Sea of Stone

by Michael Ridpath

  ‘Hey, Vigdís!’ her mother said. ‘Have a drink with us.’ She pulled herself to her feet and tottered over. She stretched upwards towards Vigdís’s ear. At least she was fully clothed. ‘And don’t tell him you are my daughter. He doesn’t know how old I am.’

  Vigdís scowled.

  ‘Do you want a drink?’ the man said in English. ‘You speak real good Icelandic.’ He placed one hand on Vigdís’s arse.

  Vigdís brushed it off. ‘Mum. We were supposed to be having dinner together.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ said her mother. ‘I can call for more pizza. And don’t call me “Mum”.’ The last in a ridiculous stage whisper.

  Vigdís fought to control the tears. She hadn’t seen her mother like this for at least a year. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, stay,’ said the guy, this time in Icelandic.

  Vigdís turned to him. Forced a smile. ‘Hey. Come here,’ she said. She took his hand and led him out of the flat into the hallway.

  With a look behind him to Audur, the man followed.

  He was a strong guy, a barrel chest and biceps showing beneath his T-shirt. But he wasn’t ready for Vigdís. Once they were outside, she shut the door to the flat, spun round and pinned him up against the wall. She whipped out her ID.

  ‘I’m Detective Vigdís Audardóttir,’ she said. ‘Listen, you Polish fuckwit. If I see you anywhere around my mother again, I’ll bust you for possession, or having sex with a pensioner, whichever carries the longest stretch. Do you hear me?’

  She wasn’t sure how much Icelandic the man really understood, but he gulped and nodded.

  ‘Good,’ said Vigdís. She let him go and tripped him so he fell to the floor. Her cheeks burning as she ran down the stairs and out to her car.

  She sat behind the driving wheel and banged it. ‘Fuck! Fuck!’ she exclaimed. And the tears rolled.

  It was late, but Aníta couldn’t sleep. She was lying in the big wooden bed in her bedroom, with Kolbeinn snoring gently beside her. The bedroom had once been Hallgrímur’s, and his father’s before him. There were some signs of Hallgrímur still in the room: a photograph of him fishing with a young Kolbeinn, and even one of his wedding day with Sylvía, she unrecognizable in the traditional skautbúningur – embroidered black jacket and long skirt with a tall white headdress and veil. Hallgrímur had the glare of an awkward bastard even on his wedding day.

  Aníta had done her best to make the room hers, mostly by adding her grandmother’s things: some framed tapestries, a photograph of her grandmother’s own farmhouse thirty kilometres away just beyond Stykkishólmur, a rocking chair and even a small spinning wheel.

  Aníta had been only one year old when her grandmother died, but nevertheless Aníta felt she knew her. Felt she knew her well.

  She had dug out copies of Moor and the Man and the collection of Benedikt Jóhannesson’s short stories, of which ‘The Slip’ was one. She read ‘The Slip’ first. It was only five pages long, but it conveyed the permanent simmering rage that the teenage boy felt towards his neighbour, and the sudden realization as he was passing the man on the cliff path that revenge was possible. Not just possible, inevitable. Could that neighbour have been Gunnar, who had slept in that very room seventy years before? It seemed to Aníta it could.

  She turned to Moor and the Man, which was set in Reykjavík during the war, but included flashbacks to a rural childhood somewhere in the countryside. Chapter three was well thumbed; someone in the house had read it many times. And it was as Jóhannes had described: two boys witnessing one of their fathers committing adultery with the other’s mother, and then later watching the cuckolded father dumping a heavy sack into a lake.

  Aníta closed the book and turned off the light. She lay down beside her husband but couldn’t get to sleep. Thoughts of Hallgrímur and Jóhannes and the goings-on at Bjarnarhöfn all those years ago swirled around her head.

  And Villi.

  Half an hour passed. Or perhaps it was an hour. She thought she could hear voices. She lifted her head from the pillow and listened.

  Voices. Coming from downstairs.

  Kolbeinn was in bed with her. Which meant it must be Villi. But who else was with him?

