Meltwater (41 page)

They were now very close to the power station, which was beginning to look like some exotic Cold War base from an old James Bond movie. Metal domes, wires, black rocks piled in puzzling directions and steam spewing out of the ground. They rounded a corner and were soon in a kind of stone amphitheatre, which doubled as a parking lot. One bus and a dozen or so cars were parked there.

‘We’re lucky,’ said Dúddi. ‘This place can get crowded, but it doesn’t look too bad this morning.’

They walked through a pathway cut into the rock and into a modern glass and wooden building. The entry ticket price was high. Franz took very little persuasion to pay for Erika. Dúddi said he would wait for them both in the café.

Erika went into the changing rooms and showered. She stripped off the dressing on her cheek; she was sure the water would do her wound good. She put on her rented swimsuit and went out to the lagoon.

The cold air bit her exposed skin, but it was only a few steps into the water, which was an unnatural bright milky blue. She closed her eyes as she lowered her body down to her neck and felt the warm soft liquid embrace her.

In the cold air, steam rose from the water and she couldn’t see how far the lagoon stretched. Underfoot was a soft white mud. She noticed a couple of women had smeared it on to their faces. Maybe she would try that later.

It was crowded near the entrance to the pool, and so she waded out deeper. She wasn’t looking for Franz and hoped he wouldn’t find her. She wanted to be alone.

The steam hovered just above the water, dampening sound as well as obscuring vision. Yet she could see upwards to the cold clear sky. It was a very strange sensation, to be surrounded by warmth and yet to see rock cliffs rising just a few hundred feet beyond the lagoon. The pool turned out to be quite large and she began to swim a gentle breaststroke. Eventually she reached the far side: a perimeter of rocks piled high. She could see no one through the steam.

She lay on her back and floated: it was easy to float in that mineral-rich water. She closed her eyes. She could hear the murmur of voices in many languages: English spoken with an Irish accent; Spanish; some kind of Scandinavian language with a different rhythm to Icelandic.

It felt good. It felt
so
good. There was something soft and invigorating about the water beyond just its temperature.

She had a lot to do once they reached the airport. She hadn’t yet thought how she would run the press conference, what she would say. She would decide that later.

She was proud of what they had achieved in Iceland, but the cost had been too high. Although she was angry at the way Nico had betrayed her, she was deeply sad about his death. She had enjoyed being with him.

And Ásta. Someone with so much promise ahead of her should not have died.

She thought about the man who had twice tried to attack her. Why couldn’t the police figure out who he was? Erika’s instinct was that he was Israeli. But there was something familiar about him. She was pretty sure that she had never seen him before, but he did remind her of someone.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw a figure wading through the steam. She turned to look. A wisp of steam blew away so that she saw the profile.

It was Franz.

No, the man was bigger than Franz.

Oh God! She recognized him.

She stood up straight. The man saw her and increased his stride towards her. There was no one else in sight.

Beneath the ripples she saw a dancing rod of grey steel. He was going to stab her, drop the knife and disappear into the steam.

He was only a few yards away now. Behind her was the rough rocky edge of the lagoon. She could never climb out that way in time. She was trapped.

She screamed.

Magnus drove fast. As they reached the turn-off from the airport road, he saw the lights of two police cars coming the other way from Keflavík.

‘Keep an eye out on the lava field,’ he said to his colleagues.

Although the terrain was basically flat, there were slashes across the landscape: gullies and fissures into which a vehicle could be driven or a body hidden. And, of course, there was the shoreline on the other side of the airport road. But they couldn’t see anything driving along the tracks that criss-crossed the lava field, nor the tell-tale cloud of dust that a vehicle would kick up.

They reached the parking lot for the Blue Lagoon. There was already a police car there with its blue light flashing, probably from Grindavík, the fishing village just over the low ridge of mountains. Magnus, Vigdís and Árni jumped out of the car and ran along the path to the entrance. A policeman was talking to the woman at reception.

‘Sergeant Magnús,’ Magnus said, identifying himself. ‘Has she seen them?’

‘Yes,’ the officer replied. ‘The woman and one of the men went to change. The other said he was going to the café.’

‘How long ago?’

‘Ten minutes,’ the woman at the reception desk said.

‘Vigdís, take the changing rooms. Árni, come with me. You too,’ he said to the constable.

They ran through the changing room to the edge of the pool. Magnus scanned the thirty or so swimmers he could see. No sign of anyone who looked like Erika, Franz or Dúddi. But with the steam, it was difficult to be sure.

‘Árni, take the perimeter. You stay here,’ he said to the constable. And with that he jumped in and waded fast into the steam.

The water was warm, but dragged at his sodden clothes. People stared at him. The wrong people. Not Erika.

He saw the back of a dark-haired woman swimming away from him and called Erika’s name. The woman turned around. It wasn’t her.

Then he heard a scream. It was close by. He tried to quicken his step, the water up to his chest. The steam cleared and he saw a tall broad-shouldered man moving towards a smaller figure in a black swimsuit.

‘Hey! Police!’ he shouted in English. ‘Stop!’

The man turned to face him. It was the guy who had grabbed Erika by the Saebraut. Sébastien Freitag.

Freitag was only a couple of yards from Erika, who was backed against the rock edge. He raised a knife. There was no way Magnus could get to him before he plunged it into her.

‘Cowabunga!’

A figure flew through the air from the rocky edge, screaming as it did so, and landed on Freitag’s upraised arm.

Both bodies plunged under the water. Magnus was on them, looking for the knife.

Árni screamed, in pain this time. He had his arms around Sébastien’s chest and neck, but Sébastien’s knife arm was free and was stabbing down on Árni’s back.

