Meltwater (Fire and Ice)

ago. I wondered how I got away with it. This is hardly the most crowded part of the country: of course I knew who it
was. I knew who everyone was. And why shouldn’t I tell you now?’
    Jóhannes returned his smile. ‘So who was it?’
    ‘My cousin from Bjarnarhöfn. Hallgrímur Gunnarsson.’
    ‘Really?’ said Jóhannes. ‘And was he poaching?’
    ‘No chance. There’s no reason for Hallgrímur to come here to poach. He had his own perfectly good farm.’
    ‘Bjarnarhöfn, eh? He and my father must have been neighbours when my father was a boy.’
    ‘At Hraun, wasn’t it?’ said Hermann.
    ‘Yes. My grandmother moved away to Stykkishólmur in the 1940s some time and my father went on to high school in Reykjavík. So why didn’t you tell the police who he
was?’
    ‘He was family and at that time my family were all pretty angry with your father. And I was scared of Hallgrímur. He came to see me the next day and warned me not to talk to anyone
about it.’
    ‘You were scared of him then, but not now?’
    ‘I was sixteen then and he was in his fifties. He was a mean bastard, still is, I suspect, but now he’s got to be in his eighties. I haven’t seen him for several years, not
since my uncle’s funeral. He is my father’s cousin, that’s the exact relationship.’
    ‘So this Hallgrímur is still alive?’
    ‘Oh, yes. I would have heard if he’d died.’
    ‘You said that your family were angry with Dad?’
    ‘Yes. He’d written something in a book which seemed to suggest that his father had had an affair with Hallgrímur’s mother, and then Hallgrímur’s father had
killed him and dumped him in the lake. I think that’s right.’
    ‘ Moor and the Man ?’ said Jóhannes.
    ‘I don’t know. I didn’t read the book. But it got my father very upset, and Hallgrímur, of course.’
    ‘So that’s why this man Hallgrímur was threatening my father with a shotgun?’
    ‘Yes. I think he was telling him not to make up any more tales about our family. Wait a moment.’ Hermann paused, running his fingers through his beard.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘I remember now. He said something about some other story Benedikt had written. About how someone had killed someone else.’
    ‘Really? Can you remember the name of the story?’
    Hermann shook his head. ‘No chance. And I can’t remember who had killed who. Maybe Hallgrímur’s father was supposed to have murdered somebody else as well? I don’t
know.’
    ‘Did your family talk about this other story?’
    ‘No. Just Hallgrímur that once.’
    Jóhannes looked down towards the hollow, wondering what that story could be. Benedikt had published a collection just before he died, it might be one of those.
    ‘Didn’t it occur to you that Hallgrímur might have killed my father?’ Jóhannes said.
    ‘No, not at the time. I mean, that happened in Reykjavík, didn’t it? And Hallgrímur was family. But you know, he is mean. He always has been. He could have done it, I
suppose.’ Hermann grimaced. ‘Killed him.’
    ‘Would you speak to the police now?’
    Hermann scratched his head. ‘Would I get into trouble for lying to them all those years ago?’
    Jóhannes shrugged. ‘I don’t know. But if you did do something wrong then, this would be a way of putting it right.’
    Hermann sucked through his teeth, and looked up towards the shimmering glacier. ‘I might,’ he said. ‘I’m not saying I would, but I might.’
    ‘Thanks.’ Jóhannes held out his hand. ‘Thank you very much.’
    As Hermann made his way back to the stables, Jóhannes stood outside the lonely little church, his brain racing.
    He was getting somewhere! He was genuinely getting somewhere. Halldór Laxness’s letter was dated 14 November 1985, about six weeks before his father had been murdered. What if
Hallgrímur had not been merely threatening Benedikt, what if he had been about to shoot him when Hermann had interrupted them?
    But would a man in the 1980s kill another man over something that had happened fifty years before? It was 1934 when Jóhannes’s grandfather and namesake had disappeared from Hraun.
And the revenge motive was the wrong way around. Hallgrímur’s father had been slandered, perhaps, but it was Benedikt’s father who had actually been killed.
    Unless this other story held a clue.
    Jóhannes looked up at the small black church, with the figures 1847 etched in iron under the cross on its roof, its churchyard surrounded by a turf-covered wall with a