66° North

by Michael Ridpath

  It was bad enough having to lie to Dísa, or at least to conceal the truth. But it was Markús that Harpa was having real problems with. She couldn’t look him in the eye. She couldn’t look her own son in the eye!

  He had begun to realize something was wrong. Usually so well behaved, he had started to act up. That would only get worse.

  And now that the police knew that Óskar was his father, it would be impossible for Harpa to keep that quiet. Markús would find out in the end, as would Óskar’s family. Maybe even the press. And then, eventually, he would discover that his mother was a murderer.

  Harpa had a strong bond with her son. The fear that that might be shattered terrified her.

  She was desperate to call Björn. But he was out in the middle of the Atlantic somewhere.

  She couldn’t go on like this. She should put an end to it all. Go to the police station and confess everything. Face up to what she had done. She hadn’t meant to kill Gabríel, the judge would understand that. Perhaps she would be found guilty of manslaughter instead of murder. She would go to jail, but not for the rest of her life. This was Iceland after all, with its famously lenient legal system.

  But they would arrest Björn as well. He would probably be locked up as an accessory or conspirator or whatever they called it, as would the others who had helped her, even that student, Ísak, who had been suspicious of her at first. They had done so much for her, she couldn’t betray them now.

  And what about Markús? Sure, her mother would look after him, look after him very well, but Harpa couldn’t bear the thought of missing him grow up.

  She took a deep breath. Somehow she would have to get through this, stick to her story, keep her wits about her, keep herself out of jail. Somehow she would have to find the strength to do that.

  She sniffed. The moisture on her cheeks cooled in the crisp air. She hadn’t even realized she was weeping. She was falling apart.

  It was strange. She used to think of herself as a tough woman, smart and tough. You had to be to get on in Ódinsbanki. Although there were women in all jobs in Iceland, the banks had a macho culture. Work hard, play hard. They won deals because they were quicker than everyone else and they were ready to take risks that other banks wouldn’t. Óskar had insisted that they all read his favourite book, Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, with its thesis that the best decisions were those taken by instinct in seconds. Harpa had kept up, helped, she had to admit, by Gabríel Örn. They were a team: Harpa was his analytical muscle, he had the aggression and ruthlessness to close the deals.

  And they had been fun, those glory days, she couldn’t pretend they hadn’t been. The trips to the Monaco Grand Prix, the yachts in the Mediterranean, the birthday parties in Barbados, following Manchester United Football club to exotic cities around Europe. It was only after going out with Gabríel for three months that Harpa realized he had supported Liverpool all his life, at least until he joined Ódinsbanki and discovered that Óskar followed Manchester United.

  But she wasn’t much better. She hated football. She just didn’t let anyone at work know that.

  Then there were the salmon fishing trips back in Iceland. That was corporate entertaining on a spectacular scale. Fly the clients to Reykjavík by private jet, and then from the City Airport to the river by helicopter. Each client had his own gillie, and even the most cack-handed could land a salmon. Her father had been so jealous. And proud.

  She smiled.

  But it was never going to last. In her heart of hearts she had known that. She had argued furiously with Gabríel over the car dealership deal, and the chain of shoe shops, both in Britain, both now bankrupt. And there were several others that she had serious doubts over. They would do fine while the economy was growing, but come a recession and they wouldn’t be able to meet their interest payments. That was a feature of nearly every deal Ódinsbanki did.

  They were winging it. And when the recession did come, everything crashed at once.

  She knew that would happen. While the others had such boundless optimism, such faith in their own abilities that they thought they had defied the laws of boom and bust, she never really believed it. Yet she had still followed them blindly.

  Something else to feel guilty about.

  She approached the harbour. She saw Kaffivagninn and smiled. She had had a part-time job there as a waitress for a few years when she was at school. She used to love to hang around the harbour. Her favourite job was cleaning out the Helgi, her father’s boat. Sometimes she would find coins and she would be allowed to keep them. It was ironic, at school people saw her as a ‘quota princess’, but in reality her father made her earn all her money.

