Deadly Pleasures

by Martin Edwards

  Raufarhöfn was a sad village. It had been a boom town in the 1960s, when herring had been harvested from the surrounding seas, but with the disappearance of the herring the town had shrunk, leaving abandoned fish-processing plants and houses. The Arctic Henge guarded the town from its little citadel to the north, oddly modern like a frame from a fantasy computer game, especially when compared to the rundown twentieth-century decay of the village itself.

  Magnus was reinforcements. The investigation of the murder of the local policeman, Halldór Sigurdsson, was being led by Detective Inspector Ólafur from Akureyri. Magnus’s colleague Vigdís had joined the inspector immediately the body was discovered, with two members of the forensic unit from Reykjavík. She had been there two days when it had been decided that Ólafur needed some extra help.

  The police station was easy to find, as was Vigdís, the only black detective in Iceland. To Magnus she was familiar, reminding him of the black police officers in Boston, where he had served in the police department for ten years before being transferred to Reykjavík. But Vigdís had never met her American father, a serviceman at the Keflavík airbase, and refused to speak English. She was an Icelander and was determined to let her fellow countrymen know it, however sceptical they were. She was also a very good detective.

  The police station was small; it had accommodated only one officer, Halldór, but was now the centre of a murder enquiry. A selection of odd chairs were crammed around two desks and there were a couple of uniformed policemen and a detective that Magnus didn’t know sitting at them. But Ólafur, the inspector in charge of the investigation, was out.

  Vigdís was clearly pleased to see him. ‘You made it!’

  ‘This is not an easy place to get to.’

  ‘At least the weather’s not too bad this time of year,’ she said. ‘The town can be completely cut off in winter.’

  ‘So, what’s been going on? Any suspects?’

  ‘I’ll brief you,’ said Vigdís. ‘Do you want to take a walk? See the sights of Raufarhöfn?’

  ‘Sure, why not?’ said Magnus. ‘I’ve been cooped up in the car for hours.’

  So they left the police station and strolled through the village towards the harbour. There are a number of small fishing villages dotted around Iceland’s coastline. Some of them are quaint. Some of them aren’t. Despite a church and the odd brightly painted house, and a cluster of fishing boats bobbing about in the harbour, Raufarhöfn wasn’t.

  But the wind had died down, the sun was on their faces, and it was almost warm.

  By the time I got here, they had already made arrests, said Vigdís. The two guys who found the body: Alex Einarsson, 22, an Icelander and Martin Fiedler, 25 a German citizen. They are both animal-rights activists, Alex in Iceland alone, but Martin Fiedler has travelled all over Europe. He received a six-month prison sentence in England a few years ago during a protest at an animal laboratory.

  They both came to Raufarhöfn as soon as they read about the shooting of the polar bear on a website called animalblood.com. The theory was that there might be another adult bear somewhere around. There were search parties combing the area looking. They found nothing, but because the visibility was so bad for three days, they couldn’t be sure that there was nothing to find.

  Alex and Martin caused real problems, trying to be as disruptive as possible. They irritated the hell out of the locals, including Halldór, the local cop, and the man who shot the polar bear in the first place.

  He had become a bit of a local hero. He killed the bear with a single shot through the eye with a .22 bullet, just as the bear was about to attack a little girl. A hero with everyone but Alex and Martin, that is. And one or two other inhabitants who don’t believe polar bears should be shot on sight.

  Alex and Martin denied they had anything to do with the murder, of course. Neither of them had ever shot a gun before, or at least that is what they claimed. They admitted to hating Halldór, but they acted as if finding his body had been a genuine shock. And we couldn’t find the weapon. We searched the area. We checked at the farmhouse where they were staying, but neither of them had had any luggage that looked as if it could hold a rifle. There was no gunshot residue on them of any kind.

  We kept them locked up, and then drove them over to the district court in Akureyri to get a warrant to keep them in custody for another week.

