the earth. Not far short of the lake of Kleifavatn I saw a car ahead,
pulled off the road, and a man waving the universal y recognized
distress signal of the stranded motorist.
We were both damned fools; I because I stopped and he because he was
alone. He spoke to me in bad Danish and then in good Swedish, both of
which I understand. It turned out, quite natural y, that there was
something wrong with his car and he couldn’t get it to move.
I got out of the Cortina. ‘Lindholm,’ he said in the formal Swedish
manner, and stuck out his hand which I pumped up and down once in the
way which protocol dictates.
‘I’m Stewart,’ I said, and walked over to his Volkswagen and peered at
the exposed rear engine.
I don’t think he wanted to kil me at first or he would have used the
gun straight away. As it was he took a swipe at me with a very
professional y designed lead-loaded cosh. I think it was when he got
behind me that I realized I was being a naming idiot – that’s a result
of being out of practice. I turned my head and saw his upraised arm and
dodged sideways. If the cosh had connected with my skul it would have
jarred my brains loose; instead it hit my shoulder and my whole arm went
numb.
I gave him the boot in the shin, raking down from knee to ankle, and he
yelped and hopped back, which gave me time to put the car between us,
and groped for the /sgian dubh/ as I went. Fortunately it’s a
left-handed weapon which was just as wel because my right arm wasn’t
going to be of use.
He came for me again but when he saw the knife he hesitated, his lips
curling away from his teeth. He dropped the cosh and dipped his hand
beneath his jacket and it was my turn to hesitate. But his cosh was
/too/ wel designed; it had a leather wrist loop and the dangling weapon
impeded his draw and I jumped him just as the pistol came out.
I didn’t stab him. He swung around and ran straight into the blade.
There was a gush of blood over my hand and he sagged against me with a
ludicrous look of surprise on his face. Then he went down at my feet and
the knife came free and blood pulsed from his chest into the lava dust.
So there I was on a lonely road in Southern Iceland with a newly created
corpse at my feet and a bloody knife in my hand, the taste of raw bile
in my throat and a frozen brain. From the time I had got out of the
Cortina to the moment of death had been less than two minutes.
I don’t think I consciously thought of what I did next; I think that
rigorous training took over. I jumped for the Cortina and ran it forward
a little so that it covered the body. Lonely though the road might be
that didn’t mean a car couldn’t pass at any time and a body in plain
sight would take a hel of a lot of explaining away.
Then I took the /New York Times/ which, its other virtues apart,
contains more newsprint than practical y any other newspaper in the
world, and used it to line the boot of the car. That done, I reversed
again, picked up the body and dumped it into the boot and slammed the
lid down quickly. Lindholm – if that was his name – was now out of sight
if not out of mind.
He had bled like a cow in a Moslem slaughter-house and there was a great
pool of blood by the side of the road. My jacket and trousers were also
liberal y bedaubed. I couldn’t do much about my clothing right then but
I covered the blood pool with handfuls of lava dust. I closed the engine
compartment of the Volkswagen, got behind the wheel and switched on.
Lindholm had not only been an attempted murderer – he had also been a
liar because the engine caught immediately. I reversed the car over the
bloody bit of ground and left it there. It was too much to hope that the
blood wouldn’t be noticed when the car was taken away but I had to do
what I could.
I got back into the Cortina after one last look at the scene of the
crime and drove away, and it was then I began to think consciously.
First I thought of Slade and damned his soul to hel and then I moved
into more practicable channels of thought such as how to get rid of
Lindholm. You’d think that in a country four-fifths the size of England
with a population less than half of, say Plymouth, there’d be wide open
spaces with enough nooks and crannies to hide an inconvenient body. True
enough, but this particular bit of Iceland – the south-west – was also
the most heavily populated and it wasn’t going to be particularly easy.
Stil , I knew the country and, after a little while, I began to get
ideas. I checked the petrol gauge and settled down for a long drive,
hoping that the car was in good trim. To stop and be found with a
blood-smeared jacket would cause the asking of pointed questions. I had
another outfit in my suitcase but al at once there were too many cars
about and I preferred to change discreetly.
Most of Iceland is volcanic and the south-west is particularly so with
bleak vistas of lava fields, ash cones and shield volcanoes, some of
them extinct, some not. In my travels I had once come across a gas vent
which now seemed an ideal place for the last repose of Lindholm, and it
was there I was heading.
It was a two-hour drive and, towards the end, I had to leave the road
and take to the open country, bouncing across a waste of volcanic ash
and scoria which did the Cortina no good. The last time I had been that
way I had driven my Land-Rover which is made for that sort of country.
The place was exactly as I remembered it. There was an extinct crater
with a riven side so that one could drive right into the caldera and in
the middle was a rocky pustule with a hole in it through which the hot
volcanic gases had driven in some long-gone eruption. The only sign that
any other human being had been there since the creation of the world was
the mark of tyre tracks driving up towards the lip of the crater. The
Icelanders have their own peculiar form of motor sport; they drive into
a crater and try to get out the hard way. I’ve never known anyone break
his neck at this hazardous game but it’s not for want of trying.
I drove the car as near to the gas vent as I could and then went forward
on foot until I could look into the impenetrable darkness of the hole. I
dropped a stone into it and there was a receding clatter which went on
for a long time. Verne’s hero who went to the centre of the earth might
have had an easier time if he had picked this hole instead of
Snaefel sjokul .
Before I popped Lindholm into his final resting-place I searched him. It
was a messy business because the blood was stil sticky and it was lucky
I had not yet changed my suit. He had a Swedish passport made out in the
name of Axel Lindholm, but that didn’t mean a thing – passports are easy
to come by. There were a few more bits and pieces but nothing of
importance, and al I retained were the cosh and the pistol, a Smith &
Wesson .38.
Then I carried him up to the vent and dropped him into it. There were a
few soggy thumps and then silence – a silence I hoped would be eternal.
I went back to the car and changed into a clean suit and pulled the
stained clothing inside out so that the blood would not touch the inside
of my suitcase. The cosh, the pistol and “Slade’s damned package I also
tossed into the suitcase before I closed it, and then I set off on the
wearisome way to Reykjavik.
I was very tired.
Chapter II
It was late evening when I pulled up in front of the Hotel Saga,
although it was stil light with the brightness of the northern summer.
My eyes were sore because I had been driving right into the western sun
and I stayed in the car for a moment to rest them. If I had stayed in
the car two minutes more the next fateful thing would not have happened,