Meltwater (Fire and Ice)

by Michael Ridpath

  There was a pause on the radio. ‘We’ll discuss it later. Anything at the crime scene?’

  ‘Forensics will give it a thorough going over, but I doubt they will find anything. The victim died of a stab wound to the stomach. Has the press release gone out, do you know? It would be good to find the snowmobilers and the couple in the other jeep.’

  ‘It has. And Chief Superintendent Kristján is doing a press conference at nine o’clock.’

  ‘We need a warrant to search the Freeflow house in Thórsgata. And their computers. Especially their computers.’

  ‘Vigdís is going to talk to Rannveig as soon as she gets in.’ Rannveig was the assistant prosecutor in Reykjavík. She would need to take a warrant to the judge at the District Court on Laekjargata. It shouldn’t be a problem: from Magnus’s limited experience, judges in Iceland were quite cooperative about that sort of thing.

  ‘OK,’ said Magnus. ‘I’m on my way back to Reykjavík.’

  He hung up. The two policemen who had stayed on the glacier overnight were ready to go back to Hvolsvöllur, and so Magnus asked them to give Ásta and him a lift. He would pick up his own vehicle from outside the police station.

  The priest’s face was pale, her expression thoughtful.

  ‘I hope none of the information you refused to give us would help us find Nico’s killer,’ said Magnus. ‘Because otherwise you are going to feel very guilty for a very long time.’

  Ásta glanced at Magnus quickly and climbed into the jeep.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘“EARL HÁKON STAYED at Hladir that winter. He became great friends with Vermundur and treated him well, since he knew he came from a distinguished family out in Iceland.

  ‘With the earl were two Swedish brothers, one called Halli and the other Leiknir. They were big strong men, bigger and stronger than any other men in Norway or elsewhere. They used to go berserk, and when they got themselves into that state they were not like other men, but like mad dogs who feared neither fire nor steel.”’

  Jóhannes Benediktsson glanced up at his class of thirteen-year-olds as he turned the page. He had them transfixed, every one of them. He read The Saga of the People of Eyri to his Icelandic class of this age every year. And every time he remembered how his own father had read the saga to him so many times when he was young, especially this passage. For Jóhannes’s father Benedikt had been brought up on a farm in the Snaefells Peninsula where the saga had taken place, indeed the very farm where Vermundur’s brother had taken charge of the two berserkers back in Iceland a thousand years before.

  The lava field between the two brothers’ farms was called the Berserkjahraun, and Benedikt had had all sorts of stories to tell about it.

  Jóhannes might just be a middle-aged man in a nondescript classroom in modern grey Reykjavík, but he could bring some of the magic of that ancient time into the lives of his mobile-phone-toting, PlayStation-and-Facebook-obsessed city kids.

  The bell rang for break. They didn’t move. Jóhannes was tempted to continue, but it was best to keep up the suspense. He snapped the book shut with his customary flourish. The class groaned.

  As he followed his students out of the classroom, Jóhannes was surprised to see Snaer, the head of the Icelandic Department, waiting for him in the corridor.

  ‘Reading The Saga of the People of Eyri again?’ he said.

  Snaer was fifteen years younger than Johannes and fifteen centimetres shorter. ‘Were you spying on me?’ Jóhannes answered, his brows knitting in disapproval.

  ‘I thought we had discussed this,’ said Snaer.

  ‘Oh, we have, we have,’ said Jóhannes. ‘On numerous occasions.’

  ‘Well, it looks as if we need to discuss it again,’ said Snaer, leading Jóhannes back into his classroom and shutting the door behind him. He took up a position in front of the teacher’s desk and turned towards the older man. The break-time chatter of adolescents interspersed with the regular thud of a football seeped in through the window.

  ‘You know that the syllabus requires you to teach Njáll’s Saga and Laxdaela Saga to this age group. Those are possibly the two greatest sagas in the Icelandic language. So why can’t you teach them?’

  ‘Because they are in baby talk,’ said Jóhannes.

