Michael Ridpath

The Polar Bear Killing

Chapter one

This was going to be the most important day of his life. He knew it. He could feel it. This would be the day when he left his mark on the world.

Constable Halldór’s fingers tightened on the wheel of his police 4x4 as it hurtled through the fog towards the farm by the river where the polar bear had been sighted. The professional hunters in their souped-up Super Jeep were at least ten kilometres away. He would get there first. He would have only a few minutes to make the shot.

The polar bear had been spotted on a beach six hours before by some fishermen, who had immediately called the coastguard. Polar bears were not native to Iceland, but once every couple of years one would pop up along the northern coastline, usually having ridden sea ice that had drifted eastwards from Greenland. Often they swam the last few miles to shore. By the time they reached Iceland, they were tired and hungry. And dangerous.

The fishermen had only caught a brief glimpse because of the poor visibility. But it had been enough for Halldór to organize a couple of parties to scout for the bear, including the two professional hunters armed with the kind of rifle that could kill a reindeer at a thousand metres. Halldór had been following on behind when he had been alerted by the call from a young girl — a farmer’s daughter — who had said she had seen the bear. Her mother was shopping in town, and her father was out with the other scouts.

The girl was alone with her little brother on the farm, and Halldór was closest to her. In the back of the police car was his .22 rifle. It was much too small a calibre to kill a big bear under normal circumstances. But many years before, Halldór had read the story of some hikers in the West Fjords in the seventies who had come upon a polar bear while carrying only a .22. One of them had waited until the bear had approached really close and then shot it through the eye. That had taken real nerve. And marksmanship.

Halldór had nerve. And he was one of the best shots in the north of Iceland. As a policeman in Reykjavík, he had applied twice for the Viking Squad — the Icelandic SWAT team — but been turned down each time. The problem wasn’t his ability to handle firearms, but his physical fitness. And now, aged forty-nine, and after seven years driving his car around and around the small town of Raufarhöfn in north-east Iceland, his girth had grown even greater. But he still knew how to shoot. And he still had nerve.

After a lull of several years, there had been a spate of polar bear invasions from the sea. Each time the bears had been shot, and there had been an outcry from urban do-gooders, people like his daughter Gudrún, for a national polar bear policy. Anaesthetic darts had been stockpiled, and experts flown in from Denmark. But even then, when the next polar bear had shown up, it too had had to be shot before it harmed any of the sightseers who had driven out to gawk at it. And so the new polar bear policy had been determined: shoot on sight. It was too expensive and too dangerous to do anything else.

The road sloped downward and the police car emerged from the fog into a shallow valley with a fast river tumbling down its middle. A cluster of prosperous farm buildings, with white concrete walls and red corrugated metal roofs, appeared. The farmer made a little money from sheep and quite a lot from leasing fishing rights on the river.

Halldór scanned the fields and pasture surrounding the farm. A flock of sheep was scattering in all directions; something had spooked them. And then he saw it. A dirty white bear loping along towards the farmhouse. And in front of it, a little girl standing still, staring at it.

Jesus!

Halldór leaned on his horn, swerved off the road and on to the grass, accelerating towards the girl. The bear stopped to look at the new arrival. The girl, too, turned towards him.

He pulled up between the girl and the bear, which was now only about a hundred metres away.

He lowered the window. ‘Jump in, Anna!’

The girl opened the passenger door and climbed in.

‘What do you think you were doing?’ Halldór said.

‘I wanted to speak to the polar bear,’ she said.

‘Those animals are dangerous!’ Halldór said. ‘He’s come a long way and he’s hungry.’

‘He’s not dangerous. Egill told me about polar bears. They are friendly. They help people.’

Egill was the old man who lived in the run-down farm barely visible at the base of the cloud on the slope on the other side of the river. He was about eighty and had long ago lost his marbles.

‘They are not friendly, Anna; they attack people, believe me. Now where is your brother?’

‘Back in the farmhouse,’ said the little girl.

‘Good.’ Halldór looked at the bear, which was staring at the vehicle. ‘OK, sit tight, Anna.’

Slowly he climbed out of the car and went around to the back to take out his rifle. The bear watched, but the girl couldn’t see him. Once the gun was loaded, Halldór made his way around the car, rested his elbows on the bonnet and aimed at the bear.

It was smaller than he had imagined it would be, and thinner; he could see its ribs. But it was still a magnificent animal.

It was also a hundred metres away, and had turned its rump towards Halldór.

A .22 bullet in the arse would do nothing to a polar bear apart from make it really angry.

‘You’re not going to shoot it!’ shouted the girl.

‘This is a dart gun,’ said Halldór. ‘I’m going to put it to sleep.’

‘It’s not a dart gun,’ the girl said. ‘My dad has a gun like that that he uses to shoot foxes. I’m not going to let you kill the lovely bear.’

What happened next would be etched in Halldór’s brain for the little time that remained of his life.

The girl jumped out of the car and ran towards the bear, shouting: ‘Look out, polar bear!’

The bear turned and, after a second’s thought, ambled towards the girl.

Halldór’s instinct was to run after the girl and pull her back. But if he did that, the bear would escape, run off into the mist. Sure, it would be shot eventually by one of the professional hunters. But not by him.

The girl stopped, suddenly aware that a very large animal with teeth and claws was approaching her. She was only a few metres from the police car. There was still time for her to turn and run. There was even time for Halldór to drag her back. But she froze.

Halldór took careful aim. The bear was coming directly towards him, its eyes two round black holes staring straight ahead.

At last the girl screamed and turned. The bear was nearly on her, only twenty metres away.

Halldór took his time. He could make this shot ten times out of ten as long as he kept his nerve. He inhaled, then exhaled slowly and squeezed the trigger. The bear dropped to the ground as the bullet tore through its eye and into its brain.

The two young men, a German and an Icelander, breathed heavily as they climbed the hill. The sky was a pale blue, and there was no sign of the thick low cloud that had settled over the area during the previous five days.

The Icelander, a thin man with straggly long hair, wearing jeans and an ‘Extinction is Forever’ T-shirt, paused and raised the binoculars that were hanging around his neck to scan the ponds and marshes of the Melrakkaslétta — the ‘fox plain’ that stretched out to the north of the town.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘She must have drowned,’ said the German in English. He was a few years older than the Icelander, a few years neater.

The bear that had been shot four days before was not yet fully grown, and the theory was that its mother may have landed as well. But now that the weather had cleared up and it was possible to see more than a couple of hundred metres, that seemed increasingly unlikely.

‘I’m afraid you have wasted your trip, Martin,’ the Icelander said, turning back up the hill.

‘Yeah,’ said Martin, following him. ‘It would have been cool to actually see a polar bear. And to stop those bastards shooting it.’

‘Here it is,’ said the Icelander, whose name was Alex. ‘The Arctic Henge.’

On the crest of the hill above them stood a half-built giant stone circle, designed in the manner of Stonehenge, with four tall stone gates at each point of the compass. The low sun painted geometric shadows down the eastern slope of the hill.

‘Cool,’ said Martin again. It was his favourite English word. ‘You say it acts like some kind of sundial?’

‘Apparently.’

They walked around the site, trying to figure out what it all meant. Alex had brought with him a drawing of what the finished henge would look like. The layout was based on an ancient Icelandic poem, but he was confused about what signified what, and Martin’s questions were just confusing him more.

‘Well, let’s ask that guy,’ Martin said.

‘What guy?’

Martin pointed to a black-clad leg sticking out from behind one of the stone pillars of a gate.

As the two men approached the gate, more of the figure came into view.

‘Mein Gott!’

It was a man. He was wearing a black police uniform. He was slumped against the pillar. And where his right eye should have been was a bloody mess.

Chapter two

It was a long journey from Reykjavík to Raufarhöfn and Detective Vigdís Audardóttir had decided to drive the whole way, taking the northern route via Akureyri and Húsavík. She had left before breakfast and it was now mid-afternoon. Raufarhöfn was in the far north-east of the country, and the last stretch of road there hugged the north coast to a point a kilometre south of the Arctic Circle. To her left the sea was a ruffled greyish blue; to her right the land was a ruffled brownish green. Farms were few and far between. It was a fine day; the sun shone down a weak yellow on the eerie remoteness of the Melrakkaslétta.

She couldn’t see any foxes, but the seashore and the lakes were teeming with bird life of all shapes and sizes. The area was an important hub in the transatlantic aerial migration network.

She felt alone. She felt good.

When Inspector Baldur, the head of the Violent Crimes Unit, had asked for volunteers to travel to Raufarhöfn to help out with a murder investigation, she had jumped at the chance to get out of Reykjavík. For once she could afford to leave her alcoholic mother for a couple of weeks. Vigdís knew she should be visiting her, but she wanted to get away from the constant reminder that she had failed in keeping her mother off the booze, and the growing realization that she would always fail: that whatever rehab programmes she went on, however much money Vigdís spent, her mother Audur would always come back to the drink.

At least her mother was somewhere safe now. Somewhere she couldn’t get hold of a drink. Somewhere where if she hit someone, it was someone else’s problem.

Vigdís’s mother was in prison.

She had struck one of her boyfriends too hard over the head with a candlestick during a drunken fight. The boyfriend had ended up unconscious and in hospital, and yes he did want to press charges. So Audur was spending two months in prison.

But Vigdís wasn’t just running away from the unsolvable problem of her mother. She was also running away from her boss, Sergeant Magnús Ragnarsson.

She turned a corner around a headland and Raufarhöfn came into sight. A classic Icelandic church with white walls and a red metal roof stood by the sheltered harbour, behind which disused fish factories and a ribbon of houses ran along the main road. Raufarhöfn had been a boom town in the 1960s when herring had been harvested from the surrounding seas, but with the disappearance of the herring the town had shrunk, leaving abandoned fish-processing plants and houses, and an oversized graveyard of white dots behind a white wooden fence on a hillside overlooking the town. The Arctic Henge guarded the town from its little citadel on another hill, oddly modern, like a screenshot from a fantasy computer game, especially when compared to the run-down twentieth-century decay of the town itself.

After the peace of the desolate drive, Vigdís steeled herself for the hurly-burly of a murder investigation. Raufarhöfn may be a sleepy little town, but Vigdís suspected that the murder of the local policeman had woken it up.

The police station was easy to find — a low white shed by the shore that looked more like a warehouse than a government building, with a number of police vehicles, marked and unmarked, outside it. Inside, half a dozen police officers from Húsavík and Akureyri milled about the two desks in the cramped quarters, as did two plain-clothes officers: Ólafur, the inspector who was head of CID in Akureyri, and Björn, one of his young detectives. Vigdís had worked with Björn on a case in Snaefellsnes. She hadn’t been impressed — his ambition exceeded his abilities. Ólafur she knew little about, having only met him a couple of times when he had visited police headquarters in Reykjavík.

They knew Vigdís. She was, after all, Iceland’s only black detective.

Ólafur had commandeered one of the two desks, so Vigdís took a collapsible chair opposite. The detective inspector was in his late thirties, lean, with buzz-cut black hair and small blue eyes under a frown that seemed to be permanent. Although Ólafur was significantly senior to Vigdís, Vigdís had more experience of murder investigations as part of the Violent Crimes Unit in the Metropolitan Police. There was just more crime in Reykjavík with its population of 180,000 people than in Akureyri, with 18,000.

‘Wasted your time, Vigdís,’ Ólafur said. ‘I called Baldur to send you back, but you were already at least halfway. Mind you, we will still need some help wrapping the case up, so you may as well stick around.’

‘You’ve made an arrest?’

‘Two,’ said the inspector. ‘Alex Einarsson, twenty-two, from Gardabaer, and Martin Fiedler, twenty-five, a German citizen from a place called Siegen. They are both extreme animal-rights activists who rushed here when they heard about the polar bear getting shot.’

‘Have they confessed?’

