Magnus thought he detected a quiver in her voice. Odd. Most ghosts had had a tough time in life, but still. ‘Is that what you wanted to speak to me about?’ he asked. ‘You want me to check it out? All the lights seem to be off at the moment.’
‘Oh, no,’ she replied, smiling weakly. ‘I just wanted to find out how the investigation was going.’
‘We’re making progress,’ Magnus said. ‘We need to track down Steve Jubb’s accomplice. And we haven’t verified the authenticity of the saga yet.’
‘Oh, it’s authentic.’
‘Is it?’ said Magnus. ‘Or is it an elaborate hoax dreamed up by Agnar? Is that why he was killed? Steve Jubb found out he was being taken for a ride?’
Ingileif laughed. The tension seemed to flow from her body. Magnus waited for her to finish.
‘Well?’ he said.
‘I’d love you to be right,’ Ingileif said. ‘And I can see why you might think that. But, of course, I know it’s genuine. It has over-shadowed my whole life, and that of every member of my family for generations.’
‘So you say.’
‘Don’t you believe me?’
‘Not really,’ Magnus said. ‘You don’t have a great track record for telling me the truth.’
The smile disappeared. Ingileif sighed. ‘I don’t, do I? And I can see how from your point of view you have to consider the possibility that it’s a forgery. But your lab guys will do tests on it, carbon-14 or whatever, and they’ll tell you how old the vellum is. And the seventeenth-century copy.’
‘Maybe,’ said Magnus.
Ingileif’s grey eyes looked straight at his. For a moment Magnus found it unsettling, but he held her gaze. ‘I want to show you something,’ she said.
She rummaged in her bag and pulled out a yellowing envelope.
She handed it to Magnus. A British stamp, same king as last time, and the same handwriting.
‘This is the reason I asked you to meet me. I should have shown it to you yesterday, but I didn’t.’
Magnus opened the envelope. Inside was a sheet of notepaper.
Merton College
Oxford
12 October 1948
Dear Isildarson
Thank you for your extraordinary letter. What an astonishing tale! The part I found the most amazing was the inscription ‘The Ring of Andvari’ in runes. One never knows with the Icelandic sagas. They are so realistic, yet the scholarly fashion is to dismiss them as fiction. Yet here is the very ring, at least a thousand years old, that appears in Gaukur’s Saga! After the discovery of his farm buried under all that ash, the saga has much more credence than I originally gave it.
I would have loved the opportunity to see the ring, to hold it, to touch it. But I think you were absolutely right to return it to its hiding place. Either that or take it to the mouth of Mount Hekla yourself and toss it in! It would be altogether wrong to hold up the evil magic of the ring to scientific archaeological testing. And please do not worry, I will not mention your discovery to anyone.
I have at last brought the Lord of the Rings to its conclusion after 10 years of toil. It is a vast sprawling book, which will probably run to at least 1200 pages, and one of which I am very proud. It will be difficult to produce in these hard times when paper is so scarce, but my publishers remain enthusiastic. When it is eventually published, as I hope it will be, I will be sure to send you a copy.
With best wishes,
Yours sincerely,
J.R.R. Tolkien
‘This says your grandfather found the ring,’ Magnus said.
Ingileif nodded. ‘It does.’
Magnus shook his head. ‘It’s incredible.’
Ingileif sighed. ‘No it’s not. It explains everything.’
‘Explains what, exactly?’
‘My father’s obsession. How he died.’
‘What do you mean?’
Ingileif stared out to sea. Magnus watched her face closely as she wrestled with her emotions. Then she turned to Magnus, moisture in the corners of his eyes. ‘I think I told you my father died when I was about twelve?’
‘Yes.’
‘He was looking for the ring. It always seemed absurd to me that an educated man should be so convinced that it still existed. But of course he knew. His own father must have told him.’
‘But not told him exactly where it was hidden?’
‘Precisely. My father started searching right after my grandfather died. My guess is that Grandpa had forbidden him to look for it. Dad used to spend days scouring the area around the Thjorsa Valley in all weathers. And then one day he never came back.’
