Far North - Michael Ridpath [33]
‘María?’
‘Yes. She’s an old friend of mine. And she was Óskar’s girlfriend for a couple of years. She was the reason he got divorced. She’s married now, to someone else, but she can tell you all about him.’
‘Hmm.’ Sexual jealousy as a motive for murder was one of the old favourites. Ingileif was right, they should probably find out more about Óskar’s lovers, at least the ones who lived in Iceland.
‘I’ll call her now,’ Ingileif said. ‘We can meet up.’
‘Vigdís can interview her tomorrow.’
‘What do you mean? She’s my witness,’ said Ingileif, rolling out of bed to dig out her mobile phone. ‘Isn’t that the technical expression?’
‘Not exactly.’
Ingileif held up her finger to shush him. ‘María? Hi, it’s Ingileif. Hey, I wanted to talk to you about Óskar. It must be terrible for you.’
Five minutes later Ingileif had fixed up for Magnus to go to María’s house to interview her the following morning. Ingileif was pleased with herself. ‘We’ll have this solved in no time,’ she said. ‘So who did you see today?’
‘My cousin, Sibba,’ Magnus answered.
‘Is she a witness?’
‘No. But she was acting as a lawyer for Óskar’s sister.’
‘Wait. You mentioned her before. She’s the cousin on your mother’s side, isn’t she?’
‘Yes. Yes, that’s right.’
‘The one who told you about your father screwing your mother’s best friend?’
‘Yes.’ Magnus’s voice was hoarse. ‘Do you mind if we don’t talk about it? I shouldn’t have mentioned it. I don’t want to think about it.’
‘OK,’ said Ingileif, and squeezed his hand.
But Magnus was thinking about it. Until the age of eight Magnus had had an idyllic childhood. His mother taught at school, his father at the university and he and his brother Óli played in the garden of their little house with its bright blue corrugated metal roof, only a short distance from where Magnus was living now in Thingholt.
But then things had changed, changed horribly. His father had announced he was leaving to go to a university in America. His mother, alone in charge of the boys, began to drink. The two boys were sent to stay with their grandparents on their farm at Bjarnarhöfn on the Snaefells Peninsula. That period of his life Magnus had blanked from his memory, but he knew that the scars were still there, buried deep under his skin.
The scars were more obvious in the case of Óli. He had never really recovered from his time at the farm.
Then one day their mother killed herself in a car crash. She was drunk. Finally, the two boys’ father, Ragnar, came over from America to rescue them and take them back with him to Boston. Magnus was twelve, Óli ten.
As Magnus had grown up and begun to understand more about alcoholism, he had developed his own way of making sense of his parents’ lives. His mother, his alcoholic mother, not the beautiful woman he dimly remembered from his childhood, was the villain, his father the hero.
That was until he had bumped into Sigurbjörg in the street four months before. She had shattered Magnus’s idea of history by telling him that his father had had an affair with his mother’s best friend. That’s what had driven her to drink. That’s what had caused him to run away to America. That’s what, ultimately, had led to her death.
It was this knowledge that Magnus had tried to cram back into its box.
‘You’re still thinking about Sibba, aren’t you?’ Ingileif said. ‘I can feel it.’
Magnus sighed. ‘Yes.’
‘You know you should face up to it. See her. Find out what really happened between your father and your mother’s friend.’
‘I said I didn’t want to talk about it.’
Ingileif ignored him. ‘I remember when you decided that you were going to stay on in Iceland. One of the reasons was that you thought there might be an Icelandic link to your father’s death.’
Magnus shook his head. ‘Ingileif…’
‘No, listen to me. You’ve obsessed about how your father was murdered and who by all your adult life. That’s why you do what you do, it’s who you are. Isn’t it?’
Reluctantly Magnus nodded. It was why he had joined the police, why he had become a homicide