‘Not yet. I’ve interviewed Alex. A nasty piece of work. He denied shooting Halldór, but he said he was glad he had been killed. Said he deserved to die for shooting the polar bear.’ Ólafur’s voice was laden with contempt, a sentiment Vigdís shared.

‘Bastard.’

Ólafur glanced at her and nodded grimly.

‘We are waiting for an interpreter to interview the German. He doesn’t speak Icelandic, of course. She’s coming from Húsavík, so should be here soon.’ Húsavík was about an hour and a half away.

Vigdís nodded. The rules were that interviews with foreign nationals had to be conducted in Icelandic through official interpreters. Which was cumbersome since most police officers under the age of forty spoke fluent English, as did most foreign suspects.

Her colleagues disliked the regulation but it suited Vigdís, whose English was poor. In fact, she refused to speak the language.

‘What evidence do you have?’ she asked.

‘No direct evidence yet,’ said the inspector. ‘But the forensic team have arrived from Reykjavík and they are at the scene now. You may have seen it when you came into town — the Arctic Henge on the brow of a hill.’

‘I saw it,’ said Vigdís.

‘I’m sure they’ll find something.’

‘If you have no evidence, why have you arrested them?’ Vigdís asked.

‘Because they are the only people in town who could have shot Halldór.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘This is a very small town. Halldór has been here for four years and he is well liked. There are a few people who thought he was a bit officious, but there was no scandal around him, no motive to kill him.’

‘How can you be sure?’ asked Vigdís.

‘He was shot through the eye. Four days ago, he shot a polar bear through the eye. You cannot tell me that is a coincidence. So we know the motive. And there were two foreigners who showed up in town who were very angry about the polar bear. This isn’t Reykjavík; we don’t have a couple of hundred thousand people to choose from. It can only be them.’

Vigdís really didn’t like the complacent Icelandic assumption that it must be the foreigners who had committed the crime, but in this case she had to admit it had some logic. They would need to find some real evidence, though, if they were going to keep the two men in custody for more than twenty-four hours.

‘When the interpreter comes do you want to join me interviewing the German? Good cop, bad cop?’ Ólafur smiled. ‘I’ll be the bad cop.’

There was a small interview room in the police station. In it were crammed Ólafur, Vigdís, the interpreter — who was a middle-aged schoolteacher from Húsavík named Sonja — and the suspect, Martin Fiedler. He had curly light brown hair, a neatly trimmed reddish beard and soft brown eyes. He seemed, to Vigdís, patient rather than angry.

Bad cop went first.

‘Did you shoot Constable Halldór?’ Ólafur asked in Icelandic. He then waited while the question was translated into English — Martin Fiedler had opted for that language rather than German. The interpreter spoke both.

‘No,’ he said calmly.

‘You are aware that he shot a polar bear through the eye four days ago?’

‘I’m aware of that,’ said Martin.

‘Do you approve of that?’

‘No. Not at all. I think it was totally unnecessary. The Icelandic government should have shot the bear with a dart gun and returned it to Greenland.’

‘All right. And do you think Constable Halldór deserved to die for killing the bear?’ The detective’s eyes were burning with anger.

‘Of course not,’ said Martin. ‘I don’t believe in violence against people any more than I believe in violence against animals. He should have been arrested for a criminal act and tried. But not shot. No.’

‘Your friend Alex said that he should have been shot.’

‘Well, Alex is wrong,’ said Martin. ‘But before you ask, Alex didn’t shoot the policeman.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because he was with me all afternoon.’

‘And where was that?’

‘At the farm we were staying in. We returned from a drive along the shore at about lunchtime. We thought the young bear that had been shot may have been with its mother. But if it was, we didn’t find her. We were disappointed; we were supposed to fly back to Reykjavík the next day. So we hung out in our room for a couple of hours. Then, later on that afternoon, we saw the fog had cleared and so we decided to go up to the henge to see what we could see. That’s when we saw the body.’

‘But no one saw you at the farm?’

‘Apparently not. Gústi — that’s the farmer — was off somewhere, and so was his wife.’

Halldór had been found by the two men at six-thirty. Halldór had last been seen in town at four-thirty, heading north out of town in his car. During that two-hour break, the two men had no alibi apart from each other.

‘You have a criminal record, don’t you? Two months in jail in England last year for breaching the peace and assaulting a police officer during a protest at an animal-testing laboratory.’

‘I didn’t assault the police officer,’ said Martin, still calm. ‘But I didn’t defend myself. I wanted to go to jail.’

‘Why didn’t you defend yourself?’ said Ólafur.

The German smiled. ‘Solidarity with the cause. With the others who were arrested with me.’

‘So is that why you shot Constable Halldór? Solidarity?’

‘I didn’t shoot him,’ said Martin.

‘You did shoot him!’ said Ólafur. He stood up, leaned over the desk and began shouting. ‘You killed him because he shot the polar bear! That’s why you hit him through the eye, just like he shot the bear! Admit it!’

Vigdís watched her colleague getting nowhere. The German was remarkably self-possessed. Although he was in a foreign country and accused of such a serious crime, he seemed to be handling the situation very well. Part of the effect of Ólafur’s yelling was dispelled by Sonja’s careful translation, but the bad cop stuff wasn’t working.

Eventually Ólafur turned to Vigdís. It was her turn.

‘Why did you come to Iceland?’ she asked.

Martin turned towards her, his soft brown eyes assessing her. As always when people first met her, Vigdís could tell he was trying to decide what to make of her. No one knew what to make of a black Icelander, especially other Icelanders.

‘I heard about the polar bear shooting. Then I saw that there was a chance that there may be another bear at risk. I thought it would be cool to fly out here to try to save it.’

‘Heard? How did you hear?’

‘Online. A Facebook group. We keep one another informed about what’s going on.’

‘What’s going on?’

‘Cruelty to animals. Protests. Torture in labs. When people are needed to make a noise to help animals.’

‘What was the name of this group?’

Martin hesitated. ‘Animal Blood Watch,’ he said eventually.

‘And they told you about the polar bear?’

‘They asked for volunteers to come to Raufarhöfn. In the end it was just Alex and me. It’s a long way and it’s expensive.’

‘How did you afford it?’

‘I have some money. My father left me some when he died.’

Vigdís examined the German. He returned her gaze. He wasn’t afraid; more curious about her. She enjoyed talking to him, hearing his calm, considered replies. She hated the idea of shooting polar bears on sight as well. Other countries found ways of tranquilizing them — in Canada it was an offence to kill a polar bear, even if it was attacking you. If Martin Fiedler really had killed the police constable, then he deserved everything the Icelandic state could throw at him, but already Vigdís didn’t believe he had.

But she shouldn’t let her bias slant the investigation. She wondered what Magnus would do. Get as complete a statement as he could of everything the two men were doing, and then check it for holes — that would be his answer.

She looked at her notes. ‘When you say “hung out in our room”, what were you doing?’

For the first time, the German looked mildly embarrassed. ‘Alex was reading a book. And I was playing a computer game.’

‘What was the book?’ Vigdís asked.

‘Something about the Rainbow Warrior.’

‘And the computer game?’

Martin Fiedler looked uncomfortable. ‘Call of Duty,’ he admitted.

Ólafur leaped on it. ‘That’s a bit violent for someone who believes in peace and love and veggie burgers, isn’t it?’

Martin regained his composure. ‘It’s a cool game. I enjoy it.’

‘So people killing people is OK, but people killing animals isn’t?’ There was a note of triumph in Ólafur’s voice.

‘They are not real people, Inspector. It’s pixels killing pixels. I’m cool with that.’

Vigdís thought a moment. She had seen her colleagues playing Call of Duty at the station. ‘Who were you playing with? The computer?’

‘No. I was playing online,’ Martin said.

Vigdís made a note. Then she got Martin to take her through everything he had been doing since he arrived in Raufarhöfn, despite the frustration of her superior officer, who insisted on lobbing random accusations at Martin whenever he got bored.

Eventually they finished, and Martin Fiedler was taken back to one of the two police cells. They thanked the interpreter and asked her to stay in town overnight.

‘He’s a cool customer,’ said Ólafur.

‘He may be innocent,’ Vigdís said.

‘Of course he’s not innocent!’ said Ólafur. ‘In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if he did it rather than the Icelander. He’s much more calculating; much more dangerous.’

‘Well, we have a lot to check on,’ said Vigdís.

‘Let me see how forensics are getting on.’ Ólafur whipped out his phone and called Edda, the forensics team leader. It was still light and, at this time in May, it would be for a couple more hours.

Ólafur spoke to her briefly. ‘No luck yet,’ he said to Vigdís when he had finished the call. ‘I’m going for a run. Doing the Triathlon in Oslo in August. Do you run?’

‘No,’ said Vigdís, lying. The last thing she wanted to do was puff along beside the inspector for a few kilometres’ humiliation before he set off up a hill. ‘It was a long drive and a long interview. I’ll have some supper at the hotel and go to my room.’

The only hotel in town looked like a dump from the outside: paint flaking on the metal cladding, the car park a square of cracked tarmac. But inside it was warm and cosy, and the supper was delicious.

The hotel was full — not just with the policemen from Akureyri and Húsavík, but also a number of journalists had made the trek, together with the odd bewildered tourist who hadn’t figured out what was happening.

Vigdís managed to ignore everyone else at supper, although it took work to brush off the RÚV television crime reporter who recognized her.

She went up to her room and unpacked her case. Her phone vibrated and she picked it up, checking the display.

Magnus.

She hesitated. Should she answer it? No. No.

Yes.

‘Hi, Magnús.’ She did a good job of making her tone indifferent.

‘Hi,’ said the familiar voice. ‘How’s it going? Solved the case yet?’

‘Inspector Ólafur had two men locked up by the time I got here.’

‘Are they the right two men?’

‘Probably not,’ said Vigdís. She gave him a quick rundown of what had happened. It was clear that Magnus wished he was out there with her. There were few murders in Iceland, and Magnus, who had spent seven years as Sergeant Detective Magnus Jonson working in Boston Police Department’s Homicide Unit, didn’t want to miss one. Which was why Baldur hadn’t sent him. That, and he didn’t want Magnus to upstage his old friend Ólafur.

Vigdís relaxed as she chatted to Magnus.

‘Keep me posted,’ he said as she finished describing the day’s events.

‘Sure. Er, Magnús?’

‘Yes?’

What? What was she going to say? What could she say? She should say nothing.

‘Nothing.’

She hung up. She was sitting on her bed. She stared out of the window. There were still a few fishing boats that worked out of Raufarhöfn, and four of them were in port. Over the water, she could see the graveyard with all those previous generations of fisherman on the patch of hillside opposite.

Halldór would be joining them soon.

She sighed.

Magnus.

She had liked him when she first met him straight off the plane from America several years before. He had had experience of dozens of murder investigations in Boston and he was willing to teach her and her colleague Árni. He was smart, he was patient with her, and he was kind. He had his faults — he rubbed his superiors up the wrong way, he didn’t necessarily do things the Icelandic way, and a few people had been hurt as he solved those crimes he had come across. He was a loner. He kept himself to himself. But Vigdís liked all that. They respected each other.

Except in Vigdís’s case it was more than just respect. She was rubbish with men. They seemed to find her attractive, but for all the wrong reasons. There had been an Icelander living in New York, a television executive, but that hadn’t worked. Vigdís’s work had screwed that relationship up before it had had a chance to take hold.

There had been a few casual affairs, one- or two-night stands. But then Vigdís had overheard one of them, a handsome moron called Benni, talking to his mates about what it was like to screw a black girl.

That had put her off.

And the previous week, she had gone out for a drink with Magnus after work. His girlfriend Ingileif was in Hamburg for a couple of weeks. Magnus liked a couple of beers after work, a hangover from his Boston days, and Vigdís thought, why not humour him?

Both of them had had more than a couple of beers. Vigdís had enjoyed letting go of her habitual self-discipline. After so many years working together, they understood each other well, but as they both got drunker, they both confided things. Magnus talked about his brother, Vigdís about her mother, but with affection not frustration.

