As Magnus drove up the valley of the Thjorsa towards Mount Hekla, lurking behind the cloud somewhere to the south-east, the landscape became progressively bleaker. Grass gave way to black rock and mounds of sand, like the detritus of a massive abandoned coalfield. The river flowed past the rounded lump of stone several hundred feet high known as Burfell, home to trolls in the old folk tales. Just beyond, the road crossed a smaller river, the Fossa, a tributary of the Thjorsa, but still powerful, and Magnus came to a junction and a sign. Well, two signs. One said Stong. The other Road Closed.
Magnus turned. It wasn’t a road. It wasn’t even a track. There were twists, turns, steep hills, sharp drops. At one point the road was nothing but black sand. Mist swirled around Magnus as he cajoled his car through the blackened terrain. Below and to the left, the Fossa surged. Fingers of snow reached down from the mountains above, and indeed the road would have been completely impassable a couple of weeks earlier, before the snow had melted. Once or twice, Magnus debated turning back. But of course Hakon’s four-wheel-drive would have had an easier time of it.
Then he rounded a bend and saw it. The red Suzuki. It was parked on a brief stretch of road fifty feet above the river. Magnus pulled up next to it and checked the plate. Definitely the Reverend Hakon’s vehicle.
He turned off his engine and climbed out of his car.
The damp air hit his nostrils. After the whine of his own car engine and the clanking of stones and rock against the chassis, everything seemed quiet, damply quiet. Except there was a low roar, the sound of water rushing by below.
Somewhere in the fog a duck quacked. Odd to hear the sound of a living thing in that landscape.
Magnus walked over to the Suzuki. Empty. He tried the door handle. Unlocked. No keys in the ignition.
He looked around. Visibility was only a couple of hundred feet. He couldn’t see Hakon. Mist swirled around the pinnacles of twisted lava all about Magnus, odd grotesque shapes, volcanic gargoyles. Under his feet was black grit and chips of obsidian, rock melted into black glass deep within the earth and then spewed out on to the very spot where he stood.
Perhaps Hakon had abandoned the car here to walk on to Stong on foot? A possibility, Magnus could not see far enough along the road to evaluate its quality. But Hakon was an Icelander and he was driving a four-wheel-drive. He was unlikely to give up that easily.
The man was crazy, Magnus knew that. He could have set out on a long hike to God-knows-where over the bleak landscape. To the cave near Alfabrekka, perhaps? To Mount Hekla? He could be away for days.
Magnus looked around the Suzuki for footprints. There were some, but they were muddled. He moved away from the vehicle in expanding circles, but the ground was too hard to betray which direction Hakon might have gone. He did find something of interest, though.
Tyre marks. About thirty feet away from the Suzuki on a small patch of soft ground. Another car had parked there. But when?
Magnus had no idea of the last time it had rained at that particular spot. It had been beautiful in the Thjorsardalur when he and Ingileif had driven to Alfabrekka the previous day. It was possible that it might not have rained since then. Or it could have rained twenty minutes before.
He debated whether to drive on to Stong. He recalled the abandoned farm from his childhood. It lay in a small patch of green by a stream. But first he had to report what he had seen to Baldur.
He pulled out his phone. No signal, which was hardly surprising. And there wasn’t a police radio in the car.
So he decided to drive back towards the main road until he found a signal to make the call.
After a bone-shattering two kilometres, his phone, which he had placed on the seat beside him, began to ring.
He pulled over and picked it up. He couldn’t drive with only one hand on that road.
‘Hi, Magnus, it’s Ingileif.’
‘Hello,’ said Magnus, wary, yet pleased that it was her.
‘Are you OK?’
‘Yes, I’m fine.’
‘It’s just I heard on the radio this morning that there had been a shooting. A police officer was in hospital. An American had been arrested. I assumed one of the two was you.’
‘Yeah, it happened right after I went to your place last night. My partner Arni was shot. I got the guy who did it.’
‘And he was after you?’
‘He was after me.’
There was a brief silence. Then Ingileif spoke again. ‘I’ve just been to see Erna, Tomas’s mother. She lives in Hella.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘She is sure that Tomas didn’t kill my father. He couldn’t have been there. He was singing with the village choir in the Hallgrimskirkja in Reykjavik that weekend.’
‘Or so she says. She is his mother, remember?’
‘That can be checked, though, can’t it? Even seventeen years later?’
‘Yes, it can,’ admitted Magnus. Ingileif was right. It was an unlikely lie. ‘What did she say about Hakon?’
‘She’s certain that he didn’t kill Dad either. But she doesn’t have any evidence.’
‘I think we can safely ignore that,’ Magnus said.
‘I suppose so,’ said Ingileif. ‘But she did sound convincing. She also told me where Hakon hides the ring.’
