66° North (12 page)

More sober heads assumed he had somehow fallen into Breidafjördur and been swept away into the ocean.

Hallgrímur walked over the snow-covered home meadow down to the church. It was little more than a hut, with black painted wooden walls and a red metal roof. There was no spire, just a white cross above the entrance. It was surrounded by a low wall of stone and turf, and a graveyard of a mixture of old grey headstones and newer white wooden crosses. Hallgrímur’s ancestors lay there. One day, in the far off future, perhaps in the twenty-first century if he was lucky, Hallgrímur would join them.

There was no pastor of Bjarnarhöfn. The pastor at Helgafell, the small bump in the distance near the town of Stykkishólmur, held services there once a month.

Hallgrímur opened the door. Benni was sitting in the front pew, staring at the altar. He had a book on his lap. Hallgrímur recognized it, it was Benedikt’s copy of the
Saga of the People of Eyri
.

‘Hello,’ said Hallgrímur, joining him. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I am trying to pray,’ said Benedikt.

‘What for?’ said Hallgrímur. ‘They won’t find him.’

‘For his soul.’

‘Ah,’ said Hallgrímur. He had never quite got to grips with the concept of soul. ‘Are you all right, Benni?’

‘No. I feel so bad for my mother. She has no idea what happened to Dad and she will never find out. Unless I tell her.’

‘You can’t do that,’ said Hallgrímur.

‘Why not?’ said Benedikt. ‘I think about it all the time.’

‘It will get us into trouble.’

‘Not very much trouble,’ said Benedikt. ‘We didn’t kill him.’

Hallgrímur frowned. ‘It would get my father into a lot of trouble.’

‘Perhaps he deserves it.’ Benedikt glared at Hallgrímur.

‘And your father, too. I know he’s dead, but everyone thinks he’s a hero. They won’t think that if they know what he did.’

‘Maybe.’

The two boys stared at the altar and its simple cross.

‘Benni?’

‘Yes?’

‘If you do tell anyone, I will kill you.’ Hallgrímur didn’t know why he made the threat: it just came out of nowhere. But he knew he meant it. And the fact that he had uttered it in the church gave it greater meaning.

Benedikt didn’t answer.

‘Tell me a story from in there, Benni,’ Hallgrímur said, tapping the book on Benedikt’s lap.

‘All right,’ said Benedikt. He was still staring ahead at the altar, not looking at Hallgrímur. ‘Do you remember Björn of Breidavík?’ Benedikt didn’t need to open the book: he knew all the stories.

‘The one who went to America and became a chieftain?’

‘Yes. Do you want to know why he went there?’

‘Why?’

‘There was a beautiful woman called Thurídur who lived at Fródá. It’s near Ólafsvík.’

‘I know.’

‘Even though she was someone else’s wife, Björn kept on going to see her. He loved her.’

‘Oh.’ Hallgrímur wasn’t sure he liked the sound of this story.

‘Thurídur’s brother was a great chieftain called Snorri who lived at Helgafell.’

‘Yes, you have told me about him.’

‘Well, Snorri was angry with Björn and had him outlawed so he had to leave Iceland.’

‘That was then,’ Hallgrímur said. ‘My father couldn’t have got your father outlawed. That doesn’t happen any more.’

Benedikt ignored him. ‘A few years later Björn returned to Breidavík and went back to seeing Thurídur. This time Snorri sent a slave to kill Björn, but Björn caught the slave and had him killed instead. There was a big battle between the families of Björn and Snorri on the ice below Helgafell. In the end Björn left Iceland of his own accord. He ended up in America with the Skraelings.’

‘Perhaps your father should have gone to America,’ said Hallgrímur.

Benedikt turned away from the altar to look straight at Hallgrímur. ‘Perhaps Björn should have killed Snorri.’

Magnus carried the two cups of coffee from the counter and sat down opposite Sigurbjörg. They were in a café on Borgartún. He had called her early, catching her just as she arrived in her office, and she had agreed to see him for a few minutes before the working day began in earnest.

He had woken up at four-thirty thinking about what Sigurbjörg had told him back in April, and had been unable to get back to sleep. Denial wasn’t going to work. He had heard what he had heard and he was going to have to make sense of it. The sooner the better.

The café was busy with office workers loading up on caffeine, mostly to go, so there were a few seats available.

‘I’m glad you called,’ said Sibba in English. ‘I didn’t think you would.’

‘Neither did I,’ said Magnus. ‘It was kinda weird seeing you yesterday.’

