Майкл Ридпат - The Wanderer

If Beccari had killed Carlotta and Rósa, he had probably killed Nancy as well, and for the same reason. Once Nancy became aware Marco Beccari was involved with the documentary, she would have realized that he hadn’t let on to the others that the letter was a fake. When Kelly had told her about Carlotta’s murder, Nancy may well have remembered the Italian girl from Einar’s visit in Nantucket. If she was the smart woman that everyone said she was, then she would have figured out that there was a possibility Marco Beccari might have killed Carlotta. And rather than coming to the Icelandic police, she might have contacted Beccari himself. And met him in her hotel, after sending Kelly away.

Beccari had just checked out of the Hotel Qaqortoq, and the hotel shuttle bus had taken him to the airport: Magnus recalled spotting the bus stopped outside the terminal. So Magnus and Paulsen retraced their steps.

The airport was no more than a small terminal building, a couple of sheds containing fire trucks and bowsers and a round concrete apron built on a rocky promontory sticking out into the sea. The Air Greenland clerk at the desk said that Beccari had just checked in, but his helicopter had been delayed for an hour. The woman thought she had seen him stroll out of the building.

Magnus and Paulsen made a quick circuit of the terminal and its toilets, which took them only five minutes, then Paulsen suggested they wait for Beccari to return. She began to make some calls.

Magnus kicked his heels for five minutes, but he was impatient. He left the terminal building and walked up to the road. To the left was the route into town: Beccari probably hadn’t gone that way, or they would have spotted him. The road twisted around to the right along the top of some small cliffs above the sea.

Magnus turned right. The road rounded an outcrop of rock and passed beneath a small playground. Two women were sitting on a bench watching three tiny children on a merry-go-round. And a few yards away, sitting on a raised slab of granite staring out to sea, was Professor Beccari.

Magnus climbed a narrow footpath and skirted around the playground behind Beccari. He crept up to him and took a seat right next to him on the granite.

‘Hello, professor.’

For a moment Beccari looked startled to see Magnus, but he swiftly recovered his composure.

‘Ah, inspector. How’s the investigation going?’

‘Pretty good,’ said Magnus.

Beccari nodded. ‘So you are sure that poor Dr Thorsteinsson is your man?’

‘No. Dr Thorsteinsson isn’t our man.’ Magnus fixed his eyes on Beccari.

‘Oh,’ said Beccari, unnerved by Magnus’s stare. ‘Do you have another suspect?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hm.’

Beccari looked away, down to the water below them. Out in the fjord the giant iceberg Magnus had seen the night before stood immobile in the water. The cruise ship had gone. Further in, just a few yards from the cliffs, an empty motorboat bobbed up and down on its mooring.

‘Marco’ — Magnus used his first name — ‘I know that you planted the Columbus letter in the book in the Vatican. And I know your father Emilio forged it.’

Beccari tensed. He was still staring hard at the sea beneath the cliffs. Magnus let the silence stretch as Beccari considered his response. ‘That doesn’t mean I killed anybody,’ he said eventually.

‘We have details of the car you rented at Keflavík Airport when you arrived in the country. We’re checking the cameras at the Hvalfjördur tunnel on the Ring Road for the day Carlotta was murdered. We will soon know what time you drove past them. We know you flew to Narsarsuaq yesterday, giving yourself just enough time to get to the Blomsterdalen and kill Rósa. And I am sure we will be able to place you at the hotel in Reykjavík where Nancy Fishburn was smothered with a pillow.

‘We’ve just started. Now we know where to look, the evidence will pile up. Forensics, fingerprints, DNA, witnesses. We will put you at the site of three murders in two countries, no problem.’

Magnus waited while Beccari digested all this. ‘Of course you will,’ he said eventually. ‘I’m amazed that I’ve gotten this far. I mean, I was so lucky that Rósa and then Einar presented themselves as suspects. If I’d had the chance to plan it properly, you might have found things more difficult.’

Magnus was amazed at the man’s ego and confidence in his own intelligence. Naturally the genius historian could have staged the perfect murder if he had had the time to put his extraordinary mind to the problem!

‘So you didn’t intend to kill Carlotta?’

‘No. I mean, at the back of my mind, I thought I might have to. But I hoped to persuade her.’

‘Persuade her of what?’

‘I don’t know how much of this you have figured out yet,’ said Beccari. He glanced at Magnus, who gave no response.

‘The reason Carlotta got in touch with me in the first place was that she had inquired at the Vatican who had checked out the volume in the past fifty years. There were only three names, and mine was one of them, so she got in touch with me to ask whether I had noticed a letter from Christopher Columbus to his brother. I said I hadn’t. Then she told me that a graduate student had found it, but the Vatican authorities suspected that it was a fake.

‘Naturally, I told her the Vatican must be correct. I wanted her to drop the whole thing.’

‘Presumably you knew your father had faked it?’

‘Yes. He told me all about it at the time, and about Nancy and John’s plan to plant the wampum in Greenland. I was studying at Pisa, and Papa knew I had been researching in the Vatican Secret Archives and so I could get access. I think that’s why he decided it was a good home for the fake. I should have refused him. He thought it was very amusing, and I knew the Fishburns and liked them, but as a professional historian I knew this was wrong. Not just criminally wrong, but morally wrong. It would mislead academics like me, cause them to waste time.’

Beccari sighed. ‘But Papa was very persuasive. He was charming and he was persistent. And beyond that, I was always trying to please him. That’s why I became a historian in the first place. That’s why it has always pained me that he never lived to see me become a professor at Princeton.’ Beccari smiled. ‘He would have loved that. He loved Americans and American universities, and not just because they were some of his best customers. So I said yes.’ For the first time Beccari looked up at Magnus. ‘I planted the letter.

‘I regretted it immediately, but then I just shoved it out of my mind. Which was really stupid. After Papa died I should have gone right back and extracted the letter; then everything would have been fine. But some part of me denied that I had ever planted it; the whole thing had nothing to do with me.’

Beccari shook his head. ‘And then Carlotta’s friend found it.’

‘I can understand why you told her it was a fake. But why did you change your mind and authenticate it?’

‘It became clear that Carlotta wasn’t going to take my word that it was a forgery and drop it. She said they had other evidence pointing to Gudrid settling in Nantucket, and that she and some Icelandic friends of hers were going to make a documentary about it. An international documentary. In that case it would be much better if everyone thought the letter was real.

‘So I went to Rome and took another look at my father’s work. It was extremely well done. So well done that it made me wonder whether he hadn’t actually made other forgeries, but that is by the by. I felt that my best bet was to be bold and bluff it out. So I told Carlotta the letter was real and I let her run with it.

‘I knew there was a good chance I would get found out in the end, but this seemed to me my best chance of escaping detection. I begged Carlotta not to tell anyone that I had missed the letter myself in 1979 — I said it would be embarrassing — and Carlotta was willing to go along with that. She was just so pleased to have my blessing, she would have done anything I asked.