Майкл Ридпат - The Wanderer

‘Tell me,’ Magnus said quietly.

‘Tell you what?’ said Einar, with an attempt at defiance.

‘Tell me about Rósa and Carlotta.’

Einar slumped back in his chair and nodded to himself. ‘All right. You know that Carlotta and I had an affair several years back, but then Rósa found out about it and told me to stop? And I did?’

Magnus nodded.

‘OK. And, as I told you in Ólafsvík, I had arranged to see Carlotta in Saudárkrókur last week, and Rósa knew nothing about it?’

‘Yes.’

‘So when I saw Carlotta behind that church with her head cracked open, my first thought, my very first thought, was that Rósa had killed her. I knew how angry Rósa would be if she had discovered we were meeting. Then, well, then I thought I was being paranoid; I mean, Rósa can be an angry woman, but she wouldn’t actually kill anyone. But I decided to keep quiet about recognizing Carlotta. It wasn’t just so that Rósa wouldn’t find out that Carlotta and I were meeting; it was also because I thought maybe she had killed her. And if it wasn’t her, but someone else, then you would find the killer and it wouldn’t matter that I knew Carlotta. I thought at the time Eygló hadn’t recognized her from Greenland, so... well... so I kept quiet.’

‘Even though you thought Rósa might be a murderer?’

‘If she had killed Carlotta then it was all my fault. Or mostly my fault. She’s my wife, goddammit, I wasn’t going to shop her to you!’

‘OK,’ said Magnus. ‘Did you talk to her about it?’

‘How could I? She called me when she saw the murder on the news. I didn’t know how to ask her if she had killed Carlotta, at least on the phone. So I just kept it matter of fact. I was expecting her to ask me all about it, to demand to know what Carlotta was doing in Iceland, but the thing is she didn’t.’ Einar’s expression became even more pained. ‘Afterwards I wondered why she didn’t.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It felt like she had known all along. That Carlotta was in Iceland. That Carlotta was dead. I mean before she had heard it on the news. Which implied...’

‘... that she had killed her?’

Einar nodded. ‘That’s what I thought, although I couldn’t admit it to myself, so I just didn’t think too hard about it. But I decided to keep quiet about knowing Carlotta in the hope you guys would turn up someone else — that rapist in Akureyri or something.’

Einar swallowed. ‘But the thing is, I was devastated when I saw Carlotta’s dead body. And if Rósa had killed her... She shouldn’t have done that. I was angry. I was ashamed. I was suspicious. I blamed myself, I blamed her, I blamed Carlotta — she shouldn’t even have been in Glaumbaer.’

He gathered himself. ‘So, Rósa and I agreed not to talk about it until I got back to Reykjavík.’

‘Which wasn’t until the night before you came out here?’

‘That’s right.’ Einar breathed deeply. ‘The problem was that I spent the night before that in Ólafsvík with Eygló.’

‘We know,’ said Magnus.

‘Yes, your partner saw me, didn’t she? Whatever it may look like, we didn’t sleep together, or at least we didn’t have sex. But after the whole Carlotta thing, I couldn’t hide that from Rósa. We had to be completely honest. I had to stop hiding things, so I told her, that evening.’

‘And she didn’t like it?’

‘No. She didn’t believe nothing happened. She started a row. It lasted all night. And, eventually, I asked her about Carlotta.’

‘What did she say?’

‘At first she denied she knew Carlotta was in Iceland before she saw her murder on the news, but by that stage I could tell she was lying. And then she told me the truth. Or I think it was the truth; at least I did then. When she was telling it to me.’

Magnus waited.

‘She knew I was seeing Carlotta. She read my emails, even though I had password-protected them — she guessed the password, and they were on my Gmail account so she could access them any time from her own computer. So she knew Carlotta was coming to Iceland, and where we were meeting in Saudárkrókur. She told me she was furious, and she wanted to catch us. She was going to scare both of us into stopping the affair, or what she assumed was an affair.

‘She decided to come back early from her trip to London. She drove up to Blönduós and tailed Carlotta to Glaumbaer. She saw us filming and Carlotta talking to me. Then she followed Carlotta up to the fjord near Drangey and then back to Glaumbaer later. She assumed Carlotta had arranged to meet me there: she wanted to catch us red-handed.’

Magnus was making notes as he listened. ‘And Carlotta didn’t spot her?’ It was difficult to follow people on empty Icelandic roads.

Einar shrugged. ‘Never underestimate Rósa,’ he said. ‘And Carlotta wouldn’t have been looking out for her.’

‘OK. Then what happened at Glaumbaer?’

‘She says ...’ Einar hesitated. ‘She said that she saw Carlotta go into the churchyard. And then after about twenty minutes a man came out to Carlotta’s car, took something out and then returned to the churchyard. Rósa waited, but there was no sign of Carlotta, although she did see the man leave the folk museum car park on foot and walk along the road. Rósa waited ten minutes and then sneaked into the churchyard herself. There she saw Carlotta’s body.’

‘Did she say why she didn’t report it?’ said Magnus.

‘She was going to. And then she thought, just like I did the next morning, that she would be the obvious suspect. So she just left. Drove straight back to Reykjavík.’

Magnus remembered it was possible to get from the churchyard at Glaumbaer to the folk museum round the back of the church away from the road.

‘Who was this man? Did she recognize him?’

‘No.’

‘Was he young or old? Did he look like an Icelander? What did he take out of Carlotta’s car?’

‘I don’t know!’ protested Einar. ‘I didn’t ask anything about him, so she didn’t tell me. I wasn’t even sure there was a man.’

‘I can see that,’ Magnus acknowledged. But he was pretty sure he knew the answer to his last question: Carlotta’s HP laptop.

‘So we kind of made peace,’ Einar said. ‘Or at any rate we fell asleep. But the next morning, we started arguing again. Did we trust each other? I wasn’t going to believe that she hadn’t killed Carlotta if she wasn’t going to accept that I hadn’t had sex with Eygló.’ Einar sighed. ‘It was stupid, but we were both tired. Me especially. I wasn’t making a lot of sense.’

‘So then she came after you. To Greenland?’

‘Yes,’ said Einar.

‘Why was that? To try to straighten things out?’

‘Yes. But not just that. She had something else to tell me.’

‘Which was?’

‘Her cancer was back. And it was going to kill her. Soon.’

‘Did you know that the wampum find and the Columbus letter are an elaborate hoax?’

Magnus looked steadily at Einar, whose eyes flicked briefly up towards him.

‘They are not a hoax. They’ve been thoroughly checked out.’

‘They are a hoax, Einar. A hoax perpetrated by a woman named Nancy Fishburn and her husband and a friend of theirs who was a rare-book dealer. You met her in Nantucket.’

Einar stared at Magnus. ‘You are not serious?’

‘I am. Her granddaughter told me so.’

‘Her granddaughter is lying. Or confused. She was the one who confused Eygló back in Nantucket in a bar. She was drunk.’

‘I don’t think so. Nancy told her all about it last week, and she told me. Are you surprised?’

The anger in Einar’s eyes fizzled out. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. ‘Why should I be surprised? Everything else has fallen apart, why shouldn’t that?’