66° North

by Michael Ridpath

  Hallgrímur stood up and looked mournfully at the dish of skyr and berries he was abandoning. He sauntered towards the hallway and the stairs.

  He paused at the door.

  ‘You are right, Mother. I did go to play in the lava field with Benni.’

  He was pleased to see his mother’s cheeks flush.

  ‘I saw you and Benni’s father,’ he went on. ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘Out!’ his mother cried. ‘To your room!’

  That night, after all the children were in bed with the lamps snuffed out, Hallgrímur heard his father shouting and his mother sobbing.

  The little boy fell asleep with a smile on his face.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Wednesday, 16 September 2009

  SERGEANT DETECTIVE MAGNUS Jonson of the Boston Police Department closed his eyes as he slipped into the deliciously warm water. His body tingled after the thirty lengths he had done and the shock of warm water after cold air. It was six degrees Celsius in the outside air, but forty degrees in the geothermally heated tub. Steam hovered a couple of feet above the Olympic sized pool, which was crowded with serious swimmers. It was six o’clock, rush hour in the open-air Laugardalur Baths, as Reykjavík’s men and women gathered after work for a swim and a chat. The fact that they were outside and nearly naked on a cold grey September evening didn’t bother any of them.

  ‘Ooh, that feels good,’ said the tall, skinny man who slid in beside Magnus. ‘You’re a fast swimmer.’

  ‘I’ve got to get rid of the energy somehow, Árni,’ Magnus said. ‘And the aggression.’

  ‘Aggression?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m not used to sitting around in a classroom all day.’

  ‘What you mean is you would rather be running around the streets of Boston blasting punks with your three fifty-seven Magnum?’

  Magnus glanced at his companion. Despite living in Reykjavík for four months, Magnus was never entirely sure when Icelanders were being serious. It was a particular problem with Árni Holm. He was good at the deadpan irony. On the other hand he occasionally said the most spectacularly stupid things. ‘Something like that, Árni.’

  ‘I hear your course is pretty good. There’s a waiting list of people to sign up for it. Did you know that?’

  ‘You should come.’

  ‘I’m on the list.’

  Magnus was teaching a course at the National Police College on urban crime in the United States. He enjoyed being an instructor; it was something he had never done before and it turned out he was good at it.

  He had been seconded to the Icelandic police at the request of the National Police Commissioner who was worried about big-city crime hitting his small country. Not that crime was unknown in Iceland. There were drugs aplenty and Friday and Saturday nights brought a regular haul of drunks into the cells at police headquarters. And of course there had been the winter demonstrations outside the Parliament that had culminated in the ‘pots-and-pans’ revolution which overthrew the government and stretched police resources to their limits.

  But the Commissioner feared that it was only a matter of time before the kind of crimes that occurred in Amsterdam or Copenhagen or even Boston arrived in Reykjavík. Foreign drug gangs. Knives. Maybe even guns. And he wanted his men to be ready for it. Hence his request for an American police detective with practical experience who spoke Icelandic.

  There weren’t a whole lot of those among America’s big-city police forces. Magnus, who had left Iceland for the States at the age of twelve with his father, fitted the bill, and when he had been shot at as a witness in a police corruption scandal he had been sent to Reykjavík as much for his own safety as for what he could do for the Icelanders.

  ‘Anything going on at CID?’ he asked Árni.

  ‘We have a bird thief.’

  ‘A bird thief?’

  ‘Someone has been stealing exotic birds. Parrots mostly, and budgerigars. There are scarcely any left in Reykjavík now. It’s a big problem. This man, and we think it is a man not a woman, is very clever.’

  ‘I thought you just did violent crimes?’

  ‘You go wherever they need you. Burglaries have doubled in the last six months and they have had to lay off twenty uniforms. The kreppa. You know what I’m talking about, you’ve seen the cost-cutting at the police college.’ Kreppa was the Icelandic term for the financial crisis, and Icelanders’ current favourite topic of conversation.

  ‘Got any leads?’

