Black Ice (12 page)

I tried to raise Christopher but he was still out on his rounds, and  even  a couple  of hefty drinks  did  nothing to shift the lead weight  in my gut.  At first it had all seemed  a bit of a lark: not any  more,  it didn't.

When  Magnus marched in with three uniformed officers, we were both glad  to see him. Separately we gave our statements, and  that  helped  to eat  up more of the dragging time. I had a stroll outside the hotel-conscious all the time of the uniformed cop eyeing me from his car-and watched  the flags of all nations stand out  as stiff as boards  in the streaming wind.

When Petursson arrived, I waited in a downstairs side-room in the hotel while he read the statements and  then interviewed Ivan.

'Well,  Mr  Craven,' he said,  as he came  through to me,  'a pretty  pan offish  we have here, have we not?'

'Kettle- not that  it matters.'

'Of course, kettle. I am out of practice. A pretty  kettle offish, to be sure.'

Together  we  went  over   my  statement  in  detail.  I  was watching  him with interest. If the scalping- that  was how I'd started to think of it- had affected him, it was only to make him more steady  and  painstaking than  before.

When  we'd  finished  that,  I left him sitting  at  a green  card table   with  copies  of  the  statements  in  front   of  him,   and wandered over to the window.

That was when his assistant Magnus jumped me.

'Now!'  Petursson   suddenly snapped. To  my  amazement, Magnus spun  me by the shoulder and- with a merry smile on his face- swung a useful left hook at my jaw. As I went reeling back, he did his level best to stick his right arm  up to the elbow in my stomach.

Luckily for me, he'd  telegraphed them fairly well; at least  I was able to lean  back so that  the first punch  only glanced  my jaw, but the second one went in deep,  and  hurt.

'I hope you are all right,'  the senior man said, as he reached down with one hand  to help me up from the carpet.

'Is this  what  they  mean  by helping  the  police  with  their inquiries?' I gasped.

'You see,' he said, talking straight past me. 'You were wrong. He is untrained.'

'Untrained?' I looked from one to the other  but they weren't very interested.

'Yes, Sir,' said  the blond.  'No  self-defence, and  I gave  him every chance.'

'Look  pal,  next  time  you  give  me  notice  and   we'll  soon see .. .'

Well,  I was annoyed. I've  been  in my share  of saloon-bar bust-ups and  I've still got all my own teeth. They're not all in my mouth,  but at least I've got them.

Patting me on the shoulder as you might a fretful child, Petursson led me to a chair  and  sat  me down.  'Do not take it personally. After our last conversation, Magnus was of the opinion that  you  were a ... professional  gentleman in these matters. I was not so sure. So we devised this little test for you.'

'Great. Have  I passed?'

I held my head between my hands. By now the pain from my jaw had linked up neatly with the pain from the top of my head.

'What do you think?'  Petursson looked at Magnus, who shrugged and  moved  over to the door.  Then  he turned  to me again:  'You  are a puzzle for us, you see.'

'Well,  I'm  sorry  about  that.'

He turned his impassive face towards  me. His eyes -like a lot of Icelanders' - were so deep  they  must've been riveted  into place.

'You went to see Solrun- what happened to her? You went to see her  mother- what  happened to her?'

He had a point there. Even I could see that.  He didn't much care  for the rest of my activities either,  and  he didn't seem to have missed much. He didn't like the way I'd  bandied his name about  the Hagstofa.

'And   you  have  been  keeping  bad  company,' he went  on.

'Palli.'

'I thought he was a fine example of your country's youth.' That  brought some  warmth into  his voice.  'He's no  Ice

lander. He is the dregs of the American  military and even they don't want  him  any  more.'  Sitting  back,  he lit another of his small cigars. This  time he held it between his middle fingers to cut down  nicotine  stain. 'Magnus knows all about  Palli.'

Magnus stayed on guard  at the door and spoke in an official report  voice. 'Palli Olafsson? His parents were both Icelanders. They  divorced  when he was three years of age and  his mother married an American from the base. They  moved to Chicago, her  new  husband's home,  in the northern part  of the United States. He grew  up as an American  ...'

His  boss cut  in: 'See,  his environment and  his upbringing were all American. Carry on.'

'He  served  with the American marines.  Later  he was many times   in   police   troubles  and   had   to   receive   psychiatric treatment.'