  ‘They are simplified, perhaps, but they convey the essence of the originals. Much more than the essence.’

  ‘Baby talk,’ said Jóhannes.

  ‘But thirteen-year-olds can’t understand the originals. I have been teaching them for nearly twenty years, and I know they can’t.’

  ‘And I’ve been teaching them for over thirty years, and I know they can,’ said Jóhannes. ‘You spied on me just now. You saw my class. They love that saga. There’s something for everyone: love, honour, fighting, murder, treachery, ghosts, witchcraft; everything a teenage child could possibly want. Sure, at first they might find it hard to follow, but they learn. They learn quickly, and that’s the point.’

  ‘I admit you have a good reading voice. But why don’t you read them Njáll’s Saga?’

  ‘I won’t read them anything in baby talk.’

  ‘Even though it is laid down in the National Curriculum?’

  ‘Even then.’

  Snaer glared at him. ‘I also understand that you have been teaching Form Ten that Halldór Laxness is a lightweight.’

  ‘I have been teaching them to think critically. Just because he won a Nobel Prize it doesn’t mean everything he wrote is perfect. And the arrogance of the man! He took it upon himself to make up his own rules for how Icelandic should be spelled, he thought our Viking ancestors were all vulgar brutes, and’ – here Jóhannes pulled himself up to his full height – ‘he thought we should wash more. Why should I be told how often to have a bath by that communist?’

  Snaer closed his eyes. Jóhannes waited. It was true that they had had this conversation before, three months before, shortly after Snaer was promoted to head of department. And indeed Jóhannes had had the same discussion with all three of Snaer’s predecessors over the years.

  The fact was that Jóhannes was a brilliant teacher of Icelandic literature. And language for that matter. Three of his former pupils held positions in the Faculty of Icelandic at the University of Iceland; another one had won the Icelandic Literature Prize the year before. He inspired people to love their country’s language. And when push came to shove, all heads of department respected that.

  Except, perhaps, Snaer.

  The younger man cleared his throat. ‘You have probably heard the rumours that with the government spending cuts the school is going to have to reduce its teaching staff by ten per cent?’

  ‘No. I don’t listen to staffroom tattle,’ Jóhannes said, lying. Of course he listened to staffroom tattle.

  ‘The Principal has told me that we need to lose one member of staff from this department. He and I have discussed it, and we feel that as the teacher who is the least willing to embrace what the school is trying to do, indeed what the government is trying to do to raise educational standards—’

  Jóhannes couldn’t contain himself. ‘Raise standards? Lower them more like.’

  Snaer ignored him. ‘—that you should be the one to leave.’

  Suddenly Jóhannes realized what Snaer was saying. No one had ever called his bluff before. ‘You can’t be serious?’

  ‘I am serious. The Principal is waiting to talk to you in his office now. Unless you want to change your mind? If you could be persuaded to teach what you are supposed to teach, you could be a very good educator.’

  ‘Educator! What kind of a word is that?’ Jóhannes demanded.

  ‘Just because your father was a novelist—’

  ‘A great novelist!’

  ‘A novelist. It doesn’t mean that your position is untouchable.’

  ‘What about the younger members of staff? Why get rid of your most experienced person?’

  ‘You mean someone like Elísabet? She’s young, she’s hardworking, she’s enthusiastic,
she teaches what she’s supposed to teach and does it well.’

  Jóhannes’s indignation subsided a touch. ‘I know. I taught her when she was a pupil here.’ Elísabet had been teaching at the school a year and a half, and she was popular with staff and pupils. She had a genuine love of Icelandic.

  ‘And she will no doubt go on to teach many fine educators herself. Unless I fire her today, of course.’

  ‘It’s all the illiterate bankers’ fault,’ Jóhannes grumbled. ‘If they hadn’t got the country into this mess there wouldn’t be these cuts.’

  ‘You mean if someone had just taught them about a couple of berserkers raging around a lava field a thousand years ago, everything would be different?’

  ‘It may have been,’ said Jóhannes defensively.

  ‘Well, it’s a bit late now. You and I have an appointment with the Principal.’

