God, what a family, Magnus thought. His own was bad enough. He remembered Ingileif’s quavering voice when she had told him about the ghost of the girl accused of incest at the Höfdi House. No wonder she felt sorry for her. She was thinking of Birna.
‘One last question. Where were you last Thursday night? The first day of summer?’
Birna laughed again. ‘You can’t be serious? You don’t think I killed the poor man, do you.’
‘Just answer the question.’
Birna hesitated. ‘Do I have to?’
Magnus knew what was coming next. He was beginning to get used to the sex life of Icelanders. ‘Yes, you do. And we will have to check out whatever you tell us. But we will do it discreetly, I can promise you. And it won’t come up in any eventual trial, unless it is relevant to the prosecution.’
Birna sighed. ‘Matthías was in New York. Probably in bed with a flight attendant.’
‘And you?’
‘I was with a friend named Dagur Tómasson. He’s married as well. We spent the night in a hotel in Kópavogur. It’s anonymous and as discreet as you can get in Iceland.’
‘Which one?’
‘The Merlin.’
‘And can we have his address?’
‘I’ll give you his mobile phone number,’ said Birna. ‘It’s nothing serious,’ she continued, staring straight at Magnus. The corners of her mouth twitched upwards. ‘I don’t like to restrict myself to any one man.’
‘I think she likes you,’ said Árni five minutes later as he was driving Magnus back to station.
‘Shut up,’ growled Magnus. ‘And check out the hotel. But somehow I suspect that alibi will hold up.’
CHAPTER TWENTY
BALDUR LISTENED CLOSELY as Magnus explained his theory that Agnar was trying to sell the ring from Gaukur’s Saga to Steve Jubb and the modern-day Isildur.
‘So what are you suggesting?’ he said, when Magnus had finished. ‘We go over Agnar’s house again, looking for a mythical ring that has been lost for a thousand years? Do you know how absurd that sounds?’ The expression on Baldur’s long face verged on contempt. ‘You were brought here to bring us some big-city homicide experience. Instead you start mumbling about elves and rings like the most superstitious Icelandic grandmother. You’ll be saying the hidden people did it next.’
Magnus’s foul mood deepened. He knew that Baldur was trying to needle him, and he fought to control his anger.
‘Of course I don’t believe that the ring is really a thousand years old,’ Magnus said. ‘Look. We know Steve Jubb murdered Agnar. But since he won’t tell us why, we need to figure it out for ourselves. We also know that Agnar was trying to sell a saga – we’ve both seen it. It exists.’
Baldur shook his head. ‘All we’ve seen is a hundred and twenty pages that was spat out of a computer printer two weeks ago.’
Magnus leaned back. ‘Fair enough. Maybe the saga is a forgery. Maybe there is a ring, but it’s a fake too. If anything, that would create a bigger motive for Steve Jubb to kill Agnar. We still need to find it.’
‘The thing is, I’m not sure that Steve Jubb did murder Agnar.’
Magnus snorted.
‘I’ve just interviewed him again. He wouldn’t tell me anything about sagas or rings. But he did deny he murdered Agnar.’
‘And you believe him?’
‘Yes, actually. My hunch is he’s telling the truth.’
‘Your hunch?’
Baldur found a sheet of paper in the pile on his desk. ‘Here’s a report from the forensics lab.’
Magnus scanned it. It was an analysis of the soil samples on Steve Jubb’s size forty-five shoes.
‘It shows that there were no traces of the kind of mud on the path from the summer house down to the lake shore, or the mud on the shore itself.’
Magnus read the report, his mind buzzing. ‘Maybe Jubb cleaned his shoes. Thoroughly.’
‘There was soil from the area right in front of the summer house. So he was at the front that evening, but not at the back. And he didn’t clean his shoes.’
‘Perhaps he changed into boots? Ditched them afterwards?’
‘We’d have found footprints in or around the house,’ Baldur said. ‘And that’s pretty unlikely, isn’t it?’
