The Chill Factor

by Richard Falkirk

‘Not usually. I come from the mainland.’

  ‘Where did you spot Hafstein?’

  The policeman pointed in the direction of the cliffs overlooking the harbour. ‘He was climbing up there.’

  ‘Climbing?’

  ‘Yes, climbing. I am told Emil Hafstein was a very good climber. He was often here observing the birds. And often he would go to the Hotel Hamma and lecture the customers in the bar about puffin-catching. They listened because he bought them drinks.’

  It was quite a speech for the policeman. I coaxed a little more from him. ‘I suppose Sigurdson went up after him?’

  The policeman picked up the authorisation papers that Sigurdson had given me and examined them more closely. Reluctantly he said: ‘Yes. I informed Sigurdson in Reykjavik and he told me to keep watch on Hafstein while he flew over. Hafstein disappeared in a cave and I posted a man at the foot of the cliffs to keep watch on the cliffs. It was a perfectly good arrangement because it would take a man at least twenty minutes to reach the ground again from that cave – the cliffs are very steep just there.’

  I guessed the reason for the policeman’s reluctance to discuss the manhunt: he had botched it up. ‘But when Sigurdson arrived Hafstein had gone?’

  The policeman nodded and pulled on his white gloves as if to cover guilty hands. ‘When Sigurdson arrived I drove him to the cliffs.’ He examined a hole forming in one finger of a glove. ‘We found the man – he was only a youth really – lying unconscious at the bottom of the cliffs.’

  ‘How the hell had that happened?’

  ‘I can only presume that Hafstein had dropped something on him.’

  ‘He must have been a bloody good shot’

  ‘That’s what Sigurdson said.’

  ‘Sigurdson was very angry?’

  The policeman fingered his jaw as if Sigurdson had hit him. ‘He was displeased.’

  ‘And he climbed the cliff?’

  ‘Yes – he is also a very good climber. But when he reached the cave he found that Hafstein had gone. I don’t think it surprised him very much. But he must have found something up there because he immediately commandeered a motor boat and set out from the harbour.’

  ‘But he must surely have told you where he was going?’

  The policeman shook his head sadly and I felt almost sorry for him. ‘He told me to mind my own business. He was very displeased.’

  I pictured Sigurdson’s displeasure and felt even more sorry for the stupid blue-chinned policeman whose true vocation was directing traffic. I sympathised, too, with Sigurdson.

  I told the policeman to take me in his Volkswagen to the cliffs. He agreed and almost called me sir; an anti-social manner and a bristly chin can sometimes be very deceptive.

  We stopped on the way at the Hotel Hamma so that the pilot could have a meal and I could have a drink. Because if I was going to climb the bloody cliffs with a rope tied round me I needed a brandy. Or two.

  It was 1 p.m. The town, white and tin-roofed and fishy, was quiet. A few cars with youths and girls in them drove past, then reappeared, as they completed circuits of the place. The fishing boats, shouldered together on the quays, creaked and murmured on the slight swell. A man in his twenties staggered down the main street waving a Coca-Cola bottle, but the brown liquid inside must have been fortified because things seemed to be going better with Coke than the manufacturers had ever envisaged.

  The bar in the hotel was closed. But a waitress gave me a brandy. In one corner a man drank vodka and ice dyed green with Crème de Menthe. In another a middle-aged woman drank thirstily at a whisky or brandy; her face looked vaguely familiar.

  I phoned Reykjavik and asked if anyone there knew Sigurdson’s destination – in case he had checked with them. No one knew.

  ‘All right,’ I said to the tamed policeman. ‘To the cliffs.’

  From the harbourside the sheer cliffs had the texture of baize. They were speckled with gulls – and puffins waiting to be netted, their orange-beaked clowns’ faces wistful and fatalistic.

  Ropes hung from the crags with children suspended from them.

  ‘They are learning to climb for eggs,’ the policeman said. ‘Soon they will be as at home on the cliff-face as they are on the ground.’

  We swung round the harbour passing two youths burning the feathers off a puffin with a blow-torch. They smiled pleasantly as we passed.

