Far North - Michael Ridpath [138]
Anna Ösk looked around for a child. As a rule, grown-ups didn’t play hide-and-seek by themselves. She couldn’t see one, but she was sure there must be one somewhere. Probably at the front of the house, the man was well hidden from the front or the road.
Very strange. She would tell her mummy what she had seen.
‘Anna Ösk!’ Her mother’s voice crashed up the stairs. This didn’t sound good.
‘Anna Ösk, come downstairs this minute! How many times have I told you to pick up your toys from the kitchen floor when you have finished playing? I’ve had enough! No TV this afternoon, do you hear me?’
Anna Ösk began to cry.
Magnus pulled up outside the wooden police station in Grundarfjördur and stepped out of the Range Rover.
‘Magnús!’
He turned to see the burly figure of Páll in his black uniform walking rapidly towards him from the direction of the harbour.
‘That was quick,’ Páll said.
‘Not much traffic.’
Páll smiled.
‘Any trace of Björn?’ Magnus asked.
‘None so far. No one has seen him for a couple of days in the harbour. It’s unlikely he took a boat out: certainly no one saw him if he did. The harbourmaster said he would check whether any small boats were missing that hadn’t been reported. I stopped in quickly to talk to his parents and his sister. They say they haven’t heard anything from him either. Same at the café the fishermen often use. The police in Stykkishólmur and Ólafsvík are looking for him too. They’ve set up road blocks on every route out of the peninsula.’
That at least was possible: there were no more than a couple of routes out of the Snaefells Peninsula. But the peninsula itself was big, perhaps eighty kilometres long and fifteen wide, and full of mountains. Impossible to search thoroughly.
Magnus wondered about a helicopter. But although sun shone along the shoreline, the mountains themselves were enveloped in cloud.
Of course if Björn had left the area the night before he could be over the other side of Iceland by now. But if he was planning to hide Harpa he might choose somewhere he knew. Somewhere close to home.
‘So what’s next?’
‘I thought shops and petrol stations,’ said Páll. ‘He may have stocked up with supplies or fuel. There aren’t many of them in town: do you want to split up or come with me?’
‘Let’s do it together,’ Magnus said. ‘You know the town and the people. I’ll just waste time.’
‘Good,’ said Páll moving towards his white police car. ‘Jump in. And you can tell me what’s really going on.’
Ísak drove his mother’s poor Honda off what was left of the track, and round the back of a large conical rock. Miraculously the axle didn’t break. He scuffed the tyre marks in the dirt with his foot. He didn’t want Björn to notice the car should he decide to drive back up the pass.
He took the knife he had bought in Borgarnes out of the plastic bag and thrust it into the pocket of his coat. Then he crept back to the boulder. The hut was about two hundred metres from where the road emerged into the open. There was virtually no cover, but only one of the windows in the hut faced that way, and that was high up, probably a little higher than eye level.
He noticed that the cloud was thickening and creeping down the walls of the valley.
On the other side of the building was a cliff about thirty metres high, with a waterfall cascading down it. There seemed to be a vertical crevice in the rock there big enough for a man to squeeze and still have a view of the hut.
Ísak gave it a try. He ran, crouching, around the hut, keeping himself out of the field of vision of the bigger windows at the side of the building. He pressed himself into the crevice. His view of the hut was indeed clear, and he was pretty sure that Björn wouldn’t be able to see him. The only problem was that water from the cascade was constantly splashing on to him, and it was cold. Very cold.
He would wait until Björn left the hut again. Then he would slip inside and deal with Harpa. Wait until Björn came back and as he discovered her body, slash a tyre of Björn’s truck and run up the road to his own car.
Leave it to Björn to dispose