Running Blind / The Freedom Trap

DESMOND BAGLEY

ONE

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 shaken.

I regarded it thoughtfully but that didn’t give me any clue, so I wrapped it in the newspaper again, dropped it on the back seat, and drove on. It had stopped raining and driving conditions weren’t too bad – for Iceland. The average Icelandic road makes an English farm track look like a super-highway. Where there are roads, that is. In the interior, which Icelanders know as the Óbyggdir, there are no roads and in winter the Óbyggdir is pretty near as inaccessible as the moon unless you’re the hearty explorer type. It looks very much like the moon, too; Neil Armstrong practised his moon-walk there.

I drove on and, at Krysuvik, I turned inland, past the distant vapour-covered slopes where super-heated steam boils from the guts of the earth. Not far short of the lake of Kleifavatn I saw a car ahead, pulled off the road, and a man waving the universally 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 naturally, 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 kill me at first or he would have used the gun straight away. As it was he took a swipe at me with a very professionally designed lead-loaded cosh. I think it was when he got behind me that I realized I was being a flaming 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 skull 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 well 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 well 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 hell of a lot of explaining away.

Then I took the New York Times which, its other virtues apart, contains more newsprint than practically 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 liberally 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 hell 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.

Still, 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 all 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 Snaefellsjökull.

Before I popped Lindholm into his final resting-place I searched him. It was a messy business because the blood was still 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 all 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.

II

It was late evening when I pulled up in front of the Hotel Saga, although it was still 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, but I didn’t; I got out and was just extracting the suitcase when a tall man came out of the hotel, paused, and hailed me. ‘Alan Stewart!’

I looked up and cursed under my breath because the man in the uniform of an Icelandair pilot was the last man I wanted to see – Bjarni Ragnarsson. ‘Hello, Bjarni,’ I said.

We shook hands. ‘Elin didn’t tell me you were coming.’

‘She didn’t know,’ I said. ‘It was a last-minute decision; I didn’t even have time to telephone.’

He looked at my suitcase resting on the pavement. ‘You’re not staying at the Saga!’ he said in surprise.

It was a snap judgment and I had to make it fast. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll be going to the apartment.’ I didn’t want to bring Elin into this but now her brother knew I was in Reykjavik he would be sure to tell her and I didn’t want her to be hurt in that way. Elin was very special.

I saw Bjarni looking at the car. ‘I’ll leave it here,’ I said lightly. ‘It’s just a delivery job for a friend. I’ll take a taxi to the apartment.’

He accepted that, and said, ‘Staying long?’

‘For the rest of the summer, as usual,’ I said easily.

‘We must go fishing,’ he said.

I agreed. ‘Have you become a father yet?’

‘Another month,’ he said glumly. ‘I’m dreading it.’

I laughed. ‘I should think that’s Kristin’s worry; you aren’t even in the country half the time. No nappy-changing for you.’

We spent another few minutes in the usual idle-small-talk of old friends just met and then he glanced at his watch. ‘I have a flight to Greenland,’ he said. ‘I must go. I’ll ring you in a couple of days.’

‘Do that.’ I watched him go and then captured a taxi which had just dropped a fare at the hotel and told the driver where to go. Outside the building I paid him off and then stood uncertainly on the pavement wondering whether I was doing the right thing.

Elin Ragnarsdottir was someone very special.

She was a schoolteacher but, like many other Icelanders of her type, she held down two jobs. There are certain factors about Iceland – the smallness of population, the size of the country and its situation in high northern latitudes – which result in a social system which outsiders are apt to find weird. But since the system is designed to suit Icelanders they don’t give a damn what outsiders think, which is just as it should be.

One result of this social system is that all the schools close down for four months in the summer and a lot of them are used as hotels. The teachers thus have a lot of spare time and many of them have quite a different summer occupation. When I first met her three years earlier, Elin had been a courier for Ferdaskrifstofaa Nordri, a travel agency in Reykjavik, and had shown visitors around the country.

A couple of seasons before, I had persuaded her to become my personal courier on a full-time summer basis. I had been afraid that her brother, Bjarni, might have thought that a touch irregular and put in an objection, but he didn’t – presumably he thought his sister to be grown-up enough to handle her own affairs. She was an undemanding person and it was an easy relationship, but obviously it couldn’t go on like that for ever and I intended to do something about it, but I doubted if this was the appropriate time – it takes someone with a stronger stomach than mine to propose marriage on the same day one has dropped a body down a hole.

I went up to the apartment and, although I had a key, I didn’t use it; instead I knocked on the door. Elin opened it and looked at me with an expression of surprise changing to delight, and something in me jumped at the sight of her trim figure and corn-coloured hair. ‘Alan!’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?’