Meltwater (Fire and Ice)

them to decide what to do. I will simply do what they tell me. Have you spoken to them?’
    Bryant didn’t answer.
    ‘You have, and they said no, didn’t they? The Modern Media Initiative, I’ll bet. My job is to solve a murder. And that I will do. But no more. Now I’m going.’ He
reached for the latch of the car door and opened it. ‘Nice talking to you.’
    ‘Think about it, Sergeant Detective Jonson.’
    Magnus slammed the door and crossed the busy road looking for the nearest bus stop.
    The man drummed his fingers as he pressed his mobile phone to his ear. He was on hold, and had been for two minutes. His eyes flicked to the statue of Leifur Eiríksson,
over to the church spire and then across to the entrance of Thórsgata. He saw a small white car emerge, driven by the guy he had seen hanging around the street for the past hour or so, and
the big detective.
    Interesting.
    He considered whether to follow them, but decided not to. Curiosity was one thing, but it was the Freeflow people he was really interested in. Besides which, he couldn’t afford to break
off the call.
    ‘Hello? . . . Yes, that’s right, fifteen thousand euros . . . And are you quite sure they won’t know where the funds come from? I want this to be an anonymous donation, you see
. . . Thank you. Thank you very much. Goodbye.’
    The man cut the connection and tossed the phone on to the passenger seat beside him. He turned back to the entrance to Thórsgata and waited.
    It was a couple of hours from Stykkishólmur back to Reykjavík. It was a beautiful drive, scarcely another car on the road, lava fields and farmland stretching
down to the sea. The capital lurked beneath the horizon, but the hazy grey shape of Mount Esja floated like a distant island in the burnished bay.
    Normally, Jóhannes would have felt a sense of euphoria driving through this isolated beauty, especially on a school day. But he couldn’t help turning over in his mind the importance
of what he had learned.
    If indeed his father had pushed Gunnar into the sea off Búland’s Head seventy years before, he was a murderer.
    His father, the man he admired most in the world, was a murderer.
    The words that Benedikt had spoken to him while they were both surveying the Berserkjahraun made sense now. Sometimes they do. Sometimes people do take revenge for family honour, just as
they had done in The Saga of the People of Eyri . And Njáll’s Saga and Gisli’s Saga and all the other sagas.
    It was an admission. More than that, it was a justification. Benedikt was justifying to his son what he had done, even if it would take nearly fifty years for that son to appreciate it.
    But Jóhannes was surprised to find that the discovery that his father was a murderer didn’t fill him with revulsion. It filled him with a kind of pride. Benedikt knew right from
wrong: that was why he was such a good writer. Like some of the sagas, his novels dealt with terrible moral dilemmas. He put his characters in positions where doing the right thing forced them to
break the law, to alienate the people they loved, sometimes to destroy their own lives. That was why novels like Moor and the Man were so popular.
    So if Benedikt had pushed his neighbour Gunnar over the cliff all those years ago, it had been the right thing to do.
    And, like the characters in his books, it had eventually destroyed him.
    Because although Jóhannes did not know for sure who had killed his father, he now knew why.
    Revenge.
    If Benedikt could kill Gunnar for murdering his own father, then Gunnar’s family could kill Benedikt for the same crime.
    A surge of anger rushed through Jóhannes’s veins. The road was long and straight, and without realizing it, Jóhannes put his foot down. He nearly came off at a corner.
    He slammed on the brakes, pulled off the road and jumped out of the car, flinging the door shut behind him.
    He was in the middle of a flat plain near the Eldborg crater, an oval-shaped stone circle bursting up from the congealed lava surrounding it.
    He kicked the wheel of the car. That was satisfying, but he wanted to kick the car itself.
    Stupid. There was a boulder a few metres away. He ran over to it and booted it hard, swearing as he did so. He kicked it again and again and again. Words tumbled out of his mouth. His eyes
stung. His face was hot; his whole body was on fire. He gave the stone one last kick and then hunched his shoulders and stomped off across the lava field towards the