66 Degrees North

by Michael Ridpath

  It was difficult being the skipper of a fishing boat. You had to be able to find the fish. And you constantly had to weigh up the risks of different courses of action. Björn had a knack for it. Gústi didn’t. And it was almost as if Gústi was determined not to take Björn’s advice.

  Björn was as much a threat as a help to Gústi. Since Björn had lost his own boat he went out with any of the skippers he could either from Grundarfjördur or one of the little ports that lined the north coast of Snaefells Peninsula: Rif, Ólafsvík, Stykkishólmur. The Kría didn’t belong to Gústi, but to a fishing company, and although Björn was ten years younger than the skipper, everyone in Grundarfjördur knew what a good fisherman he was. Gústi was afraid for his job. Björn had to be careful or there was a good chance that Gústi wouldn’t take him on as crew again.

  Still, the small catch meant it wouldn’t take long to unload the boat and clean up. Then he could be on the road down to Reykjavík to see Harpa.

  She was getting to him in a way that no woman had ever got to him before. She wasn’t his type at all, and he was beginning to realize that that was the reason why she had such an effect on him. He liked self-assured women; women who knew what they wanted and what they wanted was sex with him. He was happy to oblige, and when things got a little complicated, a little heavy, a little emotional, as they inevitably did, he moved on. Some were upset: most had always known that was the deal. He had lived with a woman for two years once, Katla, but that had only worked because they had managed to keep their emotional distance despite sharing the same bed and roof. As soon as the relationship had developed into something more, it finished.

  But Harpa was different. She was smart – he actually liked talking to her. Like him, she had been screwed by the kreppa, even if in an entirely different way. She was vulnerable and there was something about the vulnerability of such a capable woman that Björn found appealing. She needed him in a way that no woman had needed him before, and rather than running a mile, he responded to it.

  He didn’t have to ride the best part of two hundred kilometres to see her that night, but he was happy to do it. It was worth it.

  She was worth it.

  CHAPTER NINE

  MAGNUS WAS IN a good mood as he parked the Game Over on Njálsgata, opposite his house, or rather Katrín’s house. ‘Game Overs’ were what they were calling Range Rovers these days: Magnus had bought his at a knockdown price from a bankrupt lawyer who owned two, but couldn’t really afford one. It was a gas guzzler, but once you got outside Reykjavík a good four-wheel-drive was a must.

  The quick couple of beers he had had at the Grand Rokk were partly responsible for his mood. The Grand Rokk was a bar just off Hverfisgata. Warm, scruffy, populated during the week by men and women who liked to drink, it reminded Magnus of the places he and his buddies would unwind after a shift in Boston. That kind of thing was much less common in Reykjavík, except on the weekends when everyone went crazy. In fact, weekday drinking was frowned upon. Which kind of added to the allure of the Grand.

  On occasion when he had first arrived in Iceland a couple of beers had turned into many more, plus uncounted chasers, which had got him into trouble. But these days he had things under control.

  It wasn’t just the beer, though. It felt good to be doing straightforward police work again. And the case was piquing his interest. He wasn’t sure whether they would find an Icelandic link to Óskar’s death, but if they did he was willing to bet that it would be through Harpa. It was to be expected that she should be upset after her ex-boyfriend topped himself. But Harpa’s agitation was more complicated than that: she was hiding something.

  And Gabríel Örn’s suicide didn’t make sense. So far they had found no signs of suicidal thoughts or actions, or of extreme depression. And if he did want to commit suicide, walking three miles to the sea and jumping in seemed a very strange way to do it, especially on a cold night. Why not drive? Take a taxi? Or just stay at home and take some pills?

  It may be that further investigation would reveal a suicidal side to Gabríel Örn that would make sense of it all.

  But Magnus wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t.

  As he took out his house keys, the door opened and his landlady appeared, in full regalia.

  Katrín was tall with short dyed-black hair, white make-up, and metal sprouting from her face and ears. She was wearing black jeans, T-shirt and coat. She looked a little like her brother Árni, but where Árni’s features were weak, hers were strong. Under her arm was a tiny bird of a girl with short blonde hair.

