‘Sadly, I was,’ said Ingileif. ‘Until I came to my senses.’
Tryggvi Thór looked at the little boy. ‘My guess is until about five years ago?’
Ási was four.
‘That’s a very good guess,’ said Ingileif, glancing at Magnus.
‘Don’t worry, he didn’t say anything,’ said Tryggvi Thór. ‘I used to be a detective too. The boy looks just like him.’
‘And I need to separate you two,’ said Magnus. ‘Before you discover all my secrets.’ He put on his coat and hat. ‘Come on.’
They left the house and Magnus led Ingileif and Ási down to the shore. A narrow beach skirted the peninsula, bordered by a sea wall of large rocks. Ducks fussed among the seaweed.
Ási clung on to his mother’s hand.
‘He seems like a miserable old git,’ said Ingileif.
‘He is, he is. I like him.’
‘Just your type. In fact, I can imagine you becoming exactly like him in thirty years.’
‘I’m not sure whether I’m supposed to be flattered or insulted by that,’ said Magnus.
‘Oh, insulted,’ said Ingileif.
She sounded as if she was teasing — she was teasing. But there was a grit of truth there. And Magnus didn’t know what to make of that hard, sharp grit.
Suddenly, his future widened out in front of him like a chasm. He felt a lurch of fear, teetering on its edge. Would his old age be spent in Iceland or America? Who would it be with? Would it be with anyone at all? Would Ási be a part of it?
Or when he was seventy would he still not know who he was, where he was from, whom he was to live his life with?
A bit like Tryggvi Thór then.
Ingileif seemed to read his mind. ‘Sorry.’
‘About what?’ said Magnus, putting on a grin.
‘You went all thoughtful.’
The beach was empty. The sand was a mixture of yellow and black, with black pebbles scattered about, having been tossed by winds and currents this way and that in the several thousand years since they had been spewed out of some volcano. A faint smell from the seaweed draped over sand and rocks shifted in and out of Magnus’s nostrils.
The Reykjanes peninsula stretched out to the west, into the Atlantic, a black mass of frozen folds of lava. The near-perfect cone of the small volcano Keilir pushed upwards just inland from the shoreline. Although it hadn’t erupted for several millennia, it looked perfectly capable of putting on a performance at any moment.
No trees. If there had been trees there several thousand years before, and there probably had been, they had been smothered and choked by the lava, and had never had the opportunity to seed in the sterile landscape again. Only lichen and moss and the odd tuft of yellow grass could gain a foothold out there.
‘How do you like it back in Iceland?’ Ingileif asked.
‘It’s good,’ said Magnus. ‘I’m glad I came back.’
Magnus had been born in Iceland, but had moved to America to follow his father at the age of twelve. He had grown up there and, after the dreadful months following his father’s murder which the local cops couldn’t solve, had joined the Boston Police Department. When the National Police Commissioner of Iceland had come to the US looking for expertise in big-city crime, as the only Icelandic-speaking detective in the US, Magnus was the obvious candidate.
So Sergeant Detective Magnus Jonson became Sergeant Magnús Ragnarsson — Magnus’s father’s first name was Ragnar — as he spent three years attached to the Reykjavík police. His first stint.
Which was where he had met Ingileif.
They stayed together for most of those three years, but when they split up, Magnus had allowed his time in Iceland to come to an end. That was five years ago, now.
‘Why did you come back here?’
‘It wasn’t the same in Boston. It hadn’t changed; I had. You know how obsessed I used to be about investigations? I’ve lost that, or at least I had lost it in America.’
‘Because you had solved your father’s murder?’
‘That’s right,’ said Magnus. Ingileif had always understood him, almost as well as he understood himself. Probably better. He had discovered the key to his father’s murder had been in Iceland all along. Until that point, he had been driven to solve every homicide he came across in an ever-fruitless attempt to solve his father’s murder, or if not to solve it, then resolve it. Which of course he never managed to do.
But after he had dealt with his father’s death, he found the homicide investigations just depressing. And they produced ever-increasing quantities of information that had to be typed into computers.
‘Are you happy now?’
Magnus glanced at Ingileif. Never afraid to ask direct questions.
‘Yes.’ His smile broadened.
Ingileif laughed. ‘That was quick! You’ve only been back a few months. What’s her name?’
‘Eygló. She’s an archaeologist.’
‘She wasn’t a witness on that murder case you were involved in, was she? The one that was in the papers?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Magnús! You must stop doing that! You know it’s unprofessional.’ That was how Magnus had met Ingileif.
‘I know, I know.’
‘Tell me about her.’
Magnus hesitated. His instinct was not to tell his former girlfriend about how wonderful his current girlfriend was. But on the other hand, if he was going to establish a successful long-term relationship with the mother of his son, he was going to have to get over the former-girlfriend bit.
So he did, describing how Eygló had her own eleven-year-old son, about her background as an archaeologist and how she had stumbled into the role of successful presenter of TV documentaries. He tried to avoid sounding too enthusiastic, but didn’t entirely succeed.
‘She sounds perfect for you. You really like her, don’t you?’
‘I do,’ Magnus admitted.
‘I’m glad,’ said Ingileif. She sounded as if she really meant it. Yet somehow she sounded sad as well. Or was Magnus imagining that?
It was his turn to pry. ‘Last time we met, you mentioned something about a guy called Hannes?’
They had only spoken twice since Magnus had been back in Iceland, and not at all when he had been in America. The first time, when they had bumped into each other on Borgartún and Magnus had learned of Ási’s existence, Ingileif had mentioned a husband. The second time, over lunch, she had said the husband had gone off with another woman.
‘Hannes wants to come back. Turns out I’m more interesting than his skinny model. Who’d have thought it?’
‘Are you going to take him?’
‘Don’t know. Not sure.’
Magnus looked across at her. She was walking, head down. Was she avoiding his glance?
They continued on in silence for a bit. The wind whipped in from the ruffled sea, shuffling the layers of white and grey cloud into streaks of blue. Magnus switched to English for the little boy’s benefit. Or rather to exclude the little boy.
There was a question he needed to know the answer to. ‘Does he know that Hannes isn’t his father?’
‘Oh, yes. He calls him Hannes, not Dad. But I have to say that Hannes is very good to him.’
‘Does he know about me?’
‘Who? Hannes or Ási?’
‘Both.’
‘I’ve told Hannes all about you. At the moment Ási thinks he hasn’t got a dad. And I’d like to keep it that way.’ She took a couple of steps. ‘For now, at least.’
Ási had heard his name and looked up at his mother and Magnus.
‘You’re forty-one and a half,’ he said.
Magnus grinned. Ási did remember him after all! They had swapped ages last time they had met. ‘And you are four.’
‘And a half.’