Magnus grabbed the arm and pulled it back. Sébastien was big, but Magnus was bigger. He banged Sébastien’s hand against the rocky wall of the pool, but Sébastien wouldn’t let go of the knife. The fingers of Sébastien’s other hand clutched at Magnus’s face, reaching for his eyes. Magnus jabbed at Sébastien’s throat with his elbow, and the knife finally slipped out of Sébastien’s grasp. Magnus wrapped his arm around Sébastien’s neck in a headlock and plunged his face under water.

Árni let go. There was a streak of red in the milky blue.

The uniformed constable jumped in next to them, handcuffs at the ready. It took them a minute but finally Sébastien was cuffed and subdued.

‘Are you OK, Árni?’ Magnus asked.

Árni flexed his shoulders. ‘It hurts, but I think it’s a scratch rather than a hole.’

‘Cowabunga?’ Magnus raised his eyebrows.

Árni shrugged, embarrassed. ‘I wanted to distract him. It was the first thing that came into my head.’

‘Nice one, Árni.’

CHAPTER THIRTY

Sunday 18 April 2010

M
AGNUS’S ALARM WENT
off: 7.50 a.m.

He rolled out of bed, padded over to his desk and powered up his laptop.

Freeflow’s press conference was at nine o’clock British time, eight o’clock in Reykjavík. Erika had told him how to watch it live on his computer.

After discussions with the Commissioner, Magnus had taken a written statement from her about the attack in the Blue Lagoon, and then let her get on her flight to Glasgow, with the promise that she would return to Iceland within three days, ash cloud permitting. It had taken two hours to find Franz, who had never actually gone into the lagoon himself, but was waiting outside with clothes for his brother. He had escaped into the nearby mountains, where a police dog had eventually tracked him down.

Both he and his brother had given lengthy statements about what they had done and why they had done it. They showed no remorse for trying to murder Erika, just regret that they had not succeeded. Magnus doubted that Franz had the guts to kill anyone himself. But even now he seemed to be under the influence of Sébastien: he was adamant that what his elder brother had done was right and that Erika had deserved to die. Reality had not sunk in. Yet.

But Sébastien had known what he was doing all along. He was a cold-blooded, calculating killer. His own grief had not given him the right to ruin the lives of all those who knew and loved Ásta and Nico. Very few people who were prosecuted in the Icelandic justice system were acquitted, and Magnus was pretty sure that Sébastien and François Freitag were going down. Which was a thought that gave him pleasure.

Árni’s knife wound was more than a scratch, but less than a hole – more of a slice, really. He had been stitched up at the hospital in Keflavík, but would be off work for a couple of days. Magnus had agreed to keep the ‘Cowabunga’ out of his report.

The computer settled down and Magnus typed in the relevant website address. A picture of an empty lectern appeared, somewhere in London. A crowd of journalists murmured out of shot. After a minute or so, the hubbub died down and two people appeared: Erika and a blonde woman of about twenty-three with a fresh rosy face.

Erika approached the microphone. ‘Good morning, everybody,’ she said. ‘And thank you for coming at such short notice. We are going to show you a video of an event that happened on 14 January 2009 in Gaza. With me is Samantha Wilton: her sister, Tamara, is one of the people you will see on the video. The video lasts three minutes, and is an edited-down version of the full sixteen-minute footage that was given to Freeflow. The unedited version is on our website, should you wish to view it.’

She paused, looking around the audience. ‘I will not tell you what we at Freeflow think of what you will soon see. That is not our role. It is up to you to interpret. But I will ask Samantha to say a few words afterwards.’

The camera switched to a projector behind the lectern where a grainy black-and-white video ran. There were subtitles as the Hebrew was translated into English. Also the names of the victims were captioned as they spilled out of their vehicle.

Magnus had seen the unedited version before, but it was just as horrifying the second time around. Worse, given the translations of the Israeli soldiers’ comments as they were firing.

The screen went black. There was a long silence, broken only by a cough from one of the journalists. Then Samantha Wilton approached the lectern and began to speak haltingly. It was disconcerting to see the identical twin of the figure that a moment earlier had been writhing in the dirt in Gaza. She was brave, she was beautiful and she was angry.

She only spoke for two minutes. Her words were understated, but they were powerful. What had just been shown was immoral, unjust, criminal. And the criminals should be made to pay.

Magnus watched Erika take a couple of questions from the journalists, and then he shut down his computer. He planned to go into the station later that morning to plough through paperwork. Murder always generated paperwork: fortunately there was less of it in Reykjavík than he was used to in Boston. But before he did that, Magnus wanted to speak to Ollie. Presumably Ollie’s flight was still scheduled to leave that afternoon – flights from Reykjavík to the States had mostly been uninterrupted. In fact, Magnus should take his brother to the airport.

There was yet another difficult conversation to be had with him. Jóhannes was right; Magnus had a duty to tell Snorri about the similarities between Benedikt’s murder and his own father’s. Perhaps on Monday. Ollie wouldn’t like that, but he had a right to know what Magnus was planning.

It was Sunday, and Ollie’s last morning, so Magnus waited an hour or so before going downstairs to wake his brother up. There were signs someone had already had breakfast.

He went through to Katrín’s bedroom and knocked on the door. Twice. Three times.

Eventually she appeared, blinking. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘Have you got my brother in there?’

‘No. He left early this morning. He says he’s going for a drive with a friend?’

‘A friend?’

‘Some schoolteacher he met.’

Schoolteacher? That must be Jóhannes. ‘Did he say where he was going?’

‘Yeah. Back to the farm where he grew up.’

Magnus drove fast, his hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly they were white. He should have been pleased that his brother was finally taking an interest in their grandfather and their father’s death, but he wasn’t. He was furious.