Michael Ridpath: The Polar Bear Killing

‘I’m afraid you have wasted your trip, Martin,’ the Icelander said, turning back up the hill.

‘Yeah,’ said Martin, following him. ‘It would have been cool to actually see a polar bear. And to stop those bastards shooting it.’

‘Here it is,’ said the Icelander, whose name was Alex. ‘The Arctic Henge.’

On the crest of the hill above them stood a half-built giant stone circle, designed in the manner of Stonehenge, with four tall stone gates at each point of the compass. The low sun painted geometric shadows down the eastern slope of the hill.

‘Cool,’ said Martin again. It was his favourite English word. ‘You say it acts like some kind of sundial?’

‘Apparently.’

They walked around the site, trying to figure out what it all meant. Alex had brought with him a drawing of what the finished henge would look like. The layout was based on an ancient Icelandic poem, but he was confused about what signified what, and Martin’s questions were just confusing him more.

‘Well, let’s ask that guy,’ Martin said.

‘What guy?’

Martin pointed to a black-clad leg sticking out from behind one of the stone pillars of a gate.

As the two men approached the gate, more of the figure came into view.

‘ Mein Gott! ’

It was a man. He was wearing a black police uniform. He was slumped against the pillar. And where his right eye should have been was a bloody mess.

It was a long journey from Reykjavík to Raufarhöfn and Detective Vigdís Audardóttir had decided to drive the whole way, taking the northern route via Akureyri and Húsavík. She had left before breakfast and it was now mid-afternoon. Raufarhöfn was in the far north-east of the country, and the last stretch of road there hugged the north coast to a point a kilometre south of the Arctic Circle. To her left the sea was a ruffled greyish blue; to her right the land was a ruffled brownish green. Farms were few and far between. It was a fine day; the sun shone down a weak yellow on the eerie remoteness of the Melrakkaslétta.

She couldn’t see any foxes, but the seashore and the lakes were teeming with bird life of all shapes and sizes. The area was an important hub in the transatlantic aerial migration network.

She felt alone. She felt good.

When Inspector Baldur, the head of the Violent Crimes Unit, had asked for volunteers to travel to Raufarhöfn to help out with a murder investigation, she had jumped at the chance to get out of Reykjavík. For once she could afford to leave her alcoholic mother for a couple of weeks. Vigdís knew she should be visiting her, but she wanted to get away from the constant reminder that she had failed in keeping her mother off the booze, and the growing realization that she would always fail: that whatever rehab programmes she went on, however much money Vigdís spent, her mother Audur would always come back to the drink.

At least her mother was somewhere safe now. Somewhere she couldn’t get hold of a drink. Somewhere where if she hit someone, it was someone else’s problem.

Vigdís’s mother was in prison.

She had struck one of her boyfriends too hard over the head with a candlestick during a drunken fight. The boyfriend had ended up unconscious and in hospital, and yes he did want to press charges. So Audur was spending two months in prison.

But Vigdís wasn’t just running away from the unsolvable problem of her mother. She was also running away from her boss, Sergeant Magnús Ragnarsson.

She turned a corner around a headland and Raufarhöfn came into sight. A classic Icelandic church with white walls and a red metal roof stood by the sheltered harbour, behind which disused fish factories and a ribbon of houses ran along the main road. Raufarhöfn had been a boom town in the 1960s when herring had been harvested from the surrounding seas, but with the disappearance of the herring the town had shrunk, leaving abandoned fish-processing plants and houses, and an oversized graveyard of white dots behind a white wooden fence on a hillside overlooking the town. The Arctic Henge guarded the town from its little citadel on another hill, oddly modern, like a screenshot from a fantasy computer game, especially when compared to the run-down twentieth-century decay of the town itself.

After the peace of the desolate drive, Vigdís steeled herself for the hurly-burly of a murder investigation. Raufarhöfn may be a sleepy little town, but Vigdís suspected that the murder of the local policeman had woken it up.

The police station was easy to find — a low white shed by the shore that looked more like a warehouse than a government building, with a number of police vehicles, marked and unmarked, outside it. Inside, half a dozen police officers from Húsavík and Akureyri milled about the two desks in the cramped quarters, as did two plain-clothes officers: Ólafur, the inspector who was head of CID in Akureyri, and Björn, one of his young detectives. Vigdís had worked with Björn on a case in Snaefellsnes. She hadn’t been impressed — his ambition exceeded his abilities. Ólafur she knew little about, having only met him a couple of times when he had visited police headquarters in Reykjavík.

They knew Vigdís. She was, after all, Iceland’s only black detective.

Ólafur had commandeered one of the two desks, so Vigdís took a collapsible chair opposite. The detective inspector was in his late thirties, lean, with buzz-cut black hair and small blue eyes under a frown that seemed to be permanent. Although Ólafur was significantly senior to Vigdís, Vigdís had more experience of murder investigations as part of the Violent Crimes Unit in the Metropolitan Police. There was just more crime in Reykjavík with its population of 180,000 people than in Akureyri, with 18,000.

‘Wasted your time, Vigdís,’ Ólafur said. ‘I called Baldur to send you back, but you were already at least halfway. Mind you, we will still need some help wrapping the case up, so you may as well stick around.’

‘You’ve made an arrest?’

‘Two,’ said the inspector. ‘Alex Einarsson, twenty-two, from Gardabaer, and Martin Fiedler, twenty-five, a German citizen from a place called Siegen. They are both extreme animal-rights activists who rushed here when they heard about the polar bear getting shot.’

‘Have they confessed?’

‘Not yet. I’ve interviewed Alex. A nasty piece of work. He denied shooting Halldór, but he said he was glad he had been killed. Said he deserved to die for shooting the polar bear.’ Ólafur’s voice was laden with contempt, a sentiment Vigdís shared.

‘Bastard.’

Ólafur glanced at her and nodded grimly.

‘We are waiting for an interpreter to interview the German. He doesn’t speak Icelandic, of course. She’s coming from Húsavík, so should be here soon.’ Húsavík was about an hour and a half away.

Vigdís nodded. The rules were that interviews with foreign nationals had to be conducted in Icelandic through official interpreters. Which was cumbersome since most police officers under the age of forty spoke fluent English, as did most foreign suspects.

Her colleagues disliked the regulation but it suited Vigdís, whose English was poor. In fact, she refused to speak the language.

‘What evidence do you have?’ she asked.

‘No direct evidence yet,’ said the inspector. ‘But the forensic team have arrived from Reykjavík and they are at the scene now. You may have seen it when you came into town — the Arctic Henge on the brow of a hill.’

‘I saw it,’ said Vigdís.

‘I’m sure they’ll find something.’

‘If you have no evidence, why have you arrested them?’ Vigdís asked.

‘Because they are the only people in town who could have shot Halldór.’