Part 10 (1/2)

His face was covered in blood; these men did not waste time. It was not the first occasion Arnold had been in trouble with the military police but he had never seen these two before, nor had he experienced their methods of interrogation. They tied him to a chair and quite simply beat him to a pulp. He did not have a clue where Steve and the Icelander were or what they were looking for. He held out as long as he could, determined not to tell his interrogators the one thing that might come in useful, but his stamina was limited.

Bateman took out a thick roll of silver tape and bit off a ten-centimetre strip. Like Ripley, he was wearing white rubber gloves. Holding the tape in both hands, he stuck it firmly over Arnold's nose and mouth, then stood in front of him, observing his vain attempts to gasp for oxygen with scientific detachment. When it looked as if Arnold was losing consciousness, Bateman grabbed one corner and tore it away from his nose, leaving a red welt where it had taken a small piece of skin with it.

Arnold's nostrils flared frantically as he sucked in air. The tape still covered his mouth but he inhaled with all his might. Bateman picked up the roll of tape again, bit off another strip and wordlessly fixed the tape over his nose.

'I'm not going to resuscitate you if you keep this up much longer, Arnold,' Ripley said to him.

He writhed in the chair, his blood-drenched face becoming as suffused and swollen as a balloon. Bateman tore the tape off his nose again, this time removing it from his mouth as well.

'I own a Zodiac,' Arnold shouted breathlessly, when he could finally speak between desperate gulps of air. 'Steve knows where it is. He'll use it to get off the base. Don't do it again; I beg you, for Christ's sake, let me breathe.'

'A Zodiac?' Bateman asked.

'I use it for smuggling. I smuggle drugs in and out of the base. I've been doing it for two years. Mostly cocaine but also speed and dope and... I sell it in Reykjavik. I have two contacts there called...'

'Arnold,' Ripley said in a level voice. 'I'm not interested in your little schemes. Tell me where the boat is.'

'I keep it in a bay to the west of the base. There's a gap in the perimeter fence where the road from the big tool store takes a right turn into the lava field. The boat is hidden about five hundred yards away, pretty much directly below the gap in the fence.'

'Excellent. And where are they headed, Arnold?'

'To a beach just outside Hafnir. You'll find it on the map.'

REYKJAViK,

SAt.u.r.dAY 30 JANUARY, 0415 GMT

'There have been some funny goings on here,' observed the scruffily dressed detective in his early fifties, surveying Kristin's flat.

Just before midnight the police had received a phone call from a man in the neighbourhood reporting a young woman in a distressed state who had burst into his family home, demanding to use their phone and speaking incoherently of murder presumably at her house before borrowing some clothes and vanis.h.i.+ng. He had not intended to report the incident and it was more than three hours before he made up his mind to do so, largely at his wife's urging. Although he did not say as much, he was rather ashamed of himself for having let such a thing happen to his family.

The police took a statement and checked the phone's display to identify the number called by the mysterious woman. No one was home at the corresponding address but on investigation they discovered that the house-owner had a daughter. Her age seemed consistent with the description of the woman who had forced her way into the family's home; she also lived in the same neighbourhood and this was deemed sufficient grounds to dispatch two officers. No one answered when they knocked on the door of the flat, located in a two-storey maisonette. The occupants of the upstairs flat said they had been out all evening.

Noticing a small hole in Kristin's door, conceivably made by a bullet, the police called a locksmith. When they entered the flat the first thing they saw was a body lying slumped on the desk.

The detective stood over the man's body, inspecting the contents of his wallet. According to his business card his name was Runolfur Zophania.s.son and he was involved in 'ImportExport'. Apart from that his wallet contained a driving licence, some money, a sheaf of restaurant receipts, and debit and credit cards. The detective glanced around the flat: the furniture appeared to be in place, all the pictures hung straight on the walls, nothing on any of the surfaces seemed to have been disturbed, and there was no sign of any weapon. The body might just as well have fallen from the sky. Cautiously straightening the man up, he examined the bullet wound in his forehead and the gun in his hand.

'Strange angle, don't you think?' he asked his colleague, who was younger and a good deal better dressed. 'If you were going to shoot yourself in the head, would you aim straight at your forehead?'