They had left the bar unsteadily. Walked up an empty side street. Laughed.

And then Vigdís had kissed him.

For a moment he had responded, but then he had broken away. Laughed it off. They had gone home to their separate beds.

It had been a mistake. A big mistake. Why had she done it? Why?

It was all right at work. Magnus behaved as though nothing had happened. He was still friendly to Vigdís, allowing her to respond in kind.

But things had changed for Vigdís. She had enjoyed letting her guard down. She had enjoyed the sense that she was putting her career at risk by doing something she wanted to do. It enthralled her. It also scared the hell out of her.

That weekend she had gone out with some of her girlfriends and got blind drunk. There was nothing odd about an Icelander getting drunk in Reykjavík on a Saturday night, but it was odd for Vigdís.

She pulled out the full bottle of vodka she had packed in her suitcase.

Vigdís didn’t drink alone. Her mother drank alone and Vigdís had seen what had happened to her. They said alcoholism ran in families. Was her black father an alcoholic, Vigdís wondered? She had no idea, no way of knowing anything about the black American serviceman who had met her mother at Keflavík airbase one night in the eighties.

Her life was crap. No matter how many rules she followed, how often she did the right thing by her mother or Baldur or Magnus or even the lowlifes she arrested, her life was still crap. Being careful, being sober didn’t help.

She got a glass from the hotel bathroom, opened the bottle and poured a tot into it. She knocked it back. That felt good. She poured another.

Chapter three

Vigdís’s head was splitting as she listened to Ólafur summarize the case to the assembled police. She had woken up still clothed, and had barely had time to grab a cup of coffee before staggering off to the police station. The morning briefing had already started by the time she got there, and they all turned as she tried to creep in at the back.

The vodka bottle was half empty on her bedside table where she had left it.

‘Edda, what did you find yesterday?’

Ólafur was addressing the woman in charge of the three-person forensics team that had driven over from Reykjavík.

‘Basically, nothing,’ she said. ‘No casing — the shooter must have retrieved it. No bullet either, which means either the shooter picked that up as well or, more likely, it is still in the victim’s skull. The pathologist should be able to fish it out at the autopsy today.’

Poor Halldór had been sent back to the morgue in Reykjavík for examination.

‘Nothing of interest at the scene?’

‘No. Very difficult to make out footprints on the hard ground up there. There are four cigarette ends and two sweet wrappers, but that’s what you would expect from what’s essentially a tourist site. We’ll send the butts off for DNA analysis. There are a couple of rocks on the far side of the hill from the road — a good place for the shooter to stand. There are several different footprints around there. None of them is clear, and none of them matches either Alex or Martin’s boots. Somebody seems to have been walking a dog.’

‘What about the suspects?’

‘No immediately obvious signs of gunshot residue on them or their clothes. Nor blood. Once again, we’ll send the clothing back to the lab in Reykjavík for closer analysis, but I doubt we will find anything.’

‘How can you know until they have looked?’

Edda didn’t answer. Vigdís knew that Edda and her team were both sharp-eyed and accurate and that she didn’t take well to being bossed around by investigators.

‘Well, go back up there this morning and widen the search area.’

‘Thanks,’ said Edda. ‘Would never have thought of that myself.’

The remark flustered Ólafur. Edda flustered men anyway, even when not in sarcastic mode. She was tall, blonde, cool and beautiful, and she treated lustful police officers with a haughty disdain. Vigdís had tried that approach, but she couldn’t quite pull it off the way Edda could.

The inspector turned to his troops. ‘Anything interesting from the house-to-house? Anyone see the suspects approaching the henge?’

It turned out that there were two people on the northern edge of town who had heard what they thought was a gunshot that afternoon: one thought it was at five o’clock, another at five fifteen. That gave some indication of the time of death, and suggested, but didn’t prove, that if the two suspects had shot Halldór, it had been an hour to an hour and a half before they claimed they had found him. Then there were some desultory reports from the policemen who had been detailed to interview the inhabitants of Raufarhöfn. Nothing interesting.

Ólafur went through Alex Einarsson’s and Martin Fiedler’s statements, and detailed officers to corroborate their movements. Others were asked to search for a gun — none had been found at the farmhouse where they were staying — and to check up on every licensed firearms owner in the town to make sure that their weapons were secure and had not been taken, and to see if they had been fired two days ago.

‘Anything else?’

Vigdís spoke up. ‘We should also get a warrant to seize Martin Fielder’s computer.’ Her voice croaked. It was the first time she had spoken since she had woken up and the hangover was flexing its muscles. She cleared her throat. ‘He said he was online that afternoon. We can check.’ She was surprised the inspector hadn’t mentioned it.

As the group broke up, Ólafur turned to Vigdís. ‘Why were you late?’

‘I’m sorry, I overslept,’ she answered. ‘It was a long day yesterday.’

The inspector didn’t look impressed, which was fair enough. ‘I’m going to hold a press conference now, and then we’ll talk to the suspects again. Maybe a spell overnight will have focused their minds. Then I want you to take them to see the magistrate at Húsavík to issue a warrant to hold them for another week. We’ll get the warrant to seize both their laptops then as well. The prosecutor there is a woman called María. I’ll get her to meet you beforehand so she can prepare.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes. Do you have a problem with that? Don’t worry, María will present the case to the magistrate.’

‘But do we have enough evidence?’

‘They are our only suspects.’

‘I’m sorry, but in my judgement we have no evidence,’ said Vigdís.

‘Are you suggesting that we release them?’

‘Yes. We can take Martin Fiedler’s passport and request that he stays in town. Seize his laptop and have it analysed.’

‘Inspector?’ Björn, the young detective, had appeared.

‘What is it?’ said Ólafur, turning towards him.

Björn was with two men. One Vigdís didn’t recognize, but the other she knew all too well. Kristján Gylfason — smooth, silver-haired, and the most expensive criminal lawyer in Iceland.

‘Hello, Vigdís,’ said the lawyer, smiling. ‘Inspector Ólafur. I have been requested by the German Embassy to represent Martin Fiedler. This is Wolfgang Eichert from the embassy.’

Ólafur frowned, but shook Kristján’s hand and that of the young German diplomat, who was wearing a suit underneath his coat.

‘Can I see my client?’ Kristján said.

Ólafur glared at the two men. ‘Wait a moment,’ he replied. ‘I need to talk to the press first.’

Ólafur’s annoyance grew as the morning progressed. Now Kristján was involved, there was no chance of a confession, Vigdís knew, or of Ólafur persuading a magistrate to allow the police to hold him.

During a break in the proceedings, Vigdís asked Ólafur if she could go to Halldór’s house and speak to his family. Ólafur let her go. He had Björn to help him, and she was just a further irritation.

The policeman’s house was only a hundred metres from the station. The door was answered by a girl of about eighteen, short with close-cropped blonde hair and glasses. She had a delicate pointed chin and clear pale skin. Her face seemed to register no emotion as she saw Vigdís.

Vigdís introduced herself. ‘Are you Halldór’s daughter?’ she asked.

The girl nodded. ‘Gudrún.’

‘Can I have a few words?’

The girl led Vigdís through to a tidy living room. Vigdís scanned the photographs. She recognized Halldór from the case photos: a large middle-aged man with the beginnings of a double chin. She had never met him herself. There were some pictures of a younger Halldór with a woman with long dark hair — Halldór’s late wife, no doubt — and plenty of portraits of the woman by herself.

‘Mum,’ said the girl. ‘She died seven years ago. In a car crash. Dad was driving.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Vigdís. ‘For her and for your father.’ Vigdís had broken bad news many times to distraught families, but her heart went out to this girl who was now an orphan. ‘Are you alone? Are any of your family here?’

‘My grandparents and my brother are coming from Reykjavík this afternoon. And the neighbours have been kind. It’s hard to keep them away. But I just want to be alone a bit, actually.’

‘You live here all the time?’ Vigdís asked.

Raufarhöfn was far too small for its own high school, which meant local students would go to boarding school far away. Unless they left school early to get a local job. Gudrún looked too studious for that.

‘I’m in my first year at the University of Iceland,’ Gudrún said. That made her a little older than Vigdís had guessed. Icelandic kids didn’t go to university until the age of twenty. ‘I just got home for the summer holidays three days ago.’

‘Can you tell me about your father? What he was like? What did people in town think of him?’

To Vigdís’s relief, Gudrún was happy to talk. Vigdís let her tell stories about her childhood with her dad that could be of no conceivable use to the investigation, but that relaxed her, gave her comfort.

Halldór had escaped Reykjavík soon after the car accident and had accepted a posting in Raufarhöfn, taking his two children — Gudrún and her older brother Sveinn — with him. There Halldór tried to make a new life and had succeeded. He made friends in the town. He found the policing dull, but he was an enthusiastic member of the search-and-rescue team. A year after he arrived, he had played a big part in the rescue of a farmer who had fallen off a cliff in a snowstorm. That had made him popular in town, and had clearly made Gudrún proud. He was a keen shot; he would go hunting foxes with a couple of the locals, as well as target shooting on a friend’s farm.

The affection of the daughter for her father was obvious, and painful to see.

‘Have you any idea why Halldór was up at the henge? Did he like that spot?’

‘No, he didn’t. I think the henge is cool — it gives the town something to make it unique, and this town needs something. But Dad thought it was just kind of dumb. There are a few people in town who agree with him.’

Which implied that Halldór had probably been lured up there. Either he had seen something suspicious or someone had arranged to meet him. It occurred to Vigdís that Ólafur had not even arranged for Halldór’s phone to be analysed to see whom he had spoken to on the day of his murder.

Gudrún didn’t think Halldór had had any enemies in town, although she knew that some people thought him officious. He kept a closer eye on the law than his predecessor had.

‘How did your father get on with you and Sveinn?’ Vigdís asked.

To Vigdís’s surprise, Gudrún didn’t answer at first. She looked as if she was about to burst into tears. Vigdís waited.

‘Dad and I had a wonderful relationship,’ Gudrún said. ‘But Sveinn? That was more difficult.’

‘Why was that?’ Vigdís asked softly.

‘He is three years older than me. He was studying chemistry at the university, but he dropped out last year. He had trouble with drugs.’ Worry flashed in her eyes as she glanced at Vigdís. ‘I’m not sure I should be telling you this since you’re a police officer. But then I suppose he’ll be in your files anyway. He was arrested at least twice. That’s what made Dad really angry: that his son was in trouble with the police. He didn’t say it, but I know he blamed it on Mum not being around, that he hadn’t brought up Sveinn well by himself. Which is completely wrong. Sveinn’s a nice guy, a good guy. He just has trouble with drugs. Lots of good kids have trouble with drugs, don’t they?’

‘They do,’ said Vigdís. She moved over to the collection of photographs on a side table. ‘Is this him?’

There was a picture of Halldór, a younger Gudrún and a teenage boy with curly fair hair standing in a marsh. The boy was holding something.

‘Yes, that’s him,’ said Gudrún, picking up the photograph.

The something the boy was holding was a rifle.

‘Was Sveinn a good shot?’ Vigdís asked.

‘Yes,’ said Gudrún. ‘Not quite as good as Dad. They used to shoot together at a local farm.’

Then she looked at Vigdís in alarm. ‘No. Sveinn didn’t shoot Dad. No!’

Vigdís felt bad about worrying Gudrún over her brother. She left the house and walked down to her car, which she’d parked outside the station.

It would be easy enough to check on Sveinn. According to Gudrún, he was in Reykjavík when his father was shot. That would be easy enough to verify.

She called Magnus at police headquarters.

‘Did they confess?’ he asked.

‘Far from it,’ Vigdís said. ‘A guy from the German Embassy is here with Kristján Gylfason. They’ll be out by lunchtime.’

‘Do you think they did it?’

‘Don’t know. The victim fell out with his son, who is supposed to have been in Reykjavík.’

Vigdís gave Magnus Sveinn’s details and asked him to check up on Gudrún as well.

