Sea of Stone

by Michael Ridpath

  ‘Do you know where Ollie is?’

  ‘My nephew Ollie?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Villi shook his head. ‘No idea.’

  ‘You didn’t see him at Swine Lake or in the lava field?’

  ‘No,’ said Villi. ‘Why, do you think he shot Aníta?’

  ‘It’s too early to say who shot her. Do you mind if I take a look in your car?’

  ‘Do I have a choice?’

  Adam peered into the front, opened the rear doors and checked the back seat and then popped the boot. No rifle, but he would get Edda to do a thorough analysis.

  ‘Now please wait in the house,’ Adam said. ‘Don’t leave the farm until we have had a chance to question you properly.’

  ‘This is stupid,’ muttered Villi, with a worried glance over to where Aníta lay. But he got back into his car and parked it outside the farmhouse.

  Adam was glad to see two sets of flashing lights approaching – a police car and, about a kilometre behind, an ambulance.

  ‘Hey, Constable!’

  Sylvía was hurrying towards him. She seemed agitated.

  It was all Adam could do not to tell her to get lost. ‘Yes, Sylvía, what is it?’

  ‘I have just unlocked the gun cupboard,’ she said. ‘Kolbeinn’s rifle is missing.’

  Ingileif stared out of the aeroplane window at the old American radar installations that lurked at the perimeter of Keflavík Airport. The view swung as the aeroplane lined itself up on the runway. The engines whined and the aircraft began to roll.

  Ingileif felt tense but excited. Things were definitely going her way. Keflavík was a zoo, but two delayed planes for Boston were leaving in quick succession. The Icelandair reservation system was a tangle of cancellations, re-booking and overbooking. It was up to the people on the spot to ensure that the planes were filled fairly. One of the supervisors was a good friend of Ingileif’s from her hometown of Flúdir, who had found her a seat without actually having to bump someone with a guaranteed reservation.

  She was on a wild goose chase, she knew, and an expensive wild goose chase at that. But she felt lucky. More importantly, she was doing something for Magnus. She was trying. Even if she didn’t succeed she would know that at least she had tried.

  Ingileif didn’t know exactly what Magnus’s game was. She had been walking up Skólavördustígur on Sunday morning when he had called. She could tell right away from the tension in his voice that it was important. She had shut up and listened.

  ‘Ingileif. There is something I’m going to tell you. I want you to remember it. And if the police ask you about it, then tell them. But not right away.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Ingileif.

  ‘No, I don’t expect you to understand. Just do as I ask. Please.’

  It was a weird request. But Magnus wouldn’t make it without a reason.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I have just killed my grandfather,’ Magnus said.

  ‘What!’

  ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do. I can’t think straight.’

  ‘You sound as if you are thinking straight.’

  ‘No, I don’t.’ Magnus paused. ‘I need to talk to you about it. Can I see you?’

  ‘Er.’ Ingileif hesitated. She knew Magnus. She knew this wasn’t how he would talk if he really had just killed his grandfather. The tone wasn’t right. He wouldn’t kill his grandfather anyway.

  So what was he doing? He’d asked her to tell the police something that wasn’t quite true. He couldn’t admit to her it wasn’t true or she would become his accomplice if she knowingly passed on what he said. He was protecting her. But he was also asking for her help.

  He didn’t really need to see her. He needed a credible reason to call her.

  ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea, Magnús,’ she said. She tried to keep her tone neutral, devoid of emotion, willing him to understand that she knew what he wanted her to do.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d ask.’ He sounded unsurprised, pleased even. ‘Thanks, Ingileif.’

  Then he had rung off.

  She had done what he had asked, or at least what she thought he was asking her. She had played the fat detective along, let him think that he had broken her resistance, and then told him about Magnus’s confession.

  Why Magnus wanted her to do that she had no idea. She just hoped to God that he knew what he was doing. It seemed to her that he had intentionally got himself stuck in prison on a murder charge, and if he wasn’t very careful he would be stuck there for a long, long time.

  The flight time to Boston was four hours and fifty minutes. She was too tense to read and too tense to do nothing. She dug out her iPod, selected some Bach and closed her eyes.

