Meltwater

by Michael Ridpath

  The lawyer frowned. He turned to the chief superintendent. ‘What is an American doing here?’ he asked in Icelandic.

  ‘Sergeant Magnús is attached to the National Police Commissioner’s Office,’ Kristján said. ‘Show Viktor your ID, Magnús.’

  Magnus handed his identity card to the lawyer, who examined it carefully.

  ‘The guy may have Icelandic ID,’ said Erika, who was watching closely. ‘But he’s American. His accent is perfect. And I want to know what he is doing here.’

  ‘I’m trying to catch the man who killed your friend,’ said Magnus. ‘And I would appreciate some more cooperation from all of you. In particular we need to know what Freeflow is working on.’

  ‘So you can tell the US government?’ said Erika.

  ‘No, so we can ascertain who had a motive to kill Mr Andreose.’

  Viktor looked at Erika and then at the chief superintendent. ‘My clients are leaving now.’

  ‘I can’t allow that,’ said Kristján. ‘We haven’t finished questioning them.’

  ‘I ask you again, are they suspects?’

  ‘No, but they are witnesses. Witnesses in a murder investigation.’

  Viktor took a step towards him. He was taller than the chief superintendent and pointed his chin down towards the police officer.

  ‘In addition to being a lawyer, you know that I am a Member of Parliament and one of the sponsors of the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, which has been endorsed by the government. The initiative was developed in conjunction with Freeflow. Our country should be a haven for organizations like them. Freeflow’s activities are of no interest to the police, and certainly the Icelandic authorities should not be cooperating with foreign governments to force Freeflow to reveal what they are working on.’

  ‘I do not work for a foreign government!’ Magnus growled. ‘I don’t care what Freeflow is working on, beyond the obvious point that whatever it is, it’s probably pissing off someone, and that someone might be trying to stop them. I’m just trying to solve a crime. And I don’t appreciate you obstructing the police in doing that.’

  Viktor switched his attention to Magnus.

  ‘Are you threatening me?’

  Magnus was very tempted to arrest the man for obstruction of justice, but he knew that would lead to more trouble than it was worth. ‘I suggest you wait until we have finished with the witnesses.’

  ‘Where are they?’ the lawyer asked.

  ‘Through there,’ said Erika, pointing to the door of the common room at the other end of the corridor.

  ‘Out of my way,’ said Viktor as he pushed past Magnus. Vigdís stepped in front of him, with Árni next to her.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ he asked her.

  Tall and black, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, it was true that Vigdís did not look like your typical Icelandic detective.

  ‘Detective Vigdís Audardóttir,’ she replied in Icelandic.

  ‘Give me a break,’ said Viktor in English. ‘You’re another Yank. A nigger CIA spy.’ He barged past Vigdís and down the corridor. Vigdís lost her balance and almost fell.

  Árni grabbed the politician by the collar and pushed him up against the wall. ‘Don’t talk to a police officer like that,’ he shouted.

  Viktor was bigger than Árni, and stronger. He pushed Árni backwards and took a swing at him, catching him on the cheek.

  In a moment Magnus was on the politician, grabbing him from behind and pinning his arms to his sides, while the chief superintendent grabbed Árni. Viktor struggled for a few seconds, but Magnus was stronger.

  ‘He assaulted me!’ the politician said. ‘You’re all witnesses, you saw him.’

  ‘You took a slug at him,’ said Magnus. ‘And you racially abused my colleague.’

  ‘Árni! Back off,’ said Kristján. He jabbed a finger at Viktor. ‘You, in my office! Everyone else wait.’

  Kristján led the MP into his office, turfing out the open-mouthed Ásta, and shut the door behind him.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Tuesday 13 April 2010

  THE FREEFLOW TEAM drove back to Reykjavík in two vehicles: Dúddi’s father’s superjeep and Viktor’s Mercedes four-by-four. They had left Ásta behind to show the police the crime scene in daylight. Erika sat next to Viktor in the front of his car, with Dieter in the back. After an initial flurry of conversation about what had happened, they lapsed into silence, each of them absorbing the horror of the previous evening.