  Jóhannes left the Principal’s office and headed straight for the car park. The Principal had been more polite than Snaer, more respectful, but his message was clear.

  Jóhannes’s career as a teacher at that school was over.

  He had offered to give Jóhannes the rest of the day off, and Jóhannes had accepted. He needed to get out of the school right away.

  As he drove the couple of kilometres from the school to his home in Vesturbaer, Jóhannes’s brain was in turmoil. His bluff had been called as he should always have known one day it would be. Why should he be the only teacher in Iceland who got away with ignoring the National Curriculum? Sure, there were famous people in the Icelandic literary world whom he had taught as schoolchildren, but would they really care about what happened to him? ‘I thought old Jóhannes had already retired,’ would be their response.

  Jóhannes was only fifty-five, but people thought he was older. He was physically fit, big, lean and erect with a shock of thick white hair and a craggy face, but he behaved like someone ten years older. He wore tweed jackets and a tie, he smoked a pipe; he was from another era.

  He pulled up in front of his house in Bárugata. It was a big house for a teacher, on a street that had been popular in the old days with sea captains, since from the upper storeys of its buildings you could look down the hill to the Old Harbour. He had grown up there; his parents had lived and died there, and after his father’s death he had inherited it. The house was built for families and for a few years Jóhannes had brought his own family to live there, until his wife had left him, taking their children with her. Why, Jóhannes had never quite understood.

  A big house for a lone teacher. A very big house for a lone unemployed teacher.

  It had been worth a fortune before the crash. He could probably still sell it for a reasonable price even in the current depressed market. Maybe one day he would have to, but not yet.

  He pulled out his pipe and sat in his favourite armchair. It felt strange to be at home during the day in school term-time. Very strange.

  He felt a wave of depression sweep over him. If Jóhannes wasn’t a teacher, what was he?

  His father, who was indeed a great novelist, superior to Halldór Laxness in Jóhannes’s opinion, was at the height of his powers at Jóhannes’s age. He did a quick calculation. At fifty-five, Benedikt had had four more years to live, four years until Jóhannes found him right there in the hallway, stabbed.

  What a strange, inexplicable way for such a good and talented man to die.

  Jóhannes had dropped in unannounced early one evening to return a book. The front door was unlocked, as it sometimes was. He had shouted a greeting, walked in and found his father lying in a pool of his own blood out there in the hallway.

  The case had never been solved, but not for want of trying. Jóhannes had himself been interviewed a number of times, as had all Benedikt’s friends. Suspicion had flitted from one to the other of them, even resting briefly on Jóhannes’s shoulders, but no one had been arrested. A burglar was perhaps the most likely candidate, but no one really knew.

  The irony was that the autopsy had revealed a tumour in Benedikt’s brain that would have killed him in a few months anyway. Benedikt’s doctor confirmed that Benedikt had known about it for almost a year, a knowledge that he had decided not to pass on to his children.

  Jóhannes had tried, but he found it difficult to forgive his father for that.

  Benedikt had taught Jóhannes everything he knew: his love of language; his love of literature; his respect for other people, especially the young. Teaching, in Benedikt’s eyes, was a noble profession and one that Jóhannes had been proud to follow all these years. And he was good at it, really good. It was one of Jóhannes’s greatest regrets that his father had never been inside one of Jóhannes’s classrooms, never seen how enraptured those thirteen-year-olds could be with Vermundur and Styr and Arnkell and Snorri and all those other colourful characters who beckoned from the tenth century.

  Of course Jóhannes’s teaching career wasn’t necessarily over. He could fight to keep his position. Or he could look for another: times were very tough and teachers were being laid off all over Iceland, but there might be a job for him somewhere else. It would be a long struggle, a very long struggle and it might end in failure.

  Or . . .

  Or perhaps this was one of those opportunities dressed up as disaster. For years Jóhannes had been collecting all the information he could on his father. His books and manuscripts, of course, letters both to and from him, articles written by him and about him, and in recent years the dissertations on his life and works that various literature students had produced. They were lying in a series of untidy piles next to his desk. One day, Jóhannes had promised himself long ago, one day he would write a biography of his father.

