The Chill Factor

by Richard Falkirk

  As the boat approached the last run of waves on to the beach I saw Sigurdson crouched behind a crag of lava, gun in hand. To his right, about seventy-five yards away, Hafstein leaned against another crag; he also had a gun. It was the first time I had seen Hafstein in person.

  I shouted to them but the words flew out to sea. I knew what was going to happen; knew I would witness it; knew I could do nothing about it.

  The fisherman shouted at me. ‘What is going on?’ He slowed down the motor. I grabbed the wheel from him and we accelerated.

  ‘Hey!’ shouted the fisherman.

  ‘Shut up,’ I said.

  Sigurdson turned and recognised me. He put up one hand. Stop, stay away, leave it to me. If I could steer the boat in behind Hafstein there might be a chance of taking him alive. But it was too late. The waves were breaking on the shore, carrying us with them, breaking over the stern of the boat in clouds of spray.

  Then Hafstein spotted us. He levelled his pistol. Above the roar of the waves I heard the shot. God knows where the bullet went; not in the boat, not in the fisherman or me. I felt for the Smith & Wesson cold against my sopping shirt.

  As the boat ground on to the shore I heard another shot. Nearer – from Sigurdson. And Hafstein was falling, gun pointing at his own feet, one hand pawing at his chest.

  But there were three people on the beach. As Hafstein fell the third, in yellow oilskins and sou’wester, ran out from behind Hafstein. Sigurdson raised his gun, then lowered it again.

  I ran through the spent waves, but the figure in yellow reached Hafstein first. Hafstein was lying on the mauve and black cinders, blood flowing from the wound in his chest. He was dead. Sigurdson joined us.

  The man in yellow stood up and said: ‘Who are you?’ His thin intelligent face, streaming with water, was contorted with fury.

  Sigurdson said: ‘More to the point, who are you?’

  ‘I am a scientist studying the birth of life. Now, who are you?’ He pointed at Hafstein. ‘This man I know – but who are you and why did you kill him?’

  The strength of the rain was diminishing and the sky on the horizon was bright blue.

  Sigurdson put away his gun. ‘I killed him because he was trying to kill me.’ He handed the scientist his police pass covered in transparent plastic. ‘What were you doing here?’

  The scientist’s fury was waning, to be replaced by an irradicable sadness. ‘I was staying in the hut. We have a hut here, you know …’ His voice meandered on incoherently.

  The sun came out and the wet ash began to steam.

  Hafstein’s eyes were still open and his little beard stuck out determinedly above his loose neck. The gun still in his hand looked incongruous.

  ‘How did you know this man?’ I asked the scientist who had sucked-in cheeks, tufty eyebrows and passionate eyes.

  ‘He used to come here. He had special permission because of his interest in birds.’

  ‘The knot?’

  ‘And others.’

  Sigurdson said: ‘I shall want you as a witness.’ He turned to me. ‘You, too, perhaps. And that fellow.’ He pointed at the fisherman who had just succeeded in pulling the boat clear of the waves. ‘We will take the body back to Heimaey.’ He knelt and went through Hafstein’s pockets. ‘It is a pity. Now perhaps we shall never know …’

  The scientist said: ‘It is ruined now.’

  ‘What’s ruined?’ Sigurdson asked.

  ‘Our concept.’

  ‘What concept?’

  ‘To keep this island free of contamination.’

  ‘This won’t make any difference,’ Sigurdson said.

  ‘It is not just a question of physical contamination.’

  Sigurdson grunted and called to the fisherman to help him move the body. ‘It is a pity,’ he repeated. ‘A great pity. He was our man – I am sure of that.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ I said.

  The scientist said: ‘Now already Surtsey has been contaminated by human behaviour.’ He took off his sou’wester revealing thin sandy hair. ‘Surtsey was the beginning of time, the answer to everything …’

  Sigurdson, who had never displayed leanings towards metaphysics, looked at me and shrugged, indicating impatience with all eccentricity.

  We put Hafstein’s body in the boat that had brought Sigurdson to Surtsey. Sigurdson took the scientist’s name and address; we prepared to leave.

  I put a last question to the scientist. ‘You reached Hafstein first. Did he say anything?’

  The scientist looked at me vaguely. ‘Only two words.’

  Sigurdson said: ‘What were they?’ His voice sounded angry from having to ask.

  ‘He said, “German church”.’

  What the hell did that mean? Nearly all the churches in Iceland were German in a sense because of their Lutheran origins.

  Sigurdson said: ‘Is that all?’ His tone implied that the scientist should have extracted more from the dying man.

  ‘That was all.’

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ Sigurdson said accusingly.

  ‘It must mean something,’ I said. ‘I think it probably means a lot.’

  Sigurdson said: ‘We must pull in Magnusson and Laxdal now – if they’re still around.’ We crunched down the cinders to the two boats. ‘Shall we accompany Hafstein back to Heimaey?’

  ‘If you wish,’ I said. I told the fisherman I would meet him at the harbour and pay him.

  The sky was still clear, the sea much calmer. I waved to the scientist but he took no notice. We joined the corpse in the boat and headed for Heimaey.

  I looked back at Surtsey once more, when we were a few hundred yards away. The scientist was kneeling on the cinders, a bright yellow figure on the burnt virgin island. He was probably looking at the blood losing itself in the ash: the last evidence of death on the island where he had gone to observe the birth of life.

  ‘The Garden of Eden,’ I said.

  ‘It doesn’t look much like the Garden of Eden,’ Sigurdson said.

  ‘I was speaking figuratively.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said.

  We flew back in my aircraft. Magnusson had flown to the mainland and Sigurdson had converted his disappointment into anger at the blue-chinned policeman.

  The little aircraft bucketed around in high winds. Sigurdson explained that the blue calm had merely been the centre of the storm.

  We bounced along the runway at Reykjavik and the wind tried to tug us on to the grass.

  As we climbed out I said: ‘By the way, what did you find in the cave that led you to Surtsey?’

  He looked rather proud of himself. ‘There was a picture of Surtsey lying just at the mouth of the cave. He had written on top of it The Final Refuge. He must have dropped it in his hurry. He had been scribbling on it. What do you cal1 that scribbling?’

  ‘Doodling,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, doodling. He had drawn a lot of birds on the rocks and a little church on the top.’

  13

  The Latchkey belonging to a Girl working in the office of a Barrister

  Charlie Martz told me on the phone that diplomatic pressure to force the Americans to hand Shirey over was building up.

  ‘Have they named Shirey yet?’

  ‘Not yet. Have you dug up anything that could justify us holding on to him?’

  ‘I’ll tell you later,’ I said – because I hadn’t dug anything up. ‘I’ll be coming up your way.’

  ‘I guessed you would,’ he said. ‘There’s a flight due in from London, isn’t there?’

  ‘All in the line of duty,’ I said.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘But what do I tell this creep Jefferey?’

  ‘The same message,’ I said.

  ‘Okay – but he must be getting quite sore by now because I keep giving him the same message.’

  I didn’t ask whether he meant physically or mentally sore. The other development during the visit to the Westman Islands was that Laxdal was missing. He had taken off an hour before
we returned. I checked with traffic control but he hadn’t given a destination.

  I let myself into his office. He had left behind a strong odour of aftershave. I opened the drawer of his desk: the picture of Gudrun had disappeared. I checked the phone: the bug was still there.

  I didn’t think we had lost him. He hadn’t found the bug and like Magnusson he thought that my inquiries were centred on Hafstein. Now that Hafstein was dead the crucial time for Laxdal and Magnusson would be the next twenty-four hours: during that time they would discover whether my only prey had been Hafstein.

  Despite Sigurdson’s suggestion I decided against an immediate confrontation with either of them. The next few hours would be just as crucial for us. If they were happy that I had been concentrating only on Hafstein then it proved that Hafstein was unconnected with the infiltration of Russian agents.

  But why had Gislason, the agent whom the Icelandic policeman had shot in the forest, kept Hafstein’s name in his pocket? It was, among other things, amateurish. Granted, Soviet espionage was frequently amateurish – as were the espionage organisations of most countries – but that was sheer blundering.