  We stopped on the quayside and the policeman pointed at a rope idling against the cliff without a child weighting it. ‘That was Hafstein’s rope,’ he said.

  ‘Now it’s mine,’ I said without enthusiasm.

  I had scaled cliffs in the Shetlands, on the Rock of Gibraltar, in the Urals, looking at birds and nests and eggs. But I had been fitter then, and younger; and in retrospect none seemed as steep as this. But if Hafstein could do it then so could I.

  The policeman looked at me doubtfully. ‘Perhaps I should go instead.’ His voice cracked with hope that his offer would be declined.

  ‘You would be no better than me.’

  ‘Couldn’t we send someone else up?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No one else.’ I had issued the challenge to myself: I had to accept. People ridiculed us ornithologists: we had to prove ourselves.

  I tied the rope around my waist and started to climb. Up the smooth foothills with ease, then up the first steep ascent using the rope the way they taught you in the commandos.

  The green baize was cropped grass, moss and lichen. I moved lightly, exhilarated with my competence. I was half way up when I slipped. I fell a couple of feet, clenched at the rope burning through my hands, felt a razored rock slice at my calf. The rope stopped burning my hands: I had halted the fall. I swung idly for a moment, kicking at the cliff with my feet.

  A small voice reached me from below. ‘Are you all right?’

  I didn’t reply. I kicked out once more, found one foothold, then two. I rested and tried to think who would care if I killed myself. It didn’t require much thought. I looked down at the harbour, which seemed as tranquil as artists always imagine harbours. And at the policeman staring up at me, wishing that he had never been posted temporarily to the Westman Islands, that Hafstein hadn’t sought refuge here and that neither Sigurdson nor I had come in pursuit.

  I looked to one side and found a puffin staring at me wondering why I hadn’t caught him.

  I climbed on, age asserting itself; heart galloping, breath rasping. Behind me I left a trail of blood: it looked very bright and ketchupy on the cushions of moss. But the leg with the sliced calf muscle was becoming weak. I kicked myself away from the cliff-face with my left leg and went on hauling. My biceps were getting weaker, too, and whenever I rested they twitched with a life of their own.

  I gazed over the harbour, past its craggy guardians, over the metallic sea. Just me and the cliffs and the sea. A breeze played with the grass and above me somewhere I heard wings singing in the air. I hauled myself past a nest of baby puffins just hatched, growing up to be caught and eaten.

  Then I was on the ledge from which the rope was suspended. Lying there sucking down air, waiting for the pain in my chest to fade. After a few minutes I sat up and examined my leg. My foot squelched in the blood that had collected in my shoe, and the blood was still trickling down my calf. I tore a strip off my shirt and bound it tightly above the wound. I looked regretfully at the tattered black leather of my Church’s shoes.

  Far below the policeman waved. I waved back. Then crawled into the black mouth of the cave.

  After a few minutes my eyes adjusted themselves to the dusk inside. It was my closest contact with darkness since I arrived in Iceland. The only light came from the entrance and from a fissure in the roof.

  Water dripped steadily somewhere in the interior. It was the only sound: the still air muffled all sound from outside.

  But the air had been disturbed recently. On one side of the cave there were papers strewn all over the ground – the manuscript, perhaps, of a book that the author had dropped in
his hurry to escape. And folders and a photograph catching some light on its gloss. On the other side of the cave there were tins of food, some books, a sleeping bag, an oil lamp and a box of matches.

  Emil Hafstein had anticipated flight and pursuit. I wondered how he had hoped to keep the islanders away from his refuge.

  I lit the lamp with the matches. My blood looked very dark in the oily light. But the bleeding had stopped.

  I shuffled through the papers. It was a carbon copy of his book on churches. Beside it was the paper on the migratory habits of the knot containing the references to the Westman Islands. Heimaey was obviously Hafstein’s second sanctuary. Here he found peace – and plotted vengeance. But against whom?

  Hafstein’s heaven, I thought, would be a lonely atoll of primeval grandeur feathered with birds and crowned with an ancient church.

