Sea of Stone

by Michael Ridpath

  That was probably their mistake, because Ollie wasn’t sure exactly what he had heard. Except when people started talking about a writer called Benedikt who used to live at the next-door farm of Hraun who had just been murdered in Reykjavík. He remembered two nights later, when the family were discussing it at the dinner table, glancing at Afi. Afi’s glare said it all. Never, ever mention what he had heard to anyone.

  And he hadn’t, until that moment when he had lost his temper and thought, what the fuck?

  Ragnar had questioned Ollie closely about what he had seen and heard. He was frustrated at Ollie’s vague replies, but in fact Ollie wasn’t really sure. All he could clearly remember was Afi’s reaction.

  Ragnar said Ollie should talk to the authorities in Iceland. He said he would fly the two of them over there to see the police in Reykjavík. Ollie had no desire to fly to Iceland. He refused. Ragnar said he would call Afi and find out what had happened. And if he didn’t get an answer that satisfied him, he would fly out to Reykjavík himself without Ollie.

  Then Uncle Villi had suddenly shown up from Toronto at their house in Cambridge and suggested he and Ollie go for a walk. None of the rest of the family was in; it was the day before they were all due to go off to Duxbury for a month.

  Uncle Villi had driven Ollie down to the Fresh Pond nearby. They had walked and talked. Ollie had tried to persuade Villi that he had refused to go to Iceland with his father, and he promised that if the police ever did ask him what he had heard, he would claim not to remember anything.

  This wasn’t enough for Uncle Villi. He said that Ollie had to stop his father going to Iceland, otherwise he, Ollie, would die. Uncle Villi was quite convincing about that. It was partly his own strength of character, but it was also that Ollie knew Uncle Villi was Afi’s representative. And even though it was many years since Ollie had seen his grandfather, he was still scared of him. More than scared – terrified. Mortally terrified.

  Uncle Villi had not been satisfied. A week later, he accosted Ollie in the beach parking lot at Duxbury. He asked Ollie when his father was alone in the house. Ollie told him every afternoon; that was when the rest of the family left him to do his math.

  And then, two afternoons later, his father had been stabbed.

  Ollie was at the beach with his girlfriend, so he had an alibi. But he felt guilty, guilty as hell. He was an accessory, a conspirator. He felt like he had murdered his father himself. It was his information that had allowed it to be done.

  He knew he should speak to the police about what he had told Uncle Villi. Or speak to Magnus, which was more or less the same thing. But he also knew what the result of that would be. He would go to jail. Probably not for as long as Uncle Villi, but still for a few years. It would ruin his life.

  And he would never be able to look his brother in the eye again.

  Uncle Villi had reminded him of this fact on and off through the years. He had made it clear that if Villi was ever arrested for the murder of Ragnar, he would bring Ollie down with him. Sometimes Ollie thought he would call Uncle Villi’s bluff. But Ollie was a lousy poker player. Whenever he called another player’s bluff, it turned out they weren’t bluffing after all.

  So he had stayed quiet. Throughout all the investigation by the police, and by his brother, he had stayed quiet.

  And then his asshole brother had started digging again. Asking questions in Iceland, where the answers lay buried. Ollie had used every strategy in his book to get Magnus to back off. Although Magnus seemed the decisive brother, Ollie could manipulate him. Use his own weakness against him. When Ollie claimed that Magnus’s continued investigation into their father’s murder would screw him up worse than he was already, Magnus knew it was true.

  For several months it had looked as if Ollie had succeeded. Magnus had listened and promised to drop it. But then he had changed his mind. Which was why Ollie had come to Iceland; a last-ditch attempt to shut him up.

  And why Uncle Villi had followed him.

  Ollie heard an engine in the distance. At first it was a gentle hum, almost inaudible among the cries of the seabirds, but it was getting louder.

  Shit!

  He looked around the island. It was bare. Nowhere to hide, and he was easy to spot from the water.

  He sprinted back towards the house. As he reached the door, the sound of the engine was louder, but the craft, whatever it was, was still out of sight.