  As soon as they arrived at the house, Erika called everyone into the living room for a meeting. They stared at her, anxious, tired, uncertain.

  ‘What happened to Nico on the mountain was horrible,’ she began. ‘I wasn’t lying to the police when I told them I had no idea who killed him. As you all know, Nico was a vital part of Freeflow and a good friend, a great friend to many of us.

  ‘I have been thinking hard about this. It is tempting to abandon the project because of what’s happened. In fact it is going to be very difficult to carry on without Nico.’ She paused. Took a deep breath, controlling the emotion in her voice, channelling it. ‘But carry on we must. If there was one thing Nico believed in it was Freeflow and what it stands for. In addition to doing this for Tamara Wilton and the other victims we saw in that video, we are doing it for him. In memory of him.’

  She glanced around the room. ‘Are you with me?’

  There was silence for a moment, and then murmurs and nods of assent.

  ‘What if Nico was murdered by the Israeli government?’ asked Zivah. ‘To shut us up?’

  ‘Then we don’t let them,’ said Erika. ‘For Nico’s sake, we don’t let them. If that was indeed why he died, then we cannot allow his death to be in vain.’

  ‘What do we say to the police about the Gaza video?’ It was Franz, looking tired and a little scared.

  ‘Nothing. For as long as we can, we continue to say nothing. Sorry, Viktor, but I don’t trust the Icelandic police, and especially not that American – what was his name – Magnus?’

  ‘Nor the black woman,’ said Viktor.

  ‘Can you keep them off our backs?’

  ‘I can try,’ said Viktor. ‘That is what the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative is all about. You gave us the idea after all, so you deserve to be protected by it. I’ll start off by putting in a complaint to the National Police Commissioner. And I’ll go to the District Court when it opens this morning. The police are sure to apply for a warrant to search this property and I’ll see what I can do to contest it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Erika.

  ‘With Nico gone, there are all kinds of questions,’ said Dieter. ‘Not the least of which is money. Nico was the only one of us who knew where all of it is. And there were some Icelandic volunteers we were planning to draft in to help with the editing. What shall we do about them?’

  Erika sighed. ‘Yes, I am sure there are lots of good questions to be answered, lots of difficulties to be overcome. Anything from Apex on when the video will be ready?’

  ‘I just checked,’ Dieter said. ‘Eleven a.m. at the earliest.’

  ‘OK,’ Erika said. ‘We are all exhausted, and we have a lot of work ahead of us. It’s now five-thirty. I suggest we sleep until ten-thirty, then get some breakfast and start work. Ask me all your questions then.’

  Relieved to have permission to collapse, the team melted away to the various crowded bedrooms.

  Erika was sharing a room with Zivah, who had taken the floor, leaving Erika with a single bed. But rather than collapsing into it, she pulled on running clothes.

  She had to get out of there.

  She ran hard uphill along Thórsgata towards the massive spire of the church, a smooth sweeping silhouette against the lightening sky in the east. From the church she pounded down the empty narrow streets towards the bay. In a few minutes she was speeding along the bike path by the shore, the air cold and fresh in her straining lungs. She upped the pace until she was sprinting, the wind tearing through her hair, the blood pu
mping in her ears, the muscles in her legs screaming in pain and anger.

  Finally she could go no faster and stopped, bending down for a few moments. She stood up, her chest heaving, her heart thumping. In front of her, just across the narrow fjord at the edge of the bay, was a broad ridge of rock, topped by snow, glimmering pink. Mount Esja, Ásta had called it. She was right, it looked completely different than it had the previous afternoon.

  With Nico gone, Erika felt alone, and vulnerable, here in this tiny northern capital, with its clear light and cold air, a thousand miles from the nearest civilization.

  The others were all relying on her to do the right thing. And she would do the right thing. She knew what her duty was. She knew that from somewhere deep inside her she would find the strength to see this through.

  But it was going to be difficult. Very, very difficult.

  She took a deep breath, and screamed into the wind.

  It was a spectacular dawn up on the glacier. The clouds had rolled away to the south, nudged by the red ball slowly emerging over the eastern horizon. Pinks, oranges, golds and purples streaked sky and ice. The beauty was breathtaking, like no other crime scene Magnus had visited.

