Far North - Michael Ridpath [34]
‘OK. So you are all excited about spending time trying to find the Icelandic angle to Óskar’s death, which you admit is very unlikely, yet you won’t find out more about an Icelandic angle to your own father’s murder. That doesn’t make sense.’
‘It’s different,’ Magnus protested.
‘Why?’
‘Because.’ He struggled to conjure up a plausible reason, but then settled on the truth. ‘Because it’s personal.’
‘Of course, it’s personal!’ Ingileif said. ‘And that’s exactly why you have to deal with it. Just like I had to find out how my own father died even though the answer was so painful to me. And don’t tell me that that wasn’t personal!’
Magnus stroked her hair. ‘No. No, I won’t tell you that.’ Ingileif’s pain had been real, was real. She was right. It had been important for her to find out the truth. So why wasn’t it important for him?
‘You’re scared, Magnús. Admit it, you are scared of what you might find out.’
Magnus closed his eyes. He hated being called a coward. It was not his self-image at all. Since his youth he had been an avid reader of the Icelandic sagas, the tales of medieval revenge and daring. There were heroes and cowards in those stories, seekers of justice and hiders from it, and Magnus saw himself as one of those heroes. He smiled to himself. There were also women urging their men-folk to get off their asses and go avenge the family honour. Women like Ingileif.
‘You are right,’ he said. ‘I am scared. But… Well…’
‘Well, what?’
‘You know I told you I spent four years at my grandfather’s farm when my father left us?’
‘Yes.’
Magnus swallowed. ‘Those are four years I don’t want to remember.’
‘What happened?’ Ingileif asked, touching his chest. ‘What happened, Magnús?’
Magnus exhaled. ‘That’s something I really don’t want to tell you. That memory has to stay in its box.’
Harpa stared out of her window at the blinking lights of Reykjavík across the bay, waiting for Björn to come. He had a big powerful motorbike, and she knew she could trust him to get down to her as fast as he could. It was a hundred and eighty kilometres, but the road was good all the way and, with the exception of the last stretch through the Reykjavík suburbs, empty.
She had been agitated since the interview with the two detectives. The big one with the red hair and the slight American accent had got under her skin. He was smarter than the skinny one she had spoken to in January. There was something about his eyes, blue, steady, understanding, that seemed to miss nothing, to see through all her protests and posturing. He knew she wasn’t telling the truth. They had no link between Gabríel Örn’s death and Óskar’s, the Gabríel Örn case was firmly closed by the authorities, but that detective knew there was something wrong.
He would be back.
Harpa had been mean to Markús, snapping at him for not tidying up his trucks. Later, when they were reading one of the poems in Vísnabókin, favourites from her own childhood, Markús had had to point out that she had read the same verse twice.
After he was in bed she had paced around the house, desperate to go for a walk on the beach at Grótta at the end of the Seltjarnarnes promontory, but unwilling to leave Markús alone in the house. She thought of calling her mother to babysit, but she couldn’t face the explanations, the small lies hiding the much bigger lie.
So in the end she had poured herself a cup of coffee and sat at the kitchen table staring out of the window, watching night settle over Faxaflói Bay, forcing herself to remain still. She was in a kind of a trance. Inside she was screaming. Outside she was motionless, frozen.
Gabríel’s death would never leave her. In some strange way, his death, or her part in it, had lodged itself somewhere inside her. It had bided its time for a few months, but now it was growing like some ghastly tropical parasite, eating her up from the inside.
That evening, she had been unable to look Markús directly in the eye. Those big, trusting, honest brown eyes. How