Whale Fjord

Thirty-One

October 1940

Neville stood and stared at the two bodies splayed on the ground in the farmyard, just in front of the barn.

He looked at the gun hanging limply from his right hand.

Gunpowder tickled his nostrils.

What had he done?

His thoughts were whirling, leaping, lurching around his alcohol-disrupted brain. He had to steady them. Focus. Work out what the hell to do next.

What had he done?

He had driven up to the farm full of whisky-enhanced confidence. He was lucky that Kristín was there. He was even luckier that she was alone, except for her small son, whom she had quickly shooed up to his room to play.

She was polite and welcoming and seemed untroubled by their inability to speak the same language. She had given him a cup of coffee and a slice of cake. The enforced silence had been a little awkward, but he had turned on his full charm and managed a couple of witty mimes. She had laughed and looked away demurely.

He couldn’t believe his luck. This was not a situation that was going to repeat itself — alone with a beautiful girl who clearly liked him.

But it was difficult to do anything in the house with the kid upstairs.

What about one of the barns outside? Neville had had a thing about barns ever since a tumble with a farmer’s daughter at his cousin’s stables in the country when he was eighteen. That had taken place in a tall shed with hay bales stacked fifteen feet high. These were squat buildings with thick low walls of stone and a turf roof of growing green grass. Cosy.

How to get Kristín out there?

He had an idea.

He got up to leave, and led her outside to where his motor car was waiting. Then he mimed looking and walking around the farm.

The girl smiled but shook her head.

Neville made for the barns. He could hear and smell the sheep in the larger of the two turf buildings — the hay was presumably kept in the smaller one right next to it.

This was the moment. If she stayed where she was, it would indicate that she didn’t want to do anything with him. But if she followed? If she followed, her meaning would be clear.

He reached the smaller of the two barns and opened the door.

He turned. She was following him! She was protesting something in Icelandic, but he knew what she really meant. He knew what she wanted.

He entered the barn. The ceiling was low and the only light came from the open door. The floor was bare earth. The barn was piled to the roof with hay. The interior was warm, sweet-smelling and slightly dusty. It immediately brought back memories of that other girl, the chubby farm girl, what was her name?

With his brain so fuzzy, Neville couldn’t remember.

Didn’t matter.

He moved over towards the hay and turned around.

Kristín was standing in the doorway. She said something and pointed back towards his car. She looked nervous — that was understandable. He grinned. She was in for some fun.

He moved towards her.

She took a step back.

He grabbed her arm.

He wasn’t sure exactly what had happened next. He could remember the feelings that swirled around his intoxicated brain. Excitement. Euphoria. Lust. Then, as she resisted him, from somewhere deep inside, rage. Rage that like so many of the Icelanders he came across, she was obstructing him. Saying no — even he knew what nei meant. Skilekki be damned.

He knew he should stop; he needed to continue.

She screamed.

Did she mean that? What did she mean by that scream?

He didn’t know, and he didn’t care.

‘Stop!’ A male voice. Loud. Urgent. And in English.

He heard the word, but he ignored it.

Then there was a crash.

He looked up and saw her brother, that ratty little man, Marteinn, grasping a shotgun just outside the entrance to the barn, its barrel pointing upwards. He had fired into the air.

‘Stop! I said stop!’

Neville climbed to his feet. His trousers, together with his holster, seemed to have fallen to his ankles, so he bent down to pick them up, and buckled his Sam Browne belt. Kristín was sobbing on the ground next to him.

This looked bad. However much Kristín had led him on, Neville knew this looked bad. Nothing had happened, though.

He could talk his way out of this.

He staggered past Marteinn into the farmyard and took a couple of deep breaths. His instinct was to get in the car and drive away.

Nothing had happened.

Yet it had. Marteinn would talk. To the Icelandic police, to the British military police, to the Icelandic authorities.

The British would have to take his allegations seriously. It wasn’t just Neville’s word against Marteinn’s. There were two of them.

This would be hard to hush up.

Marteinn had one arm around his sister and the other was gripping his shotgun, double-barrelled with one cartridge still unfired. He was holding it in his left hand. In an odd moment of clarity, Neville remembered that Marteinn had used his right hand to pull the trigger for his first shot in the air.

Neville still had his sidearm in its holster.

He knew he was drunk. He would have to be careful, deliberate, if he wasn’t to miss, even at this close range.

He stopped. Focused. Pulled out his pistol and pointed it at the Icelander.

As Marteinn let go of Kristín and passed the shotgun from his left to his right hand, Neville pulled his own trigger. The bullet hit Marteinn in the chest. Marteinn dropped his weapon, and a second later he slumped to the ground.

Kristín looked at her brother in horror. Then she glared at Neville, fury and hatred in her eyes.

She launched herself towards him.

She was perhaps ten yards away. Enough time for Neville to raise the pistol again.

It swayed upwards in his unsteady hand as he pulled the trigger.

He hit her in the forehead and she fell like a stone.

Now what?

Christ knew.

