Meltwater (Fire and Ice)

white wooden gate.
All around was a breathtaking view: the fjord to the south, the lava field to the west, mountains to the east and north, and to the north-west, only a few kilometres away, floated the mystical
glacier. The clouds had lifted to reveal the volcano, an almost perfect cone, snow covering the permanent ice at its summit. At the very peak was a hooked pinnacle of rock, a stone thorn piercing
the ice cap.
    He looked at the rows of gravestones and for a moment wished that he had buried his father here. The old man would have loved to spend eternity in this spot. As would he, for that matter.
    He ran through Benedikt’s short story collection in his mind. They were much less well known than the novels, especially Moor and the Man , but Jóhannes had read them all many
times.
    ‘The Slip’! That must be it. It was only a few pages long, but it described how a boy took revenge over the rape of his sister by pushing the rapist off a cliff. If that was the
case, then who had been raped? And who had been pushed?
    Jóhannes remembered the words from The Saga of Grettir the Strong : ‘A tale is half told when one man tells it.’ He had his own relatives he could speak to: his aunt
Hildur was still alive and living in Stykkishólmur, the nearest town to Hraun. And there were cousins there as well. If there was a family feud buried somewhere, they might be able to give
him a clue as to where or what it was. He liked his aunt and hadn’t seen her for a couple of years. Time to pay her a visit.
    He checked his watch. It was not yet four. It would take less than an hour to get to Stykkishólmur, plenty of time to get back to Reykjavík that evening so that he could go in to
school the following morning.
    School! How he had loved that place. But not any more.
    He surveyed the glacier, the lava field, the sea and the beach beyond the hotel. It was wonderful to be outside Reykjavík in the fresh air on a school day. It was at least five years
since he had taken a day off sick. He remembered again how he had spent long days with his father and his brother and sister here, looking for the hidden people’s tunnel of jewels. There was
the crater and ruined houses and holes in the cliffs where the waves rushed in and leaped up against rock walls. And further to the west was the farm where Gudrídur the Wanderer had been
brought up: the extraordinary woman who had been born in Iceland, married in Greenland, had a child in America, returned to Iceland and then gone on a pilgrimage to Rome.
    All kinds of wonders.
    He struck out across the rock and moss towards the crater in the centre of the lava field. He would treat himself to a night at the Hotel Búdir and see his relatives in
Stykkishólmur tomorrow. And sod school.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    T HE MAN HAD been sitting in the car for hours, but he wasn’t tired.
    His vehicle was parked in the car park to the side of the great church, facing west. Ahead of him was a statue of a Viking staring off towards the Atlantic, behind which was a hotel, the Leifur
Eiríksson. Just to the left of the hotel a small road ran downhill. Thórsgata.
    He had followed the tortuous one-way system through the warren of streets that tangled themselves around the slope of the hill down towards the Parliament Square and the lake in the centre of
the city. It was odd: these must be some of the most expensive properties in town, but they had corrugated metal roofs. And where there wasn’t metal there was concrete. No wood. No brick.
    The trouble was Thórsgata was just a little too quiet. He couldn’t park in the street itself in sight of the house that Freeflow had taken over without attracting attention. There
was a marked police car opposite the building, and the officer inside was looking around.
    Which posed a problem. Someone leaving the house could either turn left uphill, in which case they would pass in sight of him parked outside the big church, or else they could turn right,
downhill, in which case he would never spot them.
    He couldn’t see a way around this. He would just have to take the fifty-fifty chance of missing them. He glanced at his phone resting on the passenger’s seat next to him. That would
help.
    Many cars had passed up Thórsgata that afternoon: police, marked and unmarked; press; TV; and no doubt some legitimate inhabitants of the street, wondering what the hell was going on.
    The man had brought a magazine, but he was too wired to read it. He kept his