Where the Shadows Lie fai-1

by Michael Ridpath

  ‘I called the Icelandic Police Commissioner an hour ago. He’s still looking for an advisor. He sounded very excited by the idea of a detective who speaks the language. So, what do you think?’

  There really was no choice.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Magnus said. ‘On one condition.’

  Williams frowned. ‘Which is?’

  ‘I take my girlfriend with me.’

  Magnus had seen Colby angry before, but never this angry.

  ‘What do you think you are doing, getting your goons to kidnap me? Is this some kind of joke? Some kind of weird romantic gesture where you think I’m going to take you back? Because if it is, I can tell you right now it’s not going to work. So tell these men to take me back to the office!’

  They were sitting in the back seat of an FBI van in the parking lot of a Friendly’s restaurant. Two agents had cruised by the offices of the medical-equipment company where Colby was in-house counsel and whisked her away. They were gathered around their car fifty feet away, with the two agents who had driven Magnus.

  ‘They tried to kill me again,’ Magnus said. ‘Almost succeeded this time.’

  He still couldn’t believe how stupid he had been, how he had let himself be led off the main street down an alley. Since the shooting he had been interviewed at great length by two detectives from the Firearm Discharge Investigative team. They had been told they would only have one chance to talk to him, so they had been very thorough, focusing especially on his decision to pull the trigger when there was an innocent civilian in the line of fire.

  Magnus didn’t regret that decision. He had traded the near certainty of his own death for a small probability that the woman would be harmed. But he had a better answer for the detectives. If the gangsters had shot him, they would probably have shot the woman next, as a witness. The Firearms Discharge guys liked this idea. They were careful not to ask him whether he had thought of that before or after he had pulled the trigger. They were going to do things by the book, but they were on his side.

  This was the second time he had shot and killed someone while on duty. After the first, when he was a rookie patrol officer in uniform two months into the job, he had suffered weeks of guilt-filled sleepless nights.

  This time he was just glad to be alive.

  ‘Too bad they failed,’ muttered Colby. Two tiny red dots of anger sizzled on each cheek; the corners of her brown eyes glistened with fury. Her mouth was set firm. Then she bit her lip, pulling strands of dark curly hair back behind her ears in a familiar gesture. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. But it’s got nothing to do with me. I don’t want it to have anything to do with me, that’s the whole point.’

  ‘It already does have to do with you, Colby.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The chief wants me to go. Leave Boston. He doesn’t think the Dominicans will stop until they’ve killed me.’

  ‘That sounds like a good idea.’

  Magnus took a deep breath. ‘And I want you to come with me.’

  The expression on Colby’s face was a mixture of shock and contempt. ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘It’s for your own safety. If I’m gone they might go after you.’

  ‘What about my work? What about my job, dammit?’

  ‘You’ll just have to leave that. It’ll only be for a few months. Until the trial.’

  ‘Was I right the first time? Is this just some weird way for you to get me back?’

  ‘No,’ said Magnus. ‘It’s because I’m worried for you if you stay.’

  Colby bit her lip again. A tear ran down her cheek. Magnus reached out and touched her arm. ‘Where would we go?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t tell you until I know you will say yes.’

  ‘Will I like it?’ She glanced at him.

  He shook his head. ‘Probably not.’ They had discussed Iceland many times during their relationship, and Colby had been consistent in her distrust of the country, its volcanoes and its bad weather.

  ‘It’s Iceland, isn’t it?’

  Magnus just shrugged.

  ‘Wait a minute, let me think.’ Colby turned away from him and stared out over the parking lot. A large family of four waddled out to their car carrying tubs of ice cream, smiles of anticipation on their faces.

  Magnus waited.

  Colby turned and stared him right in the eye. ‘Do you want to get married?’

  Magnus returned her stare. He couldn’t believe she was serious. But she was very serious.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Magnus hesitated. ‘We could talk about it.’

  ‘No! I don’t want to talk about it, we’ve talked about it for months. I want to decide right now. You want me to decide to drop everything and go away with you. Fine. I’ll do it. If we get married.’