Magnus stared at the piece of paper, not reading the words, just trying to figure out how Jubb could have dragged the body down to the lake without getting mud on his shoes. He found it impossible to believe that Jubb’s presence at the summer house that evening was just coincidence.
‘Someone else moved Agnar,’ Baldur said. ‘After Steve Jubb had left. And it’s quite probable that someone else killed him.’
‘Did you find footprints near the lake?’
Baldur shook his head. ‘Nothing useful. It had rained overnight. And the scene was well and truly compromised. The kids, their father, the paramedics, the police officers from Selfoss. They left footprints all over the place.’
‘An accomplice then,’ said Magnus.
‘Like who?’ Baldur said.
‘Isildur. This Lawrence Feldman guy.’ As soon as he said it Magnus regretted it.
Baldur spotted the flaw immediately. ‘You contacted Isildur two days later, and he replied from a computer located in California.’
‘An Icelandic accomplice. There are Lord of the Rings fans in this country.’
‘There is no record of any Icelandic number on Steve Jubb’s mobile phone, apart from Agnar’s. We know that Steve Jubb never left his hotel from the time he arrived in Reykjavík in the morning to the time he went out to Lake Thingvellir late afternoon. None of the hotel staff recalls anyone visiting him at the hotel.’
‘Someone could have gone directly to his room without stopping at the front desk.’
Baldur just raised his eyebrows.
‘Don’t tell me you’re going to spring him?’ Magnus asked.
‘Not yet. And I’m not ruling him out as a suspect. But we need to widen the investigation. Look at the more real-world circumstances.’ Baldur counted them off on his fingers. ‘Agnar saw a lover and a former lover in the weeks before he died. His wife was seriously angry about his infidelity. He had big money problems. He bought drugs. Maybe he had debts we don’t know about? Maybe he owed his dealer money? Someone else was there that night and we need to find out who.’
‘So it’s just a coincidence he was negotiating this deal with Jubb and Isildur?’
‘Why not?’ said Baldur. ‘Look. We shouldn’t rule out this saga deal completely. If you like, you can focus on that. But there are plenty of other things for the rest of the team to look at.’
‘I’m sure if I went to California I could get Isildur to—’
‘No,’ said Baldur.
Several time zones to the west, it was early morning in the woods of Trinity County, Northern California. Isildur looked out of his study over the little valley towards the waterfall tumbling down from the bare rock face opposite. The morning sunlight glistened off the rain-washed greenery. In the garden he could see the life-sized shapes of Gandalf, Legolas and Elrond, bronze sculptures he had commissioned at great expense from a San Francisco artist.
It was a beautiful spot. He had bought it with a fraction of the money he had made from selling his share in 4Portal the year before. He had been looking for a hideaway in the woods to concentrate on his projects and had found the perfect place. Alpine mountains on three sides, a small winding road on the fourth leading down through forests to the nearest very small town ten miles away.
It was a place where he could think.
He had named it Rivendell, naturally, after the sanctuary that the Fellowship of the Ring had rested in. He remembered when he had first read of Rivendell, when he was seventeen, and he had had a clear vision in his mind of the place, surrounded by woods, mountains, running water, peace, tranquillity.
This was it.
He had been working on two projects. The one that had taken most of his time was his attempt to co
ordinate the collation of an online dictionary of two of Tolkien’s Elvish languages, Quenya and Sindarin. The project had turned out to be much more frustrating than he had thought. Tolkien had never laid down hard and fast grammar rules and vocabulary, so there were many differing interpretations of the two languages. Isildur knew that: the whole point about his dictionary was that it would be flexible enough to deal with the different dialects that had grown up over time. Trouble was his collaborators were not of a flexible frame of mind.
The project had descended into acrimony and abuse. He had hoped that as the provider of the money he would have the final say. It turned out that he was indeed a unifying figure: the authority they all loved to hate.