Ingileif bit her lip.
‘When did you find this letter?’ Magnus asked.
‘Very recently. After I had approached Agnar. He had already seen the first letter from Tolkien, the one written in 1938, which I showed you yesterday. But he asked me if I could find any more evidence, so I went back to Fludir and looked through my father’s papers. There was a bundle of letters from Tolkien to Grandpa, and this was one of them.’
‘Did you tell Agnar?’
‘Yes.’
‘I bet he was excited.’
‘He drove straight over to Fludir to see me. And the letter.’
Magnus took out his notebook. ‘What day was that?’
‘It was Sunday last week.’ She did a quick mental calculation. ‘The nineteenth.’
‘Four days before he was killed,’ said Magnus. He remembered Agnar’s e-mail to Steve Jubb saying that he had found something else. And Jubb’s text message to Isildur suggesting more or less the same thing. Something valuable. Could it have been the ring?
‘Do you have any idea where the ring is?’
Ingileif shook her head. ‘No. There is that part in the saga about the ring being hidden beneath the head of a hound. There are all kinds of strangely shaped outcrops of lava that could be hounds when looked at from certain directions. That was what my father was looking for. Presumably my grandfather found the cave and my father didn’t.’
‘What about Agnar? Did he have any idea where it might be?’
Ingileif shook her head. ‘No. He asked me, of course. He was very aggressive about it. I more or less threw him out.’
‘So, as far as you know, the ring is still hidden in a small cave somewhere?’
‘I think so,’ said Ingileif. ‘You still don’t believe me, do you?’
Magnus examined the upright precise handwriting. It looked real. But of course if it had been written by a careful forger it would look real. He glanced up at Ingileif. She seemed to be telling the truth, unlike her previous two conversations with him when she had been lying badly. Of course she could have feigned her earlier awkwardness to lull him into thinking she was telling the truth this time, but she would have to be a consummate actress to pull that off. And very cunning.
Could he believe that the ring in Gaukur’s Saga had really survived?
It was tempting. There was great scholarly debate about how historically accurate Iceland’s sagas really were. Most of the people and many of the events mentioned in them had really existed, but then there were also passages that were obviously pure invention. Whenever Magnus read them, the matter-of-fact style and the realistic characters lulled him into suspending disbelief until he felt medieval Iceland was almost close enough to touch.
The homicide detective in him resisted the temptation. First of all, Magnus couldn’t even be sure that the saga itself was authentic. And even if it was, then the ring could be fictional. And even if a gold ring had existed, it would probably be either buried under tons of ash, or long since have been found and sold by a poor shepherd. The whole thing was unlikely. Highly unlikely. But speculation was pointless. It didn’t really matter what Magnus thought: what mattered was what Agnar believed, and Steve Jubb and Isildur.
For if a true Lord of the Rings fanatic thought he had a chance of getting his hands on the ring, the One Ring, then he might be tempted to kill for it.
&nb
sp; ‘I don’t know what I think,’ said Magnus. ‘But thank you for telling me. Eventually.’
Ingileif shrugged.
‘Of course, it would have been better if you had come out with all this up front.’
Ingileif sighed. ‘It would have been better if I had never let the damn saga out of my safe in the first place.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The canteen was almost full. Officer Pattie Lenahan looked around for someone she knew, and saw Shannon Kraychyk from Traffic, sitting alone at the table in the back of the room next to a bunch of civilian geeks from the computer department. She carried her tray over.
‘How you doin’, Shannon?’
‘I’m doin’ good. Other than my dumb-ass sergeant giving me a hard time because we’re behind on our quota for this month. Like there’s anything I can do about it! What am I supposed to do if Boston’s citizens suddenly decide they’re all gonna respect the speed limit?’
Pattie and Shannon traded grumbles happily for a while until Shannon excused herself and left Pattie alone with the rest of her chef’s salad.
The geeks were talking about a case the previous year. Pattie remembered it. The kidnapping of a woman in Brookline by her next door neighbour; it had dominated the newspapers and the station gossip for a couple of weeks.
