Far North - Michael Ridpath [127]
The other items were just cover: to make it less likely that the shopkeeper would take note of a stranger coming into town to buy a knife, and just a knife.
His phone beeped. He pulled it out. A text message from Sophie asking where he was. He had no intention of replying. A shame about Sophie. She was cute but that relationship had no future. She would figure out eventually what he was up to, and she was too much of a good girl not to tell someone.
The back of his mother’s Honda was filled with his parents’ camping equipment. Ísak had parked it under the rocky outcrop upon which the church at Borgarnes stood. The town was about a third of the way between Reykjavík and Grundarfjördur. He pulled out a map and examined it.
Björn had talked about a hut on a mountain pass behind Grundarfjördur. Grundarfjördur was on the north coast of the Snaefells Peninsula, the backbone of which was a range of mountains. There was no pass directly to the south of Grundarfjördur, but there were two candidates a little further away, one to the east and one to the west. Ísak would check these first.
He felt tense and strangely excited. Gabríel Örn’s death had genuinely shocked him. But over time he had got used to the idea, and his anger with the Icelandic establishment, including his father, had grown. When he, Björn and Sindri had met that summer to talk about taking things further, intellectually he had been all for it. But, like the other two, he hadn’t been ready to pull the trigger himself. They had found someone else to do that.
But now, after Óskar and Julian Lister, Ísak was ready to do the deed himself.
And there was no doubt in his mind Harpa had to be killed.
He had spent so long reading and arguing about ideas such as ‘the end justifies the means’, and ‘the vanguard of the people’, it was exciting to find himself actually living by those precepts. Lenin, Trotsky, Castro, Che Guevara, they had all begun their careers like him, young intellectuals with ideas and enthusiasm but no experience of violence. And then at some point ideas had become action. That point for him was now.
He knew Björn had given up hope of getting away with it, and he suspected that Sindri had too, but he still thought there was a good chance that they might escape prosecution. None of the three of them had actually killed anyone and there was no evidence suggesting they had. Conspiracy would be much harder to prove, especially if the police had no idea who had actually been pulling the trigger. Which Ísak was pretty sure they didn’t.
Sindri was naïve hoping that the time of revolution was now. It would come, it might take years, but civil society would eventually break down under the weight of the contradictions of capitalism. And when it did, Ísak would be ready for it. He would spend the coming years building up an elite cadre of revolutionaries, a true vanguard of the proletariat who would be able to lead people like Björn to a better world.
It would come. He was young. He could be patient.
Everything would be fine as long as they all stayed quiet. He thought he could trust Björn and Sindri to do that. But not Harpa. Harpa would talk.
He would have to be careful. Killing Harpa would of course lead to its own inquiry and he would be a prime suspect. He would have to be sure not to leave any forensic evidence in the Honda. It would be important to dispose of the body miles away from Grundarfjördur, or anywhere he had been seen.
He wouldn’t be able to set up a perfect alibi, but he had spent the previous night in a small campsite just outside Reykjavík on the road to the south-east, taking care to give the owner his name. He had got up early that morning and doubled back, driving north. Once Harpa was out of the way, he planned to drive across Iceland, through the night if necessary. If he was seen camping in Thórsmörk, well to the east of Reykjavík, the morning after Harpa’s death, the police might believe that he had spent the whole time in the area.
Ísak trusted his own intelligence. He would be able to figure it out.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR