Майкл Ридпат - The Wanderer

She briefly closed her eyes and instantly she was back in the churchyard in Glaumbaer staring down at the bloody mess at her feet.

She was stuck with it, probably forever.

She thought about the big red-haired detective with the perfect American accent and the detailed knowledge of the sagas. She could see he had guessed that there was something she wasn’t sure about, something she wasn’t telling him.

And he was right.

The Saudárkrókur police had booked Magnus a room at a small guesthouse that was cheaper than the Hótel Tindastóll, unsurprisingly. Magnus woke up at 6 a.m. and after a quick breakfast rang Milan from his hotel room.

Sergeant Tacchini was friendly and seemed helpful, but he didn’t really have much information about Carlotta. She lived in a smart suburb of Milan with her wealthy parents; her father owned a textile business. She had spent the last eight years at university in Padua, where she was studying for a PhD. She had gone to Iceland for a brief holiday by herself.

According to her parents and her sister, she had a few friends still in Milan but most of them were in Padua. No enemies. Two casual boyfriends in the last couple of years, neither one serious, neither break-up acrimonious.

No criminal record. No debts — her family was well off and Tacchini had the impression her father would look after Carlotta if she got into financial trouble, or any other kind of trouble for that matter. Her parents insisted that Carlotta had never done drugs, but her sister said she had gone through a phase of smoking marijuana when she was younger. Definitely no serious drug habit. No links to organized crime, either.

No help at all, frankly.

But Tacchini did have two bits of useful information. The first was that Carlotta’s parents were catching a flight to Reykjavík via London early that morning. And the other was the subject that Carlotta was studying at the University of Padua.

Archaeology.

Magnus called Vigdís in Reykjavík and asked her to meet the Mondinis’ flight at Keflavík International Airport, which was about fifty kilometres west of the capital. He would have liked Vigdís to escort them on a plane up to Akureyri, but Vigdís pointed out that the Mondinis had come to see their daughter, or what was left of her, and Carlotta was now in the morgue in Reykjavík. Vigdís couldn’t interview them, her English wasn’t good enough, so Magnus would have to rely on another detective, or maybe even Thelma. Or drive back down to Reykjavík himself.

There were about a dozen officers crammed into the squad room at the eight o’clock meeting, including Jón Kári, Árni, Björn, two other detectives from Akureyri, the local assistant prosecutor and a handful of uniforms. And Edda, who was staying at another guesthouse in Saudárkrókur. Not much for a murder investigation, although Magnus had had many successes in Boston with fewer resources.

This one stumped him, though. So far.

Edda reported the results of the forensics team’s investigation. While they had filled plenty of evidence bags from the churchyard, there was nothing that indicated an obvious link to a murderer. The overnight rain had made it impossible to tell if Carlotta had been killed somewhere else in the churchyard and dragged behind the church. A preliminary investigation of the victim’s vehicle had found nothing of interest, but they were transporting it down to Reykjavík that morning to go over it more thoroughly. Carlotta’s car keys were in the pocket of her jeans, but so near the top that they were almost falling out; it was possible the murderer had used them to open her car and then returned them. The keys were clean of fingerprints — even Carlotta’s — but it could just be the fabric of the jeans pocket that had rubbed them off. They had checked the spot where the little girl said she saw the man getting into a silver vehicle, a farm track two hundred metres away from the church, and found a faint tyre print that had barely survived the rain. No footprints.

There was little if no new information from any of the other officers, and no obvious places to look. But Magnus wasn’t daunted — yet. It was a question of turning over as many stones as possible, and seeing what crawled out from underneath one of them. Something would.

The most important question was whether the killer knew Carlotta. If he, or she, did indeed know her, then Magnus and his team needed to find out more about the victim. Whether she knew anyone in Iceland. Whether she had enemies in Italy. If she had secrets. What those secrets might be.

There was a lot of discussion about her phone and any possible laptop or tablet. Two constables had searched her luggage, which was still in her hotel room in Blönduós — no electronic devices, and there had been none in her car either. Either Carlotta hadn’t brought them to Iceland, or the murderer had taken them out of her vehicle.

Björn had got the three Icelandic phone networks working on call records. But the team needed to get into Carlotta’s email, which was registered with the University of Padua. To do that they needed the cooperation of the Italian authorities, and a warrant — probably several warrants in triplicate issued in Iceland and Italy. The Italians were not necessarily unwilling, but they had a reputation of being slow and a bit chaotic. Interpol would have to be involved, and prosecutors and judges. There was a well-worn procedure in place for Facebook and the other social media sites, but those too would take time. Jón Kári promised to get on to it.

It was frustrating: who Carlotta had contacted in the last few days would be key.

Then there were her parents. They might be able to help — if the Icelandic police could get more out of them than Sergeant Tacchini had been able to do.

The team needed to piece together what Carlotta had been doing in Iceland. Find out if anyone had seen her between when she left Glaumbaer at seven-thirty and when she had returned later that evening. Where had she gone? The press were all over the story, and Jón Kári could take advantage of that by appealing for information about Carlotta’s movements over the previous week. Someone would remember her.

They should also check any Italian tourists staying in the area around Glaumbaer at Varmahlíd, Saudárkrókur, Blönduós and maybe even Akureyri.

Stamps in Carlotta’s passport offered up only one trip outside the EU in the last couple of years — a brief visit to the United States via Boston the previous October. Not much help at this stage.

If the killer didn’t know Carlotta, then they had to hope forensic evidence would provide some link to a known criminal. Or a local, perhaps? A visitor at the museum that day? They would struggle, unless they discovered a link with the Akureyri rapist; although nothing had been found yet, that was worth pursuing.

They were keeping all avenues open, but at this stage Magnus’s instinct, which he shared with the officers in the meeting, was that the killer was known to Carlotta.

He came to a decision. As the meeting broke up he pulled Jón Kári and Árni to one side and told them to coordinate the investigation from Saudárkrókur, while he went down south.

He really needed to get to know Carlotta better and the only way of doing that was speaking to her parents himself.

Magnus enjoyed the long drive down to Reykjavík. He had hoped that it would give him a chance to think over the case, to get some perspective, to work out a new line of attack, but every time he came back to the same thing: find out more about Carlotta.

It was a beautiful morning. The empty road, the mountains, the glimpses of white glacier and grey fjord, the busy rivers running through heathland and lava field, the sheer desolation, even the gusts of wind that buffeted the car, lifted his spirits. Here, in the wilds, he felt like an Icelander; he felt that this was the place he was supposed to be. And now he had a proper case to get his teeth into, he felt he was doing what he was supposed to be doing.