  ‘Some. Not enough. I’m confident we will crack the case by the end of the week. When will you be joining us? I’m sure we could use your expertise.’

  ‘Two more months, I think,’ Magnus sighed. The Commissioner had insisted that Magnus do six months of the one-year basic-training course at the police college before he was given a badge. Magnus had grudgingly accepted. It was hard to argue with the Commissioner’s point that it was impossible to uphold the law if you didn’t know what it was.

  So he had spent most of the previous four months as a student and part of it teaching. He preferred the teaching.

  The water jets began to bubble and Árni closed his eyes and leaned back. Magnus took the opportunity to examine the scar on Árni’s chest. The surgeon at the National Hospital had done a good job of patching him up. Magnus had seen many plugged bullet holes that looked a lot worse.

  Magnus had worked with Árni on a case immediately after his own arrival from Boston four months before. Árni was not known as Reykjavík’s best detective, some said that he only had the job because his uncle, Chief Superintendent Thorkell Hólm, was head of CID. At times he had frustrated the hell out of Magnus, but Magnus liked him and admired his loyalty.

  And he would never forget that Árni had taken a bullet for him.

  They pulled themselves out of the hot tub, and went for a cold shower followed by a warm one.

  As they were getting dressed in the changing room Árni checked his phone. ‘A call from Baldur,’ he said, examining the display. He pressed a couple of buttons and put the phone to his ear.

  Inspector Baldur Jakobsson was the head of the Violent Crimes Unit. A good, traditional Icelandic cop, he was suspicious of Magnus and his big-city methods. Magnus understood, but he still thought he was a pain in the ass.

  It looked to Magnus like a big breakthrough with the macaw. Árni’s eyebrows shot up as he listened, and his Adam’s apple started bobbing wildly. His cheeks flushed with excitement.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes… Yes. Yes, right away.’

  Magnus’s interest was piqued.

  ‘What was that?’ Magnus said, as soon as Árni hung up.

  ‘I’ve got to get back to headquarters,’ Árni said. ‘You know Óskar Gunnarsson?’

  ‘I think so,’ Magnus said. ‘Isn’t he a banker?’ That was Magnus’s problem. Although he had done a good job of brushing up on his language so he was fluent with barely an accent, Reykjavík was a small town where everyone knew everyone else. Apart from Magnus who had never heard of anyone.

  Árni hurried to pull on his clothes. ‘Ex-CEO of Ódinsbanki. He was fired a year ago. He’s under investigation by Financial Crimes and the Special Prosecutor. Anyway, he was shot dead in London last night.’

  ‘Is there an Icelandic angle?’

  ‘The British cops haven’t found one yet, but Baldur wants us all out checking.’

  ‘I bet he does.’

  ‘You should get yourself involved,’ Árni said, as he pulled on his jacket. ‘With the foreign angle.’

  ‘Baldur won’t like it,’ Magnus said.

  ‘Since when has that stopped you?’ said Árni, as he grabbed his bag and hurried out of the changing room.

  *

  Magnus unlocked the front door of the little house in 101, the postcode for the centre of Reykjavík. The outside walls were cream concrete, and like most Icelandic houses the roof was brightly painted corrugated metal, in this case lime green. The house actually belonged to Árni and his sister, although only his sister Katr
ín lived there. Magnus paid her a very reasonable rent.

  Magnus climbed the stairs to his room. He pulled a Viking beer out of the refrigerator, flopped into a chair and opened it. Icelanders might not drink during the week, saving their efforts for heroic binges at the weekend, but Magnus was enough of an American cop to need a beer when his shift ended.

  His body tingled after the swim. The room was small, but it was enough for Magnus. He didn’t have much stuff. Before coming to Iceland he had shared a place with his former girlfriend, Colby, but he had always felt a guest, his possessions overwhelmed by hers. He did have books, though, which spilled out from the bookshelf along one wall on to the floor. In the middle of this chaos stood in a neat row his beloved sagas, in Icelandic, many of them bought by his father many years ago, their pages ragged with use.

