Magnus stroked her hair. ‘No. No, I won’t tell you that.’ Ingileif’s pain had been real, was real. She was right. It had been important for her to find out the truth. So why wasn’t it important for him?
‘You’re scared, Magnús. Admit it, you are scared of what you might find out.’
Magnus closed his eyes. He hated being called a coward. It was not his self-image at all. Since his youth he had been an avid reader of the Icelandic sagas, the tales of medieval revenge and daring. There were heroes and cowards in those stories, seekers of justice and hiders from it, and Magnus saw himself as one of those heroes. He smiled to himself. There were also women urging their men-folk to get off their asses and go avenge the family honour. Women like Ingileif.
‘You are right,’ he said. ‘I am scared. But… Well…’
‘Well, what?’
‘You know I told you I spent four years at my grandfather’s farm when my father left us?’
‘Yes.’
Magnus swallowed. ‘Those are four years I don’t want to remember.’
‘What happened?’ Ingileif asked, touching his chest. ‘What happened, Magnús?’
Magnus exhaled. ‘That’s something I really don’t want to tell you. That memory has to stay in its box.’
Harpa stared out of her window at the blinking lights of Reykjavík across the bay, waiting for Björn to come. He had a big powerful motorbike, and she knew she could trust him to get down to her as fast as he could. It was a hundred and eighty kilometres, but the road was good all the way and, with the exception of the last stretch through the Reykjavík suburbs, empty.
She had been agitated since the interview with the two detectives. The big one with the red hair and the slight American accent had got under her skin. He was smarter than the skinny one she had spoken to in January. There was something about his eyes, blue, steady, understanding, that seemed to miss nothing, to see through all her protests and posturing. He knew she wasn’t telling the truth. They had no link between Gabríel Örn’s death and Óskar’s, the Gabríel Örn case was firmly closed by the authorities, but that detective knew there was something wrong.
He would be back.
Harpa had been mean to Markús, snapping at him for not tidying up his trucks. Later, when they were reading one of the poems in Vísnabókin, favourites from her own childhood, Markús had had to point out that she had read the same verse twice.
After he was in bed she had paced around the house, desperate to go for a walk on the beach at Grótta at the end of the Seltjarnarnes promontory, but unwilling to leave Markús alone in the house. She thought of calling her mother to babysit, but she couldn’t face the explanations, the small lies hiding the much bigger lie.
So in the end she had poured herself a cup of coffee and sat at the kitchen table staring out of the window, watching night settle over Faxaflói Bay, forcing herself to remain still. She was in a kind of a trance. Inside she was screaming. Outside she was motionless, frozen.
Gabríel’s death would never leave her. In some strange way, his death, or her part in it, had lodged itself somewhere inside her. It had bided its time for a few months, but now it was growing like some ghastly tropical parasite, eating her up from the inside.
That evening, she had been unable to look Markús directly in the eye. Those big, trusting, honest brown eyes. How could she tell him that his mother was a liar? Worse than that, a murderer?
How could she live her life never being able to look her son in the eye?
She wanted to throw back the kitchen chair and scream. But she didn’t move. Didn’t move a muscle. Didn’t even raise the cup of cold coffee in front of her to her lips.
Where the hell was Björn?
She stared out into the gathering darkness, at Gabríel Örn lying there on the ground in the car park just off Hverfisgata, blood from his skull mingling with dirt in the slush.
She heard her own screams.
‘Shush, Harpa, shush.’ Björn’s voice was calm, and authoritative. Harpa stopped screaming. She sobbed instead.
He crouched down beside Gabríel. ‘Is he dead?’ Harpa whispered.
Björn frowned. By the way he moved his fingers around Gabríel’s throat, pressing on one spot and then another, Harpa could tell that he couldn’t find a pulse.
Harpa pulled out her phone. ‘I’ll call an ambulance.’
‘No!’ Björn instructed her, his voice firm. ‘No. He’s dead. There’s no point in calling an ambulance for a dead person. We’ll all end up in jail.’
‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Frikki.
‘No. Wait! Let me think,’ Björn said. ‘We need a story.’
‘No one will know it was us,’ said Sindri. ‘Let’s just go.’
‘They’ll know Harpa called him just before he came out,’ Björn said. ‘Phone records. The police will interview her. Perhaps someone was with him, someone who knows he was going to meet her.’
‘Don’t tell them anything, Harpa,’ Frikki said.
‘Oh, God,’ said Harpa. She knew she would tell the police everything.
‘Quiet!’ Björn urged. ‘Let’s calm down. We need a story. An alibi for everyone. First let’s get him out of the way. And try not to get his blood on your clothes.’
Sindri, Frikki and Björn dragged Gabríel into the small car park and laid him between two parked cars.
‘Harpa needs to go to B5,’ Ísak said. The others looked at him. ‘She needs to go to B5 right away. She needs to make a fuss about something so they remember that she is there. Start an argument with someone. Me perhaps. There is no connection between us, the police won’t suspect anything.’
‘But where was she before?’ Sindri asked.
‘With me,’ Björn said. ‘We met at the demonstration. She came back with me to my brother’s place. Things went wrong: she called her old boyfriend, wanted to see him.’
‘She waited at the bar for him and he never came,’ Ísak said.
‘What are we going to do with the body?’ Sindri asked.
‘I can move it somewhere,’ said Björn.
‘Fake a suicide,’ said Ísak. ‘I don’t know, a fall? Hang him somewhere?’
‘That’s horrible,’ Harpa said. ‘I think I am going to be sick.’
‘I’ll take him down to the sea for a swim,’ said Björn. ‘Sindri, you can help me. OK, give me your phone number, Harpa. You go to B5 with Ísak, but make sure you arrive separately. Make a fuss, but try not to get thrown out; we need you there as long as possible. I’ll get rid of the body now and call you in an hour or two. Then you can come back to my brother’s place with me. We can go through the details of your story then.’
Harpa nodded. She pulled herself together and set off for Bankastraeti and the bar, Ísak following by a different route.
Even though the plan was made up on the spot and there were plenty of holes in it, it worked. Harpa could never have thought of it. It took Ísak’s brains and Björn’s calm.
She had coped with the police questioning well. If it hadn’t been for Björn she would have cracked. He gave her the strength and determination to stick with her story. And now she was going to have to go through it all again, but this time she wasn’t sure she would be able to do as good a job.
She heard a motorbike approaching fast along Nordurströnd. She heard it come to a stop outside the house.
Her heart leapt. She ran out of the house and threw herself into the arms of the driver even before he had a chance to take his helmet off.
‘Oh, Björn, I’m so glad you are here.’ She began to sob.
He slipped off the helmet and stroked her hair. ‘There, there, Harpa. It’s all going to be OK.’
She pulled back. ‘It’s not going to be OK, Björn. I killed someone. I’m going to hell. I’m in hell.’
‘There is no hell,’ Björn said. ‘You feel guilty, but you shouldn’t. Of course killing people is wrong, but you didn’t mean to kill him, did you? It was an accident. People die in accidents.’