Good singers, these Icelanders.
Another beer. Another chaser. The anger dissipated. He began to relax. He struck up conversations with the men on either side. With the American girls, although he put on a heavy Icelandic accent for their benefit. He thought that was pretty funny. In fact, he thought he was pretty funny. He played a game of chess and lost.
Another beer. Another chaser. Two chasers. How many chasers did that make? How many beers? No idea.
Eventually it was time to go home. Magnus lifted himself off his stool and bade an emotional goodbye to his new buddies. The room lurched wildly. The guy with the flat cap briefly became two guys with flat caps, before resolving himself into a single individual again.
Boy, was Magnus drunk. Drunker than he had been for a long time. But it felt good.
He strode out of the bar and straightened up in the cold night air. It was way past midnight. The sky was clear, stars twinkled icily above him. A three-quarter moon was reflected in the bay below. He took a deep breath.
He liked Reykjavík. It was an innocent little town, and he was glad of that. He would do his part to keep it that way.
He was proud to be one of Reykjavík’s finest.
There was no one on the streets. The contrast between a Sunday and a Saturday night in Reykjavík was marked. But as he headed up the hill towards home, Magnus spotted a cluster of three men in an alley. The tableau was so familiar.
Drugs.
Magnus scowled. Low-lifes in Toytown.
He would sort them out. ‘Hey!’ he shouted, and headed down the alley. ‘Hey! What are you doing?’
The guy selling the drugs was small and dark, possibly not even Icelandic. The guy doing the buying, was taller, wiry, with a woolly hat. He had a friend, a great big Nordic block with short blonde hair and a tiny little blonde beard. Bigger even than Magnus, and showing off bulging biceps under a black T-shirt on this cold night.
‘What has it got to do with you?’ said the drug pusher. He said it in English, because Magnus had hailed him in English.
‘Give that to me,’ said Magnus, holding out his hand and swaying. ‘I’m a cop.’
‘Piss off,’ said the pusher.
Magnus lunged at him. The guy ducked and struck him in the chest. But there was no power in it and Magnus laid him out with a single blow to the jaw. The Nordic hulk grabbed Magnus and tried to drag him down to the floor, but Magnus shook him off. For a few moments the adrenaline overcame the alcohol, and Magnus landed two good blows, before getting an arm lock on the big guy. ‘You’re under arrest!’ he shouted, still in English.
The pusher was on the ground, moaning. The thin guy with the woolly hat started running.
‘Get the hell off me,’ growled the hulk in Icelandic.
He swung round and crashed backwards into the wall, crushing Magnus. Magnus let go. The big guy turned and struck Magnus twice, once in the head and once in the stomach, but Magnus dodged the third blow and hit him with an uppercut.
The big guy reeled. Another crunching punch from Magnus and he went down.
Magnus stared at the pusher who was pulling himself to his feet. ‘You’re under arrest too.’
But then the alley started to sway and spin. The blow to his stomach did its stuff, and Magnus doubled up to retch. He tried to stand up straight, but he couldn’t. He swayed. Staggered.
The little guy was about to run, when he saw the state that Magnus was in. He laughed and head-butted him in the face.
Magnus dropped.
He lay on the cold tarmac for a while. Seconds? Minutes? He didn’t know.
He heard sirens. Good. Help.
Rough hands picked him up. He tried to focus on the face in front of him. It was a cop wearing the uniform of the Reykjavík Metropolitan Police.
‘They went that way,’ said Magnus, in English. Waving indeterminately.
‘Come with us,’ said the cop and pulled Magnus over to the waiting car, with its lights flashing.
‘I’m a police officer,’ said Magnus. ‘Look, let me show you my badge.’ All this still in English.
The patrolman waited while Magnus pulled out his Commonwealth of Massachusetts driver’s licence from his wallet.
‘Come on,’ said the cop.
Then Magnus threw up all over the patrolman’s shoes.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
DIEGO TURNED ON the light. The two naked bodies entwined on top of the bed froze, but only for an instant.
