Sea of Stone

by Michael Ridpath

  Emil accepted the cup of coffee offered to him and sat down at the kitchen table at Bjarnarhöfn. Whereas the previous day the kitchen had smelled of baking, that morning it smelled of bleach.

  He was out of breath and his heart was beating unnaturally fast. The out-of-breath thing he was used to, but the heart worried him. He wondered whether he should be drinking caffeine. But one cup of coffee couldn’t do any harm. Coffee was one of the few things not on the long list of items his doctor had given him to avoid.

  After the morning’s conference, he had driven down to Borgarnes, a small town halfway between Stykkishólmur and Reykjavík, to the court where a judge was hearing his application to hold Magnus in custody during the investigation. There were no difficult questions, and Magnus himself had said nothing. He hadn’t even wanted his lawyer to attend. The police now had twenty-one days to gather evidence before they would have to appear before a judge again. In the meantime Magnus had been sent on to the prison at Litla-Hraun, where he would be held in solitary confinement.

  There were still some cakes left, and Emil took one. Adam, sitting beside him, notebook at the ready, abstained. As Emil chewed, he examined the two women opposite him. Sylvía was clearly distressed. Her small brown eyes were staring at him and Adam with a mixture of fear and bewilderment. That didn’t surprise Emil. Aníta, too, seemed to be suffering under the strain.

  ‘Delicious,’ said Emil, wiping his lips. Aníta smiled distractedly in acknowledgement. ‘Now, do either of you recognize this?’

  Emil gave a brief nod to Adam, who pulled out a clear plastic envelope containing the silver earring.

  Sylvía leaned forward, studied the earring and shook her head.

  Aníta glanced at the envelope quickly and then at Sylvía. ‘You recognize it, Sylvía! Kolbeinn gave it to you a few years ago.’ She turned to the detective. ‘I know, because I bought them in Reykjavík.’

  ‘Are you sure you don’t recognize it, Sylvía?’ Emil asked as gently as he could.

  The old lady glanced at him with panicked eyes and shook her head again.

  Aníta frowned. ‘I’m afraid Sylvía is still very upset, Emil. I don’t think she is thinking very clearly.’

  Sylvía turned to her daughter-in-law with a scowl and then stared again at the earring, fascinated.

  ‘Sylvía, we found this earring in the church yesterday morning. Do you know how it got there?’

  Sylvía raised her eyes to the detective and shook her head quickly.

  ‘Sylvía goes into the church quite a lot,’ said Aníta. ‘She cleans it, but she also goes in there to pray. She has done for the last couple of years. She could easily have dropped her earring there. The other is probably in her bedroom, if it hasn’t been destroyed by the fire.’

  ‘We will check,’ said Emil. ‘Now, Sylvía, I would like you to give us a hair sample.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Sylvía.

  ‘A policewoman will cut just a tiny bit of your hair. Will you let her do that for us, please? We found some white hairs in the church as well, and we want to see if they are yours. Or they might be your husband’s.’

  ‘Hallgrímur never went to church,’ said Sylvía.

  ‘That’s where he was found, Sylvía,’ Emil said. ‘Dead.’

  Sylvía shook her head. ‘Hallgrímur doesn’t go to church. He will be back soon.’

  ‘Do you really need to take the sample?’ Aníta asked. ‘You can see how upset she is.’

  Emil nodded. ‘We do. We can’t force her to give it, but it would really help us if she did. I’ll send a policewoman in in a moment. I would be grateful if you could persuade her to cooperate.’

  He turned to Sylvía. He hated to ask her more questions, but he had to try one more time. ‘Sylvía. How did the fire start last night?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Sylvía. ‘Hallgrímur was coming home late and he hadn’t had his dinner, so I had to cook it for him. I was cooking dinner when the kitchen caught fire. I don’t know why. And Hallgrímur still hasn’t come home.’

  Emil sighed. Sylvía’s testimony was clearly unreliable anyway, whatever she said. But they had to ask the questions and write down the answers.

  He drank the last of his coffee. Aníta and the two dogs followed him out of the farmhouse while Adam went off to find a female officer. Forensics technicians were bustling in and around the fire-damaged cottage.

