Black Ice Read online

  'Your shoe.' He put his hand up to his mouth again.

  When I looked down, a tendril of silver hair had attached itself to my shoe. I bent down and brushed it off. It was the blood at the roots that made it stick.

  'I've never seen anything so terrible.' For the first time he sounded like a foreigner. He patted his mouth with a hankie and muttered to himself in Russian.

  I soaked a towel in the kitchen and tried to clean up her nose and mouth to help her breathe. I didn't try to unfasten her. I was scared of what would happen if l did. She was still hanging there when the police arrived, and in the disturbance I saw those balls of white hair rolling like tumbleweed across the shining blue tiles of the kitchen. I hadn't the heart to go over and pick them up.

  'She was young to have white hair,' Ivan said. It was one of

  those fatuous things you do say when you're in shock.

  22

  As afternoons go, that one didn't. It lasted about a month. Back at the hotel, Ivan lay on his bed with his arms folded across his chest like a crusader on his tomb. I hardly liked to speak to him in case his brimming brown eyes overflowed and embarrassed both of us. He was an old softie.

  I tried to raise Christopher but he was still out on his rounds, and even a couple of hefty drinks did nothing to shift the lead weight in my gut. At first it had all seemed a bit of a lark: not any more, it didn't.

  When Magnus marched in with three uniformed officers, we were both glad to see him. Separately we gave our statements, and that helped to eat up more of the dragging time. I had a stroll outside the hotel-conscious all the time of the uniformed cop eyeing me from his car-and watched the flags of all nations stand out as stiff as boards in the streaming wind.

  When Petursson arrived, I waited in a downstairs side-room in the hotel while he read the statements and then interviewed Ivan.

  'Well, Mr Craven,' he said, as he came through to me, 'a pretty pan offish we have here, have we not?'

  'Kettle- not that it matters.'

  'Of course, kettle. I am out of practice. A pretty kettle offish, to be sure.'

  Together we went over my statement in detail. I was watching him with interest. If the scalping- that was how I'd started to think of it- had affected him, it was only to make him more steady and painstaking than before.

  When we'd finished that, I left him sitting at a green card table with copies of the statements in front of him, and wandered over to the window.

  That was when his assistant Magnus jumped me.

  'Now!' Petursson suddenly snapped. To my amazement, Magnus spun me by the shoulder and- with a merry smile on his face- swung a useful left hook at my jaw. As I went reeling back, he did his level best to stick his right arm up to the elbow in my stomach.

  Luckily for me, he'd telegraphed them fairly well; at least I was able to lean back so that the first punch only glanced my jaw, but the second one went in deep, and hurt.

  'I hope you are all right,' the senior man said, as he reached down with one hand to help me up from the carpet.

  'Is this what they mean by helping the police with their inquiries?' I gasped.

  'You see,' he said, talking straight past me. 'You were wrong. He is untrained.'

  'Untrained?' I looked from one to the other but they weren't very interested.

  'Yes, Sir,' said the blond. 'No self-defence, and I gave him every chance.'

  'Look pal, next time you give me notice and we'll soon see .. .'

  Well, I was annoyed. I've been in my share of saloon-bar bust-ups and I've still got all my own teeth. They're not all in my mouth, but at least I've got them.

  Patting me on the shoulder as you might a fretful child, Petursson led me to a chair and sat me down. 'Do not take it personally. After our last conversation, Magnus was of the opinion that you were a ... professional gentleman in these matters. I was not so sure. So we devised this little test for you.'

  'Great. Have I passed?'

  I held my head between my hands. By now the pain from my jaw had linked up neatly with the pain from the top of my head.

  'What do you think?' Petursson looked at Magnus, who shrugged and moved over to the door. Then he turned to me again: 'You are a puzzle for us, you see.'

  'Well, I'm sorry about that.'

  He turned his impassive face towards me. His eyes -like a lot of Icelanders' - were so deep they must've been riveted into place.

