66° North

by Michael Ridpath

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘The girlfriend called his mother in Iceland, who said she was fine.’

  ‘Had his mother seen Ísak?’

  ‘Briefly. He arrived home and then he went off again. Apparently he’s gone on a camping trip alone. To sort himself out.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘His mother didn’t tell the girlfriend. I suggest you get someone to ask her.’

  ‘We’ll do that. Thanks, Sharon.’

  Ísak was in a bit of a quandary. He had checked both passes leading towards Grundarfjördur, and had seen no sign of Björn’s pickup. It had been a lot of driving and he returned to Grundarfjördur unsure what to do next. The map didn’t show any other passes with roads through them directly to the south of the town. Indeed Grundarfjördur itself sat in a horseshoe-shaped cove, with green slopes rising smoothly to cliffs the whole way around. Lots of waterfalls, but nothing remotely resembling a pass. There were other possibilities further away, but which to try?

  He cruised slowly through the little fishing port. Although his fuel gauge still showed half full, he pulled into a petrol station.

  The guy at the counter was reading a book. He was about Ísak’s age, maybe a year or two younger. He was a little flabby, with long wispy fair hair and pasty skin. Ísak didn’t know how people like him survived stuck in the middle of nowhere all their lives. It would drive him mad: he would be out of there as soon as he could afford the bus ticket to Reykjavík.

  He paid for his petrol. ‘Can you help me?’ he asked the guy. ‘I’m looking for a mountain pass near here. A friend of mine said there is an old hut that is worth looking at.’

  ‘There are no passes here in Grundarfjördur,’ the guy said. ‘You have to go to Ólafsvík or over towards Stykkishólmur.’

  ‘I’ve tried those,’ said Ísak. ‘I couldn’t see any old huts.’

  ‘Sorry.’ The man went back to his book. The Grapes of Wrath, Ísak saw.

  Ísak headed towards the exit.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ the man said. ‘There is the Kerlingin Pass. Where the troll is.’

  ‘Troll?’

  ‘Yes, haven’t you heard of the Kerlingin troll?’ The man tutted, amazed at the ignorance of these people from Reykjavík. ‘It’s just to the east of the new road to Stykkishólmur. There is an old hut there, I am pretty sure.’

  Björn sat outside the hut, listening to Harpa inside. The screams turned to sobs, and eventually to silence.

  He had been shocked by her response. He had hoped she would at least understand his point of view. Perhaps she still would, given time. He knew how important he was to her, how much she trusted him.

  After about forty minutes he went back in.

  Harpa had pushed herself over against the wall of the hut, and was slumped against it.

  Björn untied her. ‘Sit down on the chair,’ he said. It was more of a suggestion than a command.

  Harpa ignored him. So he sat down next to her against the wall.

  ‘Can I leave you untied?’ Björn asked. ‘There’s nowhere you can really go. It’s several kilometres to the main road.’

  Harpa nodded.

  In the end she spoke, as he knew she would. ‘So what happened? Did you all get together right after Gabríel Örn died? I thought we agreed we would keep away from each other. So the police wouldn’t be able to make a link.’

  ‘Not right after. I think it was in June. I went to a bar with my brother one evening, the Grand Rokk. I bumped into Sindri there. I met him with Ísak the following day.

  ‘We all felt the same way. That what had happened to Gabríel Örn wasn’t actually that bad. That he deserved it. That others deserved it too.’

  ‘So you went to France. But if you didn’t shoot Julian Lister, what were you doing there?’

  ‘Preparing the way. Sindri’s drug-dealing friends had contacts in Amsterdam who could get hold of a rifle and a motorbike. I needed to talk to them and pay them. Then I checked out Julian Lister’s home in Normandy and buried the gun. Ísak had done the same kind of thing in London.’

  ‘Pay them? Where did you get the money?’

  ‘Most of it from Ísak. I don’t know where he gets it. Parents maybe?’

  ‘And you won’t tell me who pulled the trigger?’

  ‘No.’

  Silence. ‘But don’t you realize it is murder, what you’ve done? What you’ve all done.’