  Forensics came up with nothing, or very little. They found the bullet that killed Halldór, but not the casing. There were the usual small bits of rubbish you would expect at a tourist site, and they collected it all, but there was nothing interesting. No one had seen anyone going up the hill, apart from our two suspects. Halldór’s body was discovered at about six-thirty in the evening. He had last been seen driving out of Raufarhöfn to the north at about four-thirty. He hadn’t told anyone where he was going.

  Ólafur and I went to Halldór’s house. His wife died seven years ago in a car accident in Reykjavík: Halldór was driving. He was a policeman in Kópavogur, I remember him vaguely. Anyway, he wanted a new life and so accepted a transfer to Raufarhöfn. According to the mayor he was mostly popular, although some people thought he could be officious. He made friends in the village. He was an enthusiastic member of any search and rescue mission, and a year after he arrived he had played a big part in the rescue of a farmer who had fallen off a cliff in a snowstorm. He was a keen shot, and would go hunting foxes with a couple of the locals, as well as target shooting on a friend’s farm.

  He had two children, a daughter at the University of Iceland, and a son who lives in Reykjavík. Only the daughter was at home. Her name is Gudrún. She is small and neat with short blonde hair and glasses: she’s twenty years old but looks younger. She has been back a week from Reykjavík. She was completely distraught, she didn’t know what to do. A couple of neighbours had come round to help, and she said her grandmother and her brother were due to join her from Reykjavík soon.

  She had no idea who might have killed her father. She said there were a couple of people whom she knew didn’t like him, and he didn’t like them: local troublemakers and one of the fishing captains, but she couldn’t believe that any of them disliked him enough to shoot him. She claimed that she had never met Alex or Martin, although she had heard her father swearing about them.

  Apparently, Halldór had fallen out with his son, Sveinn. Sveinn is a couple of years older than Gudrún. He was a student at the University of Iceland studying chemistry, but dropped out in his third year. Drugs. He does casual work in bars in Reykjavík, lives somewhere in Breidholt. Gudrún sees him occasionally: she says he is a bit of a mess. She let the drugs thing slip out and then refused to tell us more, she said it wasn’t relevant. She was clearly worried she might get her brother into trouble.

  I noticed there was a photograph on a bookcase of Sveinn with his father and sister, and a rifle. They were at a makeshift range in a field. Sveinn was holding the rifle.

  Afterwards, I went on to see the little girl, Anna, who had spotted the polar bear. Her farm is about ten kilometres from Raufarhöfn. She was quite upset, both at the death of the polar bear, and about Halldór being shot. She wouldn’t speak to me: apparently she hasn’t spoken to anyone about what happened the afternoon the polar bear was shot. I tried talking to her, but she seemed scared of me. You know how impatient I get with the way some of these country people deal with me because I’m black, but in her case I could see I must look strange to her, so I didn’t push it. Her mother was worried: she wanted to take her to see a psychiatrist, but her father thought it was a waste of time. They mentioned that their neighbour over the river, Egill, had seen the bear being killed.

  I decided to talk to him. There was a good chance that the killing of the polar bear was an important factor in Halldór’s death, and I wanted to make sure we knew what had actually happened.

  Although Egill’s farm is only three hundred metres away, it is an eight-kilometre drive up to the bridge and down the other side of the valley. The farm
is old and falling apart; the roof of the barn needs fixing. It’s clear that Egill doesn’t have any of the salmon fishing rights: just a few chickens and some sheep. He’s old, God knows how old, one of those ancient farmers with beady blue eyes and a face like a lava field under a white wispy beard. The farmhouse is tiny, but the kitchen has one of those old stoves in the middle and is really warm. And clean.

  When I told him I was a detective, he didn’t believe me until he had examined my ID very closely, and then chuckled to himself about a ‘blue’ policewoman; you know how they used to call black people blue in this country? But he was nice enough about it and seemed very happy to talk.

  He said he knows Anna well. She enjoys playing down by the river, and he shouts across to her; tells her stories. He knows lots of stories. He makes up little poems that he recites to her; she loves that apparently. Her parents seem to like her relationship with him, but he scarcely ever sees her face to face.

