Where the Shadows Lie (Fire and Ice)

his open bedroom window.
    Then it all changed. His father left home to go and teach mathematics at a university in America. His mother became angry and sleepy – she slept all the time. Her face became puffy, she got fat, she yelled at Magnus and his little brother Óli.
    They moved back to the farm on the Snaefellsnes Peninsula where his mother had been brought up. That’s where the misery started. Magnus realized that his mother wasn’t sleepy all the time, she was drunk. At first she spent most of her time away in Reykjavík, trying to hold down her job as a teacher. Then she returned to the farm and a series of jobs in the nearest town, first teaching and then working cash registers. Worst of all Magnus and Óli were left for long periods in the care of their grandparents. Their grandfather was a strict, scary, angry man, who liked a drink himself. Their grandmother was small and mean.
    One day, when Magnus and Óli were at school, their mother had drunk half a bottle of vodka, climbed into a car and steered it straight into a rock, killing herself instantly. Within a week, amid acrimony of nuclear proportions, Ragnar had arrived to take them both away to Boston with him.
    Magnus returned to Iceland with his father and Óli on an annual basis for camping trips in the back country and to spend a couple of days in Reykjavík to see his grandmother and his father’s friends and colleagues. They had never gone near his mother’s family.
    Until a month after his father died, when Magnus made the trip to try to effect a reconciliation. The visit had been a total disaster. Magnus had recoiled in stunned bewilderment at the strength of the hostility from his grandparents. They didn’t just hate his father, they hated him too. For an orphan whose only family was a mixed-up brother, and with no clear idea of which country he belonged to, that hurt.
    Since then he had never been back.
    The plane broke through the clouds only a couple of hundred feet above the ground. Iceland was cold and grey and windswept. To the left was the flat field of volcanic rubble, grey and brown covered with russet and green moss, and beyond that the para-phernalia of the abandoned American airbase, single-storey sheds, mysterious radio masts and golf balls on stilts. Not a tree in sight.
    The plane hit the runway, and manoeuvred up to the terminal building. Improbably cheerful ground staff battled their way out into the wind, smiling and chatting. A windsock stuck out stiff and horizontal, as a curtain of rain rolled across the airfield towards them. It was 24 April, the day after Iceland’s official first day of summer.
    Thirty minutes later Magnus was sitting in the back of a white car hurtling along the highway between Keflavík and Reykjavík. Across the car was emblazoned the word Lögreglan – with typical stubbornness Iceland was one of the very few countries in the world that refused to use a derivation of the word ‘police’ for its law-enforcement agency.
    Outside, the squall had passed and the wind seemed to be dying down. The lavascape, undulating mounds of stones, boulders and moss, stretched across towards a line of squat mountains in the distance, still not a tree in sight. Thousands of years after the event this patch of Iceland hadn’t recovered from the devastation of a massive volcanic eruption. The thin layers of mosses nibbling at the rocks were only just beginning a process of restoration that would take millennia.
    But Magnus wasn’t looking at the scenery. He was concentrating hard on the man sitting next to him, Snorri Gudmundsson, the National Police Commissioner. He was a small man with shrewd blue eyes and thick grey hair brushed back in a bouffant. He was speaking rapidly in Icelandic, and it took all Magnus’s powers of concentration to follow him.
    ‘As I am sure you must know, Iceland has a low per-capita homicide rate and low levels of serious crime,’ he was saying. ‘Most policing involves clearing up the mess on Saturday and Sunday mornings once the partygoers have had their fun. Until the kreppa and the demonstrations over this last winter, of course. Every one of my officers in the Reykjavík area was tied up with those. They did well, I am proud of them.’
    Kreppa was the Icelandic word for the credit crunch, which had hit the country particularly badly. The banks, the government and many of the people were bankrupt, drowning under debt incurred in the boom times. Magnus had read of the