Майкл Ридпат - The Wanderer

‘I don’t know how you guys got here so fast,’ said Magnus. The Forensics Unit prided themselves on their speed to a crime scene, with some justification. Three of them were busying themselves around the body, taking photographs and sketching the surrounding ground. ‘You can’t have been here long?’

‘Fifteen minutes,’ said Edda.

‘Any sign of sexual activity?’

‘Doesn’t look like it at first sight,’ said Edda. ‘Her clothing hasn’t been disturbed, except by us and the district medical officer. No immediate sign of a struggle but we will check for skin under the fingernails.’

‘Had the body been moved after death?’

‘From the lividity, I’d say it hasn’t been moved far. But it could have been dragged here straight after death, of course. We’re checking the whole churchyard, but the overnight rain won’t have helped.’

‘Cause of death the obvious?’

‘Blunt instrument wielded with some force.’

‘It’s interesting it’s a blunt instrument,’ Árni said. ‘The local farmer who looks after the churchyard told us that a pickaxe is missing. He was digging a grave here yesterday and he thinks he left it out overnight. Probably next to the spade.’

Árni pointed to a spade lying on the ground next to the back wall of the church. Magnus scanned the churchyard — there was a pile of freshly dug earth in one corner.

‘It definitely wasn’t a pickaxe,’ said Edda. ‘Or at least not the pick itself. I suppose it could have been the pickaxe head.’

‘Or the handle?’ said Magnus.

‘But why not use the pick?’ said Árni. ‘It would be more effective.’

Magnus considered the question. ‘And messier. Maybe our murderer was squeamish? He didn’t want to split the skull completely.’

‘Or maybe it wasn’t the pickaxe after all,’ said Edda.

‘Any other evidence?’ Magnus asked her.

‘Too early to say; we’re just getting started,’ said Edda, waving towards her colleagues.

‘I’ll let you get on with it,’ said Magnus. He turned to Árni. ‘No one saw Carlotta here last night?’

Carlotta. The victim now had a name and he was using it. She was already more than just a body. Over the coming hours and days she would develop into an ever more complete personality. And Magnus would find who had killed her.

He was pleased to feel that familiar desire for justice stirring within him, a feeling that had been in abeyance in recent years on the streets of Boston.

‘Yes, someone did. Einar Thorsteinsson, an archaeologist working with the TV crew. He was standing at the door to the church when she approached him, asking him if the church was open. He didn’t see where she went; his attention was taken up with the other crew members.’

‘And that was at seven-thirty last night?’

‘About then, yes.’

‘And what time did the child see the man getting into the car?’

‘Much later. Just before ten. She was cycling back from a friend’s house just down the road. She had to be home by ten.’

‘A bit late,’ said Magnus.

‘It’s summer,’ said Árni. He was right; in late August it still didn’t get dark until after nine, and kids played outside late into the evening.

‘Carlotta can’t have hung around here for all that time,’ said Magnus. ‘Someone else would have seen her. She must have gone away and returned for some reason.’

‘Or she was killed earlier and the man the kid saw at ten o’clock had nothing to do with it,’ said Árni.

‘Any chance this could be linked to the rapes you guys are investigating in Akureyri?’ Magnus asked.

‘Unlikely. That guy carries a knife. And you heard Edda say there was no sign of sexual assault.’

‘Still, it’s possible,’ said Magnus. ‘OK. Let’s talk to some people.’

It was seven o’clock by the time Magnus followed Árni’s vehicle from Glaumbaer to the nearest police station at Saudárkrókur. The nine-year-old girl lived in a farm opposite the museum. She had said the man she saw was wearing a coat and a baseball cap. She couldn’t remember what colour the cap was. Or the coat. The man was really old, like her dad, who was thirty-two. His car was silver and not a 4 × 4. She couldn’t remember seeing Carlotta’s little blue rental car.

Her parents hadn’t noticed anything at all that evening; they had been watching TV.

The curator of the folk museum, a woman of about forty who lived in Saudárkrókur, remembered Carlotta hanging around the museum after it had closed. Carlotta was watching the filming from a distance, and her car was parked alone in the museum car park, not outside the church where it had been left overnight. That suggested that Carlotta had indeed left Glaumbaer after talking to Einar, and returned later. The curator left the museum soon after the TV crew, at about seven-thirty, but at that point she hadn’t noticed whether the car was still in the car park. She returned to work at eight-fifteen the next morning, after the body had been discovered by Eygló.

A couple of neighbouring farms lay within a few hundred metres of the folk museum, but none of their inhabitants had seen anything. Once again, by ten o’clock it was almost dark; at seven-thirty Carlotta and her killer would have been in plain daylight and much more noticeable.

There was no sign of a murder weapon, either the pickaxe or any other likely blunt instrument. Or Carlotta’s phone.

That last was a problem. These days phones, especially smartphones, provided a wealth of information for investigators: not just records of phone calls made, but emails, Internet browsing history, Facebook pages, everything.

It was highly unlikely that a twenty-six-year-old student had travelled to Iceland without her phone. So the murderer had taken it, which was a clever thing to do.

The drive to Saudárkrókur took about twenty minutes. It was still daylight, but the sun was slinking slowly down towards the mountains to the west, casting the broad valley of the Héradsvötn river in a soft yellow glow. The drive gave Magnus some time to consider what they knew so far. Which was very little. Their chief suspect was a man with a hat driving a silver car.

Unless he was the Akureyri rapist. Akureyri was about an hour away from Glaumbaer. Árni was right, it was unlikely, but it was an avenue they should pursue.

The first forty-eight hours of any murder investigation were key. They had not got very far in the first twenty-four. They needed to find out more about Carlotta Mondini.

Saudárkrókur appeared before him at the head of a fjord, a string of buildings hugging the shore and leading to a harbour. Out to sea, near the mouth of the fjord, the island of Drangey lurked, a platform raised several hundred feet above the water, its cliffs shimmering yellow in the sun.

The police station was in the church square in the centre of town. Magnus parked next to Árni’s car, and followed him into the building, which was buzzing with policemen in and out of uniform. Árni introduced Magnus to a detective from Akureyri named Björn, whom Magnus remembered working with many years before on an earlier case, and a couple of local constables.

‘And this is Chief Superintendent Jón Kári.’

Magnus turned to see a tall man with thick fair hair and ruddy cheeks approaching him, hand outstretched. ‘Welcome to Saudárkrókur,’ he said with a reserved smile.

Although his uniform bore the insignia of chief superintendent, Jón Kári was younger than Magnus, probably not more than thirty-five. Iceland was a sparsely populated country outside Reykjavík, and the rural regional chief superintendents could be in charge of a large geographical area that contained a population of only a few thousand and a dozen policemen. In Magnus’s experience, they could be defensive towards officers from the capital, especially Magnus, the Kani Cop .