‘In the altar in the church?’
‘How do you know?’
‘Tomas told me yesterday.’
‘Have you found him? Hakon?’
Magnus looked back up the road. ‘No. But I did find his car a few minutes ago. On the road to Stong. He must have gone on a hike or something. Or met someone. I found another set of tyre tracks nearby.’
There was silence at the other end of the phone. For a moment Magnus thought the connection had been dropped. The signal was still poor. ‘Ingileif? Ingileif, are you there?’
‘Yes, I’m here. Bye, Magnus.’
And she was gone.
Petur was under his car, wiping the chassis with a cloth. He had driven home from the car wash, grabbed a cloth and a bucket and then parked in a residential street a kilometre away. He didn’t want his neighbours to see him washing his car so carefully.
His phone, stuffed in his jeans pocket, rang. He rolled out from under the BMW and answered it.
‘Pesi? It’s Inga.’
He scrambled to his feet. He need to gather his wits for this conversation.
‘Inga! Hi! How are you?’
‘Why didn’t you want me to say I saw you yesterday?’
‘You were with that big cop, weren’t you?’ ‘Yes. We had just been to see the sheep farmers who went to look for Dad with Hakon. Pesi, I am pretty sure that Dad was killed. It wasn’t an accident.’
Petur realized she had given him the opportunity to go on the offensive. ‘I thought we had agreed to leave all that alone,’ he said. ‘Why were you talking to the cops about it? What could it achieve?’
‘Pesi, where were you going yesterday?’
Petur took a deep breath. ‘I can’t say, Inga. I’m sorry. Don’t ask me any more.’
‘That won’t do, Pesi. I need to know what’s going on here. Were you going to meet Hakon? On the road to Stong?’
‘Look, where are you now?’
‘Just outside Hella.’
‘OK. You’re right. You do deserve an explanation. And I’ll give you one, a full one.’
‘Go on, then.’
‘Not over the phone. We need to do this face to face.’
‘OK. I’ll be back in Reykjavik this afternoon.’
‘No, not here. You remember where Dad used to take us for picnics? The spot he said was his favourite place in Iceland?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK, meet me there. In, say, an hour and a half.’
‘Why there?’
‘I often go there, Inga. It’s where Dad is. I go there to talk to him. And I want him to be there when I talk to you.’
There was silence on the other end of the phone. Ingileif would know that such sentimentalism was unlike Petur, but then she also knew how much their father’s death had affected him.
‘OK. An hour and a half.’
‘See you then. And promise me you won’t say anything to the police. At least until after I’ve had a chance to explain things.’
‘I promise.’
Now he had a signal, Magnus called Baldur.
‘I’ve found Hakon’s car,’ he said, before the inspector had a chance to hang up on him.
‘Where?’
‘On the road to Stong. There’s no sign of him. And it’s too misty to see very far.’
‘Are you there now?’ barked Baldur.
‘No. I had to go back down the road a couple of kilometres until I could get a signal to call you.’
‘I’ll send a team up to look at it.’
‘And to search for him,’ said Magnus.
‘That won’t be necessary.’
‘Why not? Have you found him?’
‘Yes. At the bottom of the Hjalparfoss. A body was discovered there by a power worker half an hour ago. A large man with a beard wearing a clerical collar.’
Hjalparfoss was a waterfall only a kilometre or so from the turn-off to Stong. Magnus had seen a sign to it. The powerful river below him, the Fossa, flowed into it.
‘He could have jumped,’ said Baldur.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Magnus. ‘I saw tyre tracks next to the Suzuki. He was pushed.’
‘Well, don’t go back to the scene,’ said Baldur. ‘I don’t want you taking any further part in this investigation. I’m on my way to Hjalparfoss and you had better not be there when I arrive.’
Magnus felt the urge to snap back. He had had the hunch that Hakon had driven to Stong. He had found the car. But he held his tongue.
‘Glad I could be of assistance,’ he said, and hung up.
Well, almost held his tongue.
It would take Baldur at least an hour, probably more like two to get to Hjalparfoss from Reykjavik, which gave Magnus plenty of time.
He drove steadily down the track to the main road. The foot of Burfell emerged eerily out of the mist ahead. The turn-off to Hjalparfoss was a much better track, but still through black heaps of rock and sand. After a few hundred metres, the waterfall itself appeared, two powerful torrents of water divided by a basalt rock, tumbling into a pool. A police car with lights flashing was parked down by the bank of the river below the waterfall, and a small group of three or four people were clustered around something.
Magnus parked next to the police car and introduced himself. The officers were friendly and stood back to let him take a look at the body.
It was Hakon, all right. Badly battered by his journey down the river and over the waterfall.
Magnus looked at the pastor of Hruni’s fingers.
They were bare.