Майкл Ридпат - The Wanderer

‘Could the body have been moved?’

‘You mean: Was the victim smothered elsewhere in the room and moved to the bed?’

‘That’s what I was thinking.’ If Nancy met someone in her room, she would have been more likely to be sitting in the chair than on her bed.

‘Hard to say. There are no signs of it, but it’s possible if it was done gently.’

‘OK, thanks, Gudjón.’

‘I’ll write up my report when I get the toxicology results back. And I’ll call you if I find anything else of interest.’

There was no doubt about it. Nancy Fishburn had been murdered.

Magnus returned to headquarters to report to Thelma. The short drive back from the hotel gave him a welcome few minutes of peace to think. There must be a link between Carlotta’s death and Nancy Fishburn’s. He didn’t yet know whether Carlotta had discovered that the whole Nantucket Viking thing was a hoax, or how. But assuming she had, who would suffer enough from her discovery to kill her? And then to kill Nancy Fishburn?

Einar? Eygló? Suzy Henshaw? They would all bear some loss if the project fell through. But enough to kill for?

And which one of them had met Nancy and decided to go ahead with the documentary regardless? Or was it all of them?

Magnus needed to speak to them, but they were all in Greenland.

Vigdís was waiting for him. He could tell she had something.

‘What is it?’

‘I was thinking about Rósa,’ Vigdís said. ‘You know I haven’t been happy about her and Einar?’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘I remembered that the confirmation from Icelandair only explicitly mentioned that Rósa had taken the flight out to London.’

‘OK.’

‘So yesterday I asked them to check the return flight. They got back to me just now, and it turns out that although Rósa had checked in online the evening before, she didn’t show. She wasn’t on the plane.’

‘Did she get an earlier flight?’ Magnus’s heartbeat quickened.

‘Not with Icelandair, no. But I checked with WOW air and she got a flight first thing on Monday morning from Gatwick Airport with them. It arrived at Keflavík at ten-thirty.’

‘Plenty of time to get to Glaumbaer for the evening.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Check the cameras at Hvalfjördur,’ Magnus said. Hvalfjördur was a deep fjord on the Ring Road from Reykjavík to the north. It was a bottleneck, only possible to avoid with a hundred-kilometre detour. There was a tunnel under the fjord, and a camera at the exit, recording every car that drove through.

Einar, Eygló and now Rósa. They were all in Greenland together.

Magnus had to go to Greenland; they couldn’t wait for them all to return to Iceland.

Thelma was unhappy about the cost, but she accepted there was no choice, especially when Magnus pointed out that the reason all their suspects were out of the country was that the Ministers of Culture and Justice had leaned on Thelma to let them go.

Getting to Greenland was not easy. The next direct flight from Reykjavík didn’t leave for a couple of days, and Magnus couldn’t wait that long. So he booked himself on to a flight to Copenhagen that evening, and another from there to Narsarsuaq in Greenland in the morning.

Álftanes was on the way to Keflavík Airport. Magnus grabbed an overnight bag and left a note for Tryggvi Thór, who was out.

He was at the gate, standing in line to board, when his phone rang.

‘Vigdís?’

‘I’m glad I caught you. We’ve just heard back on the Hvalfjördur cameras. Rósa’s car came through the tunnel at one-seventeen p.m. on Monday afternoon. One occupant. And then it returned heading south at four-thirty-seven a.m. on Tuesday morning.’

‘Well done, Vigdís!’

That put Rósa very much in the frame.

‘And there is something else.’

‘Yes?’

‘Tryggvi Thór was found unconscious again. At Selatangar, along the coast from Grindavík. He was lucky, a French tourist stumbled on him in the fog.’

‘Was he attacked?’

‘We don’t know yet; he might well have fallen. It looks as if he had gone for a hike there. Róbert is at the hospital checking it out.’

The queue for boarding was shuffling forward and Magnus was getting very close to the gate.

‘Vigdís, can you do me a favour? Check up on Tryggvi Thór yourself. And if he tries to tell you it was an accident, don’t believe him.’

‘Magnús! I’m in the middle of a murder investigation!’

‘Thanks, Vigdís. Got to go.’

Magnus was worried about the old man. Something was going on there, something bad.

He hung up and showed the woman at the gate his boarding pass and passport. There was not much he could do about it now.

‘Cut!’

Eygló stopped talking. She was standing ankle-deep in lush green grass a couple of metres from the neat outline of the walls of a tiny square chapel, built by Gudrid’s mother-in-law a thousand years before. Erik the Red’s longhouse stood just a short distance down the hill. Eygló was talking to Tom, who was pointing his camera towards her, Ajay’s boom mic hovering above him, and Suzy standing just behind the two of them.

It was their first day’s filming in Greenland and it was not going well, or at least her scenes weren’t. It had been a long, frustrating afternoon for everyone.

Einar was standing a few metres away, next to his wife, Rósa, both glaring at her.

Professor Beccari, too, was watching, his face set in a frown of concerned sympathy. Aqqaluk, the Greenlandic fixer Suzy had hired, was off to one side murmuring on his mobile.

‘Take ten,’ said Suzy to her assembled crew, which really only numbered Tom and Ajay. She approached Eygló, smiling. ‘Here, walk with me.’

They waded through the grass, scattered with wildflowers of yellow, blue and delicate pink. At each step a cloud of tiny moths rose a metre into the air and subsided. They were only a hundred metres from the edge of what had been known as Erik’s Fjord, on the other side of which spread the airfield at Narsarsuaq, where they had landed the day before.

Erik’s longhouse had stood at one end of the straggling village of Qassiarsuk, the modern name for Brattahlíd, a sparse community of farms, green meadows, a school, a church, a hostel and a dock. This was where Erik the Red had built his farm, where Gudrid had lived, and from where Erik’s sons Leif, Thorvald and Thorstein, his daughter Freydís, and Gudrid and Thorfinn Karlsefni had all set out on their various voyages to Vinland. It was a key focus of the whole documentary.

And Eygló was screwing it up.

Suzy led Eygló a few metres down the little gully of the stream that ran down to the fjord, so that they were out of sight of the others. ‘What’s wrong, Eygló?’

‘Wasn’t that last take good enough?’ Eygló said. She had tried really hard to make it better.

‘It was OK,’ said Suzy. ‘But you can do so much better than “OK”. Where is the excitement that you do so well? Imagine what it would be like for Erik, an outlaw who had been kicked out of Norway and then Iceland, to arrive at this beautiful green empty place where he could finally settle down without interference? All this free land! And imagine his family setting off on those voyages to Vinland. You can do that, Eygló. You can imagine that. You can imagine that better than anyone else I know, better than Einar, better than Mr Grand Professor Beccari. You know you can do that, don’t you?’

Eygló nodded.

‘What’s the problem? Is it Einar? Is it Rósa?’

‘No, no, she’s fine.’

‘It is Rósa, isn’t it?’ said Suzy. ‘Ever since she joined us, you and Einar have looked miserable. I don’t need to know what’s going on between the three of you—’