  Ollie dived through the window. At least they wouldn’t be able to see him from the fjord now. But if they came ashore they would be certain to search the house.

  He decided to risk the stairs, which creaked alarmingly as he climbed them. A rotten board split.

  Upstairs were two bedrooms, each with two beds, just damp mattresses on metal frames. Ollie dived under the biggest of them and listened.

  The engine sound dimmed. For a moment Ollie thought that the boat had gone away, but then he heard voices. They had found the skiff!

  The voices got closer. They reached the door. Two men, speaking Icelandic, so Ollie had no idea what they were saying. There was a series of crashes and then the sound of splitting wood as the front door shattered.

  He could hear footsteps downstairs. Then the creak of the staircase.

  From beneath the bed, Ollie saw a pair of black boots enter the bedroom. And a moment later a friendly face behind a large, bushy black moustache.

  ‘Hi, Ollie. How are you?’

  ‘Fucking freezing,’ said Ollie.

  *

  ‘Forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty!’

  Magnus’s arms collapsed from underneath him as his chest hit the floor. His arms burned, his chest screamed. Time to torture his stomach.

  He rolled on to his back, put his hands beside his ears and sat up. ‘One, two, three—’

  ‘OK, Magnús, time’s up!’

  Thank God for that, thought Magnus, as he flopped on to his back. Sweat was pouring from his forehead and seeping over the front of his T-shirt.

  The warder, a stocky woman with short red hair and a friendly smile, stood over him.

  ‘Come on, up you get! I’ve seen people do exercises in here before, but nothing quite like you.’

  ‘Clears my mind,’ said Magnus.

  They were in the small exercise yard. Four white-painted walls, no windows, a basketball hoop and a roof of steel bars and translucent plastic. An hour a day was all the solitary prisoners were allowed in there. Magnus had decided to make the most of it – get his adrenalin going, sharpen his body and his mind.

  He hauled himself to his feet and the warder led him to his cell. There were ten cells in the solitary wing. Two of them, he knew, housed the people he had arrested only three days before. He had no idea who occupied the others.

  As the door clunked behind him, he flopped against the wall and slid to the ground, still panting.

  The warder, whose name was Heida, was the only person he had spoken to all day. He knew he was going to be stuck in solitary for a while. The usual period was three weeks, at which point he would get to see a judge again, and his lawyer would be given the evidence amassed against him. But in murder cases, he could be in there for months.

  It was frustrating not knowing anything about how the investigation was going. He had been impressed by the detective in charge of the investigation, Emil, and very glad that they hadn’t let Baldur have a go at him. He knew what Emil would be doing – letting Magnus stew while he built up the case. But Magnus really wanted to know what evidence they had gathered already.

  And what had happened to his brother.

  He had spotted Ollie with Jóhannes in the car approaching Bjarnarhöfn on Sunday afternoon. He had no way of knowing whether Ollie was under arrest too. He might even be in a cell a few metres away at Litla-Hraun. But he thought not. If they had strong evidence that Ollie had killed their grandfather then they would have had to let Magnus go.

  Magnus looked around his cell: at the bed, the pillow, the duvet, the desk, the
stool, the toilet and the red plastic sink. He was doing all this for his stupid little brother.

  He wondered whether the police had got his confession out of Ingileif yet. He hadn’t heard anything, which was frustrating, but then he didn’t expect to hear anything. Unless Emil was totally incompetent, he should have checked Magnus’s phone records and asked Ingileif about the call. He was confident that Ingileif knew what he wanted of her, and confident that she would do it. She was smart, that woman, and a quick thinker. God knows what she thought he was up to, but he trusted her not to believe that Magnus had actually killed his grandfather.

  Whereas Ollie almost certainly had. Maybe with the help of Jóhannes, the schoolteacher. Maybe it was actually Jóhannes who had staved in Afi’s head, but if that was the case, Magnus was sure that Ollie would have been right there beside him.

  As long as Magnus remained the prime suspect, Ollie might get away with it. Eventually, volcano permitting, they would let him fly back to the States. It wouldn’t be impossible to get him back, to extradite him to Iceland, but it would be difficult. And Ollie was smart enough to get himself a good lawyer back in the States.

