Meltwater (Fire and Ice)

fear of what had happened to him at Bjarnarhöfn when he was a kid was real, but he didn’t understand why that meant Magnus couldn’t pursue his own
investigations. He had a perfect right to, whatever Ollie said.
    Magnus felt the anger rise within him. Once again he was being manipulated by his brother, who was taking on his habitual role of injured victim. Magnus was always being manipulated by his
brother. Well, this time Magnus wasn’t going to let him get away with it. He picked up the photograph of Ollie with his cocky smirk, and stuck it dead centre in the middle of the wall.
    Ollie was involved, and no amount of whining on his part would change that.
    His doorbell rang. He went downstairs to see Ingileif, smiling broadly on the doorstep. She kissed him.
    ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I finally get to see you.’
    They went up to his room. ‘Is Ollie here?’
    ‘He’s downstairs. He said he was going to sleep.’
    ‘So I won’t get to meet him?’
    ‘Perhaps not tonight. Although he seems to have made good friends with Katrín.’
    ‘Really? Last time I saw her, she liked girls.’
    ‘A passing phase, I think. Ollie and I had a fight.’
    ‘Already?’
    ‘Yeah. Over that.’ Magnus nodded to the wall.
    ‘You want to find out more and he doesn’t?’
    ‘That’s right.’
    Magnus slumped on to the bed. Ingileif flopped next to him, and snuggled into his chest. He put his arm around her and squeezed.
    ‘At some point you need to do what you need to do,’ Ingileif said. ‘I know you worry about him, but this is important for you too. And maybe once you have figured out
what’s going on, you can take all that down.’
    ‘Maybe,’ said Magnus. ‘Maybe a lot of things would be better.’
    ‘I hope so,’ said Ingileif. But Magnus could hear the note of doubt in her voice. Perhaps he would never be able to live in peace with the death of his father. But he had to try.
    ‘How’s the other investigation going?’ Ingileif asked. ‘The guy who died on the volcano?’
    ‘Not brilliantly.’
    ‘Tell me about it.’
    So Magnus told her about Freeflow and Erika and Teresa. As he talked he unwound, relaxed.
    And then they made love.
    As Magnus lay in bed staring at the ceiling, his thigh lightly touching Ingileif’s naked, slumbering body, he thought how good it was to have her back.
    He smiled.

CHAPTER NINETEEN
    Thursday 15 April 2010
    ‘T HE ASH IS falling,’ said Árni. ‘Did you see it on TV?’
    His eyes were shining. It was
eight o’clock and all the members of the Violent Crimes Unit were huddled together in a meeting room to discuss the case. The uniformed inspector was there, as were Rannveig and Chief
Superintendent Thorkell Holm, the head of CID and everybody’s boss. And Baldur, of course.
    ‘Some of us have better things to do in the morning than watch TV,’ said Baldur.
    ‘Like sleep,’ said Róbert.
    ‘There was a shot of a farm in Mýrdalur,’ Árni continued. ‘The whole place is covered in this horrible grey stuff, including the sheep. The farmer said he was
screwed. The ash will poison his crops and his animals. Fluorine.’
    ‘Is the eruption getting worse?’ someone asked.
    ‘It’s still going strong. And there is a lot of ash. They have closed some airspace as far away as Scotland. Apparently the ash can ruin aircraft engines.’
    ‘It looks OK here,’ said Róbert. And indeed it did. In Reykjavík it was a bit cloudy, a bit cold, but no sign of ash.
    ‘The wind is blowing it all to the east,’ said Árni. ‘Although they say it’s going to blow south today.’
    Thorkell cleared his throat. He was a bluff grey-haired man with a shiny good-natured face. Not quite as sharp as Snorri, the Commissioner, but no dummy. And he was Árni’s uncle.
‘Let’s start. We have a lot to get through this morning. Magnús?’
    Magnus ran through the attack on Erika the evening before and the attempts to find the attacker. Several witnesses had seen him run across Laugavegur up the hill towards the
Hallgrímskirkja, but no one had seen him get into a car. Erika had confirmed that she was pretty sure that he was the same man who had attacked her and Nico on the volcano. She herself had
spent a couple of hours in hospital – her cheek had been badly cut – but now she was back at the house on Thórsgata.
    Magnus repeated his description and said he was due to spend some time with a police artist that morning.
    ‘You heard him speak, did you, Magnús?’ Baldur