  Björn sighed. ‘I don’t think it is, Harpa. Not really.’

  ‘How can it not be?’

  ‘People have always died in Iceland. It’s a dangerous place. Farmers die in snowdrifts looking for their sheep. Fishermen drown at sea.’

  ‘Not any more, they don’t,’ Harpa said. ‘It’s years since a farmer died of exposure. And my father never lost anyone on his boat.’

  ‘He was lucky,’ said Björn. ‘I lost my elder brother and my cousin on my uncle’s boat when it sank. He survived with two others.’

  Harpa raised her eyebrows. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘I was fourteen,’ said Björn. ‘I should have been on the boat too, but our football team had an important cup match. I have felt guilty ever since.’

  ‘You never told me.’ Björn saw a flicker of sympathy in Harpa’s eyes and then it died. ‘But these people weren’t murdered.’

  ‘Not directly. But they died trying to put food on their families’ tables. Unlike the bankers who never ran any risks at all.’

  ‘That’s no justification, Björn.’

  ‘My point is, people die, Harpa. And Gabríel Örn and Óskar died for a better cause than my brother.’

  ‘I don’t see that.’

  Björn’s patience snapped. ‘These people destroyed our country! They have put us and our children and our children’s children into debt for a century. And they are getting away with it! Not a single one is in jail. Someone had to do something.’ He fought to control himself. He wanted to win Harpa over, not shout at her. ‘It turned out that was us.’

  Björn took a deep breath. There was more he could tell her, something that would persuade her, but now wasn’t the time. Not yet. Not until Ingólfur Arnarson had been dealt with.

  ‘I have to make a phone call,’ he said. He took hold of the rope. ‘I’m going to tie your hands together, and your feet. I’m sorry, I won’t be long.’

  He tied two complicated knots around Harpa’s wrists and ankles. He made them tight, confident that she wouldn’t be able to untie them herself. And even if she did, where could she go?

  He grabbed his phone, her phone and the knife he had brought with him, and went out to the pickup truck. He drove up to the top of the pass, and down the other side. In front of him, bathed in sunshine, stretched a magnificent view: the whole of Breidafjördur dotted with its islands, the holy bump of Helgafell and beyond that the town of Stykkishólmur to his right, the mountains of the West Fjords in the distance, and in the foreground the Berserkjahraun tumbling down towards the sea.

  On the ridge above him stood the lonely figure of the stone troll herself, her head only a couple of metres below heavy cloud.

  He got out of the truck and checked for a signal. There was one.

  He made his call and was about to return to the hut, when he paused. He could hear the sound of a car. He looked down and saw a small hatchback climbing the potholed road towards him. A car like that was not robust enough to make the cratered track down to the hut. Probably a tourist wanting to check out the troll.

  Björn decided to wait and watch.

  The road was a nightmare. Ísak was amazed that this could ever have been the main route in to Stykkishólmur. He did his best to navigate around the craters as the Honda heaved and jolted its way up the pass, but it was impossible to avoid them entirely.

  He was only a couple of hundred metres away when he spotted Björn’s red pickup, and Björn himself leaning next to it, watching him.

  Think.

  Ísak slowed. There would be no way that Björn would be a
ble to recognize him as the driver yet.

  He stopped. Executed a jarring three-point turn, and slowly headed down the hill, as though he had given up in the face of the bad road.

  He drove slowly, his eyes flicking constantly up to the mirror where he could see the pickup behind him. Sure enough, after a minute or so, Björn climbed in and turned around, heading back over the pass. Another minute and Björn’s vehicle was out of sight.

  Ísak waited a couple of minutes more, turned his car around yet again, and followed his co-conspirator.

  He made his way carefully, getting out of his vehicle before each bend to peer around it on foot: he didn’t want Björn to see his car suddenly appear in the open. After half an hour or so of very slow progress, Ísak put his head around a boulder and saw the hut, standing alone on a knoll in the valley of stone, rock, moss and water, with Björn’s truck parked outside it.

  Harpa had spent much of her childhood untangling fishing nets. She had strong nimble fingers and knew how fishermen tied knots.