She knew she should go back into the station and report to Ólafur what Gudrún had told her and ask for instructions. She also knew he would be clutching at anything that could convict the two animal-rights activists. Yet someone should be looking for other suspects.

She decided to drive out to the farm where Halldór had shot the polar bear. No one had done that yet.

The farm was ten kilometres from Raufarhöfn, on a knoll with a lush green meadow sloping gently down to a fast-flowing river. The establishment looked prosperous: tidy round hay bales were piled high alongside a large well-maintained barn for the sheep to winter in. The farmer and his wife were home, and they introduced Vigdís to Anna.

She was about eight, with long hair that was so blonde it was almost white, big blue eyes, and pale skin smeared with red blotches like daubs of paint from a coarse-haired brush. She was still badly upset, both at the death of the polar bear and at Halldór being shot. She wouldn’t say a word to Vigdís; her parents said she hadn’t spoken to anyone about what happened that afternoon.

Vigdís tried to coax something out of her, but the little girl was clearly scared. Vigdís was frustrated by the response of some country people to her black skin, but she understood that she must look strange to the poor girl and so she didn’t push it. As Vigdís was leaving, she had a word with the farmer, whose name was Pétur.

‘I’m sorry about scaring your daughter, but we need to know what happened.’

‘We’re worried about her,’ said Pétur. ‘She has changed totally over the last few days. She is usually so confident, not scared of anything — she wouldn’t be bothered by you in normal circumstances. She has always liked polar bears, so Halldór killing that one made her angry.’ Pétur shook his head. ‘I was just glad. I mean, he saved Anna’s life. Apparently she went over and tried to talk to the bear, according to Halldór. The strange thing is, I was ten kilometres away looking for the bear myself, with my own gun, and all the time it was here.’

‘Halldór told you what happened then?’

‘Yes. He drove up to the farm and saw Anna walking out to talk to the bear. He called her into the car, and she came, but then she ran out again. So he shot the bear through the eye. That must take real nerve.’ The farmer sighed. ‘I owe him everything. And now those animal do-gooders have shot him. The bastards! Poor Gudrún.’

‘We don’t know it was them,’ said Vigdís, although it was clear that local gossips had already condemned Alex Einarsson and Martin Fiedler.

‘Must be,’ said the farmer. ‘No one else around here would kill him. He was a good man, Halldór. But Anna still can’t forgive him.’

‘So there was no one to witness what happened?’

‘Anna sent her little brother indoors, thank God. The old guy over the river saw it. Egill. You could talk to him. But it’s a long way to get there; you have to drive up to the bridge and then back.’

Vigdís decided to talk to the neighbour. It was clear that the killing of the polar bear was an important factor in Halldór’s death, and Vigdís wanted to establish what had actually happened.

Although Egill’s farm was only three hundred metres away directly over the fast-flowing river, it was an eight-kilometre drive up to the bridge and down the other side of the valley. It was a rough drive from the bridge to the farm. On one side of the dirt track the river rushed down towards the nearby sea. On the other side, the Melrakkaslétta stretched northwards through marsh and bog: a patchwork of browns, greens, oranges and yellows, with the low sun glinting off silver-grey ponds. A tough, bleak place to scratch a living. The farm was old and falling apart; the roof of the barn needed fixing. It was obvious that Egill didn’t own any of the fishing rights: just a few chickens and some sheep.

As at most farms, the first one to greet Vigdís was the sheepdog. It skipped over to her car on its three legs, showing unexpected agility for a dog that was clearly past its prime. She wondered how he and his master rounded up the sheep. Maybe they were all old with three legs too.

As she parked her car and bent down to stroke the dog, Egill appeared. He was one of those ancient farmers with beady blue eyes and a face like a lava field under a white beard. He was wearing blue overalls and a woolly hat.

He frowned when he saw her. ‘Who are you?’

‘I am from Reykjavík CID,’ Vigdís said, reaching for her card.

The old farmer clearly didn’t believe her; he took the card and squinted at it. He looked up at Vigdís and then back at the card and started to laugh.

‘Well, well, well,’ he said. ‘A blue policeman.’

‘Blue’ was how the Icelanders had traditionally described black people. Ordinarily, being laughed at by an ignorant yokel about the colour of her skin would have raised Vigdís’s hackles, but there was something about the warmth of the chuckle and the sparkle that appeared in those beady eyes that made Vigdís forgive the old man.

‘Come in, my dear, come in!’

The farmhouse was tiny, but the kitchen had an old peat stove in the middle and was really warm. It was also clean, Vigdís was glad to see. The man may be old, but he could look after himself.

He poured Vigdís a cup of thick, muddy coffee and they sat down at the kitchen table. He took off his cap to reveal wispy grey hair and very large ears.

‘So what do you want, my dear? Have you discovered who stole old Bjartur’s leg?’ He began to laugh at his own joke, an alarming rumble, like an approaching earthquake.

‘I am investigating Constable Halldór’s death.’

The laugh stopped instantly. ‘Halldór is dead?’ The old man sat back to take in the news. ‘I didn’t know. I haven’t left the farm for a few days. What happened?’

‘He was shot. Murdered.’

‘No!’ Egill shook his head. ‘Poor man. How can I help you?’

‘I understand that you witnessed him shooting the polar bear last week?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘What happened?’

The old farmer sipped his coffee. ‘It was my fault.’

Vigdís didn’t understand. ‘What was your fault?’

‘That Anna ran up to the polar bear. That was why Halldór had to shoot him.’

‘How do you mean?’

The old man’s many wrinkles rearranged themselves into a smile of surprising warmth and simplicity. ‘Anna and I are good friends,’ he said. ‘It’s important to make friends who are younger than you, you know?’

He stared at Vigdís, demanding her agreement.

‘I am sure it is,’ she said.

‘Anna likes to play on her side of the river and I come down to mine and we talk. I tell her stories. She likes my stories.’

‘I see,’ said Vigdís, stifling her impatience. Shut up and listen, she told herself. If you listen, sometimes you learn something.

‘There was one story she particularly liked. You know I am a newcomer here? I arrived forty-eight years ago. From Grímsey, the island in the north. You know it?’

‘I know it,’ said Vigdís. It was a few kilometres north of Akureyri, bang on the Arctic Circle.

‘There is a famous story from there that I used to tell Anna. Shall I tell you?’

‘Please do,’ said Vigdís, putting down her notebook.

‘One day all the fires went out on the island. It was in the days before matches, and so three islanders had to try to get to the mainland to bring back embers to rekindle them. The sea was iced up, so they had to walk across the ice. One of the men got lost and drifted out to sea on an ice floe.’

The farmer’s face became animated as he spoke. His voice was deep but clear. He was a good storyteller; Vigdís could understand why the little girl liked to listen to him.

‘The next morning, the man was cold and hungry and thirsty, but he was still a long way from land. His ice floe drifted towards another chunk of ice, on which there was a mother polar bear trapped with her cubs. The man was scared, but there was nothing he could do to steer his ice away from the bears. Soon they collided. But the mother polar bear didn’t eat the man: she allowed him to suckle her milk with her cubs and kept him warm. When the man had regained his strength, she swam over to the mainland, with him on her back. He gathered some embers and then returned on her back to Grímsey, and all the fires on the island could be rekindled. The man was so grateful, he gave the bear cow’s milk and two slaughtered sheep, and the bear swam off back to her cubs.’

‘That’s a good story,’ Vigdís admitted.

‘It was Anna’s favourite. Which was why, when Anna saw the polar bear, she wasn’t afraid of it. That’s why it is my fault that she went out to talk to it.’

‘I see,’ said Vigdís. The old guy was probably right. It was best to tell children to be scared of polar bears in this part of the world. ‘Did you see the bear?’

‘Not until I heard the sound of the police car arriving. It was a foggy day, but at that moment the cloud lifted and I saw the bear and Anna and the policeman. I still have good eyesight at distance. I need these for reading.’ He waved an old pair of spectacles that had been lying on the kitchen table, one arm wrapped with tape. ‘I could tell the bear was a youngster and in bad condition. Constable Halldór shouted something and Anna climbed into his car. The policeman took out his rifle from the boot. Then Anna jumped out of the car and started off towards the polar bear. I couldn’t believe it. Why would she do that? Well, I knew why. It was my story.’

At this point Egill paused and stared at Vigdís. His beady little eyes shone with anger. ‘Halldór did nothing to stop her. He had plenty of time to shout to her, or to drag her back, but he didn’t. He just aimed his rifle and shot the bear.’

‘You think he should have got the child back into the car?’

‘Of course!’ Egill seemed suddenly agitated. ‘Halldór need not have shot the bear at all. He could have coaxed the child back into his car and taken her off to the farmhouse. Then he could have called for help and they could have captured the bear and taken it back to Greenland. It was small and weak — it would have been possible to do.’

‘Surely Halldór had to shoot the bear?’ Vigdís said.

‘No, he didn’t. In fact, I think he put Anna’s life at risk so that he could get a good shot. But what if he had missed? Anna would be dead now.’

Vigdís saw the farmer’s point.

‘Did you tell Anna’s parents this?’

‘Yes, I did. But they think I am just an old fool. They wanted to believe Constable Halldór was a hero for saving their daughter. But he wasn’t. He wasn’t at all. Was he? What do you think?’

Vigdís’s instinct was to prevaricate. But if the old man was right about what he had seen — and he seemed very lucid on the subject — then he had a point. And despite herself, Vigdís did feel sorry for the starving polar bear.

‘Perhaps he wasn’t such a hero after all.’

Egill smiled a small smile of triumph.

‘The next day I went into town and talked to some people in the café at the petrol station. Everyone seemed to think Halldór was a hero. I started trying to explain what I had seen, but no one was listening to me. Except maybe the waitress, Lilja. No one listens to me much anymore apart from her.’ He smiled. ‘And Anna.’

Chapter four

Vigdís returned to town to find Ólafur in a very bad mood. Neither Alex nor Martin Fiedler had confessed. In Martin’s case that wasn’t very surprising with his hotshot lawyer sitting next to him. The German Embassy official and the lawyer had protested vigorously, and Ólafur’s telephone conversation with María, the Húsavík prosecutor, had not gone well. She was young and inexperienced, and unwilling to stand up to Kristján. But Ólafur had to admit that the real problem was that Vigdís was right: they had no real evidence. That just pissed him off more.

He knew one or either or both of the tourists were guilty — there was nobody else and neither of them seemed to care about a policeman’s life as much as a polar bear’s. Inspector Ólafur was determined not to let them get away with it, especially the smart-arsed German. It would just require a bit of patience. The trouble was, Ólafur was not a patient man.

Alex Einarsson had driven their hire car out of town on the long journey back to Reykjavík. He lived with his parents and assured the police that he would be contactable there. Martin Fiedler remained stranded in Raufarhöfn, and Ólafur had taken custody of his passport. Detective Björn had been despatched to Húsavík to get the warrant to search the two men’s computers.

Vigdís told Ólafur what she had discovered about Halldór’s family and the shooting of the polar bear, but Ólafur didn’t listen closely. If it didn’t help him build a case against the German, it didn’t interest him.

Magnus called Vigdís from Reykjavík to report on his investigations of Halldór’s son, Sveinn. As Gudrún had intimated, he had a minor criminal record: he had been arrested for possession of cannabis twice and assault once. Magnus had gone to Sveinn’s apartment in Breidholt, where a half-stoned woman — who was probably Sveinn’s girlfriend, although she didn’t admit to it — said that Sveinn was at that moment on his way to Raufarhöfn. She also said he worked in a café downtown.

The café proprietor, a brisk woman in her thirties, told Magnus that Sveinn was in danger of losing his job because he was so unreliable. But she remembered that Sveinn was working the afternoon shift the day his father had been shot. It had been on the news the following morning, and Sveinn had called her up saying he would not be coming in for the next few days, which she had understood completely.

The owner said that although Sveinn was unreliable, he was a good guy. She clearly liked him.