  So at that point, Magnus would have to try to negotiate his own freedom. Deny his confession.

  At the time, in the half-hour or so after he had discovered Hallgrímur’s body, it had seemed like a good idea. Because he hadn’t actually killed Hallgrímur, he knew that there was no evidence that would conclusively prove that he did. If he had been in the United States, with a good lawyer, he was confident that the case would collapse.

  But Iceland was different. Sibba was right: if the prosecutor and the investigating detective were convinced that a suspect had committed a crime, it was more than likely he would be convicted. Magnus didn’t think that Emil or the prosecutor, in this case probably Kári himself, were crooked. But they were effective. And as a quasi-foreigner, no one would be too unhappy to see him take the rap.

  In which case he would be moving next door, into the permanent wings.

  So why did he do it? Why did he cover up for his brother? He detested cops who covered up for friends or relatives.

  It wasn’t exactly because he was glad that Afi was dead, although he was. Magnus had read the sagas many times. He understood revenge. But he had also seen enough revenge-related killings on the streets of Boston to know that they were wrong. Ollie had been wrong to do what he had done.

  But Ollie wasn’t an evil person. He was an unreliable loser of doubtful morals, but that was different. It was Afi who had turned Ollie into a murderer. It was Afi’s responsibility, his fault. He had paid with his life. And, in a way, Ollie had already paid with his.

  It was Magnus’s destiny to look after Ollie.

  It had been good to talk to Ingileif. To feel that she was on the same wavelength as him. When he eventually got out of here, he would go see her again, whatever she said, wherever she was – Hamburg or Timbuktu.

  But when? When would that be?

  Three weeks? Or fifteen years?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  EMIL RAN HIS eyes over Jóhannes’s statement, preparing himself for Ollie’s interview. He was sure Jóhannes was hiding something. And he was fairly confident Ollie would tell him what.

  Baldur was further down the corridor of Stykkishólmur police station, interviewing Gabrielle with Vigdís. Emil had spent half an hour with him going through what he knew of the family at Bjarnarhöfn. Baldur had also interviewed Villi, who had stood by his story that he had been walking around Swine Lake, but now remembered that he had seen a young couple while he was there. Also his car, a rented Peugeot, was definitely not the vehicle that Adam had seen parked in the hollow.

  But the rifle and its bearer were still out there somewhere. The Viking Squad was hanging around in the station, watching TV, waiting to be called out. It was a shame that the manpower couldn’t be used in the search, but Rúnar had insisted that the squad be kept at the station in readiness, in case the shooter popped up somewhere, shooting.

  One thing was certain: Ollie could not have shot Aníta. Páll had done a good job of tracking him down with the help of the coastguard. He had been noticed by the locals as he had taken the boat out into the fjord, and indeed the owner of the skiff had reported it missing. When Aníta was shot, Ollie was out on the water.

  Emil led the interpreter and Adam into the interview room. Ollie was hunched up in his chair, cradling a cup of coffee in his hands.

  ‘Hello, Ollie,’ said Emil in English. ‘Must have been cold out there?’

  Ollie grunted.

  Emil turned on the recording equipment and the laborious interview started, with everything being translated back and forth from Icelandic.

  ‘Now, Ollie, take me through again everything that happened on Sunday morning.’

  The details came thick and fast. They matched what Jóhannes had said very closely, except Ollie’s recounting of why they decided to go to Arnarstapi. In Ollie’s version, Jóhannes simply told him they were going there and didn’t tell him why. Emil let Ollie talk, and wrote everything down.

  When he had finished, Emil asked him another question. ‘When did you last speak to your brother?’

  ‘Magnus? I don’t know.’ Ollie frowned. ‘I suppose not since last Thursday. Although I’ve been staying with him, I didn’t see him on Friday or Saturday.’

  ‘Did you phone him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Ollie paused. ‘Yeah. I’m sure.’

  ‘If we look at your mobile phone records, which we will do, will we find any calls to him? Any texts?’

  ‘No.’

