Meltwater (Fire and Ice)

by Michael Ridpath

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t you speak Icelandic? What’s the CIA doing sending a spy to Iceland who doesn’t speak Icelandic? I saw through your disguise, by the way.’

  ‘I know you’re a good detective, Magnus. And no, I don’t speak the language. I am more of a Freeflow specialist than an Iceland specialist. We have other people who work for the government who speak Icelandic.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Yes. People like you.’

  Magnus turned to the driver. They had passed the Hallgrímskirkja on top of the hill and were driving down the other side towards Snorrabraut. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You work for the government, don’t you?’

  ‘Not the American government. I’m attached to the National Police Commissioner’s Office in Iceland.’

  ‘Yeah, but you’re still on the BPD payroll. And you’re getting your pension contributions; I know, I checked. Come on, you’re a cop, you know it’s all about the pension rights.’

  ‘Hey, I’m thirty-four, what do I care about pensions?’ But Magnus knew that while that was true for him personally, a lot of his colleagues in the BPD became fixated on their earliest retirement date years in advance.

  ‘I’m just saying,’ said Bryant.

  ‘Saying what?’

  ‘That you are a US citizen.’

  Magnus sighed. ‘So what do you want?’

  ‘I want to know what Freeflow is working on right now.’

  ‘No,’ said Magnus.

  Bryant drove on. They were down to the bay now, and he turned eastwards on Saebraut. Mount Esja was free of clouds, its rocky ramparts gleaming full of sprightly spring promise. ‘Nice town, Reykjavík,’ Bryant said. ‘Very pretty. This reminds me a bit of Maine, you know. I used to go there on vacations when I was a kid.’

  ‘More trees in Maine,’ Magnus said.

  ‘True,’ Bryant said. ‘I know it has something to do with Israel.’

  ‘You watch TV in Icelandic, then?’

  ‘I have people to do it for me. Have you been following the peace negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Magnus.

  ‘Well, even if you had you wouldn’t know that they are at a crucial stage. The Palestinians have indicated that they might show some flexibility if the Israelis do. There’s a chance that we could get an agreement in the next month or so. A real agreement. The State Department is cautiously optimistic.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘It’s very good, Magnus. This is the most intractable problem in the world today. But the main difficulty that both sides have isn’t with each other, it’s with their own people – the right wing in Israel that believes in the God-given right of Jews to settle the occupied territories, and the Palestinian terrorists who want to see an end to the state of Israel.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I am saying that if a leak came out that harmed the reputation and good faith of either Israel or the Palestinians, it could disrupt the negotiations at a delicate stage.’

  ‘How do you know that what Freeflow is working on would do this?’

  ‘I don’t, for sure. It’s just a guess. But the balance of probability is that a big leak would screw things up. What do you think?’

  Magnus thought of the images of those bullets from the Israeli helicopter thudding into Tamara Wilton’s body. He thought of the chuckles, the jokes. ‘I’d say it might.’

  Bryant indicated and pulled over to the side of the road. The car behind hooted; he ignored it.

  He turned to Magnus and looked him straight in the eye. ‘If you could disrupt or delay this leak, whatever it is, it might save the peace process.’

  Magnus hesitated. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Why not?’ said Bryant. ‘Tell me why not. It’s your duty to your country, the United States. Plus it will help stop one of the worst conflicts of the last fifty years.’

  ‘It’s true I am an American,’ Magnus said. ‘But I am an Icelander as well. And the job I am doing at the moment is for the Republic of Iceland. If you want the leak disrupted, then you should speak to the Icelandic authorities. It’s up to them to decide what to do. I will simply do what they tell me. Have you spoken to them?’

  Bryant didn’t answer.

  ‘You have, and they said no, didn’t they? The Modern Media Initiative, I’ll bet. My job is to solve a murder. And that I will do. But no more. Now I’m going.’ He reached for the latch of the car door and opened it. ‘Nice talking to you.’

  ‘Think about it, Sergeant Detective Jonson.’

