The Chill Factor

by Richard Falkirk

  ‘He’s in some sort of trouble and I want to help him. Did he go to a party with you that evening?’

  ‘I do not know who you are talking about.’

  ‘Do you remember him?’ I turned to the other boy but his companion said: ‘He doesn’t speak English.’

  ‘The waitress says you were with a fair-haired American on Saturday.’

  ‘Then she is mistaken.’

  ‘Why are you lying?’

  ‘I am not.’ He put some kronur on the table with the bill. ‘What sort of trouble is this American in?’

  ‘Very bad trouble. You could help him. I do not think he has done anything wrong.’

  ‘You do not think assaulting and murdering an innocent girl is wrong?’

  ‘I didn’t mention the girl. Did you know her?’

  He nodded hesitantly.

  ‘Was she so innocent?’

  ‘You do not understand the Icelandic mentality. If a girl and a boy are fond of each other then they sleep together. This is not a loss of innocence: it is the most natural thing in the world. It is you people who make it seem dirty.’

  ‘And what if a girl sleeps with many men?’

  ‘It is her business.’

  ‘You speak very good English.’

  ‘My father was a diplomat in London for some time. I lived there for two years.’ He melted slightly. ‘I like it very much there.’

  ‘Even with our dirty ways?’

  ‘Different ways perhaps.’ A slight strategic withdrawal. There was plenty of Icelandic patriotism in him; but he had already acquired a diplomatic defence mechanism from his upbringing.

  ‘Why doesn’t your friend speak English? Most young Icelanders do.’

  ‘His father was a diplomat in Paris.’ He smiled. ‘Paris, France.’

  We seemed to have established friendly relations. ‘I promise you that this boy you met had nothing to do with the girl’s death. Now, can you help me?’

  But I had underestimated him. ‘I do not believe you. He was seen with the girl.’

  ‘The boy you were with in here?’

  No such simple traps for Iceland’s future representative in Washington, London or Moscow. ‘No, the American boy you have just described.’

  ‘You won’t help?’

  ‘Look.’ He leaned forward to deliver his final speech. ‘This is a dirty business. In Iceland we know nothing of murder or sexual assault. This crime could not have been committed by an Icelander. This American that you describe was seen with the girl at the Saga Hotel. He was also seen leaving with her. Shortly after that she was found dead. In those circumstances I cannot help you.’ He stood up to leave.

  ‘You mean she was found dead at about the time the American was arriving at the party?’

  ‘What party?’

  ‘So, you’re falling for the Communist anti-American propaganda.’

  ‘You don’t even understand that. Communism in Iceland is not like Communism elsewhere. It is merely the voice of protest against the establishment. The true Opposition against the Government. Every democracy needs an opposition, does it not?’

  I paid my bill and stood up. It was rather sad. ‘I suppose you are a Communist?’

  He nodded so defiantly that it was almost an apology.

  ‘What would your father say?’

  ‘He would understand.’

  ‘I doubt it. He would know that even if your Icelandic Communism is different to doctrinaire Communism it is just as surely being used by the men in the Kremlin for their own purposes. Just as this poor girl’s death is being used.’

  ‘We are not so naïve as that.’ He walked away with his friend and I felt almost sorry that I had implanted the doubt. But if he was going to be a diplomat he would have to learn.

  Sleep was a long way off. I lay staring at a watercolour called An Image from the Saga Period by Asgrimur Jonsson and tried to dispel the image of Shirey’s frightened face.

  I considered ringing Gudrun then remembered that she was on a London flight.

  I followed Shirey from the Saga Hotel through the light streets to the girl’s home. The girl became a Russian with a scar above her crotch and heavy breasts.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ my wife said. ‘I burnt them as soon as I saw them. I guessed what had happened.’

  But she turned away from me in the bed that first night and who could blame her?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, months later. ‘I’m so terribly sorry. I burnt the pictures but they’re still with us. They always will be.’

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘But forget the pictures at the divorce. They mustn’t be mentioned. I’ll arrange everything.’

