Black Ice (7 page)

'One of the boat people,' Christopher explained. 'About two dozen  of them  fetched  up here.'

'Have a care then,  Mr  Bell,'  Ivan  said.  'These people  are ingenious entrepreneurs, I am told. They may well have plans in the general direction of the stuffed-puffin  market.'

We watched the  boy with  the biscuit-coloured face wander off through the crowds, and  then Ivan  turned  to me, slipping a silver-backed notebook  from his pocket.

'Tell  me,'  he said,  flipping it open,  'does  the name  ... now where is it ... does the name Oscar Murphy mean anything to you?'

'Not  a thing.'

'Truly?'

'Hell, Ivan,  I've only been here one night.  Why? Who is he?'

He put the notebook back into his pocket. 'I'm not quite sure. One  of our  embassy  people  mentioned him. He wouldn't say any more. You know what  those awful Intelligence people are like ... they  won't   tell  you  the  time  except  in  code.  Come along, my children, Uncle Ivan is ready for drinkie poohs. Lead the way,  Master Bell, you're  the nearest  we have  to a native guide.'

13

In  a  tight  corner,  I  can  eat  guillemot without complaint. Pushed, I can listen to a conversation about the art of bowling leg-breaks. What I cannot do - cheerfully, anyway- is both at the same time. So before the coffee came,  I left Christopher and Ivan  and  took a taxi back to Vesturbrun.

My plan was quite simple: get back into the flat and  have a good snoop  around, particularly at the photo  of Solrun's handsome boyfriend. If Petursson had the place staked  out, as he almost  certainly would,  I could always say I'd  nipped  back to get my razor,  and exit smartly.

At first I didn't think  I'd get past the foyer. Petursson's man was  taking   it  easy,   thumbing  through  a  magazine  as  he sprawled on a low chair  in the small lounge area just inside the door. All that registered on me was his light chamois jacket they must pay their cops well around here. After that it was eyes ahead and straight towards  the lift. I knew he was watching me, and any minute I was expecting to be called  to heel.

But not one  word.  Up  I went,  and  the same  god  that  had installed short-sighted policemen  downstairs had arranged for the door  to Solrun's flat to be left open.

He'd also arranged for a whirlwind  to go through  the place. I couldn't believe  it.  Furniture was  tipped  over. Clothes  were scattered everywhere. Drawers had  been ripped  open and emptied, books had been swept from their shelves, and even the mattress had  been pulled  off the bed.

My first thought was indignation that the cop downstairs should  sit  there  reading up gardening tips  while an intruder went through the flat. My second was that perhaps I shouldn't put  in an  official complaint: I was also an  intruder. And  the third  was the photo album. It was still there, down the back of the radiator. The only surprise was that whoever had done the searching hadn't ripped  the radiator off the wall.

For the second  time,  I sat down and opened  it. This time, I began - as they say- at  the beginning.

Overall, it tended  to suggest  that  Solrun  had cancelled  her application to the nunnery. It started with boys who didn't look as if they'd ever  raised  razor  to cheek and  it ended  with  the Italian-looking smoothie and  the  rip-mark  where  the  badge had  been.  In  between  were young  blokes bulging  their biceps beside swimming-pools, students trying to look tubercular and poetic,  and  sharpies poised with languid  cigarettes and  bored eyes. Men with moustaches, men with beards, men with shaggy sweaters, men with hand-stitched suits, men with bikes and motor-bikes and  cars. And me, out of focus as usual, ringed in red,  by a waterfall.

I sat and  thought about  it for a moment.  I wasn't  jealous.

You couldn't be jealous of Solrun any more than you could hate the sun  for shining  on other  people too. She was a bit on the universal side, was Solrun.

I turned to the last page again.  I knew what the long-spiked chestnut was now. It was a few years since I'd seen a picture of it, which  probably  explained   why  I hadn't recognised it immediately. It was a model of the first sputnik- you know, the Russians' vintage spacecraft. And the only people who'd be at all likely to give pride-of-place to a junky  chunk  of patriotic souvenir  like that  would not be Italian.

Once again  I studied  the man. Somehow he looked familiar now. He certainly didn't look Russian. I know it's  wrong  to nominate racial stereotypes but it is remarkable how many Russian   men  do  have  faces  like  over packed satchels, and Russians  don't usually dress like him either.