  ‘Hi, Magnus,’ Katrín said in English. She had spent some time in England and liked to speak to him in that language. ‘We’re just going out. This is Tinna, by the way.’

  ‘Hello, Tinna,’ said Magnus. ‘How you doin’?’

  Tinna nodded, smiled, and leaned into her taller companion’s side.

  Magnus wasn’t yet familiar enough with the conventions of female friendship in Iceland to be sure of what exactly he was witnessing.

  Katrín noticed his confusion. ‘I’ve gone off men, Magnus. They smell and they lie. Don’t you think so?’

  ‘Well…’ Magnus said.

  ‘Tinna is much nicer,’ Katrín said, squeezing the small blonde.

  Tinna smiled up at her friend and they kissed each other quickly on the lips.

  ‘Oh, don’t tell Árni, will you, Magnus? I wouldn’t mind, but it will only upset him.’

  ‘I won’t,’ said Magnus. One of the reasons Árni had installed Magnus with his sister was so that Magnus could spy on her. This was something Magnus was not prepared to do. He liked Katrín, she made a good house mate, even if they didn’t see very much of each other. Perhaps because they didn’t see very much of each other.

  As he entered the hallway, he smelled cooking. He checked the kitchen, wondering if Katrín had left something on the stove. There was Ingileif, pushing some scallops around a frying pan with a wooden spoon.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, leaving the stove and coming towards him. She gave him a long, lingering kiss.

  ‘Hi,’ said Magnus, smiling. ‘This is a bit of a surprise.’

  ‘You’ve been to the Grand Rokk, haven’t you? I can smell it on your breath.’

  ‘Does it bother you?’ said Magnus.

  ‘No, of course not. I think that dive suits you perfectly. Just don’t try and drag me in there. Do you like scallops?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘That’s lucky.’

  ‘Um. How did you get in here, Ingileif?’

  ‘Katrín let me in. Oh, by the way, did you meet Tinna? Cute, isn’t she?’

  ‘Um. Possibly,’ said Magnus. He wasn’t quite sure what he thought about Ingileif talking herself into his house without asking him.

  ‘I’ve been invited to a party on Friday night. Jakob and Selma. Do you want to come?’

  ‘Is he the little guy with the big nose?’

  ‘More of a big guy with a little nose. You have met him. They are two of my best clients.’

  Ingileif ran a fashionable gallery. Ran it very well. Her clients were some of the wealthiest citizens of Reykjavík, beautiful people, who owned beautiful art and dressed beautifully. They were all perfectly friendly to Magnus, but he didn’t fit. For a start he didn’t have the right clothes, there was not a designer T-shirt or a designer suit in his wardrobe. His two favourite shirts were by LL Bean, but he didn’t think that counted, and neither did his suit from Macy’s. The main thing, though, was that all these people had known each other since they were kids.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Magnus. ‘I expect I’ll have work to do on the Óskar Gunnarsson case.’

  ‘OK,’ Ingileif said. She didn’t seem bothered. She never seemed bothered that she went out without him.

  He never quite knew where he stood with her. But it was kinda nice when she showed up in his home, right in the middle of his life, unannounced, uninvited.

  She glanced at him. ‘You know, these scallops can wait.’r />
  Magnus smiled as he looked down at Ingileif. She was snuggled under his arm, her head resting on his chest, her blonde hair bunched up under his chin. Her eyes were closed, but she wasn’t asleep. He noticed the familiar little nick above one of her eyebrows. There was a small smile on her own lips.

  ‘I fit very nicely in here,’ she said. ‘Am I just the right size, or are you?’

  ‘I guess we both are,’ said Magnus. ‘We fit.’

  ‘We do.’

  It was true, Ingileif was one of the good things about Iceland, a reason to stay. Magnus had had a girlfriend in the States for several years, a lawyer named Colby. She was smart, she was attractive and she knew what she wanted. And what she wanted was for Magnus to quit the police force, go to law school, get a decent job and marry her. That wasn’t what Magnus wanted, which is why they had broken up.

