Where the Shadows Lie (Fire and Ice)

ferry Magnus’s bag back to the house, and once Árni had made sure that Magnus was installed, he left him. There was no sound from Katrín.
    Magnus stepped out on to the street. Consulting a city map, he walked one block down the hill and one block across. The sky had cleared, apart from a single thin slab that covered the top of the ridge of stone and snow that was Mount Esja. Magnus was beginning to spot a pattern: the base of the cloud moved up and down the mountain several times a day, depending on the weather. The air was clear and crisp. At eight-thirty it was still light.
    He found the street he was looking for and made his way slowly along, examining each house as he went. Perhaps he wouldn’t recognize it after all these years. Perhaps they had changed the colour of the roof. But as he followed the road over a hump he saw it: the small house with the bright blue roof of his childhood.
    He stopped outside it and stared. The old whitebeam was still there, but a rope had been added to one of the branches. A good idea. A deflated football lay in a bed of daffodils, just about to bloom. He was glad there were still children there; he guessed most of the houses in that neighbourhood were now inhabited by young couples. A large Mercedes SUV stood proudly outside, containing two child seats. A far cry from his father’s old VW Beetle.
    He closed his eyes. Above the murmur of the traffic he could hear his mother calling Óli and him inside for bed. He smiled.
    Then the front door began to open and he turned away, embarrassed that the current owners would see a strange man leering at their house.
    He made his way down the hill towards the centre of town. He passed a group of four men and a woman unloading equipment from a van. A band getting ready for Saturday night. The girl with the leopard-skin miniskirt and tail zipped past on her bicycle. In Reykjavík, he realized, you could expect to see the same person on the streets several times in one day.
    He stopped at Eymundsson’s bookstore, an all-glass jewel on Austurstraeti, where he picked up the last English copy of The Lord of the Rings , and a copy of the Saga of the Volsungs , in Icelandic.
    He headed over towards the Old Harbour and another memory from his childhood, a small red kiosk, Baejarins beztu pylsur . He and his father used to go there every Wednesday night, after hand-ball practice, for a hot dog. He joined the line. Unlike the rest of Reykjavík, Baejarins beztu hadn’t changed over the years, except there was now a picture outside of a grinning Bill Clinton tucking into a large sausage.
    Munching his hot dog, he strolled through the harbour area and along the pier. It was a working harbour, but at this time of the evening it was peaceful. On one side were trawlers, on the other, sleek whale-watching vessels and small inshore fishing boats. There was a smell of fish and of diesel, although Magnus passed a squat white hydrogen fuel pump. He paused at the end, a respectful distance from a fisherman fiddling with his bait in a bag, and surveyed the stillness.
    Beyond the harbour wall, the black rock and white snow of Mount Esja was reflected in the steel-grey water. A seagull wheeled around him, looking for a discarded morsel, but after a few seconds abandoned him with a disappointed cry. An officious looking motor boat cut through the harbour entrance on some mission of nautical bureaucracy.
    Iceland had changed so much since the disruptions of his childhood, but what he recognized of Reykjavík brought back the early years, the happy years. There was no reason to visit his mother’s family; they need never even find out he was in the country. He was pleased with the way his Icelandic seemed to be coming back so well, although he was aware that he spoke with a touch of an American accent: he needed to work on rolling those ‘r’s.
    Reykjavík was a long way from Boston, a long way north of Boston. Twenty-five degrees of latitude. It wasn’t just the cold air or the patches of snow that told him this – Boston Harbor could be cold and bleak enough – it was the light: clear but soft, pale, thin. There was a subtle warmth to the greys of the harbour in Reykjavík, compared with its harsher Boston counterpart.
    But he would be glad when the trial date came up and he could go back. Although the Agnar case was an interesting one, he missed the violent edge of the streets of Boston. At some point over the last ten years, sorting out the