  Of course, that was the real reason she had liked to hang around the harbour, to be near him. She didn’t see him for days at a time. He would often arrive home after she had gone to bed, and be off again before she had woken up. But he loved her. His love for her was always unquestioning. It was to please him that she had worked so hard at school, that she had got a job in a bank, that she had earned so much money.

  She was amazed that he had forgiven her for losing him all his savings. He had a hot temper and bore grudges, and his money was extremely important to him. She had been terrified that he would never forgive her.

  But he had. Over time she realized that he had decided that she had been duped as well, that in his eyes she was just as much a victim as him. While this wasn’t true, Harpa was extremely grateful.

  She looked at her watch. Only ten minutes until she was due back at the bakery. She didn’t want to abuse Dísa’s kindness, so she hurried to the bus stop and caught a number 13 back to Seltjarnarnes.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  MAGNUS’S SPIRITS ROSE as he drove north from Reykjavík. The clouds were blown away and the sun shone out of a pale blue sky. It felt good to fly along the open road, away from the people and the bustle of the city, the grey sea shimmering to his left, the mountains looming on his right.

  The road plunged deep under Hvalfjördur, Whale Fjord, one of the deepest fjords in Iceland, swung through a valley between two fells and then crossed Borgarfjördur, its surface creased by strong currents. Just beyond the little town of Borgarnes, the road forked to the left. A couple of kilometres outside the town was the church of Borg, where Egill had lived, the hero of one of Magnus’s favourite sagas.

  The sagas were like the great architectural monuments of other countries. In a land with no great settlements and precious few sizeable buildings, Icelanders looked to their literature for a sense of their identity, of their past. During his adolescence in America, and then later into adulthood, Magnus had read and reread these medieval tales obsessively, conjuring in his mind’s eye the heaths and fjords of Iceland in the tenth century.

  They had become a refuge for a lone Icelandic kid who found himself overwhelmed by his big American Middle School. Egill was one of the most extraordinary characters from the sagas: a brave and cruel warrior, who fought against great odds in Norway and England, before returning to his farm at Borg. But he was also a poet, whose elegy to his drowned son Magnus knew by heart. It was kind of cool to be driving past his farm now.

  It was a good road, almost empty of traffic. The flanks of the fells glowed orange and gold in the low autumn sun, and the sheep were rounded balls of wool, ready for the oncoming winter. Soon the Snaefells Peninsula approached, a backbone of ragged mountains with the Snaefells glacier itself a white dome at the western end capping a slumbering volcano. The entrance to the Centre of the Earth in Jules Verne’s book. Magnus took the turning at Vegamót up the pass and into the mountains. The road wound upwards, until he cleared the pass and Breidafjördur opened out before him.

  He pulled over.

  Beneath him was the Berserkjahraun, a frozen stream of rock spilling down towards the sea in dramatic folds of grey and green. In the foreground Swine Lake twisted around the edge of the lava, its water level low at this time of year. Then down by the seashore was the farm of Hraun, and on the other s
ide of the little cove, nestling under its own huge fell, Bjarnarhöfn.

  Magnus’s good spirits evaporated as he felt icy fingers clutch at his chest. The fears of childhood never left you. Just over the mountain to his right was the parallel pass where the Kerlingin troll stood, the stone sack of babies over her shoulder. Down in the lava field, the murdered Swedish berserkers roamed. On the heath over to the east strode the ghost of Thórólfur Lame Foot, killed by his neighbour Arnkell a thousand years before.

  And in that farm down there, right now in the twenty-first century, lived Hallgrímur, Magnus’s grandfather.

  Magnus shook his head. How could he, a fit thirty-three-year-old who had got through many a tough situation, be afraid of an old man in his eighties?

  But it wasn’t just the man. It was the memories.

  Magnus looked over to the right, beyond the mole that was Helgafell, to Stykkishólmur, a white splatter of dots by the sea. Among those dots somewhere was Unnur Ágústsdóttir with answers to other questions.

  But in the meantime, he had to find Björn.