  The only protagonist with whom I had not yet made any sort of contact was Magnusson.

  I let myself out of Laxdal’s office and walked across the grass to the coach station. It reminded me of Russia. Spacious and modern and soulless, with a girl with a transparent blouse and black brassière selling tickets inside a glass cage. The girl in the apartment in Moscow had worn a black brassière.

  I ordered coffee at the bleak ‘Russian’ bar. The whole building had been designed as if Iceland were an offshore island of the Soviet Union. Only the massive docility – a docility founded on fear – of the waiting passengers was missing. It was my job to ensure that such docility was never forced upon the Icelandic people. I had to find out about Magnusson, the enigma in the cast.

  I phoned Sigurdson and said: ‘Did you make that fitting in the trawler owner’s office?’

  ‘We did,’ Sigurdson said. So Magnusson’s office was bugged, too.

  ‘Any results?’

  ‘Nothing of importance. Mostly talk about cod and herring.’ He rejected reticence on the phone as unnecessary. He said: ‘By the way, that bullet was British.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way,’ I said. ‘And I’d like to hear the tapes from Magnusson’s office some time.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘No, not now. Tomorrow, perhaps.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘The Icelandair flight is due in from London.’

  Were we all watching each other? And wouldn’t it have been much easier if we had employed some agency to do the job?

  ‘All in the line of duty,’ I said.

  ‘When should we question our two friends?’

  ‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘I’m not convinced it’s the right thing to do.’

  ‘I’ve had all the papers from the cave picked up. If you want to study them they are at your disposal.’

  ‘Later,’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘Don’t forget that we will find some real girls when this is over.’

  ‘I won’t forget,’ I said. But there didn’t seem to be much wrong with the one I’d got.

  As I left the phone kiosk a small girl pointed me out to her mother. I remembered that my drip-dry clothes hadn’t dripped completely dry and that my trouser leg was stained with blood.

  I took a taxi back to the city airport and waited while the driver compared the conversion chart with the price on the meter – the meters couldn’t keep up with devaluation in Iceland. The cab drivers in Reykjavik seemed to be more honest than most; Muscovite cab drivers had also been comparatively honest. I drove back to Baragata, changed, then pointed the Chevrolet towards Keflavik and felt excited because I was meeting my girl. At the same time I wondered if she would have considered it immoral to have slept with the pilot in one of the hotels adjoining London Airport – bearing in mind her relationship with me.

  Once again I accelerated past Stapi. Who had taken a shot at me there? Magnusson, probably. Certainly not Hafstein. And sniping was somehow out of character with Laxdal: he was too flamboyant as if he were trying to cover up a defect in his personality – cowardice perhaps.

  German Church. What German Church? Hafstein had been interested in every bloody church in Iceland. The only church I could directly connect him with was the church beside the mud pools. But that was Roman Catholic, possibly the least German church on the island.

  I went first to the base and found Charlie Martz in his quarters with his wife and two daughters. His wife was a good-looking, hospitable woman in her thirties, happy to be wherever her husband was but wishing he were somewhere else; his daughters were pretty and bouncy and wore white knee-socks. Route 66 was on the television; they switched it off.

  Martz poured us both some whisky in chunky glasses crammed with ice. The girls, aged about eleven and twelve, sat cross-legged on the floor and stared at me with interest that didn’t flatter.

  ‘I hear you’re an ornithologist,’ Mrs Martz said.

  I said I was. She addressed the girls. ‘Why don’t you two do something like that?’

  ‘What is it?’ one of them asked.

  ‘Bird watching,’ Mrs Martz said.

  ‘Oh,’ they said, and disappeared into their bedrooms.

  Mrs Martz persevered. ‘I believe you’re studying the fall-out from Hekla.’ She must have guessed that I had other interests.

  ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I hear you’re having a show of a rather different kind here tomorrow.’

  ‘You mean the demonstration? It’s all such a pity. Relationships were getting so much better.’