  Magnus had been up all night in Hvolsvöllur police station. Chief Superintendent Kristján had managed to persuade Viktor not to press charges against Árni, but had not allayed the MP’s suspicions about Magnus’s CIA connections. The forensic team had driven out from Reykjavík to meet Magnus at the police station before five a.m. and, together with one of Kristján’s officers, they had set off up to the volcano through driving snow. But suddenly, as they mounted Mýrdalsjökull, the snow had ceased and clear sky had appeared.

  The surface of the glacier was pristine, covered with new snow, brushed pink in the dawn light. The multitude of vehicle tracks that the local cop explained usually criss-crossed the route towards the volcano had completely disappeared. The two police jeeps proceeded cautiously westwards towards a plume of smoke.

  The volcano.

  They crested a ridge and a clear view of a broken landscape of ice, steam, cooling lava and rock spread out before them. A dome of rock thrust out from the saddle between the two glaciers, Eyjafjallajökull and Mýrdalsjökull, and nestling in the broken crown of this dome was a glowing pool of orange.

  ‘That’s odd,’ said the policeman. ‘It’s gone quiet.’

  ‘Yeah. I was expecting sparks and plumes of lava,’ said Magnus, who had seen the eruption several times on TV over the previous couple of weeks. The glow fascinated him, signifying as it did the subterranean power of the earth to create and destroy, but it fell short of the pyrotechnics he had been expecting.

  They pulled up next to the only vehicle in front of the volcano, another police jeep with the two poor bastards who had spent the night up there guarding the scene. The night watchmen accepted the thermos of coffee proffered to them by their colleague gratefully.

  ‘God, are we glad to see you,’ said one of them. ‘It was a vile night.’

  ‘No sign of anyone?’ Magnus asked.

  ‘No,’ said the policeman. ‘Good luck finding anything after all that snow. Here, you’d better sign the log.’

  Magnus felt faintly ridiculous signing a crime scene logbook a couple of thousand feet up in the middle of nowhere, but he appreciated the insistence on correct procedure. He looked around. There would be no tracks. And it would be extremely hard to find something that had been dropped under the new snow. He glanced at the leader of the forensic team, a tall long-legged woman with short blond hair named Edda, whom Magnus had never met before. She was stunningly beautiful in a classically Nordic way, and Magnus had tried hard not to stare at her on the journey up to the glacier. He was sure that policemen stared at her stupidly all the time, and he didn’t want to be that obvious.

  At that moment, she looked grim. She could see her team had a long, cold, pointless day ahead of them.

  The wind was still brisk and bit through Magnus’s coat, although he could feel heat emanating from the volcano ahead of him. Apart from the odd rumble, it was silent. Asleep? Or just taking a nap?

  They all put on extra-large forensic overalls which covered their snow jackets, and Ásta led Edda and Magnus up the lava bank towards the volcano, each one following carefully in the other’s footsteps so as to keep disturbance to a minimum. Ásta pointed out where the Freeflow team had parked the evening before, where the other jeep and the two snowmobiles were located, where the team had paused on the rim to watch the volcano and where Erika and Nico had wandered off.

  And there was Nico’s body, lying on its back, covered by a layer of snow.

  As she caught sight of it, Ásta uttered a small cry and stopped in her tracks.

  You cannot be cruel to the dead, but it seemed cruel to have left that body up there, cold and alone, abandoned to the volcano and the blizzard.

  The volcano grumbled, a seismic belch, and spat a single gobbet of orange magma up into the air.

  ‘Stay here,’ Magnus said to Ásta.

  Edda approached the body, with Magnus following. Edda motioned for Magnus to wait a few yards back while she crouched down beside Nico. Magnus watched as she gently brushed snow from his face and then his front. ‘Single stab wound to the abdomen,’ she called back to Magnus. ‘The blade was removed. There’s a lot of blood. Do you want to take a look?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ said Magnus.

  ‘OK, but don’t touch him.’

  Magnus waited until Edda had made her way back to him and then he took up her former position, crouching by the body.

