.m. Wasn’t there anything she could do?

No.

If only her mother would listen to her, listen properly. It wasn’t as if sacrificing Vigdís’s career would do her mother any good. She’d still wind up in jail once Magnus had reported her. Why couldn’t she see that?

It was thanks to Audur that Vigdís had a career in the police in the first place. It had been hard growing up black in Iceland. There had been some overtly cruel racism, but most of it was just unthinking: Icelanders were unused to black people. Vigdís could deal with the individual slights, but they built up over a lifetime, a steadily increasing load that never went away.

Vigdís had been strong enough to bear that load, thanks to her mother. Audur was Vigdís’s fiercest supporter, willing to go into battle anywhere at any time for her daughter.

When Vigdís had talked to a police recruiter about a job in the force and the man had laughed, telling her that the idea of a black policewoman wasn’t conceivable in Iceland, Audur had been angry. Her anger turned into incandescent rage when she saw Snorri Gudmundsson, the head of the Reykjavík Metropolitan Police, on television talking about how they needed police officers from minorities. She stormed into police headquarters first thing the next morning and demanded to see him. She was turned away.

But then she wrote a letter — this was back in the days when people still wrote letters. Two days later she received a phone call inviting her to come into headquarters and meet Snorri to discuss her daughter. Snorri listened and encouraged Vigdís to apply to the police.

So Audur had got her into the police force and now she was going to get her out.

Vigdís knew her mother. She was grasping at straws, and the one straw left was that Magnus wouldn’t actually report her, or rather report Vigdís.

Was she right? Was there any way Vigdís could persuade Magnus not to talk?

No. Pleading wouldn’t help. Pointing out the consequences for her if he spoke up wouldn’t change his mind; he was already well aware of them. Vigdís didn’t doubt Magnus’s affection and loyalty towards her. That was the problem. She knew he believed that when cops put their loyalty to other cops above the law, everything fell apart. It was partly because the results would be so consequential that Magnus would think it important to do what he considered the right thing.

So Vigdís’s career was over and her mother was going to jail.

In which case, why not just turn Audur in herself? Then only one of them would suffer.

Sending her own mother to jail was unthinkable, but it was also logical.

Vigdís just couldn’t do it. How could she live with herself afterwards? For Magnus, loyalty to justice beat everything else. For Vigdís, it was loyalty to family, even if, apart from Erla, her only family was her drunken mother, who seemed happy to put her own survival before her daughter’s.

But keeping quiet, sacrificing both of them, didn’t make sense.

At 5.09 a.m., according to the numbers on her phone by the side of her bed, Vigdís decided she would call Lúdvík and tell him what she had seen. She would still be in trouble — she was convinced Thelma had it in for her — but her career would probably survive. She knew Magnus would be right behind her.

But she would feel terrible. How could she live with herself?

She’d just have to. She’d call Lúdvík as soon as possible that morning.

As soon as possible meant when the meeting was over.

She could see Magnus was wrapping up, so she slipped out and left the building by the back entrance into the car park, crammed with an assortment of police vehicles. She moved away from the door and leaned against the black railings. She selected Lúdvík’s number in Hafnarfjördur.

She heard his voice as he picked up. ‘Hi, Vigdís.’

She couldn’t do it. She just couldn’t do it. She couldn’t tell this policeman that her mother had run over someone and killed them when drunk.

‘Vigdís? Is that you?’

She shook herself. ‘Yes, Lúdvík. Sorry, it’s me, I was distracted. I wondered how your investigation was going? Into the hit and run. Any progress?’

‘Nothing so far, beyond the silver car. Why, have you got something for me?’

‘No, I was just curious. Sorry, I’ve got to go.’

She winced as she put down the phone. That was it. It was all over.

Magnus returned to his desk. There was plenty to do, but he needed a few minutes to think. Thinking was underestimated.

Vigdís showed up and sat silently at his desk, waiting. It was good to have Vigdís there — she could help him do the thinking. She had done that many times before.

She looked a bit down — her mother, no doubt. They could talk about that later.

‘We can assume it wasn’t Gudni and Bjarni who killed Louisa and Neville Pybus-Smith,’ Magnus said. ‘Gudni wasn’t in London in March 1985, and although Bjarni could perhaps have flown there from university in Florida, it’s unlikely.’

‘Bjarni definitely didn’t throw Louisa’s phone into the bay at ten-forty-two,’ said Vigdís. ‘It’s very hard to believe that Gudni stabbed Louisa and then ditched the phone in the sea. He’s just too old and frail. And I never understood why he would wait forty-five years to get his revenge. Why not do something earlier?’

‘All right. If it wasn’t them, who was it?’

They sat in silence for a few more moments.

‘Someone else who didn’t want Louisa to tell you what she’d found out,’ said Vigdís. ‘But what was that?’

‘Probably — and I say probably, not certainly — something about Neville Pybus-Smith’s murder.’

‘If those two Scandinavians Joyce Morgan saw entering Pybus-Smith’s building were not Gudni and Bjarni, then who were they?’

Magnus grabbed a sheet of paper and a pen and began drawing.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Drawing a family tree.’

A minute later, Magnus looked over the diagram he had sketched and showed it to Vigdís.

At the top was Hálfdán, the farmer at Laxahóll. Beneath him were his children, Kristín, Marteinn and Siggi. Beneath Kristín was Gudni and beneath Gudni, Bjarni.

Next to Siggi Magnus had scribbled two names: on one side Sunna and on the other Frída of Selvík. Beneath Siggi and Frída was Jón.

It was possible that there were other cousins or offspring who hadn’t been mentioned to Magnus yet, but for now, this list would do.

He thought a moment.

‘We need an older man in 1985.’ He circled a name. ‘And we need a younger one.’ He circled another one. ‘What do you think?’

Vigdís squinted at the diagram thoughtfully. Then she perked up. ‘I think you’ve got it! Let’s go.’