Authors: Michael Ridpath
‘I was planning to spend that with my brother,’ Magnus said. ‘And I’m flying back tomorrow evening.’
‘Oh. OK,’ Colby said, leaving the invitation hanging there.
‘What would he think?’ Magnus asked.
‘Who?’
‘The guy who gave you that ring.’
Colby glanced down at her fingers quickly and then put her left hand under the table. ‘Oh, that’s Richard. Richard Rubinstein. You remember him?’
‘Not really,’ said Magnus.
‘Yeah, well.’ Colby sighed. ‘I don’t think Richard and me is going to work out.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Magnus.
‘Yeah.’ Colby shrugged. Looked down at her coffee. Then glanced quickly up at Magnus through a strand of curly dark hair. ‘Do you want to take a look at the apartment? I’ve got some new curtains from Crate & Barrel. I think you’ll like them.’
Magnus smiled. Thought. Then stopped thinking.
‘You know me. A sucker for new curtains.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Monday, 19 April 2010
I
T WAS CHAOS
at Keflavík Airport. Vigdís had never seen it so full. The ash cloud was drifting back and forth across Northern Europe, occasionally opening up patches of airspace above Norway and Scotland. France, Germany, England and much of Central Europe was closed. Ironically, Keflavík itself remained open, protected by the prevailing wind pushing the ash to the south. It was a nightmare for the airlines: their schedules were a mess and all their aircraft were in the wrong place. The Icelandic staff were answering questions patiently. This was the kind of crisis Icelanders were good at, thinking on their feet.
Vigdís had checked Davíd’s flight on the Internet before setting off to the airport but there had been no information on its status. She joined a small crowd peering at a monitor, and picked out Davíd’s flight from New York.
Cancelled.
Vigdís felt her eyes sting. Her phone vibrated in her jeans pocket. A text.
Flight delayed then cancelled. Shall I try again tomorrow? D
.
She texted back immediately:
Yes. Please try again. I really want you to come
.
She pushed through the crowds back to her car. She was surprised at how disappointed she was. She liked Davíd, liked him a lot, but they were not that close. They hadn’t had the chance to be. That was the problem.
Finally the right guy had come along, and she hadn’t been able to see him because of her stupid job and the stupid volcano. She liked her job, but she needed a personal life too. A relationship. Something.
She drove back towards home. She considered dropping in on her mother, making sure she was awake and ready to go to her work in the café. But she couldn’t face it. There would be a row. She would feel even worse. Her mother would just have to look after herself.
So, work it was. She picked up her phone and called the station. To her surprise, Árni answered.
‘You’re in early,’ she said. It was not yet eight o’clock.
‘There’s a lot to do,’ said Árni. ‘Has Davíd landed?’
‘Flight cancelled,’ said Vigdís. ‘I thought I’d come in and help you out.’
‘Hey, I’m sorry,’ said Árni. ‘I know you were looking forward to seeing him.’
Vigdís considered denying it. She wasn’t big on emotion at work, but Árni meant what he said, and she appreciated it.
‘Thanks. What’s happening with Magnús? They said on the radio a farmer had been murdered in the Stykkishólmur area, but they didn’t give any details.’
‘They’ve arrested him,’ said Árni.
‘I don’t believe it!’
‘The gossip is they’ve got a good case.’
‘Jesus. There’s no way he did it, you know that, Árni?’
‘Yeah, I know it. Hey, Vigdís?’
‘Yes?’
‘Maybe you shouldn’t come in. I won’t tell Baldur your boyfriend hasn’t shown up. Maybe you should do some digging yourself? See if you can help Magnús.’
Vigdís stared out at the open road cutting through the brown rubble of the lava field ahead of her. At least that would take her mind off Davíd. ‘Magnús told me pretty explicitly to back off,’ she said.
‘Of course he did,’ said Árni. ‘He’s a stubborn bastard. But you know what he would do if you or I were in a similar fix?’
‘I do.’ Vigdís smiled.
‘Tell you what. I’ll sneak out of here and meet you at Café Roma at nine-thirty. We’ll figure out how we can help him.’
It was a cool, moist morning. Aníta walked her mare Grána through the farmyard past the singed cottage. The building looked intact, the roof seemed to have held, although the window frames of the living room and kitchen were blackened. A smell of wet, stale smoke seeped through the damp air.