  ‘I’m sorry about that,’ Aníta said as they walked across the farmyard to Emil’s car. ‘You can see she isn’t thinking clearly at all. That earring is definitely hers.’

  ‘Will you be able to look after her?’

  Aníta shrugged. ‘I think she should be somewhere else. This place clearly upsets her now. Ingvar said he would come over and take a look at her. Maybe she can go and stay with him.’

  ‘If she does say anything to you about the fire, or about Hallgrímur, will you let me know?’ said Emil.

  Aníta nodded. Emil was about to get in the car when he registered the hesitancy in Aníta. The suppressed agitation. She was weighing up whether to tell him something.

  He stood still.

  ‘Aren’t you leaving?’ she said after a few moments.

  ‘I’m waiting,’ said Emil.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For you to tell me something.’ He raised his eyebrows.

  Aníta blushed slightly. Fiddled with the edge of her sweater. Made a decision. ‘Gabrielle came over to see me this morning,’ she began. ‘It probably has nothing to do with your investigation, but I feel I should inform you anyway. Just don’t say it was me that told you. She said something interesting about Ingvar and Hallgrímur…’

  Sigurbjörg Vilhjálmsdóttir, or Sibba as she was known to her friends and family, was preoccupied as she drove over the high heath to the south-east of Reykjavík. Pylons marched over the snow-spattered lava field towards a geothermal plant, crouching under a wrinkled mountain, belching billows of steam into the cold air. It was a clear day with pale blue sky and low sunshine dazzling off the streaks of snow.

  Sibba was going to visit her cousin. In prison.

  She had got the call the evening before. She was watching television with her husband. In the couple of years since the kreppa had taken hold, she had received a number of these calls at home and at odd hours from bankers or lawyers who had suddenly found themselves confronted by policemen asking difficult questions. Sibba was a lawyer, a partner of a firm with smart offices in Borgartún, a boulevard lined with swish modern bank headquarters that ran along the shore of Faxaflói Bay. She was a commercial lawyer, but increasingly her work had become criminal, as her clients had been questioned about their role in various alleged frauds that had taken place during the boom years in the first decade of the century.

  But this phone call was different. This time she had been asked to defend a murder suspect. And the murder suspect was Magnús Ragnarsson, her cousin.

  Sibba had been placed in a difficult position. Magnus had informed her who the victim was – her own grandfather, Hallgrímur. She had resisted the urge to call her uncle at Bjarnarhöfn and find out what had happened, or even to ring her parents in Canada. She had refused to act for Magnus at first, pointing out the obvious conflicts and her lack of experience of murder cases, but Magnus had insisted. He said she was the only lawyer in Iceland he could trust to do what he wanted her to do.

  She respected Magnus. He knew what he was doing. So, reluctantly, she had agreed to act for him.

  That was the first strange call she had received that day. The second, later on that evening, had been from her father who said that he had arrived at Bjarnarhöfn that afternoon to find the place in uproar and his own father murdered. Sibba was so surprised to hear that he was in Iceland, and concerned about the conflict with Magnus, that she hadn’t admitted that she knew already. That had been stupid. Her father would discover soon enough that she was defending the man accused of murdering her grandfather.

  Sibba understood why h
er father hadn’t told her he was coming to Iceland, but nevertheless she was a little miffed that he hadn’t dropped in on her in Reykjavík on the way up to Bjarnarhöfn. She had a good relationship with him, and both her parents doted on her children, their grandchildren. Still, it would be a big help for Kolbeinn and Aníta to have her dad around. He was good in a crisis; he had faced them in mining camps all over the world. He would know what to do.

  Sibba and Magnus had a lot in common. Like him, she had grown up abroad, in her case Toronto, only moving to the land of her ancestors when she graduated from law school. But they were not really close; Sibba had only realized that Magnus was back in Iceland when she had bumped into him in the street about a year before. He was eight years younger than her, but they liked and respected each other. The idea that he had murdered Hallgrímur seemed preposterous.