  He needed her help and she wouldn’t let him down. She would fix things. She smiled. She felt lucky.

  Emil slowed as he came to the police checkpoint just to the east of Vegamót, the restaurant and petrol station at the turn-off to Stykkishólmur on the south shore of the Snaefells Peninsula. There was a small queue of two or three cars and a truck waiting for the constable to let them through.

  Emil recognized the constable. He slowed his car and wound down the window.

  ‘No luck, Hinrik?’

  ‘No one remotely like Ollie Jonson.’

  This was one of only two roads off the peninsula. The other was a dirt track that ran along the north coast.

  ‘What about the N54?’ Emil asked.

  ‘The guys from Búdardalur have got that covered.’

  The truck hooted, followed by two of the cars. The constable ignored them.

  ‘I suppose he could have passed before you got here?’ said Emil.

  ‘Rúnar called Borgarnes. They set up something just north of the turn-off for the N1,’ said the constable. ‘That would have caught him, even if he had driven south directly.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I saw it,’ said Emil. ‘Do you have a weapon?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, if he does come by, and he waves a rifle at you, let him see you are unarmed and don’t try to stop him.’

  Hinrik nodded.

  The policeman didn’t look nervous, although he had every right to be scared. It was probably best if a lone policeman didn’t have a sidearm anyway, thought Emil. A cop with a gun would only encourage Ollie to shoot first.

  ‘Come on!’ yelled the truck driver. ‘Stop chatting, we’ve got places to go!’

  ‘I’ll let you get on with it,’ Emil said, marvelling at how impatient people were, even here, in the middle of nowhere. He pulled away and turned north over the Kerlingin Pass towards Bjarnarhöfn. He was the first in a strung-out convoy. Several minutes behind him would be Baldur and a couple of detectives, followed by a van with a small number of uniformed officers, and then, when they had mustered, the Viking Squad.

  Emil had admitted he needed help, and he and the Commissioner had decided that there should be no conflict if the Reykjavík Violent Crimes Unit investigated Aníta’s shooting, since Magnus was definitely not a suspect. Emil himself would continue to investigate Hallgrímur’s murder. Clearly Emil and Baldur would have a lot of information to share, but Emil thought it highly unlikely that Baldur would try to steer the investigation away from Magnus. He wasn’t so sure about his detectives, Árni and Vigdís, although Emil would much rather deal with them than Baldur.

  The Commissioner couldn’t afford to part with many uniforms. They had already despatched all the spare officers they had in the capital to Hvolsvöllur to help with the volcano. And cuts in police numbers following the kreppa in 2008 meant that there were very few spare officers anyway.

  But if Ollie really had gone into hiding with a rifle, they would need every man they could get. Which was why the Commissioner had summoned the Viking Squad, Iceland’s SWAT team. Emil knew there were a small number of firearms in Stykkishólmur police station, but not nearly enough for every officer. Rúnar and his men would have to be very careful.

  Once
again, there were two or three vehicles from the press parked a short distance before Bjarnarhöfn in the lava field, but Emil ignored them. Rúnar and Adam were waiting for him outside the farmhouse. They led him in to the living room, passing Kolbeinn and Sylvía in the kitchen.

  ‘I take it no one has found Ollie yet?’ asked Emil.

  ‘Not yet. We’ve set up roadblocks. Gudjón is driving the roads, and Páll is looking in Stykkishólmur. That’s all we can do for now.’

  ‘How’s Aníta? I think I passed her ambulance on the way up.’

  ‘She’s alive, but critical. Unconscious. They’ve decided to take her down to Reykjavík. Stykkishólmur hospital couldn’t deal with her.’

  ‘Forensics found anything?’

  ‘Not so far,’ said Rúnar. ‘No bullet casings from where they think the shooter’s vehicle was, but he was probably positioned somewhere further in the lava field. Nor have they found any of the bullets themselves, although the one that hit Aníta is still probably inside her – there was no sign of an exit wound. They’ll dig it out at the hospital, no doubt.’

  ‘Do we know what the weapon was yet?’

  ‘We have a good idea,’ said Adam. ‘Kolbeinn’s .22 hunting rifle is missing from his gun cupboard.’

