leave.’
The younger officer put the question. The general smiled broadly, his strong teeth gleaming, and leant forwards.
‘I don’t think the way we run our embassy has any bearing on the matter.’
‘Ask him if he knows who Kristin is.’
‘No, I don’t know anything about her,’ the general answered.
‘Ask Jaws here if it’s possible that the gunman and his companion were at the pub on military business.’
The younger detective hesitated, then repeated the question in English. Smith bent down to the general who smiled even more broadly.
‘I’m afraid you’ve been watching too many Hollywood movies. We don’t shoot at Icelanders. We protect them and consider them friends of the United States. We also direct unprecedented sums of money their way by means of generous contracts. I’m afraid I can’t help you gentlemen any further. If you came here to offend a friendly nation, you did a good job of it. Good day.’
He rose. Smith came round to the front of the desk and waited for the policemen to stand, which they did, belatedly. The elder detective with the hat looked Smith up and down, then turned to Wesson.
‘Smith and Wesson? Is that some kind of joke?’ he asked.
Smith smiled thinly. ‘You’re the joke, buddy,’ he replied in fluent Icelandic.
The two men’s eyes met.
‘Who are you really? What are you hiding?’
‘Gentlemen, you will have to excuse me. Smith will show you out. I have no further comment.’
As the two detectives drove away from the embassy, the car-phone started ringing. The call came direct from the switchboard of the National Commissioner of Police. The man on the line introduced himself as a lawyer before launching into a tirade about his jeep being stolen.
‘I lent my jeep to my ex-girlfriend, the woman you’re looking for, and she hasn’t returned it,’ he announced.
‘Are you talking about Kristin, the woman wanted for questioning?’ the elder policeman asked.
‘Yes, her,’ the lawyer replied irritably. ‘Thank God one of you lot is a bit quicker on the uptake. I’ve been passed from one fool to another by your switchboard.’
‘What did she want with the jeep?’
‘I don’t see how that matters,’ the lawyer said indignantly. ‘I’m asking you to please just find my vehicle.’
‘Did she say where she was going?’
‘Well if I knew where she was going or where she was now, I wouldn’t be wasting my time reporting this.’
‘Is there a phone in the jeep, a car-phone perhaps?’ The detective’s patience was wearing thin.
‘Of course.’
‘Have you tried calling it, sir?’
‘Of course I’ve called the phone,
The lawyer gave them the number.
‘So are you going to find her then?’ he demanded.
‘Sir, the Reykjavik police force will not rest until your precious car is recovered,’ the detective said wearily and hung up. It was not long before the phone rang again. This time it was the chief inspector.
‘Have you been offending our friends at the American embassy?’ he asked angrily.
‘Not as far as I know,’ the policeman answered. He sounded genuinely astonished. News travels fast, he thought.
‘I’ve just had the justice minister on the line. He’s had a call from some chap who said you’d made fun of the appearance of the most senior official at the embassy. And mocked their names to boot. Is that right?’
‘We’re investigating a crime and they could have been more accommodating. We’ve got a body and a shooting on our hands. Do you really think this is the moment to worry about a man who could chew carrots through a barbed wire fence?’
‘Don’t give me that, Detective Inspector. I’m told you were rude and arrogant.’
‘He wasn’t even the ambassador, just some general who looks like a cod and is about as cooperative.’
Knowing his officer of old and realising that it would be futile to pursue this, the chief inspector tried a new line of attack.
‘This Kristin you’re advertising as wanted for questioning, have you any idea where she is?’
‘Not a clue,’ the detective admitted, scratching his head.
Chapter 24
SOUTH-EAST ICELAND,
SATURDAY 30 JANUARY, EVENING
Kristin lifted the tattered German uniform jacket and ran her hands over the cloth, feeling buttons, pockets, lapels. The fabric was surprisingly soft to the touch; it was a peculiar thought that it had belonged to a German officer who had died in it up by the glacier. There were three medals pinned to the left breast. She handed the jacket to Steve who also examined it carefully.
‘I found him in a small gully not more than five kilometres above the farm to the east,’ Jon said slowly, his eyes shifting from one of them to the other. ‘I buried him on the spot, the little that was left of him. Put up a small cross. The way I saw it, he was one of
‘How long ago did you say this was?’ Kristin asked.
‘About twenty years.’
‘Hang on, are you saying he’d been lying practically on your doorstep for more than thirty years?’
‘Hardly on my doorstep. No, he was quite some way from here, well hidden among the rocks.’
‘Why didn’t you report your discovery?’
‘It was nobody else’s business. This was ten years after the major recovery expedition and there’s hardly been any sign of the military round here since. It’s not for the likes of me to go contacting senior officers in the army. I wouldn’t know where to start.’
‘So why did you take the jacket? Why didn’t you bury it as well?’
‘I don’t really know. Maybe I wanted a souvenir. As I said, I’m very interested in the war and anything to do with it. It was Karl’s hobby too, before he died. I remember when the plane flew over; Karl and I used to speculate about it endlessly. It’s easy to climb on to the glacier from here; hardly more than a gentle slope for those who know it well, though you have to watch out for crevasses. We scoured the glacier time and again in search of the plane but we never found it. The glacier’s like that. It’s quick to swallow up anything that sinks into it.’
‘Then spits it out again a hundred years later,’ Kristin added.
‘Yes. Or longer. Or never.’
While Kristin found it impossible to imagine what a German plane would have been doing this far north, Jon assured her that it was not unusual to see enemy aircraft flying over the south-eastern corner of the country during the war. They came from the airport at Stavanger in Norway, he explained, having been specially adapted to carry extra fuel; the return flight across the North Atlantic lasted more than eleven hours, during which time the temperature in the cockpit could drop to -30°C or lower. The planes were mostly Junkers Ju 88s. Generally these were reconnaissance missions but occasionally the Germans carried out air raids. He remembered a Heinkel He 111 fighter, for example, carrying out a machine gun attack on the British camp at the village of Selfoss in 1941, during which one man was killed. German aircraft were also spotted on rare occasions flying over Hornafjordur; they hugged the mountain range before disappearing from view behind Mount Eystrahorn. And a Focke-Wulf 200 once bombed the British tracking station just outside the village of Hofn. So Jon was not particularly surprised that a