  *

  Grundarfjördur was twenty kilometres further west along the coast from the Berserkjahraun. It was a compact fishing village of white houses, a church and large sheds dedicated to processing fish, squeezing around a crescent-shaped harbour. Behind it a heath of browned grass and waterfalls led up to mountains. To one side, thrusting out of the sea, was a tower of green-and-grey hooped rock known as Kirkjufell or Church Fell.

  Björn’s house was a small one-storey affair on the western edge of town, right by the shore, in the shadow of the rock.

  No one was at home. His neighbour said that she hadn’t seen Björn for a couple of days.

  Magnus drove back to the harbourmaster’s office. The harbour-master, a tall man with thinning sandy hair and glasses, knew Björn Helgason well. Over a cup of coffee he explained that Björn had sold his boat a few months before to pay off his loans, and now crewed for other captains either in Grundarfjördur, Stykkishólmur or some of the other ports along the north coast of the peninsula. There were three fishing companies in town that Magnus should try.

  This he did, without success. As far as they knew, Björn was on none of their boats.

  Damn! It was a risk of course, it was always a risk to interview a suspect without calling ahead first to ensure they were there, but it was a risk Magnus often took. He liked to catch them by surprise. You could tell a lot from the look on a guilty man’s face when he answered the door to the police when he hadn’t been expecting them.

  Magnus dropped in on the local police station, a brown wooden building just behind the harbour. There he met an affable constable in his forties with a full moustache, named Páll. Another cup of coffee. It was clear that Páll was excited by a visit from the Reykjavík Violent Crimes Unit, although he pretended not to show it. He knew Björn well, of course. Although not from Grundarfjördur originally, Páll had been stationed there for ten years and he liked the place.

  Times were tough, though, for the fishermen, both the independent operators and the fishing companies with their fish factories in town. Too much borrowing. Even here, two hundred kilometres from Reykjavík, people had borrowed too much. It was those damn bankers and that arrogant son-of-a-bitch Ólafur Tómasson.

  Magnus humoured the constable as he went through the traditional kreppa litany, and asked him to keep an eye out for Björn over the next few days. He left Páll his number, and told him that he wanted to see Björn in connection with Óskar Gunnarsson’s murder.

  Then, after stopping at a café in town for a late lunch, Magnus decided to take a slight detour to Stykkishólmur. Perhaps Björn was working on a boat out of there. And if he wasn’t? Well, Magnus might drop in on Unnur.

  Magnus sped through the Berserkjahraun without glancing left towards his grandfather’s farm. A little further on a sea eagle heaved itself into the air, its distinctive white tail fanned out behind it, and beat a path towards a knoll. This little hill, a familiar sight from the farm at Bjarnarhöfn, was only two hundred feet high and was known as Helgafell, or Holy Mountain. One of the first settlers in those parts, Thórólfur Moster-beard, had decided that this little mountain was in fact holy and that he and his kinsmen would be swallowed up by it when they died. To preserve the sanctity of the place he insisted that no man should do their ‘elf-frighteners’ on the hill, on pain of death. Of course his neighbours did just that, defecating in full view of Thórólfur’s men, and started the first of countless feuds.

  And in the church under the hill, Magnus remembered, was the grave of Gudrún Ósvifsdóttir, the heroine of another great saga, the Laxdaela.

  This landscape, that had changed so little over the last thousand years, brought those sagas that Magnus had read and reread two thousand miles away to life. Each of the farms mentioned in the sagas was still there, still farmed. Bjarnarhöfn, his grandfather’s farm, was named after Björn the Easterner, Styr had lived at Hraun, Snorri the Chieftain at Helgafell, Arnkell at Bolstad just over the mountain. The farms then would have housed more people than they did now. Most of the time, just as now, they would have taken their sheep up to the fells, tended to their horses, cultivated hay in the home meadow. Except in those days every now and then the Norse farmers would stomp back and forth across the lava plain clutching swords and battleaxes to beat the shit out of each other. Magnus’s grandparents had told Óli and him some of these stories. But they had added a veneer of darkness to them that had at first thrilled and then terrified the boys.

