Far North - Michael Ridpath [109]
‘Oh, come on, Magnus, think about it. I had to do it. If there was any chance at all that you were on to something, I’d look like a right idiot if I hadn’t told people back here. Don’t worry, they’re not taking it too seriously, or else there would be a plane load of them on the way to Reykjavík. They are focusing on the Dutch angle.’
‘Dutch angle?’
‘Yes. A farmer saw a guy the day before the shooting. He was nosing around in the woods from where the shots were fired. The farmer thought he had gone for a pee. They found a hole in the earth big enough to contain a rifle; they assume the man must have been burying it. The man’s motorbike had Dutch number plates.’
‘Did he give a description?’
‘Not much. Just that the guy was wearing a light blue jacket.’
‘What have the Dutch got against your Chancellor?’ Magnus asked.
‘There is a Muslim community in Holland. Although it could just as easily be someone passing through.’
‘Al-Qaeda?’
‘That’s their favourite theory so far. Although Al-Qaeda tends to prefer blowing people up to shooting them.’
‘Interesting.’
‘I am really sorry, Magnus. I appreciate you taking me into your confidence.’
‘Don’t give me that bullshit, Sharon! I trusted you and you screwed me. It’s that simple.’
‘I did what I thought I had to do.’
‘Yeah, right. Well, keep me in the loop. And talk to Vigdís; she’s still on the case at our end. Especially if you do get a firm ID on Ísak. I’m thinking maybe he was preparing the ground in London for someone else. The guy who pulled the trigger.’
‘I see what you mean,’ said Sharon. ‘I’ll bear it in mind. Sorry, Magnus.’
‘Yeah.’ Magnus hung up.
Sharon’s contrition took some of the sting off Magnus’s anger. He liked her. What was that word she had used? Bollocking? He’d never heard that one before.
For some reason what rankled most about the Commissioner’s ‘bollocking’ was the crack about Magnus not being a real Icelander. That was because it was partially true. But he knew that even if he had spent his whole life in the country he would still have alerted Sharon to the possibility that Ísak might have been in Normandy. He would always put finding the truth before political niceties, whether he was in Boston or in Iceland.
That was just the way he was.
What was the Commissioner thinking of anyway? Magnus hated it when his bosses talked about the ‘bigger picture’, the ‘political angle’. Justice wasn’t like that. The law wasn’t like that. If someone broke the law, especially if that someone had murdered someone else, then it was Magnus’s duty to bring him to justice. Not just Magnus’s duty, everyone else’s.
Simple. Once politics took precedence over the law, things fell apart. He’d seen it in Boston and now he was watching it in Iceland.
He wondered whether the Commissioner would follow through on his threat to send him back to America. Perhaps that would be a good thing. Perhaps the Commissioner was right, Magnus wasn’t a true Icelander at all. This wasn’t where he belonged: he belonged on the streets of Boston, processing the dead bodies with holes in them.
He could go back to Boston, and Ingileif could go to Germany. That would be good for her. But it would be a shame. He still didn’t know what kind of relationship he had with her. Her explanation that it was because of him that she wanted to stay in Iceland surprised him. And pleased him.
He walked on towards Borgartún, the avenue lined with the gleaming new bank headquarters. Just in front of it, in its own green island surrounded by roads and modern offices, was the Höfdi House. It was an elegant white wooden mansion built at the beginning of the twentieth century, and famous as the meeting place of Reagan and Gorbachev in 1986. It was also the place where Ingileif had asked him to meet her to talk about the case he was working on when he had arrived in Iceland the previous spring. The place where Ingileif changed in his eyes from being another witness to something more.
He realized that in his mind the Höfdi House would always be connected with her.