‘I haven’t seen Jonson around here recently,’ one of them said.
‘Haven’t you heard? He’s been disappeared. He’s a witness on the Lenahan case.’
‘You mean Witness Protection Programme?’
‘I guess.’
‘I heard from him the other day.’ Pattie glanced quickly at the speaker. A Chinese guy, small, talked real fast. ‘Sent me an e-mail out of the blue. He wanted me to check out an e-mail header for him, same as in the Brookline case.’
‘Did you nail it?’
‘Yeah. It was nowhere near as difficult. Some guy in California. He made no real attempt to hide the IP.’
The conversation moved on and Pattie finished her salad. She got herself a cup of coffee and took it back to the squad room.
Uncle Sean’s arrest had caused a big stir in her family. It was hardly surprising, everyone in her family were cops, had been for three generations, and none of them was a bad one, especially not Uncle Sean. That was the problem with the department, it was all bound up in rules and regulations, in cops snooping on cops. Cops like Magnus Jonson.
Pattie wasn’t entirely sure she agreed with the family consensus. It seemed to her that Uncle Sean was accused of something pretty serious. And she had never really trusted him: he was just a little too glib, too flaky. She didn’t know Magnus Jonson; but what she did know was that you didn’t rat out a fellow cop. Ever.
Should she tell her father what she had heard? He, at least, was a straight guy. He’d know what to do, whether to tell anyone else.
And besides, if she didn’t tell him and he ever found out, he would have her hide.
Better tell him.
The noise was appalling. Magnus and Arni were sitting at the back of a long low room, deep underground, listening to a group of teenage no-hopers called Shrink Wrapped. They were playing a bizarre mixture of reggae and rap, with their own Icelandic twist. Original, perhaps, but painful. Especially in combination with Magnus’s malingering hangover. He had thought that food and fresh air had taken care of his headache, but now it was back with a vengeance.
Magnus had dutifully returned to the station to fill Baldur in on his interview with Ingileif. Baldur shared Magnus’s scepticism that the ring in the saga did really exist, but he understood his point that the promise that it might would fire up Steve Jubb and the modern-day Isildur, as well as Agnar.
Baldur had sent one of his detectives to Yorkshire to search Steve Jubb’s house and computer, although they were having trouble getting a search warrant from the British authorities. A hot-shot criminal lawyer from London had popped up from nowhere to raise all kinds of objections.
Another sign that there was big money somewhere in the background of this case.
‘This your kind of music, Arni?’ Magnus asked.
Arni looked at him with contempt. Magnus was relieved. At least the boy had some taste. He knew very little about Icelandic bands himself, but had recently formed a fondness for the ethereal Sigur Ros. A far cry from this bunch.
The band stopped. Silence, wonderful silence.
Petur Asgrimsson stood up from his chair in the middle of the floor and took a few paces towards the band. ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ he said.
There were cries of protest from the five blond teenage rap’n’reggae stars. ‘Come back next year, when you have refined things a little,’ he said. ‘And lose the drummer.’
He turned towards his visitors and pulled up one of the chairs lining the back of the room. He was a tall, imposing figure with a spare frame but square shoulders, and Ingileif’s high cheekbones. His cranium, shaved smooth, bulged above his long thin face. His grey eyes were hard and intelligent, swiftly assessing the two policemen.
‘You’ve come to speak to me about Agnar Haraldsson, I take it?’
‘Are you surprised?’ Magnus asked.
‘I thought you would have been here earlier.’
There was a hint of rebuke in the comment, an accusation that they were a little slow.
‘We would have been if your sister had only told us the full story up front. Or if you had contacted us yourself.’
Petur raised his fair eyebrows. ‘What would I have to say?’
‘You knew that Ingileif was trying to sell Gaukur’s Saga through Agnar?’
Petur nodded. ‘Much against my will.’
‘Did you ever meet him?’
‘No. Or at least not recently. I think I might have bumped into him a couple of times when Ingileif was a student. But not since then. I was quite clear that I would play no part in the negotiations over the saga.’
