Майкл Ридпат - The Wanderer

‘There’s nothing going on between the three of us!’ Eygló interrupted sharply.

‘All right,’ said Suzy. ‘But you just stay here for a couple of minutes, and I’ll go back and tell Rósa to take herself away. Einar too. What about Beccari?’

‘No. No, he’s fine,’ said Eygló, who had a feeling that the professor was on her side.

‘OK, he stays. And then you’ll come back, and we will try again. And this time, you will do it as well as I know you can.’

Suzy took Eygló’s shoulders and looked into her eyes. ‘OK?’

Down here, by the stream, out of sight of the others, Eygló could feel Suzy’s confidence in her give her strength. She nodded.

Suzy turned and climbed up the small slope over the lip of the gully.

Eygló stood by the stream and took some deep breaths. The brook babbled loudly and half a dozen wagtails bobbed and darted around her. Somewhere in the distance some twenty-first-century farm machinery rumbled. A gentle scent rose up from the wildflowers, mixing with a touch of twenty-first-century cow manure. It was a rare cloudless day, another reason Suzy was keen to get as many scenes in the can as she could.

Gudrid would have come down to this very stream to fetch water, to wash clothes. Eygló grinned. Perhaps to escape her in-laws.

Eygló could do this. She was ready.

But when she climbed up the slope, Suzy was speaking to a small group of people gathered around an old Land Rover and a pickup truck down by the road.

‘Eygló!’ Suzy called. ‘Over here!’

As Eygló approached the group she could tell they were archaeologists: the clothes, the facial hair, the spectacles, the doughty muddiness of them. The smallest of the group, an Asian-looking woman with long shiny dark hair, smiled when she saw Eygló.

‘Hi, Eygló. I don’t know if you remember me? Anya? Anya Kleemann.’

‘Yes, I do remember you!’ said Eygló with a smile. ‘You were on the dig with us here back in 2011.’ She was a Greenlander of about Eygló’s age doing a PhD at Aarhus University in Denmark, as far as Eygló could remember.

‘That’s right. I heard you were going to be filming here.’

‘You look like you’ve come from your own excavation somewhere?’

‘Tasiusaq. It’s just a few kilometres over the hill that way.’ She pointed northwards. ‘In the next fjord. A thirteenth-century farmhouse.’ She gave a shy smile. ‘It’s my first dig as supervisor.’

‘Cool.’

‘I thought Viking Queens was brilliant, by the way,’ Anya said.

‘Thanks,’ said Eygló. ‘It was Suzy’s idea. She produced it.’

‘And now we’re doing Gudrid the Wanderer,’ said Suzy.

‘Great subject,’ said Anya. She looked over to the meadow under which lay the ruins of the Brattahlíd longhouse. ‘Presumably you are talking about the wampum?’

‘Of course,’ said Suzy. ‘Were you there when it was found?’

‘I was,’ said Anya. ‘But it was an Italian girl who found it. Carlotta, isn’t that right, Eygló?’

Eygló nodded. She could tell Anya had spotted the change in her and Suzy’s expression. But Eygló didn’t want to explain, not in front of Suzy.

Fortunately, Suzy took charge. ‘I’m afraid Carlotta died recently. She was murdered. In Iceland.’

‘Oh, no!’ said Anya. ‘That’s dreadful. What happened?’

‘The police are trying to figure it out,’ said Suzy. ‘And not doing a very good job of it.’

‘My God.’ Anya looked stunned. ‘I didn’t know her well — I only met her on that dig, but I liked her. That’s horrible.’

Eygló nodded. It was. It was definitely horrible.

‘You know she contacted me a couple of weeks ago? Out of the blue, really. I hadn’t heard from her since the dig. It was about the wampum.’

Please shut up, thought Eygló. A few days before she would have been eager to hear what Anya had to say about why Carlotta wanted to talk to her about wampum, but now Eygló just wanted to change the subject.