'I've never given it any thought,' his colleague replied.

'And if he did hold the gun up to his forehead, shouldn't there be signs of scorching or powder marks? Or blowback on his forearm?'

'So you don't think it was suicide, despite the note on the computer?'

'According to his driver's licence, the man lives on the other side of town, in Breidholt. If you were going to kill yourself, would you go to someone else's house to do it?'

'Why do you keep asking me how I would do it if I was going to commit suicide?' the younger detective asked, running a hand down the handsome tie that complemented his suit exactly. 'Is it secret wishful thinking?'

'Not secret enough, obviously,' replied the older man, who in contrast was wearing a torn jumper and battered hat. 'This Kristin who lives here, what does she do?'

'Lawyer with the foreign ministry.'

'And Runolfur here was in the ImportExport business, whatever that means. There's no sign of a struggle, and the upstairs neighbours say they weren't at home. Still, it's a small gun. It wouldn't have made much noise.'

'You're the firearms expert.'

'Indulge me, if you will, in my attempted reconstruction,' the elder officer said, ignoring his colleague's jibe. 'If you were going to kill yourself, would you shoot a bullet through the front door first?'

'Let's see, the door was open. He must have meant to shoot himself in the head but missed and the bullet entered the door. After that he aimed straight at his forehead to be sure of hitting it. Something like that?'

'So he shot himself with the door of the flat open?'

'Looks like it.'

'This is one of the most cack-handed suicides I've ever seen. Why shoot himself here? Was he involved in a relations.h.i.+p with this Kristin?'

'I imagine Kristin would be in a better position to answer that than I am.'

'I suppose we'd better put out a wanted notice. But don't say anything about her being a suspect in a murder inquiry, only that we need to speak to her.'

'Is it really conceivable that a government lawyer could have killed this man?'

'If I were going to murder someone, I'd go for a salesman every time,' the older detective replied, carefully scrutinising the hole in the man's forehead.

KEFLAViK AIR BASE,

SAt.u.r.dAY 30 JANUARY, 0500 GMT

Arnold's directions proved accurate. Before he left them at the administration block, he had told Steve how to get out of the base without using a gate or climbing over the wire. Kristin could not begin to imagine what sort of favour he owed Steve, but it must have been considerable. She preferred not to think about it.

After leaving Thompson, they headed west, away from the airport and Leifur Eiriksson terminal. The military traffic in the area had intensified; police roadblocks had been set up at intervals around the base and soldiers now patrolled the perimeter fence on the Keflavik side. To the south and west the base was bracketed by sea. Avoiding the more frequented ways, they darted from building to building, s.h.i.+elded by the darkness, until the built-up area petered out, giving way to lava and snowfields which ran down to the sh.o.r.e.

The sky was cloudless and full of stars, and with the moon lighting their way they covered the distance quickly. Arnold's detailed description of the landmarks soon led them to the Zodiac. All they needed now was to follow the sh.o.r.e south past Hvalsnes and into Kirkjuvogur bay, to the hamlet of Hafnir, where they could abandon the boat and hitch a lift into Reykjavik. The Zodiac had a quiet outboard motor, a twenty-horsepower engine that chugged into life at the first attempt. As Steve steered away from sh.o.r.e, Kristin had the impression that this was not the first time he had navigated along this stretch of coast. An icy wind buffeted her face and although the boat did not achieve much of a speed, it smacked into the waves at regular intervals, forcing her to cling with all her strength to the rope fastened at the bows. Her anorak was soon drenched by the spray.

A quarter of an hour later they abandoned the boat at Hafnir. They had not spoken at all during the journey.

'Is this how they smuggle the drugs?' Kristin asked at last, once Steve had made the rubber dinghy fast.

'I wouldn't know,' he said. They left it at that.

As they made their way north from Hafnir towards the Reykjanes dual carriageway, they saw the distant reddish-brown glow illuminating the sky above Keflavik and Njardvik. After about forty-five minutes' walk in complete silence they noticed headlights approaching out of the darkness behind them. The car slowed down as it drew near, finally stopping a little way ahead of them. It was a baker on his way to Keflavik; he offered them a lift up to the main road. From there it should not take them long to hitch a lift to Reykjavik.