The Polar Bear Killing Read online

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because he was with me all afternoon.’

  ‘And where was that?’

  ‘At the farm we were staying in. We returned from a drive along the shore at about lunchtime. We thought the young bear that had been shot may have been with its mother. But if it was, we didn’t find her. We were disappointed; we were supposed to fly back to Reykjavík the next day. So we hung out in our room for a couple of hours. Then, later on that afternoon, we saw the fog had cleared and so we decided to go up to the henge to see what we could see. That’s when we saw the body.’

  ‘But no one saw you at the farm?’

  ‘Apparently not. Gústi – that’s the farmer – was off somewhere, and so was his wife.’

  Halldór had been found by the two men at six-thirty. Halldór had last been seen in town at four-thirty, heading north out of town in his car. During that two-hour break, the two men had no alibi apart from each other.

  ‘You have a criminal record, don’t you? Two months in jail in England last year for breaching the peace and assaulting a police officer during a protest at an animal-testing laboratory.’

  ‘I didn’t assault the police officer,’ said Martin, still calm. ‘But I didn’t defend myself. I wanted to go to jail.’

  ‘Why didn’t you defend yourself?’ said Ólafur.

  The German smiled. ‘Solidarity with the cause. With the others who were arrested with me.’

  ‘So is that why you shot Constable Halldór? Solidarity?’

  ‘I didn’t shoot him,’ said Martin.

  ‘You did shoot him!’ said Ólafur. He stood up, leaned over the desk and began shouting. ‘You killed him because he shot the polar bear! That’s why you hit him through the eye, just like he shot the bear! Admit it!’

  Vigdís watched her colleague getting nowhere. The German was remarkably self-possessed. Although he was in a foreign country and accused of such a serious crime, he seemed to be handling the situation very well. Part of the effect of Ólafur’s yelling was dispelled by Sonja’s careful translation, but the bad cop stuff wasn’t working.

  Eventually Ólafur turned to Vigdís. It was her turn.

  ‘Why did you come to Iceland?’ she asked.

  Martin turned towards her, his soft brown eyes assessing her. As always when people first met her, Vigdís could tell he was trying to decide what to make of her. No one knew what to make of a black Icelander, especially other Icelanders.

  ‘I heard about the polar bear shooting. Then I saw that there was a chance that there may be another bear at risk. I thought it would be cool to fly out here to try to save it.’

  ‘Heard? How did you hear?’

  ‘Online. A Facebook group. We keep one another informed about what’s going on.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Cruelty to animals. Protests. Torture in labs. When people are needed to make a noise to help animals.’

  ‘What was the name of this group?’

  Martin hesitated. ‘Animal Blood Watch,’ he said eventually.

  ‘And they told you about the polar bear?’

  ‘They asked for volunteers to come to Raufarhöfn. In the end it was just Alex and me. It’s a long way and it’s expensive.’

  ‘How did you afford it?’

  ‘I have some money. My father left me some when he died.’

  Vigdís examined the German. He returned her gaze. He wasn’t afraid; more curious about her. She enjoyed talking to him, hearing his calm, considered replies. She hated the idea of shooting polar bears on sight as well. Other countries found ways of tranquilizing them – in Canada it was an offence to kill a polar bear, even if it was attacking you. If Martin Fiedler really had killed the police constable, then he deserved everything the Icelandic state could throw at him, but already Vigdís didn’t believe he had.

  But she shouldn’t let her bias slant the investigation. She wondered what Magnus would do. Get as complete a statement as he could of everything the two men were doing, and then check it for holes – that would be his answer.

  She looked at her notes. ‘When you say “hung out in our room”, what were you doing?’

  For the first time, the German looked mildly embarrassed. ‘Alex was reading a book. And I was playing a computer game.’

  ‘What was the book?’ Vigdís asked.

  ‘Something about the Rainbow Warrior.’

  ‘And the computer game?’

  Martin Fiedler looked uncomfortable. ‘Call of Duty,’ he admitted.

  Ólafur leaped on it. ‘That’s a bit violent for someone who believes in peace and love and veggie burgers, isn’t it?’

