Майкл Ридпат - The Wanderer

‘So, it all looked good. Until Carlotta called me three weeks ago and said she wanted to speak to me again about the letter. She had doubts and she was going to talk to Einar about them. In fact, she was going to Iceland to see him.

‘I knew I was in trouble. I almost confessed then. But the consequences to my career would have been catastrophic. I have my enemies in the academic world, especially at Princeton, and they would have lost no time in plunging in the knife. For someone in my position to have planted a forgery would be a scandal. It would ruin my reputation and the reputation of the university. And... And my reputation is important to me. I have made a major contribution to the understanding of history, and I have more to do. Quite simply, I am one of the top historians in the world. Without history... I am nothing. I tried to imagine what would happen to me if I was unmasked as a forger, and I just couldn’t. It was too terrible.’

Beccari was searching Magnus’s face for understanding. Magnus could believe he wasn’t exaggerating. For someone with an ego like Beccari’s, the shame of being unmasked as a forger would be too horrible to contemplate.

‘I see,’ Magnus said. ‘So you agreed to meet Carlotta at Glaumbaer?’

‘Yes. At that point I didn’t plan to kill her. I just wanted to hear what she had to say and find some way to keep her quiet. I typed up an offer for her to take up a post in the history department at Princeton. It might have come in useful.’

‘And what did she have to say?’

‘She had just read some interview with me online from a few years back, where I had said that my father was a rare-book dealer. That he was the one who had gotten me interested in history — which was true, of course. Anyway, she remembered from her visit to Nancy Fishburn in Nantucket that Nancy’s husband had collected rare books. She had done some googling, and discovered that there used to be a rare-book dealer called Emilio Beccari and she even found the introduction of an obscure pamphlet on antiquarian books where his name was mentioned along with John Fishburn. So she wanted to know if Emilio was my father, and if I could explain the connection. Apparently she had been in touch with an archaeologist in Greenland who had some doubts about the wampum as well.

‘I didn’t do a good job. I admitted that my father’s name was Emilio, but I said I had no idea who his clients were. It was just a coincidence that I had taken out the volume in which the letter was found.’

Beccari shook his head. ‘She just didn’t believe me. Once she started considering the possibility that the letter was a fake, it was obvious that I must have been the one who planted it. She said she was going to Saudárkrókur that very evening, and that she would tell Einar.

‘I pleaded with her. I showed her the letter offering her the job at Princeton. I offered to outright bribe her, give her cash. But none of that worked. It just proved to her that the letter was a fake and that I had planted it.

‘She turned and walked away. We were standing at the back of the churchyard, away from the road, out of sight of anyone. I knew once she reached the front of the church and went through the gate, it would all be over. My reputation, my chair at Princeton, my books, my ideas, everything. In those seconds I realized that if I let her tell the world what she knew, I would kill myself. I would have to kill myself — I would have no choice. I couldn’t face my colleagues, my family, the memory of my father. Myself. I would have to end my life.

‘And then I thought: Why? Why should I have to end my life? Why not hers?’

Beccari licked his lips and swallowed.

‘I had no time to think it through: I had to act. There was a spade and a pickaxe leaning against the back wall of the church. So I grabbed the pickaxe and whacked her over the head — not with the pick itself, I couldn’t do that, but with the flat bit. She crumpled.’

He paused, swallowing again, staring at his feet. ‘I could tell right away she was dead. Then I started thinking. No one knew we were meeting — Carlotta had told me that. The churchyard was quiet, there was no one around, and although there were some neighbouring farms, they were quiet too. It was late — still daylight, but everyone was at home. I dragged her behind the church. I knew I had to get rid of the pickaxe, and then I had the idea of getting rid of Carlotta’s laptop and phone too, so you wouldn’t find her emails to me. Her phone was in her pocket, and the laptop was in her car. I threw them into the sea with the pickaxe on the way back to Reykjavík.

‘Then I went to meet the TV documentary crew a couple of days later in Ólafsvík as though nothing had happened. And it seemed to work. You never suspected me. It looked like I was going to be lucky.’

One of the little kids from the playground scrambled over to where Magnus and Beccari were sitting. He stopped right in front of them, inches away from a ten-foot drop down to the road. Magnus was alarmed and turned to look at the two women on the bench. They smiled and waved — they didn’t care that the kid was about to plunge to his death. Greenlanders clearly had a different sense of personal risk.

Beccari avoided the child’s big brown eyes. ‘Your mom wants you,’ Magnus said in English, pointing to the women. The child may or may not have understood the words, but he turned and ran back to the playground.

‘And then Nancy Fishburn showed up in Iceland?’

Beccari nodded. ‘The first I heard of it was an email she sent me. She said she had spoken to Suzy and now she wanted to speak to me. Could I meet her at her hotel in Reykjavík?

‘So I did. At first, it looked good. She had told Suzy about the hoax, but Suzy had wanted to keep it all a secret, and Nancy had agreed. But it turned out Nancy had just heard about Carlotta’s murder. I said that had nothing to do with me. I’m not sure whether or not she believed me, but she said she was going to have to speak to the police and tell them what she knew about me.

‘I couldn’t let her do that. So I smothered her with a pillow while she was sitting down in a chair in her hotel room. It wasn’t hard — she wasn’t strong. Then I lifted her on to the bed, and hoped people would think she had died of natural causes.’

‘It almost worked,’ said Magnus.

‘It was a shame — she was a good friend of my father’s, but she had to die.’

‘So what about Rósa?’ Magnus asked.

‘Ah, Rósa. Apparently she was following Carlotta and saw me in Glaumbaer. I had no idea. She didn’t know me then, but she did recognize me when she met me getting on the plane to Greenland. Once again, I had no idea. In fact, she was quite friendly to me.’

‘So she didn’t say anything about identifying you?’

‘No, not then. But the evening I left the crew and came here to Qaqortoq, she called me. She told me she had seen me at Glaumbaer, and she was pretty sure I had killed Carlotta. She had also figured out that the whole thing was probably a hoax: she guessed that I must have been involved somehow — she was a smart woman.

‘I told her she was crazy, of course. But then she said she had a deal for me. She said she wouldn’t tell anyone she had recognized me if I told her all about the hoax. She realized that if she told the police she had seen me at Glaumbaer, the hoax would come out and it would be really damaging for Einar. She said she only had a few more months to live and all she cared about was him.

‘I thought about it, and decided to trust her. So I told her what I knew about the hoax: the Columbus letter and the wampum. I promised I would do my best to keep it quiet, and she said that as long as the hoax remained a secret, she wouldn’t tell the police about me.