  Outside his window, a couple of blocks up the hill, the Hallgrímskirkja lurked, its sweeping spire clad in scaffolding like a spaceship ready for launch, surrounded by gantries.

  Magnus sighed as he sipped the cold fizzy liquid. That was good.

  In Boston, a shift would frequently include a dead body. Solving the crime didn’t usually involve random shooting of bad guys, as Árni had suggested, but it did take a whole lot of talking to people: people whose lives had just been destroyed by the loss of someone they loved, people whose lives were already destroyed by the hell that was their everyday existence, witnesses who wanted to talk, witnesses who didn’t. Most of the time was spent on making sure the prosecution case went smoothly, the witness statements were typed up accurately and the forensic evidence was all in the proper place with the chain of evidence intact.

  It was long hours, painstaking, frustrating, depressing, but Magnus could never get enough of it. Every victim had a family, someone who cared that they had died, and Magnus would do his best for that someone.

  Of course he knew that he was doing it for himself as well. His own father had been murdered in a small town just outside Boston when Magnus was twenty and a student at college. The local police had got nowhere in solving the crime, and neither had Magnus, despite spending the best part of a year trying. In fact, he was still trying; he had never given up. That was why Magnus had joined the Boston Police Department. That was why he always had the energy for another dead body.

  And now here he was, in Iceland. On his arrival in the spring he had been thrown into a case, a very interesting case, but since then there had been nothing but teaching and studying. The orange Penal Code lay on his desk by the window. He knew probably three-quarters of it by now.

  It wasn’t as if the boys in the Violent Crimes Unit downtown had had much to do. In June a man had been found stabbed to death in the street at four on a Sunday morning. The first cops to the scene had solved the crime, figuring that the eighteen-year-old kid out of his skull on speed, waving a knife soaked in blood around his head and shouting how he would kill anyone else who came near him was a likely suspect.

  Magnus had given his word to Snorri Gudmundsson, the National Police Commissioner, that he would stay for two years. He owed it to him for providing him with refuge when the Dominican gang from back home were after him, and to Árni for taking a bullet when the hit man they sent to Reykjavík had caught up with him.

  Of course the Dominicans knew where he was now. Their boss might be in Cedar Junction jail back in Massachusetts, put there with the help of Magnus’s testimony, but there were plenty of gang members still at large. Magnus hoped that now that he had done his stint as a witness he was no longer a target, but he couldn’t be sure. He could never be sure.

  But it was going to be hard to stick it out in Reykjavík. Four months and he was already climbing the walls.

  Árni was right though. He should make a call. Try to get assigned on to this Óskar Gunnarsson case. You never knew, there might be something in it. It would make a change. And it might be interesting to deal with the British police.

  But who to call? Baldur would just say no, that was for sure. Magnus knew the Commissioner would take his call, but he wanted to save that access for when he really needed it. Thorkell Holm, head of CID, was his best bet. It would piss Baldur off, but that was just tough.

  He took out his phone, called the police switchboard and asked to be put through.

  Then he heard a giggle.

  He looked up.

  There was a naked woman lying on his bed.

  ‘Ingileif! What the hell are you doing here?’

  She threw off the covers and bounded over to him in the chair. ‘You didn’t see me, did you? What kind of cop are you when you can’t even spot a woman lying under your bed covers, desperate for sex?’

  ‘You were hiding!’ Magnus protested.

  ‘Pathetic.’

  She straddled him. Her familiar, delightful breasts shook inches away from his face as she laughed, her blonde hair falling loose over her face.

  ‘How did you get a key?’

  ‘Oh, do be quiet, Magnús. I’ve been waiting here half an hour for you. And you have far too many clothes on.’

  ‘But—’

  She kissed him. Deeply. He raised his hands to her bare hips. He didn’t care how she had got in. He wanted her. Now.

  A muffled crackling came from his phone, which had dropped to the floor. Ingileif broke away and picked it up.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Give it to me!’ Magnus cried, reaching for the phone.