  Magnus slammed the door and crossed the busy road looking for the nearest bus stop.

  The man drummed his fingers as he pressed his mobile phone to his ear. He was on hold, and had been for two minutes. His eyes flicked to the statue of Leifur Eiríksson, over to the church spire and then across to the entrance of Thórsgata. He saw a small white car emerge, driven by the guy he had seen hanging around the street for the past hour or so, and the big detective.

  Interesting.

  He considered whether to follow them, but decided not to. Curiosity was one thing, but it was the Freeflow people he was really interested in. Besides which, he couldn’t afford to break off the call.

  ‘Hello? . . . Yes, that’s right, fifteen thousand euros . . . And are you quite sure they won’t know where the funds come from? I want this to be an anonymous donation, you see . . . Thank you. Thank you very much. Goodbye.’

  The man cut the connection and tossed the phone on to the passenger seat beside him. He turned back to the entrance to Thórsgata and waited.

  It was a couple of hours from Stykkishólmur back to Reykjavík. It was a beautiful drive, scarcely another car on the road, lava fields and farmland stretching down to the sea. The capital lurked beneath the horizon, but the hazy grey shape of Mount Esja floated like a distant island in the burnished bay.

  Normally, Jóhannes would have felt a sense of euphoria driving through this isolated beauty, especially on a school day. But he couldn’t help turning over in his mind the importance of what he had learned.

  If indeed his father had pushed Gunnar into the sea off Búland’s Head seventy years before, he was a murderer.

  His father, the man he admired most in the world, was a murderer.

  The words that Benedikt had spoken to him while they were both surveying the Berserkjahraun made sense now. Sometimes they do. Sometimes people do take revenge for family honour, just as they had done in The Saga of the People of Eyri. And Njáll’s Saga and Gisli’s Saga and all the other sagas.

  It was an admission. More than that, it was a justification. Benedikt was justifying to his son what he had done, even if it would take nearly fifty years for that son to appreciate it.

  But Jóhannes was surprised to find that the discovery that his father was a murderer didn’t fill him with revulsion. It filled him with a kind of pride. Benedikt knew right from wrong: that was why he was such a good writer. Like some of the sagas, his novels dealt with terrible moral dilemmas. He put his characters in positions where doing the right thing forced them to break the law, to alienate the people they loved, sometimes to destroy their own lives. That was why novels like Moor and the Man were so popular.

  So if Benedikt had pushed his neighbour Gunnar over the cliff all those years ago, it had been the right thing to do.

  And, like the characters in his books, it had eventually destroyed him.

  Because although Jóhannes did not know for sure who had killed his father, he now knew why.

  Revenge.

  If Benedikt could kill Gunnar for murdering his own father, then Gunnar’s family could kill Benedikt for the same crime.

  A surge of anger rushed through Jóhannes’s veins. The road was long and straight, and without realizing it, Jóhannes put his foot down. He nearly came off at a corner.

  He slammed on the brakes, pulled off the road and jumped out of the car, flinging the door shut behind
him.

  He was in the middle of a flat plain near the Eldborg crater, an oval-shaped stone circle bursting up from the congealed lava surrounding it.

  He kicked the wheel of the car. That was satisfying, but he wanted to kick the car itself.

  Stupid. There was a boulder a few metres away. He ran over to it and booted it hard, swearing as he did so. He kicked it again and again and again. Words tumbled out of his mouth. His eyes stung. His face was hot; his whole body was on fire. He gave the stone one last kick and then hunched his shoulders and stomped off across the lava field towards the crater. He tripped and fell over some of the heather, stumbled on some more, fell again, and then a third time; he lay, panting on the grey stone.

  The heat left him. His toe hurt like hell. A golden plover fluttered over the mossy lava next to him, peeping its displeasure at the disturbance he had caused.

  He sat up, took off his shoe and rubbed his toe, still breathing heavily.

  He felt a little scared. He hadn’t done that for years, not since he was a child. He used to lose his temper sometimes then, when he was bullied or when things didn’t go well at school. His father had comforted him, called him his little berserker.