  That and the fact that Colby didn’t like being shot at by hoodlums with semi-automatic rifles on the streets of Boston.

  Ingileif seemed to have no intention of marrying him, or changing him. They had met in his first week in Iceland, she had been a witness and then a suspect in the murder case he had worked on. They had gone through a lot together. Like Magnus, her father had been killed when she was a child. Magnus had discovered how that had happened, a discovery that had been very difficult for Ingileif to take.

  He had supported her, talked to her, understood her pain, helped her come to terms with it, or at least accept that she could never completely come to terms with it. It was a bond between them.

  She shifted in his arms. ‘So, have you solved Óskar’s murder yet?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Magnus.

  ‘That’s pathetic. You’ve had all day.’

  ‘It might take me more than a day,’ Magnus said.

  ‘Even for CSI Magnús?’

  ‘I think you mean CSI Boston?’

  ‘Do I? I never watch those programmes. But I bet I can solve your crime.’ Ingileif disentangled herself from Magnus and sat up in bed. ‘Give me your clues.’

  ‘It doesn’t really work like that,’ said Magnus. ‘We haven’t found an Icelandic connection. The murderer probably lives in London. That was where Óskar was killed, after all.’

  ‘Huh. Well, have you sorted out Óskar’s sex life?’

  ‘Do you know about Óskar’s sex life?’

  ‘Not personally, you idiot. But I have come across him. Kamilla, his wife, or rather his ex-wife, was one of my clients. Nice woman. Pretty. A bit dull.’

  ‘Vigdís interviewed her,’ Magnus said. ‘She didn’t think there was much animosity there now.’

  ‘Probably not,’ said Ingileif. ‘But there was for a bit. Especially when María was involved.’

  ‘María?’

  ‘Yes. She’s an old friend of mine. And she was Óskar’s girlfriend for a couple of years. She was the reason he got divorced. She’s married now, to someone else, but she can tell you all about him.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Sexual jealousy as a motive for murder was one of the old favourites. Ingileif was right, they should probably find out more about Óskar’s lovers, at least the ones who lived in Iceland.

  ‘I’ll call her now,’ Ingileif said. ‘We can meet up.’

  ‘Vigdís can interview her tomorrow.’

  ‘What do you mean? She’s my witness,’ said Ingileif, rolling out of bed to dig out her mobile phone. ‘Isn’t that the technical expression?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  Ingileif held up her finger to shush him. ‘María? Hi, it’s Ingileif. Hey, I wanted to talk to you about Óskar. It must be terrible for you.’

  Five minutes later Ingileif had fixed up for Magnus to go to María’s house to interview her the following morning. Ingileif was pleased with herself. ‘We’ll have this solved in no time,’ she said. ‘So who did you see today?’

  ‘My cousin, Sibba,’ Magnus answered.

  ‘Is she a witness?’

  ‘No. But she was acting as a lawyer for Óskar’s sister.’

  ‘Wait. You mentioned her before. She’s the cousin on your mother’s side, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘The one who told you about your father screwing your mother’s best friend?’

  ‘Yes.’ Magnus’s voice was hoarse. ‘Do you mind if we don’t talk about it? I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I don’t want to think about it.’

  ‘OK,’ said Ingileif, and squeezed his hand.

  But Magnus was thinking about it. Until the age of eight Magnus had had an idyllic childhood. His mother taught at school, his father at the university and he and his brother Óli played in the garden of their little house with its bright blue corrugated metal roof, only a short distance from where Magnus was living now in Thingholt.

  But then things had changed, changed horribly. His father had announced he was leaving to go to a university in America. His mother, alone in charge of the boys, began to drink. The two boys were sent to stay with their grandparents on their farm at Bjarnarhöfn on the Snaefells Peninsula. That period of his life Magnus had blanked from his memory, but he knew that the scars were still there, buried deep under his skin.

  The scars were more obvious in the case of Óli. He had never really recovered from his time at the farm.

