The name was familiar. Magnus could remember a presence from his early childhood, a friendly blonde woman who used to come to their house sometimes. She was called Unnur, wasn’t she?
‘So Dad met her through Mom?’
‘I guess so.’
‘Did Uncle Ingvar tell you where she is now?’
‘Apparently she moved back to Stykkishólmur about ten years ago. She’s teaching at the school there. Her husband is one of his colleagues at the hospital.’
‘Thank you, Sibba. Thank you very much.’
‘Are you going to see her? It might not be such a good idea.’
‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’
The box was opening. The box where he had crammed all the unpleasant stuff. The four years in Bjarnarhöfn. His father’s infidelity. It was all oozing out.
He couldn’t shut that box.
For most of his adult life Magnus had been obsessed with later events, events from several years after he had settled in America. His father, Ragnar, had been murdered when Magnus was twenty, at a house that Ragnar was renting from a fellow MIT professor for the summer. The house was in Duxbury, a small town on the shore to the south of Boston. Ragnar’s new wife, Kathleen, was out, ostensibly checking on a plumbing problem at their own house back in town. Ollie, as Magnus’s brother called himself in the States, was at the beach with his girlfriend, and Magnus himself was waiting tables in a restaurant in Providence over the college vacation.
Someone had walked into the house through the unlocked front door, stabbed Ragnar in the back, and finished him off with a couple of thrusts to the chest.
The police had struggled to find a killer. The only forensic evidence was a single strand of sandy-coloured hair from which it had been possible to recover a partial DNA sequence. Magnus had been convinced that his stepmother was responsible, but she had turned out to be in bed with a local air-conditioning engineer at the time. After the police had given up, Magnus himself had spent long hours trying to solve the crime. He had eventually managed to locate a mysterious bearded birdwatcher who had been seen poking around near the house. But the new potential witness hadn’t seen or heard anything, nor did he have any conceivable link to Ragnar.
Another blind alley.
Magnus had never really given up. But he had always focused on America, where Ragnar seemed to have no real enemies.
But his father did have enemies in Iceland. If Hallgrímur held Ragnar responsible for his daughter’s alcoholism, for her eventual death, then he would certainly count as an enemy.
Which was why Magnus would have to go and speak to Unnur Ágústsdóttir, and open the lid of that box just a little wider.
‘Magnus?’
‘That’s me.’ He looked down at a short woman with blonde hair, a worn face but a friendly smile.
‘Sharon Piper.’ She held out her hand and he shook it.
‘Flight OK?’
‘Bumpy landing in all that wind. Do you have any trees on this island? I thought we were coming down on to the moon.’
‘They used to tell the GIs before their posting here that there was a blonde Viking virgin tied to every tree.’
‘Is that what persuaded you to come?’
‘I am actually Icelandic,’ Magnus said. ‘I’ve lived in the States since I was twelve. But even for me it takes some getting used to. Are you OK to go straight to police headquarters or do you want to go to your hotel first?’
‘Let’s get down to work.’
As Magnus drove Piper along the thirty kilometre stretch of straight road from the airport at Keflavík to Reykjavík he kept two hands firmly on the steering wheel as gusts of wind buffeted the Range Rover.
‘Is the whole country like this?’ asked Piper, staring out of the window at the brown volcanic rubble.
‘Not all of it,’ said Magnus. ‘There was a big eruption around here a few thousand years ago. You can see where the moss is beginning to eat away at the lava. Eventually, in a few more thousand years, it will become soil and grass will grow.’
‘Do you really think the human race won’t have permanently screwed up the earth in the next few thousand years?’
‘Er, no,’ said Magnus. An environmental cop. That was a new animal for him, although he suspected there were quite a few in Iceland.
‘You say the eruption was that long ago? It looks more like ten years. Or last year. How can people live here?’
‘They’re a tough lot, the Icelanders. There was a time in the eighteenth century when one of the volcanoes erupted and the whole country was covered in a haze for several years. Crops died, animals died, the population got down to less than thirty thousand. They thought about quitting then, but they stayed.’
‘They?’ Piper said. ‘You said “they”.’
Magnus smiled. ‘You’re right. I guess I meant “we”. I feel a bit like a foreigner in my own country.’
‘Where are you from in the States?’
‘Boston. I worked as a detective in the Homicide Unit. Same kind of thing you do. More guns, I guess.’
‘Probably,’ said Piper. ‘Although there are a hell of a lot of guns in London these days.’
‘Do you feel vulnerable not carrying?’ Magnus asked. It was something he had always wondered about the British police.
‘Most of the time, no,’ Piper said. ‘We do have more and more officers who are firearms trained. I haven’t been threatened with a gun yet. Have you?’
‘A few times,’ said Magnus. ‘That’s one of the things I find difficult here. Cops don’t carry guns.’
‘Do the criminals? That’s the key question, I suppose.’
‘Not until I showed up,’ Magnus said. That was not one of his proudest moments, luring a Dominican hit man from Boston to Reykjavík with a gun that he had managed to plug Árni with. The real problem with guns was when you ended up shooting the bad guys. Magnus had done that twice, once at the start of his career when he was a uniformed officer on patrol, and once earlier on that year when a couple of guys were trying to kill him.
He still had the dreams. A bald fat guy on the street in Roxbury telling him he had some information about a homicide Magnus was investigating. Stupidly following the guy down the alleyway. Too late realizing that the kid on the corner had an out-ofneighbourhood gang tattoo. Diving, turning, shooting. The kid falling. Spinning around, plugging the fat guy on the crown of his bald head. And then doing it all again and again all night.
But Magnus still felt naked without a weapon.
The truck in front wobbled as a gust of wind tried to sweep it off the road.
‘Jesus.’ Piper tensed and reached out for the dashboard in front of her.
Magnus gripped the Range Rover’s steering wheel harder. White spray whipped off the top of the waves skimming the ocean to their left.
‘Any news on the investigation?’ Magnus asked.
‘No real breakthroughs,’ said Piper. ‘We are still pursuing the Russian angle, although that’s looking less likely. A handwriting expert took a look at the script on the Post-It note we found outside Óskar Gunnarsson’s house. He reckons that whoever wrote it wasn’t a native Russian speaker, or should I say, writer.’
‘You mean it was a decoy?’
‘Looks like it.’
‘Did you try out an Icelandic accent on your witness?’
‘Yes. We took her to the Icelandic Embassy and she listened to some of the people there. She thinks the courier she saw could have had an Icelandic accent. But he spoke very good English.’
‘Interesting.’
‘Yeah. Of course he could have been a genuine courier from one of Gunnarsson’s Icelandic contacts in London, but we haven’t discovered anyone who was trying to deliver anything to him at home.’
‘What about the killer himself? Was he speaking Icelandic?’
‘We did try the girlfriend with the Icelanders from the embassy. She thought the language she heard might have been Icelandic, but she was stretching it. She didn’t really know.’