  Shirey and I had both been fixed in much the same way. Was that the reason for my compassion for the pink-faced airman who didn’t remotely comprehend the competing forces that had snared him?

  I continued to stare at the helmeted warriors from the sagas until I joined them.

  10

  The Fugitive

  The delegates to the conference on marine life were discussing sardines in a variety of languages and accents at the breakfast table while the landlady deplored the decline in morals that had resulted in the girl’s death.

  She presented each of us with a very hard-boiled egg. The Brazilian cracked his as if it were a skull, the Italian tapped his as if he expected an answer.

  Rain sprayed the windows, a wind moved the branches of a birch tree in the garden. The landlady, who was grey and excessively maternal, was very proud of that tree.

  She abandoned morals for weather. ‘Soon the sun will shine and it will be vonderful,’ she said.

  The wonder of Iceland, I found, occasionally jarred. ‘Do you know how many days it rained last year?’ I asked.

  She made a bird-like movement with her head. ‘I do not know. But we have a beautiful climate here in the south because of the Gulf Stream. We have hardly any of the snow.’

  ‘It’s a simple statistic,’ I said. ‘It rained every day.’

  The statistic stopped the sardine talk. ‘It rain every day?’ asked the Italian.

  ‘Every day,’ I said.

  ‘Mama mia,’ he said and dented his egg.

  ‘In Iceland,’ said the landlady, ‘we have a saying about the weather.’ She smiled at her cosmopolitan table, managing to exclude the cocksure English from her beneficence. ‘We say, “If you do not like the weather, just wait a moment”.’ She replenished everyone’s coffee cup except mine.

  On the sideboard lay a copy of Morgunbladid. There was a picture of the dead girl as a schoolgirl on the front page. And underneath a police statement asserting that the girl, who was believed to have been in the company of an American serviceman that evening, had been under the influence of alcohol and may have died from asphyxia due to regurgitation. It added that no explanation had yet been found for a bruise on her mouth and the tearing of some of her clothes. Another news story said that civilian workers from the NATO base had reported that an American serviceman was being questioned by military police.

  I picked up the newspaper and read the editorial. It was reasoned and reasonable. Homicide appeared to have been ruled out, but there were still a lot of unanswered questions. The torn clothing, the bruise, the alcohol content of the girl’s blood. If the Americans were, in fact, holding one of their servicemen then they should at least give Icelandic police access to him in the interests of NATO relations. The editorial appealed for restraint, particularly among the younger sections of the populace.

  I imagined what Thjodviljinn had to say about it and felt sorry for Charlie Martz.

  There didn’t seem to be a lot I could do for Fred Shirey.

  So I asked the landlady for more coffee and thought about the job I had come to do. Somewhere, something didn’t add up. My assailant hadn’t been Hafstein because he had been at work. That left Laxdal or Magnusson of the known suspects – and instinct told me that it was Magnusson. But why hadn’t my attacker killed me? After all, they had tried the h
ard way once. It was as if they had been reassured rather than alarmed by finding me at Hafstein’s house.

  I sipped the coffee: it was cold. The talk at the Table of Babel had progressed to whitebait, so I left and returned to my room.

  If my visit to Hafstein’s home had given the general alarm to the Russian network then suspects like Magnusson would already be on the run. I went into the hallway and phoned Magnusson at his Reykjavik number. No reply. I tried his Westman Islands number and a woman answered. I asked to speak to Magnusson in what I hoped was immaculate Icelandic and waited for her to say that he wasn’t at home. Instead she said: ‘He is just finishing his breakfast – I will get him for you.’ I hung up. Perhaps Sigurdson was wrong: he wasn’t an agent.

  I returned to my room to worry about it. Why was he still at home waiting to be taken in for questioning? He was hardly a hypnotised rabbit. And my presence at Hafstein’s would surely have warned him that I was investigating key suspects. Unless he wasn’t connected with Hafstein and presumed that I was suspicious only of the bearded lover of birds and churches. Perhaps he was working independently of Hafstein and Laxdal: a spy within a spy ring. Whatever the reason, Magnusson seemed to think he was sitting as pretty as a puffin on the cliffs of Heimaey.

