Michael Ridpath - 66 Degrees North

It was an inevitable result of the kreppa that one of the hottest places to hang out in the good times would slow down. It wasn’t their fault that he and Magda were sacked, he knew that.

Life since then had been difficult. He lived with his mother, an office cleaner, in Breidholt, a mostly poor suburb of Reykjavík. His existence had become desperately boring. He had started doing drugs again. He had gone back to stealing. It had started when his laptop had suddenly died on him. With that went his means of communicating with Magda. Try as he might, he hadn’t been able to fix it. So then he had nicked another one some idiot had left lying around on a car seat.

And then, unbidden, memories of that dreadful night in January forced themselves to the front of his brain. Yet again.

That was something he absolutely mustn’t tell Magda. She would never understand.

‘Frikki!’

He looked around and there she was! How could he possibly have missed her?

‘Oh Frikki!’ She rushed up to him, flung her arms around him, kissed him, and hugged him tight.

All thoughts of that January night melted away.

Magnus brushed past the two kids embracing in the Arrivals Hall and looked out for someone who might be Detective Sergeant Piper. He had no idea what she looked like and he hadn’t brought a sign with her name on it. But he should be able to recognize a cop, even a British one.

His phone rang. It was his cousin Sibba.

‘I called Uncle Ingvar. I’ve found out who the “other woman” was.’

Magnus took a deep breath. ‘Tell me.’ But he still wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

‘Unnur. Unnur Ágústsdóttir. As I thought, she was a friend of Margrét’s from school. They went off together to do teacher training in Reykjavík and then both got jobs in the city.’

The name was familiar. Magnus could remember a presence from his early childhood, a friendly blonde woman who used to come to their house sometimes. She was called Unnur, wasn’t she?

‘So Dad met her through Mom?’

‘I guess so.’

‘Did Uncle Ingvar tell you where she is now?’

‘Apparently she moved back to Stykkishólmur about ten years ago. She’s teaching at the school there. Her husband is one of his colleagues at the hospital.’

‘Thank you, Sibba. Thank you very much.’

‘Are you going to see her? It might not be such a good idea.’

‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’

The box was opening. The box where he had crammed all the unpleasant stuff. The four years in Bjarnarhöfn. His father’s infidelity. It was all oozing out.

He couldn’t shut that box.

For most of his adult life Magnus had been obsessed with later events, events from several years after he had settled in America. His father, Ragnar, had been murdered when Magnus was twenty, at a house that Ragnar was renting from a fellow MIT professor for the summer. The house was in Duxbury, a small town on the shore to the south of Boston. Ragnar’s new wife, Kathleen, was out, ostensibly checking on a plumbing problem at their own house back in town. Ollie, as Magnus’s brother called himself in the States, was at the beach with his girlfriend, and Magnus himself was waiting tables in a restaurant in Providence over the college vacation.

Someone had walked into the house through the unlocked front door, stabbed Ragnar in the back, and finished him off with a couple of thrusts to the chest.

The police had struggled to find a killer. The only forensic evidence was a single strand of sandy-coloured hair from which it had been possible to recover a partial DNA sequence. Magnus had been convinced that his stepmother was responsible, but she had turned out to be in bed with a local air-conditioning engineer at the time. After the police had given up, Magnus himself had spent long hours trying to solve the crime. He had eventually managed to locate a mysterious bearded birdwatcher who had been seen poking around near the house. But the new potential witness hadn’t seen or heard anything, nor did he have any conceivable link to Ragnar.

Another blind alley.

Magnus had never really given up. But he had always focused on America, where Ragnar seemed to have no real enemies.

But his father did have enemies in Iceland. If Hallgrímur held Ragnar responsible for his daughter’s alcoholism, for her eventual death, then he would certainly count as an enemy.

Which was why Magnus would have to go and speak to Unnur Ágústsdóttir, and open the lid of that box just a little wider.

‘Magnus?’

‘That’s me.’ He looked down at a short woman with blonde hair, a worn face but a friendly smile.

‘Sharon Piper.’ She held out her hand and he shook it.

‘Flight OK?’

‘Bumpy landing in all that wind. Do you have any trees on this island? I thought we were coming down on to the moon.’

‘They used to tell the GIs before their posting here that there was a blonde Viking virgin tied to every tree.’

‘Is that what persuaded you to come?’

‘I am actually Icelandic,’ Magnus said. ‘I’ve lived in the States since I was twelve. But even for me it takes some getting used to. Are you OK to go straight to police headquarters or do you want to go to your hotel first?’

‘Let’s get down to work.’

As Magnus drove Piper along the thirty kilometre stretch of straight road from the airport at Keflavík to Reykjavík he kept two hands firmly on the steering wheel as gusts of wind buffeted the Range Rover.

‘Is the whole country like this?’ asked Piper, staring out of the window at the brown volcanic rubble.

‘Not all of it,’ said Magnus. ‘There was a big eruption around here a few thousand years ago. You can see where the moss is beginning to eat away at the lava. Eventually, in a few more thousand years, it will become soil and grass will grow.’

‘Do you really think the human race won’t have permanently screwed up the earth in the next few thousand years?’

‘Er, no,’ said Magnus. An environmental cop. That was a new animal for him, although he suspected there were quite a few in Iceland.

‘You say the eruption was that long ago? It looks more like ten years. Or last year. How can people live here?’

‘They’re a tough lot, the Icelanders. There was a time in the eighteenth century when one of the volcanoes erupted and the whole country was covered in a haze for several years. Crops died, animals died, the population got down to less than thirty thousand. They thought about quitting then, but they stayed.’

‘They?’ Piper said. ‘You said “they”.’

Magnus smiled. ‘You’re right. I guess I meant “we”. I feel a bit like a foreigner in my own country.’

‘Where are you from in the States?’

‘Boston. I worked as a detective in the Homicide Unit. Same kind of thing you do. More guns, I guess.’

‘Probably,’ said Piper. ‘Although there are a hell of a lot of guns in London these days.’

‘Do you feel vulnerable not carrying?’ Magnus asked. It was something he had always wondered about the British police.

‘Most of the time, no,’ Piper said. ‘We do have more and more officers who are firearms trained. I haven’t been threatened with a gun yet. Have you?’

‘A few times,’ said Magnus. ‘That’s one of the things I find difficult here. Cops don’t carry guns.’

‘Do the criminals? That’s the key question, I suppose.’

‘Not until I showed up,’ Magnus said. That was not one of his proudest moments, luring a Dominican hit man from Boston to Reykjavík with a gun that he had managed to plug Árni with. The real problem with guns was when you ended up shooting the bad guys. Magnus had done that twice, once at the start of his career when he was a uniformed officer on patrol, and once earlier on that year when a couple of guys were trying to kill him.