Meltwater (Fire and Ice)

another police jeep with the two poor bastards who had spent the night up there guarding the scene. The night watchmen accepted
the thermos of coffee proffered to them by their colleague gratefully.
    ‘God, are we glad to see you,’ said one of them. ‘It was a vile night.’
    ‘No sign of anyone?’ Magnus asked.
    ‘No,’ said the policeman. ‘Good luck finding anything after all that snow. Here, you’d better sign the log.’
    Magnus felt faintly ridiculous signing a crime scene logbook a couple of thousand feet up in the middle of nowhere, but he appreciated the insistence on correct procedure. He looked around.
There would be no tracks. And it would be extremely hard to find something that had been dropped under the new snow. He glanced at the leader of the forensic team, a tall long-legged woman with
short blond hair named Edda, whom Magnus had never met before. She was stunningly beautiful in a classically Nordic way, and Magnus had tried hard not to stare at her on the journey up to the
glacier. He was sure that policemen stared at her stupidly all the time, and he didn’t want to be that obvious.
    At that moment, she looked grim. She could see her team had a long, cold, pointless day ahead of them.
    The wind was still brisk and bit through Magnus’s coat, although he could feel heat emanating from the volcano ahead of him. Apart from the odd rumble, it was silent. Asleep? Or just
taking a nap?
    They all put on extra-large forensic overalls which covered their snow jackets, and Ásta led Edda and Magnus up the lava bank towards the volcano, each one following carefully in the
other’s footsteps so as to keep disturbance to a minimum. Ásta pointed out where the Freeflow team had parked the evening before, where the other jeep and the two snowmobiles were
located, where the team had paused on the rim to watch the volcano and where Erika and Nico had wandered off.
    And there was Nico’s body, lying on its back, covered by a layer of snow.
    As she caught sight of it, Ásta uttered a small cry and stopped in her tracks.
    You cannot be cruel to the dead, but it seemed cruel to have left that body up there, cold and alone, abandoned to the volcano and the blizzard.
    The volcano grumbled, a seismic belch, and spat a single gobbet of orange magma up into the air.
    ‘Stay here,’ Magnus said to Ásta.
    Edda approached the body, with Magnus following. Edda motioned for Magnus to wait a few yards back while she crouched down beside Nico. Magnus watched as she gently brushed snow from his face
and then his front. ‘Single stab wound to the abdomen,’ she called back to Magnus. ‘The blade was removed. There’s a lot of blood. Do you want to take a look?’
    ‘Yes, please,’ said Magnus.
    ‘OK, but don’t touch him.’
    Magnus waited until Edda had made her way back to him and then he took up her former position, crouching by the body.
    Nico had been a good-looking man, late thirties probably, fine features, a shaven skull under his hat, tiny snowflakes clinging to the couple of days’ of stubble on his cheeks. His lips
were bluish. Silent. A diamond stud glinted on one earlobe. His jacket was stained with blood. Magnus prodded where Edda had zipped it open to reveal the wound. One stab was all it had taken.
    Magnus felt the familiar urge coursing through his veins. He would find the person who did this. He owed it to Nico, to the people who loved Nico. Magnus had seen dozens – no, hundreds
– of dead bodies in his time as a homicide detective in Boston. But however many there were, he never forgot that each one had been an individual, who loved and was loved, who would be
mourned, who had things to do that would never be done.
    He stood up. Looked at the ground around the body. Already the snow that had fallen overnight was beginning to melt from the warmth of the lava.
    ‘I suppose one of these stones was the one the killer tried to crack over the victim’s head,’ said Magnus. ‘I don’t know how the hell you tell which one. There
won’t be fingerprints, of course, the guy must have been wearing gloves up here.’
    Edda surveyed the ground sceptically. ‘We might get some fibre, you never know.’ She frowned. ‘Perhaps it’ll be possible to figure out which stone he dropped. The
witnesses said it had just started to snow, didn’t they? Obviously most of the snow would have fallen later, but there just might be a thin layer of new snow underneath the rock we are
looking