Sun on Fire (22 page)

They climbed over a fence and waded through frozen, withered grass to get to where the old farmhouse had stood. The place was not visible from the road—all that was left of it was the concrete floor. Tufts of grass had seeded themselves through cracks in its surface, most of which was carpeted with green moss. A symbol had been cut into the concrete: a circle, nearly two meters across, with a cross inside. The grooves of the pattern were around ten centimeters wide and two centimeters deep; someone had expended considerable effort to make it.

“The sun cross,” Birkir said.

“I know of people who come here to pray in times of need,” said the cop. “They say you should stand in the middle of the cross at midday with outstretched arms and look toward the sun. Then your shadow falls over the cross, forming another cross.”

“Who are you supposed to pray to?” Birkir asked. “This is a heathen symbol.”

“That’s right,” the cop replied, “but it doesn’t matter who you pray to, be it Christ, God, the Holy Spirit, Allah, Buddha, Odin,
Thor, or even that old Viking—Gunnar of Hlídarendi—who lived nearby. There’s a direct line from this place to whatever Almighty there may be. It listens to your prayer without bothering about the name it gets called, or what language is used. It’s enough that you focus on what’s on your mind. Just so long as it’s not frivolous.”

“Sounds to me like you’ve tried it.”

The cop blushed. “My son was very ill one time. I came here then.”

“I hope he got better.”

The policeman nodded.

Birkir checked his watch and saw that it was nearly noon. He stepped into the center of the cross, his back to the sun, and stretched out his arms. His shadow formed a cross superimposed upon the carved symbol.

“Are you going to pray?” the cop asked.

Birkir shook his head. “No, I’ve nothing to pray for except frivolity. Either that or world peace and happiness, but the Almighty is hardly able to grant that as long as we humans keep devoting ourselves to the opposite. It’s good to know this place exists, though.”

Birkir meant what he said. This space felt kind of sacred; he had a rare feeling of peace, and promised himself he’d visit here in summertime.

They drove back to Hvolsvöllur and had coffee and sandwiches at the police station.

“Can I see the evidence about the fire at Sandgil?” Birkir asked.

“Not today, I’m afraid. The archive is locked and the sheriff has the keys. I’ll photocopy it for you tomorrow and send it.”

“Thanks very much.”

“But you might be able to take a shortcut. Your boss at the violent crime division—isn’t that Magnús Magnússon?

“Yes?”

“He was a police officer here at Hvolsvöllur during that time. He didn’t move to Reykjavík until after the accident. I think he was called to the scene of that fire and wrote up the report on it.”

15:00

As he drove back toward Reykjavík, Birkir called his boss.

“We need to talk,” Birkir said. “About the fire at Sandgil.”

“Is it really necessary to open that up again? It happened decades ago.”

“Yes, and I’m not happy about having to go all the way to Fljótshlíd to discover that you were involved in that investigation.”

“It’s no concern of yours, as far as I can see,” Magnús snapped.

Birkir replied patiently, “All the main characters in the Berlin murder investigation are in some way connected with it. Of course it’s my concern. I need all available information about this case.”

“Oh, all right. Drop by my house when you get back to town.”

Magnús lived with his wife in a handsome old villa on a street just north of Jónshús. Birkir’s apartment was in the same district, but much farther west. It was a quiet part of town but conveniently close to the city center, so parking spaces were sometimes difficult to find; Birkir therefore drove straight back home, left the car in his reserved spot, and walked over to his boss’s place.

“You’ve managed to take advantage of the good weather,” Magnús said as he greeted Birkir at the door and ushered him into his hobby room. This was his sanctuary, where he did his fly tying—that and trout fishing in the summer were his two main interests. The walls of the room were hung with stuffed freshwater fish, pictures of anglers fishing in lakes and streams, and individually labeled frames displaying colorful fishing flies; books about
trout fishing and distinguished anglers lay on the table and lined the shelves.

Magnús offered Birkir a seat and took his place at his worktable. Secured by a little clip beneath a magnifying glass was a small fishhook onto which he had already bound the first feather. Above the worktable was a rack with transparent plastic drawers containing the raw materials for tying flies.