  Magnus drove into Stykkishólmur, past his old school and on to the harbour, surrounded by a jumble of multicoloured houses clad in corrugated iron, some of them quite old. At first glance the town hadn’t changed much. The large white hospital and a Franciscan convent dominated one side of the harbour. It had been strange to see the nuns, many of them from southern European countries, around town. Iceland was emphatically not a Catholic country, so the nuns and their unfamiliar ways had seemed exotic to the local kids.

  The hospital was called St Francis’s, and Magnus’s Uncle Ingvar was a doctor there. It brought back memories too. Visiting Óli. Magnus’s own brief stay for an arm broken, ostensibly while falling off a haystack. The lies. The nurse who didn’t believe him. The fear of being found out.

  Forcing himself back to the present, Magnus asked around at the offices of the local fishing companies. They knew Björn Helgason, but hadn’t seen him for a couple of weeks. They were pretty sure that he wasn’t on a Stykkishólmur boat.

  As he walked out along the quay, Magnus considered what to do next. He could drive back westwards along the peninsula to Ólafsvík and Rif to ask around for Björn. Or he could drive back home. Or…

  Or he could see Unnur.

  He knew deep down he had already taken the decision. That was one reason why he had driven all the way up here to look for Björn. That was why he had checked Stykkishólmur rather than Ólafsvík. Who was he kidding? He was here to see his father’s mistress.

  Tracing someone in a small Icelandic town is not difficult. He returned to the fishing office, borrowed a phone directory, and looked under ‘U’ for Unnur – the Icelanders listed people under their first names.

  She lived in a neat white house on top of a cliff overlooking the harbour. It was just beside Stykkishólmur’s modern church, which was an extraordinary edifice: a cross between a white Mexican adobe church and a space ship. It had been under construction the whole time Magnus lived around there. It was a different kind of interplanetary rocket to the Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík, but it made Magnus wonder if there was some kind of strange intergalactic theology behind Icelandic church design.

  Weird.

  Magnus sat outside the house for a couple of minutes. Perhaps, finally, he was getting close to understanding why his parents had split up. And maybe, just maybe, why his father had been murdered. He took a deep breath, got out of the car and rang the doorbell.

  It was answered by a grey-hai
red woman with blue eyes, fine cheekbones and pale, translucent skin. Magnus had calculated that if she was the same age as his mother Unnur would be fifty-eight. She looked about that age, but she had a graceful beauty about her. Magnus couldn’t reconcile her with the woman he dimly remembered from his childhood. She must have been a stunner in her time. In Magnus’s father’s time.

  ‘Yes?’ She smiled hesitantly.

  ‘Unnur?’

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘Do you mind if I speak with you for a few minutes? My name is Magnús Ragnarsson.’ Magnus waited a beat for the name to register. ‘I am Ragnar Jónsson’s son.’

  For a moment, Unnur seemed confused. Then her lips pursed.

  ‘Yes, I do mind,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’

  ‘I want to speak with you about my father.’

  ‘And I don’t want to talk to you about him. That was a long time ago and it has nothing to do with you.’

  ‘Of course it has something to do with me,’ Magnus said. ‘I have only just found out about the affair. It explains things about my childhood, about my mother and my father. But there is still a lot I don’t understand.’

  The woman hesitated.

  ‘I know it will be painful for you, and for me too. But you are the only person who can help me. I don’t talk to my mother’s family any more, or rather they won’t talk to me.’

  Unnur nodded. ‘That doesn’t surprise me.’ She took a deep breath. ‘All right. But my husband is due back soon. He works at the hospital. When he returns, we change the subject, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ said Magnus.

  Unnur led him into the living room, and disappeared to get some coffee. Despite her initial hostility, she couldn’t skip on this basic prerequisite of Icelandic hospitality. Magnus scanned the room. It was comfortable and, like every Icelandic living room, it had the full complement of family photographs. One wall was lined with books in Icelandic, Danish and English. Through a big picture window there was a magnificent view over the grey waters of Breidafjördur, dotted with flat islands, and the silhouettes of the mountains of the West Fjords on the far side.