  Martin regained his composure. ‘It’s a cool game. I enjoy it.’

  ‘So people killing people is OK, but people killing animals isn’t?’ There was a note of triumph in Ólafur’s voice.

  ‘They are not real people, Inspector. It’s pixels killing pixels. I’m cool with that.’

  Vigdís thought a moment. She had seen her colleagues playing Call of Duty at the station. ‘Who were you playing with? The computer?’

  ‘No. I was playing online,’ Martin said.

  Vigdís made a note. Then she got Martin to take her through everything he had been doing since he arrived in Raufarhöfn, despite the frustration of her superior officer, who insisted on lobbing random accusations at Martin whenever he got bored.

  Eventually they finished, and Martin Fiedler was taken back to one of the two police cells. They thanked the interpreter and asked her to stay in town overnight.

  ‘He’s a cool customer,’ said Ólafur.

  ‘He may be innocent,’ Vigdís said.

  ‘Of course he’s not innocent!’ said Ólafur. ‘In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if he did it rather than the Icelander. He’s much more calculating; much more dangerous.’

  ‘Well, we have a lot to check on,’ said Vigdís.

  ‘Let me see how forensics are getting on.’ Ólafur whipped out his phone and called Edda, the forensics team leader. It was still light and, at this time in May, it would be for a couple more hours.

  Ólafur spoke to her briefly. ‘No luck yet,’ he said to Vigdís when he had finished the call. ‘I’m going for a run. Doing the Triathlon in Oslo in August. Do you run?’

  ‘No,’ said Vigdís, lying. The last thing she wanted to do was puff along beside the inspector for a few kilometres’ humiliation before he set off up a hill. ‘It was a long drive and a long interview. I’ll have some supper at the hotel and go to my room.’

  *

  The only hotel in town looked like a dump from the outside: paint flaking on the metal cladding, the car park a square of cracked tarmac. But inside it was warm and cosy, and the supper was delicious.

  The hotel was full – not just with the policemen from Akureyri and Húsavík, but also a number of journalists had made the trek, together with the odd bewildered tourist who hadn’t figured out what was happening.

  Vigdís managed to ignore everyone else at supper, although it took work to brush off the RÚV television crime reporter who recognized her.

  She went up to her room and unpacked her case. Her phone vibrated and she picked it up, checking the display.

  Magnus.

  She hesitated. Should she answer it? No. No.

  Yes.

  ‘Hi, Magnús.’ She did a good job of making her tone indifferent.

  ‘Hi,’ said the familiar voice. ‘How’s it going? Solved the case yet?’

  ‘Inspector Ólafur had two men locked up by the time I got here.’

  ‘Are they the right two men?’

  ‘Probably not,’ said Vigdís. She gave him a quick rundown of what had happened. It was clear that Magnus wished he was out there with her. There were few murders in Iceland, and Magnus, who had spent seven years as Sergeant Detective Magnus Jonson working in Boston Police Department’s Homicide Unit, didn’t want to miss one. Which was why Baldur hadn’t sent him. That, and he didn’t want Magnus to upst
age his old friend Ólafur.

  Vigdís relaxed as she chatted to Magnus.

  ‘Keep me posted,’ he said as she finished describing the day’s events.

  ‘Sure. Er, Magnús?’

  ‘Yes?’

  What? What was she going to say? What could she say? She should say nothing.

  ‘Nothing.’

  She hung up. She was sitting on her bed. She stared out of the window. There were still a few fishing boats that worked out of Raufarhöfn, and four of them were in port. Over the water, she could see the graveyard with all those previous generations of fisherman on the patch of hillside opposite.

  Halldór would be joining them soon.

  She sighed.

  Magnus.

  She had liked him when she first met him straight off the plane from America several years before. He had had experience of dozens of murder investigations in Boston and he was willing to teach her and her colleague Árni. He was smart, he was patient with her, and he was kind. He had his faults – he rubbed his superiors up the wrong way, he didn’t necessarily do things the Icelandic way, and a few people had been hurt as he solved those crimes he had come across. He was a loner. He kept himself to himself. But Vigdís liked all that. They respected each other.