“Tell me about this incident at Sandgil,” Birkir said. “How were you and Sheriff Arngrímur involved?”

Magnús squinted through the magnifying glass. “OK,” he said. “I’ll rehash it, but there are several reports about the case, written at the time, and you should have a look at them if this is so important. I’m not sure I can remember the details accurately.”

“I’ll do that,” Birkir said. “I’ll be getting the reports tomorrow.”

Magnús started his account tentatively. “I’ll begin with the background, my working relationship with Arngrímur at the time. You’d better hear the whole story since you’re digging this up now, though I can’t imagine how it’s going to help you in any way in your investigation.”

“Let’s just see what comes up,” Birkir said. “Please continue.”

“Well, I was a police officer in the Rangárvellir district when it happened. Even though I was from there, it wasn’t my dream job, because I wanted to move to Reykjavík. I’d met my wife at Lake Laugarvatn, where she was at high school and I was at the PE training college. I got myself a summer job with the police force back home, and preferred it to the teacher training course, so I didn’t go back to college. My wife went on to study law after high school, and I wanted to be with her in Reykjavík. But getting a job with the city force was difficult at that time, and even more so for somebody from out of town.”

As he spoke, Magnús picked up small tufts of feathers with a pair of pliers and offered them up to the fly he was working on.

“Arngrímur Esjar became district sheriff in Rangárvellir in the spring of 1972. He wasn’t quite thirty, the youngest ever person to get such a post. He had a high-class law degree and had distinguished himself as an attorney at the Reykjavík Criminal Court, but even so, that in itself was not enough to get such an appointment. No, he had connections. His father, Ólafur Ingi Esjar, was a member of parliament and one of the most powerful men in the country, who would have been a cabinet minister but for his extensive and lucrative business interests. He could run his businesses and serve in parliament, but the workload involved in being a minister would have taken too much time away from his business affairs, and he chose to stay on the sidelines. But he had his fingers in every pie, and the government didn’t do a thing without his knowledge and consent. Word is, Ólafur more or less totally financed his party’s activities.”

He paused a moment while he tied a complicated knot.

“Arngrímur and I got to know each other well during that time in the Southeast. He was single and didn’t know anyone in the district, and I was on my own while my wife was at law school. So we hung out outside of work, too—we rode horses and played badminton in the gym of the local primary school.”

Magnús looked up from his work and turned to Birkir.

“And now we get to your question,” he said. “Soon after Arngrímur came to work out there, this very odd group moved into the little farmhouse at Sandgil, way up in Fljótshlíd. They were hippies from Reykjavík, two young men—Jón and Helgi—and two young women—Sunna and Rakel—and a boy, Fabían. Those five were the permanent residents, but they had a heap of visitors, some of them long-term.”

Birkir said, “Those three men were all guests at the Icelandic embassy in Berlin last Sunday. Also Starkadur, Sunna’s brother.”

“Yes, but that has to be coincidence. There’s no connection here.”

“Nevertheless, please carry on with your story. You seem to remember it all pretty well.”

“Yes, it’s coming back to me. OK . . . so Jón and Sunna were a couple, as were Rakel and Helgi. Fabían was supposedly employed by Jón but was in fact a homeless, dysfunctional kid they’d taken under their wing. The house they moved into was on some rural land that had belonged to Jón’s great uncle, but the uncle had died without any children, so Sváfnir, Jón’s father, inherited it. I understand that Jón took over the house without asking Sváfnir’s permission, but it seems the matter rested there.

“The young people were all involved in various kinds of art, which was supposed to support their rural existence. Jón wrote poems, Helgi was into ceramics, and Sunna was a musician and also made wax candles. Rakel wanted to be a writer, and Fabían was an artist. On Friday afternoons, weather permitting, they would set up outside the co-op store and try to make money. Sunna played the guitar and sang her songs, and the others offered their artwork for sale. The boys didn’t sell a thing, but folks would throw coins into Sunna’s guitar case. Eventually, realizing they couldn’t live off their art, the hippies found another way to earn money—they grew cannabis in their attic to sell in Reykjavík. Small amounts to begin with, but then they increased their production. That was when the cultivation stopped being a secret, because the electricity company noticed the sudden surge in consumption at the cottage. Before that, Jón had always had difficulties paying the electricity bill, but now he began to pay up front, even though the bill had tripled. People passing the cottage
at nighttime reported seeing strange lights shining through the cracks in the roof. It didn’t take us long to put two and two together.”

