Michael Ridpath - Where the Shadows Lie

Sigurbjorg sat down again and swallowed. ‘Your father was having an affair with your mother’s best friend. She found out about it, they had a god-awful row, she started drinking.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ Magnus said.

Sigurbjorg shrugged.

‘Are you sure it’s true?’

‘No, I’m not,’ said Sigurbjorg. ‘But I suspect it is. Look, there must have been other problems. I used to really like your mother, especially before she started drinking, but she was always a bit neurotic. Given her parents, that’s hardly surprising.’

‘It is true,’ Magnus said. ‘You’re right, it must be. I just find it hard to believe.’

‘Hey, Magnus, I’m really sorry you heard this from me.’ Sigurbjorg reached out and touched his hand. ‘But I’ve got to go now. And I promise I won’t tell the grandparents you’re here.’

With that, she ran away.

Magnus stared at his coffee cup, still a quarter full. He needed a drink. A real drink.

It wasn’t far to the bar he had drunk in the night before, the Grand Rokk. He ordered a Thule and one of the chasers all the other guys at the bar were drinking. It was some kind of kummel, sweet and strong, but OK if gulped down with the beer.

Sigurbjorg had just turned his world upside down. The whole story of his life, who he was, who his parents were, who was right and who was wrong, had just been inverted. His father had never blamed his mother for what had happened, but Magnus had.

She had driven away his father. She had ignored Magnus through drink and then abandoned him through death. Ragnar had heroically rescued his sons, until he had been cruelly murdered, possibly by the wicked stepmother.

That was the story of Magnus’s childhood. That was what had made him who he was.

And now it was all false.

Another beer, another chaser.

For a moment, a calming moment, Magnus flirted with the idea that the affair was a fiction invented by his grandfather to justify his hatred of his father. One part of him wanted to go along with that idea, to try to live the rest of his life in denial.

But in his time in the police department Magnus had seen enough squalid family disintegrations to know that what Sigurbjorg had told him was all too plausible. And it would explain the depth of his grandfather’s hatred.

He had assumed that his father’s refusal to blame his mother for the mess she had made of all their lives was nobility on his part. It wasn’t. It was a recognition that he was partly responsible. Wholly responsible?

Magnus didn’t know. He would never know. It was a typical family mess. Blame all over the place.

But it meant that his father was a different man than he thought he was. Not noble. An adulterer. Someone who abandoned his wife when she was at her weakest and her most vulnerable. Magnus had known all along that if he really thought about it he would have realized that his father must have started his affair with Kathleen, the woman who became his stepmother, while she was still married to someone else. So Magnus hadn’t really thought about it.

It was true that Icelanders had a more relaxed view of adultery than the prudish Americans, but it was still wrong. Something that lesser mortals might dabble with, but not Ragnar.

What else had he done? What other flaws had he concealed from his sons? From his wife?

Magnus’s beer was still half full, but his chaser was empty. He caught the shaven-headed barman’s eye and tapped the glass. It was refilled.

He felt the liquid burn his throat. His brain was fuzzing over pleasantly. But Magnus was not going to stop, not for a long time. He was going to drink until it hurt.

That was how he drank in college, after his father died. He got wildly horribly drunk. And the following morning he would feel wretched. For him, that was half the reason why he drank, the feeling of self-destruction afterwards.

He had lost most of his friends then, other than a few hardened drinkers like himself. His professors were dismayed, he went from close to the top of his classes to scraping along the bottom. He almost got thrown out of the university. But no matter how hard he tried, he didn’t quite manage to destroy his life totally.

Unlike his mother, of course. She had succeeded very well.

It was a girl who pulled him out of it, Erin. Her patience, her determination, her love, that made him realize not that he was destroying himself – he knew that already, that was the point after all – but that he didn’t want to destroy himself.

After college she had gone her way, teaching in inner-city schools in Chicago, and he had gone his. He owed her a lot.

But now he wanted to drink to his mother. He raised his beer glass. ‘To Margret,’ he said.

‘Who’s Margret?’ said a tall man in a black leather jacket, on the stool next to him.

‘Margret’s my mother.’

‘That’s nice,’ said the man, with a slur. He raised his beer. ‘To Margret.’ He put down his glass. He nodded towards the beer in front of Magnus. ‘Bad day?’

Magnus nodded. ‘You could say that.’

‘You know they say that drink doesn’t solve anything?’ the man said.

Magnus nodded.

‘That’s balls.’ The man laughed and raised his glass.

Magnus noticed for the first time that chess sets were glued upside-down to the ceiling. Huh. That was kind of cool.

He looked around the bar. The patrons were all ages and sizes. They carried on a desultory conversation interrupted with bursts of chuckles and wry laughter. Many were unsteady on their feet and inaccurate with their gestures and back-slapping. At one end of the bar two college-age American girls were perched on stools, entertaining a succession of loquacious Icelanders. At the other end a thin man with grey hair sticking out under a flat cap suddenly burst into a rendition of a tune from Porgy and Bess in a mellifluous baritone. ‘Summertime – and the livin’ is ea-easy…’

Good singers, these Icelanders.

Another beer. Another chaser. The anger dissipated. He began to relax. He struck up conversations with the men on either side. With the American girls, although he put on a heavy Icelandic accent for their benefit. He thought that was pretty funny. In fact, he thought he was pretty funny. He played a game of chess and lost.

Another beer. Another chaser. Two chasers. How many chasers did that make? How many beers? No idea.

Eventually it was time to go home. Magnus lifted himself off his stool and bade an emotional goodbye to his new buddies. The room lurched wildly. The guy with the flat cap briefly became two guys with flat caps, before resolving himself into a single individual again.

Boy, was Magnus drunk. Drunker than he had been for a long time. But it felt good.

He strode out of the bar and straightened up in the cold night air. It was way past midnight. The sky was clear, stars twinkled icily above him. A three-quarter moon was reflected in the bay below. He took a deep breath.

He liked Reykjavik. It was an innocent little town, and he was glad of that. He would do his part to keep it that way.

He was proud to be one of Reykjavik’s finest.

There was no one on the streets. The contrast between a Sunday and a Saturday night in Reykjavik was marked. But as he headed up the hill towards home, Magnus spotted a cluster of three men in an alley. The tableau was so familiar.

Drugs.

Magnus scowled. Low-lifes in Toytown.

He would sort them out. ‘Hey!’ he shouted, and headed down the alley. ‘Hey! What are you doing?’

The guy selling the drugs was small and dark, possibly not even Icelandic. The guy doing the buying, was taller, wiry, with a woolly hat. He had a friend, a great big Nordic block with short blonde hair and a tiny little blonde beard. Bigger even than Magnus, and showing off bulging biceps under a black T-shirt on this cold night.