Far North - Michael Ridpath [72]
Arnór returned home. His father was late back from a trip to the local town. When he failed to return home that night, his mother raised the alarm. Arnór’s father was never seen nor heard from again. The theory was that he had fled to America, but if he had, he never sent word back to Iceland. And Arnór never told anyone what he had seen.
Magnus closed the book. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said in English.
Unnur had claimed that Hallgrímur’s father had killed Benedikt’s father, Jóhannes, who was the farmer at Hraun. If the episode in the novel was based on that, that would mean that Benedikt and Hallgrímur were the two small boys, and Jóhannes’s body was in a nearby lake: either Swine Lake or perhaps the lake next to it, Hraunsfjardarvatn.
Magnus hadn’t heard anything about a neighbour being murdered, or even disappearing. But if it had happened when his grandfather was a child, that would have been in the 1930s. Neither had he heard about a writer living nearby, there certainly wasn’t one there during Magnus’s four-year stay in the 1980s. But Benedikt could easily have moved away years before.
Ingileif paused in her playing. She had noticed the stunned expression on Magnus’s face.
‘What are you reading?’ she asked.
Magnus held up the cover of his book.
‘Oh, I’ve read that. It’s not bad. I like him.’
‘I’ve never read anything he wrote until now.’
‘He’s quite good. A bit like Steinbeck, but not that good. I’ve read most of his books, I think. Why the sudden interest? And why the “Jesus Christ”?’
Magnus told Ingileif about his visit to Unnur. He felt slightly guilty about not mentioning it to her before, but she seemed to understand, and she didn’t dwell on what Unnur had said about her affair with his father, for which Magnus was grateful.
‘I remember that chapter,’ Ingileif said. ‘So this woman thinks that the guy who killed Benedikt’s father was your great-grandfather?’
‘That’s right. Gunnar was his name.’
‘Do you remember him? Was he still alive when you were at Bjarnarhöfn?’
‘No, he had been dead a long time. I don’t know very much about him. Apart from how he died.’
‘And how was that?’
‘Have you heard of Búland’s Head?’
‘It’s on the Snaefells Peninsula somewhere, isn’t it? I’ve never been there.’
‘That’s right. It isn’t too far from my grandfather’s farm. It’s one of those places that has a bunch of folk tales attached to it. The road from Grundarfjördur to Ólafsvík runs along its edge. It used to be very narrow, and it’s still pretty scary, or it was in the nineteen eighties. Apparently my great-grandfather slipped and fell. He was riding his horse.’
‘But no one told you about him being suspected of killing anyone?’
‘No. But then my grandparents would be hardly likely to tell me. As you know, I lived with my father from the age of twelve and he never spoke about my mother’s family. Do you know anything about this guy Benedikt Jóhannesson?’
‘A bit. He wrote in the sixties and seventies. I think that might have been one of his last books.’
Magnus checked the front of the book. ‘Copyright 1985.’
‘There you are. Actually, he died about then. I think he might have been murdered. I’m sure he was. Hold on, let’s google him.’
Ingileif grabbed her laptop and after a certain amount of fiddling about they were on the Icelandic Wikipedia entry for Benedikt Jóhannesson. Born 1926, died 1985. He was born and brought up on a farm on the Snaefells Peninsula. He studied Icelandic at the University of Iceland and lived in Reykjavík. He published a dozen novels, the last of which was Moor and the Man, and several collections of short stories.
‘Those are quite good,’ said Ingileif. ‘I think I prefer them to the novels, although they are not as popular.