  I asked about the polar bear. He went off on a long tangent about how he was born on the island of Grímsey in the north. There is a famous story about how one day all the fires went out on the island. It was in the days before matches and so three islanders had to try to get to the mainland to bring back embers to rekindle them. The sea was iced up, and one of the men got lost and drifted out to sea on an ice floe. The next morning, he came across a mother polar bear trapped on another slab of drift ice. The bear allowed the man to suckle her milk with her cubs, and kept him warm. When the man had regained his strength, she swam over to the mainland, with him on her back. He gathered some embers and then returned on her back to Grímsey, and all the fires on the island could be rekindled. The man gave the bear cow’s milk and two slaughtered sheep and the bear swam off.

  This was Anna’s favourite story. Which was why, when Anna saw the polar bear, she wasn’t afraid of it.

  Egill didn’t realise that the bear was there until he heard the sound of the police car arriving. It was a foggy day, but at that moment the fog lifted and he saw the bear and the girl and the policeman. He still has good eyesight at distance, he says. The bear was a youngster and in bad condition. He saw the girl climb into the police car, and then the policeman take out his rifle. Then the girl jumped out of the car, and started off towards the polar bear.

  At this point Egill paused and stared at me. His beady little eyes shone with anger. Halldór did nothing to stop her. According to Egill, he had plenty of time to shout to her, or to drag her back, but he didn’t. He just aimed his rifle and shot the bear.

  Egill seemed very upset by this. In his view, Halldór need not have shot the bear at all. He could have coaxed the child back into his car and taken her off to the farmhouse. Then he could have called for help and they could have captured the bear and taken it back to Greenland. It was small and weak, so doing this would have been possible.

  The next day Egill had gone into town and talked to some people in the café at the petrol station. Everyone seemed to think Halldór was a hero. Egill started trying to explain what he had seen, but no one was listening to him. Except maybe the waitress, Lilja. No one listens to him much any more.

  I asked him whether he had any idea who might have killed Halldór. He said he hadn’t been away from the farm for a couple of days: he didn’t know Halldór had been murdered. But no, he didn’t have any ideas.

  Someone from the German Embassy in Reykjavík arrived in town, together with a lawyer from Akureyri. The pressure was on to find more evidence against Alex and Martin. We decided to interview everyone in town. The population is only 194 and someone must have seen something. But Ólafur asked me to look at the website Alex and Martin had said told them that the polar bear that had been shot might have had a mother.

  I checked it out: it was very interesting. You can see the flurry of messages after the first reports of the polar bear being shot. Everyone was angry, and someone with the nickname Foxgirl suggested that volunteers come out to Raufarhöfn and disrupt the search for a second bear. Two members said they would go; they turned out to be Alex Einarsson and Martin Fiedler. Martin said he was flying from Düsseldorf to Iceland.

  I couldn’t figure out who Foxgirl was from the website, although it was clearly someone who lived in or near to Raufarhöfn. And Foxgirl makes sense when you think of the Melrakkasléttarnes with all its foxes. It made me wonder about Gudrún. Maybe she was Foxgirl, or if she wasn’t, maybe she knew who was. I spoke to Ólafur about it, and we decided to return to Halldór’s house to ask her more questions.

  Gudrún’s grandmother and brother had just arrived from Reykjavík. We decided to talk to them before Gudrún, see if we could get more family background. The grandmother didn’t tell us much we didn’t know already. She was Halldór’s mother-in-law. She had good things to say about him, but I got the impression that they had fallen out over his decision to move from Reykjavík to Raufarhöfn. And over Sveinn, his son.

  We spoke to Sveinn. He had a shaven head and dirty clothes and seemed strung out. He fiddled with a cigarette the whole time, desperate to light up. Definitely a junkie. He said he had a job in a bar in downtown Reykjavík. When we asked him what we would find when we checked his criminal record, he said he had been done for possession a couple of times, and assault once.

  ‘How were relations between you and your father?’ Ólafur asked him.

  ‘Not good,’ he said. ‘Dad was really angry when I left university. Chemistry just wasn’t my thing and he didn’t understand that. And I told you I got busted for possession. He assumed I was a pusher. Which I’m not.’ He glared at us, daring us to contradict him, but I wasn’t convinced. ‘I didn’t talk to him much after that.’