  ‘But this is totally the wrong way to make a decision like that.’

  ‘What do you mean? Do you love me?’

  ‘Of course I love you,’ Magnus replied.

  ‘Then let’s get married. We can go to Iceland and live happily ever after.’

  ‘You’re not thinking clearly,’ Magnus said. ‘You’re angry.’

  ‘You bet I’m angry. You’ve asked me to commit to going away with you, and I’ll do it if you commit to me. Come on, Magnus, decision time.’

  Magnus took a deep breath. He watched the family climb into the car which sagged on its axles. They pulled out past the other FBI vehicle, the one that had picked up Colby. ‘I want you to come with me for your own safety,’ he said.

  ‘So that’s a no, then?’ Her eyes bored into his. Colby was a determined woman, that was one of the things Magnus loved about her, but he had never seen her this determined. ‘No?’

  Magnus nodded. ‘No.’

  Colby pursed her lips and reached for the door handle. ‘OK. We’re done here. I’m going back to work.’

  Magnus grabbed her arm. ‘Colby, please!’

  ‘Get your hands off me!’ Colby shouted and threw open the door. She walked rapidly over to the four agents standing around the other car and muttered something to them. Within a minute the car was gone.

  Two of the agents returned to the van and climbed in.

  ‘I guess she’s not going with you,’ said the driver.

  ‘I guess she’s not,’ said Magnus.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Magnus looked up from his book and out of the airplane window. It had been a long flight, made longer by the five-hour delay in their departure from Logan. The plane was descending. Beneath him was a blanket of coarse grey clouds, torn only in a couple of places. As the aircraft approached one of these Magnus craned his neck to try to get a glimpse of land, but all he could see was a patch of crumpled grey sea, flecked with white caps. Then it was gone.

  He was worried about Colby. If the Dominicans did come after her it would unequivocally be his fault. When he had first told her about Lenahan’s conversation she had counselled against going to Williams. She claimed she had always thought law enforcement a stupid profession. And if he had agreed to marry her in the parking lot of Friendly’s, she would be in the seat next to him on her way to safety, instead of in her apartment in the Back Bay, waiting for the wrong guy to knock at the door.

  But Magnus had had to do what was right. He always had and he always would. It was right to go to Williams about Lenahan. It was right to shoot the kid in the yellow T-shirt. It would have been wrong to marry Colby because she forced him to. He had never been sure why his parents had gotten married, but he had lived with the consequences of that mistake.

  Perhaps he was too nervous, perhaps the Dominicans would ignore her. He had demanded that Williams organize some police protection for her, a request that Williams had reluctantly agreed to; reluctantly because of her refusal to go to Iceland with Magnus.

  But if the Dominicans did catch her, would he be able to live with the consequences of that? Perhaps he should just have said yes, agreed to whatever she wanted just to get her ou
t of the country. That’s what she had been trying to force him into. He hadn’t allowed himself to be forced. And now she might die.

  She was thirty, she wanted to get married and she wanted to marry Magnus. Or a modified Magnus, a successful lawyer pulling down a good salary, living in a big house in Brookline or maybe even Beacon Hill if he was really successful, driving a BMW or a Mercedes. Perhaps he would even convert to Judaism.

  She hadn’t cared that he was a tough cop when they had first met. It was at a party given by an old friend of his from college, also a lawyer. The mutual attraction had been instantaneous. She was pretty, vivacious, smart, strong willed, determined. She liked the idea of an Ivy League graduate walking the streets of South Boston with a gun. He was safe but dangerous, even his occasional bad moods seemed to attract her. Until she started to view him not as a lover but as a potential husband.

  Who did she want him to be? Who did he want to be? For that matter, who was he? It was a question Magnus often asked himself.

  He pulled out his electric-blue Icelandic passport. The photograph was similar to the one in his US passport, except the Icelander was allowed to smile, whereas the American was not. Red hair, square jaw, blue eyes, traces of freckles on his nose. But the name was different. His real name, Magnus Ragnarsson. His name was Magnus, his father’s name was Ragnar, and his grandfather’s name was Jon. So his father was Ragnar Jonsson and he was Magnus Ragnarsson. Simple.