  'You went to see Solrun- what happened to her? You went to see her mother- what happened to her?'

  He had a point there. Even I could see that. He didn't much care for the rest of my activities either, and he didn't seem to have missed much. He didn't like the way I'd bandied his name about the Hagstofa.

  'And you have been keeping bad company,' he went on.

  'Palli.'

  'I thought he was a fine example of your country's youth.' That brought some warmth into his voice. 'He's no Ice

  lander. He is the dregs of the American military and even they don't want him any more.' Sitting back, he lit another of his small cigars. This time he held it between his middle fingers to cut down nicotine stain. 'Magnus knows all about Palli.'

  Magnus stayed on guard at the door and spoke in an official report voice. 'Palli Olafsson? His parents were both Icelanders. They divorced when he was three years of age and his mother married an American from the base. They moved to Chicago, her new husband's home, in the northern part of the United States. He grew up as an American ...'

  His boss cut in: 'See, his environment and his upbringing were all American. Carry on.'

  'He served with the American marines. Later he was many times in police troubles and had to receive psychiatric treatment.'

  He stopped. Petursson said: 'He's a bum.' He looked round the room for an ashtray and then crossed and tapped his cigar ash into a potted plant on the window-sill.

  'How did he end up here?'

  'What was that television programme they had in America? Roots. It was that sort of thing. He wanted to come here to try to be an Icelander. Crazy idea. He is a crazy man. Sometimes he can be very dangerous. His head is full of wild things. He should be in the kleppur.'

  An alarming thought suddenly came to me. 'You don't think he had anything to do with Solrun's mother?'

  He sat there, shaking his head. 'No, not Palli. We blame him for many things but not this.'

  'So, who do you blame?'

  Magnus coughed and spread his feet. Petursson began to straighten up the papers in front of him. The cigar smoke was a blue mist in the beams of sunlight from the window.

  'Did you see a lady who was sweeping her pavement when you called? She tells us that she saw a man in a corduroy suit with a swarthy complexion call at the house. She says he was with a tall skinny man who walked like a woman.'

  Neither Ivan nor I could quarrel with those descriptions. 'Go on.'

  'Very well. Before you two went in, she saw three men go to the house. She believes two of them were wearing dark uniforms. They were inside the house when you called the first time, but left, apparently in a hurry, before you returned.'

  'They were inside with ... with Solrun's mother?'

  'Yes. Torturing her.'

  I remembered the whimpering noise we'd heard that Ivan insisted was a puppy. That must've been her. I swallowed hard on the thought.

  'Were they looking for Solrun too?'

  He nodded. 'That is my belie(' He beat me to the next question. 'She had been there. She arrived and left at night but the woman across the road saw her. You know what those women are like.'

  'What exactly did they do to her, Petursson?'

  In a matter-of-fact voice, he recited it, as he packed his papers into a soft leather briefcase. They had been professionals. The torture was graded so that she would be systematically weakened. Each time they gripped one lock of hair- he demonstrated how they wrapped it round a finger-and ripped it out. She must have been very brave. They had torn out almost all her hair, but she had told them nothing. T
he ordeal brought on a heart attack, and then I had disturbed them.

  There wasn't much I could say to that. I followed the two of them out to the door and just as they were going I remembered about the man in the photograph. It made a handy banana skin to slip under his foot as he was going.

  'Perhaps,' I said, 'that nice Mr Kirillina will be able to help you find Solrun.'

  He stopped, and slowly his big shoulders turned so that he faced me again. He was clearly surprised that I'd picked up his name.

  'Why do you think that?' he asked.

  'Well, he was a leading member of her fan-club.'

  He weighed that for a moment, and then, with considerable caution, he added: 'I think Mr Kirillina would be very pleased to find her himself.'

  That didn't seem to advance the sum of human knowledge very far, or not the section of it that I was supervising. I had one last try as he waited for the lift.

  'If it's not top secret, I'd like to hear the detailed description of her attackers from Solrun's mother. Will she be able to talk by tomorrow, do you think?'

