Where the Shadows Lie

by Michael Ridpath

  He clearly knew his town, though. He had recognized Pétur Ásgrímsson’s name immediately and had only required a few seconds to check that Ingileif’s gallery was where he thought it was. He was at the Hótel Borg less than a quarter of an hour later.

  Isildur was nervous, scared even. He was in a strange country, and Iceland was a very strange country. Someone had been murdered and there was a chance that the murderer was the man walking along beside him. Isildur didn’t like to think too hard about that; he had decided not to ask Gimli right out whether he had killed the professor.

  But the danger added to the thrill. It was a long shot: perhaps the police would get to the ring first. Perhaps the ring was a fake all along. Perhaps no one would ever find it. But there was a chance, a real chance, that Isildur might end up the owner of the actual ring that had inspired The Lord of the Rings, that had been carried to Iceland by his namesake a thousand years before.

  That was cool. That was seriously cool.

  The main entrance to Neon was just a small door on the street, but Bjarnason led them around the back. There another door was propped open by a couple of crates of beer. A young man was carrying in some cases of vodka.

  Bjarnason stopped him and rattled something in Icelandic. That was one weird language. Isildur wondered to himself which Middle Earth language would sound like it. Possibly none of them: Quenya was Finnish-influenced and Sindarin was derived from Welsh. Perhaps Icelandic was just too obvious for Tolkien – no fun.

  The boy led them downstairs past a vast dance floor to a small office. There a tall man with a shaved head was in earnest discussion with a red-haired woman in jeans and a Severed Crotch T-Shirt.

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Bjarnason to Isildur. ‘I’m sure he speaks English.’

  ‘Mr Ásgrímsson?’ said Isildur.

  The man with the shaved head looked up. ‘Yes?’ No hint of a smile. His smooth skull bulged alarmingly.

  ‘My name is Lawrence Feldman and this is my colleague Steve Jubb.’

  ‘What do you want? I thought you were in jail?’ Ásgrímsson said.

  ‘Steve was always innocent,’ Isildur said. ‘I guess the cops finally figured that out.’

  ‘Well, if you want the saga, the police have it. And when they have finished with it, there is no way we are selling it to you.’

  Ásgrímsson was aggressive, but Isildur stood up to him. He was used to people trying to push him around, people who underestimated the programmer whose talents they needed to make their business work.

  ‘That’s a topic for a later day. We want to speak with you about a ring. Isildur’s ring, or perhaps you prefer Gaukur’s ring.’

  ‘Get out of my club now!’ Ásgrímsson’s voice was firm.

  ‘We’ll pay well. Very well,’ said Isildur.

  ‘Listen to me,’ said Ásgrímsson, his eyes burning. ‘A man has died because of that stupid saga. Two men, if you include my father. My family kept it a secret for centuries for a reason, a good reason as it turns out. It should still be a secret, and it would have been if I had had my way. But the reason it isn’t is you – your nosing around, your flashing dollars everywhere.’

  He took a step closer to Isildur. ‘You’ve seen what the result is. Professor Agnar Haraldsson is dead! Don’t you feel guilty about that? Don’t you think you should just get the hell out of Iceland and fuck off back to America?’

  ‘Mr Ásgrímsson—’

  ‘Out!’ Pétur was shouting now, his finger pointing to the exit. ‘I said, get out!’

  The pastor was sweating in the unseasonably warm sun. It was a glorious day and he had already walked about seven kilometres. He was in a high valley, uninhabited even by sheep this early in the year. A brook ran down from the snow-covered heath at the head of the valley. All around him snow was melting, trickling, dribbling, seeping over the stones and into the earth. Most of the grass that had been revealed in the last few days was yellow, but by the side of the brook there was a patch of rich green shoots. Spring. New nourishment for this barren land.

  All around birds chirped and warbled in the sunshine.

  He took a deep breath. He remembered when he had first come to this valley, as the newly arrived pastor of Hruni, how he had felt that this is where God lived.

  And at that moment, he believed it again.