Vigdís thanked Magnus and wrote up her report. Then Ólafur sent her off to a couple of farms south of town to ask about registered firearms. Both farmers showed her their rifles and said they hadn’t fired them on the day in question.

Back at the police station, Ólafur dismissed everyone and went for a run.

Vigdís returned to the hotel. It was a mellow evening, the sun shining low over the hills to the west, gilding the grassy slopes of the cliff by the harbour entrance a soft yellow. She decided to walk out there. Just as she was leaving her hotel room, she paused. She turned and grabbed the vodka bottle. She wanted peace and quiet and a view of the sea. And a drink.

The soft evening light was ruffled by a stiff breeze from the west. Vigdís didn’t mind; she wanted fresh air and lots of it. She struck out past the church up a path to the cliff at the mouth of the harbour. A small orange lighthouse squatted on its summit — she decided to head for that.

She was frustrated at Ólafur and his mishandling of the investigation. Of course the two animal-rights activists should be suspects, but not at the expense of anyone else. She sometimes thought that the older-school Icelandic policemen viewed a criminal investigation as an exercise in gathering information to confirm a known theory. It was true that most Icelandic crime was of a straightforward nature: a drunken man holding a knife next to a body, threatening to stab anyone who came near him — not hard to solve that. But she and Magnus had been involved in a number of difficult cases where the obvious solution had proven to be the wrong one.

Vigdís was pretty sure this was one of those.

Magnus would sort Ólafur out. It was ironic: having gone all the way to Raufarhöfn to escape her boss, now she almost wished he was here.

‘Hey!’

She turned to see a figure coming down the hillside from the graveyard. Martin Fiedler.

‘Vigdís! Your name is Vigdís, isn’t it?’

The man was speaking in English.

‘Hi,’ she said. And then: ‘I do not speak English.’

‘Of course you do,’ said Martin Fiedler. ‘Every Icelander speaks English.’

‘Not me,’ said Vigdís.

He approached her. ‘OK. Sprechen Sie Deutsch?’

‘Nein.’

‘Oh, that’s a shame,’ the German said in English. ‘Can I walk with you?’

Despite professing not to speak English, Vigdís in fact understood quite a lot of the language. As Martin had said, it was impossible not to pick up some English living in Iceland. As a girl she had become so sick of people assuming that she was not Icelandic and speaking English to her that she resolved not to learn the language. She knew it was stubborn. But then everyone was always telling her she was stubborn.

She shook her head. ‘No, Mr Fiedler. No walk together. I policeman. You...’

‘Criminal?’ said the German. ‘I’m not a criminal. And please call me Martin.’

‘Criminal Martin,’ said Vigdís.

Martin laughed. He had a friendly smile and very warm brown eyes.

‘Look, Vigdís, if I don’t speak Icelandic and you don’t speak English, then how can there be a problem? Tell me.’

Vigdís hesitated.

‘If you don’t mind me walking with you, just say: “I don’t understand.”’

Despite herself, Vigdís smiled. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, and turned away from Martin along the track.

Within a moment, he was at her side.

‘Well, I need to talk to someone,’ said Martin. ‘That Alex guy is an idiot. I think he genuinely believes it was good the policeman was shot. The farmhouse we were staying in has thrown us out — they believe we killed the cop — so now I have moved into the hotel. So I’ll talk to you, right?’

Vigdís didn’t answer.

‘Right?’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Vigdís.

‘Cool,’ said Martin. ‘Then let me tell you all about myself.’

And he did. He spoke slowly and clearly, pausing to choose simple sentence constructions that Vigdís would understand. And she did understand nearly all of it.

He spoke of his childhood, how he had always been fond of animals and how as he learned about climate change and extinction he had become angry. His father was a senior executive for a power company who had become disillusioned with the efforts of his employer to talk about carbon emissions without actually doing anything about them. Martin’s father was too old or scared or well entrenched to do anything either, but he encouraged his son.

Then he had died and left Martin a bit of money. After university Martin had used it to fund his protests against climate change and, increasingly, against animal cruelty either in the lab or the hunting field.

Vigdís listened, caught up in Martin’s enthusiasm.

‘Now I am going to tell you about my girlfriends,’ he said.

‘Why?’ said Vigdís in English.

‘Don’t spoil it,’ said Martin. ‘You don’t understand me, remember. I’m not going to tell you my secrets if you can understand them.’

‘OK,’ said Vigdís. ‘I don’t understand.’ They had reached the lighthouse. There was a stunning view of the waterlogged Melrakkaslétta plain, of the town behind them and of the Arctic Ocean stretching north towards the icecap. The invisible Arctic Circle was only a few hundred metres away.

‘It’s cold up here in the wind,’ said Vigdís in Icelandic. ‘Let’s go down there.’ She pointed to a spot on the lee side of the headland, just above the cliff face.

‘OK,’ said Martin, understanding.

They found a patch of soft dry grass and sat down. They were facing east, and the sun behind them was throwing golden trails on to the sea. Far below, driftwood from Siberia bumped up against the black pebble shoreline. Terns wheeled beneath them, making their familiar ‘kría!’ call.

‘It’s beautiful,’ said Martin.

Vigdís nodded. She hesitated and then pulled out her vodka bottle and offered him some. Martin raised his eyebrows and took a swig. He passed the bottle back to Vigdís.

‘Now, Petra. Let me tell you about Petra.’

Petra was a beautiful raven-haired goddess that had somehow been dropped down from the heavens into Martin’s high school. He told of his various stratagems to woo her, all of which failed. He was funny. Even in English he was funny.

As the sun sank lower, Vigdís began to feel colder, but she didn’t care. The sea was beautiful. The light was beautiful. The lunatic German’s patter was warm and comforting. The vodka tasted good. She was having a good time.

‘Why do I like you, Vigdís?’ he said. ‘I mean, all you have said to me is “I don’t understand” and “Are you a murderer?”.’

‘That does not work?’ said Vigdís slowly in English. ‘I thought that was a good speech. Perhaps that is why I do not have lots of boyfriends.’

‘Because you accuse them of being murderers? No, that’s not a good line.’

‘It works with you, I think.’ Although Vigdís scarcely ever spoke English, it turned out that she could do it better than she expected.

‘Yes. That’s true,’ said Martin.

‘Do you like me because I am black?’ said Vigdís. She found herself looking at Martin with suspicion. The answer was important.

‘Because you are black? Why?’

‘I do not know.’ She paused, searching for the English word. ‘Curiosity?’

‘I am curious about you. But not because you are black.’

‘You are curious about me? About what?’

‘I suppose I am curious about what a nice girl like you is doing in a dump like this, working for a moron like that detective inspector.’

‘Moron?’

‘Idiot.’

‘Ah.’ Vigdís paused. Why not answer the question? ‘I like order. I like things to be done just so. I do not like it when some people just take everything and leave other people with nothing. I feel I am protecting Icelandic society. And that is good.’ She looked at Martin. ‘Does that sound stupid?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘But your boss is a moron.’

Vigdís laughed. ‘My boss is a moron,’ she agreed. She shivered.

Slowly Martin put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her towards him. She could feel the warmth of his body through his coat. She felt like a teenager sneaking out of one of those summer village dances. It was nice. She had another pull of vodka and passed it to Martin.

He kissed her.

It was a long kiss. A kiss of exploration. A warm kiss.

She heard the rattle of stones behind and above her. About thirty metres away she saw the tall, lean and sweaty figure of Inspector Ólafur staring down at them.

‘Oh shit!’ Vigdís said in Icelandic.

‘Scheisse!’ said Martin.

Vigdís put her head in her hands.

‘I take it this is not good,’ said Martin, moving away from her. Vigdís didn’t answer. When she looked up, Ólafur had set off back to town.

‘This is not good,’ said Vigdís. ‘I am sorry, Martin. I am just as stupid as Ólafur. More stupid. I must go.’

She set off down the hillside, clutching her bottle of vodka. She went straight up to her hotel room, finished the bottle and tried to get to sleep. It took her a long time.

Then she was wakened by a gentle knock.

‘Who is it?’ she called. No answer, just another knock.

Wearing pants and a T-shirt, she opened the door a crack, fearing that it would be Ólafur deciding the middle of the night was the right time to reprimand her.

But it wasn’t Ólafur.

For a moment she was going to send him away. But then she thought, screw it. If she was in deep trouble, she may as well enjoy it while she had the chance. She smiled.

‘Come in, Martin.’

Chapter five

Vigdís made sure she was at Ólafur’s morning meeting to discuss the case in plenty of time. He glared at her as he arrived. The meeting was inconclusive. There was no forensic evidence linking Alex or Martin to the shooting — none whatsoever. They hadn’t found a gun that the two men could conceivably have used. The autopsy on Halldór carried out in Reykjavík had retrieved the bullet in his skull, as Edda had guessed. It was a .22 calibre. That was good news: if they found a rifle that they suspected may have shot him, ballistics analysis should confirm it.

The forensics team had copied the hard disk from the two tourists’ laptops and transmitted the downloaded information to the lab in Reykjavík for analysis. The previous afternoon Vigdís had told Edda to make sure the technicians checked on Martin’s online activities between three and six o’clock on the day of the murder. As always it was frustrating that she couldn’t just open up the laptop to check for herself, but it was against protocols, and unless everything was done strictly according to those protocols, any evidence they did find could be thrown out in court.

After the meeting, Ólafur went outside to talk to the press. The polar bear killing made a good news story not just in Iceland but also overseas, and Ólafur did not enjoy admitting that he had released the two suspects.

Once the conference was over, he grabbed Vigdís.

‘Outside. Now.’

They walked around the side of the police station to a patch of concrete overlooking the harbour at the back. No one but the seabirds could see them.

‘What were you doing, Vigdís?’

‘I’m sorry, Ólafur,’ Vigdís mumbled.

‘How long has this been going on for? How long have you known him?’

‘I met him yesterday in the police station.’

‘And when did you first kiss him?’

‘Just then. You saw me.’

Ólafur’s anger seemed to have left him. He seemed genuinely perplexed.

‘Why? Why, Vigdís? I don’t understand. You must know that snogging suspects is not professional behaviour?’

‘I know,’ said Vigdís.

Suddenly the consequence of what she had done hit her. Somehow, out in the wilderness, away from her mother and the police station and her day-to-day life, she had thought that her actions would not matter in the real world of Reykjavík policing. But it would. She would be disciplined. She may end up back in uniform, or even losing her job entirely.

But she wouldn’t beg.

‘I will have to report this,’ Ólafur said.

‘I understand,’ said Vigdís.

‘I am going to get Reykjavík to send a replacement out for you. In the meantime, I want you to stay clear of Martin Fiedler. In fact, you are off the case. As soon as your replacement arrives, you go back to Reykjavík.’

Magnus drove up to the University of Iceland campus on the hill overlooking Reykjavík City Airport. He was curious about Vigdís’s case, and eager to help her. He would love it if it was her who made the breakthrough and not Baldur’s old buddy Ólafur.

He found the building that housed the politics department and tracked down the office of Dr Árndís Húbertsdóttir, Gudrún’s tutor, a friendly woman in her forties. With the students away, she wasn’t teaching, and she was happy to talk to Magnus.

‘I was so sorry to hear about Gudrún’s father,’ she said. ‘I knew her mother had died several years ago. Poor girl.’

‘Do you know her well?’

‘I take an interest in my students, so I know her a little, but you can never really have much of an idea about their life outside the university. She is a good student, with a real interest in politics.’

‘As an academic subject, or as an activist?’ Magnus asked.

‘Both, really. She is politically engaged. Most of the students are here, and most of them to the left.’

A question struck Magnus. ‘Is she interested in animal rights, do you know?’

‘Yes, she is,’ said Dr Árndís. ‘Very much so. Save the whales. Stop experimenting on rats...’

‘And stop shooting polar bears the moment they arrive in Iceland?’