His other project was to try to track down Gaukur’s Saga. He had first become aware of it a few years before, through an Internet forum. He had put together a Danish academic who had discovered echoes of the lost saga in an eighteenth-century letter he had turned up, with Gimli, an Englishman whose grandfather had studied at Leeds University under Tolkien. The details were frustratingly vague, but Isildur was willing to spend big money to flesh them out.
And he did all this from the computer in his study at Rivendell.
He had never been overseas. He had been brought up in New Jersey, and spent all his vacations as a child with his family on the Jersey Shore. He had majored in electrical engineering at Stanford in California, and spent his career in Silicon Valley. He was a gifted programmer, intuitive, focused, able to make connections. 4Portal was his second venture, a company that developed software for advertising portals on cell phones. It was spectacularly successful, and Isildur’s six per cent share had been converted to many millions when he and his more commercial minded partners sold out.
The plan was that after a year or so in Rivendell, he would go back to the Valley and try something else.
Once he had Gaukur’s Saga in his possession. And the ring.
The last few weeks had been a rollercoaster ride of rising expectations and disappointments. First, the message from Agnar that he had found the saga. Then, a couple of weeks later that he had actually found Ísildur’s ring. Gimli’s excited reports that the saga might indeed be real and that there was a deal to be done, and then it had all gone wrong.
Agnar was dead. Gimli was in jail. The police had the saga.
And the ring was out there, somewhere in Iceland, and he had no way of knowing where.
Isildur had done what he could from Rivendell. He had procured the best legal representation for Gimli. But it was becoming clear that if he was to find the ring, he would have to go to Iceland himself.
He had a passport, ordered before a planned trip to New Zealand to see where the movies were made. He had abandoned the trip at the last minute in a fit of nervousness. Had gotten as far as the airport, but never made it on to the plane.
That nervousness had to be overcome.
He turned to his computer screen and called up a travel website.
Magnus spent the rest of the day talking to the police officers who had searched the summer house and Agnar’s house, as well as Steve Jubb’s hotel room. No sign of anything resembling a ring.
He went to see Linda, Agnar’s wife at her house in Seltjarnarnes. She tolerated his intrusion with barely concealed irritation. She was tall and thin with blonde hair and a drawn face. With a baby and a toddler to look after, she was barely holding things together.
She was an angry woman. Angry with her husband, angry with the police, angry with the bank, the lawyers, the fridge door that wouldn’t shut properly, the broken window that Agnar hadn’t got fixed, angry at the great big enormous hole in her life.
Magnus felt for her, and for her two children. Whatever Agnar’s sins, whatever his infidelities, he hadn’t deserved to die.
Yet another family blown apart by murder. Magnus had seen so many over the course of his career. And he did all he could for each and every one of them.
Of course she hadn’t seen any bloody ring. He searched the house for possible hiding places, but found nothing. At eight o’clock he left, taking the bus back to the centre of Reykjavík. He hadn’t yet been allocated the use of a police-owned car, and he had left Árni behind.
His conversation with Baldur had shaken him. He understood Baldur’s point, that was the trouble. He couldn’t figure out how Steve Jubb could have murdered Agnar and disposed of his body without getting his feet dirty.
But he just couldn’t accept that Jubb had gone to see Agnar about a secret multi-million dollar deal, and then Agnar had been murdered for some totally unrelated reason a couple of hours later.
His intuition told him that just didn’t make sense. And, like Baldur, he trusted his intuition.
He stopped off at the Krambúd convenience store opposite the Hallgrímskirkja, and bought himself a Thai curry to heat up. When he got back to Katrín’s house, he shoved it in to the microwave.
‘How are you feeling?’
He turned around to see the landlady of the house making her way to the refrigerator. She was speaking English. She took out a skyr and opened it.
‘So so.’
‘Quite a night last night.’
‘Thank you for getting me into bed,’ said Magnus. He meant it, although he would rather have avoided the subject. He had had enough humiliation for one day.
‘No problem,’ said Katrín smiling. ‘You were very sweet. Just before you went to sleep you gave me a cute little smile, and said “You’re under arrest.” Then you fell asleep.’
‘Oh, Jeez.’