  Except in Vigdís’s case it was more than just respect. She was rubbish with men. They seemed to find her attractive, but for all the wrong reasons. There had been an Icelander living in New York, a television executive, but that hadn’t worked. Vigdís’s work had screwed that relationship up before it had had a chance to take hold.

  There had been a few casual affairs, one- or two-night stands. But then Vigdís had overheard one of them, a handsome moron called Benni, talking to his mates about what it was like to screw a black girl.

  That had put her off.

  And the previous week, she had gone out for a drink with Magnus after work. His girlfriend Ingileif was in Hamburg for a couple of weeks. Magnus liked a couple of beers after work, a hangover from his Boston days, and Vigdís thought, why not humour him?

  Both of them had had more than a couple of beers. Vigdís had enjoyed letting go of her habitual self-discipline. After so many years working together, they understood each other well, but as they both got drunker, they both confided things. Magnus talked about his brother, Vigdís about her mother, but with affection not frustration.

  They had left the bar unsteadily. Walked up an empty side street. Laughed.

  And then Vigdís had kissed him.

  For a moment he had responded, but then he had broken away. Laughed it off. They had gone home to their separate beds.

  It had been a mistake. A big mistake. Why had she done it? Why?

  It was all right at work. Magnus behaved as though nothing had happened. He was still friendly to Vigdís, allowing her to respond in kind.

  But things had changed for Vigdís. She had enjoyed letting her guard down. She had enjoyed the sense that she was putting her career at risk by doing something she wanted to do. It enthralled her. It also scared the hell out of her.

  That weekend she had gone out with some of her girlfriends and got blind drunk. There was nothing odd about an Icelander getting drunk in Reykjavík on a Saturday night, but it was odd for Vigdís.

  She pulled out the full bottle of vodka she had packed in her suitcase.

  Vigdís didn’t drink alone. Her mother drank alone and Vigdís had seen what had happened to her. They said alcoholism ran in families. Was her black father an alcoholic, Vigdís wondered? She had no idea, no way of knowing anything about the black American serviceman who had met her mother at Keflavík airbase one night in the eighties.

  Her life was crap. No matter how many rules she followed, how often she did the right thing by her mother or Baldur or Magnus or even the lowlifes she arrested, her life was still crap. Being careful, being sober didn’t help.

  She got a glass from the hotel bathroom, opened the bottle and poured a tot into it. She knocked it back. That felt good. She poured another.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Vigdís’s head was splitting as she listened to Ólafur summarize the case to the assembled police. She had woken up still clothed, and had barely had time to grab a cup of coffee before staggering off to the police station. The morning briefing had already started by the time she got there, and they all turned as she tried to creep in at the back.

  The vodka bottle was half empty on her bedside table where she had left it.

  ‘Edda, what did you find yesterday?’

  Ólafur was addressing the woman in charge of the three-person forensics team that had driven over from Reykjavík.

  ‘Basically, nothing,’ she said. ‘No casing – the shooter must have retrieved it. No bullet either, which means either the shooter picked that up as well or, more likely, it is still in the victim’s skull. The pathologist should be able to fish it out at the autopsy today.’

  Poor Halldór had been sent back to the morgue in Reykjavík for examination.

  ‘Nothing of interest at the scene?’

  ‘No. Very difficult to make out footprints on the hard ground up there. There are four cigarette ends and two sweet wrappers, but that’s what you would expect from what’s essentially a tourist site. We’ll send the butts off for DNA analysis. There are a couple of rocks on the far side of the hill from the road – a good place for the shooter to stand. There are several different footprints around there. None of them is clear, and none of them matches either Alex or Martin’s boots. Somebody seems to have been walking a dog.’

  ‘What about the suspects?’

  ‘No immediately obvious signs of gunshot residue on them or their clothes. Nor blood. Once again, we’ll send the clothing back to the lab in Reykjavík for closer analysis, but I doubt we will find anything.’

  ‘How can you know until they have looked?’