  Over to the left, along the side of the valley, were some rocky crags. He turned off the path, what little there was of it, and squelched through the yellow grass towards them. He took out his notebook.

  He needed to find a good hiding place.

  Tómas’s arrest as a suspect for the murder of Agnar Haraldsson had been on the lunch time news on the radio. Top story, hardly surprising, given Tómas’s celebrity. The moment he heard it the pastor knew he had to find a new place to hide the ring.

  He paused and examined it on the fourth finger of his right hand. It didn’t look a thousand years old. That was the thing with gold – it didn’t matter how old it was, if you polished it carefully it looked new. Or newer.

  There were scratches and scuffs. But the inscription in runes engraved on the inside was still legible, just.

  He remembered when he and Ásgrímur had found it in that cave. Well, it was hardly a cave, more like a hole in the rock. It was the greatest, the most profound moment of his life. And of Ásgrímur’s of course. Even if it was just about his last.

  It was miraculous that the hole had not been submerged in any of the volcanic eruptions of the previous millennium, especially the big one that had smothered Gaukur’s farm. But then the ring dealt in miracles.

  He had worn it on and off now for nearly twenty years. He loved it, he worshipped it. Sometimes he would just sit and stare at it, the music of Led Zeppelin or Deep Purple swirling around him, wondering at its history, its mystery, its power. Andvari, Odin, Hreidmar, Fafnir, Sigurd, Brynhild, Gunnar, Ulf Leg Lopper, Trandill, Ísildur and Gaukur, they had all owned it. And now it was his. The pastor of Hruni.

  Extraordinary.

  But although it gave him a tremendous feeling of exhilaration, of power, every time he put it on, over time his disappointment had grown. The pastor thought of himself as a pretty extraordinary man, and he had assumed that the ring had chosen him because of his knowledge of the devil and of Saemundur. But although he had thrown himself into his studies, nothing had happened. Nothing had been revealed to him. The way to power and domination had not appeared.

  But how could it, when he locked himself up in the hills at Hruni? He had assumed that it was his duty to keep the ring in the shadows of Mount Hekla, which was after all only forty kilometres away as the raven flew. But keep it for whom? He had always assumed that his son was worthless, far too lightweight and superficial to make any use of the ring. But perhaps he might make something of his life after all. He was already a celebrity in Iceland. It was unlikely that an Icelander could go out into the wider world and make a name for himself, but perhaps Tómas could.

  With the help of the ring.

  The pastor scrabbled around in the rocks looking for a niche similar to the one in which he had originally found the ring seventeen years before. He would have to be very careful to make clear notes of where he had hidden it, or else it might be lost for another ten centuries.

  But maybe he shouldn’t conceal it? The ring had not revealed itself to him and Dr Ásgrímur merely to be removed from the world again. It was making an entrance into the affairs of men.

  It wanted to be discovered.

  The hiding place in the altar at Hruni church wasn’t the best. A determined police team, or anyone else for that matter, could find it there. But it was the right place.

  The pastor took off the ring and grasped it in his hand. He closed his eyes and tried to feel what the ring was telling him.

  It was the right place.

  He turned on his heel and began walking back towards Hruni at a brisk pace. He checked his watch. He would be lucky to be home by nightfall.

  Ingileif’s hou
se, or rather her family’s house, was on a bank over-looking the river that ran through Flúdir. Flúdir itself was a prosperous village with a convenience store, an hotel, two schools, some municipal buildings and a number of geothermally powered greenhouses – Ingileif said it had the best farming in Iceland. But no church: the parish church was at Hruni, three kilometres away.

  Although the village itself wasn’t up to much, the view was spectacular. To the west was the valley of the glacial River Hvítá, with its ancient settlement at Skálholt, the site of Iceland’s first cathedral, and to the north were the glaciers themselves, thick slabs of white running a dead-straight horizon between mountain peaks.

  Hekla was out of sight, behind the hills to the south-east.