  I remembered Heimaey, the inhabited member of the Westman Islands, from my boyhood. A green valley encircled by razored cliffs, with men, intent on catching puffins, hanging from them on ropes like pendulums. The waves exploding all round and the smell of herring – the smell of money as they called it. The evocations called me. I decided to fly to Heimaey and interview Magnusson.

  I consulted my Icelandair timetable. On the front was a picture of a blonde stewardess in her scarlet uniform: Gudrun would be back from London this evening. There was a Fokker Friendship flight to Heimaey at 8.30 a.m. arriving at 8.55. I looked at my wristwatch: it was 8.59. If I went I would have to charter.

  I switched on the radio and listened to the news on American Forces Network Iceland. It was mostly about a Wall Street recession with an interpretive piece by Walter Kronkite of CBS.

  As I walked out of the room the phone in the hallway rang. I picked it up and Sigurdson’s voice said: ‘Conran?’

  ‘Speaking. What’s new, Einar?’

  ‘Quite a bit,’ he said. ‘You’d better come down to my office.’

  ‘Anything you can tell me on the phone?’

  ‘Hafstein’s vanished,’ he said.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll come down right away.’

  At the front door the landlady was standing, arms akimbo as near as damn it. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘The vonderful sunshine.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but just wait a moment.’

  ‘How do you know he’s skipped?’

  ‘He didn’t go back to his apartment in Reykjavik last night. He always gets to work at 8.30 in the morning. He hasn’t turned up. Apparently he phoned the office twenty minutes ago saying that he wouldn’t be in again for a while. He didn’t say why.’

  ‘Was it a local call?’

  Sigurdson said it was.

  ‘Then he’s still in Iceland?’

  Sigurdson nodded. ‘I have alerted all ports and airports.’ He poured us both coffee from the jug on his desk.

  I said. ‘The obvious place to go to is Hveragerdi.’

  He looked at his gold watch. ‘Okay, let’s go.’ He sounded like a television marine.

  Three-quarters of an hour later Sigurdson braked his red Volvo sharply outside Hafstein’s country residence. Steam blossomed around it and there was a man in dungarees in the hothouse. The front door of the house was ajar; Sigurdson looked cross as if he would have preferred to shoulder-charge it.

  On the kitchen table was some half-eaten bread, cheese and skyr – the Icelandic version of yoghurt. Nothing in the lounge had been moved since my visit: it was a shop window in a neglected store – patina of dust on the TV, fruit crinkling in a bowl on the sideboard. In the small bachelor bedroom there were signs of a hasty departure: the wardrobe door open, three freshly-laundered shirts lying across the bed, a grey wool sock on the floor, the bedside lamp knocked over.

  Sigurdson said: ‘The bird has flown.’ It seemed singularly apt. He added: ‘Whoever hit you must have warned him.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

  In the study the birds were unruffled by it all. I checked the snowy owl – the bug was still there like an egg.

  ‘Did your monitor pick anything up from this?’ I asked Sigurdson.

  ‘Nothing at all. Hafstein must have been by himself all the time.’

  ‘What about phone calls?’

  ‘Not one.’

  Hafstein was either a master spy or an innocent at home. But if he was innocent why had he departed in such a frantic hurry?

  Sigurdson said: ‘We will have to pull this place apart,’

  ‘I suppose so.’ It didn’t seem right somehow.

  ‘I’ll put a couple of the local police on to it and a fingerprint man from Reykjavik.’ He looked at me almost shyly. ‘Dabs, I believe you call them.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘dabs.’

  I sat in Hafstein’s chair behind the desk and stared out the gyrfalcon. Why, Hafstein? Why have you fled? Why have you forsaken your birds and your churches? What machinations of sophisticated intrigue have made you abandon all you hold dear?

  And, incidentally, where the hell are you?

  I opened the desk drawer. The paper on the migratory habits of the knot was missing. And so was the photograph of the girl who had sent her love to Hafstein long ago.