  Nico had been a good-looking man, late thirties probably, fine features, a shaven skull under his hat, tiny snowflakes clinging to the couple of days’ of stubble on his cheeks. His lips were bluish. Silent. A diamond stud glinted on one earlobe. His jacket was stained with blood. Magnus prodded where Edda had zipped it open to reveal the wound. One stab was all it had taken.

  Magnus felt the familiar urge coursing through his veins. He would find the person who did this. He owed it to Nico, to the people who loved Nico. Magnus had seen dozens – no, hundreds – of dead bodies in his time as a homicide detective in Boston. But however many there were, he never forgot that each one had been an individual, who loved and was loved, who would be mourned, who had things to do that would never be done.

  He stood up. Looked at the ground around the body. Already the snow that had fallen overnight was beginning to melt from the warmth of the lava.

  ‘I suppose one of these stones was the one the killer tried to crack over the victim’s head,’ said Magnus. ‘I don’t know how the hell you tell which one. There won’t be fingerprints, of course, the guy must have been wearing gloves up here.’

  Edda surveyed the ground sceptically. ‘We might get some fibre, you never know.’ She frowned. ‘Perhaps it’ll be possible to figure out which stone he dropped. The witnesses said it had just started to snow, didn’t they? Obviously most of the snow would have fallen later, but there just might be a thin layer of new snow underneath the rock we are looking for.’

  ‘Worth a try,’ Magnus said, impressed.

  Edda stood up straight. ‘It all looks pristine now, but the trouble is there have been hundreds of people up here over the last few weeks, thousands. And they will all have been dropping stuff. There’s no way of telling what came from the killer and what came from a tourist a few days ago.’

  ‘I see what you mean,’ said Magnus. He was still finding it hard not to stare. Even wrapped up in forensic overalls over a heavy snow jacket she looked gorgeous. Ridiculous. If you worked in Iceland you just had to get used to working with women like Edda.

  Or like Ingileif. Funny how he kept on thinking about her in the strangest places.

  ‘OK, I’ll leave you to it,’ he said. ‘Let me know if you turn up anything.’

  He retraced his steps to the police jeeps where Ásta was waiting for him together with the local Hvolsvöllur cops.

  ‘You got a call on the
radio,’ one of them said. ‘Inspector Baldur from Reykjavík. He wants to talk to you. Channel seventeen.’

  Baldur was head of the Violent Crimes Unit and kind of Magnus’s boss. ‘Kind of’ because actually Magnus reported directly to the National Police Commissioner and was ‘attached’ to Baldur’s department. Baldur was a cop of the old school, suspicious of new foreign methods. Although he was ten years older than Magnus and held a higher rank, he had significantly less experience of homicide investigations. He knew that, as did Magnus and the Police Commissioner.

  A recipe for trouble. Which, Magnus suspected, was on its way. Especially since Baldur wanted to avoid the Hvolsvöllur police channel and switch to a more private frequency.

  ‘Good morning, Baldur.’

  ‘What the hell happened last night, Magnús? I’ve had the Commissioner on the phone. Apparently Árni assaulted an MP.’

  ‘Viktor isn’t pressing charges, is he?’ Magnus said.

  ‘No. Not this time. But he’s very angry. And he has lots of powerful friends.’

  ‘Did he say why he isn’t pressing charges?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because he slugged Árni himself. And accused me of being a CIA spy. And called Vigdís a “nigger”. And I tell you if he does that again, I’ll slug him myself.’

  ‘But she is a “nigger”, isn’t she?’

  Magnus took a deep breath. They were speaking Icelandic and Magnus had used the English word, as of course had Viktor. Baldur’s English was poor and his cultural sensitivity even worse. Even so, it seemed to Magnus that Baldur should stand up for his officers.

  ‘I want Árni off the case,’ Baldur said.

  ‘I’m telling you, it wasn’t his fault,’ said Magnus. Not entirely true, but someone had to stand up for Árni, and it clearly wasn’t going to be Baldur. Árni had a reputation for incompetence, but he was keen and he was loyal and he had once saved Magnus’s life, and that was good enough for Magnus. ‘If he’s off the case, I’m off the case.’