‘But you would take your share of the sale proceeds?’ Arni asked.
‘Yes,’ said Petur simply. He looked around his nightclub. ‘Times are tough. The banks are getting difficult. Like everyone else, I borrowed too much.’
‘Is this your only club?’ They were in the depths of Neon, on Austurstraeti, a short shopping street in the centre of town.
‘No,’ Petur replied. ‘This is my third. I started with Theme on Laugavegur.’
‘Sorry, I don’t know it,’ said Magnus. ‘I’ve been away from Iceland a long time.’
‘I thought from your accent you were American,’ Petur said. ‘It was the most popular place in Reykjavik a few years ago. I spent a few years in London on the edges of the music scene there, learning the trade you could say, but when Reykjavik was setting itself up as the Ibiza of the north I thought I had better come home. Theme was just a small cafe, but I squeezed in a dance floor and got lucky. It became the place to go, and because it was so small, everyone had to queue outside. There’s no one happier than a seventeen-year-old Icelandic girl wearing a crop top, shivering outside a club at three o’clock in the morning in the snow.’
‘What happened to it?’ Magnus asked.
‘It’s still going, but it’s much less popular than it used to be. I saw that coming, so I opened Soho, and now Neon.’ Petur smiled. ‘This town is fickle. You have to stay one step ahead or you get trampled.’
Petur exuded confidence. He wasn’t going to get trampled.
‘Have you read Gaukur’s Saga?’ Magnus asked.
‘Read it? I think I know it off by heart. I certainly used to.’
‘Your sister said you have no interest in it.’
Petur smiled. ‘That’s certainly true now. But not when I was a boy. My father and grandfather were obsessed, and they passed that obsession on to me. Have you read it?’
Magnus and Arni nodded.
‘I adored my grandfather, and I loved the stories he told me about Isildur and Gaukur and Asgrimur from when I was little. I was groomed to be the keeper of the saga, you see, the keeper of th
e secret. And it wasn’t just Gaukur’s Saga that interested me, it was all the others.’
‘Did you know that your grandfather found the ring?’ Magnus asked.
Petur frowned. ‘My sister told you about that? I didn’t know she even knew about it.’
Magnus nodded. ‘She turned up a letter from Tolkien to your grandfather Hogni, which mentioned that Hogni had found the ring.’
‘And replaced it,’ said Petur. ‘He put it back, you know.’
‘Yes, the letter said that too.’ Magnus studied Petur. There was no doubt that the mention of the ring had disconcerted him. ‘So why aren’t you still obsessed with the saga?’
Petur took a deep breath. ‘My father and I argued about it, or about the ring, just before he died. You see my grandfather didn’t trust my father after he had revealed Gaukur’s Saga to the whole family. He wasn’t supposed to do that, it was supposed to be just me, the eldest son.’
A hint of bitterness touched Petur’s voice. ‘So Grandfather decided to tell me of the existence of the ring a few months before he died. He impressed upon me the importance of leaving the ring undisturbed. He scared the living daylights out of me. He persuaded me that if I, or my father, were to find the ring and take it from its hiding place then a terrible evil would be unleashed throughout the whole world.’
‘What kind of evil?’ Magnus asked.
‘I don’t know. He wasn’t specific. In my imagination it was some kind of nuclear war. I had just read On the Beach by Nevil Shute – you know, the story about survivors of a nuclear war in Australia – and it scared me witless. But the day after my grandfather died, my father set out on an expedition to Thjorsardalur to find the ring. I was furious. I told him he shouldn’t go, but he wouldn’t listen.’
‘You didn’t go with him?’
‘No. I was away at high school in Reykjavik. But I wouldn’t have gone in any case. My father was close friends with the local pastor. As soon as my grandfather died, my father told him all about Gaukur’s Saga, and the ring. It was something else I was upset about: letting the secret out to someone outside the family. The pastor was an expert on folk legends and the two of them discussed where the ring might be. So they went off on expeditions together.
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