‘And that, too. In fact, I’m sure that’s why she left a couple of days before the end of term. She asked my permission. She said her father was ill. I believed her; she’s an honest girl, or at least I thought she was. But then I saw that a polar bear had been shot in her home town, and that the mother may be loose in the area, and I thought: I bet she has gone home to try to find it. By that time it was too late to stop her.’

‘Did you know it was her father who had shot the polar bear?’

‘I knew it was a policeman, but I didn’t notice the name. If I had I might have made the connection, but I didn’t know what her father did, just that he was very ill. Supposedly. But then when the news came out that he had been murdered, I understood everything.’

‘He wasn’t ill at all,’ said Magnus.

‘Obviously not.’

‘Has Gudrún been in touch?’

‘Yes. She says that with what has happened, she won’t be coming back to university next year. I told her not to rush to a decision; she has the whole summer. I’m sure she would be better here in Reykjavík than stuck in Raufarhöfn by herself. I read she has a brother?’

‘Yes. Sveinn. She didn’t mention him?’

‘No. I hope they can stick together. Support each other.’

‘You didn’t ask her why she lied to you?’

‘No. Given what has happened, I’m willing to forget it.’

‘Of course,’ said Magnus. ‘Thanks for your help.’

‘Not at all,’ said Dr Árndís. ‘If you do see her, tell her I think she has a bright future. She shouldn’t throw it away. She should come back here.’

In the car park, Magnus dialled Vigdís’s number. He was sure she would want to hear what he had to say. She didn’t pick up. He knew he ought to get hold of Inspector Ólafur directly, but he thought he would give Vigdís one more try later.

Vigdís passed Martin in the lobby of the hotel. He had no doubt been waiting for her.

‘Vigdís! Are you OK?’ he asked in English.

‘No,’ said Vigdís. She was tempted to just walk up the stairs and ignore him, but she paused.

‘Are you in trouble?’ He did at least seem concerned.

‘Yes. Much trouble.’

‘I’m very sorry. I suppose we should not speak to each other?’

‘No, Martin,’ Vigdís said. ‘No.’

‘OK.’ He looked sad. Despite everything, Vigdís was pleased to see how sad he looked. ‘OK. I understand. It’s a shame but I don’t want to mess up your life.’

Vigdís turned and walked up the stairs to her room. The maids had not been in yet. The sheets where he had slept were still a mess, and she thought she could still smell him.

She had been so stupid! First Magnus and now an unknown German! What was she thinking? What was happening to her?

She sat on the bed. It just seemed so unfair. Other people could have fun. Other people could get drunk, sleep with a man. She spent so much time doing the right thing, looking after her mother, being a conscientious cop. Then she let down her guard just once and look what happened.

She saw the empty vodka bottle in the bin. She knew there wasn’t an off-licence in town, so she grabbed her laptop and searched. The nearest was at Thórshöfn, sixty-five kilometres away. It was a long way, but no one would miss her if she drove there and back. She would drink the whole bottle. Screw them. Screw them all.

Her phone rang. She checked it. Magnus. Screw him, too. She tossed it on to the bed and let it whine.

Then what would she do? After she woke up from her drunken stupor? When she eventually had to return to Reykjavík, to her mother, to her job, to her mortgage?

She was sure that Ólafur would report her. But then what would happen was not clear. They could throw the rulebook at her, or they could give her a break. Inspector Baldur, the head of the Violent Crimes Unit, didn’t like her much, although he respected her commitment to the Icelandic language and they shared a similar distaste for the way English was creeping into every aspect of Icelandic society like a weed. Above him was Thorkell Holm, the chief superintendent in charge of CID, whose decision it would probably be. But above him, the national police commissioner was a big fan of Vigdís. Reykjavík was no longer 100 per cent white and he did not want its police force, especially its CID, to be 100 per cent white either. She felt bad about how she had let him down.

And then there was Magnus. Magnus who himself had started an affair with a murder suspect, Ingileif, who was now his girlfriend. He had got away with it somehow. He at least would understand. But he didn’t have much political clout, except again with the commissioner.

No. Vigdís should not give up yet. She should get a grip — go back to her habitual ways of self-discipline and diligence. If she could prove Martin was innocent, that would help. And although she couldn’t believe the man she had just slept with was guilty of murder, if he was, he should be punished.

But what could she do, banished to her hotel room?

She looked at her laptop and opened it up. What had Martin said the Facebook group was called that had alerted him to the polar bears in Iceland? Animal Blood Watch. That was it.

Vigdís got to work. She found the group. And she found out who had urged Martin and Alex to come to Raufarhöfn. Very interesting.

Her phone rang again.

Magnus.

She hesitated and then picked it up.

‘Hi, Magnús.’

‘Vigdís! What were you doing?’

‘You’ve heard then.’

‘Baldur told me. You were seen snogging a murder suspect. He is sending me out there to relieve you. Is it true?’

‘Yes,’ said Vigdís.

‘But why?’

There was silence. ‘I don’t know,’ said Vigdís. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Are you OK?’

Vigdís took a deep breath. ‘Not really, Magnús.’

‘OK. We’ll talk when I get there. I did find something out about Gudrún, by the way.’

‘Yes?’

Magnus told her how Gudrún was an animal-rights activist and how she had left university a couple of days early to return to Raufarhöfn to look for the mother polar bear.

‘That makes perfect sense,’ said Vigdís. ‘I’ve just been checking the Facebook group. You can see the flurry of messages after the first reports of the polar bear being shot. Everyone was angry, and someone with the nickname “Foxgirl” suggested that volunteers come out to Raufarhöfn and disrupt the search for a second bear. Two members said they would go — Alex Einarsson and Martin Fiedler. Martin said he was flying from Düsseldorf to Iceland.’

‘Is Foxgirl Gudrún?’

‘It’s not absolutely certain, but that would be my guess. Whoever it is, she lives in or near to Raufarhöfn and goes to university in Reykjavík. “Foxgirl” makes sense when you think of the Melrakkaslétta with all its foxes.’

‘It must be her, mustn’t it?’ said Magnus.

‘We can ask her,’ said Vigdís. ‘She won’t know how difficult it is to get Facebook to give us confirmation. Also, it turns out the interpreter we were using to interview Martin Fiedler is also in the group.’

‘Now you’re off the case, I was going to call Ólafur to tell him about Gudrún. But you should do it.’

‘He won’t listen to me.’

‘He may do. And if he doesn’t, that’s his fault. If you can still help solve this thing, that won’t do you any harm.’ There was a pause. ‘Remember how I met Ingileif? It doesn’t have to be the end of the world.’

‘I do,’ said Vigdís. ‘I was there.’

Magnus and Vigdís had gone together to Ingileif’s gallery on Skólavördustígur in Reykjavík to interview her. Even at that stage Vigdís had noticed how struck Magnus was with her.

‘See you later,’ said Magnus. ‘And good luck.’

Chapter six

Vigdís went straight to the police station and found Ólafur. ‘What is it?’ he demanded.

‘I have checked the Facebook group Martin and Alex used. And I have spoken to Magnús about Gudrún Halldórsdóttir.’

‘I told you that you were off the case.’

‘I know. But you will want to hear what I’ve got.’

Ólafur sighed. He was feeling the pressure — he needed something to break his way. He did want to know what Vigdís had got.

‘So tell me.’

Vigdís told him and Ólafur listened this time. Closely.

‘I need to go talk to this girl,’ Ólafur said.

‘Can I come?’ said Vigdís.

Ólafur opened his mouth to say no, but hesitated. ‘All right,’ he said, grabbing his coat. ‘But stay quiet. I’ll do the talking.’

Although it was only a two-minute walk to Halldór’s house, Ólafur took a police car and a uniformed officer. Gudrún answered the door and led them into the living room. A couple in their seventies sat on a sofa, staring at a skinny man of about twenty-three with a shaven head, wearing jeans and a stained T-shirt.

Sveinn. The fair curls of the teenager in the family photo had all gone.

Grief stalked the room. The family looked shattered, all four of them.

To Vigdís’s surprise, rather than demanding to speak to Gudrún immediately, Ólafur started with the grandparents. But it made sense: get as much background as possible before confronting a suspect.

First they spoke to the grandparents alone in the kitchen over cups of coffee. It turned out that they were Halldór’s parentsin-law — his own parents were both dead. They didn’t say much that the police didn’t know already. They had good things to say about Halldór and how he had brought up their grandchildren after their daughter’s death, although Vigdís got the impression that they were unhappy with his decision to move the family from Reykjavík to Raufarhöfn, about as far away from them as it was possible to go in Iceland.

Then it was Sveinn’s turn. He didn’t touch his coffee. He seemed nervous, fiddling with a cigarette, desperate to light up. His eyes darted around the room, from the detectives, to the door, to his cigarette. A strung-out junkie, Vigdís thought. She felt sorry for him — he must be feeling the pressure. She would have taken him outside so he could at least have a smoke, but that hadn’t seemed to have occurred to Ólafur, and she decided she should just keep quiet and be grateful that Ólafur had let her come along.

‘How were relations between you and your father?’ Ólafur began.

‘Not good,’ Sveinn replied unhappily. ‘Dad was really angry when I left university. Chemistry just wasn’t my thing and he didn’t understand that. And I’m sure you know I got busted for possession. Dad assumed I was a pusher. Which I’m not.’ He glared at Ólafur, daring him to contradict him. Vigdís wasn’t convinced. ‘I didn’t talk to him much after that.’

‘Did you talk to Gudrún?’ Ólafur asked.

‘Yeah. Not often. But every now and then.’

‘And how was the relationship between her and her father?’

‘Oh, Gudrún is a good girl,’ Sveinn said. ‘You can tell that just from looking at her. Works hard, passes exams, has nice clean boyfriends. Dad used to point out to me what a good girl she was.’

‘So no major arguments?’ Vigdís said.

‘Not until last week.’

‘Last week?’

‘Yeah. Gudrún called me. I’d seen the news about how Dad had shot the polar bear and was a big hero. I knew Gudrún would be upset about that; she’s a big Save the Whales supporter. And save the orangutan. And the chimpanzee. So I was pretty sure I could guess her attitude to Dad shooting a polar bear.’

Ólafur glanced at Vigdís. Gudrún hadn’t said anything about an argument.

‘So they had a fight?’ Ólafur asked.

‘A massive one. But it wasn’t just that Gudrún was upset that he had killed the polar bear. It was how he had done it.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Gudrún has a friend who works in the petrol station — Lilja. Anyway, she told Gudrún she had spoken to an old farmer who lives on the other side of the river from where the bear was shot. Apparently, Dad let a little girl wander over to the bear so he could shoot it, rather than getting the little girl out of the way and letting the bear escape. Gudrún was horrified that Dad would use a child as bait like that.’ Sveinn broke the cigarette between his fingers and swore. ‘But I’m not surprised. If Dad thought he had a chance to be the guy who shot the polar bear, then he would take some big risks. And not just with his own life.’

‘Did your father teach you to shoot?’ Vigdís asked.

Sveinn frowned. ‘Yes.’

‘Were you any good?’

Sveinn nodded. ‘Not bad. Not as good as Dad, though. He was an excellent shot.’

‘What about Gudrún?’

‘She wasn’t a bad shot either, for a girl. Not as good as me.’ Sveinn’s brows knitted again. ‘Hold on. What are you suggesting?’

‘We’re just asking questions,’ Ólafur said.

‘No, you’re not. You’re suggesting that Gudrún shot Dad, aren’t you? Well, you know what? You’re out of your minds. You’ve met Gudrún. She would never shoot anyone, let alone Dad, no matter how angry she was with him.’

‘Just a couple more questions,’ said Ólafur.

‘No! No way! I’m not answering any more questions.’ Sveinn got to his feet and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. ‘You two are mental, you are. Bloody useless. All you cops are bloody useless. My dad was bloody useless.’ A tear appeared in his eye, but he rushed from the kitchen before it had a chance to escape. He threw open the back door and lit up outside.

Ólafur glanced at Vigdís. ‘I think we need to invite Gudrún down to the station, don’t you?’

