Where the Shadows Lie

by Michael Ridpath

  The bar was filling up with a younger crowd, overwhelming some of the earlier drinkers who staggered out into the dusk. A band set up, and within a few minutes began to play. The music was too loud for a contemplative beer, so Magnus left.

  Outside, the streets, so quiet earlier, were full, teeming with the young and not-so-young dolled up for a night on the town.

  Time for bed, Magnus thought. As he opened the door of his new lodgings, he passed Katrín on her way out, dressed in black gothic finery, her face powdered white and improbably studded with metal.

  ‘Hi,’ she said with half a smile.

  ‘Have a good evening,’ said Magnus in English. Somehow that seemed the correct language in which to speak to Katrín.

  She paused. ‘You’re some kind of cop, aren’t you?’

  Magnus nodded. ‘Kind of.’

  ‘Árni’s such an arsehole,’ Katrín muttered, and disappeared into the semi-darkness.

  Diego took his time breaking into the ground-floor apartment in Medford. The apartment was the bottom half of a small clapboard house in a quiet road, and the good news was that the yard was obscured by trees. No one would see him, so he could focus on not making a noise.

  He climbed through the kitchen window and padded into the living room. The bedroom door was open and he could hear gentle snoring. He sniffed. Marijuana. He smiled. That should slow his target down nicely.

  He slid into the bedroom. Noted the lump on the bed, and the bedside light. He drew his gun, a Smith and Wesson .38 revolver. Then he switched on the light, pulled back the covers and cocked his weapon. ‘Sit up, Ollie,’ he barked.

  The man sat bolt upright, his eyes blinking, his mouth open in surprise. He matched the photograph Diego had studied earlier: about thirty years old, skinny, light brown curly hair, blue eyes that were now puffy and bloodshot.

  ‘Yell, and I blow your head off! You got me?’

  The man swallowed and nodded.

  ‘All right. Now, I got one simple question for you. Where’s your brother?’

  Ollie tried to speak. Nothing came out. He swallowed and tried again. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I know he stayed with you here last week. Where did he say he was going to when he took off?’

  Ollie took a deep breath. ‘I have no idea. He was here one day and gone the next. Just grabbed his stuff and left without saying goodbye. Typical of my brother. Hey, man,’ Ollie seemed to be waking up, ‘can we come to some arrangement here? Like, I give you some money and you leave me alone?’

  Diego grabbed Ollie’s head by his hair with his left hand and shoved the revolver into his mouth with his right. ‘The only arrangement we come to is you tell me where he is. You don’t know where he is that’s tough for you ’cause you die.’

  ‘Hey, man, I don’t know where he is, I swear!’ Ollie’s words were muffled as he tried to speak with metal in his mouth.

  ‘You ever played Russian roulette?’ said Diego.

  Ollie shook his head and swallowed.

  ‘It’s real easy. There are six chambers in this revolver. One of them holds a bullet. You and I don’t know which one. So when I pull the trigger, we don’t know whether you gonna die. But you let me pull the trigger six times, you dead for sure. Get it?’

  Ollie swallowed and nodded. He got it.

  Diego let go of Ollie’s hair, he didn’t want to shoot his own hand, after all, and then he pulled the trigger.

  A click. The chamber rotated.

  ‘Oh, God,’ said Ollie.

  ‘You might think it’s just you that’s taking the risk,’ went on Diego. ‘But in point of fact it’s me too. ’Cause if I blow your head off and you ain’t told me what I wanna know, then I lose, see? Makes the game kinda fun for the both of us.’ He smiled at Ollie. ‘So, once more, where’s your brother at?’

  ‘I don’t know, man, I swear I don’t know!’ Ollie shouted.

  ‘Hey, quiet!’ Diego narrowed his eyes. ‘You know, I still don’t believe you.’ He pulled the trigger again.

  Click.

  Ollie cracked. ‘Oh God, don’t shoot me, please don’t shoot me! I’d tell you if I could, I swear I would! Some guys from the FBI came to get his stuff. I asked where they were taking him, but they wouldn’t tell me.’

  Diego heard a low hissing sound and smelled warm urine. He glanced down at the rapidly spreading dark patch on Ollie’s boxers. In his experience, once they pissed themselves, they were usually telling the truth.