Then the man leaped off the woman, twisted and sat up, all in one athletic movement. The woman opened her mouth to scream, but stopped when she saw the gun.
Fortunately, there was no way that either of them could know that there was only one bullet in the cylinder of the revolver.
Diego chuckled.
It was pretty funny. He had positioned himself in an armchair in the living room, gun drawn, out of line of sight of the door. He’d waited there happily all evening. Then two people had come in.
Diego decided to wait. Surprise them when they turned around. But he’d never got the chance!
The guy jumped the girl right away. And she seemed happy with that. For a moment it looked as if Diego was going to get a show right there on the living room floor, but then the woman led the guy into the bedroom. And neither of them even saw him!
He decided to wait until they had taken off whatever clothes they were going to take off. Naked was good, as far as he was concerned. Then he slipped through the open door into the bedroom, and watched the action in the dim glow of the streetlights outside for a few seconds.
Now they were both blinking in the glare of the electric light.
‘You!’ Diego jabbed the revolver at the man. ‘In the bathroom! Now! And if I hear a sound I’ll come right in there and pump your skinny ass full of bullets.’
The guy needed no more prompting. He was out of the bed and in the bathroom with the door shut in an instant.
He moved over towards the woman. Colby.
Nice body. A bit thin, but nice firm tits.
She saw where he was looking. ‘Do what you want,’ she said. ‘Just do it.’
‘Hey, all I want is a little talk,’ said Diego. ‘I ain’t gonna touch you, as long as you talk to me.’
Colby swallowed, her eyes wide.
In a swift movement, Diego grabbed her hair with one hand and jammed the revolver in her mouth with the other. ‘Where’s Magnus?’
‘Who?’ The woman was barely audible.
‘Magnus Jonson. Your boyfriend.’ He smiled and glanced at the bathroom. ‘Or one of your boyfriends. Looks like you’re the kind of girl that needs several men to keep you happy.’
‘I … I don’t know.’
Diego pulled the trigger. Click.
A strangled sob from Colby.
Diego explained the rules of his version of the Russian roulette game. He just loved that bit, loved watching the eyes of his victims. The fear. The uncertainty. Perfect.
‘OK. I’ll ask you again. Where is Magnus?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Colby. ‘I swear it. He said he was going away somewhere and he couldn’t tell me where.’
‘Did you guess?’
Colby shook her head.
Diego spotted weakness. ‘You guessed, didn’t you?’
‘N-no. No, I swear I didn’t.’
‘Thing is, I ain’t believing you.’
He pulled the trigger again.
Click.
‘Oh, God.’ Colby slumped backwards, trying to sob with the barrel of a gun crammed into her mouth.
Diego loved this game. ‘You guessed. OK. So now I’m gonna guess,’ said Diego. ‘Is he in state?’
Colby hesitated and then shook her head.
‘All right. In the country then?’
‘No.’
‘We talking Mexico?’
A shake of the head.
‘Canada?’
Another shake.
Diego was rather enjoying this. ‘Is it hot or cold?’<
br />
No answer.
He squeezed the trigger.
Click.
‘Cold. It’s somewhere cold.’
‘Good girl. But I give up now. My geography ain’t that good. Where’s he at?’
Another click. The game wasn’t strictly fair. Although Colby didn’t know which chamber the bullet was in, Diego knew it was in the last. That’s how he liked to play the game. It really would be too bad to blow her brains out before he had gotten the answer he wanted.
‘OK. OK. He’s in Sweden. I don’t know where in Sweden. Stockholm, I guess. It’s Sweden.’
‘You’re just a thick-headed Icelandic drunk, aren’t you?’
With difficulty Magnus focused on the red face of the National Police Commissioner in front of him. His mouth was dry, his head was pounding, his stomach growling.
‘I’m sorry, sir.’ He would call his superior officer ‘sir’. Screw Icelandic etiquette.