  Emil would bet that Ollie was telling the truth on that, at least as far as the phone records went.

  ‘Why didn’t you talk to him?’

  ‘He was busy with the case he was working on. And we had had an argument. About whether he should ask more questions about Dad’s murder, and Joe’s father, the writer. He was determined; I didn’t want him to.’

  ‘In that case, why did you and Jóhannes want to go up to Bjarnarhöfn to talk to your grandfather?’

  Ollie didn’t answer for a moment. He sipped his coffee. Then he spoke. ‘Because I felt more comfortable with Jóhannes than with my brother. Jóhannes is kind of reassuring; my brother is a nut job when it comes to anything to do with Dad’s death.’

  ‘Do you know what this is?’ said Emil, waving the sheets of paper he had brought in to the interview room with him.

  Ollie shook his head.

  ‘This is Jóhannes’s statement that I took from him in Reykjavík this morning. I asked him the same questions I asked you. This is what he said about deciding to go to Arnarstapi.’ Emil read out three different passages, all of which contradicted Ollie. ‘You see, I don’t believe that you and Jóhannes took a detour just to go for a walk on the cliffs.’

  Ollie shrugged. ‘Whatever.’

  ‘I think you were supposed to meet Hallgrímur there. That’s why you called him at the farm. He wasn’t there and you wanted to know why.’

  Ollie shifted in his chair. Emil could see that he was thinking, trying to decide whether to change his story, weighing up the pros and cons.

  Help him along. ‘I don’t think you killed your grandfather,’ Emil went on. ‘But it’s hard not to mark you down as a chief suspect when you and Jóhannes are lying so blatantly. All I need is an explanation about why you were there. The real explanation.’

  Ollie seemed to come to a decision and smiled quickly. ‘OK. You are right. We were planning to meet Hallgrímur there. We wanted to talk about Dad’s death. We had questions to ask him.’

  ‘OK. But why meet him there? Why not at the farm?’

  Silence. Emil waited.

  ‘I couldn’t face going back to the farm. You know what a miserable childhood I had there. Jóhannes mentioned Arnarstapi as a neutral place.’

  ‘I see,’ said Emil. Ollie seemed to relax a touch. It was Emil’s turn to think.
‘I still don’t see why you chose Arnarstapi. Why not a café in Stykkishólmur? Or Grundarfjördur? Both places are quite a bit closer.’

  Ollie shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Ask Jóhannes.’

  ‘What is it about Arnarstapi? There are those cliffs there, aren’t there? The path to Hellnar. That’s a quiet place where you couldn’t be seen. A good place to pitch someone into the sea.’

  Ollie frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Both you and Jóhannes had good reasons for wanting Hallgrímur dead,’ Emil said. ‘You hated him because of what he had done to you as a child. Jóhannes hated him because he thought he had murdered his father. You didn’t want to ask him questions. Jóhannes maybe, but not you. You wanted to kill him.’

  ‘I don’t know what you are talking about,’ said Ollie.

  ‘Yes, you do. The plan was to lure Hallgrímur out to Arnarstapi, kill him, and drop him off the cliffs into the sea. Wasn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ said Ollie. ‘Is your theory he drove out there, we killed him, then drove him back to Bjarnarhöfn and dumped him in the church? That makes no sense.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense. But you intended to kill him, he didn’t show up and then Magnús killed him instead. That makes sense.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t.’

  ‘Did you know Magnús was going to kill the old man?’

  ‘I told you, I haven’t spoken to Magnus for days,’ said Ollie. ‘And actually, I don’t believe my brother did kill him.’

  ‘You don’t, huh?’ Emil said. ‘Is that because you killed him after all? Killed him and then drove out to Arnarstapi afterwards? You know we can use the phone records to check exactly where you were when you made those calls to Hallgrímur?’

  ‘Then I suggest you should do that,’ said Ollie. ‘That way you will know I was miles away when my grandfather was murdered.’

  Emil rubbed the middle of his three chins. It almost made sense, but not quite.

  ‘Can I go back to Reykjavík now?’ said Ollie. ‘I want to make sure I get my next flight out of this stupid country.’