  She had watched closely as Björn tied the rope around her wrists and ankles. He knew what he was doing. She couldn’t reach the knot on her wrists, and the one on her ankles would be extremely difficult. In fact she suspected that Björn himself would have to use a knife to cut it.

  But she could only try. She tugged, pulled, pushed and puzzled. Eventually, she made progress and she could feel the whole knot loosen. But just as she was about to pull it apart, she heard the sound of Björn’s vehicle approaching.

  She hesitated, and then tightened the knot again.

  Next time.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  ANNA ÖSK SET her little pony off at a canter around her bedroom. She had had the pony for three weeks now, since her birthday, and she still liked to play with it all the time.

  Her mother said she could have a real one when she was nine. Her daddy wasn’t so sure. He was worried about money. He was always worried about money. Silly man. Mummy had told her that they were rich. It was obvious: they had a really big house right in the middle of Reykjavík by the lake.

  But when she got her pony they couldn’t keep it at home. Apparently their garden wasn’t big enough. Which was also silly. Their garden was really big, much bigger than the one belonging to Anna Ösk’s best friend Sara Rós.

  Anna Ösk lifted up her pony to the window to look at the garden. Her bedroom was on the second floor, high up, and she had a good view. She could see exactly where you could put a stable, right in the corner where the little tree was. Easy-peasy.

  As she was planning the exact positioning of the structure, Anna Ösk noticed some movement in the next-door garden. Someone was crawling through the bushes at the back. It was a man. He was really difficult to see, but Anna Ösk could tell it wasn’t the man who lived in the house next door. She wondered if he was playing hide-and-seek.

  He must have been because he crawled right up to the neighbour’s car, which was parked at the top of the driveway, and then slid until he was halfway underneath.

  Anna Ösk looked around for a child. As a rule, grown-ups didn’t play hide-and-seek by themselves. She couldn’t see one, but she was sure there must be one somewhere. Probably at the front of the house, the man was well hidden from the front or the road.

  Very strange. She would tell her mummy what she had seen.

  ‘Anna Ösk!’ Her mother’s voice crashed up the stairs. This didn’t sound good.

  ‘Anna Ösk, come downstairs this minute! How many times have I told you to pick up your toys from the kitchen floor when you have finished playing? I’ve had enough! No TV this afternoon, do you hear me?’

  Anna Ösk began to cry.

  Magnus pulled up outside the wooden police station in Grundarfjördur and stepped out of the Range Rover.

  ‘Magnús!’

  He turned to see the burly figure of Páll in his black uniform walking rapidly towards him from the direction of the harbour.

  ‘That was quick,’ Páll said.

  ‘Not much traffic.’

  Páll smiled.

  ‘Any trace of Björn?’ Magnus asked.

  ‘None so far. No one has seen him for a couple of days in the harbour. It’s unlikely he took a boat out: certainly no one saw him if he did. The harbourmaster said he would check whether any small boats were missing that hadn’t been reported. I stopped in quickly to talk to his parents and his sister. They say they haven’t heard anything from him either. Same at the café the fishermen often use. The police in Stykkishólmur and Ólafsvík are looking for him too. They’ve set up road blocks on every route out of the peninsula.’

  That at least was possible: there were no more than a couple of routes out of the Snaefells Peninsula. But the peninsula itself was big, perhaps eighty kilometres long and fifteen wide, and full of mountains. Impossible to search thoroughly.

  Magnus wondered about a helicopter. But although sun shone along the shoreline, the mountains themselves were enveloped in cloud.

  Of course if Björn had left the area the night before he could be over the other side of Iceland by now. But if he was planning to hide Harpa he might choose somewhere he knew. Somewhere close to home.

  ‘So what’s next?’

  ‘I thought shops and petrol stations,’ said Páll. ‘He may have stocked up with supplies or fuel. There aren’t many of them in town: do you want to split up or come with me?’

  ‘Let’s do it together,’ Magnus said. ‘You know the town and the people. I’ll just waste time.’

  ‘Good,’ said Páll moving towards his white police car. ‘Jump in. And you can tell me what’s really going on.’