Or  cops.  You  don't usually  see cops  dressed  in  exquisite chamois jackets. That's why he looked familiar. The man in the photograph with Solrun  - Russian, Martian or whatever the hell he was - was at this moment sitting downstairs, cool as you like.

I was going to do something about that,  right there and then, only this chain saw started at the top of my head and  zoomed straight through to my torso and sliced me in two at the pelvis. Either he was  downstairs, cool  as  you  like.  Or  he was upstairs, in charge of chain saws.

14

In books, they always say being knocked out gives you a red effect between the eyes. Well this one was a violent shade  of mustard, and it swelled and heaved at the back of my eyes until I had to edge them open. Ouch. Close again. The yellow started ebbing  and flowing and  I realised,  like it or not, I was alive.

On  the whole, I didn't like it.

This  time I opened  my eyes and found  myself face down on the carpet. A minute  later  I was face down  in the  bathroom, over the loo. I felt better for that. So I had a glass of water and did it all over again.

I looked-at myself in the mirror. That was a mistake too. I'd gone  the  colour  of candle-fat  and  I could  swear  there  were sparks  coming  out  of the  top of my head  where he'd  hit me. Chamois jacket.  While  I was sitting  there carefully working it all out, he must have coasted  up in the lift and coshed me with a sputnik.

I had another glass of water which, after some difficult negotiations, my stomach decided  to accept. Then  I turned  to go back into  the living-room  when I saw him.

He  was  framed   in  the  doorway.   Handsome,  of  course. Elegant, in  the fine soft leather.  But very very surprised. He should've been running away,  I should've been catching  him: instead we stood  there  trying to hypnotise each other.

Then  it broke. I shouted something; he turned and fled, and I was so unsteady that  I crashed  over the sofa as I tried to race after  him.

I got to the door in time to see the lift go. I got to the lift in time to see it had reached  the ground. And I got back to the flat window  in time to see a van tearing down  the hill.

That was when  I lost my second glass of water.

Luckily,  I managed  to grab  the pan from the floor in time. A pan?  In  the  middle  of the sitting-room   floor? Once  the urgency  had  passed,  I studied  it with some interest. One large pan, orange in colour,  wooden of handle,  and very heavy. For smacking someone over the head, it was a lot more useful than the scatter cushions  or the bits of wicker.

While the latest attack  of dizziness passed, I sat on the floor cushion  and  had  another look at  the  photo  album. The  last page had  been torn out. Surprise, surprise.

I put together  the bits of my brain that were still undamaged and pointed  them at this chaotic scene. They didn't do too well. Young Chamois wishes to retrieve photo of self so as not to be linked   with  Solrun. Yes?  Well,  possibly.  So  he  sneaks  in, smashes up  the flat, sneaks  out,  sits reading  Harpers until  I arrive,  sneaks  back, wallops  me over the head with pan, grabs photo  and  goes.

On balance,  I thought  not.

I decided to discard  the theory that he carried  large pans on his person on the off-chance of meeting  a diurnalist in need of treatment. On wobbly legs I went through to the kitchen. Aha. One  row of pans, orange  with wooden  handles. Mummy Pan, Baby Pan, but Big Daddy  Pan was missing from the end  hook. So, I  tried  that  one.  As I sat  admiring his photograph,  he tiptoed   past  me  into   the  kitchen,   selected   the  senior   pan, tiptoed  back, and  panned  me. He then threw it down,  grabbed the photograph, made his escape  ... and  then popped  back to see how I was. Little  as I understand  human behaviour, this didn't sound  too convincing either. And if it didn't sound too good to me, how would it sound to Petursson? The flat suddenly looked a very good place not to be. I went.

15

What  you do in Britain  when you want  to play bloodhounds  is to  start   off at  the  local  sub  post  office.  There, when   they eventually dig out the electoral roll from under  the bacon slicer -invariably covered in potato dirt and still warm from the cat - you can find out who lives where and  with whom.

In Iceland, it's the Hagstofa. The  official records  office is in an old building  opposite a green  hillock where a statue of Eric the Unsteady, or one of his chums, leans  on his axe. With  his rat's-tail hair,  staring eyes and  straggly  beard,  he looks like a sixties' folk-singer.