Björn was waiting for them.

‘We heard back from the digital forensics guys in Reykjavík,’ he said. ‘Just a preliminary report, but it seems that between 14.38 and 17.53 on the afternoon of the murder, Martin — or someone acting as Martin — was playing Call of Duty online.’

‘Who with?’

‘Three people. Two Germans and a Dutchman.’

Ólafur glanced at Vigdís. ‘Sounds as if Martin may be telling the truth. He was playing a computer game when the shot was heard at about five or five-fifteen.’

Vigdís’s heart had leaped at the news, but she was determined not to let it blind her. She needed her head to be in control.

‘Possibly,’ she said. ‘Alex may have gone out and shot Halldór while Martin was playing the game. Or Martin may have constructed an alibi somehow with some German friends.’

‘Björn, see what the digital guys can do to confirm that he really was online. And get the Europol people in Reykjavík to get in touch with Germany. We need real detectives to talk to real people about this, not online bullshit.’

‘It will take a while to go through Europol.’

‘Which is why we need to get on to it quickly.’

‘Yes, Ólafur!’

‘Now, let’s talk to Gudrún.’ Ólafur hesitated. ‘And Vigdís. I’ll lead, but if you want to ask something, do.’

Halldór’s daughter looked alone and vulnerable in the interview room. Ólafur switched on the recorder and introduced himself, Vigdís, the uniformed officer and Gudrún.

‘Why am I here?’ Gudrún said. She looked scared.

‘Because you lied to us,’ said Ólafur.

‘Lied? What do you mean?’

‘You didn’t tell us that you had left university two days early to try to save the mother polar bear. Or that you had had a big argument with your father just before he died.’

The anxiety on Gudrún’s face ratcheted up. ‘Did my brother tell you this?’

‘Yes. And your tutor at the university. But the question is, why didn’t you tell us?’

Gudrún lowered her eyes to the desk.

‘Look at me, Gudrún,’ said Ólafur. ‘Why did you lie to us?’

Gudrún didn’t look up.

‘Are you Foxgirl?’ Vigdís asked. ‘Did you tell Alex and Martin to come to Raufarhöfn and disrupt the hunt for the other bear?’

Now Gudrún looked up. She nodded miserably.

‘Did you think we wouldn’t find out?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose so.’

‘Did you talk to Martin and Alex when they got here?’ Vigdís asked.

‘No,’ said Gudrún. ‘I didn’t want them to know that I was Foxgirl. That I was the daughter of the man who had shot the polar bear. And I didn’t want Dad to find out that I had been in touch with them. So I kept quiet.’

‘Does anyone know that you are Foxgirl?’

‘My friends at the university. And a couple of people around here.’

‘Sonja Jósepsdóttir? The teacher in Húsavík?’

‘Yes. She would know who I am.’

‘But not Martin Fiedler and Alex Einarsson?’

‘No. And definitely not Dad.’

‘So what did you argue with your father about?’ Ólafur asked.

‘Him shooting the polar bear.’ Gudrún shook her head. ‘I know him. He wanted the glory. He wanted to be the one who shot the bear. In Bolungarvík in the West Fjords they have a stuffed polar bear in the museum. Dad would have loved that. A little museum with a stuffed polar bear “shot by Constable Halldór Sveinsson”.’ She shuddered. ‘Horrible.’

‘And what did he say when you criticized him?’

‘He said that he had to shoot the bear to protect the little girl. But that’s not what really happened. Lilja in the petrol station told me that the farmer next door saw the whole thing. Dad wasn’t saving the little girl; he was using her as bait to shoot the bear. With a .22! He could easily have missed and then the girl would be dead. All for his vanity!’

Then Gudrún put her hand to her mouth and began to sob. ‘Listen to me, blaming him. He’s dead now! And I hated him just before he died. He and I loved each other. Why did it have to end like that? With a fight? I want him back. I want Mum back.’

Ólafur and Vigdís watched the girl break down in front of them. Vigdís glanced at Ólafur. He nodded.

‘Gudrún?’ she said gently. ‘Did you shoot your father?’

The girl stopped sobbing and she looked at Vigdís with incredulity. ‘What?’

‘Did you shoot your father?’

‘He was shot with a .22 rifle,’ said Ólafur. ‘Your father owned a .22 rifle. You know how to shoot it.’

‘I thought those two activists who came shot him? I thought you had arrested them?’

‘We can send your father’s gun for analysis. We can see if the bullet we found in your father’s skull was fired from the gun. If you shot him, we will find out.’

‘But I didn’t shoot him!’ said Gudrún. She looked at both detectives, her face a mixture of misery, confusion and fear. ‘I didn’t shoot him,’ she said much more quietly. ‘Oh, my God! You really think I shot my father, don’t you?’

‘We know you had an argument with him,’ said Ólafur. ‘We know that you were angry about the polar bear and the little girl. We can check the rifle.’

‘Check it then!’ said Gudrún, and then she started to sob. ‘This doesn’t make any sense. I remember what Dad told me about all this. I won’t say anything more to you without a lawyer.’

And she didn’t.

They needed to get Halldór’s rifle to Reykjavík for ballistics analysis as fast as possible. Ólafur persuaded the coastguard to lend them one of the helicopters they had been using to look for the polar bear, and one of Edda’s forensic technicians took the bagged-up rifle and hitched a lift to Reykjavík.

They kept Gudrún in the cell overnight — her father’s police cell. With luck they would hear back within twenty-four hours and then charge her.

‘We’ve done just about all we can for today,’ said Ólafur later. ‘I’m going for a run.’

‘I’ve still got some paperwork to finish up,’ said Vigdís. ‘If you’ll let me.’

Ólafur glanced at the other two policemen working at their desks. ‘Come outside with me, Vigdís.’

She followed him out to his car.

‘Well done,’ Ólafur said. ‘That was good work. I’m glad I listened to you.’

‘So am I,’ said Vigdís dryly.

‘Look, I’m sorry, but when this is over, I will have to submit an official report to Chief Superintendent Thorkell. I will tell him you played an important part in the investigation. But what you did was totally unacceptable. If Martin Fiedler had in fact killed Halldór, you would have ruined any chance of securing a conviction.’

‘I know,’ said Vigdís. She had been sure that Martin was innocent. She was also sure that Ólafur was right: she had acted unprofessionally. She couldn’t expect anything else from Ólafur; she had only herself to blame.

Chapter seven

‘Hi, Vigdís!’

Vigdís looked up from her paperwork to see the large familiar figure of Magnus grinning at her. She grinned back.

‘You made it!’

‘This is not an easy place to get to. I ended up flying to Akureyri and borrowing one of their cars to drive the rest of the way.’

‘At least the weather’s not too bad this time of year,’ she said. ‘The town can be completely cut off in winter.’

Magnus scanned the tiny police station. Two uniformed policemen were also working in there. They nodded a greeting to him.

‘Is Ólafur here?’

‘He’s gone for a run. He could be ages. That man is super fit.’

‘What’s he like?’ Magnus asked.

Vigdís glanced quickly at the officers around them. ‘Old school.’

‘Well, since he isn’t here, why don’t you tell me what’s been going on?’

‘All right,’ said Vigdís. ‘Do you want to take a walk? See the sights of Raufarhöfn?’

‘Sure, why not?’ said Magnus. ‘I’ve been cooped up in the car for three hours.’

So they left the police station and strolled through the town towards the harbour. The wind had died down, the evening sun was on their faces, and it was almost warm. They found a wall by the harbour. In front of them a fisherman was loading a very large net on to a very small boat.

‘What happened, Vigdís?’

‘I don’t know. I was just stupid.’

‘But why?’

‘I don’t know that either. I was free of worrying about Mum for a few days. I was lonely.’ Vigdís really didn’t want to mention the drink. She was too ashamed. ‘It feels like you are a long way from real life out here. I was so stupid.’

‘Yeah,’ said Magnus. They sat in companionable silence for a moment. ‘It’s the kind of stupid thing I would do.’

Vigdís smiled. ‘That’s no recommendation, is it?’

‘No,’ said Magnus. ‘Definitely not.’

‘My career is screwed now.’

‘Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows? Has Ólafur made an official complaint to Thorkell yet?’

‘Not yet, but he will. He’s told Baldur, and Baldur will tell his cronies. I don’t think he has told any of the other police officers here.’

‘That’s something,’ said Magnus.

Vigdís snorted. She would be a laughing stock back in Reykjavík once everyone found out. ‘It is the kind of thing you would do, isn’t it?’

Magnus nodded. ‘Is he a nice guy, at least?’

‘Martin? I think so. That is if he isn’t a cop killer after all.’

Magnus frowned, as if struck by a thought. ‘Does he speak Icelandic?’

‘No,’ said Vigdís.

‘Do you speak English to him? Or are you a secret German speaker?’

‘He speaks English to me,’ said Vigdís. ‘And I sort of reply back.’

‘Sounds like a perfect relationship.’

‘I know,’ said Vigdís. ‘It’s ridiculous. But I do sort of like him. I am such an idiot.’

Magnus smiled at her. It wasn’t that he disagreed with her; her idiocy was incontrovertible. But he was on her side. They both knew he could be an idiot from time to time too.

They watched the fisherman tidy up the net and lock the boat cabin. He nodded to the two detectives and headed back to the warmth of his home. Presumably he would be out at sea again early the next morning.

‘OK,’ Magnus said. ‘Tell me about the case.’

Vigdís was glad to go over the investigation with Magnus; it straightened it all in her mind. Magnus listened quietly for the most part, just asking the odd question to clarify things.

‘So there we are,’ she finished. ‘If the ballistics report comes back tomorrow with confirmation that Halldór was shot by his own rifle, we have pretty much got Gudrún.’

Magnus sat silently, his hands thrust into the pockets of his coat.

‘Magnús?’ Vigdís said. ‘What is it?’

‘Do you think it will? Confirm that the bullet came from Halldór’s rifle?’

‘Yes,’ said Vigdís. ‘Yes, I do.’

‘You said Gudrún denied killing her father,’ he said at last. ‘How did she seem?’

‘At the end of her rope. She just broke down. She answered our questions quietly, with tears streaming down her cheeks. It was hard to read her: I couldn’t tell whether she was upset because of all the pressure of the last few days, or whether she couldn’t face what she had done. Inspector Ólafur was sure she was guilty.’

‘And what about you? What was your instinct?’

Vigdís hesitated. She wanted to believe that Gudrún was guilty. She wanted to believe that Martin was innocent. But... ‘My instinct? I’m not sure.’

Magnus looked at her steadily. He raised his eyebrows. ‘I know you, Vigdís. Not being sure isn’t your style.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I think your gut feel is that she’s innocent and you don’t want to admit it.’

‘Magnús, that’s ridiculous! We are detectives. We deal in evidence.’

‘We deal in people,’ said Magnus. ‘It takes a certain kind of daughter to shoot out the eye of her father. I’ve met one or two of that kind of woman in America. But none in Iceland that I can think of.’

‘So are you saying Martin or Alex shot him? Or Sveinn? He wasn’t even in Raufarhöfn.’

‘No.’ Magnus was quiet for a couple of minutes, staring at the fishing boats bobbing gently by the quayside. Vigdís let him think. ‘Has it rained since Halldór was murdered?’

‘No,’ Vigdís said.

‘Good,’ said Magnus. ‘I’ll go to bed now. I won’t wait for Ólafur — I’d like to delay talking to him if I can. But we’ll meet downstairs in the hotel lobby at five tomorrow morning to take a look at the crime scene. I think I’d like to find out a bit more before I report to him.’

Chapter eight

Vigdís led the way up the hill towards the henge, her long legs making easy work of the slope. The sun had already been up for a while, and the air was full of the sound of birds busy with whatever birds do that early in the morning.

‘You know they laid this out according to the ‘Völuspá’, the first poem of the Poetic Edda?’ Magnus said.

Vigdís’s only reply was to let out something between a moan and a grunt.