  Sigurdson said: ‘I’ll bring in the man outside.’ But the man outside was already inside, standing in the living room, not sure whether to be angry or frightened. He was about fifty-five, stringy, with a weathered face and large arthritic hands; there were snuff stains under his nostrils. He said in Icelandic: ‘What are you doing in this house?’

  Sigurdson showed him his identification and asked where Hafstein was.

  The man shrugged and fingered his hairy nostrils. ‘How should I know?’

  Sigurdson stood in front of him, jacket tight around his chunky shoulders. He exuded menace without bothering with threats. ‘When did you last see him?’

  ‘Two days ago. He came to do some work in his study.’

  ‘In the morning or evening?’

  ‘In the evening.’

  ‘Did you speak to him?’

  ‘I spoke to him.’

  ‘Where?’

  The man pointed to the study with a crippled forefinger. ‘In there. We talked about the tomatoes. He has only just connected the steam from the hills and he is very concerned about them. I look after them. Watering and suchlike …’

  His voice trailed away, withered by the disbelief on our faces. Two days ago I had installed the bug behind the snowy owl and it would have picked up the conversation between Hafstein and his handyman.

  Sigurdson said: ‘You’re lying. Why?’ He was very efficient at this sort of thing, less happy with the more sophisticated devices of detection.

  The man produced a worn silver snuffbox from the pocket of his dungarees and took a pinch to win a little time. He sneezed, which was surprising from a seasoned snuff-taker; but then he wasn’t concentrating on his vice.

  Sigurdson opened his jacket and the man looked at the butt of the pistol stuck in the shoulder-holster. Sigurdson said: ‘What is your name?’

  The snuffbox slid back into the man’s pocket. ‘Thorarinsson,’ he said. ‘Eggert Thorarinsson.’

  ‘When did you last see Hafstein?’

  ‘I told you, two days ago.’ He couldn’t understand how we knew he was lying.

  Sigurdson gave him a gentle push and he fell back into the cheap orange armchair. A cloud of dust arose from the new upholstery. ‘We know you are lying. Now please tell us the truth. We don’t want to get tough with you.’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  Sigurdson took off his jacket and put his gun on to
p of the TV set. You could see the outline of his vest under his shirt, and the muscle beneath the vest. He rolled one fist in the palm of the other. ‘Start remembering,’ he said.

  ‘Please,’ Thorarinsson said. ‘I am a sick man.’

  ‘When did you last see Hafstein?’ Sigurdson moved nearer to Thorarinsson, his fist still clenched.

  Thorarinsson examined the fist. ‘This morning,’ he said.

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘About three hours ago.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us that before?’

  ‘He asked me not to tell anyone.’

  ‘Did he give you any money to encourage you to keep quiet?’

  Thorarinsson hesitated.

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘He gave me my wages in advance because he said he would be away for some time.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘I forget the exact amount.’

  ‘Have you been home since Hafstein left?’

  Thorarinsson shook his head.

  ‘Then you still have the money on you.’

  Thorarinsson nodded unhappily and took a pinch of snuff.

  Sigurdson flicked his fingers. ‘Come on, Thorarinsson, let’s see how much he gave you.’

  Thorarinsson took a wad of new notes and handed them to Sigurdson.

  Sigurdson ruffled them with his thumb and said: ‘You seem to be a very highly paid hothouse gardener.’ He laughed for the first time that day. ‘It is also a lot of money for a clerk in the Thjodskrain to be able to afford as a bribe.’

  I said to Thorarinsson: ‘Where did he say he was going?’

  ‘He didn’t say.’

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Where?’ I asked, while Sigurdson menaced.

  ‘He didn’t say.’ Thorarinsson was trembling, his eyes on the money in Sigurdson’s hand. ‘He didn’t say. I swear it. He often went away without telling me where. In the summer he travelled all over Iceland looking at churches and birds. That was all he lived for. That and his tomatoes …’

  He stopped speaking because Sigurdson had picked him up by the collar of his dungarees.

  Thorarinsson yelped. ‘I don’t know where he went, Akureyri maybe. Or Hafnarfjödur. I don’t know. I could tell you any place in Iceland just to stop you hitting me. But I am not a good liar.’