Far North - Michael Ridpath [63]
And in the church under the hill, Magnus remembered, was the grave of Gudrún Ósvifsdóttir, the heroine of another great saga, the Laxdaela.
This landscape, that had changed so little over the last thousand years, brought those sagas that Magnus had read and reread two thousand miles away to life. Each of the farms mentioned in the sagas was still there, still farmed. Bjarnarhöfn, his grandfather’s farm, was named after Björn the Easterner, Styr had lived at Hraun, Snorri the Chieftain at Helgafell, Arnkell at Bolstad just over the mountain. The farms then would have housed more people than they did now. Most of the time, just as now, they would have taken their sheep up to the fells, tended to their horses, cultivated hay in the home meadow. Except in those days every now and then the Norse farmers would stomp back and forth across the lava plain clutching swords and battleaxes to beat the shit out of each other. Magnus’s grandparents had told Óli and him some of these stories. But they had added a veneer of darkness to them that had at first thrilled and then terrified the boys.
Magnus drove into Stykkishólmur, past his old school and on to the harbour, surrounded by a jumble of multicoloured houses clad in corrugated iron, some of them quite old. At first glance the town hadn’t changed much. The large white hospital and a Franciscan convent dominated one side of the harbour. It had been strange to see the nuns, many of them from southern European countries, around town. Iceland was emphatically not a Catholic country, so the nuns and their unfamiliar ways had seemed exotic to the local kids.
The hospital was called St Francis’s, and Magnus’s Uncle Ingvar was a doctor there. It brought back memories too. Visiting Óli. Magnus’s own brief stay for an arm broken, ostensibly while falling off a haystack. The lies. The nurse who didn’t believe him. The fear of being found out.
Forcing himself back to the present, Magnus asked around at the offices of the local fishing companies. They knew Björn Helgason, but hadn’t seen him for a couple of weeks. They were pretty sure that he wasn’t on a Stykkishólmur boat.
As he walked out along the quay, Magnus considered what to do next. He could drive back westwards along the peninsula to Ólafsvík and Rif to ask around for Björn. Or he could drive back home. Or…
Or he could see Unnur.
He knew deep down he had already taken the decision. That was one reason why he had driven all the way up here to look for Björn. That was why he had checked Stykkishólmur rather than Ólafsvík. Who was he kidding? He was here to see his father’s mistress.
Tracing someone in a small Icelandic town is not difficult. He returned to the fishing office, borrowed a phone directory, and looked under ‘U’ for Unnur – the Icelanders listed people under their first names.
She lived in a neat white house on top of a cliff overlooking the harbour. It was just beside Stykkishólmur’s modern church, which was an extraordinary edifice: a cross between a white Mexican adobe church and a space ship. It had been under construction the whole time Magnus lived around there. It was a different kind of interplanetary rocket to the Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík, but it made Magnus wonder if there was some kind of strange intergalactic theology behind Icelandic church design.
Weird.
Magnus sat outside the house for a couple of minutes. Perhaps, finally, he was getting close to understanding why his parents had split up. And maybe, just maybe, why his father had been murdered. He took a deep breath, got out of the car and rang the doorbell.
It was answered by a grey-haired woman with