He bent over the two bodies. Kristín was dead, the top of her head a bloody mess. His bullet had hit Marteinn in the heart; Neville watched as life ebbed from the man’s blue eyes.

Had he really just killed two people? One of them the woman he had been fantasizing about for the last couple of weeks? The woman with whom he believed himself to be in love?

He had.

He felt numb. He felt as if he was about to throw up.

Don’t throw up. Mustn’t throw up. Mustn’t leave a pile of vomit for people to find.

Think!

He needed a story. An explanation. For the farmer, when he came back. For the Icelandic police. He was a British officer, so they should believe him. But he needed to give them something to believe.

A story.

What story?

He could explain that it was all a misunderstanding, that Kristín had led him to the barn, that Marteinn had just got the wrong end of the stick, that Marteinn had been about to shoot him and that he had shot Marteinn first in self-defence.

And Kristín? Why had he shot Kristín?

Because he had had no choice. Because he had had no time to think. Because he had known she would testify that he had tried to force himself on her and had shot her brother.

That wouldn’t work.

What if he said Marteinn had attacked him? That Marteinn was a communist spy who had been cornered?

And Kristín? She had attacked him too.

He would tie himself in knots trying to explain that one. The military police would see right through it.

All right. How about if he said he had never even been to Laxahóll? He was pretty sure no one had seen him driving up the track to the farm. That sounded right.

Then what about the bodies? Had some other unknown person arrived and shot them? Bloody Lieutenant Marks would testify that Neville was intending to visit the farm, as would Major Harris. And the bullets in the bodies came from a British officer’s revolver. His revolver.

He had to move those bodies. Hide them somewhere, perhaps in the fjord. Except that would mean driving out on to the main road along the shore where he could be seen. What about that hollow he had seen driving up to Laxahóll? Then he would say he had never been to the farm at all.

As a plan, it was far from perfect, but it was the best he could think of. And he had to do something. He couldn’t just stand there staring until the farmer arrived.

He felt a raindrop fall on his face, and then another. That was good, it would help hide any blood marks on the ground. Somewhere behind the rain clouds the sun was slipping below the horizon. The countryside was enveloped in a murky gloom. It would be dark very soon.

How to move the bodies?

Then he had a thought.

The boy! The damned boy!

He looked upwards at the farmhouse. He thought he saw a small head in one of the upstairs windows. Then it was gone.

He would have to deal with the damned boy.

An hour later, he climbed into the Ford, started up the engine, turned on the headlamps and windscreen wipers and drove slowly down the lane through the darkness to the main road along the fjord.

He had been lucky. He had found some sacking in the barn and had wrapped the two bodies in it. He had crammed them into the rear of the Ford, with the shotgun, and driven to the hollow he had spotted before.

No one had passed him along the track.

He had scouted out the hollow and found a crevasse just big enough to stuff the bodies into. There were plenty of loose stones and boulders around, and he had been able to cover the cleft in the rock completely. He decided to get rid of the shotgun later.

As he approached the end of the track to the junction with the main road, he turned off his glimmering headlights. Through the dark and the rain, he could just make out the shape of the old turf-covered farm on the shore of the fjord. Yellow light from its windows. The inhabitants might hear his car, but they wouldn’t see it.

He turned left and headed back to Reykjavík.

How had it happened? He still couldn’t quite believe he had killed two people. It was self-defence: Marteinn had been just about to shoot him. Then he had had to kill Kristín; he had had no choice.

He knew he should have shot the boy. He just couldn’t bring himself to do it. He had scared the living daylights out of him, though, threatened to come back and shoot him as well if he breathed a word to anyone. He just had to hope that that would be enough.

He should have shot him.

He swerved as he took a bend too fast. He slowed down. He was still drunk.

His luck would have to hold if he was going to get away with it.

There would be a search. The local police would be alerted. Neville would have to make sure he inserted himself as their point of contact. As head of military intelligence on the island, that should not be difficult. He would play up Marteinn’s communist leanings.

When Lieutenant Marks found out that Kristín and her brother were missing, he would no doubt ask difficult questions, questions which Neville would answer with simple denials. He had driven straight back to Reykjavík from Hvammsvík. He never stopped at Laxahóll.

It would be difficult for Marks to get around Neville. He would have to persuade Neville’s superiors at Divisional HQ to investigate him. That would be the last thing they would want to do. A British officer killing two Icelandic citizens would be a disaster for relations with the government. Even a hint of suspicion would be damaging.

No. Unless Marks had incontrovertible proof that Neville was involved, Divisional HQ would look firmly the other way.

As he stared grimly through the wipers at the road ahead, Neville thought he might just get away with it. As long as the kid stayed quiet. And the bodies weren’t found.

He gripped the steering wheel tightly.

With luck, he might avoid justice. But he couldn’t avoid himself.

He would always know that he had shot two people in cold blood. The hollow pain in the pit of his stomach was never going to go away.

He was a murderer and he always would be. For the rest of his life.

He pulled to the side of the road, the dark waters of Hvalfjördur dimly visible through the rain, leaned his head on the steering wheel and wept.