But it wasn’t just the man. It was the memories.
Magnus looked over to the right, beyond the mole that was Helgafell, to Stykkisholmur, a white splatter of dots by the sea. Among those dots somewhere was Unnur Agustsdottir with answers to other questions.
But in the meantime, he had to find Bjorn.
Grundarfjordur was twenty kilometres further west along the coast from the Berserkjahraun. It was a compact fishing village of white houses, a church and large sheds dedicated to processing fish, squeezing around a crescent-shaped harbour. Behind it a heath of browned grass and waterfalls led up to mountains. To one side, thrusting out of the sea, was a tower of green-and-grey hooped rock known as Kirkjufell or Church Fell.
Bjorn’s house was a small one-storey affair on the western edge of town, right by the shore, in the shadow of the rock.
No one was at home. His neighbour said that she hadn’t seen Bjorn for a couple of days.
Magnus drove back to the harbourmaster’s office. The harbour-master, a tall man with thinning sandy hair and glasses, knew Bjorn Helgason well. Over a cup of coffee he explained that Bjorn had sold his boat a few months before to pay off his loans, and now crewed for other captains either in Grundarfjordur, Stykkisholmur or some of the other ports along the north coast of the peninsula. There were three fishing companies in town that Magnus should try.
This he did, without success. As far as they knew, Bjorn was on none of their boats.
Damn! It was a risk of course, it was always a risk to interview a suspect without calling ahead first to ensure they were there, but it was a risk Magnus often took. He liked to catch them by surprise. You could tell a lot from the look on a guilty man’s face when he answered the door to the police when he hadn’t been expecting them.
Magnus dropped in on the local police station, a brown wooden building just behind the harbour. There he met an affable constable in his forties with a full moustache, named Pall. Another cup of coffee. It was clear that Pall was excited by a visit from the Reykjavik Violent Crimes Unit, although he pretended not to show it. He knew Bjorn well, of course. Although not from Grundarfjordur originally, Pall had been stationed there for ten years and he liked the place.
Times were tough, though, for the fishermen, both the independent operators and the fishing companies with their fish factories in town. Too much borrowing. Even here, two hundred kilometres from Reykjavik, people had borrowed too much. It was those damn bankers and that arrogant son-of-a-bitch Olafur Tomasson.
Magnus humoured the constable as he went through the traditional
Then, after stopping at a cafe in town for a late lunch, Magnus decided to take a slight detour to Stykkisholmur. Perhaps Bjorn was working on a boat out of there. And if he wasn’t? Well, Magnus might drop in on Unnur.
Magnus sped through the Berserkjahraun without glancing left towards his grandfather’s farm. A little further on a sea eagle heaved itself into the air, its distinctive white tail fanned out behind it, and beat a path towards a knoll. This little hill, a familiar sight from the farm at Bjarnarhofn, was only two hundred feet high and was known as Helgafell, or Holy Mountain. One of the first settlers in those parts, Thorolfur Moster-beard, had decided that this little mountain was in fact holy and that he and his kinsmen would be swallowed up by it when they died. To preserve the sanctity of the place he insisted that no man should do their ‘elf-frighteners’ on the hill, on pain of death. Of course his neighbours did just that, defecating in full view of Thorolfur’s men, and started the first of countless feuds.
And in the church under the hill, Magnus remembered, was the grave of Gudrun Osvifsdottir, the heroine of another great saga, the
This landscape, that had changed so little over the last thousand years, brought those sagas that Magnus had read and reread two thousand miles away to life. Each of the farms mentioned in the sagas was still there, still farmed. Bjarnarhofn, his grandfather’s farm, was named after Bjorn the Easterner, Styr had lived at Hraun, Snorri the Chieftain at Helgafell, Arnkell at Bolstad just over the mountain. The farms then would have housed more people than they did now. Most of the time, just as now, they would have taken their sheep up to the fells, tended to their horses, cultivated hay in the home meadow. Except in those days every now and then the Norse farmers would stomp back and forth across the lava plain clutching swords and battleaxes to beat the shit out of each other. Magnus’s grandparents had told Oli and him some of these stories. But they had added a veneer of darkness to them that had at first thrilled and then terrified the boys.
Magnus drove into Stykkisholmur, past his old school and on to the harbour, surrounded by a jumble of multicoloured houses clad in corrugated iron, some of them quite old. At first glance the town hadn’t changed much. The large white hospital and a Franciscan convent dominated one side of the harbour. It had been strange to see the nuns, many of them from southern European countries, around town. Iceland was emphatically not a Catholic country, so the nuns and their unfamiliar ways had seemed exotic to the local kids.
The hospital was called St Francis’s, and Magnus’s Uncle Ingvar was a doctor there. It brought back memories too. Visiting Oli. Magnus’s own brief stay for an arm broken, ostensibly while falling off a haystack. The lies. The nurse who didn’t believe him. The fear of being found out.
Forcing himself back to the present, Magnus asked around at the offices of the local fishing companies. They knew Bjorn Helgason, but hadn’t seen him for a couple of weeks. They were pretty sure that he wasn’t on a Stykkisholmur boat.
As he walked out along the quay, Magnus considered what to do next. He could drive back westwards along the peninsula to Olafsvik and Rif to ask around for Bjorn. Or he could drive back home. Or…
Or he could see Unnur.
He knew deep down he had already taken the decision. That was one reason why he had driven all the way up here to look for Bjorn. That was why he had checked Stykkisholmur rather than Olafsvik. Who was he kidding? He was here to see his father’s mistress.
Tracing someone in a small Icelandic town is not difficult. He returned to the fishing office, borrowed a phone directory, and looked under ‘U’ for Unnur – the Icelanders listed people under their first names.
She lived in a neat white house on top of a cliff overlooking the harbour. It was just beside Stykkisholmur’s modern church, which was an extraordinary edifice: a cross between a white Mexican adobe church and a space ship. It had been under construction the whole time Magnus lived around there. It was a different kind of interplanetary rocket to the Hallgrimskirkja in Reykjavik, but it made Magnus wonder if there was some kind of strange intergalactic theology behind Icelandic church design.
Weird.
Magnus sat outside the house for a couple of minutes. Perhaps, finally, he was getting close to understanding why his parents had split up. And maybe, just maybe, why his father had been murdered. He took a deep breath, got out of the car and rang the doorbell.
It was answered by a grey-haired woman with blue eyes, fine cheekbones and pale, translucent skin. Magnus had calculated that if she was the same age as his mother Unnur would be fifty-eight. She looked about that age, but she had a graceful beauty about her. Magnus couldn’t reconcile her with the woman he dimly remembered from his childhood. She must have been a stunner in her time. In Magnus’s father’s time.
‘Yes?’ She smiled hesitantly.
‘Unnur?’
‘That’s me.’
‘Do you mind if I speak with you for a few minutes? My name is Magnus Ragnarsson.’ Magnus waited a beat for the name to register. ‘I am Ragnar Jonsson’s son.’
For a moment, Unnur seemed confused. Then her lips pursed.
‘Yes, I do mind,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’
‘I want to speak with you about my father.’
‘And I don’t want to talk to you about him. That was a long time ago and it has nothing to do with you.’
‘Of course it has something to do with me,’ Magnus said. ‘I have only just found out about the affair. It explains things about my childhood, about my mother and my father. But there is still a lot I don’t understand.’
The woman hesitated.