  But of course the US bureaucracy could not cope with this logic. A son could not have a different last name to his father and his mother, whose name was Margret Hallgrimsdottir, and still have the government computers accept him as part of the same family. Obviously it couldn’t cope with the accents on the vowels, and it didn’t really like the non-standard spelling of Jonsson either. Ragnar had fought this for a few months after his son arrived in the country and then thrown in the towel. The twelve-year-old Icelandic boy Magnus Ragnarsson became the American kid Magnus Jonson.

  He turned back to the book on his lap. Njals Saga, one of his favourites.

  Although Magnus had spoken very little Icelandic over the past thirteen years, he had read a lot. His father had read the sagas to him when Magnus had moved to Boston, and for Magnus they had become a source of comfort in the new confusing world of America. They still were. The word saga meant literally what is said in Icelandic. The sagas were the archetypal family histories, most of them dealing with the three or four generations of Vikings who had settled Iceland around 900 AD until the coming of Christianity to that country in 1000. Their heroes were complex men with many weaknesses as well as strengths, but they had a clear moral code, a sense of honour and a respect for the laws. They were brave adventurers. For a lone Icelander in a huge Junior High School in the United States, they were a source of inspiration. If one of their kinsmen was killed, they knew what to do: they demanded money in compensation and if that was not forth-coming they demanded blood, all strictly according to the law.

  So when his father was murdered when Magnus was twenty, he knew what to do. Search for justice.

  The police never found his father’s killer, and despite Magnus’s efforts, neither did he, but he decided after leaving college to become a policeman. He was still searching for justice, and despite all the murderers he had arrested over the last decade, he still hadn’t found it. Every murderer was his father’s murderer, until they were caught. Then the quest for just retribution went on, unsatisfied.

  The plane descended. Another gap in the clouds; this time he could see the waves breaking against the brown lava field of the Reykjanes Peninsula. Two black stripes bisected the barren stone and dust: the highway from Reykjavik to the airport at Keflavik. Wisps of cloud, like smoke from a volcano, drifted over an isolated white house in a puddle of bright green grass, and then Magnus was over the ocean again. The clouds closed in beneath the airplane as it began its turn for the final approach.

  He had the feeling, as Iceland came nearer and nearer, that he was moving towards solving his father’s murder, or at least re solving it. Perhaps in Iceland he could finally place it in some kind of perspective.

  But the airplane was also bringing him closer to his childhood, closer to pain and confusion.

  There was a golden period in Magnus’s life before the age of eight, when his family all lived together in a little house with white corrugated-metal walls and a bright blue corrugated-metal roof, close to the centre of Reykjavik. It had a tiny garden with a white-painted picket fence and a stunted tree, an old whitebeam, on which to clamber. His father went off to the university every morning, and his mother, who was beautiful and always smiling then, taught at the local secondary school. He remembered playing soccer with his friends during the long summer nights, and the excitement of the arrival of the thirteen mischievous Yuletide elves during the dark cosy winters, each dropping a small present in the shoe Magnus left beneath his open bedroom window.

  Then it all changed. His father left home to go and teach mathematics at a university in America. His mother became angry and sleepy – she slept all the time. Her face became puffy, she got fat, she yelled at Magnus and his little brother Oli.

  They moved back to the farm on the Snaefellsnes Peninsula where his mother had been brought up. That’s where the misery started. Magnus realized that his mother wasn’t sleepy all the time, she was drunk. At first she spent most of her time away in Reykjavik, trying to hold down her job as a teacher. Then she returned to the farm and a series of jobs in the nearest town, first teaching and then working cash registers. Worst of all Magnus and Oli were left for long periods in the care of their grandparents. Their grandfather was a strict, scary, angry man, who liked a drink himself. Their grandmother was small and mean.