  Perhaps that day was now.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  MAGNUS STOPPED OFF at Hvolsvöllur police station where he reported back to Chief Superintendent Kristján. He decided not to wait for the press conference at nine, but to head straight back to Reykjavík. He wanted to get at that house on Thórsgata.

  He switched to his own car and offered to give Ásta a lift back with him. He could hardly leave her stranded in Hvolsvöllur.

  It was an hour-and-a-half’s drive to Reykjavík, but Ásta swiftly fell asleep in the seat beside Magnus. He considered trying to grill her, but he doubted that there was much more he could get out of her. The countryside of south Iceland sped past: clumps of sodden yellow grass with the odd horse looking cold, wet and hungry. The area was renowned in Iceland for its rich soil, and the horses for their cheerful hardiness, but it all looked a bit miserable to Magnus.

  As they reached the steep bank just beyond Hveragerdi and climbed the switchbacks on to the snow-covered heath above, Ásta woke up.

  This was an active geothermal area, with steam leaking out of fissures in the rock, and indeed there was a power station to the right fed by the heat bubbling up from the centre of the earth. Pylons marched across the bleak landscape a short distance from the road, channelling all that energy towards the light and heat of Reykjavík. Lava, congealed after an eruption thousands of years ago, rippled under the snow.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ said Ásta, yawning. ‘It’s been a long night. And a strange one.’

  ‘How did you say you got caught up with these people?’ Magnus asked.

  ‘Through my uncle. Viktor – the man you made friends with last night.’

  ‘Nice guy,’ said Magnus. ‘Did you hear what he called my colleague?’

  Ásta winced. ‘That was bad. But he is a good guy really. He’s an idealist, and our country needs more of those.’

  ‘I should know who he is, but I’ve only been back in Iceland a year,’ Magnus said. ‘Which party is he?’

  ‘The Movement. He was elected in 2009. He’s ambitious: I’m sure he’d like to be a minister.’

  ‘Well connected?’

  ‘I think so. Well, he’s good friends with the Prime Minister.’

  ‘So, I’ll take that as a yes.’ Magnus sighed. A bad enemy to make. He had hoped th
at there would be less politics in Reykjavík than Boston. Silly idea. The politics were just different.

  ‘What’s this Icelandic Modern Media Initiative?’ he asked.

  ‘It all started when Freeflow came here last year. Erika was on TV saying that Iceland should become a kind of offshore centre for free speech and a haven for investigative journalists worldwide. Viktor was watching and got very excited. He and some other MPs believe that Iceland’s troubles during the credit crunch of 2008 are the result of secrecy among the establishment of bankers and politicians. So he got in touch with Erika and Nico the next day.’

  ‘So it’s all Freeflow’s idea?’

  ‘That’s where it started,’ said Ásta. ‘But my uncle is the driving force behind it here in Iceland. The initiative itself is a resolution before Parliament to amend Iceland’s laws to make all this happen. It’s a good idea, actually.’

  ‘So has he kept in touch with Freeflow?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was involved in the Ódinsbanki leaks. Oh!’ Ásta paused. ‘I shouldn’t have said that to a policeman.’

  ‘I think there’s a lot more you should be saying.’

  ‘I have to keep a confidence.’ Her voice was firm.

  ‘Look, Ásta. When I get to Reykjavík I will go to the District Court and get a warrant to search the house those people are staying in, and their computers. By lunchtime I will know what they are working on. It would help me a lot if you could tell me now. In a murder investigation every hour counts.’

  Ásta turned away from him and looked out across the snow-covered moor.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ said Magnus.

  Magnus was expecting silence for the rest of the trip, but after a minute, Ásta spoke. ‘Are you really in the CIA?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Magnus said. ‘Erika Zinn is paranoid. That’s an absurd idea.’ He glanced across at the priest in the seat next to him, whose big blue eyes were watching him closely. ‘Don’t you believe me?’