  She got up and pulled back the curtain to check outside. The thick grey cloud was shredding. An almost full moon peeped through it, scattering pale sparkles on to the fjord. To the north she could see the green aurora slinking over the mountains of the West Fjords. The little church was clearly visible in the moonlight, as was the police tape fluttering at its entrance. They must have moved Hallgrímur’s body by now, surely. Aníta shuddered.

  It didn’t feel like it.

  Soon he would be brought back to the little churchyard and laid next to his ancestors, to his father Gunnar and his daughter Margrét. Maybe one day Aníta would join them. She shivered again.

  The farmyard was empty, but she could still hear the voices.

  Kolbeinn was asleep. She considered waking him, but decided against it. Just in case.

  She went out on to the landing and slowly descended the staircase. The door to the kitchen was open. The only light inside came from the moon. She saw the silhouette of a small boy. Smaller than Krissi. Was it Krissi?

  The voices were clearer. One of them she recognized.

  ‘Go to bed now, boy. You heard nothing. Do you hear me? Nothing.’

  Aníta stood completely still. What should she do? Scream? Grab the boy?

  She felt fear. Not so much her own fear as the fear of the small boy. Was it Krissi?

  He had moved out of her vision now, but a familiar figure had stepped forward.

  Hallgrímur.

  His face was illuminated by a flickering orange glow. He seemed to notice her for the first time and glared.

  Then he turned towards where the boy had been and hissed, ‘To bed, if you know what’s good for you.’

  ‘Stop!’ Aníta shouted and ran forward into the kitchen. ‘Hallgrímur, stop!’

  But he wasn’t there. Neither was the boy.

  ‘Krissi?’ she called out in a loud whisper.

  And then she saw the glow. The orange glow.

  Fire.

  Hallgrímur’s cottage was on fire. And outside it, standing only a few metres away, was Sylvía.

  ‘Kolbeinn!’ Aníta shrieked. She ran back to the staircase. ‘Kolbeinn! The cottage is on fire! Come quick!’

  Stopping only to pull on her boots by the door, she ran outside. The glow came from the window facing the farmhouse, which itself was out of sight of her bedroom. It lit up the small figure of Sylvía, her short white hair sticking up, staring, mesmerized.

  ‘Stand back, Sylvía!’ Aníta said, grabbing the old woman and pulling her back. The fire was intensifying in front of her eyes. The first signs of smoke curled along the edges of the window.

  ‘Hallgrímur needed his dinner,’ Sylvía said. ‘He hasn’t had his dinner yet.’

  Aníta paused just for a second. What the hell was the old woman on about? She didn’t have time to figure it out. She ran back to the farmhouse to meet Kolbeinn emerging from the doorway.

  ‘You get the hose!’ she shouted. ‘I’ll call the fire service!’

  And she rushed into the house and dialled 112.

  CHAPTER TEN

  January 2010

  THE PLANE BANKED low over the town of Cohasset on its approach to Boston’s Logan airport. Magnus stared down at the snow-covered trees; he had read about the major dump the previous week. From the air, New England looked like a massive forest, extending as far as the eye could see; nothing like the neat patchwork of towns that appeared on the map, which in the real world were marked only by the round water towers on their stilts sticking high up above the trees.

  So many trees! God, it was good to see them.

  Magnus had felt no desire to cross-country ski in Iceland, but the clear blue sky, the glistening snow and all those trees made him want to put on a pair as soon as he landed.

  The pl
ane banked again, and lined up towards the runway squatting in Boston Harbor. The city stretched out to the left of the aircraft. The neighbourhoods where he had spent so many years cataloguing the dead bodies, getting to know the victims, figuring out who had killed them and why. A homicide investigation was like a process of reincarnation. First you found a body. Then you found its name. Then he or she became a murder victim. Then she became a person, a real person with a job, a family, hopes, fears, friends, lovers, faults. And enemies. And you began to work for that person, for that person’s family. You had to find who had killed her and why.

  And when you did find the killer, and the evidence against him, and you did the paperwork right and he went to court and then to jail, it wasn’t over. There was always another body. Another victim to get to know.

  This cycle had become Magnus’s life the moment he had joined the homicide unit seven years before. He could never get enough of it. And he was good at it – there were very few unsolved cases. If there was no evidence, he would keep looking. If the witnesses wouldn’t talk, he would find a way to crack them.