  The doors opened and he and Magnus stepped inside.

  'Didn't I say? There won't be any descriptions, I'm afraid. She died at sixteen-twenty.'

  He balanced his wide hat on top of his creamed head, and the doors met.

  23

  I found Palli on a stool in the hotel bar he'd named. He hadn't got any smaller, any lovelier, or any sunnier in his disposition.

  'I was drinking a brenni-and-coke but for you I'll have a vodka - that big.' He opened his fingers to the barman to indicate about half a pint of vodka. Then he gave a silent jeering laugh.

  As the glass landed on the bar, I grabbed it and held it at arm's length.

  'Now, before we start, there's one thing we get straight. No pain. No hand-squeezing, no tooth-pulling, no eye-poking and no neck-breaking. Got me? You're going to sit up there like a nice big boy and smile and say thank you to the kind gentleman.'

  He came slowly up off the stool. No one had spoken to him like that since he was seven, and they'd probably regretted it then.

  'I'll say what the fuck .. .'

  'Or,' I said, silencing him with one raised finger, 'you don't get to know about today's murder.'

  'What murder?' He sank back. I was quite relieved. Although Petursson had said it was nothing to do with him, he would've been my number-one suspect for any crime north of Glasgow.

  'Solrun's mother,' I said, handing him his drink.

  'Shit. The old lady. Why'd anyone want to do that?'

  I told him what little I knew about it, and news of a juicy killing seemed to calm him down. He'd certainly found a drinking place to match his personality. It was a bleak dark barn, and the only other customers were two men: one singing softly to the fruit-machine as he tried to waltz with it, and a man on the next stool who was trying to guess his own name.

  Brain-damage boozing used to be quite a problem in Iceland. He'd managed to find the one place where traditional values still prevailed.

  'Your turn,' I said, without any ceremony.

  'How's that?' he said, squinting up at me over his second drink.

  'You said you'd tell me about you and Solrun. The marriage - remember?'

  To my surprise, in a quiet and reasonable tone he began to tell me.

  'Have you heard of Frimerkjapeninga? Sure you haven't. Why the hell would you? It's just another of them crazy words that's three blocks long- they got plenty of those here, believe me. Frimer-crap, whatever the word is, is what they call the stamp money the government here pays all the school-kids for their vacation work. Like picking up leaves in the parks and picking the weeds out, all crummy jobs like that. They stick the money away in the bank for them and when they're twenty-two or so they can pick it up. Worth having too. It can be a couple of thousand bucks.'

  'As much as that?'

  'That's right.' He drained his drink. 'You okay for another of these? Thanks. It's a long time between drinks when I'm paying. So that's what they call their stamp money. There's only two ways of getting your hands on it. Either you wait till pay-out day, or you get married.'

  He pointed his thick blunt finger at me. 'You got it. They call them stamp weddings - I think that's frimekjagifting, or something like that. Some of the kids get married just so's they can pick up the cash. Then they get divorced. Who cares- they got the money.'

  'She only married you for the money?'

  'You got it.'

  I remembered what Hulda had said. 'And it wasn't a real marriage. There wasn't anything between you?'

  'You mean true love?' He gave his sour laugh again, took a slot out of his new drink and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. When the jeering, ugly look drained from his face, something a good deal more pleasant moved in. On anyone else you might've taken it for general human decency. 'Truth is, 'he added, 'I was standing in for my best buddy.'

  'How'd you mean?'

  'Well,' he clamped a hand over his flat stomach as a belch erupted from his mouth, 'I said I'd tell you so I will. She was my best buddy's girl. He wanted me to marry her so's she could get the money and that's what I did.'

  'And you're not going to tell me who your best buddy is?'

  'No sir, I am not. He asked me to look after his desert-bike and I did, and he asked me to look after his baby and I did. No problem.'

  'That's the Triumph Trophy, is it?'

  The glass stopped halfway to his mouth and his face burst into one big grin.

  'The six-fifty?' I went on.

