Free Sea of Stone by Michael Ridpath Page A

spear.
    They were buried right where Jóhannes was standing.
    There were feuds aplenty in saga times, Jóhannes thought. But from what he had read, and what Magnus the American detective had told him, there were still feuds today. If his calculations were correct, the first death had been in 1934. Followed by 1940. And then 1985. Possibly 1996. And now today, 2010.
    He couldn’t deny that there was something inside him that was stirred by the feud, that resonated with all those other feuds of saga times that he knew so intimately.
    But they were dangerous, those old feuds, where neighbour slew neighbour. Styr himself had been involved in many, and had been killed as a result of one.
    Jóhannes had his heroes from the sagas. Egill, the violent, ruthless warrior who slaughtered enemies from Norway to England to Iceland, and yet whose poetry was so beautiful thathis captor, King Athelstan of England, set him free when he heard it. Grettir the Strong, who had survived as an outlaw for twenty years with his strength and cunning. Leifur Eiríksson who had sailed to Greenland and then on to Vinland, the grape-bearing shore of North America.
    But Jóhannes knew he didn’t resemble these men. The saga hero he most admired, the one whom he would most like to have been, was Njáll. Njáll was a lawyer and a peacemaker, who advised his bloodthirsty friends how to win their feuds through the annual parliament at the Althing, or by subterfuge or cunning, rather than simply with the sword or axe.
    Njáll would have put a stop to this modern-day feud. Prevent it from festering. He would have figured out a way.
    Jóhannes looked across at Bjarnarhöfn, where Hallgrímur Gunnarsson had lost his life only hours before, and where his family were at that very moment mourning him.
    There should be no more deaths. Jóhannes knew what Njáll would do.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER SEVEN
    ‘H ERE , TÓTA , TAKE this out to the policeman,’ said Aníta, handing her daughter some of the
hangikjöt
and rye bread. It had somehow seemed right to serve this traditional smoked lamb dish for dinner. It was one of Hallgrímur’s favourites. Also, they had a lot of it at the farm and there were plenty of people to feed.
    As Tóta grudgingly took the plate outside to the poor policeman who was still guarding the crime scene, Aníta took her seat at the table. It was surrounded by her husband’s family – Hallgrímur’s family. Sylvía was there, of course, and Ingvar had driven back to Bjarnarhöfn from Stykkishólmur, with his French wife Gabrielle, whom Aníta liked. Plus one other surprise guest.
    Villi.
    He had arrived unannounced in the middle of the comings and goings outside Hallgrímur’s cottage. He had flown in from Canada that day. He said that he had received a ticket from a friend in Toronto whose onward trip to Europe had been ruined by the volcano. He had been shocked to learn that Hallgrímur had been murdered that morning, but his arrival was a welcome distraction.
    He was the eldest of the three brothers, probably sixty-four, Aníta would guess. She realized that he actually looked like an older version of Magnus. He had Magnus’s broad shoulders and almost his height, but there was also something about the way he held himself, alert, watchful, that recalled his nephew. His hair, which had once been fair, was now a sandy grey.
    He had just retired from a career in engineering, which had taken him all over the world from his base in Canada. He had worked for most of that time for mining companies, although he wasn’t a mining engineer. His experience as a young man building roads and bridges in Iceland’s rugged landscape had served him in good stead in the Yukon and Chile and New Guinea.
    Aníta was pleased to see him.
    ‘I didn’t see any sign of ash in Reykjavík,’ Villi said. His voice was a deep rumble. He still spoke perfect Icelandic, with just a hint of a North American accent. Once again, like Magnus.
    ‘The