Майкл Ридпат - The Wanderer

Magnus had forgotten how much Vigdís didn’t like Thelma.

‘I’ve been thinking,’ said Magnus.

‘Novel approach.’

‘There is definitely something wrong with the Nantucket theory.’

‘Oh, Magnús! Don’t tell me. You stayed up late last night reading The Saga of the Clueless Viking and discovered Gudrid and Thorfinn actually landed on the South Pole.’

‘No, listen, Vigdís. I’m serious.’

‘OK,’ said Vigdís. ‘I’m listening.’

Magnus repeated what Eygló had told him at the airport.

Vigdís was doubtful. ‘If Suzy checked it out and the girl said it was a joke, it was probably a joke.’

‘Yes, but Nancy Fishburn wrote a book about Gudrid. And she just happens to live on Nantucket. And she visited the place in Greenland where the wampum connecting Gudrid to Nantucket was found.’

‘If she’s a fan of Gudrid, it’s not surprising she went to Greenland,’ said Vigdís. ‘The only coincidence is that she lives in Nantucket herself. And I’m not sure that’s that big a coincidence.’

‘How’s this for a coincidence? Carlotta found the wampum. Carlotta was working on the Columbus letter. Carlotta is now dead.’

Vigdís was silent for a moment, thinking. ‘Let’s say this old lady cooked up a hoax. So what?’

‘It would be bad news for the people making the documentary: Einar, Eygló and Suzy. It would be a public humiliation.’

‘Maybe. But would that be enough for them to murder someone? I mean, they would have to cancel the documentary. They might lose some money. But bad things like that happen to people all the time and they don’t kill for it. None of them seems unbalanced: a bit intense maybe, a bit stressed, but not killers. Plus, they all have alibis for that night, don’t they? They were in Saudárkrókur eating dinner together.’

Vigdís shook her head. ‘ I think it has something to do with Rósa and Einar. It’s a classic love triangle gone wrong. Jealous girlfriend, jealous wife, scheming husband.’

‘You yourself said they all have alibis. Look, it’s a lead,’ said Magnus. ‘And someone needs to follow it up. I’d like to talk to her.’

‘Good luck getting Thelma’s approval for you to fly to Nantucket,’ said Vigdís. ‘That really would be a wild goose chase.’

Vigdís was right. ‘I know, I know. But I’ll see if I can get a detective there to ask questions.’

Magnus didn’t know any police officers in Nantucket himself, but he made some calls to his former colleagues in Boston, and was soon speaking to a detective in the Nantucket PD, who agreed to go out to Siasconset and interview Nancy Fishburn.

That evening, back at Tryggvi Thór’s house in Álftanes, Magnus pulled down The Saga of the Greenlanders and The Saga of Erik the Red from his collection and read them through.

When he came to the descriptions of the mysterious lagoon at Hóp, Magnus recalled the pond in the footage from the TV documentary. Even if it turned out that Gudrid, Thorfinn and their crew had not landed there, there was still some similar lagoon somewhere along the north-east coast of North America that they had visited a thousand years ago. Magnus marvelled at the idea of a handful of Europeans clinging on to the edge of a vast continent in ad 1000.

Gudrid really was an extraordinary woman. To have journeyed so far and seen so much of the world, so long ago. She had travelled from Iceland to America and back again. Magnus had travelled from America to Iceland and back. And now he was trying to put down roots in Iceland for the second time.

Gudrid had been married three times, and had given birth to her own son in a foreign land. Magnus might have a son in Iceland, then again he might not. It was all probably a result of Vigdís’s lively imagination. And even if Ási was Magnus’s son, would Ingileif acknowledge the fact? Magnus hoped she would. Part of him hoped too that it might bring them back together; perhaps she still cared for him?

Magnus sighed and closed his book.

He and Ingileif were not good for each other; he knew that now.

Tryggvi Thór pulled out into the centre of the road and overtook four tourist busses in a row ahead. Four! All heading to the Blue Lagoon, and it was still only nine o’clock in the morning. He was on the road to Grindavík from Reykjavík, seeking isolation. On either side stretched the barren black lavascape of the Reykjanes peninsula, scored with treacherous gullies and crevasses where baked stone had cooled and cracked, Ahead a pillar of steam rose from the power station that fed the artificial lagoon.

One of the reasons he had left Africa, with its teeming life of all kinds, was to rediscover the barren desolation of his home country. With the tourist boom, this was harder to find, especially in high summer when the more intrepid foreigners in their hired cars spread out all over the country in search of lonely corners.

Tryggvi Thór knew a corner that he hoped they had not yet found. He drove past the lagoon and around the outskirts of the fishing village of Grindavík, heading east, past a couple of farms into another lava field. The paved road became unpaved track, running about a kilometre in from the sea. He turned off it and drove down towards the water and a small car park in the midst of volcanic debris, shielded from the west winds by a burly wall of lava that had spilled into the sea millennia ago and frozen hard.

The place was known as Selatangar. And it was empty.

Good.

He slipped on his daypack and followed a footpath through the stones to the east, away from the wall. It was noticeably cooler than it had been that morning, and a sea mist lurked just a hundred metres offshore. As he walked he saw it creep and slide towards him. It reached out and grabbed a pair of eider ducks splashing in the swell, smothering them in its milky clasp. The black beach was cluttered with driftwood, bleached almost white from its long journey through the Atlantic.

In the higgledy-piggledy jumble of rocks, stones and pebbles, it was difficult to spot the first sign of human habitation, a circular pile in which fishermen had lived 150 years before. The place had been a seasonal fishing settlement from the Middle Ages until some time in the nineteenth century, a warren of drystone hovels linked by paths cut through the lava. Rows of boulders stretched out into the sea: primitive breakwaters to protect the open fishing boats as they landed their catch, which would then be hung out to dry for months on wooden racks erected along the shore.

Tryggvi Thór halted and listened to the silence. Except it wasn’t quite silent: the wavelets lapped against the beach, a breath of wind rustled through the rocks, and his own blood thudded gently in his ears. The moist sea air massaged his face in a delicate tingle.

It wasn’t absolute silence, but it was the loneliness he had sought.

A cormorant appeared as if by magic from beneath the grey water slopping against the pebbles. The mist had ventured ashore now, slinking along the narrow paths between the dwellings.

He wondered what it would have been like inhabiting those harsh stone buildings — cramped, damp, cold, with nothing green in sight — and he marvelled again at the toughness and dogged determination of Icelanders in centuries gone by. Not that they had much of a choice.

Tryggvi Thór’s parents had occasionally brought him and his brother here when they were kids back in the fifties, and they would happily spend all afternoon running through this abandoned settlement, playing all kinds of games.

A ripple of movement in the mist attracted his attention. He stared at the swirling moisture. It was nothing. Unless it was ‘Tanga-Tómas’ the local ghost his father had told him stories about.