As did Suzy. ‘Would you excuse us, Anya?’ she said. ‘We are on a tight schedule, and I need my archaeologist back.’

‘We should get going,’ said Anya. ‘Are you staying at the hostel in the village?’

‘No. In the hotel over in Narsarsuaq,’ said Eygló. ‘We’re there for a couple of days.’

‘Well, maybe we’ll come over and have a drink with you one evening?’

‘That would be great,’ said Eygló.

‘Einar Thorsteinsson is with us,’ said Suzy.

‘I remember Einar,’ said Anya. ‘I thought he and Carlotta had a thing going?’

Oh Christ, thought Eygló. This just gets worse. ‘Einar’s wife is here as well,’ she said.

Anya got it. ‘OK. See you later.’ And with that she and her troupe drove off back towards the village.

‘Ready?’ There was a hint of worry in Suzy’s glance; Eygló wasn’t sure whether she was afraid that Eygló had been put off her stride, or that Eygló had noticed that Suzy had shut down any conversation about the wampum.

Eygló nodded. ‘Let’s do it.’

But as she waded through the grass back to the ruins of the chapel, she couldn’t help thinking about what Anya had said. Carlotta had wanted to speak to her about the wampum. Eygló assumed that Carlotta had doubts and had communicated them to Anya. The police back in Iceland should be told. But Eygló sure as hell wasn’t going to tell them, and she wasn’t going to follow her original plan of quizzing Einar about the find either.

She took up her position by the outline of the tiny chapel. She stared down at the grass and the yellow flowers — buttercups, she thought — and took a couple more deep breaths, trying to force herself back to Gudrid and Erik and Thjodhild, Erik’s wife who had built the church.

She flinched as Tom approached, waving a light meter near her face. ‘You’ve been a good girl, haven’t you?’ he said softly. ‘No more questions about the wampum being planted?’

‘No,’ said Eygló. ‘No, I promise you.’ She was glad Tom hadn’t been there to listen to what Anya had told them, but he would no doubt hear it from Suzy, one way or another.

‘Excellent,’ Tom said. ‘Then you’ve got nothing to worry about.’ He winked. ‘Just get this take right, eh?’

He returned to his camera.

But his words, which he had meant to be comforting, wrenched Eygló crashing back to the twenty-first century. She thought of Carlotta, who had spent several months at this very spot and whom she had seen lying lifeless behind the church at Glaumbaer less than a week before. She thought of Rósa and her jealousy of Carlotta and now of Eygló herself. And she thought of Tom, only a few metres away from her.

She was destined to spend the next ten days with Tom and Rósa. There was no escape in Greenland — you couldn’t even drive from one settlement to the other.

She was trapped. She was scared. She was so very scared.

The fear, the awfulness of Carlotta’s death, overwhelmed her. She burst into tears.

‘Cut!’ Suzy said, her voice tense with frustration. ‘That’s all for today. We’ll try again tomorrow.’

Aqqaluk said it would be an hour before the speedboat arrived to carry them back across the fjord to Narsarsuaq and their hotel, so Eygló wandered away from the others in search of solitude. There was an outcrop of red rocks just behind the village, on which perched a statue of Leif Erikson, and Eygló headed for it. As in Reykjavík, he was depicted staring towards America. Halfway there.

She sat on the grass at his feet and looked out over the water. A parade of small icebergs lay in the channel, drifting slowly up the fjord from where they had calved from the glacier out of sight just around the headland to her right. She had felt isolated in Iceland many times before, but this was a new kind of isolation. Brattahlíd was not connected to anywhere by road, except a couple of farms in the next fjord. She could easily see the dusty runway and buildings of Narsarsuaq on the other side of the water. That had been an American airbase built during the Second World War, and heavily populated with servicemen during the Cold War. Now it was a plain of dust, drab buildings and fuel tanks, surrounded by rocky hillsides and water. Oddly, it served as one of the two international airports into Greenland.