  The house was a single-storey affair, cosy, but large enough for a family of five. Magnus and Ingileif spread out the contents of several cardboard boxes on the floor of Ingileif’s mother’s bedroom. There were indeed a dozen letters from Tolkien to Högni, Ingileif’s grandfather, which had only come into her father’s possession after Högni’s death. Ingileif showed Magnus a first edition of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume of The Lord of the Rings. Magnus recognized the handwriting of the inscription inside: To Högni Ísildarson, one good story deserves another, with thanks and all good wishes, J.R.R. Tolkien, September 1954.

  They studied a folder of notes and maps, most of which were in Dr Ásgrímur’s handwriting, which showed guesses of where the ring might be hidden. There were also notes and letters from Hákon, the pastor. They dealt with various folk tales he had researched. There were several pages on the story of Gissur and the troll sisters of Búrfell, which was a mountain close to Gaukur’s farm at Stöng. There was also a mention of a story about a shep-herd girl named Thorgerd who ran off with an elf.

  ‘Do you have elves in America?’ Ingileif asked.

  ‘Not as such,’ said Magnus. ‘We got drug dealers, we got pimps, we got mobsters, we got crooked lawyers, we got investment bankers. No elves. But if we ever do have any problems with elves in the South End, I know right where to come for help. We could do an exchange with the Reykjavík Metropolitan Police.’

  ‘So you didn’t hear any stories about them when you were a kid?’

  ‘Oh, yes, especially when I was living with my grandparents in Iceland. My dad was more into sagas than elves and trolls. But I do remember asking him about them.’ Magnus smiled at the memory. ‘I guess I was fourteen. We were hiking in the Adirondacks. That was my favourite thing, hiking with my dad. My brother wouldn’t come, so it was just me and him. We spoke nothing but Icelandic to each other for a whole week. We talked about everything.

  ‘I can remember exactly where we were, on the shore of Raquette Lake. We were eating a sandwich sitting on a rock that looked like a troll. Dad told me how the Icelanders would have invented a long involved story about it. Then I asked him whether he believed in elves.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘He kind of dodged the question. So I pressed him on it. He was a mathematician, he spent all his life dealing in proofs, there was no proof that elves existed.

  ‘So he gives me a long lecture about how although there is no proof that elves exist there is equally no absolute proof that they don’t. So science can’t answer the question. He said although he didn’t believe in elves, he was too much of an Icelander to deny their existence, and if I ever lived in Iceland I would understand.’

  ‘And now you live in Iceland, do you believe in them?’

  Magnus laughed. ‘No. What about you?’

  ‘My grandmother saw hidden people all the time,’ Ingileif said. ‘Back in a rock near the farm where my mother was born. In fact a hidden woman came to her the night before my mother’s birth. They were planning to call Mum Boghildur, but the hidden woman said that unless my grandmother named her Líney the baby would die young. So that’s how my mother became Líney.’

  ‘Better than Boghildur,’ said Magnus. ‘The hidden woman had taste.’

  ‘Here, look,’ said Ingileif, pointing to a map with notes and arrows scrawled across it. ‘This is where they were heading for the weekend my father died.’ A cave was marked near a stream about ten kilometres away from the abandoned Viking farm at Stöng.

  Ingileif’s cell phone rang. As she answered Magnus could hear an agitated male voice, although he couldn’t hear it well enough to recognize it.

  ‘That was my brother,’ Ingileif said when the call was over. ‘Apparently the two foreigners who were trying to buy the saga showed up at Neon. An American and an Englishman. They were asking about the ring. Pétur sent them packing.’

  ‘You’d think they would have the sense to leave all that alone.’

  ‘That’s certainly Pétur’s opinion,’ said Ingileif. ‘He warned me they’ll be looking for me too. He doesn’t want me to tell them anything.’

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘No. And they’re not buying the saga at any price, if we ever do get the chance to sell it. Pétur is adamant about that, and I agree with him.’ She checked her watch. ‘It’s nearly seven o’clock. The pastor should be back by now. Shall we go and check?’

