Meltwater (Fire and Ice)

1985. A powerful scene in the book described how two boys, friends from neighbouring farms, had come across the father of one of them having sex with the mother of the other one in a barn.
A month later the boys were playing by a lake, when they saw the woman’s husband dumping a heavy weight in a sack into the water. That evening, her lover never returned home. He had been
murdered.
    What interested Jóhannes particularly was the rumour that had sprung up in the Snaefells Peninsula that there were parallels with the disappearance of Benedikt’s own father,
Jóhannes’s grandfather, from his farm at Hraun in 1934. That mystery had never been solved: some people thought he had run away to America, some that he had fallen into the fjord by
Hraun. And then, after reading the book, some felt he had been murdered by a neighbouring farmer.
    Benedikt didn’t live long enough to deny the rumour and as far as Jóhannes was aware it had never been substantiated. Jóhannes’s own provisional opinion was that
Benedikt had simply invented a solution to a problem that had haunted him from his childhood, but there was no doubt that more research was needed.
    As Jóhannes sorted the documents, one particular piece of paper forced itself to the top of the pile.
    It was a letter Jóhannes had received two months earlier from a former pupil whose late grandfather had been a friend of Halldór Laxness. The pupil had been going through his
grandfather’s papers and made an interesting discovery. In 1985, when Halldór himself was a very old man, he had written to the pupil’s grandfather from Búdir, a hotel on
the south coast of the Snaefells Peninsula, over the mountains from Hraun. The pupil had enclosed a photocopy of Halldór’s letter with the relevant passage highlighted. It was dated 14
November 1985, only a month before Benedikt was murdered.
    Jóhannes read it through, although the paragraph was so familiar he had probably memorized it by now.
    I saw an extraordinary thing yesterday while riding through the lava field with the stable boy. Benedikt Jóhannesson was involved in an altercation with a man with
     a shotgun. For a moment I thought that the man would actually shoot Benedikt. The stable boy – Hermann was his name – was quite brave, he rode down and somehow calmed things
     down.
    I had no idea that Benedikt was staying at the hotel. I looked out for him at dinner that evening, but he must have left.
    Odd.
    Odd indeed. And something Jóhannes had been meaning to clear up. He had got as far as checking with the Hotel Búdir. There had indeed been a stable boy named Hermann employed by
the hotel in the 1980s. What was more he was still there: now he was in charge of the stables attached to the hotel.
    Jóhannes could sit in his chair and mope about his lost teaching career all day.
    Or he could get off his backside and do something.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    ‘Y OU KNOW WHO’S behind this, don’t you?’
    Erika and Dieter were sitting on the bed in her room with her laptop open in front of them. Erika was sipping a can of Red Bull, Dieter Coke Zero. They were on encrypted Skype to Apex. Although
Apex could see Erika and Dieter, they couldn’t see Apex: he had his video camera turned off. Erika still had no idea what he looked like. Dieter liked Skype: because it had been developed in
Sweden, his theory was that the CIA had never had the chance to build a backdoor into the software through which they could eavesdrop. Apex had his doubts about that, but then Apex always had
doubts.
    The door was shut. Zivah and the others were having breakfast downstairs in the living room.
    ‘Who?’ Erika asked.
    ‘Mossad, of course,’ said the Australian.
    ‘We don’t know that,’ said Erika.
    ‘No – we never know who is watching us, do we? But it’s not the Chinese, is it? And Mossad are mean.’
    ‘How would they know we’ve got the video?’
    ‘Good question,’ said Apex. ‘But I suggest you all get out of Reykjavík right away before anyone else gets killed.’
    ‘No, Apex. We are publishing this. And we are doing it in the next week. For Nico’s sake.’
    ‘Hey, Erika, you don’t want to mess with Mossad.’
    ‘Apex, we will mess with anyone. No one can intimidate Freeflow into not publishing. No one.’
    ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’
    ‘What do you care?’ said Erika. ‘You’re safe in some pit in Melbourne or Sydney or wherever you are. We’re the ones who are taking the risk