  Jóhannes the adolescent had controlled his temper with difficulty at first, but then with more and more ease. In fact one of his main qualities as a teacher was his patience. It was strange how out of nowhere that temper tantrum had hit him.

  But of course it wasn’t out of nowhere. He had lost his job. He had discovered that his father was a murderer. And that raised all kinds of questions about why his own father had in turn been killed.

  Life would never be the same again for Jóhannes Benediktsson.

  Ásta picked up a new cartridge on her way home from Thórsgata and installed it on her scanner. It was happy again now – no more whining.

  Eighty pages to go. It was a slow bottom-of-the range machine that liked to grind, slide and wink before each page. It was trying Ásta’s patience.

  It had been a tough day. Ásta was good at dealing with the bereaved, but Teresa Andreose’s distress was of an intensity she had rarely seen before. She had booked her into a hotel, and then taken her to the police station and left her there. Teresa had eventually warmed to her a little bit, but understandably she was suspicious of Ásta’s connection with Freeflow.

  Ásta wasn’t sure now what to think about Erika. Like everyone else in the room she had been shocked at Teresa’s accusation. There was no doubt that Erika had slept with another woman’s husband, and that was clearly wrong. Erika had a lot to answer for. Yet Ásta couldn’t help admiring the way that Erika had stood and accepted Teresa’s tirade, not arguing with it, not making excuses.

  It also put Erika’s insistence that they continue to work on Project Meltwater in a different light. Ásta had been suspicious that Erika was using the claim that ‘Nico would have wanted it’ to justify her own ambition to promote Freeflow. Now it was clear that Erika really did care about Nico. Perhaps in her mind there was no conflict: she wanted to go ahead with the project for her own sake and for Nico’s.

  Thirty-eight pages to go. Ásta was tempted to multi-task.

  Her eyes were drawn to a sheaf of paper she had printed out the previous weekend when she had heard Freeflow were coming to Iceland – press reports on their past leaks. She had skimmed them on Saturday, but there was something she had heard later in the house in Thórsgata that she wanted to check out.

  She leafed through the printouts. After eight more pages of the journal had been scanned, she found what she was looking for.

  She called up Wikipedia on her machine, and typed in a name.

  She stared at the result. And stared, as the consequences of what she was reading sank in.

  It could be a coincidence, of course. It must be a coincidence. But the more she thought about it, the more unlikely that seemed.

  She needed to know.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  MAGNUS DIDN’T TELL his colleagues about his conversation with the CIA. They were doing well on the list of Israelis in Iceland: most of the tourists had been accounted for; there were still half a dozen to be followed up. The Italians were harder: half of Reykjavík’s hotels seemed to be harbouring at least one Italian tourist, and five had been booked into the Hotel Rangá the night of the murder, the nearest big hotel to Fimmvörduháls. Of course none of them was still there. Vigdís had driven out there to talk to the manager and the staff. That would probably be her last task before going to Paris.

  Árni had tracked down a black Suzuki Vitara rented from Keflavík Airport by two Canadian men, both dark haired and in their twenties. He had their names, but no idea where they were staying. They could be anywhere in the country.

  Chief Superintendent Kristján called. ‘What were you doing driving across the Markarfljót in the middle of a jökulhlaup?’ he demanded.

  ‘I wanted to get to the other side,’ Magnus said.

  ‘This is no joke, Magnús.’ And indeed the chief superintendent didn’t sound amused. ‘So far we have managed to avoid any fatalities. We found the British schoolgirls and the Norwegian ambassador. But how stupid would we have looked if the only casualty had been one of our own men? In this country you have to treat nature with respect. Icelandic policemen know this.’

  Magnus winced at the slur on his American background. He hated it when Icelanders made the point that he wasn’t really one of them. He almost mentioned that they had natural disasters in the United States too, hadn’t Kristján heard of Hurricane Katrina? But he thought better of it; that event had hardly covered the American authorities in glory.