I'd  nipped   back  to Hulda’s and  had  a  quick  shower  and change when I realised  I could just  catch  the Hagstofa before it closed.  It had struck  me that- apart from personal toe-curling information- I knew very little about Sol run's background. I'd been taken there once before by a local journalist and  I knew it was definitely  the place  to start.

The  manager- if that's what the three-foot  word on his teak door said  - wasn't sure.  He  was  a  pink  hairless   man  with rimless  glasses  and  a face like a hamster after  a three-course meal,  and  he was torn  between  their  tradition of open government and  suspicion  of unannounced strangers.

Two things did it. The sight of my Metropolitan Police Press Pass, with my thumb over the last two words as it wafted across his line of vision, and  the words  Petursson and  Kopavogur in the same  sentence.

With mumbled apologies,  he  took  me  through  to a  room where the walls, from floor to ceiling, were lined with shelves of metal  files.

He reached   for  one,  then  froze  with  his  hand   up,  like a schoolboy  wanting to leave the room.

'Allow me,'  I said,  reaching past  him  and  taking  the  file down.

'Thank you,'  he murmured. 'So difficult. The office girls are

always  taking  away  my steps.  I think  they do it for a joke.' Naturally, since this was Scandinavia and  not Britain, there was no potato dirt  and  cat warmth. Only  sheet  upon sheet of computer print-out. Hamster gave a little hop over to the table and  began  to flick  rapidly   through the  thin  skins  of paper. Suddenly he stopped. With one small sausage finger, he pushed his specs up his nose and  gave me a shifty look.

'For   the  police?'  I  don't suppose he'd  seen  many  cops in crumpled old corduroy suits.

I nodded  towards  the grey  telephone. 'Ring  Petursson.' He gave me a quick  nervous smile and turned  the file towards  me.

'This is her, I think.  Is that  her date  of birth?'

I looked at his finger. That made her twenty. That would be her.

He slammed that  file shut  and  pushed  it away, and  brought another one through from  the next room.               .

'In this file there is just the standard information.' He had it open and his finger on her name again. He began to read of her address, occupation, parents' names,  father  dead  ... 'What exactly  are you looking for?'

I was listening but I was watching him too. His lower lip was

shaking. His eyes were all over the place.  For reasons  known only to himself and  the computer, my little hamster was telling whoppers.

'Let's have a look.' I turned  the file round  towards  me. When computers first came out I recognised  them for what they were, a  passing  fad,  and  ignored   them.  The  result  is  that   I  still experience deep  panic at  the sight of those square-shouldered letters. But I made him show me the letter code which followed every name, and what each letter meant.  And it was all exactly as he had said: except he'd  missed out one letter- a capital C.

'What does it mean?'

The tip  of his fat  finger  whitened   on  the  page.  His  eyes blinked furiously  behind  his specs. His lip wobbled  again.  But he still didn't say anything.

This time I reach over for the telephone. 'Petursson will not be at all pleased ...'

He leaned forward, his finger still stuck  to the page. 'But  he knows. He must know. Everyone  in Iceland  knows.'

I stood there  holding  the  telephone, looking  down  at  his burning face. �I don’t. Tell  me.'

With a sigh he sat back, removed his glasses and  rubbed  the corners of his eyes with finger and  thumb. In a quiet,  relieved voice, he said: 'She is married.' Then  he added: 'You  knew, of course.'

I didn’t. But he'd  led me .there by his own fear.

Solrun, married?  Well, it wasn't  so amazing, was it? What was amazing was that she hadn't told me. Neither  had Hulda, come to think of it, when I'd stumbled upon the right question for once. And the little hamster here had nearly chewed  his lips off with nerves when I'd  asked. Yet it could hardly  be a secret: everyone in the country  must  know.

'Why didn't you want  me to know?'

He   replaced   his  specs   and   looked   at   me  unflinchingly through   their  smeared   lenses.  'I must   help  you  with  your official  inquiries  but  I  think   I  must  not  give  my  personal opinions.'

Whatever it was he was defending, he was doing his best, and he wasn't  a man who had been equipped by nature to stand up to  Gestapo interrogation. I decided   to  leave  him  with  his toenails on.

'In that case, officially, I'd like to see the official record of the official marriage.'

After a moment's thought, he blinked a couple of times and went back  to his wall of files.