Where the Shadows Lie

by Michael Ridpath

Vigdís sighed. ‘My father was an American serviceman at the Keflavík airbase. I don’t know his name, I’ve never met him, according to my mother he doesn’t even know I exist. Does that satisfy you?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Magnus. ‘I know how difficult it can be to figure out your identity. I still don’t know whether I am an Icelander or an American, and I just get more confused the older I get.’

  ‘Hey, I don’t have a problem with my identity,’ said Vigdís. ‘I know exactly who I am. It’s just other people never believe it.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Magnus. A couple of raindrops fell on the windscreen. ‘Do you think it will rain all day?’

  Vigdís laughed. ‘There you are, you are an Icelander. When in doubt discuss the weather. No, Magnús, I do not think it will rain for more than five minutes.’ She drove down the other side of the hill towards the police headquarters on Hverfisgata. ‘Look, I’m sorry, I just find it easier to straighten out those kind of questions up front. Icelandic women are a bit like that, you know. We say what we think.’

  ‘It must be tough being the only black detective in the country.’

  ‘You’re damn right. I’m pretty sure that Baldur didn’t want me to join the department. And I don’t exactly blend in when I’m out on the streets, you know. But I did well in the exams and I pushed for it. It was Snorri who got me the job.’

  ‘The Commissioner?’

  ‘He told me my appointment was an important symbol for Reykjavík’s police force to be seen as modern and outward looking. I know that some of my colleagues think a black detective in this town is absurd, but I hope I have proved myself.’ She sighed. ‘The problem is I feel like I have to prove myself every day.’

  ‘Well, you seem like a good cop to me,’ Magnus said.

  Vigdís smiled. ‘Thanks.’

  They reached police headquarters, an ugly long concrete office block opposite the bus station. Vigdís drove her car into a compound around the back and parked. The rain began to fall hard, thundering down on the car roof. Vigdís peered out at the water leaping about the parking lot and hesitated.

  Magnus decided to take advantage of Vigdís’s direct honesty to find out a bit more about what he had got himself into. ‘Is Árni Holm related to Thorkell Holm in some way?’

  ‘Nephew. And yes, that is probably why he is in the department. He’s not exactly our top detective, but he’s harmless. I think Baldur might be trying to get rid of him.’

  ‘Which is why he dumped him on me?’

  Vigdís shrugged. ‘I couldn’t possibly comment.’

  ‘Baldur isn’t very happy with me being here, is he?’

  ‘No, he isn’t. We Icelanders don’t like being shown what to do by the Americans, or anyone else for that matter.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ Magnus said.

  ‘But it’s more than that. He’s threatened by you. We all are, I suppose. There was a murderer on the loose last year, he killed three women before he turned himself in.’

  ‘I know, the Commissioner told me.’

  ‘Well, Baldur was in charge of the investigation. We failed to find the killer and there was a lot of pressure on Snorri and Thorkell to do something. People wanted heads to roll. Moving Baldur on would have been the easiest thing to do, but Snorri didn’t do that. I’d say Baldur isn’t out of the woods yet. He needs to solve this case and he needs to do it himself.’

  Magnus sighed. He could understand Baldur’s position, but it wasn’t going to make his life in Reykjavík easy. ‘And what do you think?’

  Vigdís smiled. ‘I think I might learn something from you, and that’s always good. Come on. The rain is easing off, just like I said it would. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got work to do.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  INGILEIF WAS SHAKEN by the visit of the two detectives. An odd couple: the black woman had a flawless Icelandic accent, whereas the tall red-haired man spoke a bit hesitantly with an American lilt. Neither of them had believed her, though.

  As soon as she had read about Agnar’s death in the newspaper, she had expected the police. She thought she had perfected her story, but in the end she didn’t think she had done very well. She just wasn’t a good liar. Still, they had gone now. Perhaps they wouldn’t come back, although she couldn’t help thinking that somehow they would.