  But he pulled the trigger for the third time, just for the hell of it.

  Click.

  He’d discussed this situation with Soto. There were two schools of thought. One was you waste every relative and associate of the witness to send a clear message to him and anyone else who might be tempted to follow his lead. But when the witness was a cop, that wasn’t such a good idea. You’d be declaring a major war on a heavily armed and well-organized opposition. The most successful drugs businesses operated under the radar, making as little fuss as possible, keeping business conditions nice and calm.

  Ollie didn’t know where Magnus was. There was no point in stirring things up.

  ‘OK, man, I’m gonna quit this game now,’ Diego said. ‘Let’s call it a tie. But don’t you go to the cops telling them I’m looking for your bro’, you know what I’m saying? Otherwise we don’t play no games, I just blow you away with the first shot.’

  ‘All right, man. All right. That’s cool.’ Ollie sobbed as tears streamed down his face.

  Diego leaned over and turned out the light. ‘You go back to bed now. Sweet dreams.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  MAGNUS FOLLOWED THE stocky frame of Officer O’Malley towards the bright lights of the 7-Eleven. His fingers twitched an inch or so above his gun.

  O’Malley turned and smiled. ‘Hey. Loosen up, Swede. Keep your eyes open but don’t get too tense. If you’re tense, you make mistakes.’

  O’Malley had decided to call Magnus ‘Swede’ in honour of his Scandinavian ancestry, and an old Swedish partner he had worked with twenty years before. Magnus hadn’t set him straight: if his training officer wanted him to be Swedish, he would be Swedish. He’d been on the streets for only two weeks, but already he had a great respect for O’Malley.

  ‘Looks quiet,’ O’Malley said. They had been given no information by the dispatcher as to the nature of the disturbance at the convenience store.

  Magnus saw a thin figure move towards them from out of the shadows. O’Malley hadn’t seen him. The figure was making a direct line for O’Malley. Magnus tried to reach for his gun, but his arm wouldn’t move. The figure raised his own weapon, a three fifty-seven Magnum, and pointed it at O’Malley. In a panic Magnus managed to get his fingers around his own gun, but he couldn’t lift it. Try as he might, it was too heavy. Magnus opened his mouth to shout a warning to his partner, but no sound came.

  The man turned to Magnus and laughed, still pointing his gun at O’Malley. He was young, scrawny and looked as if he hadn’t washed for a week. His eyes were bloodshot and unfocused, he had bad teeth and his complexion, lit up by the light emanating from the convenience store, was like wax. It was if he were dead already, some kind of walking zombie.

  O’Malley still hadn’t seen him.

  Magnus tried to shout, tried to lift his gun. Nothing. Just an eerie cackle from the gunman.

  Then there was a shot. Two. Three. Four. They went on and on.

  Finally, O’Malley fell to the ground. Magnus’s gun arm responded. He raised his weapon and fired into the laughing face of the dopehead. He fired and fired again, and again and again …

  Magnus woke up.

  There was noise outside his window. Reykjavík 101 at play on a Saturday night: laughter, accelerating cars, shrieks, singing, vomiting, and underneath it all, the persistent bass rumble of powerful amplifiers.

  The chunky volume of The Lord of the Rings lay open on the floor where he had let it drop a couple of hours earlier. It smothered the slimmer edition of t
he Saga of the Volsungs.

  He checked his watch. 5.05 a.m.

  It was an old familiar dream: it had disturbed his nights for two years after that first shooting. Of course the reality had differed from the dream, the dopehead had only fired two shots into O’Malley before Magnus dropped him. But during those long nights Magnus had debated pointlessly with himself whether he could have fired sooner and saved O’Malley, or delayed longer and saved the dopehead.

  That was a long time ago. Magnus thought he had taken the second shooting much better than the first, now that he was an experienced cop. Maybe he had thought wrong. His subconscious demanded time to deal with it, and there was nothing he could do about it, however tough a cop he was.

  Bummer.

  *

  Reykjavík Metropolitan Police Headquarters was a busy place early on Sunday morning. Exhausted uniformed police led pale and shaky citizens along the corridors, taking them through the later stages of the weekly Saturday-night arrest cycle.

