‘No, not me. Give me drunks any time rather than these weirdos. When you’re dealing with pissheads, you know exactly where you stand.’
‘Haddi, you’re getting old. There’s no hurry back, we’ll just keep behind them and make sure there aren’t any stragglers. All right?’
Skúli composed his piece in his mind for the Sunday edition. This would be a front page, ‘reports Skúli Snædal, crime correspondent’, he thought.
Dagga and Lára walked ahead, wondering where their support car had gone.
‘Good photos?’ Dagga asked.
‘Not bad at all,’ Lára replied, scrolling through them and holding the camera up so that Dagga could share them.
‘He’s good-looking, isn’t he?’
‘Who?’
‘Kolbeinn, the juggler guy,’ Lára said. ‘Didn’t you notice him? I couldn’t stop taking pics of him without his shirt on. Gorgeous, I thought.’
‘Passionate type,’ Dagga agreed. ‘Great-looking and has no idea of it. Hey, Skúli, what do you think? Lára was saying that juggler is just luscious. She reckons he can leave towels all over her bathroom floor whenever he wants.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t know . . .’ Skúli muttered, flushing and dropping back behind in embarrassment.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ he heard Dagga say. ‘I like that young policeman you had the pics of this morning.’
‘Gummi? Very young and innocent, I thought.’
‘Nothing like teaching a young dog new tricks. I was hoping he’d take my name and address.’
Skúli rolled his eyes and let himself drop even further behind.
As the marchers made their way home and night began to fall, heavy cloud rolled in off the Atlantic and settled low, shrouding the hills and hugging the mountainsides. It was almost fully dark as two figures emerged from the hillside overlooking the construction site, hauling themselves from shallow hiding places scooped in the ground where their friends had half-buried them.
They silently made their way to the part of the fence where security cameras had the most awkward angles to cover and quickly snipped at the wire until a hole big enough to crawl through had been made. Inside the compound they vanished, returning without the backpacks they had set out with. They rapidly patched the fence to hide their tracks and vanished back up the slope where they unearthed a pair of mountain bikes that had been hidden for them in the loose gravel. Swinging legs over, they bounced down the track towards Hvalvík.
They were long gone when flames began to lick hungrily at the row of trucks and bulldozers, as well as the site manager’s new Landcruiser, which the activists had felt was just as legitimate a target.
16
Sunday, 14 September
The site manager could hardly speak through his fury. The previous day’s demonstration had cost a day’s work, but at least it had been peaceful. He had been called out in the early hours to find that his fleet of vehicles was wrecked and the security guards had seen nothing. His first phone call had been to the agency that had supplied them and his second had been to Spearpointto demand a more reliable replacement.
Gunna arrived with Haddi from Hvalvík to find Bjössi already at work. A couple of uniformed officers were looking over the burnt-out vehicles and Haddi went to keep them company. Bjössi was sitting in the site manager’s office interviewing the latest in a procession of the site staff.
‘Hi, Bjössi. How goes it?’
‘Ah, Gunna. At last,’ Björn replied, turning away from the miserable-looking man sitting opposite him. ‘Make us some coffee, will you? And a few doughnuts wouldn’t come amiss.’
‘You, dear friend, can kiss my arse and make your own coffee.’
‘No offence, Gunna. We few remaining male chauvinist pigs have to try and make a stand now and again.’
‘None taken. How are you getting on?’
‘Bloody terrible. They’re all Polish or Portuguese, or some such foreigners. Their Icelandic is as good as my Swahili, so it’s all in English.’
‘Your English is all right, isn’t it?’
‘My English is fine, but theirs isn’t,’ Bjössi grumbled. ‘Anyway, any luck your side?’
‘Not a peep. Nobody saw a thing last night between here and Hvalvík. I’ve spoken to every farmer along the way and there’s not a thing. Even that old nosy parker Jóhann at Fremribakki, who’s up at five every single morning in case he misses out on something, says he hasn’t seen or heard a soul since the march went past yesterday.’
Bjössi jerked a thumb at the door and the man sitting opposite him scuttled out without a backward glance.
‘So, what have we got, then?’ Gunna asked, examining the office noticeboard.
‘Nothing, it seems, unless forensics find something around the wreckage. I reckon they just used good old-fashioned rags soaked in petrol, lit a fire under each one and then got out quick.’
‘So, no witnesses, because the security guards were playing poker in one of the sheds all night, and not a hope of finding footprints or anything that could be definitely linked to these guys, not after the number of people who were tramping around here yesterday.’
‘It’s going to take a while, this one,’ Bjössi said with satisfaction, leaning his bulk back on two legs of the site manager’s chair so that it creaked in protest. ‘I expect we’ll come across them sooner or later, but it won’t be through anything we do here. Someone will blab or want to settle a score eventually.’
‘You know, I’m wondering how they got clear without being seen. The fires started around midnight, so it was pretty dark. It’s a good long walk from here even into Hvalvík. If we can find out how they did that, we’d be a step or two closer.’
‘Hm. If you think so. Ach, some idiot’ll have a drop too much to drink soon enough and spill the beans,’ Bjössi said with conviction. ‘Anyway, I’d better carry on with these numbskulls who see and hear nothing and don’t know anything either.’
14-09-2008, 2006
Skandalblogger writes:
What’s that freedom thing about, Grandad?
The march was exciting, wasn’t it just? The papers and the TV are telling us how peaceful it was, with Kolli Sverris doing his juggling and all the colourful people getting in tune with nature before they return to civilization in their 4 x 4s in time for the footie.
But a little bird whispers to the Skandalblogger that not everything went as sweetly as we’re being told. Just how did the fire in the InterAlu compound start? You know, the fire that nobody’s talking about that burned out every piece of heavy machinery on the site? What? You mean you didn’t know about it? All the news guys were there, even our cousins the Norwegians were good enough to send a TV crew, but unfortunately they’d all gone back to their hotels by the time the real business started.
And what happened to the overseas activists who were quietly herded off to one side at Keflavík, kept for a couple of hours and just as quietly deported without even leaving the terminal?
Well, damn me for a cranky old liberal with some strange ideas about freedom of speech and the right to protest, but I’d have thought that there might be a bit more to this than meets the eye.
Keep taking the pills, and watch this space!
Bæjó!
Vilhjálmur Traustason hesitated, sparking Gunna’s curiosity. In spite of what she saw as his numerous failings, the man could generally be relied on to get straight to the point.
‘I, er, wanted to mention to you the investigation into the young man who was found outside Hvalvík.’
Gunna could imagine him twisting his fingers into knots as he spoke.