‘Don’t worry. You will probably have to do the same for me one day.’
She leaned back against the fridge, eating her yoghurt. She had a couple fewer studs in her face than she had the first night Magnus had met her. She was wearing black jeans and a T-shirt emblazoned with an image of a wolf’s jaws. The microwave pinged and Magnus extracted his dinner, tipped it out on to a plate, and began to eat. ‘I don’t usually get that drunk.’
‘I really don’t mind. Just as long as you are careful where you throw up. And you clean it up afterwards.’
Magnus grimaced. ‘I will. I promise.’
Katrín examined him. ‘Are you really a policeman?’
‘Matter of fact I am.’
‘What are you doing in Iceland?’
‘Helping out.’
Katrín ate some more of her skyr. ‘You see, the thing is, I don’t like my little brother spying on me.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Magnus. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not officially a signed-up member of the Reykjavík Metropolitan Police. I’m not going to tell anyone what you’re up to.’
‘Good,’ said Katrín. ‘I saw you going into Ingileif’s gallery yesterday.’
‘Do you know her?’
‘A bit. Is she suspected of something?’
‘I can’t really tell you that.’
‘Sorry. Just curious.’ She waved her spoon in the air. ‘I know! Is it Agnar’s murder?’
‘I really can’t say,’ Magnus said.
‘It is! A friend of mine went out with him when she was at university. I saw him the other day in a café, you know. The Café Paris. With Tómas Hákonarson.’
‘Who’s he?’ Magnus asked.
‘He has his own TV show. The Point it’s called. Gives politicians a hard time. He’s quite funny.’
They ate in silence for a minute. Magnus knew he should write the name down, but he was too tired, he couldn’t be both-ered.
‘What do you think of her?’ he asked.
Katrín put down the yoghurt and poured herself some orange juice. Magnus noticed that there was a tiny blob of skyr on the ring jutting out of her lip. ‘Ingileif? I like her. Her brother’s a bastard, though.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘He won’t let me sing in his clubs any more, that’s why,’ said Katrín, anger in her voice. ‘He owns the hottest places in town. It’s not fair.’
‘Why did he ban you?’
&
nbsp; ‘I don’t know. I had some really successful gigs. It’s only because I missed a couple, that’s all.’
‘Ah.’ From what he had seen of Pétur he wasn’t surprised that he was tough on unreliable acts.
‘I like her, though.’
‘Ingileif?’
‘Yeah.’ Katrín lit up a cigarette and sat down opposite him. ‘I’ve even bought some of the stuff in her gallery. That vase, for instance.’ She pointed to a small twisted glass vase with a dirty wooden spoon in it. ‘Cost a bomb, but I kind of like it.’
‘Do you think she’s honest?’ Magnus asked.
‘Is that a cop talking?’
Magnus shrugged.
‘Yes, she is. People like her. Why? What’s she done?’
‘Nothing,’ Magnus said. ‘Do you know Lárus Thorvaldsson?’
‘The painter? Yes, a little. He’s a friend of Ingileif’s too.’
‘A good friend?’
‘Nothing serious. Lárus has lots of girls. You know where you are with him, if you see what I mean. No hassle.’
‘I think I do,’ said Magnus. It was pretty clear that Katrín knew him in much the same way Ingileif did.
Katrín looked at him closely. ‘Are you asking that as a cop, or do you have some other interest?’
Magnus put down his fork and rubbed his eyes. ‘I really don’t know.’ He picked up his empty plate, rinsed it off and stuck it in the dishwasher. ‘I need sleep. I’m going to bed.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
BALDUR SEEMED TO have a new lease of energy at the morning meeting as he doled out tasks to his detectives. He passed on the report from the forensics lab about the mud on Steve Jubb’s shoes, and explained that they needed to widen their investigation. Speak to everyone they had interviewed one more time. Interview new people: anyone who might conceivably have seen another visitor to Agnar, the people who sold Agnar drugs, his students, his former girlfriends, his colleagues, his friends, his wife’s friends, neighbours, everyone.
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