‘Do you do this often? Is this a once-a-week thing for you? Or perhaps you hit the bottle every day? I didn’t read anything about this on your file. You broke a few rules from time to time, but you never showed up for duty intoxicated.’
‘No, sir. It’s been years since I got that drunk.’
‘Then why did you do it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Magnus said. ‘I got some bad news. Personal news. It won’t happen again.’
‘It had better not,’ said the Commissioner. ‘I have an important role in mind for you, but that role demands that my officers should respect you. Within three days you have made yourself a laughing stock.’
The night was a blur, but Magnus could remember the laughter. The desk sergeant had heard about the new hot-shot detective over from America and had thought it highly amusing that this man was now in his drunk tank. As had the patrolmen who had arrested him. And the other uniformed officers coming off duty. And the next shift coming on.
They had had the kindness to drive him back to his house. He had passed out in the car, but vaguely remembered Katrín getting his clothes off and putting him to bed.
He had woken up a few hours later with his head exploding, his bladder full and his mouth dry. He crawled back into the police station at about ten o’clock. The rest of the detectives grinned and whispered as he sat at his desk. Within a minute Baldur had told him with a thin smile that the Big Salmon wanted to see him.
‘I am very sorry I have let you down, Commissioner,’ Magnus repeated. ‘I do appreciate what you have done for me here, and I am sure I can help.’
The Commissioner grunted. ‘Thorkell seems to think you have made a good start. How is the Agnar Haraldsson case going? I heard about the discovery of the saga. Is it genuine?’
‘Possibly, but we don’t know yet for sure. It looks like the Brit Steve Jubb was trying to buy it from Agnar. There was a problem, they had a dispute, and Jubb killed him.’
‘Jubb still isn’t talking?’
‘Not yet. But there’s this guy Lawrence Feldman who goes by the Internet alias of Isildur, who seems to have financed the deal. We know where he lives. If I put some pressure on him, I’m sure he’ll talk.’
‘So why don’t you?’
‘He’s in California. Baldur won’t authorize it.’
The Commissioner nodded. ‘Can you work today, or do you need to take the day off sick?’
Magnus suspected that this wasn’t a kind offer from a concerned superior. It was a direct question of his commitment.
‘I can work today.’
‘Good. And don’t let me down again. Or else I will send you straight back to Boston and I don’t care who is after you.’
Ingileif watched as Professor Moritz carefully carried the envelope containing the old scraps of vellum to his car outside while a female colleague took the bigger seventeenth-century volume. A couple of uniformed police officers and the young detective called Árni danced around in attendance.
She had expected to feel relief. She felt nothing of the kind. She was drowning, drowning beneath a wave of guilt.
The secret that her family had kept for so many generations, hundreds and hundreds of years, was disappearing out of the door. It had been an astounding achievement to keep it so quiet for so long. She could imagine her ancestors, fathers and eldest sons, huddled over a peat fire in their simple turf-roofed farmhouse, reading the saga over and over to each other during the long winter nights. It must have been difficult keeping its existence from extended family, neighbours, in-laws. But they had succeeded. And they hadn’t sold out. A farmer’s life in Iceland during the last three centuries was extremely precarious. Even when they had endured unimaginable poverty and starvation, they hadn’t taken the easy way. They had needed the money more than her.
What right did she have to cash it in now?
Her brother, Pétur, had spoken the truth when he had urged her not to sell. And he hated the saga even more than she did.
She looked around the gallery. The objects on display – the vases, the fish-skin bags, the candle-holders, the lavascapes – were truly beautiful. But did they matter so much?
The police said that the saga would be needed for evidence. They would keep its existence quiet while the investigation was still under way. But eventually everyone would know. Not just Icelanders, but the whole world. Tolkien fans from America, England, the rest of Europe would want to find out everything about the document. Every corner of the secret would be raised to the glare of global publicity.
