Meltwater (Fire and Ice)

get Nico and Erika and tell them to come down?’ said Dúddi. ‘The rest of you, follow me. We’ll keep an eye out for Franz.’
    They could no longer see their jeep below them. Scrambling down the pile of cooled lava was unpleasant: the wind seemed to be blowing harder and colder and the stones slipped underfoot. It was a
relief to get back to their vehicle, and to find Franz waiting inside. The jeep they had parked next to was gone; only the two snowmobiles remained, as far as Ásta could see.
    They piled into the car and waited for Dieter and the others. Dúddi switched the engine on: the warmth and the shelter from the wind was a relief. Ásta saw two figures climb on to
the snowmobiles and zoom off. The mess of tyre tracks was still visible, but it wouldn’t be long before they would be covered in snow. She hoped Dúddi knew how to operate his GPS.
    They could no longer see the volcano, save for a fuzzy orange glow through the whiteness. But they could hear it.
    ‘Come on,’ muttered Dúddi to himself as he sat in the driver’s seat. ‘We can’t hang around much longer. I’m going back to get them. You wait
here.’
    He climbed out of the jeep and Ásta watched him bend into the wind towards the slope of lava.
    ‘I hope they’re OK,’ said Zivah, nervously.
    ‘Of course they are,’ said Ásta.
    ‘You don’t think they could have fallen into the volcano or anything, do you?’
    ‘No,’ said Ásta, peering into the bitter white gloom. ‘Don’t worry. They’ll be fine.’

CHAPTER THREE
    S ERGEANT MAGNUS JONSON sipped from his bottle of Viking beer and stared at the wall of his studio apartment. He was still
tingling from his after-work swim, and the soak in the geothermally heated hot tub at the Laugardalur baths. He had been in Reykjavík nearly a year now, had graduated from the National
Police College five months before and was now well into the routine of the Violent Crimes Unit of the Metropolitan Police. That afternoon, he had investigated a suspected domestic violence case: a
woman had supposedly fallen down the stairs, bruising her shoulder and getting herself a black eye. Magnus had goaded her hung-over but abusive boyfriend, hoping for an opportunity to slug him, but
Vigdís, a fellow detective in the unit with a bit more patience than Magnus, had defused the situation. Bummer.
    His room was right downtown in Reykjavík’s 101 district, on the first floor of a small house on Njálsgata owned by the sister of one of his colleagues. Through his window
Magnus had a great view of the sweeping floodlit spire of the Hallgrímskirkja. But he wasn’t looking at the church.
    He was looking at the wall.
    He had only started sticking up the photographs when his girlfriend Ingileif had disappeared to Germany five months before. He had felt a little self-conscious at first, and he knew she would
have laughed at him. But he was a detective, a detective with an unsolved crime. He had tried hiding from it for years, but he hadn’t succeeded. So he pinned it up on his wall.
    He had started with just photographs, but now there were copied pages of reports, newspaper articles and multicoloured Post-its. He would occasionally rearrange everything to look at the
evidence from different angles. Sometimes the fiddling revealed a new insight, but it had never revealed the solution. At least not yet.
    At the moment his father, Dr Ragnar Jónsson, was smiling down from the top left section of the wall. Beneath him were photographs of Duxbury, Massachusetts, the town outside Boston where
Ragnar had been stabbed to death fourteen years before in 1996. The photograph had been taken by Magnus in the back yard of the house there where Magnus, his brother Ollie, Ragnar and
Magnus’s stepmother had spent a month that summer. Beneath it were notes about the case, many scribbled by Magnus when, as a twenty-year-old student, he had tried to figure out what had
happened. One page, highlighted, described how his father had been stabbed once in the back and twice in the chest.
    On the far right of the wall was a cutting from a newspaper showing a photograph of the famous Icelandic novelist Benedikt Jóhannesson, and another describing his murder in the winter of
1985 at his house in Reykjavík. Next to it was a photograph of Hraun, the farm in the Snaefells Peninsula a couple of hours north of Reykjavík where Benedikt had been born. Underneath
was a photocopy of the forensic patholo-gist’s report