Black Ice Read Online Free Page A

sheep  foraging  gamely among  the green  knobbly  rocks and pinned a lone gull to the sky. A herd of ponies truffing for salt in the dust  of the road  parked  reluctantly to let me pass.
    Thingvellir was just as I remembered it. Which wasn't  all that  surprising when  you  think  it's  been  like that  since  the world  was premiered.
    It's a vast plain of lava stretching for miles from the foot of an eighty-foot escarpment of rock. It's  the prototype for the  House of Commons. The world's first politicians, around the year nine hundred, used to stand with their backs to the cliff to use it as a sound-box while  they  lied about  the  budget.  Even then they liked the sound  of their own voices.
    If a country can  have a soul,  Iceland's is there.  And it was there that Solrun and I had together whatever it was we had together. That's why she should be there.
    But I wasn't sure. As I drove I remembered what Batty had said about her dangerous friends. The more I thought about it, the more I realised  that  he wouldn't go to all this trouble  to get me out there unless there was something going on. What was she up to? And was she okay? Tension tightened me like a banjo as I parked and climbed  the steep slope up the back of the cliff-top. Either the slope had got steeper  or I'd  got older  in the past two years  because  I had  to stoop  to climb it, and  I found  my face only a couple of feet away from the lava, the bare bones of the earth. At the top, I stopped and straightened. The sky was the colour of old jeans. Ten miles away, a line of mountains was a snow-stained smudge on  the  horizon.  Below me, fingers of lava  ran out into  the wide bright  lake.
    I'm  not a scenery  man myself, but if you are given to having your  breath took, that's the place for it.
    I might've known where she'd  be sitting. Right on the edge of the cliff, her legs dangling over the long drop, facing out into the void between  earth  and sky.
    'In that river down there,' she said, pointing,  'they used to tie rocks to unfaithful women  and  throw  them in to drown.'
    'That explains it,'  I answered.
    'What?'
    'Why  your  hair's always  wet. How are you, little kiddo?'
    What  does the name Solrun  mean  to me, Mr Batty? Well, I'll tell you. It means a girl who can't  see a cliff without  wanting  to hang her legs over it. It means a girl who's wild and wonderful  and wayward.
    You  know  those  Scandinavian film stars  like Britt  Ekland?
    They left home because they were sick of being the plainest girls in  town,  and  went  to Hollywood  where  the competition was thinner. And in northern Europe, the Icelandic girls make all the  others   look  sort   of  dowdy.   Even   in   that   aristocratic company, Solrun  was something special.
    In a race where  hair  varies from daffodil  to snowdrop, hers was about  narcissus, cropped  short  and  half-curly  in a style that might have looked boyish on anyone else. On her it looked sexy. On her,  bald would  have looked sexy.
    She was slim, the handy,  tuck-under-your-arm size, and she was composed  entirely of lovely round  pieces which were joined up with  lovely slim  pieces. What  she  meant  to me personally was friendship and  sex.  It's  a  much-neglected combination. Without absurd hopes and false promises, like love for instance, you can keep a clear head to enjoy what's going on. It can lead to all sorts of unfashionable abstractions, like trust and respect, and they don't weather  too well when love's  around.
    It happened like this.  I was on an official  public-relations tour of the country for a magazine.  Solrun, who was modelling then but also did some front jobs for things like this, was shepherding us around.
    Now anyone  who works for a newspaper is by definition a person in whom  hope outruns intelligence and  this lot - thirty odd  of them  - were