He stopped. Petursson said: 'He's a bum.' He looked  round the room for an ashtray and  then crossed  and  tapped his cigar ash into a potted  plant  on the window-sill.

'How  did  he end  up here?'

'What was that  television  programme they had in America? Roots. It was that sort of thing.  He wanted  to come here to try to be an Icelander. Crazy  idea.  He is a crazy  man. Sometimes he can  be very dangerous. His head  is full of wild things.  He should  be in the kleppur.'

An alarming thought suddenly came to me. 'You don't think he had anything to do with Solrun's mother?'

He sat there, shaking his head. 'No, not Palli. We  blame him for many  things  but  not this.'

'So, who do you blame?'

Magnus coughed  and  spread   his feet.  Petursson began  to straighten up the papers in front of him. The cigar smoke was a blue mist in the beams  of sunlight from the window.

'Did  you see a lady  who was sweeping her pavement when you called? She tells us that she saw a man  in a corduroy suit with a swarthy complexion  call at  the house. She says he was with a tall skinny  man  who walked like a woman.'

Neither Ivan  nor I could quarrel with those descriptions. 'Go on.'

'Very  well. Before you two went in, she saw three  men go to the   house.   She   believes   two  of  them   were  wearing dark uniforms. They  were inside the house when you called  the first time, but left, apparently in a hurry, before you returned.'

'They were inside with ... with Solrun's mother?'

'Yes. Torturing her.'

I remembered the whimpering noise we'd  heard  that  Ivan insisted was a puppy. That must've been her. I swallowed  hard on the thought.

'Were  they looking for Solrun  too?'

He  nodded. 'That  is  my  belie(' He  beat  me  to  the  next question. 'She had been there. She arrived  and left at night  but the  woman  across  the  road  saw  her.  You  know  what  those women are like.'

'What exactly did they do to her, Petursson?'

In  a  matter-of-fact voice,  he  recited  it,  as  he  packed  his papers   into  a  soft  leather briefcase.  They   had  been  professionals. The torture was graded  so that  she would be systematically  weakened. Each time they gripped  one lock of hair- he demonstrated how they wrapped it round a finger-and ripped it out.  She  must  have  been  very  brave.  They  had  torn  out almost all her hair, but she had told them nothing. The ordeal brought on a heart  attack, and  then  I had disturbed them.

There wasn't much I could say to that.  I followed the two of them out to the door and just as they were going I remembered about  the man in the photograph. It made a handy banana skin to slip  under  his foot as he was going.

'Perhaps,' I said, 'that nice Mr Kirillina will be able to help you find Solrun.'

He stopped, and  slowly his big shoulders turned  so that  he faced me again. He was clearly surprised that I'd  picked up his name.

'Why  do you think  that?'  he asked.

'Well,  he was a leading  member  of her fan-club.'

He weighed  that  for a moment, and  then, with considerable caution, he added: 'I think Mr Kirillina would be very pleased to find her himself.'

That didn't seem to advance the sum of human  knowledge very far, or not the section of it that I was supervising. I had one last try as he waited  for the lift.

'If it's not top secret,  I'd  like to hear the detailed  description of her attackers from Solrun's mother. Will she be able to talk by tomorrow, do you think?'

The   doors   opened   and   he  and   Magnus   stepped   inside.

'Didn't I say? There won't  be any descriptions, I'm afraid. She died at sixteen-twenty.'

He balanced his wide hat on top of his creamed  head, and the doors  met.

23

I found  Palli on a stool in the hotel bar he'd  named. He hadn't got any smaller, any lovelier, or any sunnier in his disposition.

'I was  drinking a  brenni-and-coke but  for you  I'll  have  a vodka  - that   big.'  He  opened   his  fingers  to  the  barman  to indicate about half a pint of vodka. Then  he gave a silent jeering laugh.

As the glass  landed  on  the  bar,  I grabbed it and  held it at arm's length.

'Now,  before we start, there's one thing  we get straight. No pain.  No hand-squeezing, no tooth-pulling, no eye-poking and no neck-breaking. Got  me? You're going  to sit up there  like a nice   big  boy  and   smile   and   say   thank   you   to  the   kind gentleman.'

He came slowly up off the stool.  No one  had spoken  to him like that  since  he was seven,  and  they'd  probably regretted it then.

'I'll say what  the fuck .. .'

'Or,' I said,  silencing  him with one raised  finger, 'you don't get to know about today's murder.'