  ‘No idea when it was taken?’ asked Emil.

  ‘Kolbeinn last noticed it was there two weeks ago, when he took out the shotgun it’s kept with. He has a licence for both guns, by the way. The cupboard had been unlocked and locked again, by someone who knew where the key was kept: in a drawer in the hallway.’

  ‘That could have been any of the family, presumably,’ said Emil.

  ‘But not Ollie,’ said Rúnar.

  ‘Good point.’

  ‘Villi was going for a hike around Swine Lake when the shots were fired,’ said Adam.

  Emil had seen Swine Lake as he descended from the mountain pass down towards Bjarnarhöfn. It was about a kilometre long, shaped like a hook, and was bordered on one shore by black sand and on the other by the Berserkjahraun lava flow. It wasn’t far from there to the part of the lava field where Aníta had been shot, but a hundred-metre-high conical pile of volcanic detritus stood in the way, obstructing the line of sight.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Do you want to speak to him? He’s upstairs in his room. We decided to keep him away from Kolbeinn. We had Edda examine his hands for gunpowder residue. Nothing.’

  Emil shook his head. ‘We had better leave it to Baldur. He should be here soon. He will be leading the investigation into the shooting. What about Kolbeinn?’

  ‘He was mending fences in a meadow close to the farm,’ Rúnar said. ‘Constable Gudjón was in his car and could see him the whole time. Kolbeinn wants to go down to Reykjavík with his wife, but we haven’t let him. He’s in the kitchen.’

  ‘Better wait for Baldur for that too,’ said Emil. ‘And the kids?’

  ‘At school,’ Rúnar said. ‘But Gudjón said that Gabrielle, Dr Ingvar’s wife, showed up just before Aníta went out riding. Aníta had saddled up a horse for her. They had a massive argument, Gabrielle drove off in a huff, and Aníta went out riding by herself.’

  ‘Gabrielle can’t have shot Aníta, surely?’ said Adam.

  ‘Why? Because she’s a woman?’ Emil threw in some sarcasm. ‘Not strong enough to pull a trigger?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Adam, sheepishly.

  ‘Looks like Baldur will have some leads to follow,’ said Emil.

  ‘There is one other thing about Villi,’ said Adam. ‘Björn checked on his flight on Sunday morning. It landed at 6.32 a.m.’

  ‘And he didn’t get here until the afternoon, did he?’

  ‘Just after two.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Emil. ‘It would take, what, two and a half, three hours to drive from Keflavík to here?’

  ‘That’s about right,’ said Adam, who had done that drive on Sunday night himself.

  ‘So that’s three or four hours unexplained. You know, I think I will have a quick word with Villi before Baldur gets here. Can you fetch him?’

  A couple of minutes later Villi appeared in the living room. He looked worried.

  ‘How’s Aníta?’ he asked.

  ‘Still alive, as far as we know,’ said Emil.

  Villi breathed out. ‘Good.’ He stared straight at Emil. ‘Now. What can I tell you?’

  ‘A colleague of mine will be here in a moment to ask you some more about what you were doing this morning,’ said Emil. ‘But I just want to ask you quickly about Sunday. What time did your flight land at Keflavík?’

  ‘Early. Half past six. Maybe seven o’clock.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us that before?’

  Villi shrugged. ‘You didn’t ask me, I suppose.’

  ‘You told us you drove here directly from Reykjavík.’

  ‘I don’t think I did,’ said Villi.

  ‘Well, you implied it.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to.’

  Emil took a deep breath to calm his impatience. It had been Adam who had originally interviewed Villi, and he clearly hadn’t done a thorough enough job of it.

  ‘All right. So what did you do between six-thirty and two o’clock on Sunday?’

  ‘I hung out in Reykjavík,’ Villi said. ‘Had breakfast at the Grey Cat. Walked around. Had another cup of coffee somewhere.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Kaffitár on Bankastraeti.’

  ‘Why did you do that? Why didn’t you drive straight up here?’

  Villi shrugged. ‘It was my first time back in Reykjavík for a while. I wanted to look around, enjoy the place.’