Magnus continued: “Fridays, they would head off to Reykjavík in an old Russian jeep and circulate round the clubs to sell packs of the stuff. We set up an operation to arrest them outside Reykjavík on one of their sales trips, and as a follow-up the sheriff and I drove down to Fljótshlíd to conduct a house search at Sandgil and arrest the two who’d stayed behind. We’d arrested Jón, Helgi, and Rakel in possession of a large quantity, but Sunna and Fabían remained at home. We were only a few kilometers away when we saw smoke and then fire at the house. We drove as fast as we could, but we got there too late. Fabían had escaped and vanished into the night, but Sunna was trapped inside—we heard her shouting for help. Arngrímur tried to rescue her, but his efforts were in vain. He was lucky to get away with his life, because he lost consciousness trying to get back out of the house, and I had to drag him to safety. The house burned to the ground before firefighters could get there. It took a search team to find Fabían, and he was completely incapable of explaining the cause of the fire. When it became clear that he was a mental and physical wreck, he was committed to an appropriate institution.”

“So what was the cause of the fire?”

Magnús paused. Finally he said, “The forensic investigation of the ruins indicated that a gas stove had been in use when the fire started. A large saucepan containing traces of wax lay on the floor. Witnesses said that there had always been things for candle production—molds, coloring, wicks—in the living room. The surviving household members confirmed that candle production had taken place in the house. The investigators’ conclusion was that Fabían had been melting wax in rather rudimentary
conditions. The wax overheated, and fire broke out. He was able to get out through the back door, but Sunna was probably in the attic tending to the cannabis plants, unaware of the fire until it was too late. Her body was found under the collapsed roof near the small skylight she probably tried to escape through.”

“So it was an accident.”

“Yes, a tragic one. Sheriff Arngrímur was so traumatized by the experience that he quit his job and went to work for the foreign service. Shortly afterward I was offered a position in Reykjavík, and I tried to put the matter behind me. This experience was simply too devastating to even think about.”

“Why did Arngrímur stop calling himself Esjar?”

“I don’t know,” Magnús said. “Maybe to keep his head down. The Esjar family name was kind of prominent, and his father made a lot of noise wherever he went.”

“And instead of taking on his father’s first name for his patronymic, Arngrímur used his father’s second name,” Birkir said. “Any idea why?”

“No,” Magnús answered, impatiently. “I haven’t seen Arngrímur since all of that happened. He suffered from burns and smoke inhalation, and I think it took him a long time to recover. He never went back to Hvolsvöllur.”

17:30

Even though Gunnar was officially on leave, Birkir knew he wanted to be kept up to speed on the investigation, so he decided to make a sick call to his home.

María met him at the door. “Birkir Li. My favorite.” She smiled, and invited him into the apartment, which smelled of cooking.

“You make sure Gunnar not go back to Egilsstadir,” she whispered as she ushered him into the living room, where Gunnar sat in a comfortable chair with a stool under his feet.

“Mom is cooking meat stew,” he grinned, looking at Birkir with his good eye; the left one was completely obscured by an ugly blue swelling. “Stay for dinner. There’s plenty. Enough to last all week.”

“How are you doing?”

“I’m great,” Gunnar said. “But the doc thinks I’ll be worse tomorrow when the bruising on my chest kicks in. I asked Mom to cook the stew a long time, at least two hours, because I don’t want to have to chew too much.”

“How did you sleep?”

“Really well. The rest of the ward needed extra sleeping pills because of my snoring. The night shift had never heard anything like it,” Gunnar said triumphantly.

“You’re lying,” Birkir said.

“OK, I might be exaggerating, but I slept really well, thanks. The hospital gave me strong painkillers. I’m supposed to take more if I can’t sleep tonight.”

Birkir told Gunnar about his trip out to Fljótshlíd and his conversation with Magnús. Then they ate meat stew and watched
CSI
on television. When Gunnar had fallen asleep in his chair, Birkir went home.