  'Hell, how about that, we gotta guy who knows about desert-bikes.'

  The truth is that I don't know much about them at all. I'd recognised it: but then, with those old-fashioned sit-up handle bars and high ground clearance, it wasn't all that clever. I knew that they were the great classic bikes of the sixties. You had to be able to handle them too- not like these modern rockets that the kids strap themselves inside before they close their eyes and pray. What might've been a little bit clever was that I'd noticed the chain, clean enough to wear as a slightly oily necklace- the sign of a man who loved bikes.

  What had happened was that somewhere along the way, among the thousands of people I'd chatted to and thousands I'd interviewed, or among the thousands of bits and pieces I'd written and thousands I'd read, someone had told me about desert-bikes, and a bit of it had stuck. But for the next thirty minutes he told me how much he knew about them- which actually was a lot- and he still thought I was an expert.

  And as he talked, I saw the way he changed. He'd begun by wanting to demonstrate his fury and his cruelty. But when he talked about something he loved, you could almost see the bunched muscles soften and pleasure drive the tension out of his gripped face.

  'Pinky's?' My eyes were on the girls- romantic rather than pornographic- who writhed in smudged blue and red beneath the hair of his arms. It was a fair guess. A lot of Americans in their thirties had picked up tattoos at Pinky's on R and R in Hong Kong.

  By way of reply, he pushed up the short sleeve of his tee-shirt where it stretched over his football of a bicep. There were the two tattooed words I knew would be there.

  'Some of the boat people ended up here, I believe,' I said. Slowly, he nodded his cropped and colourless head. Casually, I went on: 'I saw the little kid selling newspapers in the town.'

  'I seen him too. First time I was so scared I started shaking. I was thinking about the kids who used to come up to us carrying grenades.'

  He slapped the bar with his hand. The crack was so loud that the man who was now proposing to the fruit-machine turned and glared at us, then carried on.

  'Now I see him and I know he's just a kid, like any other kid, nothing special. You know something? This place is too damned dull. You know what the guys out at the base call this island? Icehole. I know what they mean. Sometimes when it's been raining for about a year and the wind takes the goddam coat off your back every time you step out, it can be rough. But you go to the right place, it's Fun
City, coupla laughs, coupla drinks, coupla girls- each. Fun City, man.'

  By two in the morning we'd had those coupla drinks a coupla dozen times, and he'd had all four girls - his and mine - crawling all over him. Now he was down to one.

  We were watching a strange tribe engaged in a frenetic fertility ritual which involved self-dislocation of all the major joints while being tortured by the most advanced sound-and light techniques. It was a disco, half-a-dozen floors of it from what I could see. To me it looked like a high-rise hell, but then these days I find whist over-stimulating. Palli- even though he was my age- and the rest of the young savages thought it was wonderful.

  'Kids fly in from London to this place,' he told me.

  'Can't they shoot their planes out of the sky before they land?'

  We'd reached an agreement over the booze. Palli had stopped being so punitive about it and reverted to-his brenni and-Coke. He was the only non-native I knew who actually liked the stuff. It's known locally as Black Death, some say because of the colour of the bottle and some say because they have to carry you home in a hand-cart afterwards. I'd settled for martinis, which they served in the same measures as beer and at the same price as gold.

  'Shall I tell you about my daddy?' There was a lot of self-mockery in his question, but something else too.

  'Tell me about your daddy.'

  We were spread all over the table, facing each other. The last of the girls was sitting on the floor, looped disconsolately around his thigh.

  'My daddy was an Icelander.' I tried to make the right sort of surprised reactions. 'So was my old lady. They bust up. She married a guy from the base, and I ended up back in Chicago.'

  He stopped. To spur him on, I said: 'You enlisted?'

  'Yeah. Afterwards I had problems. Shrinks, all that garbage. Shit, man, I didn't know who the hell I was.' He shuffled the girl around so he could lean over the table to get nearer to me. She didn't mind. She didn't even notice.