  The shop was empty so she returned to her desk, and pulled out some sheets of paper and a calculator. She stared at all the minus signs. If she delayed the electricity bill, she might just be able to pay Svala, the woman who made the glass pieces in the gallery. Something in her stomach flipped, and an all-too familiar feeling of nausea flowed through her.

  This couldn’t go on much longer.

  She loved the gallery. They all did, all seven women who owned it and whose pieces were sold there. At first they had been equal partners: her own skill was making handbags and shoes out of fish skin tanned to a beautiful luminescent sheen of different colours. But it emerged that she had a natural talent for promoting and organizing the others. She had increased sales, jacked up prices and insisted on concentrating on the highest quality articles.

  Her breakthrough had been the relationship she had developed with Nordidea. The company was based in Copenhagen, but had shops all over Germany selling to interior designers. Icelandic art fitted well into the minimalist spaces that were so highly fashionable there. Her designers made glassware, vases and candleholders of lava, jewellery, chairs, lamps, as well as abstract landscapes and her own fish-skin leather goods. Nordidea bought them all.

  The orders from Copenhagen had grown so fast that Ingileif had had to recruit more designers, insisting all the time on the best quality. The only problem was that Nordidea were slow payers. Then, as the credit crunch bit in Denmark and Germany, they became even slower. Then they just stopped paying at all.

  There were repayments on a big loan from the bank to be made. On the advice of their bank manager the partners had borrowed in low-interest euros. The rate may well have been low for a year or two, but as the króna devalued the size of the loan had ballooned to the point where the women had no chance of meeting their original repayment schedule.

  More importantly for Ingileif, the gallery still owed its designers millions of krónur and these were debts that she was absolutely determined to meet. The relationship with Nordidea had been entirely her doing; it was her mistake and she would pay for it. Her fellow partners had no inkling of how serious the problem was, and Ingileif didn’t want them to find out. She had already spent her legacy from her mother, but that wasn’t enough. These designers weren’t just her friends: Reykjavík was a small place and everyone in the design world knew Ingileif.

  If she let all these people down, they wouldn’t forget it, and neither would she.

  She picked up the phone to call Anders Bohr at the firm of accountants in Copenhagen that was trying to salvage something from Nordidea’s chaotic finances. She telephoned him once a day, using a mixture of charm and chastisement in the hope of badgering him into giving her something. He seemed to enjoy talking to her, but he hadn’t cracked yet. She could only try. She wished she could afford a plane ticket to have a go at him in person.

  A hundred kilometres to the east, a red Suzuki four-wheel-drive pulled up outside a cluster of buildings. There were three structures: a large barn, a large house and a slightly smaller church. A big man climbed out of the car – he was well over six feet tall, with dark hair greying at the temples, a strong jaw hidden by a beard, and dark eyes glittering under bushy eyebrows. He looked more like forty-five than his real age, which was sixty-one.

  He was the pastor of Hruni.

  He stretched and took a deep gulp of cool, clear air. White puffs of clouds skittered through a pale blue sky. The sun was low, it never rose very high at this latitude, but it emanated a clear light that picked out in shadow the lines of the hills and mountains surrounding Hruni.

  Far to the north the sunlight was magnified white on the smooth horizontal su
rface of the glacier which filled the gaps between mountains. Low hills, meadows that were still brown at this stage of spring, and rock surrounded the hamlet. The village of Flúdir, while just on the other side of the ridge to the west, could have been twenty kilometres away. Fifty kilometres away.

  The pastor turned to look at his beloved church. It was a small building with white-painted corrugated sides and a red-painted corrugated roof, standing in the lee of a rock-strewn ridge. The church was about eighty years old, but the gravestones around it were gnarled weather-beaten grey stone. Like everywhere in Iceland, the structures were new, but the places were old.

  The pastor had just come back from ministering to one of his flock, an eighty-year-old farmer’s wife who was terminally ill with cancer. For all his forbidding presence the pastor was good with his congregation. Some of his colleagues in the Church of Iceland might have a better understanding of God, but the pastor understood the devil, and in a land that lay under constant threat of earthquake, volcano or storm, where trolls and ghosts roamed the countryside, and where dark winters suffocated isolated communities in their cold grip, an understanding of the devil was important.