  Then one day their mother killed herself in a car crash. She was drunk. Finally, the two boys’ father, Ragnar, came over from America to rescue them and take them back with him to Boston. Magnus was twelve, Óli ten.

  As Magnus had grown up and begun to understand more about alcoholism, he had developed his own way of making sense of his parents’ lives. His mother, his alcoholic mother, not the beautiful woman he dimly remembered from his childhood, was the villain, his father the hero.

  That was until he had bumped into Sigurbjörg in the street four months before. She had shattered Magnus’s idea of history by telling him that his father had had an affair with his mother’s best friend. That’s what had driven her to drink. That’s what had caused him to run away to America. That’s what, ultimately, had led to her death.

  It was this knowledge that Magnus had tried to cram back into its box.

  ‘You’re still thinking about Sibba, aren’t you?’ Ingileif said. ‘I can feel it.’

  Magnus sighed. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know you should face up to it. See her. Find out what really happened between your father and your mother’s friend.’

  ‘I said I didn’t want to talk about it.’

  Ingileif ignored him. ‘I remember when you decided that you were going to stay on in Iceland. One of the reasons was that you thought there might be an Icelandic link to your father’s death.’

  Magnus shook his head. ‘Ingileif…’

  ‘No, listen to me. You’ve obsessed about how your father was murdered and who by all your adult life. That’s why you do what you do, it’s who you are. Isn’t it?’

  Reluctantly Magnus nodded. It was why he had joined the police, why he had become a homicide detective, why he was so relentless in tracking down the killer of every victim he came across.

  ‘OK. So you are all excited about spending time trying to find the Icelandic angle to Óskar’s death, which you admit is very unlikely, yet you won’t find out more about an Icelandic angle to your own father’s murder. That doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘It’s different,’ Magnus protested.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because.’ He struggled to conjure up a plausible reason, but then settled on the truth. ‘Because it’s personal.’

  ‘Of course, it’s personal!’ Ingileif said. ‘And that’s exactly why you have to deal with it. Just like I had to find out how my own father died even though the answer was so painful to me. And don’t tell me that that wasn’t personal!’

  Magnus stroked her hair. ‘No. No, I won’t tell you that.’ Ingileif’s pain had been real, was real. She was right. It had been important for her to find out the truth. So why wasn’t it important for him?

>   ‘You’re scared, Magnús. Admit it, you are scared of what you might find out.’

  Magnus closed his eyes. He hated being called a coward. It was not his self-image at all. Since his youth he had been an avid reader of the Icelandic sagas, the tales of medieval revenge and daring. There were heroes and cowards in those stories, seekers of justice and hiders from it, and Magnus saw himself as one of those heroes. He smiled to himself. There were also women urging their men-folk to get off their asses and go avenge the family honour. Women like Ingileif.

  ‘You are right,’ he said. ‘I am scared. But… Well…’

  ‘Well, what?’

  ‘You know I told you I spent four years at my grandfather’s farm when my father left us?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Magnus swallowed. ‘Those are four years I don’t want to remember.’

  ‘What happened?’ Ingileif asked, touching his chest. ‘What happened, Magnús?’

  Magnus exhaled. ‘That’s something I really don’t want to tell you. That memory has to stay in its box.’

  Harpa stared out of her window at the blinking lights of Reykjavík across the bay, waiting for Björn to come. He had a big powerful motorbike, and she knew she could trust him to get down to her as fast as he could. It was a hundred and eighty kilometres, but the road was good all the way and, with the exception of the last stretch through the Reykjavík suburbs, empty.

  She had been agitated since the interview with the two detectives. The big one with the red hair and the slight American accent had got under her skin. He was smarter than the skinny one she had spoken to in January. There was something about his eyes, blue, steady, understanding, that seemed to miss nothing, to see through all her protests and posturing. He knew she wasn’t telling the truth. They had no link between Gabríel Örn’s death and Óskar’s, the Gabríel Örn case was firmly closed by the authorities, but that detective knew there was something wrong.