‘OBG is a good client of our firm’s, as you can imagine. Do you want to ask me about Óskar Gunnarsson? That might be tricky.’

‘No, no.’ Magnus took a deep breath. ‘I wanted to talk about our family.’

‘I wondered,’ said Sibba. ‘Have you seen any of them since you’ve been here?’

‘Only you that once.’

‘I can understand why you would want to avoid them, especially after the way Grandpa treated you last time you were here.’

Magnus had summoned up the courage to travel back to Iceland when he was twenty, just after his father died. He had hoped to achieve some kind of reconciliation with his mother’s family. It hadn’t worked: the trip was as painful as he had feared.

‘Have you been up to Bjarnarhöfn recently?’ Magnus asked.

‘Yes. I took my husband and the kids to stay in Stykkishólmur for a few days in July with Uncle Ingvar. He’s a doctor at the hospital there. But we visited Grandpa and Grandma a few times.’

‘How are they?’

‘Very good, considering their age. They both still have all their marbles. And Grandpa still potters about on the farm.’

‘But Uncle Kolbeinn does most of the work?’

‘Oh, yes. And he lives in the farmhouse. Grandpa and Grandma have moved into one of the smaller houses.’

Bjarnarhöfn was made up of a number of buildings: barns, three houses and of course the little church down towards the fjord.

‘Has he changed much?’

‘No. He’s pretty much set in his ways.’

‘The old bastard,’ Magnus muttered.

Sibba looked sympathetic. ‘You didn’t enjoy your time at Bjarnarhöfn, eh?’

‘No. You were lucky growing up in Canada, away from them.’

‘I remember visiting when I was a child,’ Sibba said. ‘In fact, I remember staying at Bjarnarhöfn when you and Óli were there. You were both very quiet. Like you were scared of Grandpa.’

‘We were. Especially Óli.’ Magnus winced. ‘It’s still difficult to think about it now. You know Óli and I never talked about it after we went to America? It’s like the whole four-year period was blanked out of our minds.’

‘Until I came along?’ Sibba said. ‘I’m sorry. I should never have told you about your father and the other woman. It just didn’t occur to me that you wouldn’t know, it’s all that the rest of the family ever talked about. But of course I was older than you: you and Óli were just little kids.’

‘I’m glad you did, Sibba. In fact, that’s what I want to ask you about.’

‘Are you sure?’ Sibba said.

‘Yes.’ Magnus nodded. ‘I need to find out what happened in my parents’ lives. It’s been nagging at me ever since Dad was murdered.’

Sibba’s eyebrows rose in surprise. ‘This doesn’t have anything to do with
that
, does it?’

‘I doubt it. But I’m a cop, I like to ask questions until I get answers. You are the only member of the family I think I could talk to. Grandpa has turned the others pretty much against me.’

Hallgrímur, Magnus’s grandfather, had three sons and a daughter: Vilhjálmur the eldest, who had emigrated to Canada in his twenties, Kolbeinn, Ingvar and Margrét, Magnus’s mother. Sibba was Vilhjálmur’s daughter who had grown up and been educated in Canada, but had moved to Iceland after university, gone to law school and then on to a career as a lawyer in Reykjavík. Magnus had always liked her the most of his mother’s family.

She looked at Magnus closely. ‘So, fire away. I’m not sure how much I can help you.’

Magnus sipped his coffee. ‘Do you know who the other woman was?’

‘I did, but… no… I forget her name,’ Sibba winced, struggling to remember. She shook her head. ‘No. It will come to me. She was Aunt Margrét’s best friend from school. She lived in Stykkishólmur. They both went to teacher training school in Reykjavík.’

‘Was she teaching at the same school as Mom?’

‘No idea.’

‘Did you ever meet her?’

‘No. But I heard about her. I could ask my father, if you like?’

‘That would be great. But do me a favour. Don’t tell him that it was me asking.’

‘OK,’ said Sibba, reluctantly. She checked her watch. ‘I’ve got to go. I’ve got a meeting in five minutes.’

She stood up and kissed Magnus on the cheek. It was a nice gesture. Magnus was short of family in Iceland: there were none left on his father’s side. This was the closest he got.

‘Are you
sure
you want to know all this?’ she asked.

Magnus nodded. Ingileif was right. ‘I’m sure.’

