To: Torfi, Gudjon, Helga, Gisli, HerdisValtýr, Gudmundur, Teitur, Siggi, and allthe other Icelanders.
Thanks for lending me your country.
To be encumbered with a corpse is to be in a difficult position, especially when the corpse is without benefit of death certificate. True, any doctor, even one just hatched from medical school, would have been able to diagnose the cause of death. The man had died of heart failure or what the medical boys pompously call cardiac arrest.
The proximate cause of his pumper having stopped pumping was that someone had slid a sharp sliver of steel between his ribs just far enough to penetrate the great muscle of the heart and to cause a serious and irreversible leakage of blood so that it stopped beating. Cardiac arrest, as I said.
I wasn’t too anxious to find a doctor because the knife was mine and the hilt had been in my hand when the point pricked out his life. I stood on the open road with the body at my feet and I was scared, so scared that my bowels loosened and the nausea rose in my throat to choke me. I don’t know which is the worse – to kill someone you know or to kill a stranger. This particular body had been a stranger – in fact, he still was – I had never seen him before in my life.
And this was the way it happened.
Less than two hours previously the airliner had slid beneath the clouds and I saw the familiar, grim landscape of Southern Iceland. The aircraft lost height over the Reykjanes Peninsula and landed dead on time at Keflavik International Airport, where it was raining, a thin drizzle weeping from an iron grey sky.
I was unarmed, if you except the sgian dubh. Customs officers don’t like guns so I didn’t carry a pistol, and Slade said it wasn’t necessary. The sgian dubh – the black knife of the Highlander – is a much underrated weapon if, these days, it is ever regarded as a weapon at all. One sees it in the stocking tops of sober Scotsmen when they are in the glory of national dress and it is just another piece of masculine costume jewellery.
Mine was more functional. It had been given to me by my grandfather who had it off his grandfather, so that made it at least a hundred and fifty years old. Like any good piece of killing equipment it had no unnecessary trimmings – even the apparent decorations had a function. The ebony haft was ribbed on one side in the classic Celtic basket-weave pattern to give a good grip when drawing, but smooth on the other side so it would draw clear without catching; the blade was less than four inches long, but long enough to reach a vital organ; even the gaudy cairngorm stone set in the pommel had its use – it balanced the knife so that it made a superlative throwing weapon.
It lived in a flat sheath in my left stocking top. Where else would you expect to keep a sgian dubh? The obvious way is often the best because most people don’t see the obvious. The Customs officer didn’t even look, not into my luggage and certainly not into the more intimate realms of my person. I had been in and out of the country so often that I am tolerably well known, and the fact I speak the language was a help – there are only 20,000 people who speak Icelandic and the Icelanders have a comical air of pleased surprise when they encounter a foreigner who has taken the trouble to learn it.
‘Will you be fishing again, Mr Stewart?’ asked the Customs officer.
I nodded. ‘Yes, I hope to kill a few of your salmon. I’ve had my gear sterilized – here’s the certificate.’ The Icelanders are trying to keep out the salmon disease which has attacked the fish in British rivers.
He took the certificate and waved me through the barrier. ‘The best of luck,’ he said.
I smiled at him and passed through into the concourse and went into the coffee shop in accordance with the instructions Slade had given me. I ordered coffee and presently someone sat next to me and laid down a copy of the New York Times. ‘Gee!’ he said. ‘It’s colder here than in the States.’
‘It’s even colder in Birmingham,’ I said solemnly, and then, the silly business of the passwords over, we got down to business.
‘It’s wrapped in the newspaper,’ he said.
He was a short, balding man with the worried look of the ulcered executive. I tapped the newspaper. ‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. You know where to take it?’
‘Akureyri,’ I said. ‘But why me? Why can’t you take it?’
‘Not me,’ he said definitely. ‘I take the next flight out to the States.’ He seemed relieved at that simple fact.
‘Let’s be normal,’ I said. ‘I’ll buy you a coffee.’ I caught the eye of a waitress.
‘Thanks,’ he said, and laid down a key-ring. ‘There’s a car in the parking lot outside – the registration number is written alongside the masthead of The Times there.’
‘Most obliging of you,’ I said. ‘I was going to take a taxi.’
‘I don’t do things to be obliging,’ he said shortly. ‘I do things because I’m told to do them, just like you – and right now I’m doing the telling and you’re doing the doing. You don’t drive along the main road to Reykjavik; you go by way of Krysuvik and Kleifavatn.’
I was sipping coffee when he said that and I spluttered. When I came to the surface and got my breath back I said, ‘Why the hell should I do that? It’s double the distance and along lousy roads.’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m just the guy who passes the word. But it was a last-minute instruction so maybe someone’s got wind that maybe someone else is laying for you somewhere on the main road. I wouldn’t know.’
‘You don’t know much, do you?’ I said acidly, and tapped the newspaper. ‘You don’t know what’s in here; you don’t know why I should waste the afternoon in driving around the Reykjanes Peninsula. If I asked you the time of day I doubt if you’d tell me.’
He gave me a sly, sideways grin. ‘I bet one thing,’ he said. ‘I bet I know more than you do.’
‘That wouldn’t be too difficult,’ I said grumpily. It was all of a piece with everything Slade did; he worked on the ‘need to know’ principle and what you didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
He finished his coffee. ‘That’s it, buster – except for one thing. When you get to Reykjavik leave the car parked outside the Hotel Saga and just walk away from it. It’ll be taken care of.’
He got up without another word and walked away, seemingly in a hurry to get away from me. All during our brief conversation he had seemed jittery, which worried me because it didn’t square with Slade’s description of the job. ‘It’ll be simple,’ Slade had said. ‘You’re just a messenger boy.’ The twist of his lips had added the implied sneer that it was all I was good for.
I stood and jammed the newspaper under my arm. The concealed package was moderately heavy but not obtrusive. I picked up my gear and went outside to look for the car; it proved to be a Ford Cortina, and minutes later I was on my way out of Keflavik and going south – away from Reykjavik. I wished I knew the idiot who said, ‘The longest way round is the shortest way there.’
When I found a quiet piece of road I pulled on to the shoulder and picked up the newspaper from the seat where I had tossed it. The package was as Slade had described it – small and heavier than one would have expected. It was covered in brown hessian, neatly stitched up, and looked completely anonymous. Careful tapping seemed to indicate that under the hessian was a metal box, and there were no rattles when it was