Michael Ridpath - Where the Shadows Lie

They moved back to the farm on the Snaefellsnes Peninsula where his mother had been brought up. That’s where the misery started. Magnus realized that his mother wasn’t sleepy all the time, she was drunk. At first she spent most of her time away in Reykjavik, trying to hold down her job as a teacher. Then she returned to the farm and a series of jobs in the nearest town, first teaching and then working cash registers. Worst of all Magnus and Oli were left for long periods in the care of their grandparents. Their grandfather was a strict, scary, angry man, who liked a drink himself. Their grandmother was small and mean.

One day, when Magnus and Oli were at school, their mother had drunk half a bottle of vodka, climbed into a car and steered it straight into a rock, killing herself instantly. Within a week, amid acrimony of nuclear proportions, Ragnar had arrived to take them both away to Boston with him.

Magnus returned to Iceland with his father and Oli on an annual basis for camping trips in the back country and to spend a couple of days in Reykjavik to see his grandmother and his father’s friends and colleagues. They had never gone near his mother’s family.

Until a month after his father died, when Magnus made the trip to try to effect a reconciliation. The visit had been a total disaster. Magnus had recoiled in stunned bewilderment at the strength of the hostility from his grandparents. They didn’t just hate his father, they hated him too. For an orphan whose only family was a mixed-up brother, and with no clear idea of which country he belonged to, that hurt.

Since then he had never been back.

The plane broke through the clouds only a couple of hundred feet above the ground. Iceland was cold and grey and windswept. To the left was the flat field of volcanic rubble, grey and brown covered with russet and green moss, and beyond that the para-phernalia of the abandoned American airbase, single-storey sheds, mysterious radio masts and golf balls on stilts. Not a tree in sight.

The plane hit the runway, and manoeuvred up to the terminal building. Improbably cheerful ground staff battled their way out into the wind, smiling and chatting. A windsock stuck out stiff and horizontal, as a curtain of rain rolled across the airfield towards them. It was 24 April, the day after Iceland’s official first day of summer.

Thirty minutes later Magnus was sitting in the back of a white car hurtling along the highway between Keflavik and Reykjavik. Across the car was emblazoned the word Logreglan – with typical stubbornness Iceland was one of the very few countries in the world that refused to use a derivation of the word ‘police’ for its law-enforcement agency.

Outside, the squall had passed and the wind seemed to be dying down. The lavascape, undulating mounds of stones, boulders and moss, stretched across towards a line of squat mountains in the distance, still not a tree in sight. Thousands of years after the event this patch of Iceland hadn’t recovered from the devastation of a massive volcanic eruption. The thin layers of mosses nibbling at the rocks were only just beginning a process of restoration that would take millennia.

But Magnus wasn’t looking at the scenery. He was concentrating hard on the man sitting next to him, Snorri Gudmundsson, the National Police Commissioner. He was a small man with shrewd blue eyes and thick grey hair brushed back in a bouffant. He was speaking rapidly in Icelandic, and it took all Magnus’s powers of concentration to follow him.

‘As I am sure you must know, Iceland has a low per-capita homicide rate and low levels of serious crime,’ he was saying. ‘Most policing involves clearing up the mess on Saturday and Sunday mornings once the partygoers have had their fun. Until the kreppa and the demonstrations over this last winter, of course. Every one of my officers in the Reykjavik area was tied up with those. They did well, I am proud of them.’

Kreppa was the Icelandic word for the credit crunch, which had hit the country particularly badly. The banks, the government and many of the people were bankrupt, drowning under debt incurred in the boom times. Magnus had read of the weekly demonstrations which had taken place in front of the Parliament building every Saturday afternoon for months, until the government had finally bowed to popular pressure and resigned.

‘The trend is worrying,’ the Commissioner went on. ‘There are more drugs, more drug gangs. We have had problems with Lithuanian gangs and the Hells Angels have been trying to break into Iceland for years. There are more foreigners in our country now, and a small minority of them have a different attitude to crime to most Icelanders. The yellow press here exaggerates the problem, but it would be a foolish police commissioner who ignored the threat.’

He paused to check if Magnus was following. Magnus nodded to indicate he was, just.

‘I am proud of our police force, they work hard and they have a good clear-up rate, but they are just not used to the kind of crimes that occur in big cities with large populations of foreigners. The greater Reykjavik area has a population of only a hundred and eighty thousand, the entire country has only three hundred thousand people, but I want us to be prepared in case the kinds of things that happen in Amsterdam, or Manchester, or Boston for that matter, happen here. Which is why I asked for you.

‘Last year there were three unsolved murders in Iceland, all related. We never knew who committed them until he volunteered himself at police headquarters. He was a Pole. We should have caught him after the first woman was killed, but we didn’t, so two more died. I think with someone like you working with us, we would have stopped him then.’

‘I hope so,’ said Magnus.

‘I’ve read a copy of your file and spoken to Deputy Superintendent Williams. He was very flattering.’

Magnus raised his eyebrows. He didn’t know Williams did flattery. And he knew there were some serious black marks in his record from those times in his career when he hadn’t always done exactly what he had been told.

‘The idea is that you will go through a crash course at the National Police College. In the mean time you will be available for training seminars and for advice should something crop up that you can help us with.’

‘A crash course?’ said Magnus, wanting to check that he had understood correctly. ‘How long would that take?’

‘The normal course is a year, but since you have so much police experience, we would hope to get you through in less than six months. It’s unavoidable. You can’t arrest someone unless you know Icelandic law.’

‘No, I see that, but how long did you…’ Magnus paused as he tried to remember the Icelandic word for ‘envision’ ‘… see me being here?’

‘I specified a minimum of two years. Deputy Superintendent Williams assured me that would be acceptable.’

‘He never mentioned that kind of timeframe to me,’ said Magnus.

Snorri’s blue eyes bored into Magnus’s. ‘Williams did, of course, mention the reason why you were so eager to leave Boston on a temporary basis. I admire your courage.’ His eyes flicked towards the uniformed police driver in the front seat. ‘No one here knows about it apart from me.’

Magnus was about to protest, but he let it drop. As yet, he had no idea how many months it would be until the trial of Lenahan and the others. He would go along with the Police Commissioner until he was called to testify, then he would return to Boston and stay there, no matter what plans the Commissioner had for him.

Snorri smiled. ‘But, as luck would have it, we have something to get your teeth into right away. A body was discovered this morning, in a summer house by Lake Thingvellir. And I am told that one of the initial suspects is an American. I am taking you straight there now.’