'What  murder?' He  sank  back.  I  was  quite   relieved.   Although  Petursson had said  it was nothing to do with  him,  he would've been my number-one suspect  for any crime  north  of Glasgow.

'Solrun's mother,' I said,  handing him his drink.

'Shit. The  old lady. Why'd anyone  want  to do that?'

I told  him what  little  I knew about  it, and  news of a juicy killing  seemed   to  calm   him  down.   He'd  certainly found   a drinking place  to match  his personality. It was a  bleak  dark barn,  and  the only other  customers were two men: one singing softly to the fruit-machine as he tried to waltz with it, and a man on the next stool who was trying  to guess his own name.

Brain-damage  boozing   used   to  be  quite   a  problem   in Iceland. He'd  managed to find the one place where traditional values still prevailed.

'Your  turn,' I said,  without  any ceremony.

'How's that?'  he said,  squinting up at  me over his second drink.

'You said you'd  tell me about  you and Solrun. The marriage - remember?'

To my surprise, in a quiet  and  reasonable tone he began  to tell me.

'Have you  heard  of Frimerkjapeninga? Sure  you  haven't. Why the hell would you? It's just another of them crazy words that's three  blocks long- they got plenty of those here, believe me. Frimer-crap, whatever the word is, is what  they call the stamp money the government here pays all the school-kids for their vacation work. Like picking up leaves in the parks and picking the weeds out, all crummy jobs like that. They stick the money away in the bank for them and when they're  twenty-two or so they can pick it up. Worth  having too. It can be a couple of thousand bucks.'

'As much  as that?'

'That's right.' He drained his drink. 'You okay for another of these?  Thanks. It's   a  long  time  between  drinks   when  I'm paying.  So that's what  they call  their  stamp money. There's only two ways of getting your hands  on it. Either  you wait till pay-out  day,  or you get married.'

He pointed  his thick blunt finger at me. 'You got it. They call them   stamp  weddings - I  think   that's  frimekjagifting, or something like that. Some of the kids get married  just so's they can pick up the cash. Then  they get divorced. Who cares- they got the money.'

'She  only married  you for the money?'

'You got it.'

I remembered what  Hulda had said.  'And  it wasn't  a real marriage. There wasn't anything between  you?'

'You  mean  true love?' He gave his sour  laugh again,  took a slot out of his new drink  and  wiped his mouth  with the back of his hand. When  the jeering,  ugly look drained from  his face, something a good deal more pleasant moved in. On anyone else you might've taken it for general  human decency. 'Truth is, 'he added, 'I was standing in for my best buddy.'

'How'd you mean?'

'Well,' he clamped  a hand  over his flat stomach as a belch erupted from his mouth, 'I said I'd tell you so I will. She was my best buddy's girl. He wanted  me to marry her so's she could get the money and  that's what  I did.'

'And  you're not going  to tell me who your  best buddy  is?'

'No sir, I am not.  He asked  me to look after  his desert-bike and  I did, and he asked me to look after his baby and I did.  No problem.'

'That's the Triumph Trophy, is it?'

The  glass stopped  halfway  to his mouth  and  his face burst into one big grin.

'The six-fifty?' I went on.

'Hell,  how  about   that,   we  gotta   guy  who  knows  about desert-bikes.'

The  truth  is that  I don't know much  about  them at all. I'd recognised  it: but then, with those old-fashioned sit-up handle bars and high ground  clearance, it wasn't all that clever. I knew that  they were the great  classic bikes of the sixties. You had to be able to handle  them too- not like these modern  rockets that the kids strap themselves inside before they close their eyes and pray. What  might've been a little bit clever was that I'd  noticed the chain, clean enough  to wear as a slightly oily necklace- the sign of a man  who loved bikes.

What   had  happened was  that  somewhere along  the  way, among  the  thousands of people I'd  chatted to and  thousands I'd  interviewed, or among  the thousands of bits and  pieces I'd written  and  thousands I'd  read,  someone  had  told  me about desert-bikes, and  a bit of it had stuck.  But for the next  thirty minutes he told me how much he knew about  them- which actually  was a lot- and  he still thought I was an expert.

And as he talked,  I saw the way he changed. He'd  begun by wanting to demonstrate his fury and  his cruelty. But when  he talked  about  something he loved,  you  could  almost  see  the bunched  muscles soften and  pleasure  drive  the tension  out of his gripped  face.