Björn rode his bike the short distance from Seltjarnarnes down to the harbour. Harpa had left early for the bakery, dropping Markús off with her mother on the way. Björn had told Harpa he was going back to Grundarfjördur to join a trawler that was going out for a couple of days. He had an hour or two to kill, so he went down to his favourite place in Reykjavík.

He parked his bike and strolled along the quayside. There were not many boats around: a large Russian trawler, and a couple from the Westman Islands, plus a few much smaller vessels. The Old Harbour in Reykjavík was of course much larger than Grundarfjördur, but these days it seemed quieter. The concentration of fishing quotas in fewer and fewer hands over the previous twenty-five years meant that there were fewer boats, and those
boats that were around spent more time at sea. It was all much more efficient, and Iceland was one of the very few countries in the world whose fishermen made money rather than consuming government subsidies. But this profitability had come at a cost: boats scrapped, fishermen losing their jobs, sometimes whole communities shut down.

Until the
kreppa
, Björn had been a beneficiary of all this. His uncle in Grundarfjördur had been one of the original recipients of a quota, which had been granted to those men who were fishing between the years 1980 and 1983. The quota represented the right to fish a certain proportion of a total amount of catch set each year by the Marine Research Institute and the Ministry of Fisheries, depending on the level of fish stocks. The fortunate ‘quota kings’ as they soon became known, had either continued to fish, or sold out to larger companies for millions, or sometimes hundreds of millions of krónur. Einar, Harpa’s father, had done just that. Björn’s uncle had sold his quota and his boat,
Lundi
, to Björn at a low price, but even so, Björn had had to borrow heavily from the bank.

Björn had been fishing with his uncle since the age of thirteen. He was a natural, they said he could think like a cod, and he was also quick to understand and make the most of the new technology that was becoming available for mapping the sea bed and locating shoals of fish. Soon he had paid down most of his debt. Then he borrowed more to buy the quota of another small fisherman in Grundarfjördur. The quota applied to the proportion of a catch and not to a particular boat, so the secret to profitability was to own as high a level of quota as one boat could sustain. Then, in 2007, he took down another loan to buy a third small quota and some state-of-the-art electronics for
Lundi
.

His old school friend from Grundarfjördur, Símon, who had become a banker rather than a fisherman, and who had just left one of the Icelandic banks to join a hedge fund in London, advised him. The thing to do was borrow in a mixture of Swiss francs and yen, because the interest rates were low and the Icelandic króna
would stay strong. It was what Símon was doing on a major scale at his hedge fund, and he was making a fortune.

Björn took his friend’s advice and for a while things worked out fine. Then the króna began to depreciate, and although the interest rate was still low, the size of his loan in krónur was growing fast. The
kreppa
came in earnest, the Icelandic banks went bust, the króna collapsed and Björn’s loans ballooned way above any amount he could ever possibly repay.

He received a good offer for his quota and his boat from a large company in Akureyri in the north. He took it, and paid down the bank as much as he could. And now he was begging for work from anyone who would take him on. He had an excellent reputation as a fisherman, but he found it difficult to shut up and take orders when he had his own views on where the fish were and how to catch them, so some of the captains, like Gústi, saw him as a threat. But Björn could still just about make a living and he could still go out to sea.

He had lost his boat and his dreams. All he had wanted since he was a boy was to own a fishing boat and hunt the fish. And now it was denied him.

When he had seen Símon one Friday night in Reykjavík a month after the banks collapsed, his friend was surprised at Björn’s misfortune. Símon had unwound that trade the previous spring and gone the other way. His fund had made millions.

Bastard.

Björn hadn’t seen Símon since then.

Now the politicians were talking about joining the European Union. They promised that Icelandic fish would be kept safe for Icelandic fisherman, but Björn knew that within a decade the Spanish, the French and the British would have helped themselves to his country’s carefully husbanded stocks, leaving nothing for the Icelanders.

And all this had been caused by a bunch of speculators sitting on their fat arses in overheated offices borrowing money they didn’t have to buy stuff they didn’t understand.

Bastards.

Björn’s father, a postman and a lifelong communist, was right after all. They were all bastards.

The wind was picking up. Small clouds skipped across the blue sky above, and even in the sheltered harbour the little fishing boats bobbed, creaked and rattled. Björn walked back down the quay to Kaffivagninn, the café used by the fisherman. It was almost empty. He glanced around, looking for Einar who often hung around there, eager to share a yarn with anyone who would listen, but he couldn’t see him. He bought himself a coffee and
kleina
, sat at a table by the window and thought of Harpa.