  Ingileif turned away. ‘I am sorry, Sergeant Magnús is busy right now. He’ll be with you as soon as he has finished. He probably won’t be more than a couple of minutes. Doesn’t usually take him longer than that.’

  ‘Ingileif!’ Magnus pushed her off his lap and on to the floor. Ingileif triumphantly hit the red disconnect button just before Magnus could grab the phone.

  ‘That was a Chief Superintendent someone or other,’ Ingileif said. ‘Don’t worry, he said he quite understood.’

  Magnus picked her up off the floor and threw her down on to the bed.

  It is extremely difficult to make love to a woman who won’t stop laughing.

  ‘Can I watch LazyTown now?’

  Harpa glanced at her son’s plate, which was empty.

  ‘Did you watch TV at Granny’s house?’

  ‘No.’ Markús shook his curly head and looked straight at her with his big clear brown eyes. Harpa knew that small children often lied, but not Markús. He never lied, at least not to her. Where did he get that honesty from? Not from his father, that was for sure.

  And not from her.

  ‘All right, off you go.’

  Harpa followed her child as he scampered into the living room and she slotted the DVD into the player.

  She went back into the kitchen and stacked their dishes in the dishwasher. She liked to eat with her son, even though it was early.

  From out of the kitchen window she looked out over Faxaflói Bay. To the right, behind the oil storage tanks, was the city of Reykjavík, a jumble of brightly coloured houses overlooked by the Hallgrímskirkja, its majestic sweeping spire boxed in by scaffolding. Straight across the bay squatted Mount Esja, a horizontal rampart of granite, still free of snow at this time of year. And to the left lay the small town of Akranes, stuck on the end of a peninsula, a thin trail of smoke emerging from its tall cement-works chimney.

  Her little house was right on Nordurströnd, the road that ran along the north-eastern edge of the prosperous suburb of Seltjarnarnes, which was perched on its own promontory sticking out into the bay. The house had been expensive because of the view, but Harpa had been able to take out a big mortgage to cover the cost, a mortgage that she had been easily able to service with her banker’s salary. She should have taken a straightforward repayment mortgage, but like many other Icelanders she had chosen a loan where the principal was linked to inflation. The advantage was that the monthly payments were lower.

  The disadvantage was that when inflation was high, for example after a massive devaluation of the currency, the value of the
loan soon overtook the value of the house.

  She had no banker’s salary any more so she couldn’t afford the payments. The house was now worth less than the mortgage. She was going to lose it, that was inevitable. The only reason she hadn’t lost it already was the government’s temporary edict that the banks had to delay foreclosures until November.

  What would happen then? Perhaps the bank would be lenient. Or perhaps she and Markús would end up living with her parents like some teenage mother just out of high school.

  If her parents could keep their own house, that is. She knew they had financial difficulties – she was after all responsible for them – she just didn’t know how bad they were. And she was too afraid to ask.

  Why had she taken out that stupid mortgage? She had an MBA from Reykjavík University. She knew there was a theoretical risk. She had just been sucked up in the mindless optimism of jam today, jam tomorrow that had swept Iceland.

  She switched on the news. Something about ministers threatening to resign over the agreement the government had made to repay the four billion euros it had borrowed from the British government to bail out depositors in Icesave, the London Internet operation of one of the Icelandic banks.

  Then she heard a name that was all too familiar.

  ‘The Icelandic banker, Óskar Gunnarsson, former chairman of Ódinsbanki, has been murdered in his house in London. He was shot.’

  Harpa froze, the hot water running over the dish she was rinsing.

  ‘Óskar Gunnarsson was under investigation by the authorities in Iceland over alleged fraud at Ódinsbanki prior to its nationalization nearly a year ago. It is not clear yet whether his murder had anything to do with the alleged fraud.’

  Harpa grabbed her laptop and opened it up, looking for more information. As she waited for the computer to boot up, she thought of the charismatic banker. But she also thought of Gabríel Örn. One murdered banker. Another murdered banker.

  Would there ever be a time when she didn’t think of Gabríel Örn?