  One day, when Magnus and Oli were at school, their mother had drunk half a bottle of vodka, climbed into a car and steered it straight into a rock, killing herself instantly. Within a week, amid acrimony of nuclear proportions, Ragnar had arrived to take them both away to Boston with him.

  Magnus returned to Iceland with his father and Oli on an annual basis for camping trips in the back country and to spend a couple of days in Reykjavik to see his grandmother and his father’s friends and colleagues. They had never gone near his mother’s family.

  Until a month after his father died, when Magnus made the trip to try to effect a reconciliation. The visit had been a total disaster. Magnus had recoiled in stunned bewilderment at the strength of the hostility from his grandparents. They didn’t just hate his father, they hated him too. For an orphan whose only family was a mixed-up brother, and with no clear idea of which country he belonged to, that hurt.

  Since then he had never been back.

  The plane broke through the clouds only a couple of hundred feet above the ground. Iceland was cold and grey and windswept. To the left was the flat field of volcanic rubble, grey and brown covered with russet and green moss, and beyond that the para-phernalia of the abandoned American airbase, single-storey sheds, mysterious radio masts and golf balls on stilts. Not a tree in sight.

  The plane hit the runway, and manoeuvred up to the terminal building. Improbably cheerful ground staff battled their way out into the wind, smiling and chatting. A windsock stuck out stiff and horizontal, as a curtain of rain rolled across the airfield towards them. It was 24 April, the day after Iceland’s official first day of summer.

  Thirty minutes later Magnus was sitting in the back of a white car hurtling along the highway between Keflavik and Reykjavik. Across the car was emblazoned the word Logreglan – with typical stubbornness Iceland was one of the very few countries in the world that refused to use a derivation of the word ‘police’ for its law-enforcement agency.

  Outside, the squall had passed and the wind seemed to be dying down. The lavascape, undulating mounds of stones, boulders and moss, stretched across towards a line of squat mountains in the distance, still not a tree in sight. Thousands of years after the event this patch of Iceland hadn’t recovered from t
he devastation of a massive volcanic eruption. The thin layers of mosses nibbling at the rocks were only just beginning a process of restoration that would take millennia.

  But Magnus wasn’t looking at the scenery. He was concentrating hard on the man sitting next to him, Snorri Gudmundsson, the National Police Commissioner. He was a small man with shrewd blue eyes and thick grey hair brushed back in a bouffant. He was speaking rapidly in Icelandic, and it took all Magnus’s powers of concentration to follow him.

  ‘As I am sure you must know, Iceland has a low per-capita homicide rate and low levels of serious crime,’ he was saying. ‘Most policing involves clearing up the mess on Saturday and Sunday mornings once the partygoers have had their fun. Until the kreppa and the demonstrations over this last winter, of course. Every one of my officers in the Reykjavik area was tied up with those. They did well, I am proud of them.’

  Kreppa was the Icelandic word for the credit crunch, which had hit the country particularly badly. The banks, the government and many of the people were bankrupt, drowning under debt incurred in the boom times. Magnus had read of the weekly demonstrations which had taken place in front of the Parliament building every Saturday afternoon for months, until the government had finally bowed to popular pressure and resigned.

  ‘The trend is worrying,’ the Commissioner went on. ‘There are more drugs, more drug gangs. We have had problems with Lithuanian gangs and the Hells Angels have been trying to break into Iceland for years. There are more foreigners in our country now, and a small minority of them have a different attitude to crime to most Icelanders. The yellow press here exaggerates the problem, but it would be a foolish police commissioner who ignored the threat.’

  He paused to check if Magnus was following. Magnus nodded to indicate he was, just.

  ‘I am proud of our police force, they work hard and they have a good clear-up rate, but they are just not used to the kind of crimes that occur in big cities with large populations of foreigners. The greater Reykjavik area has a population of only a hundred and eighty thousand, the entire country has only three hundred thousand people, but I want us to be prepared in case the kinds of things that happen in Amsterdam, or Manchester, or Boston for that matter, happen here. Which is why I asked for you.