‘Apparently, there’s a path bearing the name of each of the dwarfs mentioned in the poem. All seventy-two of them.’

‘I bet you know all their names,’ said Vigdís.

‘Not all of them,’ said Magnus.

‘When did you read all this stuff?’

‘When I was a kid at high school.’

‘In America?’ Magnus had moved to Boston from Iceland when he was a kid.

‘Yes.’

They carried on in silence for a few moments.

‘Magnús?’

‘Yes?’

‘Did your friends in America think you were a little weird?’

‘Thanks, Vigdís.’

Although forensics had finished with the scene, police tape still flapped in its own geometric circle within the henge. Vigdís pointed out the spot where Halldór had been shot, and the two rocks down the hill from where it was possible his killer had stood. While there was a clear view of the gate where Halldór had been found, the rocks were on the other side of the hill from the road, out of sight.

Magnus examined the ground and then made his way down the hill along a half-trodden path, criss-crossing twenty or thirty metres on either side. He paused every time he came to a patch of exposed mud. After ten minutes or so he halted.

‘Vigdís!’

She came over. ‘Found some dwarf footprints?’

Magnus pointed to a patch of mud next to a puddle. ‘Look.’

Vigdís looked. ‘I see tracks.’

‘Look more closely. And count.’

Vigdís looked again. ‘Jesus!’ she said, standing up. ‘Well, well, well.’

‘Do you have any spare spent .22 bullets or casings among the evidence?’ Magnus asked. ‘Doesn’t matter which gun they are from.’

‘We have a few from the range Halldór used back at the station.’

‘Perfect.’

‘Bjartur! Quiet!’

The old farmer came out to meet Magnus and Vigdís, wearing blue overalls and a woolly cap. The sheepdog, the Icelandic breed with a red and white coat and a curled tail, hopped over to them on its three legs.

Vigdís was right: the skin under Egill’s beard was criss-crossed with crevasses and fault lines.

He broke into a smile of welcome when he recognized her. ‘The blue policewoman! Come in, come in! I have a little coffee but no cakes, I’m afraid.’

Before they entered the house, Magnus glanced across the river towards the more prosperous farm on the other side. The view was clear and uninterrupted.

‘So that’s where the polar bear was shot?’ he said.

The farmer frowned and nodded. ‘Yes. It was a cruel day.’

They sat at a table in the cosy kitchen and Egill took off his hat. His ears were massive, flapping straight out from his head, and sprouting white hairs like some kind of polar mammoth. He poured a small quantity of thick gritty liquid from a thermos into two cups. There wasn’t enough for himself.

‘I’m sorry, I wasn’t expecting visitors.’

Magnus sipped the coffee and tried hard not to grimace.

‘Do you know who murdered Halldór yet?’ Egill asked Vigdís.

‘Not yet,’ said Vigdís.

‘Yes,’ said Magnus.

Vigdís glanced at him quickly. And so did Egill. The bright blue eyes focused on Magnus under bushy eyebrows.

Magnus produced a clear plastic bag, inside which was a small brass-coloured metal object.

Egill’s eyes turned to the bag.

‘Did you know, Egill, that our scientists can examine a rifle and determine whether it was the one that fired this bullet? With 100 per cent accuracy.’

Egill shook his head, still concentrating on the bullet. His left hand fiddled with one of his ears, pulling it out even further from his head.

‘We’ve come to ask you for your rifle,’ Magnus said slowly. ‘So our scientists can examine it. See if it was the weapon that fired the bullet that killed Halldór. Can you fetch it for me?’

Egill didn’t move. He stared at the bullet. Then looked up at Vigdís and Magnus. He sat back in his chair.

‘You know I told you about that polar bear in Grímsey? The man the bear saved was one of my ancestors.’

‘It may be wrong to shoot polar bears,’ Magnus said quietly, ‘but it’s very wrong to shoot people.’

‘That policeman risked Anna’s life just so he could get the credit for killing a bear,’ Egill said, his eyes suddenly on fire. ‘So he shot the bear through the eye, but that was just because the bear was moving slowly.’ He leaned forward. ‘If the bear had charged — and it could easily have charged — then it would have been almost impossible to hit it with that accuracy. If he had hit the bear in the chest or the neck with a .22, Anna would be dead now. So I couldn’t understand why everyone was treating the man like a hero when he had almost killed a child.’

‘How did you get him up to the henge?’ Magnus asked.

‘I spoke to him on the telephone. I told him what I had seen. Said I needed to talk to him and suggested we meet at the henge by one of the stone gates there. I made him think I was going to blackmail him. I waited a short distance away from the henge and shot him. Through the eye. He was standing still.’

‘You had your dog with you, didn’t you?’ said Vigdís. ‘We saw the tracks from its three paws in the mud on the way up the hill.’

‘Yes, he comes everywhere with me,’ said Egill. ‘Couldn’t leave him behind.’

‘I think you had better show us where you keep your rifle,’ Magnus said.

Egill nodded. He bent down and scratched the ears of the dog at his feet. The animal rolled on to his side, so that the rear right stump where his leg had once been was visible. His tail thumped the kitchen floor.

‘Sorry, Bjartur, old fellow. I’m going to have to leave you now. Perhaps Anna will look after you.’

For the first time, a tear appeared in the old man’s eye.

Chapter nine

Magnus stood under the newly hewn arch of the Arctic Henge and looked down at the little town of Raufarhöfn waking up.

A series of clouds were gathering over the Melrakkaslétta plain, preparing an assault on the stone circle. It was chilly this early in the morning.

Only a few feet away from him, Halldór had stood and waited for a bullet to thud into his brain, fired from the rifle of a mad old man. Halldór may have been wrong to shoot the polar bear. He was definitely wrong to risk the little girl’s life. But Magnus hated cop killers. Always.

He saw a police Skoda drive the short distance out of town and park at the foot of the low hill on which the henge stood. A lone man got out and began to jog up the hill. Ólafur.

He paused about a hundred metres away. ‘Magnús!’ he yelled.

Magnus stepped forward. ‘Yes!’

‘Come down here!’

‘I want to show you something!’

‘I said, come to me!’

Magnus shrugged and trotted down the hill slope. Ólafur looked wary, glancing from side to side.

‘You know Halldór was killed coming to a meeting like this right here?’ he said.

Magnus held up his hands. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry. I didn’t think of that. But I do want to show you something.’

‘Why didn’t you report to me when you got in last night?’ Ólafur was not happy.

‘It was late and I had had a long journey,’ said Magnus. ‘Come and look at this.’ He led Ólafur around the hill to where the dogs’ footprints were.

‘It’s a dog,’ said Ólafur.

‘A three-legged dog,’ said Magnus.

‘So?’

‘So, Egill, the neighbour of the little girl Anna who saw Halldór shoot the polar bear, has a three-legged dog.’

Ólafur stood up and looked up the hill to the henge. The rocks from where the shooter may have fired at the police constable were not far away.

‘So?’

‘So I think you should take a photograph of these tracks before that rain cloud gets here,’ Magnus said, pointing towards the Melrakkaslétta.

Ólafur grunted and then pulled out his phone and took photographs.

‘You know we have a suspect?’ he said. ‘Halldór’s daughter. We are just waiting for ballistics confirmation from Reykjavík.’

‘Which will say that the bullet was not fired from Halldór’s rifle.’

Ólafur frowned. ‘How do you know?’

‘Because it was fired from Egill’s gun — the farmer who owns the dog. He confessed about half an hour ago.’

Anger flashed across Ólafur’s face. ‘Where is Vigdís?’

‘She is waiting at Egill’s farm with him. Waiting for you to go and arrest him.’

Ólafur frowned. ‘Why hasn’t she arrested him? Why haven’t you?’

‘Me?’ Magnus smiled. ‘Oh, I think I arrived too late to have any effect on the case. Vigdís is a very good detective, as you know. Between the two of you, you cracked it.’

Ólafur’s frown deepened. He examined Magnus with suspicion. ‘What do you want?’

‘Vigdís told me that as she was sitting looking at the sea, she was joined by Martin Fiedler. Apparently you were running by and you thought you saw them kissing!’ Magnus gave a dry laugh. ‘She doesn’t know him; they don’t even speak the same language! But I’m sure you were mistaken. You were moving; it was a bit of a distance away.’

‘I know what I saw,’ Ólafur said.

‘I don’t think you do,’ said Magnus. ‘Look, Ólafur. I have worked with Vigdís for several years. She is a very good detective. She doesn’t deserve to have her career ruined. It would be humiliating for you if people thought I had turned up here and solved the case in a couple of hours before I had even spoken to you. I have no wish to humiliate you, Ólafur.’

Ólafur looked at the dog prints in the mud. ‘How did the forensics people miss that?’

‘I was looking for signs of a three-legged dog,’ Magnus said. ‘Kids like Gudrún don’t shoot their fathers, however angry they are with them. But crazy old men with a soft spot for little girls and polar bears? Maybe. He seemed the most likely of all the people Vigdís told me about.’

Ólafur sighed. ‘All right.’ He stared out towards the cliff at the mouth of the harbour. ‘I was running fast. It had been a long day and Vigdís was far away. I must have been mistaken. I’ll tell Baldur that.’

‘Good,’ said Magnus. He checked his watch. ‘You may just have time to get to Egill’s farm and arrest him before your morning meeting.’

‘Hey, aren’t you going the wrong way?’

Vigdís and Magnus were in her car, leaving Raufarhöfn, with Magnus driving. Magnus had left his vehicle behind for one of the Akureyri officers to drive back to their station. Magnus had turned left rather than right out of the hotel car park. South.

‘I thought we would go the long way round,’ he said. ‘It’s more scenic.’

‘You’re nuts,’ Vigdís said. ‘It took me nine hours to get here around the ring road to the north. It’ll take days the other way via Höfn and Vík.’

‘Relax, Vigdís,’ Magnus said. ‘I didn’t tell anyone in Reykjavík what time we were leaving. Did you? And it’s beautiful scenery this way.’

‘We’re not going to some saga site, are we? You want to stop off and see where Njáll got burned or something?’

‘Maybe,’ said Magnus. ‘Or that iceberg lagoon.’

Vigdís frowned. ‘If you hadn’t just saved my arse, I’d demand that you stop and let me out.’

‘You’re welcome,’ said Magnus. ‘It’s always a pleasure to help you.’

‘Huh!’

They drove out of town and rounded a bend.

‘Ah, a hitchhiker,’ said Magnus. ‘Let’s stop.’

‘Let’s not,’ said Vigdís.

‘The poor guy is stranded in the middle of nowhere.’ Magnus slowed.

‘Oh, Christ! It’s Martin! Martin Fiedler. Speed up, Magnus! We can’t take him.’

‘Why not?’ said Magnus, pulling up next to the German, who was standing with his thumb out, looking cold.

‘It’s going to be humiliating, him in the car with you and me.’

The car came to a halt. Magnus got out of the driver’s seat and took the keys with him. He shook Martin’s hand and gave him the keys.

‘Look after the car, will you? And Vigdís.’

‘I will,’ said Martin with a grin.

Vigdís rolled down the window. ‘What the hell are you doing, Magnús?’

‘I’ll walk back to Raufarhöfn and drop the other car in Akureyri.’ He took a well-thumbed Icelandic — English dictionary out of his pocket and tossed it into Vigdís’s lap. ‘Here. You may need this.’

Vigdís stared at the dictionary, and then at Martin climbing into the seat next to her. ‘You planned this, Magnús!’

‘Have a good trip!’ Magnus said. ‘I’ll tell Baldur I gave you four days’ leave after all the overtime you worked on the case.’

Vigdís shook her head. And then she smiled.

Martin put the car into gear and drove off, towards the south. The long, slow way around the island.

Author’s note

This is based on a much shorter story under the same title that appeared in Deadly Pleasures (edited by Martin Edwards), an anthology of short stories by members of the Crime Writers’ Association.

Content

Michael Ridpath
The Polar Bear Killing

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Author’s note