Where the Shadows Lie (Fire and Ice)

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    ‘Oh my God, you didn’t know, did you? Nobody told you!’
    ‘What affair?’
    ‘Forget I said anything. Look, I’ve got to go.’ She began to stand up.
    Magnus reached out and grabbed her hand. ‘What affair?’ The anger surged through his voice.
    Sigurbjörg sat down again and swallowed. ‘Your father was having an affair with your mother’s best friend. She found out about it, they had a god-awful row, she started drinking.’
    ‘I don’t believe you,’ Magnus said.
    Sigurbjörg shrugged.
    ‘Are you sure it’s true?’
    ‘No, I’m not,’ said Sigurbjörg. ‘But I suspect it is. Look, there must have been other problems. I used to really like your mother, especially before she started drinking, but she was always a bit neurotic. Given her parents, that’s hardly surprising.’
    ‘It is true,’ Magnus said. ‘You’re right, it must be. I just find it hard to believe.’
    ‘Hey, Magnus, I’m really sorry you heard this from me.’ Sigurbjörg reached out and touched his hand. ‘But I’ve got to go now. And I promise I won’t tell the grandparents you’re here.’
    With that, she ran away.
    Magnus stared at his coffee cup, still a quarter full. He needed a drink. A real drink.
    It wasn’t far to the bar he had drunk in the night before, the Grand Rokk. He ordered a Thule and one of the chasers all the other guys at the bar were drinking. It was some kind of kummel, sweet and strong, but OK if gulped down with the beer.
    Sigurbjörg had just turned his world upside down. The whole story of his life, who he was, who his parents were, who was right and who was wrong, had just been inverted. His father had never blamed his mother for what had happened, but Magnus had.
    She had driven away his father. She had ignored Magnus through drink and then abandoned him through death. Ragnar had heroically rescued his sons, until he had been cruelly murdered, possibly by the wicked stepmother.
    That was the story of Magnus’s childhood. That was what had made him who he was.
    And now it was all false.
    Another beer, another chaser.
    For a moment, a calming moment, Magnus flirted with the idea that the affair was a fiction invented by his grandfather to justify his hatred of his father. One part of him wanted to go along with that idea, to try to live the rest of his life in denial.
    But in his time in the police department Magnus had seen enough squalid family disintegrations to know that what Sigurbjörg had told him was all too plausible. And it would explain the depth of his grandfather’s hatred.
    He had assumed that his father’s refusal to blame his mother for the mess she had made of all their lives was nobility on his part. It wasn’t. It was a recognition that he was partly responsible. Wholly responsible?
    Magnus didn’t know. He would never know. It was a typical family mess. Blame all over the place.
    But it meant that his father was a different man than he thought he was. Not noble. An adulterer. Someone who abandoned his wife when she was at her weakest and her most vulnerable. Magnus had known all along that if he really thought about it he would have realized that his father must have started his affair with Kathleen, the woman who became his stepmother, while she was still married to someone else. So Magnus hadn’t really thought about it.
    It was true that Icelanders had a more relaxed view of adultery than the prudish Americans, but it was still wrong. Something that lesser mortals might dabble with, but not Ragnar.
    What else had he done? What other flaws had he concealed from his sons? From his wife?
    Magnus’s beer was still half full, but his chaser was empty. He caught the shaven-headed barman’s eye and tapped the glass. It was refilled.
    He felt the liquid burn his throat. His brain was fuzzing over pleasantly. But Magnus was not going to stop, not for a long time. He was going to drink until it hurt.
    That was how he drank in college, after his father died. He got wildly horribly drunk. And the following morning he would feel wretched. For him, that was half the reason why he drank, the feeling of self-destruction afterwards.
    He had lost most of his friends then, other than a few hardened drinkers like himself. His professors were dismayed, he went from close to the top of his classes to scraping along the bottom. He almost got thrown out of the university. But no matter how hard he tried, he didn’t quite manage to destroy his life totally.
    Unlike his