  Ísak drove his mother’s poor Honda off what was left of the track, and round the back of a large conical rock. Miraculously the axle didn’t break. He scuffed the tyre marks in the dirt with his foot. He didn’t want Björn to notice the car should he decide to drive back up the pass.

  He took the knife he had bought in Borgarnes out of the plastic bag and thrust it into the pocket of his coat. Then he crept back to the boulder. The hut was about two hundred metres from where the road emerged into the open. There was virtually no cover, but only one of the windows in the hut faced that way, and that was high up, probably a little higher than eye level.

  He noticed that the cloud was thickening and creeping down the walls of the valley.

  On the other side of the building was a cliff about thirty metres high, with a waterfall cascading down it. There seemed to be a vertical crevice in the rock there big enough for a man to squeeze and still have a view of the hut.

  Ísak gave it a try. He ran, crouching, around the hut, keeping himself out of the field of vision of the bigger windows at the side of the building. He pressed himself into the crevice. His view of the hut was indeed clear, and he was pretty sure that Björn wouldn’t be able to see him. The only problem was that water from the cascade was constantly splashing on to him, and it was cold. Very cold.

  He would wait until Björn left the hut again. Then he would slip inside and deal with Harpa. Wait until Björn came back and as he discovered her body, slash a tyre of Björn’s truck and run up the road to his own car.

  Leave it to Björn to dispose of Harpa’s body.

  But then, if Björn was subsequently caught, which he probably would be, he would talk.

  No. Ísak would just have to kill Björn as well as Harpa. Either wait until Björn left the hut and surprise him when he returned, or if Björn didn’t leave, creep into the hut after night fell and they were both asleep. If Ísak wasn’t frozen to death by then.

  It wasn’t ideal, but he was committed now.

  Magnus waited in the car as Páll went into Samkaup, the main supermarket in town. He called Baldur and told him that there was no sign of Björn. He had already passed on Sharon’s message about Ísak’s disappearance.

  Baldur was businesslike. Sindri wasn’t talking. Not a word. Wasn’t even bothering with a lawyer. Magnus wasn’t surprised. If there was one mo
re hit still to come, Sindri would be happy to bide his time.

  Árni had checked with Ísak’s parents. Ísak had left home at nine o’clock the previous evening in his mother’s car, a small Honda, loaded with camping stuff. She said that the family had been on a number of camping trips to Thórsmörk, a hundred and fifty kilometres to the east of Reykjavík.

  They had struck lucky. Calling around campsites, they had discovered that Ísak had been spotted at a site near Hveragerdi, to the south-east of Reykjavík, on the way to Thórsmörk. Although Baldur and Magnus agreed that Ísak wasn’t going on a little holiday jaunt, it was possible that if he was looking for wilderness to hide in, he might choose an area with which he was familiar.

  Or he might be in the Snaefells Peninsula with Björn and Harpa.

  Magnus suggested that they pull Gulli in. Perhaps somehow he had travelled from Tenerife to London and Paris and then back to Tenerife. Unlikely, but they didn’t want to take any chances: if he was in custody he couldn’t assassinate anyone. Baldur agreed. He had given up condemning Magnus’s wilder ideas. The stakes were too high.

  Páll returned to the car. ‘Nothing. Let’s go on.’

  Grundarfjördur was a small, compact town and it didn’t take long for Páll to get from place to place. They checked Vínbúd, the state liquor store, and then went on to the petrol station.

  The kid behind the counter knew Björn Helgason but hadn’t seen him since he had filled up his red pickup the morning of the day before.

  ‘That was probably to get down to Reykjavík,’ Magnus said. As an afterthought, just as he was leaving, he paused.

  ‘You haven’t seen a young guy in here have you? A student, twenty-two years old, neatly dressed, about one seventy-five tall, fair hair, little dimple on his chin? Driving a small blue Honda?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the kid. ‘A guy like that was in here about an hour ago. Asked me where a mountain pass was with a hut. I told him about the Kerlingin Pass. He’d never even heard of the troll. Can you believe it? These guys from Reykjavík don’t know anything.’