  ‘I had to look for the evidence,’ said Magnus. ‘Especially since they say there is going to be ash falling later on.’

  ‘Did you find any?’

  ‘Yes.’ Magnus filled Kristján in on the state of the investigation.

  ‘It sounds like you are making some progress,’ said Kristján. ‘Keep me informed. But I won’t be able to spare any of my officers for the next couple of days. And don’t take any more stupid risks around the volcano.’

  ‘I won’t. How’s the guy in the Cat?’

  ‘The Caterpillar? He’s a hero. The highway isn’t too badly damaged, and the bridge is still standing. I think he’s gone home now for supper.’

  Ásta brought Teresa Andreose into the station and Magnus interviewed her. Teresa was much calmer until Erika Zinn’s name was mentioned. She had been jealous of Erika for months. Even though she suspected her husband of having an affair with Erika, she had had no evidence. But two weeks earlier, she had confronted her husband about his relationship with his Freeflow colleague. Nico had admitted that they had slept together a couple of times, but promised he wouldn’t do it again. However, when he had said that he was going to Reykjavík with the Freeflow team, including Erika, Teresa had exploded.

  Nico had gone regardless, and now he was dead.

  ‘Did Nico speak to you much about Freeflow?’ Magnus asked.

  ‘Only in the most general terms. He kept on telling me what a wonderful organization it was, but he didn’t talk about the details.’

  ‘What about the Gruppo Cavour scandal?’

  ‘That happened before Nico got involved. And we live in Milan: fortunately we have nothing to do with those Roman scandals.’

  Magnus studied the Italian woman. She looked exhausted after her earlier eruption. Although she had reapplied her makeup, she could not hide the despair in her eyes.

  ‘When can I have them send his body back to Italy?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Magnus said. ‘We need to keep it here for a while. With the murder investigation.’

  ‘You can’t do that! I won’t let him stay in this horrible country a moment longer!’ For a moment it looked as if the fight would flare up in her again. But when Magnus shrugged, her shoulders slumped. ‘Can I at least see him?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Magnus. ‘I’ll get one of my colleagues to take you to the mo
rgue.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Teresa smiled quickly. ‘And when I have seen him, I will go home. There is nothing more I can do here.’

  Magnus hesitated. Could Teresa have paid someone to follow her husband to Iceland and kill him? Magnus doubted it, but it had to be an outside possibility. Erika’s testimony suggested she was the real target on the mountain, but then Teresa could have wanted both of them dead. So now there were two reasons to look for an Italian.

  Magnus considered insisting that Teresa stayed in Iceland, but decided to let her go. He had her address in Milan; the next step if he was serious about investigating her would be to get in touch with the police there. So he finished the interview and got hold of Róbert to take her to Barónsstígur to see the body of her husband.

  At about seven, Magnús packed up to leave the station. Ordinarily he would have stayed later at this early stage of the investigation, but he hadn’t had much sleep in the previous couple of days, and he knew he should see Ollie.

  Before shutting down his computer, he checked the file he had added that morning. Sure enough there were some words added to the bottom:

  we at ff have no idea who killed nico. like you we suppose it was someone with a grudge against us.

  i am worried. whoever killed nico was trying to kill erika. he might try again. i want you to catch him. so if you have any questions about freeflow, ask me. maybe i can answer them maybe i can’t.

  Magnus smiled. That was interesting. Clearly someone at Freeflow wanted to help him. He wondered which of the group had written the message. Not Erika, obviously. Probably not Ásta. Perhaps Franz? Or someone with a longer period of involvement: Dúddi or Dieter?

  What to ask?

  He remembered Baldur’s words. If there were any tensions within the Freeflow group, they hadn’t come out in any of the interviews so far. But Teresa’s dramatic outburst had demonstrated that there were things going on between members of the group that Erika and the rest of them had kept from the police.

  Magnus began to type:

  No one told us about Nico and Erika’s relationship. Is there anything else going on between the people at Freeflow that we should know about?