That was going to be one hell of a mess to clear up.
She waved at the constable, cosy in his police car, sipping the cup of coffee she had brought him earlier.
She touched Grána’s flanks and the mare speeded up to a
tölt
, the unique gait, a kind of smooth trot, of the Icelandic horse. Aníta wanted to get out of there, into the open.
She was badly shaken. Hallgrímur’s murder. The fire. And then seeing Hallgrímur himself the night before.
Like a lot of Icelanders, Aníta could see things. See people. Dead people. Ghosts.
She wasn’t proud of it. In fact, it scared the hell out of her. It hadn’t at first. Her grandmother, her mother’s mother, had died suddenly when Aníta was one. Apparently her mother had been very ill in the first few months of Aníta’s life, and her
amma
had cared for the baby. And after she died, she cared for her granddaughter still.
When Aníta’s parents caught their three-year-old daughter talking to someone invisible, at first they thought she had an imaginary friend. But it soon became clear that the little girl was conversing with her grandmother. They kept this knowledge within the family, and as Aníta grew older, the visits from her grandmother became rarer.
Until one night when Aníta was twelve, her grandmother told her to warn her cousin Sindri not to go out on the fishing boat that day. Sindri was four years older than Aníta, a good-looking and popular boy in Stykkishólmur, and another one of Aníta’s
amma
’s grandchildren. So Aníta got up very early the next morning and rode her bike into town, down to the harbour where Sindri was preparing his friend’s father’s fishing boat to go out for the day. There was a brisk wind, and black clouds lurked on the western horizon, but then there were nearly always dark clouds lurking on the horizon.
Sindri was joking with the men. He was a tall, strapping sixteen-year-old who looked to Aníta more like a man than a boy.
He didn’t know about Aníta’s gift. What could she say to him? How could he possibly believe she was anything but a silly girl? What if the others went out on the boat, Sindri stayed behind, and nothing happened? She would feel so stupid. Humiliated. There is little a twelve-year-old girl fears more than extreme embarrassment. All the other kids would know, everyone would know. The teasing would unbearable.
Also, although Aníta had no doubts that she was talking to her grandmother, she wasn’t sure that the old lady’s warning was based on reality. She was a bit of a worrier, Aníta’s grandmother, always fretting that she should be careful.
So Aníta turned and pedalled back to her farm.
Sure enough there was a storm. And Sindri was washed overboard.
Aníta told no one of her grandmother’s warning, but the old lady was very angry with her. And the guilt was unbearable. She stopped eating, stopped doing her homework, her parents grew worried, but she never explained.
As she grew up, Aníta kept her talent quiet. Every Icelandic town had its ‘seers’, and Stykkishólmur was no exception. Women who spoke to hidden people, men who could look into the future. Aníta had no intention of becoming one of their number. On the winter of her fourteenth birthday, her friends became obsessed with the Ouija board, but Aníta wanted nothing to do with it, even though they all assured her she would be certain to get through to ‘the other side’.
Her grandmother appeared with much less frequency. There had been a couple of warnings, which Aníta now heeded, and a
message for Sylvía. Aníta had told Kolbeinn of her skill, and Sylvía when necessary. Both of them had accepted it, and kept the knowledge to themselves.
But last night was the first time Aníta had seen a ghost who was not her grandmother, and she didn’t like it. At all. She had no desire to see Hallgrímur ever again.
The horses found it difficult to pick through the lava field, so Aníta rode along the edge of the Berserkjahraun, with the great lump of Bjarnarhöfn Fell rising above her. To her left, the clouds hovered above the tossing sea of lava and moss, frozen in cold anger. A raven hoisted itself into the air, croaking as it did so, soon to be joined by its mate. On the other side of the lava field, the farm of Hraun squatted on top of its knoll, and far in the distance she could see the holy bump in the landscape that was Helgafell.
It was good to be out in the fresh air. There was plenty to worry about when she got back to the farm, Sylvía top of the list. Aníta had left her preparing to go out to see to the chickens, which was Sylvía’s normal early-morning routine. Sylvía was still remarkably strong for her age, unlike her husband whose energy had declined over the last few months. Perhaps Aníta had made a mistake? Perhaps Sylvía would set alight the chicken shed, or rather the chicken shipping-container. The metal wouldn’t burn, but the straw would. Or even worse, she might return to the farmhouse and set fire to the kitchen. But Kolbeinn was out in the farmyard; he would notice if something went wrong.