Eventually, she would probably be allowed to sell the saga. In the open, under the glare of publicity, she would no doubt get a handsome price, if the Icelandic government didn’t somehow manage to confiscate it from her. If she could just keep the gallery going for a few months longer, it might survive.
Until Agnar’s death, keeping the gallery open was the most important thing in her life. Now she appreciated how wrong she was.
The gallery was going bust because she had made a poor business judgment. The kreppa made matters worse, but she should never have trusted Nordidea. She was to blame and she should have taken the consequences.
Outside, the professor and the police climbed into their cars and drove off. Ingileif felt trapped in the tiny gallery. She grabbed her bag, switched off the light and locked up. So what if she lost a sale or two that morning?
She walked down the hill, her mind in incoherent turmoil. She soon reached the bay, and walked along the bike path which ran along the shore. She headed east, towards the solid block of Mount Esja, its top smothered in cloud. The breeze skipping in from across the water chilled her face. The sounds of Reykjavík traffic merged with the cries of seagulls. A pair of ducks paddled in circles a few yards out from the red volcanic pumice that served as a sea wall.
She felt so alone. Her mother had died a few months before, her father when she was twelve. Birna, her sister, wouldn’t care or understand. She would be sympathetic for a few minutes, but she was too self-absorbed, stuck in her nice house and her bad marriage and her bottles of vodka. She had never been interested in Gaukur’s Saga, and after their father died she had picked up their mother’s hostility to the family legend. She had told Ingileif she couldn’t care less what Ingileif did with it.
Ingileif knew she should speak to Pétur, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. He had hated the saga with a passion for what he thought it had done to their father. Yet, even he had believed that it would be wrong to sell. She had assured him that Agnar would be able to do a deal while keeping the secret safe, and only then had Pétur reluctantly agreed. He would be angry with her now, and justifiably so. Not much sympathy there.
He must have read about Agnar’s murder in the papers, but he hadn’t been in touch with her yet. Thank God.
It was ironic. She had been determined not to let her father’s death screw her up like it had screwed up the other members of her family. She was the sane, down-to-earth one, or so she thought.
And now poor Aggi had been murdered. Foolishly she had trie
d to hide the existence of the saga from the police. As a plan, that was never going to work. And even now she was hiding something.
She glanced down at her bag. Where she had slipped the envelope just before the police came to take away the saga. The other envelope.
She recalled the big red-haired detective with the slight American accent. He was trying to catch the man who had murdered Agnar, and she had some information that would be certain to help him. It was far too late to try to keep it quiet, the police would find out in the end. The betrayal had been committed, the mistake had been made, the consequences were playing themselves out. There was nothing she could do to put the saga back in its safe.
She stopped in front of the Höfdi House, the elegant white-timbered mansion where Gorbachev had met Reagan when she was six years old.
She dug the detective’s number out of her purse, and punched it into her mobile phone.
Colby was waiting on the sidewalk outside the bank when it opened. Walked straight in to the cashier, first in line, and withdrew twelve thousand dollars in cash. Then she drove to an outdoor equipment store and bought camping gear.
When the thug with the gun had left her apartment she had been too scared to scream. Richard hadn’t been any help: he had scurried out of the bathroom muttering how his legal career was too important to be caught up with criminals, and she should rethink her friendships. She had watched dully as he had scrambled to get into his clothes and left her. He forgot his jacket.
Tough.
She was glad she hadn’t told the thug about Iceland. It had been a close call, she had been so scared that she had almost given it away, but the change to Sweden at the last minute was inspired. Magnus had told her that he used to have the nickname ‘Swede’, and that had stuck in her brain.
The thug had believed her. She was sure of it.
She hoped it would take him and his friends some time to realize their mistake, but she wasn’t going to hang around. She certainly wasn’t going anywhere near Magnus. Now she took Magnus’s warnings seriously. She wasn’t taking any risks with credit cards, or hotels or friends. No one would know where she was.
Where the Shadows Lie Page 14