  The road descended sharply, winding down a steep hillside. In front of her a broad plain stretched down to the sea, clear of snow at the lower altitude, dotted with farms. And in the far distance, at least seventy kilometres away on the other side of the plain, a plume of white rose high into the deep blue sky, and then bent over to the right as the north wind pushed it towards Europe. Beneath the white, and somehow quite separate from it, were smaller puffs of black. Ash. Not the fine high ash that was travelling across oceans high in the atmosphere, but denser stuff that fell to ground.

  Eyjafjallajökull.

  The sight took Sibba by surprise. She had watched the eruption on the news, and seen the disruption to local farms and to air travellers thousands of kilometres away. But she had yet to see the volcano itself.

  She forced her eyes back to the road, with its switchbacks twisting down the steep slope, and then glanced quickly to the south. Along the shoreline she could see the ribbon of houses that made up the old trading port of Eyrarbakki, and at its eastern edge the white tower and buildings of Litla-Hraun prison.

  She had been there a couple of times over the previous few months to visit bankers charged with financial crimes. It hadn’t taken long to get them out, and none of her clients had yet been successfully prosecuted; this was new territory for the Icelandic legal system. But defending a murder charge would be an entirely different story. It was rare in Iceland once the police and prosecution had put together a case for a suspect in a traditional serious criminal trial not to be found guilty. There were no juries, and few loopholes to seek out.

  She hoped Magnus’s arrest had just been a dreadful mistake that would quickly become clear. Otherwise she would have her work cut out.

  The prison was surrounded by a high wire fence. Sibba parked in a space outside the gates and introduced herself to the guard. She was led through to House Number One, a low white building fenced off from the others, where prisoners were held in solitary confinement. The building held a mixture of prisoners on remand and troublemakers from the main prison who had been sent there as a punishment. Conditions in the main prison were quite lax, but solitary was tough: no contact with other prisoners or visitors, one hour per day exercise alone in a walled courtyard. And this for citizens who had not yet been found guilty. The permanent residents, by contrast, had a shower in their cells, a wide-screen TV in the communal area of each wing, a gym, a snack shop, classrooms and plenty of social life.

  The set-up was quite an incentive to confess, really.

  Sibba was searched and then led into the interview room. She waited a moment and then Magnus came in. It struck her again how he looked like a younger version of her father: big, square-shouldered with red hair and an air of strong composure. He was wearing sweatpants and shirt, no doubt provided by the police.

  He grinned when he saw her. She hesitated, torn for a moment between her role as cousin and lawyer, and then gave him a hug. The guard was surprised and made no effort to stop her.

  They sat down and the guard left.

  ‘I’m used to being in your chair,’ said Magnus. They spoke in English, as they usually did. Neither Magnus nor Sibba’s accent had any trace of Icelandic. ‘It’s weird to be on this side of the table.’

  ‘This whole thing must be pretty weird for you,’ Sibba said.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Half an hour, maybe,’ said Magnus. ‘Haven’t had time to decorate my cell yet.’

  ‘Did you see the volcano on the way down?’

  ‘Yes. Spectacular. Can’t see it from my cell, though. Can’t see anything from my cell.’

  ‘How did the hearing go in Borgarnes?’ Sibba asked.

  ‘As you would expect. They’ve got me here for twenty-one days. I’m sure they will show you the paperwork.’

  ‘You should have let me come,’ Sibba said.

  ‘You and I know there is nothing you could have done,’ said Magnus. ‘It was a formality. The judge was always going to send me down here.’

  ‘Possibly,’ said Sibba. ‘But before we start, I have to ask you. Are you sure you want me to act for you?’ She looked closely at her cousin. ‘I can find you another lawyer with more experience of violent crime.’

  He smiled. ‘No. I’ve thought this through. I want you.’

  ‘But what about the fact that Hallgrímur was my grandfather too? You know my father showed up yesterday at Bjarnarhöfn? I’m going to have to explain to him that I am defending the man who is supposed to have murdered his own father.’