  Of course there was one unsolved murder. There was always the one unsolved murder. It might have happened before he joined the department, but it had pursued him throughout his career as a policeman.

  Murder in Iceland was different. Magnus had been lucky: he had been involved in a handful of fascinating cases since he had arrived in the country nine months before. But the population was small, barely three hundred thousand people in the whole nation, handguns were banned, and serious crime was rare, at least when compared to a big US city. That was good for Iceland’s citizens, but frustrating for Magnus. Three murders a year was not enough; it didn’t take long for him to feel like climbing the walls.

  That was part of the reason why he had decided to take a couple of vacation days to return to the States. He had been transferred to Reykjavík in a hurry, partly at the request of Iceland’s Police Commissioner, but also because he had become a witness in a nasty police corruption case involving a Dominican drug gang. There had been a couple of attempts on his life, and his boss, Deputy Superintendent Williams, had grabbed at the chance to get him safely out of the country.

  But the Icelanders had wanted someone for more than just a few months. The National Police Commissioner had made Magnus commit to staying in Iceland for two years, and so Magnus had spent six months at the police college learning the law. Magnus felt he owed the Commissioner, not least because Magnus’s presence in Iceland had lured the Dominicans with their guns to Reykjavík, with the result that the Commissioner had nearly lost one of his own officers.

  So, nine months down, fifteen to go.

  That was one of the reasons for returning to Boston. To put in some face time. Keep up with the department’s news. Make sure they hadn’t forgotten about him. Headcount was a big issue these days; Magnus wanted to know they were still counting his head.

  Magnus was uncertain what he felt about returning to the States. As an adolescent, and then as an adult, he had felt proud of his Icelandic heritage. He had kept up his language skills, read the sagas and returned with his father once a year to go hiking in the wilderness. He had always felt special among the other Americans. Different.

  But when he had returned to Iceland, things had not been as easy as he expected. His Icelandic was very good, but not perfect. The people were reserved and he felt like an outsider, if only because he wasn’t part of the intricate web of connections of family, school, university and job, which bound all Icelanders together. He found himself withdrawing from the others. He liked his colleagues, especially Vigdís and the hapless Árni, but he didn’t socialize with them. For six months there had been Ingileif, but then she had left for a job in Germany.

  The plane was on its final approach now, only a few feet above the cold grey sea.

  Ingileif. Magnus smiled to himself. He missed Ingileif. Impulsive, unpredictable, insatiable. Gone.

  But the real problem was the one there had always been; the unsolved murder. Magnus was twenty when he had been told that his father had been killed, stabbed in the hallway of the house by the shore he was renting for the summer. For a year or so Magnus had thrown himself into his own personal investigation, determined that if the police couldn’t find his father’s killer, he would. But he hadn’t. No matter how many other crimes he solved in the Greater Boston Area, or indeed in Iceland, he hadn’t.

  But in Iceland he had turned up some interesting new lines of inquiry. Lines that his brother Ollie had insisted that he drop.

  The airplane juddered as its wheels hit the tarmac.

  That was the other reason for coming to Boston. To get Ollie to change his mind.

  It was a Sunday night, so O’Rourke’s wasn’t too crowded.

  ‘Cheers, Stu,’ Magnus said as he raised his glass of Sam Adams.

  ‘Skol!’ Detective Stuart Riordan grinned as he raised his own glass. He was a short guy of about Magnus’s age, with a neat beard and highly toned muscles. Magnus and he used to work out together in the police gym, but Magnus never quite pushed himself as hard as Stu.

  ‘I’m impressed,’ said Magnus. ‘But it’s actually “Skál”.’

  ‘Whatever. How’s the beer over there?’

  ‘Not as good as this,’ said Magnus. Truthfully, it wasn’t just the Sam Adams he missed; it was the couple of beers after a shift. In Iceland they thought you were an alcoholic if you had a beer on a Tuesday, but didn’t care if you drank a couple of gallons on a Friday night.

  ‘Meet any hot Eskimo babes?’

  ‘Don’t you mean cool Eskimo babes?’ Magnus said. Stu liked to talk about babes, even though he was happily and monogamously married to a woman called Donna. Maybe because he was happily and monogamously married to Donna.