No, Aníta shouldn’t have left her mother-in-law alone. Sylvía was going to be a problem.
Aníta noticed a figure ahead hunched on a stone a few metres in to the lava field. It was a woman, with her back to her. She was wearing a long skirt, and a headscarf. She was dressed like an old lady, but she didn’t look old.
Grána drew nearer.
‘Hello?’ Aníta called.
The woman turned. She had long plaited blonde hair, like Aníta. But she was quite a bit younger, probably in her mid-thirties, with clear features. She looked familiar to Aníta, but at first
Aníta couldn’t place her. Tears streamed down the woman’s cheeks.
‘What’s wrong?’ Aníta said, nudging Grána towards the edge of the lava field. The mare didn’t want to move.
‘It’s Jóhannes. He killed Jóhannes.’
‘Jóhannes?’ Aníta said. ‘Who is Jóhannes?’ But of course she knew.
‘Jóhannes from Hraun.’ The woman waved an arm vaguely in the direction of the farm on the other side of the Berserkjahraun.
Aníta recognized the woman. She had seen her face staring out of photographs in Hallgrímur’s cottage. It was Marta: Hallgrímur’s mother, Gunnar’s wife, her husband’s grandmother.
Aníta’s first instinct was to turn Grána around and bolt for home, but the woman didn’t look threatening. She just looked broken-hearted.
‘Who killed Jóhannes, Marta?’ Aníta asked.
The woman didn’t seem to be surprised that Aníta knew who she was.
‘My husband,’ she said. ‘Gunnar. And I have to pretend that I don’t know what happened to him. All the neighbours go looking for him up in the mountains, when all the time he is at the bottom of Swine Lake! I know that and Gunnar knows that. But he still goes out with them.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Aníta. And it was true, she felt a burst of sympathy for this woman sitting a few metres away from her. A woman who had been dead for forty years. Aníta looked across the lava field to the farm of Hraun, standing proud on its knoll.
‘I come here to think about Jóhannes,’ the woman said. ‘To get away from that monster at home.’
Grána had had enough. She pinned back her ears and reared. Aníta kept her balance and fought to bring the mare back under control. The horse wheeled around a couple of times before Aníta calmed her down.
When she looked back into the lava field, Marta was gone.
*
Emil surveyed the police officers sitting around the table in the conference room in Stykkishólmur police station, which had been turned into an incident room. Someone had placed a large whiteboard along the wall opposite the door. It was empty; no one had had the time to write on it.
It was eight o’clock and none of the officers had got much sleep after the goings-on at Bjarnarhöfn. There was Rúnar, Páll and three more of the local police constables. Then the two detectives who had arrived the evening before to reinforce Emil: from Keflavík a small man in his twenties with prematurely thinning fair hair named Adam, and Björn from Akureyri, who was pleasingly chubby, at least to Emil’s eyes. With Reykjavík out of bounds as a source of detective manpower, there were precious few other places to go for help.
Then there was Edda, the head of the forensics unit. At least Emil had been allowed to use them, even though they were based in Reykjavík. She was a head taller than him, with long legs, short blonde hair and an air of calm competence. Emil had worked with her on one of her first major cases, when she had spotted some fibres on a fence in the garden of a house in Akranes whose owner had been brutally assaulted by a burglar. It had led to a conviction that otherwise would probably never have been made. She was gorgeous then. And she was gorgeous now, even though she looked as tired as the rest of them.
Emil’s stomach rumbled. The hotel in Stykkishólmur had been overwhelmed with the sudden influx of policemen and forensics technicians, and hadn’t been able to come up with much of a breakfast that early in the morning.
‘Let’s start with the fire,’ Emil said. ‘How badly burned is the property?’
‘The structure is still standing,’ said Rúnar. ‘The inside is badly burned, especially the kitchen and the living room. The desk has gone, as well as the computer. Plenty for forensics to work on,’ he said to Edda.
‘It’s pretty clear that the old woman started it,’ said Emil. ‘She seemed to think that she was cooking supper for her husband.
She still doesn’t understand, or refuses to understand, that he has been murdered.’