So I told him the whole thing: about the way the place had been wrecked, Mr Chamois in the foyer, the crack over the head, even the pan. The only thing I didn't mention was the photograph- well, that had gone anyway.
I ended up: 'Do you think Mr Chamois bopped me, Petursson?'
He rubbed his fingers up the long bones of his jaw. 'No, I do
not think he did,' he said, in his roller-coaster accent. 'And now you want to know why. Many reasons. The ones you say, like why would he come back, and how did he get the pan, and so on. But there is another reason. It does not bother you if I smoke?'
He tapped one of his small cigars out of the packet and lit it with a green plastic lighter. He returned both the packet and the lighter to his pocket before continuing.
'He is a diplomat,' he said.
'A diplomat? What sort of diplomat?'
'Not the sort to assault journalists, I can assure you.'
'What nationality is he? What was he doing?'
He rapped the table top twice to silence me. 'Listen, Mr Craven, listen to me. The man who hit you with the pan was hiding in the kitchen.'
He picked a matchstick out of the ashtray and scraped the ash off the end of his cigar before it fell in an unauthorised place.
He wasn't a man for chances, Petursson. That was what made him so good.
'How do you know?'
'Simple. My men were watching the flat. They saw him go in.
'So why didn't they arrest him?'
'Also simple. They didn't see him leave. He got out by a service door at the side.'
'Was he a diplomat too?'
He chose to ignore the sardonic inflexion. 'No, not this man.
I was hoping you might tell us a little about him, Mr Craven?' I pointed at the top of my head. 'That's all I know about him.'
He sat back in his chair and studied me with an interested, uncritical air. 'That is my difficulty, you see. Am I telling you things? Or am I telling you things you already know? That is my main worry. That, and how much trouble you can make for my country.'
He rose clumsily, heaving the chair back with one hand.
'I'd like you to take a little walk with me, if you would be so kind.'
'Fine,' I said. 'But I didn't know anything about the man in the kitchen, you know. For all I know, he could've been there all night.'
'Oh, no, Mr Craven,' he said, checking the angle of his hat in the window. 'If he had been, you would have been dead. By the way, give me your opinion on the two gentlemen by the harbour as we go, will you?'
He knew how to deliver a line all right, did Petursson, and I hoped I looked appropriately shocked: because he was monitoring every reaction. Before I had time to wonder about the man who might have killed me, Petursson had ushered me outside into the soft light of the late evening. When he took my sleeve to point out the snow on the mountains, I knew he was giving me time to look at the two men dawdling at the water's edge.
They didn't even need to touch each other. The effect that Petursson's appearance had on them was minute but un mistakable. One, who was throwing stones at a plastic bottle in the water, glimpsed us as he turned. His eyes flicked like knives to his mate, who had his back to us. With a quick movement of his hand, he tossed the remaining half-dozen or so stones into the water and, before the pitter-patter of their landing had died, the two of them were walking off briskly, shoulder to shoulder.
We watched them go before we, at a much more leisurely rate, followed.
'Well? Did anything about them strike you?'
'Obviously they're fishermen.' He didn't look too amazed by that deduction. Men in a semi-uniform of roll-neck sweater, reefer-type jacket, and roll-on woollen hats, all dark blue, seen