  Every one of the congregation of Hruni was aware of the awful fate of their predecessors who had danced with Satan and been swallowed up into the ground for their sins.

  Martin Luther had understood the devil. Jón Thorkelsson Vídalín, from whose seventeenth-century sermons the pastor borrowed heavily, understood him. Indeed, at the farmer’s wife’s request, the pastor had used a blessing from the old pre-1982 liturgy to ward off evil spirits from her house. It had worked. Colour had returned to the old lady’s cheeks and she had asked for some food, the first time she had done that for a week.

  The pastor had an air of authority in spiritual matters that gave people confidence. It also made them afraid.

  In years gone by, he used to perform an effective double act with his old friend Dr Ásgrímur, who had understood how important it was to give his patients the will to heal themselves. But the doctor had been dead nearly seventeen years. His replacement, a young woman who drove over from another village fifteen kilometres away, put all her faith in medicine and did her best to keep the pastor away from her patients.

  He missed Ásgrímur. The doctor had been the second-best chess player in the area, after the pastor himself, and the second most widely read. The pastor needed the stimulation of a fellow intellectual, especially during the long winter evenings. He didn’t miss his wife, who had walked out on him a few years after Ásgrímur’s death, unable to understand or sympathize with her husband’s increasing eccentricity.

  Thoughts of Ásgrímur reminded the pastor of the news he had read the previous day about the professor who had been found murdered in Lake Thingvellir. He frowned and turned towards his house.

  To work. The pastor was writing a major study of the medieval scholar Saemundur the Learned. He had already filled twenty-three exercise books with longhand writing: he had at least another twenty to go.

  He wondered whether his own reputation would ever match that of Saemundur’s, that a future pastor of Hruni would write about him. It seemed absurd. But perhaps one day he would be called upon to do something that the whole world would notice.

  One day.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Árni was having trouble locating Elvish speakers in Iceland, especially on a Saturday.

  The couple of professors at the university he called were dismissive of his request. Tolkien was not a subject of serious study, and the only person who had any interest in the British author had been Agnar himself, but his colleagues doubted that he spoke any Elvish. So Magnus suggested that Árni dive into the Internet and see what he came up with.

  Magnus himself decided to make use of the Internet to try to track down Isildur. Isildur was clearly the senior partner in the relationship with Steve Jubb and probably the one putting up the money. If Steve Jubb wouldn’t tell them anything about the deal he was discussing with Agnar, maybe Isildur would. If they could find him.

  The more Magnus thought about it, the less likely it seemed to him that Isildur would be a friend of Jubb’s from Yorkshire. That kind of nickname was more common in the online world than the physical one.

  But before he got to work, there was an e-mail waiting for him, forwarded by Agent Hendricks, who fortunately seemed to be working on a Saturday.

  It was from Colby.

  Magnus took a deep breath and opened it.

  Magnus

  The answer must be no. I can tell you don’t really mean it, so don’t pretend you do.

  Don’t bother sending me any more e-mails, I won’t reply to them.

  C.

  Magnus felt a rush of anger. She was right, of course, he didn’t really want to marry her, and there was no chance that he would be able to persuade her that he did. But he was worried about her safety. He typed rapidly.

  Hi Colby,

  I am very worried about you. I need to get you to safety. Now. If you don’t want to come with me then I will try to arrange something else. So please get in touch with me, or if not me, with the FBI, or with Deputy Superintendent Williams at Schroeder Plaza. If you do contact him, speak to him directly and only him.

  Please do this one thing for me,

  Love

  Magnus

  It probably wouldn’t work, but it was worth a try.

  Magnus spent the rest of the afternoon in the murky waters of the Internet, feeling his way around forums and chat rooms. There were an awful lot of Lord of the Rings fans out there. They seemed to split into the amateurs and the obsessives. The amateurs were mostly thirteen-year-old boys who couldn’t spell and had seen the movies and thought the Balrogs were really cool. Or they were thirteen-year-old girls who couldn’t spell and had seen the movies and thought that Orlando Bloom was really hot.

