‘I said I didn’t want to talk about it.’
Ingileif ignored him. ‘I remember when you decided that you were going to stay on in Iceland. One of the reasons was that you thought there might be an Icelandic link to your father’s death.’
Magnus shook his head. ‘Ingileif…’
‘No, listen to me. You’ve obsessed about how your father was murdered and who by all your adult life. That’s why you do what you do, it’s who you are. Isn’t it?’
Reluctantly Magnus nodded. It was why he had joined the police, why he had become a homicide detective, why he was so relentless in tracking down the killer of every victim he came across.
‘OK. So you are all excited about spending time trying to find the Icelandic angle to Oskar’s death, which you admit is very unlikely, yet you won’t find out more about an Icelandic angle to your own father’s murder. That doesn’t make sense.’
‘It’s different,’ Magnus protested.
‘Why?’
‘Because.’ He struggled to conjure up a plausible reason, but then settled on the truth. ‘Because it’s personal.’
‘Of course, it’s personal!’ Ingileif said. ‘And that’s exactly why you have to deal with it. Just like I had to find out how my own father died even though the answer was so painful to me. And don’t tell me that that wasn’t personal!’
Magnus stroked her hair. ‘No. No, I won’t tell you that.’ Ingileif’s pain had been real, was real. She was right. It had been important for her to find out the truth. So why wasn’t it important for him?
‘You’re scared, Magnus. Admit it, you are scared of what you might find out.’
Magnus closed his eyes. He hated being called a coward. It was not his self-image at all. Since his youth he had been an avid reader of the Icelandic sagas, the tales of medieval revenge and daring. There were heroes and cowards in those stories, seekers of justice and hiders from it, and Magnus saw himself as one of those heroes. He smiled to himself. There were also women urging their men-folk to get off their asses and go avenge the family honour. Women like Ingileif.
‘You are right,’ he said. ‘I am scared. But… Well…’
‘Well, what?’
‘You know I told you I spent four years at my grandfather’s farm when my father left us?’
‘Yes.’
Magnus swallowed. ‘Those are four years I don’t want to remember.’
‘What happened?’ Ingileif asked, touching his chest. ‘What happened, Magnus?’
Magnus exhaled. ‘That’s something I really don’t want to tell you. That memory has to stay in its box.’
Harpa stared out of her window at the blinking lights of Reykjavik across the bay, waiting for Bjorn to come. He had a big powerful motorbike, and she knew she could trust him to get down to her as fast as he could. It was a hundred and eighty kilometres, but the road was good all the way and, with the exception of the last stretch through the Reykjavik suburbs, empty.
She had been agitated since the interview with the two detectives. The big one with the red hair and the slight American accent had got under her skin. He was smarter than the skinny one she had spoken to in January. There was something about his eyes, blue, steady, understanding, that seemed to miss nothing, to see through all her protests and posturing. He knew she wasn’t telling the truth. They had no link between Gabriel Orn’s death and Oskar’s, the Gabriel Orn case was firmly closed by the authorities, but that detective knew there was something wrong.
He would be back.
Harpa had been mean to Markus, snapping at him for not tidying up his trucks. Later, when they were reading one of the poems in
After he was in bed she had paced around the house, desperate to go for a walk on the beach at Grotta at the end of the Seltjarnarnes promontory, but unwilling to leave Markus alone in the house. She thought of calling her mother to babysit, but she couldn’t face the explanations, the small lies hiding the much bigger lie.
So in the end she had poured herself a cup of coffee and sat at the kitchen table staring out of the window, watching night settle over Faxafloi Bay, forcing herself to remain still. She was in a kind of a trance. Inside she was screaming. Outside she was motionless, frozen.
Gabriel’s death would never leave her. In some strange way, his death, or her part in it, had lodged itself somewhere inside her. It had bided its time for a few months, but now it was growing like some ghastly tropical parasite, eating her up from the inside.
That evening, she had been unable to look Markus directly in the eye. Those big, trusting, honest brown eyes. How could she tell him that his mother was a liar? Worse than that, a murderer?
How could she live her life never being able to look her son in the eye?
She wanted to throw back the kitchen chair and scream. But she didn’t move. Didn’t move a muscle. Didn’t even raise the cup of cold coffee in front of her to her lips.
Where the hell was Bjorn?
She stared out into the gathering darkness, at Gabriel Orn lying there on the ground in the car park just off Hverfisgata, blood from his skull mingling with dirt in the slush.
She heard her own screams.
‘Shush, Harpa, shush.’ Bjorn’s voice was calm, and authoritative. Harpa stopped screaming. She sobbed instead.
He crouched down beside Gabriel. ‘Is he dead?’ Harpa whispered.
Bjorn frowned. By the way he moved his fingers around Gabriel’s throat, pressing on one spot and then another, Harpa could tell that he couldn’t find a pulse.
Harpa pulled out her phone. ‘I’ll call an ambulance.’
‘No!’ Bjorn instructed her, his voice firm. ‘No. He’s dead. There’s no point in calling an ambulance for a dead person. We’ll all end up in jail.’
‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Frikki.
‘No. Wait! Let me think,’ Bjorn said. ‘We need a story.’
‘No one will know it was us,’ said Sindri. ‘Let’s just go.’
‘They’ll know Harpa called him just before he came out,’ Bjorn said. ‘Phone records. The police will interview her. Perhaps someone was with him, someone who knows he was going to meet her.’
‘Don’t tell them anything, Harpa,’ Frikki said.
‘Oh, God,’ said Harpa. She knew she would tell the police everything.
‘Quiet!’ Bjorn urged. ‘Let’s calm down. We need a story. An alibi for everyone. First let’s get him out of the way. And try not to get his blood on your clothes.’
Sindri, Frikki and Bjorn dragged Gabriel into the small car park and laid him between two parked cars.
‘Harpa needs to go to B5,’ Isak said. The others looked at him. ‘She needs to go to B5 right away. She needs to make a fuss about something so they remember that she is there. Start an argument with someone. Me perhaps. There is no connection between us, the police won’t suspect anything.’
‘But where was she before?’ Sindri asked.
‘With me,’ Bjorn said. ‘We met at the demonstration. She came back with me to my brother’s place. Things went wrong: she called her old boyfriend, wanted to see him.’
‘She waited at the bar for him and he never came,’ Isak said.
‘What are we going to do with the body?’ Sindri asked.
‘I can move it somewhere,’ said Bjorn.
‘Fake a suicide,’ said Isak. ‘I don’t know, a fall? Hang him somewhere?’
‘That’s horrible,’ Harpa said. ‘I think I am going to be sick.’
‘I’ll take him down to the sea for a swim,’ said Bjorn. ‘Sindri, you can help me. OK, give me your phone number, Harpa. You go to B5 with Isak, but make sure you arrive separately. Make a fuss, but try not to get thrown out; we need you there as long as possible. I’ll get rid of the body now and call you in an hour or two. Then you can come back to my brother’s place with me. We can go through the details of your story then.’
Harpa nodded. She pulled herself together and set off for Bankastraeti and the bar, Isak following by a different
