Michael Ridpath - Where the Shadows Lie

‘Actually, no. I haven’t seen much of him recently, until yesterday. But he asked me to go to one on Saturday.’

‘I wouldn’t buy yourself a frock for that one.’

‘No,’ said Ingileif. ‘I hear he might be double booked.’

‘You say you saw him yesterday?’

Ingileif described her meeting with Tomas in Mokka, and his cryptic questions about the Agnar case.

‘How does he get along with his father?’ Magnus asked.

‘Well, I don’t know about now. But it always used to be the classic relationship between an over-demanding father and a son who is constantly trying to please and never quite succeeds. Tomas tried to rebel, dropping out, the parties and so on, but he never quite managed it. He always felt his father’s disapproval deeply. I’m sure he still does.’

‘So he might do his father a favour? A big favour?’

‘Like murdering someone?’

Magnus shrugged.

Ingileif thought about it for a few seconds. ‘I don’t know,’ she said in frustration eventually. ‘I can’t imagine he would. I can’t imagine that anyone would murder anyone else. That kind of thing just doesn’t happen in Iceland.’

‘It happens everywhere,’ said Magnus. ‘And it’s happened here. To Agnar.’

They were now on the floor of the plain, driving on a long straight road that cut through fields of knotted brown grass. Every mile or so, a farmhouse or a little white-and-red church perched on top of a hillock, a green patch of home meadow laid out neatly in front of it. Sheep grazed, most still shaggy with the winter’s wool, but the prevalent animal was the horse, sturdy animals, barely bigger than ponies, many a golden chestnut colour.

‘So, back in America, are you a tough-guy cop with a gun like you see on TV?’ Ingileif asked. ‘You know, chasing the bad guys around the city in sports cars?’

‘Cops get irritated as hell by the TV shows, they never get it right,’ said Magnus. ‘But yes, I do have a gun. And the city is full of bad guys, or at least the areas I end up working in.’

‘Doesn’t it depress you? Or do you get a thrill out of it?’

‘I dunno,’ said Magnus. It was always hard to explain being a cop to civilians. They never quite got it. Colby had never gotten it.

‘Sorry,’ said Ingileif, and she turned to look out of the window.

They drove on. Perhaps Magnus was being unfair to Ingileif. She had made an effort to understand him the night before.

‘There was a girl I knew in college, Erin. She used to go down into Providence to work with the kids there. It was a real tough place back then. I went with her, partly because I thought what she was doing was good, mostly because I thought she was the most beautiful girl in the college and I wanted to get her into bed.’

‘How romantic.’

‘Yeah. But she did do a lot of good. She was great with the kids, the boys drooled over her, and the girls thought she was cool too. And I helped out.’

‘I bet all the girls thought you were cool as well,’ Ingileif said with a grin.

‘I managed to fight them off,’ said Magnus.

‘And did you worm your evil way into this poor girl’s bed?’

‘For a while.’ Magnus smiled at the memory. ‘She was genuinely a very good person. One of the best people I’ve ever met. Much better than me.

‘Every time she met a screwed up kid who was dealing drugs or knifing his neighbours, she saw a scared little boy who had been abused and abandoned by his parents and by society.’

‘And you?’

‘Well, I tried to see it her way, I really did. But in my world there were good guys and bad guys, and all I saw was a bad guy. The way I saw it, it was the bad guys who were ruining the neighbourhood and corrupting the other kids in it. All I wanted to do was stop the little punk from ruining other people’s lives. Just like my life had been ruined by whoever killed my father.’

‘So you became a cop?’

‘That’s right. And she became a teacher.’ Magnus smiled wryly. ‘And somehow I think she has made the world a better place than I have.’

‘Do you still see her?’

‘No,’ said Magnus. ‘I visited her once in Chicago a couple of years after we left college. We were very different people by then. She was still gorgeous, though.’

‘I think I’d agree with you,’ Ingileif said, turning towards him. ‘About the bad guys.’

‘Really?’

‘You sound surprised?’

‘I guess I am.’ Erin certainly hadn’t agreed with him. Neither had Colby for that matter. Policemen always felt lonely on that point, as if they were doing the jobs no one else wanted to do, or even wanted to admit needed doing.

‘Sure. You’ve read your sagas. We Icelandic women are constantly nagging our menfolk to get out of bed and go and avenge their family honour before lunch time.’

‘That’s true,’ said Magnus. ‘I’ve always loved that in a woman, especially on a Sunday morning.’

They drove on in silence. Over the cantilevered bridge at the River Olfusa and through the town of Selfoss.

‘How long are you staying in Iceland?’ Ingileif asked.

‘I thought it was going to be several months. But now it looks like I will have to go back to the States next week to testify at a trial.’

‘Are you coming back afterwards?’

‘Not if I can help it,’ said Magnus.

‘Oh. Don’t you like Iceland?’ Ingileif sounded offended. Which was hardly surprising; there is no easier way to offend an Icelander than to disparage their country.

‘I do like it. It just brings back difficult memories. And my job at the Reykjavik CID isn’t working out that well. I don’t really get along with the boss.’

‘Is there a girlfriend back in Boston?’ Ingileif asked.

‘No,’ said Magnus, thinking of Colby. She was an ex -girlfriend if ever there was one. He wanted to ask Ingileif why she had asked him that, but that would sound crass. Perhaps she was just curious. Icelanders asked direct questions when they wanted to know answers.

‘Look, there’s Hekla!’

Ingileif pointed ahead towards the broad white muscular ridge that was Iceland’s most famous volcano. It didn’t have the cone shape of the classic volcano, but it was much more violent than the prettier Mount Fuji, for example. Hekla had erupted four times in the previous forty years, through a fissure that ran horizontally along the ridge. And then, every couple of centuries or so, it would come up with a big one. Like the eruption of 1104 that had smothered Gaukur’s farm at Stong.

‘Do you know that around Boston they sell Hekla cinnamon rolls?’ Magnus said. ‘They’re big upside-down rolls covered in sugar. Look just like the mountain.’

‘But do they blow up in your face at random intervals?’

‘Not that I’m aware of.’

‘Then they’re not real Hekla rolls. They need a bit more violence in them.’ Ingileif smiled. ‘I remember watching Hekla erupt in 1991. I was ten or eleven, I suppose. You can’t quite see it from Fludir, but I had a friend who lived on a farm a few kilometres to the south and you got a great view of it from there.

‘It was extraordinary. It was January and it was night time. The volcano was glowing angry red and orange and at the same time you could see a green streak of the aurora hovering above it. I’ll never forget it.’

She swallowed. ‘It was the year before Dad died.’

‘When life was normal?’ Magnus asked.

‘That’s right,’ said Ingileif. ‘When life was normal.’

The volcano loomed bigger as they drove towards it, and then they turned to the north and lost it behind the foothills that edged the valley. With two kilometres to Fludir, they came to a turn-off to Hruni to the right. Magnus took it, and the road wound through the hills for a couple of kilometres, before breaking out into a valley. The small white church of Hruni was visible beneath a rocky crag, surrounded by a house and some farm buildings.