Michael Ridpath - Where the Shadows Lie

But he had no choice. She had given him no choice.

He composed a brief report to Williams, telling him he was safe and in e-mail contact should Williams learn anything about the trial date.

He thought of writing to Ollie, as his brother now called himself, but decided against it. The FBI had informed Ollie that Magnus was disappearing, and an agent had taken his stuff from the guestroom in Ollie’s house. That would have to be enough – the less Magnus had to do with Ollie the better. He realized that it wasn’t just Colby who was at risk from the Soto gang, his brother might be too.

Magnus closed his eyes. Nothing he could do about that now except hope that the gangsters would ignore them all.

Oh, God. Maybe Colby was right. Maybe he should just have pretended that he hadn’t heard Lenahan’s conversation.

Of course, in his beloved sagas, the heroes always did their duty. But then most of their relatives came to a bloody end before the story was finished. It was easy to be brave with your own skin, much harder with other people’s. He felt more like a coward than a hero, safe in Iceland when his brother and his girlfriend were in danger.

But then the ancient Icelandic reaction kicked in. If they touched a hair of Colby’s or Ollie’s head, he would make the bastards pay. All of them.

Baldur held another conference at two o’clock that afternoon. The team were still fresh and enthusiastic.

He began with the initial findings from the autopsy. It looked likely that Agnar had drowned; there was some mud found in his lungs, which suggested that he was still breathing when he hit the water. As Magnus had suspected, the fragments of stone in the victim’s head wound were from the dirt road rather than the lake floor.

There were small traces of cocaine in the victim’s blood, and some alcohol, but not nearly enough to cause intoxication. The pathologist’s conclusion was that the victim was struck on the back of the head with a stone, fell unconscious and was dragged into the lake where he drowned. No surprises there.

Baldur and Vigdis had interviewed Andrea. She had admitted that her affair with Agnar had been going on for about a month. She was besotted with him, she had spent most of the previous year trying to seduce him, and had finally succeeded after a drunken student party to which he had been invited. She had spent one weekend with him at the summer house. Her finger-prints were indeed one of the two sets that remained unidentified.

Andrea said that Agnar had seemed terrified that his wife would discover what had happened. He had promised her after she had caught him with a student four years before that he would remain faithful, and until Andrea he had kept his word. Andrea’s impression was that Agnar was scared of Linda.

Magnus outlined the theory that Isildur was a nickname for a Lord of the Rings fan, and that Steve Jubb was one himself. One or two of the faces around the table looked a little uncomfortable. Maybe Arni wasn’t the only one to have seen the Lord of the Rings movie.

Baldur handed round the list of entries from Agnar’s appointments diary. Dates, times, and the names of people he had met, mostly fellow academics or students. He had been away on a two-day seminar at the University of Uppsala in Sweden three weeks before. And one afternoon the previous week was blocked out with the word ‘Hruni’.

‘Hruni is near Fludir, isn’t it?’ Baldur said.

‘Just a couple of kilometres away,’ Rannveig, the assistant prosecutor, said. ‘I’ve been there. There’s nothing but the church and a farm.’

‘Perhaps the entry refers to the dance rather than the place,’ Baldur said. ‘Something collapsing that afternoon? A disaster?’

Magnus had heard of Hruni. Back in the seventeenth century the pastor of Hruni was notorious for the wild parties he held in his church at Christmas. One Christmas Eve the devil was seen hanging around outside, and the following morning the whole church and its congregation had been swallowed up by the earth. Since then the phrase ‘Hruni dance’ had slipped into the language to mean something that was falling apart.

‘The little boy who died young came from Fludir,’ said Vigdis. ‘Isildur Asgrimsson. And here’s his sister.’ She pointed to a name on the list of appointments. ‘Ingileif Asgrimsdottir, sixth of April, two-thirty. At least, I’m pretty sure that she was the boy’s sister. I can check.’

‘Do that,’ said Baldur. ‘And if you are right, track her down and interview her. We’re assuming that Isildur is a foreigner but we need to keep an open mind.’

He picked up a sheet of paper on the conference table in front of him. ‘We have searched Steve Jubb’s hotel room and the forensics people are examining his clothes. We found a couple of interesting text messages that had been sent on his mobile phone. Or we think they might be interesting, we just don’t know. Take a look at the transcriptions.’

He passed around the sheet, on which two short sentences had been typed. They were in a language that Magnus didn’t recognize, didn’t even begin to recognize. ‘Does anyone know what this is?’ Baldur asked.

There were frowns and slowly shaking heads around the table. Someone tentatively suggested Finnish, someone else was sure it wasn’t. But Magnus noticed that Arni was shifting uncomfortably again.

‘Arni?’ Magnus said.

Arni glared at Magnus, and then swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. ‘Elvish,’ he said, very quietly.

‘What?’ Baldur demanded. ‘Speak up!’

‘They might be in Elvish. I think Tolkien created some Elvish languages. This might be one of them.’

Baldur put his head in his hands and then glared at his subordinate. ‘You’re not going to tell me the huldufolk did this, are you now Arni?’

Arni shrank. The huldufolk, or hidden people, were elf-like creatures who were supposed to live all over Iceland in rocks and stones. In everyday conversation Icelanders were proud of their belief in these beings, and, famously, highways had been diverted to avoid removing rocks in which they were known to live. Baldur did not want his murder investigation to be derailed by the most troublesome of all Iceland’s many superstitions.

‘Arni could be right,’ said Magnus. ‘We know Steve Jubb and Isildur, whoever he is, were doing a deal with Agnar. If they needed to communicate with each other about it they could have used a code. They are both Lord of the Rings fans: what better than Elvish?’

Baldur pursed his lips. ‘All right, Arni. See if you can find someone in Iceland who speaks Elvish, and ask them if they recognize what this says. And then get them to translate it.’

Baldur glanced around the table. ‘If Steve Jubb won’t tell us, we need to find out who this Isildur is ourselves. We need to get in touch with the British police in Yorkshire to see if they can help us with Jubb’s friends. And we need to check all the bars and restaurants in Reykjavik to find out if Jubb met anyone else apart from Agnar. Perhaps Isildur is here in town; we won’t know until we ask around. And I am going to interview Agnar’s wife.’ He doled out specific tasks for everyone around the table, except Magnus, and the meeting was over.

Magnus followed the inspector into the corridor. ‘Do you mind if I join Vigdis to interview the sister of the kid who died?’

‘No, go ahead,’ said Baldur.

‘What do you think so far?’ Magnus asked.

‘What do you mean, what do I think?’ Baldur said, stopping.

‘Oh, come on. You have to have a hunch.’

‘I keep an open mind. I gather evidence until it points to one conclusion. Isn’t that what you do in America?’

‘Right,’ Magnus said.

‘Now, if you want to help, find me Isildur.’