Michael Ridpath - Where the Shadows Lie

Magnus sighed. He could understand Baldur’s position, but it wasn’t going to make his life in Reykjavik easy. ‘And what do you think?’

Vigdis smiled. ‘I think I might learn something from you, and that’s always good. Come on. The rain is easing off, just like I said it would. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got work to do.’

Ingileif was shaken by the visit of the two detectives. An odd couple: the black woman had a flawless Icelandic accent, whereas the tall red-haired man spoke a bit hesitantly with an American lilt. Neither of them had believed her, though.

As soon as she had read about Agnar’s death in the newspaper, she had expected the police. She thought she had perfected her story, but in the end she didn’t think she had done very well. She just wasn’t a good liar. Still, they had gone now. Perhaps they wouldn’t come back, although she couldn’t help thinking that somehow they would.

The shop was empty so she returned to her desk, and pulled out some sheets of paper and a calculator. She stared at all the minus signs. If she delayed the electricity bill, she might just be able to pay Svala, the woman who made the glass pieces in the gallery. Something in her stomach flipped, and an all-too familiar feeling of nausea flowed through her.

This couldn’t go on much longer.

She loved the gallery. They all did, all seven women who owned it and whose pieces were sold there. At first they had been equal partners: her own skill was making handbags and shoes out of fish skin tanned to a beautiful luminescent sheen of different colours. But it emerged that she had a natural talent for promoting and organizing the others. She had increased sales, jacked up prices and insisted on concentrating on the highest quality articles.

Her breakthrough had been the relationship she had developed with Nordidea. The company was based in Copenhagen, but had shops all over Germany selling to interior designers. Icelandic art fitted well into the minimalist spaces that were so highly fashionable there. Her designers made glassware, vases and candleholders of lava, jewellery, chairs, lamps, as well as abstract landscapes and her own fish-skin leather goods. Nordidea bought them all.

The orders from Copenhagen had grown so fast that Ingileif had had to recruit more designers, insisting all the time on the best quality. The only problem was that Nordidea were slow payers. Then, as the credit crunch bit in Denmark and Germany, they became even slower. Then they just stopped paying at all.

There were repayments on a big loan from the bank to be made. On the advice of their bank manager the partners had borrowed in low-interest euros. The rate may well have been low for a year or two, but as the krona devalued the size of the loan had ballooned to the point where the women had no chance of meeting their original repayment schedule.

More importantly for Ingileif, the gallery still owed its designers millions of kronur and these were debts that she was absolutely determined to meet. The relationship with Nordidea had been entirely her doing; it was her mistake and she would pay for it. Her fellow partners had no inkling of how serious the problem was, and Ingileif didn’t want them to find out. She had already spent her legacy from her mother, but that wasn’t enough. These designers weren’t just her friends: Reykjavik was a small place and everyone in the design world knew Ingileif.

If she let all these people down, they wouldn’t forget it, and neither would she.

She picked up the phone to call Anders Bohr at the firm of accountants in Copenhagen that was trying to salvage something from Nordidea’s chaotic finances. She telephoned him once a day, using a mixture of charm and chastisement in the hope of badgering him into giving her something. He seemed to enjoy talking to her, but he hadn’t cracked yet. She could only try. She wished she could afford a plane ticket to have a go at him in person.

A hundred kilometres to the east, a red Suzuki four-wheel-drive pulled up outside a cluster of buildings. There were three structures: a large barn, a large house and a slightly smaller church. A big man climbed out of the car – he was well over six feet tall, with dark hair greying at the temples, a strong jaw hidden by a beard, and dark eyes glittering under bushy eyebrows. He looked more like forty-five than his real age, which was sixty-one.

He was the pastor of Hruni.

He stretched and took a deep gulp of cool, clear air. White puffs of clouds skittered through a pale blue sky. The sun was low, it never rose very high at this latitude, but it emanated a clear light that picked out in shadow the lines of the hills and mountains surrounding Hruni.

Far to the north the sunlight was magnified white on the smooth horizontal surface of the glacier which filled the gaps between mountains. Low hills, meadows that were still brown at this stage of spring, and rock surrounded the hamlet. The village of Fludir, while just on the other side of the ridge to the west, could have been twenty kilometres away. Fifty kilometres away.

The pastor turned to look at his beloved church. It was a small building with white-painted corrugated sides and a red-painted corrugated roof, standing in the lee of a rock-strewn ridge. The church was about eighty years old, but the gravestones around it were gnarled weather-beaten grey stone. Like everywhere in Iceland, the structures were new, but the places were old.

The pastor had just come back from ministering to one of his flock, an eighty-year-old farmer’s wife who was terminally ill with cancer. For all his forbidding presence the pastor was good with his congregation. Some of his colleagues in the Church of Iceland might have a better understanding of God, but the pastor understood the devil, and in a land that lay under constant threat of earthquake, volcano or storm, where trolls and ghosts roamed the countryside, and where dark winters suffocated isolated communities in their cold grip, an understanding of the devil was important.

Every one of the congregation of Hruni was aware of the awful fate of their predecessors who had danced with Satan and been swallowed up into the ground for their sins.

Martin Luther had understood the devil. Jon Thorkelsson Vidalin, from whose seventeenth-century sermons the pastor borrowed heavily, understood him. Indeed, at the farmer’s wife’s request, the pastor had used a blessing from the old pre-1982 liturgy to ward off evil spirits from her house. It had worked. Colour had returned to the old lady’s cheeks and she had asked for some food, the first time she had done that for a week.

The pastor had an air of authority in spiritual matters that gave people confidence. It also made them afraid.

In years gone by, he used to perform an effective double act with his old friend Dr Asgrimur, who had understood how important it was to give his patients the will to heal themselves. But the doctor had been dead nearly seventeen years. His replacement, a young woman who drove over from another village fifteen kilometres away, put all her faith in medicine and did her best to keep the pastor away from her patients.

He missed Asgrimur. The doctor had been the second-best chess player in the area, after the pastor himself, and the second most widely read. The pastor needed the stimulation of a fellow intellectual, especially during the long winter evenings. He didn’t miss his wife, who had walked out on him a few years after Asgrimur’s death, unable to understand or sympathize with her husband’s increasing eccentricity.

Thoughts of Asgrimur reminded the pastor of the news he had read the previous day about the professor who had been found murdered in Lake Thingvellir. He frowned and turned towards his house.