Eventually they finished, and Martin Fiedler was taken back to one of the two police cells. They thanked the interpreter and asked her to stay in town overnight.
‘He’s a cool customer,’ said Ólafur.
‘He may be innocent,’ Vigdís said.
‘Of course he’s not innocent!’ said Ólafur. ‘In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if he did it rather than the Icelander. He’s much more calculating; much more dangerous.’
‘Well, we have a lot to check on,’ said Vigdís.
‘Let me see how forensics are getting on.’ Ólafur whipped out his phone and called Edda, the forensics team leader. It was still light and, at this time in May, it would be for a couple more hours.
Ólafur spoke to her briefly. ‘No luck yet,’ he said to Vigdís when he had finished the call. ‘I’m going for a run. Doing the Triathlon in Oslo in August. Do you run?’
‘No,’ said Vigdís, lying. The last thing she wanted to do was puff along beside the inspector for a few kilometres’ humiliation before he set off up a hill. ‘It was a long drive and a long interview. I’ll have some supper at the hotel and go to my room.’
The only hotel in town looked like a dump from the outside: paint flaking on the metal cladding, the car park a square of cracked tarmac. But inside it was warm and cosy, and the supper was delicious.
The hotel was full — not just with the policemen from Akureyri and Húsavík, but also a number of journalists had made the trek, together with the odd bewildered tourist who hadn’t figured out what was happening.
Vigdís managed to ignore everyone else at supper, although it took work to brush off the RÚV television crime reporter who recognized her.
She went up to her room and unpacked her case. Her phone vibrated and she picked it up, checking the display.
Magnus.
She hesitated. Should she answer it? No. No.
Yes.
‘Hi, Magnús.’ She did a good job of making her tone indifferent.
‘Hi,’ said the familiar voice. ‘How’s it going? Solved the case yet?’
‘Inspector Ólafur had two men locked up by the time I got here.’
‘Are they the right two men?’
‘Probably not,’ said Vigdís. She gave him a quick rundown of what had happened. It was clear that Magnus wished he was out there with her. There were few murders in Iceland, and Magnus, who had spent seven years as Sergeant Detective Magnus Jonson working in Boston Police Department’s Homicide Unit, didn’t want to miss one. Which was why Baldur hadn’t sent him. That, and he didn’t want Magnus to upstage his old friend Ólafur.
Vigdís relaxed as she chatted to Magnus.
‘Keep me posted,’ he said as she finished describing the day’s events.
‘Sure. Er, Magnús?’
‘Yes?’
What? What was she going to say? What could she say? She should say nothing.
‘Nothing.’
She hung up. She was sitting on her bed. She stared out of the window. There were still a few fishing boats that worked out of Raufarhöfn, and four of them were in port. Over the water, she could see the graveyard with all those previous generations of fisherman on the patch of hillside opposite.
Halldór would be joining them soon.
She sighed.
Magnus.
She had liked him when she first met him straight off the plane from America several years before. He had had experience of dozens of murder investigations in Boston and he was willing to teach her and her colleague Árni. He was smart, he was patient with her, and he was kind. He had his faults — he rubbed his superiors up the wrong way, he didn’t necessarily do things the Icelandic way, and a few people had been hurt as he solved those crimes he had come across. He was a loner. He kept himself to himself. But Vigdís liked all that. They respected each other.
Except in Vigdís’s case it was more than just respect. She was rubbish with men. They seemed to find her attractive, but for all the wrong reasons. There had been an Icelander living in New York, a television executive, but that hadn’t worked. Vigdís’s work had screwed that relationship up before it had had a chance to take hold.
There had been a few casual affairs, one- or two-night stands. But then Vigdís had overheard one of them, a handsome moron called Benni, talking to his mates about what it was like to screw a black girl.
That had put her off.
And the previous week, she had gone out for a drink with Magnus after work. His girlfriend Ingileif was in Hamburg for a couple of weeks. Magnus liked a couple of beers after work, a hangover from his Boston days, and Vigdís thought, why not humour him?
Both of them had had more than a couple of beers. Vigdís had enjoyed letting go of her habitual self-discipline. After so many years working together, they understood each other well, but as they both got drunker, they both confided things. Magnus talked about his brother, Vigdís about her mother, but with affection not frustration.
They had left the bar unsteadily. Walked up an empty side street. Laughed.
And then Vigdís had kissed him.
For a moment he had responded, but then he had broken away. Laughed it off. They had gone home to their separate beds.
It had been a mistake. A big mistake. Why had she done it? Why?
It was all right at work. Magnus behaved as though nothing had happened. He was still friendly to Vigdís, allowing her to respond in kind.
But things had changed for Vigdís. She had enjoyed letting her guard down. She had enjoyed the sense that she was putting her career at risk by doing something she wanted to do. It enthralled her. It also scared the hell out of her.
That weekend she had gone out with some of her girlfriends and got blind drunk. There was nothing odd about an Icelander getting drunk in Reykjavík on a Saturday night, but it was odd for Vigdís.
She pulled out the full bottle of vodka she had packed in her suitcase.
Vigdís didn’t drink alone. Her mother drank alone and Vigdís had seen what had happened to her. They said alcoholism ran in families. Was her black father an alcoholic, Vigdís wondered? She had no idea, no way of knowing anything about the black American serviceman who had met her mother at Keflavík airbase one night in the eighties.
Her life was crap. No matter how many rules she followed, how often she did the right thing by her mother or Baldur or Magnus or even the lowlifes she arrested, her life was still crap. Being careful, being sober didn’t help.
She got a glass from the hotel bathroom, opened the bottle and poured a tot into it. She knocked it back. That felt good. She poured another.
Chapter three
Vigdís’s head was splitting as she listened to Ólafur summarize the case to the assembled police. She had woken up still clothed, and had barely had time to grab a cup of coffee before staggering off to the police station. The morning briefing had already started by the time she got there, and they all turned as she tried to creep in at the back.
The vodka bottle was half empty on her bedside table where she had left it.
‘Edda, what did you find yesterday?’
Ólafur was addressing the woman in charge of the three-person forensics team that had driven over from Reykjavík.
‘Basically, nothing,’ she said. ‘No casing — the shooter must have retrieved it. No bullet either, which means either the shooter picked that up as well or, more likely, it is still in the victim’s skull. The pathologist should be able to fish it out at the autopsy today.’
Poor Halldór had been sent back to the morgue in Reykjavík for examination.
‘Nothing of interest at the scene?’
‘No. Very difficult to make out footprints on the hard ground up there. There are four cigarette ends and two sweet wrappers, but that’s what you would expect from what’s essentially a tourist site. We’ll send the butts off for DNA analysis. There are a couple of rocks on the far side of the hill from the road — a good place for the shooter to stand. There are several different footprints around there. None of them is clear, and none of them matches either Alex or Martin’s boots. Somebody seems to have been walking a dog.’