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘They don’t have Eskimos in Iceland. I’ve told you that a dozen times, moron. They have Viking babes. They’ve had three Miss Worlds.’

  ‘OK, so any hot Viking babes?’

  Magnus thought of Ingileif. She counted. He smiled.

  ‘Hey,’ said Stu. ‘Colby’s history, then?’

  Magnus nodded. Colby was the woman Magnus had gone out with for a couple of years in Boston. Until she had taken offence at being shot at in the North End.

  ‘That’s good,’ said Stu. ‘She was bad for you, man. She was stuck way up her own ass.’

  ‘Yep,’ said Magnus. ‘She was.’ Colby was a lawyer and wanted Magnus to be a lawyer. She didn’t think much of Magnus’s police buddies, or of his police buddies’ wives or girlfriends. ‘I think you’d like the Viking. You should come visit some time.’

  ‘All those icebergs? No way. It’s cold enough here.’

  Magnus didn’t push it. Stu had never left the United States, and now he and Donna had a kid they were in the week-at-the-shore vacation routine of their parents. Stu was actually a smart guy: there was nothing he didn’t know about the American Civil War, and he and Magnus had talked for hours about the minutiae of American politics while hanging out in cars waiting. But he knew very little about the world outside the United States, nor did he care.

  ‘Hey, Magnus! How the hell are you?’

  Magnus looked up to see two more of his former colleagues approaching the table. Artie, a black detective, dapper even on a Sunday night, and Craig, an older guy with a comfortable roll over the waistband of his jeans.

  ‘I’m doing great,’ said Magnus. He stood up. There was a lot of hugging and back-slapping. Magnus liked it. He had always felt himself a little aloof from his colleagues in Boston, but the camaraderie and warmth made a pleasant change from Iceland. These guys were genuinely pleased to see him.

  It was strange; he felt a different person here, speaking English. Different from the Icelandic cop, speaking Icelandic in Reykjavík. It was as if his personality changed in subtle ways, depending on which language he was using, even though he was just the same guy underneath.

  ‘Hey, I’m sorry to hea
r about Jason, Stu,’ said Artie, with a sympathetic frown.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Stu. ‘He was engaged, too. Gonna get married in June. I was on the invitation list.’

  The bonhomie was gone. ‘Jason Hershel?’ said Magnus, remembering a tall young guy with a buzz cut who had joined Homicide a month before Magnus had left for Reykjavík.

  ‘Yeah, that’s the guy,’ said Stu. ‘A good kid.’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Magnus.

  ‘You tell him,’ Stu said to Craig.

  Craig sighed. ‘There had been a shooting in the D Street Projects. Turf war. Stu and Jason were just door-to-door canvassing. Jason knocked on the door, the punk let him in, panicked and shot him.’

  ‘He wasn’t even a suspect,’ said Stu.

  ‘Is he…’ Magnus asked.

  Stu took a deep breath. ‘Yeah. Shot twice in the chest. Died in the ambulance on the way to hospital.’

  ‘Did you get the punk?’

  ‘Shot him as he ran down the stairwell,’ said Stu. ‘Didn’t kill him, unfortunately. The fucker is already out of hospital. One of those times that makes you wish Massachusetts had the death penalty.’

  Stu stared at Magnus. It was a discussion they had had on and off over the years. Stu for, Magnus against.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Magnus simply.

  ‘What can I get you guys?’ A waitress in a Bruins T-shirt hovered.

  ‘Four beers,’ Stu said. ‘And I think we need some chasers, don’t we, guys?’

  ‘Hey, good to see you, Magnus.’ Deputy Superintendent Williams leaned back in his chair. ‘They finally threw you out of Iceland?’

  ‘Not quite yet,’ said Magnus, taking the seat in front of Williams’s desk.

  ‘I’m surprised. I got a couple of calls from their Police Commissioner over the last year. Sounded like he couldn’t wait for me to take you off of his hands.’

  ‘There were some awkward situations.’

  Williams laughed, wrinkles spreading themselves over his worn black face. ‘Yeah. There always were awkward situations with you. But he called back later and said he wanted to keep you.’