  ‘It’s a pity the servicemen aren’t allowed to stay in town in the evenings,’ I said. I turned to Martz. ‘Incidentally Charlie, why aren’t they? They’re not vampires …’

  ‘We just like to play it safe,’ Martz said. ‘We don’t want to give the Commies any ammunition. It only needs one fight over a girl and you’ve got trouble. You know how it is – girls in any part of the world like a change. The Icelanders are tough, brusque, rough guys. It only needs some smooth-talking jerk from Los Angeles or Chicago or some place to move in on one of their girls and wham! – you’ve got yourself a brawl.’

  ‘So 3,000 Americans have to be off the streets because you’re afraid a handful of Communists might make capital out of a good healthy punch-up?’

  Martz drank deeply and the ice clicked against his teeth. ‘I didn’t make the rules. And I didn’t say I agreed with them.’

  Mrs Martz said: ‘Would you like another drink, Mr Conran?’

  I gave her my glass. My leg was hurting and I felt bad-tempered. ‘Do you like it in Iceland, Mrs Martz?’

  ‘I like to be where my husband is.’ She qualified this. ‘It’s not too bad in the summer. It’s just like being in a small American town out here. But I don’t look forward to the winter, Mr Conran. A couple of years back a little girl wandered off one evening. She wasn’t gone long. But when they found her she had fallen in a snowdrift and was almost frozen to death. We have something here in the winter called the Chill Factor.’

  ‘l know,’ I said. ‘Charlie told me about it.’

  I looked around the room and envied them their comfortable domesticity on a lava field. Even with the Chill Factor. Tall paper flowers in the corner, mementoes from Charlie’s ports of call, photographs of the kids as babies, lived-in furniture.

  Martz had probably told his wife about my private life because she remained gracious despite my bad temper. ‘I like the Icelandic people,’ she said.

  I grinned. ‘You should – they discovered America after all.’ I took a drink of Scotch dodging the rocks. ‘In fact you could argue that the Icelanders are responsible for bringing the Americans here.’

  She looked puzzled. ‘I thought Christopher Columbus found America.’

  ‘Leif Ericsson got there first. He was the son of the explorer Eric
the Red and he was born in Iceland. He reached the American coast in A.D. 999 – centuries before Christopher Columbus.’

  Mrs Martz looked inquiringly at her husband. Martz said: ‘Billy boy’s right for once. Ericsson called it Vinland. In 1965 they found a map of Vinlanda made in the fifteenth century. It was unveiled at Yale – on Columbus Day. The Spaniards and Italians in the States defended Christopher like crazy and a slogan appeared on a wall in Boston – “Leif Ericsson is a Fink”.’

  ‘Well I never,’ said Mrs Martz.

  Martz said to his wife: ‘I wonder if you would excuse us for a few moments. We’re helping Bill with some of his research and the conversation is liable to get a little technical.’

  ‘Why, of course,’ she said, having heard similar requests many times before. ‘I’ll go and tell the kids all about thatFink Ericsson.’

  ‘Well?’ Martz said when she had gone.

  I told him about Hafstein’s death.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘Did Sigurdson have to shoot to kill?’

  ‘He didn’t have much option, Charlie. Hafstein fired first.’

  ‘So that’s our principal lead dead and gone.’

  ‘I don’t think he was our principal lead.’

  ‘Then what the hell did he take off like that for? What was he doing bribing hothouse attendants and what was he doing with all that dough? What’s more, what was he doing making himself a hidey-hole up there with the puffins?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s just a hunch. Magnusson and Laxdal didn’t seem to give a damn as long as we were after Hafstein. That doesn’t figure, does it, Charlie?’

  He grunted and rubbed his scalp as if he were massaging his brains. ‘Perhaps they knew that Hafstein wouldn’t incriminate them.’

  ‘You just said he was our most important lead.’

  He sloshed some more Scotch into my glass. ‘Maybe we should give Magnusson and Laxdal a going over. We’re getting nowhere very fast at the moment.’

  ‘We’ve got nothing on them,’ I said. ‘Communism’s no crime in this country. And Magnusson is quite an influential man. Rough him up and you’ll really be in trouble.’ I paused. ‘In any case I think they’re more valuable to us the way they are.’