  As soon as Magnus arrived at his desk, he turned on his computer. He smiled as he saw the e-mail from Johnny Yeoh. The kid had come up with the goods.

  At the morning meeting, Baldur looked as if he hadn’t slept much either. Dark bags drooped under his eyes, and his cheeks were sunken and grey. Magnus surveyed his fellow detectives around the table; they had lost a lot of their earlier bounce.

  Baldur began with the latest reports from forensics. With Agnar, Steve Jubb and Andrea, three of the four sets of fingerprints in the house were accounted for. The footprints were confirmed as Steve Jubb’s. But there were no bloodstains on any of Jubb’s clothes, not even the tiniest spatter.

  Baldur asked Magnus if it would be difficult to smash someone over the head and then drag them out of the house and twenty metres down to the lake without getting any blood on your clothes. Magnus had to agree that it would be difficult, but he contended it was not impossible.

  ‘I spoke to Agnar’s wife yesterday,’ Baldur said. ‘She’s an angry woman. She had no idea of the existence of Andrea. She believed her husband had kept his promise to be a good boy.

  ‘Also she has been through Agnar’s papers and discovered that he was in a much deeper financial hole than she had realized. Debts, big debts.’

  ‘What has he been spending the money on?’ Rannveig, the assistant prosecutor asked.

  ‘Cocaine. She knew about the cocaine. And he gambled. She estimates he owed about thirty million krónur. The credit-card companies were beginning to complain, as was the bank that held the mortgage on their house. But now he’s dead, a life insurance policy will take care of that.’

  Magnus did a quick mental calculation. Thirty million krónur was a bit over two hundred thousand dollars. Even by the standards of Iceland’s debt-addicted citizens, Agnar owed a lot of money.

  ‘All in all, Linda had a motive to kill her husband,’ Baldur continued. ‘She says she was alone with her young children on the Thursday night. But she could easily have slung them in the back of the car and driven to Thingvellir. It’s not as if they could tell us, one’s a baby and the eldest isn’t even two yet. We need to keep her in the frame. Now, Vigdís. Did you speak to the woman from Flúdir?’

  Vigdís ran through the interview with Ingileif. She had checked out Ingileif’s alibi: she had indeed been at her artist friend’s party until eleven-thirty on the evening Agnar was murdered. And with her ‘old friend’ the painter afterwards.

  ‘She might have been telling the truth about that, but we think she was lying about other stuff,’ said Magnus.

  ‘What other stuff?’

  ‘She was very coy about Agnar,’ said Vigdís. ‘My hunch is there was more going on there than she let on.’

  ‘We’ll go back and talk to her in a couple of days,’ said Magnus. ‘See if her story sticks.’

  ‘Any progress on Isildur?’ Baldur asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Magnus. ‘I found someone calling himself Isildur on a Lord of the Rings forum on the Internet. I got hold of his e-mail details and asked a buddy of mine in the States to check him out.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s the same one?’

  ‘We can’t be absolutely sure, but it looks highly likely to me. This man is obsessed with magic rings and Icelandic sagas, just like Steve Jubb.’

  Baldur grunted.

  Magnus went on. ‘His name is Lawrence Feldman and he lives in California. He has two houses, one in Palo Alto and one in Trinity County, which is two hundred and fifty miles north of San Francisco. That’s where the e-mail message came from.’

  ‘Two houses?’ said Baldur. ‘Do we know if he is wealthy?’

  ‘He’s loaded.’ Although Johnny hadn’t been able to pull the police files on Feldman, if indeed there were any, he had found plenty of stuff on the Internet about him. ‘He was one of the founders of a software company in Silicon Valley, 4Portal. The company was sold last year, and each of the founders walked away with forty million bucks. Feldman was only thirty-one. Not bad going.’

  ‘So he could easily afford an expensive lawyer,’ said Baldur.

  ‘And a room at the Hótel Borg for Steve Jubb.’

  ‘OK. We need to get this guy’s police record, if he has one,’ said Baldur. ‘Can you do that?’

  ‘I could, but it’s probably easier if the request came from the Reykjavík police,’ said Magnus. ‘More official, fewer favours called in.’

  ‘We’ll organize that,’ said Baldur.

  ‘But I could go see him,’ Magnus said.