  Edda didn’t answer. Vigdís knew that Edda and her team were both sharp-eyed and accurate and that she didn’t take well to being bossed around by investigators.

  ‘Well, go back up there this morning and widen the search area.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Edda. ‘Would never have thought of that myself.’

  The remark flustered Ólafur. Edda flustered men anyway, even when not in sarcastic mode. She was tall, blonde, cool and beautiful, and she treated lustful police officers with a haughty disdain. Vigdís had tried that approach, but she couldn’t quite pull it off the way Edda could.

  The inspector turned to his troops. ‘Anything interesting from the house-to-house? Anyone see the suspects approaching the henge?’

  It turned out that there were two people on the northern edge of town who had heard what they thought was a gunshot that afternoon: one thought it was at five o’clock, another at five fifteen. That gave some indication of the time of death, and suggested, but didn’t prove, that if the two suspects had shot Halldór, it had been an hour to an hour and a half before they claimed they had found him. Then there were some desultory reports from the policemen who had been detailed to interview the inhabitants of Raufarhöfn. Nothing interesting.

  Ólafur went through Alex Einarsson’s and Martin Fiedler’s statements, and detailed officers to corroborate their movements. Others were asked to search for a gun – none had been found at the farmhouse where they were staying – and to check up on every licensed firearms owner in the town to make sure that their weapons were secure and had not been taken, and to see if they had been fired two days ago.

  ‘Anything else?’

  Vigdís spoke up. ‘We should also get a warrant to seize Martin Fielder’s computer.’ Her voice croaked. It was the first time she had spoken since she had woken up and the hangover was flexing its muscles. She cleared her throat. ‘He said he was online that afternoon. We can check.’ She was surprised the inspector hadn’t mentioned it.

  As the group broke up, Ólafur turned to Vigdís. ‘Why were you late?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I overslept,’ she answered. ‘It was a long day
yesterday.’

  The inspector didn’t look impressed, which was fair enough. ‘I’m going to hold a press conference now, and then we’ll talk to the suspects again. Maybe a spell overnight will have focused their minds. Then I want you to take them to see the magistrate at Húsavík to issue a warrant to hold them for another week. We’ll get the warrant to seize both their laptops then as well. The prosecutor there is a woman called María. I’ll get her to meet you beforehand so she can prepare.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes. Do you have a problem with that? Don’t worry, María will present the case to the magistrate.’

  ‘But do we have enough evidence?’

  ‘They are our only suspects.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but in my judgement we have no evidence,’ said Vigdís.

  ‘Are you suggesting that we release them?’

  ‘Yes. We can take Martin Fiedler’s passport and request that he stays in town. Seize his laptop and have it analysed.’

  ‘Inspector?’ Björn, the young detective, had appeared.

  ‘What is it?’ said Ólafur, turning towards him.

  Björn was with two men. One Vigdís didn’t recognize, but the other she knew all too well. Kristján Gylfason – smooth, silver-haired, and the most expensive criminal lawyer in Iceland.

  ‘Hello, Vigdís,’ said the lawyer, smiling. ‘Inspector Ólafur. I have been requested by the German Embassy to represent Martin Fiedler. This is Wolfgang Eichert from the embassy.’

  Ólafur frowned, but shook Kristján’s hand and that of the young German diplomat, who was wearing a suit underneath his coat.

  ‘Can I see my client?’ Kristján said.

  Ólafur glared at the two men. ‘Wait a moment,’ he replied. ‘I need to talk to the press first.’

  Ólafur’s annoyance grew as the morning progressed. Now Kristján was involved, there was no chance of a confession, Vigdís knew, or of Ólafur persuading a magistrate to allow the police to hold him.

  During a break in the proceedings, Vigdís asked Ólafur if she could go to Halldór’s house and speak to his family. Ólafur let her go. He had Björn to help him, and she was just a further irritation.

  The policeman’s house was only a hundred metres from the station. The door was answered by a girl of about eighteen, short with close-cropped blonde hair and glasses. She had a delicate pointed chin and clear pale skin. Her face seemed to register no emotion as she saw Vigdís.