  I crawled around the cave looking for the clue which Sigurdson had found to Hafstein’s next refuge. But all I found was the skeleton of a puffin and the source of the iced water dripping from the roof.

  I lit a cigarette and blew the smoke over the top of the wavering flame. Lastly I picked up the photograph of the girl who had once sent her love to Hafstein. Then I knew why the face of the woman in the Hamma Hotel had been familiar.

  ‘You should go to the hospital to have that leg seen to,’ the policeman said. Heimaey had a hospital as well as a cinema, a dance hall, a bank and a telephone exchange.

  ‘Just get me back to the hotel,’ I said.

  ‘Very well.’ The beetle Volkswagen jerked forward round the harbour.

  ‘Hafstein had prepared himself for a siege up there,’ I said.

  ‘So Mr Sigurdson said.’

  ‘How the hell was he going to keep all your egg-climbers away from the cave?’

  ‘They wouldn’t have gone near it.’

  ‘Why on earth not?’

  ‘Because it is said to be haunted.’ He smiled apologetically as Icelanders do when they mention the supernatural. ‘I expect Hafstein spread the story himself.’

  The woman was still in the corner with a drink in front of her. And the man was still contemplating his green vodka with understandable suspicion.

  I sat down in front of the woman and said: ‘Where’s Hafstein?’

  The drink was whisky and she had drunk more than one. She was middle-aged and had given up caring about her appearance long ago. A shawl hung round her shoulders, her greying hair was dull, her features still retained character but the flesh covering them had lost interest.

  She looked up slowly from her drink. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Where’s Hafstein?’

  ‘He’s gone,’ she said. As if for ever.

  ‘It is important that I find him.’ I ordered a brandy and a large whisky from the hovering waitress. ‘Important for Iceland.’

  ‘What do I care about Iceland?’ She peered at me muzzily. ‘What do you care about Iceland?’ She poured the old whisky into the new and drank thirstily.

  ‘You were once very fond of Emil Hafstein. A long time ago.’

  ‘Djofullin sjalfur! A long, long time ago. So long ago that it doesn’t matter. We have both lived another lifetime since then.’

  ‘You are married?’

  ‘I am a widow.’ She peered at me through the haze of alcohol. ‘What does it matter to you?’

  ‘I want to help.’

  ‘No one can help. Not now.’

  ‘Did you hit the man who was guarding the foot of the cliffs with a rock?’

  She nodded. ‘I just stood there talking to him. He didn’t suspect a woman. Why should he? Then I pointed at the cave. When he looked up I hit him with a stone.’

  ‘You could go to prison for that.’

  ‘What do I care?’

  ‘Please help,’ I said. ‘I want to help Hafstein.’

  ‘Help? You will only betray him. The way everyone has.’ She finished the whisky and pushed the empty glass towards me. ‘The way I did.’

  ‘Because you married someone else?’

  She nodded heavily. ‘Then I watched him grow old and felt myself grow old as I bore my husband’s children. Now it is too late, everything is too late.’

  I wondered why she had married someone else. A lover’s quarrel, parental pressure. Perhaps Hafstein had doubted his capabilities as a lover. Perhaps … ‘You could still be happy together,’ I lied.

  ‘Not now. Emil is a little mad. I am old and no longer attractive. There is nothing left for us.’

  ‘But you still loved him enough to warn him that the police were coming over from the mainland.’

  ‘News travels fast in Heimaey. Yes, I warned him. He heard me calling him from the bottom of the cliffs. I think he was watching all the time.’

  ‘And then he fled by boat?’

  ‘There is no other way to flee from Heimaey unless you can fly an aeroplane.’

  I leaned forward, staring at the mottled hand, searching for the real truth. ‘What was he fleeing from? What was he frightened of?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He never told me.’

  ‘But he used to come here often?’

  ‘Yes, but not to see me. It was just a coincidence that I lived here.’

  ‘And he never told you what he was frightened of?’

  ‘Never.’ She was telling the truth.

  ‘Did he never tell you why he left all those provisions in the cave?’

