One of the reasons he had left Africa, with its teeming life of all kinds, was to rediscover the barren desolation of his home country. With the tourist boom, this was harder to find, especially in high summer when the more intrepid foreigners in their hired cars spread out all over the country in search of lonely corners.
Tryggvi Thór knew a corner that he hoped they had not yet found. He drove past the lagoon and around the outskirts of the fishing village of Grindavík, heading east, past a couple of farms into another lava field. The paved road became unpaved track, running about a kilometre in from the sea. He turned off it and drove down towards the water and a small car park in the midst of volcanic debris, shielded from the west winds by a burly wall of lava that had spilled into the sea millennia ago and frozen hard.
The place was known as Selatangar. And it was empty.
Good.
He slipped on his daypack and followed a footpath through the stones to the east, away from the wall. It was noticeably cooler than it had been that morning, and a sea mist lurked just a hundred metres offshore. As he walked he saw it creep and slide towards him. It reached out and grabbed a pair of eider ducks splashing in the swell, smothering them in its milky clasp. The black beach was cluttered with driftwood, bleached almost white from its long journey through the Atlantic.
In the higgledy-piggledy jumble of rocks, stones and pebbles, it was difficult to spot the first sign of human habitation, a circular pile in which fishermen had lived 150 years before. The place had been a seasonal fishing settlement from the Middle Ages until some time in the nineteenth century, a warren of drystone hovels linked by paths cut through the lava. Rows of boulders stretched out into the sea: primitive breakwaters to protect the open fishing boats as they landed their catch, which would then be hung out to dry for months on wooden racks erected along the shore.
Tryggvi Thór halted and listened to the silence. Except it wasn’t quite silent: the wavelets lapped against the beach, a breath of wind rustled through the rocks, and his own blood thudded gently in his ears. The moist sea air massaged his face in a delicate tingle.
It wasn’t absolute silence, but it was the loneliness he had sought.
A cormorant appeared as if by magic from beneath the grey water slopping against the pebbles. The mist had ventured ashore now, slinking along the narrow paths between the dwellings.
He wondered what it would have been like inhabiting those harsh stone buildings — cramped, damp, cold, with nothing green in sight — and he marvelled again at the toughness and dogged determination of Icelanders in centuries gone by. Not that they had much of a choice.
Tryggvi Thór’s parents had occasionally brought him and his brother here when they were kids back in the fifties, and they would happily spend all afternoon running through this abandoned settlement, playing all kinds of games.
A ripple of movement in the mist attracted his attention. He stared at the swirling moisture. It was nothing. Unless it was ‘Tanga-Tómas’ the local ghost his father had told him stories about.
This was why he had come back from Africa, places like this.
And to right a wrong. To do his duty.
What did that mean for someone who had spent more than two decades away from his homeland?
It still meant something. Even though Tryggvi Thór had been bewitched by Africa, had fallen in love with one of its women, had produced his own African daughter, he had remained an Icelander. And as he had aged, and especially since Charity had died, that had become more important to him.
No one had ever suggested that Tryggvi Thór was anything but tough, even at seventy-one. Yet the attack on him in his own house had shaken him, as it was supposed to do. It had made him question whether doing what he was planning to do was worth it.
There was corruption all over the world: Tryggvi Thór had witnessed it on a large and small scale in Africa. Yet Iceland should be better than that. Amazingly, for a few years at the beginning of the century Iceland had teetered at the top of the World Corruption Index as the least corrupt country in the world. But Iceland had its own special form of corruption: people who knew each other looking out for each other. During the financial crisis the depth of this corruption had been laid bare for all to see. Elections had been fought and won and then lost on the issue. Although many Icelanders were infuriated with the way those in power helped their friends, they also understood. After all, they helped their friends. In an environment as tough as Iceland, you had to, because one day you would need help in return.
Low-level corruption he could have ignored, but in truth there wasn’t much of that in Iceland. Tourists didn’t get shaken down by armed police as they drove around the country. Icelandic corruption wasn’t like that; it operated on a much higher level. And the corruption Tryggvi Thór had come home to confront was at the highest level.
His daughter Sóley was as sickened by the corruption as anyone else; it was where her antipathy to the police had come from. She was rising high in the diplomatic service, high enough to see the networks in action. Sóley had guessed what her father was up to, why he had returned to Iceland, but he hadn’t confided in her. Not that he didn’t trust her to keep his purpose to herself — he certainly trusted her. It was just that she was always so worried about him. She treated him like an old man, to be fussed over and protected. He might be seventy-one, but he didn’t feel like an old man.
There was no doubt he was in some danger, though. With Charity gone, he thought that didn’t matter, but of course it did. Sóley and her children would miss him if something happened to him. Símon, Tryggvi Thór’s son, wouldn’t care. They hadn’t got on since Fanny, Símon’s mother, had divorced Tryggvi Thór right after he was thrown out of the police. Like his mother, Símon had never forgiven him, never believed that Tryggvi Thór wasn’t corrupt himself.
Well, screw Símon.
But then there was Greta, at medical school in Kampala. She did matter. Tryggvi Thór missed her so badly. He wanted to live long enough to see her become a doctor and start her own family.
He struck out further along the shore, picking his way through the moss-spattered lava.
He was glad that he had asked the Kani Cop to stay with him. They had a lot in common. It was not just that they were both Icelanders who had spent a long time abroad; it was also that Tryggvi Thór recognized something of himself in Magnus, something of the cop he used to be.
Tryggvi Thór instinctively trusted Magnus, and there were not many police officers he could say that of.
Stones rattled behind him, and he turned.
No one.
He stopped and listened. Nothing
The path had petered out to barely discernable worn patches in otherwise jagged lava, and so he made for the beach. The tide was out and it would be easier to walk along the shore through the black sand.
After a few hundred metres, he decided he had gone far enough, and began to retrace his steps. The mist had overwhelmed the shoreline and it was difficult to see more than a few metres ahead. He could hear the sea, to his left, but he couldn’t see it any more. Following the path as it threaded its way through the stone dwellings would take him back to his car, but he checked the compass he always carried with him just to make sure he was going in the right direction.
He passed by one of the circular hovels. He felt rather than heard a rush behind him. He began to turn but then...