  Magnus sighed. ‘I know it will be difficult for you, Sibba, but I would really like you to represent me. I’ve thought about it hard. You are about the only person in this country I know who I can trust to do what I want. You and me are pretty similar. As you said, we both shared the same evil grandfather. You’ve been in this country a lot longer than I have, but I think you at least understand what it’s like for me to be here.’

  ‘Maybe I do,’ said Sibba.

  ‘Look. If I promise not to lie to you, will you promise to do what I instruct you to? As my lawyer?’

  Sibba paused. This was getting strange. She was wary that Magnus was leading her into some kind of trap. But on the other hand, he seemed to need her. Sibba liked to be needed, by her family as well as by her clients. That was why she had become a lawyer in the first place. And although some of the bankers who had defrauded their shareholders out of millions needed her too, that was not quite so satisfying.

  ‘OK,’ said Sibba, pulling out a notepad. ‘Let’s start. Tell me what happened.’

  In calm, clear tones, Magnus did just that. He explained how he had driven up from Reykjavík to see his grandfather, how he had found the body, how he had called the police, and how he had answered their questions. Sibba took detailed notes.

  After he had finished, she looked them over. She realized that he had told her nothing more than what he had told the police. Not one tiny bit more. Usually her clients had plenty to say that they hadn’t included in their statements. Maybe Magnus had nothing to hide. But no one had nothing to hide, especially someone sitting in jail charged with murder.

  ‘So what aren’t you telling me?’ she asked him.

  He just shrugged.

  She leaned forward. ‘From what you’ve said, the case against you is pretty strong. The evidence is all circumstantial, but that can be enough. If the police and the judge are convinced you are guilty, they will find you guilty. There’s no jury for us to bamboozle. You’ll go to jail for a long time. Obviously you will be fired from the police force here. And when you get out, everyone in this country will know who you are for evermore: the American cop who killed his Icelandic grandfather. If you go back to the States, no police department there will take you with a murder conviction. Do you want all that?’

  Magnus looked at her steadily, his expression grim. He blinked once, but he didn’t answer. Why didn’t he answer?

  ‘There must be other details you know that you haven’t told the police yet that can help establish your innocence. I need to know what those details are.’

  Still nothing.
r />   ‘You promised you wouldn’t lie to me.’ Sibba stared hard into Magnus’s blue eyes.

  He held her gaze. ‘I did.’

  ‘Very well, then. Why do the police think you are a suspect?’

  ‘They say I tampered with the crime scene. They say I hated my grandfather, and that I believed he was responsible for my father’s death. And I discovered the body, which means I could have killed the old man.’

  ‘Did you?’ Sibba asked.

  Magnus didn’t answer at first. ‘Did I what?’ he asked slowly.

  ‘Did you tamper with the crime scene?’ Sibba asked.

  Magnus didn’t answer.

  ‘OK. Did you hate your grandfather?’

  ‘You know I did,’ said Magnus.

  And that left the big question. The one that lawyers had to be very careful about asking their client. But Sibba realized that she couldn’t defend Magnus unless she knew the answer.

  ‘Did you kill Hallgrímur?’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  VIGDÍS REALIZED SHE had probably woken Katrín up. Árni’s sister took an age to answer the doorbell of the brightly painted little house in Njálsgata. She was bleary eyed with the remains of the previous night’s make-up staining her face. She was a tall woman with black dyed hair and a penchant for facial metal. So different from Árni. Vigdís didn’t know her well, but she rather liked her.

  ‘Hi. What do you want?’ Perhaps Katrín was not so keen to see her.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you. Did you hear about Magnús?’

  ‘Yeah. My brother told me you’ve arrested him for murder. And if you’re that stupid I’m not going to answer any of your questions.’

  ‘Hold on, hold on,’ said Vigdís, raising her hand to stop Katrín shutting the door on her. ‘I’ve got a day off. I know Magnús didn’t kill anyone. I’m here unofficially to help him prove it.’

  Katrín blinked. Hesitated. ‘Oh. OK. Come in. I’ll make some coffee.’

  The kitchen was surprisingly tidy, and Katrín began to fiddle with a coffee machine.

  ‘Has anyone come around to speak to you yet?’ Vigdís asked. ‘Officially.’