A seagull wheeled around him, looking for a discarded morsel, but after a few seconds abandoned him with a disappointed cry. An officious looking motor boat cut through the harbour entrance on some mission of nautical bureaucracy.
Iceland had changed so much since the disruptions of his childhood, but what he recognized of Reykjavik brought back the early years, the happy years. There was no reason to visit his mother’s family; they need never even find out he was in the country. He was pleased with the way his Icelandic seemed to be coming back so well, although he was aware that he spoke with a touch of an American accent: he needed to work on rolling those ‘r’s.
Reykjavik was a long way from Boston, a long way north of Boston. Twenty-five degrees of latitude. It wasn’t just the cold air or the patches of snow that told him this – Boston Harbor could be cold and bleak enough – it was the light: clear but soft, pale, thin. There was a subtle warmth to the greys of the harbour in Reykjavik, compared with its harsher Boston counterpart.
But he would be glad when the trial date came up and he could go back. Although the Agnar case was an interesting one, he missed the violent edge of the streets of Boston. At some point over the last ten years, sorting out the day-to-day procession of shootings, stabbings and rapes, finding the bad guys and bringing them to justice, had become more than a job. It had become a need, a habit, a drug.
Reykjavik just wasn’t the same. Toytown.
He felt a pang of guilt. Here he was safe, thousands of miles from that teeming city of drug gangs and police-corruption trials. But Colby wasn’t. How could he get her to listen to him? He had the feeling the harder he pushed it, the more obstinate she would become. But why? Why did she have to be like that? Why did she have to use this issue, of all issues, to try to resolve the question of their relationship? If he were more emotionally subtle, if he were Colby herself, for example, he would be able to figure out a way of manipulating her to come with him. But as he tried to think of a plan, his head began to spin.
He sighed and turned back to the city. As he walked back up the hill along Laugavegur he looked out for a likely bar for a quick beer. Down a side street he spied a place called Grand Rokk. From the outside it looked a bit like a scruffy Boston pub, but with a tent covering tables at which a dozen people were smoking as they drank. Inside, the place was about a quarter full. Magnus eased his way past a group of regulars lined up along the bar and ordered himself a large Thule from the shaven-headed barman. He found a stool in the corner and sipped his beer.
The other drinkers looked as if they had been there a while. Quite a few had shot glasses containing a brown liquid crouching next to their beers. A line of tables along one wall were inlaid with the squares of chessboards. There was a game in progress. Magnus watched idly. The players weren’t that good, he could beat them easily.
He smiled when he remembered challenging his father, a for-midable player, night after night. The only way Magnus could ever beat the clever strategist was by aggressive assaults on his king. They nearly always failed, but sometimes, just sometimes he would break through and win the game, to the pleasure of both father and son. Magnus knew that although his father would never dream of giving him a break, he was rooting for Magnus, always rooting for Magnus.
Too often, Magnus saw his father only through the dreadful prism of his murder, and forgot the simpler times before his death. Simpler, but not simple.
Ragnar was a very clever man, a mathematician with an international reputation, which was why he had been offered the position at MIT. He was also humane, the saviour who had whisked Magnus and his little brother away from misery in Iceland when they had feared that he had abandoned them. Magnus had many fond memories of his father from his teenage years: not only playing chess and reading the sagas together, but also hiking in the Adirondacks and in Iceland, and long discussions through the evening about anything that Magnus was interested in – sparring matches in which his father always listened to Magnus and respected his opinion, yet also tried to prove him wrong.
But there was one aspect of his father’s life that Magnus had never understood: his relations with women. He didn’t understand why Ragnar had married his mother, or why he left her. He certainly didn’t understand why he had then gone on to marry that awful woman Kathleen. She was the young wife of one of the other professors at MIT, and Magnus realized later that they must have been having an affair even when Magnus joined his father in Boston. Although outwardly charming and beautiful, Kathleen was a controlling woman who resented Magnus and Ollie. Within a few months of their marriage she seemed to resent Ragnar too. Why his father hadn’t seen that coming, Magnus had no idea.
Eighteen months after that dreadful occasion, Ragnar was dead, found stabbed on the floor of the living room at the house they were renting for the summer in Duxbury, on Boston’s South Shore.
Magnus had had no doubt who was the chief suspect. The detectives investigating the case listened to his theories about his stepmother with sympathy at first, and then with irritation. After an initial couple of days where they seemed to pursue her vigorously, they let her drop. This made no sense to Magnus, since they didn’t have another suspect. Months went by and the police couldn’t come up with a better idea than that a total stranger broke into the house, stabbed Ragnar, and then disappeared into the ether, leaving no trace other than a single hair, which the police had been unable to identify, despite DNA testing.
It was only the following year, when Magnus devoted his summer vacation from college to making his own inquiries, that he discovered that his stepmother had had a cast-iron alibi: she was in bed with an air-conditioning engineer in town at the time of the killing. A fact that stepmother and policemen had conspired to keep from Magnus and his brother.
The bar was filling up with a younger crowd, overwhelming some of the earlier drinkers who staggered out into the dusk. A band set up, and within a few minutes began to play. The music was too loud for a contemplative beer, so Magnus left.
Outside, the streets, so quiet earlier, were full, teeming with the young and not-so-young dolled up for a night on the town.
Time for bed, Magnus thought. As he opened the door of his new lodgings, he passed Katrin on her way out, dressed in black gothic finery, her face powdered white and improbably studded with metal.
‘Hi,’ she said with half a smile.
‘Have a good evening,’ said Magnus in English. Somehow that seemed the correct language in which to speak to Katrin.
She paused. ‘You’re some kind of cop, aren’t you?’
Magnus nodded. ‘Kind of.’
‘Arni’s such an arsehole,’ Katrin muttered, and disappeared into the semi-darkness.
Diego took his time breaking into the ground-floor apartment in Medford. The apartment was the bottom half of a small clapboard house in a quiet road, and the good news was that the yard was obscured by trees. No one would see him, so he could focus on not making a noise.
He climbed through the kitchen window and padded into the living room. The bedroom door was open and he could hear gentle snoring. He sniffed. Marijuana. He smiled. That should slow his target down nicely.
He slid into the bedroom. Noted the lump on the bed, and the bedside light. He drew his gun, a Smith and Wesson. 38 revolver. Then he switched on the light, pulled back the covers and cocked his weapon. ‘Sit up, Ollie,’ he barked.
The man sat bolt upright, his eyes blinking, his mouth open in surprise. He matched the photograph Diego had studied earlier: about thirty years old, skinny, light brown curly hair, blue eyes that were now puffy and bloodshot.
‘Yell, and I blow your head off! You got me?’
The man swallowed and nodded.
‘All right. Now, I got one simple question for you. Where’s your brother?’
Ollie tried to speak. Nothing came out. He swallowed and tried again. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I know he stayed with you here last week. Where did he say he was going to when he took off?’
Ollie took a deep breath. ‘I have no idea. He was here one day and gone the next. Just grabbed his stuff and left without saying goodbye. Typical of my brother. Hey, man,’ Ollie seemed to be waking up, ‘can we come to some arrangement here? Like, I give you some money and you leave me alone?’
Diego grabbed Ollie’s head by his hair with his left hand and shoved the revolver into his mouth with his right.
