Meltwater (Fire and Ice)

families and for a few years Jóhannes had brought his own family to live there, until his wife had left him, taking their children with her. Why, Jóhannes had never quite
understood.
    A big house for a lone teacher. A very big house for a lone unemployed teacher.
    It had been worth a fortune before the crash. He could probably still sell it for a reasonable price even in the current depressed market. Maybe one day he would have to, but not yet.
    He pulled out his pipe and sat in his favourite armchair. It felt strange to be at home during the day in school term-time. Very strange.
    He felt a wave of depression sweep over him. If Jóhannes wasn’t a teacher, what was he?
    His father, who was indeed a great novelist, superior to Halldór Laxness in Jóhannes’s opinion, was at the height of his powers at Jóhannes’s age. He did a quick
calculation. At fifty-five, Benedikt had had four more years to live, four years until Jóhannes found him right there in the hallway, stabbed.
    What a strange, inexplicable way for such a good and talented man to die.
    Jóhannes had dropped in unannounced early one evening to return a book. The front door was unlocked, as it sometimes was. He had shouted a greeting, walked in and found his father lying
in a pool of his own blood out there in the hallway.
    The case had never been solved, but not for want of trying. Jóhannes had himself been interviewed a number of times, as had all Benedikt’s friends. Suspicion had flitted from one to
the other of them, even resting briefly on Jóhannes’s shoulders, but no one had been arrested. A burglar was perhaps the most likely candidate, but no one really knew.
    The irony was that the autopsy had revealed a tumour in Benedikt’s brain that would have killed him in a few months anyway. Benedikt’s doctor confirmed that Benedikt had known about
it for almost a year, a knowledge that he had decided not to pass on to his children.
    Jóhannes had tried, but he found it difficult to forgive his father for that.
    Benedikt had taught Jóhannes everything he knew: his love of language; his love of literature; his respect for other people, especially the young. Teaching, in Benedikt’s eyes, was
a noble profession and one that Jóhannes had been proud to follow all these years. And he was good at it, really good. It was one of Jóhannes’s greatest regrets that his father
had never been inside one of Jóhannes’s classrooms, never seen how enraptured those thirteen-year-olds could be with Vermundur and Styr and Arnkell and Snorri and all those other
colourful characters who beckoned from the tenth century.
    Of course Jóhannes’s teaching career wasn’t necessarily over. He could fight to keep his position. Or he could look for another: times were very tough and teachers were being
laid off all over Iceland, but there might be a job for him somewhere else. It would be a long struggle, a very long struggle and it might end in failure.
    Or . . .
    Or perhaps this was one of those opportunities dressed up as disaster. For years Jóhannes had been collecting all the information he could on his father. His books and manuscripts, of
course, letters both to and from him, articles written by him and about him, and in recent years the dissertations on his life and works that various literature students had produced. They were
lying in a series of untidy piles next to his desk. One day, Jóhannes had promised himself long ago, one day he would write a biography of his father.
    Perhaps that day was now.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    M AGNUS STOPPED OFF at Hvolsvöllur police station where he reported back to Chief Superintendent Kristján. He
decided not to wait for the press conference at nine, but to head straight back to Reykjavík. He wanted to get at that house on Thórsgata.
    He switched to his own car and offered to give Ásta a lift back with him. He could hardly leave her stranded in Hvolsvöllur.
    It was an hour-and-a-half’s drive to Reykjavík, but Ásta swiftly fell asleep in the seat beside Magnus. He considered trying to grill her, but he doubted that there was much
more he could get out of her. The countryside of south Iceland sped past: clumps of sodden yellow grass with the odd horse looking cold, wet and hungry. The area was renowned in Iceland for its
rich soil, and the horses for their cheerful hardiness, but it all looked a bit miserable to Magnus.
    As they reached the steep bank just beyond Hveragerdi and climbed the switchbacks