Meltwater (Fire and Ice)

to the farm where he grew up.’
    Magnus drove fast, his hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly they were white. He should have been pleased that his brother was finally taking an interest in their
grandfather and their father’s death, but he wasn’t. He was furious.
    The only reason that Magnus could think of for Ollie and Jóhannes to drive up to Bjarnarhöfn was to confront the old man. And if that was going to happen, Magnus wanted to be there.
It was out of consideration for Ollie that he had held off asking his own questions about the two murders. And now Ollie was blithely blundering in by himself.
    Sure, there was emotion involved in Magnus’s frustration, but the policeman in him knew that Ollie’s action was a really bad idea. If anyone was going to ask Hallgrímur
questions, it should be Magnus. He knew what to ask, and he would know what to do with the answers. Magnus couldn’t trust Ollie to do that.
    Jóhannes seemed an intelligent man. Maybe he could be trusted at least to remember the answers.
    It was weird that Ollie had teamed up with Jóhannes. Who had contacted whom? Magnus wondered. It must have been Ollie who had made the first move. Jóhannes’s disapproval of
Ollie had been obvious at lunch, and Magnus would naturally be the brother he would call.
    But why would Ollie talk to Jóhannes and not Magnus? Perhaps he had tried to, but Magnus was too busy chasing homicidal Belgians.
    Strange, very strange.
    Magnus was skirting the flank of Mount Esja. The sun glinted off the grey Faxaflói Bay, and Reykjavík was gleaming in the distance. It was a little less than two hours to
Bjarnarhöfn from Reykjavík. Magnus had forgotten to ask Katrín what time Ollie had left, but he guessed it was early: Magnus hadn’t heard his brother leave the house. So it
was unlikely he would catch them up.
    He picked up his phone and called in to the station to tell Baldur he wouldn’t be in until late afternoon. He made an excuse about how it was Ollie’s last day and a problem had come
up with his flight home. Which was true; Ollie would be hard pushed to get to Bjarnarhöfn and back in time to catch it.
    Baldur didn’t complain. He still had his work cut out. Although the Church wasn’t implicated in Ásta’s murder, Soffía’s allegations were out in the open, or
at least halfway out. It was going to be a rough summer for the Church of Iceland.
    The car radio cut to the news. The Freeflow video was given prominence and they played a clip of Samantha Wilton’s plea for the criminals responsible to be brought to justice. There was
already a comment from the Israeli government, who said that the video was a fake. That was quick, thought Magnus. An Icelandic correspondent speculated that the peace process would be delayed yet
again.
    Was the video a fake? Magnus had no idea. But it seemed to him that Freeflow was wide open to misinformation, no matter how carefully it said it vetted everything it received. And he
wasn’t convinced by Freeflow’s protestation of neutrality. Although it wasn’t overtly commenting on the evidence, the video had been edited and presented for maximum emotional
impact. What Magnus didn’t know was whether Freeflow was the manipulator or the manipulated.
    The road plunged into the deep twisting tunnel under Hvalfjördur and the radio cut out. As he emerged on to the other side, he switched to a CD. It was a Brahms cello sonata that Ingileif
used to play all the time. She had introduced Magnus to classical music and the sonata had become one of his favourite pieces, inextricably mixed up in his mind, in his soul, with her.
    Just when he thought he had got used to being without her, she had burst back into his life. For a couple of days, a couple of nights, he had remembered why he loved being with her so much.
Fooling around with her was fun, but she meant so much more to him than that, and he couldn’t pretend to himself or to her that she didn’t.
    Which was why Kerem pissed him off so badly. She was jerking Magnus around and he didn’t like it.
    Presumably she was still in Iceland somewhere, trapped by the ash cloud, staying with her friend María probably. The sooner she was back in Hamburg with her Turk the better.
    He ejected the cello, and replaced it with Soundgarden. Much better.
    He approached the Snaefells Peninsula along an empty road. While the sky above him was clear and the sea over to the left sparkled, the mountains that formed the