  ‘Just as a place to escape. From everyone. As I say, he was a little mad. He said everyone’s values were wrong. He was upset that no one really wanted to publish his books. Sometimes he talked about revenge. I didn’t ask him what he meant. I just listened and pretended that it was all happening many years ago.’

  She started to cry.

  ‘Did he suddenly seem to have a lot of money?’

  She nodded; the tears splashed on the table and into her whisky. I ordered another and refused myself another brandy. The man in the corner plucked up courage, downed his green drink and left.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t know where he’s gone?’

  ‘I didn’t say I didn’t know.’

  ‘Where has he gone then?’

  ‘He has gone to die.’

  ‘To commit suicide?’

  ‘He has gone to die. To a place where he will be alone. To be as close to the earth and as far away from the values that he hated as it is possible to be.’

  To the atoll with the church and the friendly birds. The boat on the beach, the boat in pursuit …

  ‘Where is that?’ I asked. But I knew already.

  ‘To die where life is beginning.’

  ‘He’s gone to Surtsey?’

  She nodded. I should have known; just as I should have known about the Westman Islands. Once upon a time I would have been quicker.

  I bought her another whisky. Then I went down to the harbour and hired the fastest motor boat I could find.

  12

  The Fire-Bringing Giant

  You could see Surtsey, named after Surtur the fire-bringing giant from Norse myths, quite plainly from Heimaey. A basking whale, black against the bright sky.

  It first made its presence known when fishermen saw a glow under the waves and found that the water was hot. Within a week Surtsey had grown to a height of forty metres and a length of 500 metres. In April 1964 it entered into what they called its Strombolian phase, hurling lava bombs 300 metres into the air. And the red lava streams that doused themselves in the sea strengthened the new island’s foundations so that it didn’t slip away again like so many recruits who just faded away since The Grenadiers paraded permanently in the ninth century.

  The eruption continued in 1966 then settled with an area of about three square miles.

  The Westman Islanders claimed it for themselves. So did Paris-Match. But Surtsey belonged to Iceland and the scientists of the world, and that is how it stayed. A mauve and green island of lava, changing shape, forming its own ashy beaches, permitting the ele
ctrolysis of life to start as perhaps it had started on earth at the beginning of time.

  The scientists had kept it as sterile as possible and they would not welcome Emil Hafstein or his pursuers as they had welcomed the first moth or the first flower, which had been the Sea Rocket.

  The motor boat was very fast and we raced past the minute islands of Sudurey, Hellisey and Sulnasker.

  The fisherman at the wheel slowed down as Surtsey swam up in front of us, about two miles away.

  ‘You want to take some photographs?’ he asked.

  ‘Just keep going,’ I said.

  Waves were slapping the bows now and a dark cloud had appeared in the sky as Surtsey had once appeared in the sea.

  The fisherman, about eighteen, young, pale and hard, said: ‘Soon it will storm.’

  ‘Too bad,’ I said.

  He gave his Icelandic friendliness another try. ‘Do you know what they say about the weather in Iceland?’

  ‘Just wait a moment …’

  ‘You know.’ He swung the boat so that a wave sprayed over me.

  We ploughed on as the clouds gathered. The waves chopped harder and the spray reached both of us. Soon it mixed with rain. My jacket and flannels stuck to my body, the dried blood was swabbed from my leg. My hair was plastered over my forehead Hitler fashion. The helmsman smiled at me with satisfaction.

  Behind us Heimaey disappeared in the rain. And a couple of other Grenadiers with it. We were about a mile from Surtsey which in the stormy light looked as if it were made of blended plasticines, the way children mix them.

  I saw the boat grounded on the tiny beach, and another one nearby. The wind blew straight at us, helping Surtsey to repel invaders.

  At the base of the plasticine cliff I saw a cough of light. Then we heard a crack.

  The fisherman looked puzzled. ‘Thunder?’ He shook his head; it was nothing like thunder. ‘Did you hear that?’

  I nodded into the rain and spray. ‘I heard it.’ Water filled my mouth and the wind snatched my words.

  ‘Perhaps it was Surtsey starting up again?’

  I shook my head violently so that he wouldn’t be deterred by the fact that someone had just fired a gun on the world’s newest island.