  These brief posts were outweighed by mighty articles from the obsessives, who wrote thousands of words on obscure aspects of Middle Earth, Tolkien’s invented world. There were disputes about whether those Balrogs had real wings or metaphysical ones, or about why there were no young ents, or about exactly who or what was Tom Bombadil.

  Magnus hadn’t read The Lord of the Rings since he was thirteen himself, and he had only a vague recollection of all these characters. But it wasn’t just the obscurity of the arguments that surprised him, it was the passion and occasionally vitriol that accompanied them. To a great many people all over the world, The Lord of the Rings was clearly very, very important.

  After two hours he found a posting from a man named Isildur. An obsessive. It consisted of several paragraphs commenting on a long academic article by someone called John Minshall on the nature of the power of the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings.

  There are a number of rings of power in Tolkien’s book, all made by elves, except for the greatest of them, the One Ring to rule them all, which was made by Sauron, the Dark Lord. Long before the events of the book took place a desperate battle was fought between the evil Sauron and an alliance of men and elves; a battle which was won by the alliance. The ring was cut off the Dark Lord’s hand by a man named Isildur. But afterwards, on his march home, the victorious Isildur and his men were waylaid by orcs. As Isildur tried to escape he jumped into a river, where the ring slipped off his finger and was lost. Soon afterwards the orcs caught him and he was shot through with arrows.

  The ring lay at the bottom of the river for centuries until it was discovered by a hobbit-like creature named Déagol who was fishing there with his friend Sméagol. Sméagol was overwhelmed with desire for the beautiful glittering ring, and when his friend refused to give it to him, he strangled him and put the ring on his own finger. Over time Sméagol was consumed by it, becoming a slithering, obsessive creature called Gollum, until eventually, centuries later, the ring was taken from him by Bilbo Baggins, the hero of Tolkien’s first book, The Hobbit.

  The ring has all kinds of powers. The keeper of the ring does not grow old, but
eventually he becomes weary and fades away. If the holder wears the ring, he becomes invisible to normal mortals. Over time, the ring exerts a power over its keeper, causing him to lie, cheat or even kill to maintain possession of it. Wearing it becomes an addiction. But most importantly, Sauron, the Dark Lord, is searching for the ring. When he finds it he will gain total domination of Middle Earth. The only way the Ring can be destroyed is if it is taken to Mount Doom, a volcano in the centre of Mordor, Sauron’s own country, and thrown into the ‘Crack of Doom’. This becomes the quest for Bilbo’s nephew, a hobbit named Frodo.

  Minshall argued that the powers of the ring showed that Tolkien had been inspired by Wagner’s Ring Cycle of operas, in which the gods compete to take control of the Ring and dominate the world.

  This idea seriously upset the present-day Isildur.

  He quoted Tolkien himself who denied that there was a connection, claiming that ‘both rings are round, and there the resemblance ceases’. Then Isildur launched on a long discourse quoting from the Saga of the Volsungs and the Prose Edda, both written in Iceland in the thirteenth century. He claimed that Tolkien had read the Volsung Saga when he was still a schoolboy and that it had inspired him for the rest of his life.

  Both these sources describe how three gods, Odin, Hoenir and the trickster god Loki, were travelling when they came upon a waterfall where a dwarf named Andvari was fishing in the shape of a pike. Loki caught him, and stole some gold from him. Andvari tried to keep back a magic ring, but Loki spotted it, and threatened to send the dwarf to Hel, who was Loki’s daughter, the goddess of death, unless he gave the ring to Loki. Andvari laid a curse on the ring and disappeared into a rock. During the rest of the saga the ring passes from person to person, creating mayhem wherever it goes. Isildur seemed to believe that both J.R.R. Tolkien and Richard Wagner had read the Saga of the Volsungs, which explained the similarity between the two stories.