  ‘Did you talk to Gudrún?’ Ólafur asked.

  ‘Yeah. Not often. But every now and then.’

  ‘And how was the relationship between her and her father?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, Gudrún is a good girl,’ Sveinn said. ‘You can tell that just from looking at her. Works hard, passes exams, has nice clean boyfriends. Dad used to point out to me what a good girl she was.’

  ‘So no major arguments?’ I said.

  ‘Not until last week?’

  ‘Last week?’

  ‘Yeah. Gudrún called me. I’d seen the news about how Dad had shot the polar bear and was a big hero. I knew Gudrún would be upset about that; she’s a big save the elephant fan. And save the orang-utan. And the chimpanzee. So I was pretty sure I could guess her attitude to her father shooting a polar bear.’

  I exchanged glances with Ólafur. Gudrún hadn’t told us any of that.

  ‘So they had a fight?’ Ólafur asked.

  ‘A massive one. But it wasn’t just that Gudrún was upset that he had killed the polar bear. It was how he had done it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Gudrún has a friend who works in the petrol station who overheard an old farmer who lives on the other side of the river from where the bear was shot. Apparently Dad let a little girl wander over to the bear so he could shoot it, rather than getting the little girl out of the way and letting the bear escape. Gudrún was horrified that Dad would use a child as bait like that.’

  Sveinn broke the cigarette between his fingers and swore. ‘But I’m not surprised. If Dad thought he had a chance to be the guy who shot the polar bear, then he would take some big risks. And not just with his own life.’

  ‘Did your father teach you to shoot?’ I asked.

  Sveinn frowned. ‘Yes. But only when I was a kid.’

  ‘Were you any good?’

  Sveinn nodded. ‘Not bad. Not as good as Dad, though. He was an excellent shot.’

  ‘What about Gudrún?’

  ‘She wasn’t a bad shot either, for a girl. Not as good as me.’ Sveinn’s brows knitted again. ‘Hold on. What are you suggesting?’

  ‘We’re just asking questions,’ Ólafur said.

  ‘No you’re not. You are suggesting that Gudrún shot Dad, aren’t you? Well, you know what? You’re out of your mi
nds. You’ve met Gudrún. She would never shoot anyone, let alone Dad, no matter how angry she was with him.’

  ‘Just a couple more questions,’ said Ólafur.

  ‘No! No way! I’m not answering any more questions.’ Sveinn got to his feet and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. ‘You two are mental, you are. Bloody useless. All you cops are bloody useless. My dad was bloody useless.’ I noticed a tear appear in his eye, but he rushed from the room before it had a chance to escape. He threw open the front door and lit up outside.

  We took Gudrún down to the station. She admitted she had had a row with her father. She was angry with him for killing the polar bear, and very angry with him for putting the little girl’s life at risk, although he denied it. He said that he couldn’t stop her from going up to the bear, and the only way to save the child was to shoot the animal. Gudrún didn’t believe him. She said that she did use the nickname Foxgirl online, and she had urged concerned people on animalblood.com to come out to Raufarhöfn to stop another polar bear from being shot, although she had been too nervous to actually make contact with Alex and Martin once they were here. And she said that her father had taught her to shoot. But she denied killing him herself.

  There was an obvious way to find out. We took the rifle and some spent casings we found at his house, and rushed them to the lab in Reykjavík for analysis. Either it will match the bullet that killed Halldór, or it won’t. We persuaded the coastguard, who had had a helicopter up looking for a second bear, to fly a constable to Akureyri with the evidence, and from there he flew on to Reykjavík. We should have an answer back any time soon.

  They were sitting on a wall by the harbour. In front of them a fisherman was loading a very large net on to a very small boat. ‘So you see, Magnús, I’m afraid you’ve wasted your time. It looks like you’ll be heading back home tomorrow.’

  Magnus sat silently, his hands thrust into the pockets of his coat.

  ‘Magnus?’ Vigdís said. ‘What is it?’