  ‘In California?’ Baldur looked doubtful.

  ‘Sure. It would take a day to get there, a day to get back, but I might get him to tell me what he and Jubb are up to.’

  Baldur frowned. ‘We don’t know for sure that this is the same Isildur that Steve Jubb is working for. And anyway, he won’t talk. Why should he? Steve Jubb isn’t saying anything, and we have him in custody.’

  ‘Depends how I ask him.’

  Baldur shook his head. ‘It will cost money. I’m not sure I can get authorization for a trip that will probably be a waste of time. Haven’t you heard of the kreppa?’

  It was impossible to spend more than a few hours in Iceland without hearing about the kreppa. ‘Just an economy fare and perhaps one night in a motel,’ Magnus said. He looked at the bodies around the table. ‘You’re putting a whole lot of resource into this investigation. An airplane ticket won’t make much difference.’

  Baldur glared at Magnus. ‘I’ll think about it,’ he said, giving Magnus the distinct impression that he wouldn’t.

  ‘OK,’ Baldur continued, addressing the group. ‘It looks like someone calling himself Isildur was behind the negotiations with Agnar. If this Lawrence Feldman was that man, he had the cash to back a significant deal.’

  ‘But what could they have been negotiating over?’ said Vigdís.

  ‘Something to do with The Lord of the Rings?’ Magnus said. ‘Or the Saga of the Volsungs, maybe. I read it again last night. A magic ring plays an important part in both books. There’s a theory that Tolkien was inspired by the Volsung Saga.’

  ‘All the old copies of the saga will be in the Árni Magnússon Collection at the University of Iceland,’ said Baldur. Árni Magnússon was a Danish-educated antiquarian who travelled around Iceland in the seventeenth century gathering up all the sagas he could find. He transported them to Denmark, but they were returned to Iceland in the 1970s, where they were housed in an institute bearing the great collector’s name. ‘Are you saying Agnar had stolen a copy?’

  ‘He might have switched it for a facsimile,’ suggested Vigdís.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Magnus. ‘Or perhaps he had some wacko theory that he was selling to Isildur. Maybe he was going to do some research for him.’

  Baldur frowned and shook his head.

  ‘It could be narcotics,’ Rannveig said. ‘I know it’s boring, but in Iceland, if it’s an illicit deal, it’s nearly always drugs.’

  There was silence for a moment around the t
able. The assistant prosecutor had a point.

  ‘Was there anything in Agnar’s papers suggesting what this deal could be?’ Rannveig asked.

  ‘No, I checked most of them myself,’ Baldur said. ‘Apart from those e-mails on his computer, there is nothing about a deal with Steve Jubb. And the files on his laptop are all work related.’

  ‘What was he working on?’ Magnus asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean what was he researching when he died?’

  ‘I’m not sure he was researching anything. He was marking exam papers. And translating a couple of sagas into English and French.’

  Magnus leaned forward. ‘Which sagas?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Baldur said, defensively. He clearly didn’t appreciate being interrogated in his own meeting. ‘I didn’t read through all his working papers. There are piles of them.’

  Magnus restrained himself from pushing the point. He didn’t want to put Baldur’s back up any more than he had to. ‘Can I take a second look? At his working papers, I mean.’

  Baldur stared at Magnus, making no attempt to hide his irritation. ‘Of course,’ he said drily. ‘That would be a good use of your time.’

  There were two places to look: Agnar’s room at the university, or the summer house. There would be more papers at the university, and it was closer. On the other hand, if Agnar had been working on something relevant to Steve Jubb it was likely to be at the summer house where it would be available for his meeting.

  So Árni drove Magnus out to Lake Thingvellir. ‘Do you think Baldur will let you go to California?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know. He didn’t seem excited by the idea.’

  ‘If you do go, can you take me with you?’ Árni glanced at Magnus sitting in the passenger seat and noticed his hesitation. ‘I did my degree in the States so I am familiar with US police procedures. Plus, California is my spiritual home.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know. The Gubernator.’

  Magnus shook his head. Árni would be demanding a personal interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger next. Besides, Magnus would rather approach Lawrence Feldman in his own way without his Icelandic puppy at his heels. ‘We’ll see.’