  ‘Do you have receipts? From the cafés?’

  ‘No,’ Villi said.

  What a surprise, thought Emil.

  ‘That’s going to make it difficult for us to check your story.’

  ‘You could ask the people serving then. They probably wouldn’t remember me at Kaffitár, but they might at the Grey Cat. And I paid by credit card.’ Villi pulled out his wallet and showed them a Bank of Montreal card. ‘Will that help?’

  ‘It might,’ said Emil. ‘May we take this? We’ll return it later on today.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Villi, and passed it over.

  Emil heard a car, or perhaps two cars, drawing up outside. ‘Wait here a moment,’ he said.

  He left Villi in the kitchen and stepped out into the farmyard to see the tall, lean figure of Baldur approaching him, with Vigdís and Árni in tow.

  ‘OK, Dumpling,’ said Baldur. ‘Tell me what the hell is going on here.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  OLLIE WAS COLD. His fingers were cold, his feet, which were still wet, were cold; his whole body was cold. The rug was just an old piece of carpet. He was warmer with it than without it, but that wasn’t saying much.

  He was hungry. And thirsty. He had only had a cup of coffee and a bowl of Cheerios for breakfast – he had steered clear of the weird Icelandic yoghurt – and that had seemed an age ago. He checked his watch. One-thirty. Lunchtime, he thought. His stomach rumbled in agreement.

  Come on, he told himself, man up. So it was lunchtime? It was possible for humans to miss lunch and not die. The cold wasn’t enough to kill him either. At least not yet.

  He would at some point need food and drink and warmer clothes. And that would probably mean a trip back to Stykki to borrow or steal. But it would be good to avoid the town if he could. Ollie had little idea of the local geography. He knew he was east of Stykki, and Bjarnarhöfn was west. And further to the west along the coast, beyond Bjarnarhöfn, was the town of Grundarfjördur. But that was a long way in a motorboat.

  What about the other direction? He had absolutely no idea. There seemed to be some mainland to the north of him; there was definitely a mainland-sized hill. That couldn’t be the West Fjords, could it? The West Fjords was the fist with outstretched fingers that reached out to the ocean from the top left of Iceland on the map. Surely that was further away from Stykki than the hills Ol
lie could see? Was there some settlement over there in that piece of land, whatever it was? Ollie had no idea. Knowing how empty Iceland was, probably not.

  Which meant Stykki. After nightfall. Which around here, even in April, was pretty late. The idea of manoeuvring the boat through the sharp skerries at night scared him.

  At least they hadn’t found him yet. He had been on the island for three hours or so and hadn’t heard any searchers.

  God he was cold. And stiff.

  Outside, the sun was shining weakly from a pale blue sky. Maybe he would be warmer out there, especially if he walked a bit. Got his blood circulating. He might even dry his legs a little in the sun; stuck under the rug they were going to stay damp all day.

  He crawled out from underneath the rug and hopped out of the broken window. It was just possible to see Stykki in the distance. But there was a low hill at the centre of the island that obscured the view, so Ollie decided to keep to the eastern shore, out of sight of the town, or, more importantly, any boats puttering in and out of the harbour.

  It was good to stretch his legs. The island was treeless and would have felt deserted if it wasn’t for all the bird life. Ducks, cormorants, geese, little white birds, even smaller brown birds, were all over the place. It was comforting, in a way.

  After walking for twenty minutes, he found a rock in the lee of the hill and sat down, stretching out his legs to the sun.

  His thoughts turned for the hundredth time to how he had gotten himself into this mess.

  It was during the series of blazing rows with his father after Kathleen, stupid bitch, had told Ragnar about her and Ollie sleeping together. She had wanted to hurt his father and had succeeded in that. But she had also seriously screwed him.

  At some point, when he was screaming at his father, he had yelled that his mother’s family were a bunch of murderers. Then, when his father had asked him to explain, instead of shutting up like he should have done, he did just that. He said how, when he was seven years old, he had come into the kitchen at Bjarnarhöfn very late one night and overheard Afi and Uncle Villi talking about how a man called Benedikt had been stabbed. They saw him and Afi had threatened him never, ever to tell anyone what he had heard.