  They drove back up to Hruni, but there was no answer when they rang the doorbell. The pastor’s car was still in the garage. They looked up around the hills and the valley to see if they could spot a solitary walker. The sun, lower now, produced a soft, clear light, that seemed to pick out every detail of the landscape, and lit the snow on the distant mountains with a pinkish glow. A pair of ravens whirled in the distance, their croaking borne over the grassland by the breeze. But there was no sign of a human being anywhere.

  ‘What time does it get dark?’ Magnus asked. ‘Nine-thirty?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Ingileif. ‘About that, I guess. It’s getting later and later these days.’

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  Ingileif nodded. ‘I know a place in the village we can get something to eat.’

  ‘Let’s do that. We can come back here afterwards.’

  ‘And then drive back to Reykjavík?’

  Magnus nodded.

  ‘We could do that,’ said Ingileif. ‘Or …’ She smiled. Her grey eyes danced under her blonde fringe. She looked delectable.

  ‘Or what?’

  ‘Or we could see him in the morning.’

  Magnus woke with a start. He was sweating. For a moment he didn’t know where he was. He looked across the room at an unfamiliar window, blue-grey moonlight behind the thin curtains.

  A hand touched his forearm.

  He turned to see a woman lying in bed next to him. Ingileif.

  ‘What is it, Magnús?’

  ‘A dream, that’s all.’

  ‘A bad dream?’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘No, it’s OK.’

  ‘Magnús, I want to know about your bad dreams.’ She pulled herself up on one elbow, her breasts shadows in the weak light seeping in from the curtains. He could make out a half smile of concern. She touched his cheek.

  So he told her. About the dream, the 7-Eleven, O’Malley, the dopehead. And about the alleyway, the garbage cans, the fat bald guy, and the kid, the kid who Williams had said had just died.

  She listened. ‘Do you get these dreams a lot?’

  ‘No,’ Magnus said. ‘Not until very recently. That second shooting.’

  ‘But they were trying to kill you, weren’t they, those two men?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. I don’t feel guilty about it at all,’ said Magnus. ‘At least, not while I’m awake.’ He slammed his fist into the mattress. ‘It doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know why I let it bother me.’

  ‘Hey, you killed someone,’ Ingileif said. ‘You were absolutely right to do it, you had no choice, but you feel bad about it. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t, and you are human, even if you think you are a big tough cop. I wouldn’t like you if you weren’t.’

  And she snuggled up into his chest. H
e pulled her tightly to him.

  They kissed.

  He stirred.

  Afterwards she fell right back asleep. But Magnus couldn’t. He lay still, on his back, staring up at the ceiling.

  She was right about the dreams, of course. He should expect them, accept them. The idea lulled him.

  But then he thought of Colby, hiding out somewhere, God knows where, fearing for her life. Shouldn’t he feel guilty about her?

  He glanced over to Ingileif, her eyes closed, breathing gently in and out through half-open lips. Even in the gloom he could make out the nick in her eyebrow.

  Colby had made it pretty clear that there was little chance of salvaging their relationship. In fact, a one-night-stand with a beautiful Icelandic girl was a perfectly sensible way to get over her. Much better than getting blind drunk and winding up in jail. Trouble was, looking at Ingileif lying beside him, it didn’t feel like a one-night stand at all. He really liked her. Really liked her.

  And for some stupid reason that made it a much worse betrayal of Colby.

  After driving back from Hruni they had stopped at the only hotel in Flúdir. It turned out to have a very good restaurant. They had eaten a long leisurely dinner, watching the valley of the Hvítá submerge into darkness in front of them. They had walked back to Ingileif’s house along the smaller river that ran through the village, and then they had wound up in Ingileif’s childhood bedroom.

  He smiled at the memory.

  He was being ridiculous. He had been in Iceland for less than a week, and already he was beginning to understand that the Icelanders had a more casual attitude to sex than he was used to. He was just like, what’s-his-name, the painter, Ingileif’s alibi. Sure she liked him, just like she liked skyr or strawberry ice cream. Maybe less.

  He had to be careful here. Sleeping with a witness was a definite no-no in America, and somehow he doubted that Baldur would be impressed if he ever found out. And could he be entirely sure that she was innocent?