Michael Ridpath - Where the Shadows Lie

O’Malley had decided to call Magnus ‘Swede’ in honour of his Scandinavian ancestry, and an old Swedish partner he had worked with twenty years before. Magnus hadn’t set him straight: if his training officer wanted him to be Swedish, he would be Swedish. He’d been on the streets for only two weeks, but already he had a great respect for O’Malley.

‘Looks quiet,’ O’Malley said. They had been given no information by the dispatcher as to the nature of the disturbance at the convenience store.

Magnus saw a thin figure move towards them from out of the shadows. O’Malley hadn’t seen him. The figure was making a direct line for O’Malley. Magnus tried to reach for his gun, but his arm wouldn’t move. The figure raised his own weapon, a three fifty-seven Magnum, and pointed it at O’Malley. In a panic Magnus managed to get his fingers around his own gun, but he couldn’t lift it. Try as he might, it was too heavy. Magnus opened his mouth to shout a warning to his partner, but no sound came.

The man turned to Magnus and laughed, still pointing his gun at O’Malley. He was young, scrawny and looked as if he hadn’t washed for a week. His eyes were bloodshot and unfocused, he had bad teeth and his complexion, lit up by the light emanating from the convenience store, was like wax. It was if he were dead already, some kind of walking zombie.

O’Malley still hadn’t seen him.

Magnus tried to shout, tried to lift his gun. Nothing. Just an eerie cackle from the gunman.

Then there was a shot. Two. Three. Four. They went on and on.

Finally, O’Malley fell to the ground. Magnus’s gun arm responded. He raised his weapon and fired into the laughing face of the dopehead. He fired and fired again, and again and again…

Magnus woke up.

There was noise outside his window. Reykjavik 101 at play on a Saturday night: laughter, accelerating cars, shrieks, singing, vomiting, and underneath it all, the persistent bass rumble of powerful amplifiers.

The chunky volume of The Lord of the Rings lay open on the floor where he had let it drop a couple of hours earlier. It smothered the slimmer edition of the Saga of the Volsungs.

He checked his watch. 5.05 a.m.

It was an old familiar dream: it had disturbed his nights for two years after that first shooting. Of course the reality had differed from the dream, the dopehead had only fired two shots into O’Malley before Magnus dropped him. But during those long nights Magnus had debated pointlessly with himself whether he could have fired sooner and saved O’Malley, or delayed longer and saved the dopehead.

That was a long time ago. Magnus thought he had taken the second shooting much better than the first, now that he was an experienced cop. Maybe he had thought wrong. His subconscious demanded time to deal with it, and there was nothing he could do about it, however tough a cop he was.

Bummer.

*

Reykjavik Metropolitan Police Headquarters was a busy place early on Sunday morning. Exhausted uniformed police led pale and shaky citizens along the corridors, taking them through the later stages of the weekly Saturday-night arrest cycle.

As soon as Magnus arrived at his desk, he turned on his computer. He smiled as he saw the e-mail from Johnny Yeoh. The kid had come up with the goods.

At the morning meeting, Baldur looked as if he hadn’t slept much either. Dark bags drooped under his eyes, and his cheeks were sunken and grey. Magnus surveyed his fellow detectives around the table; they had lost a lot of their earlier bounce.

Baldur began with the latest reports from forensics. With Agnar, Steve Jubb and Andrea, three of the four sets of fingerprints in the house were accounted for. The footprints were confirmed as Steve Jubb’s. But there were no bloodstains on any of Jubb’s clothes, not even the tiniest spatter.

Baldur asked Magnus if it would be difficult to smash someone over the head and then drag them out of the house and twenty metres down to the lake without getting any blood on your clothes. Magnus had to agree that it would be difficult, but he contended it was not impossible.

‘I spoke to Agnar’s wife yesterday,’ Baldur said. ‘She’s an angry woman. She had no idea of the existence of Andrea. She believed her husband had kept his promise to be a good boy.

‘Also she has been through Agnar’s papers and discovered that he was in a much deeper financial hole than she had realized. Debts, big debts.’

‘What has he been spending the money on?’ Rannveig, the assistant prosecutor asked.

‘Cocaine. She knew about the cocaine. And he gambled. She estimates he owed about thirty million kronur. The credit-card companies were beginning to complain, as was the bank that held the mortgage on their house. But now he’s dead, a life insurance policy will take care of that.’

Magnus did a quick mental calculation. Thirty million kronur was a bit over two hundred thousand dollars. Even by the standards of Iceland’s debt-addicted citizens, Agnar owed a lot of money.

‘All in all, Linda had a motive to kill her husband,’ Baldur continued. ‘She says she was alone with her young children on the Thursday night. But she could easily have slung them in the back of the car and driven to Thingvellir. It’s not as if they could tell us, one’s a baby and the eldest isn’t even two yet. We need to keep her in the frame. Now, Vigdis. Did you speak to the woman from Fludir?’

Vigdis ran through the interview with Ingileif. She had checked out Ingileif’s alibi: she had indeed been at her artist friend’s party until eleven-thirty on the evening Agnar was murdered. And with her ‘old friend’ the painter afterwards.

‘She might have been telling the truth about that, but we think she was lying about other stuff,’ said Magnus.

‘What other stuff?’

‘She was very coy about Agnar,’ said Vigdis. ‘My hunch is there was more going on there than she let on.’

‘We’ll go back and talk to her in a couple of days,’ said Magnus. ‘See if her story sticks.’

‘Any progress on Isildur?’ Baldur asked.

‘Yes,’ said Magnus. ‘I found someone calling himself Isildur on a Lord of the Rings forum on the Internet. I got hold of his e-mail details and asked a buddy of mine in the States to check him out.’

‘Are you sure it’s the same one?’

‘We can’t be absolutely sure, but it looks highly likely to me. This man is obsessed with magic rings and Icelandic sagas, just like Steve Jubb.’

Baldur grunted.

Magnus went on. ‘His name is Lawrence Feldman and he lives in California. He has two houses, one in Palo Alto and one in Trinity County, which is two hundred and fifty miles north of San Francisco. That’s where the e-mail message came from.’

‘Two houses?’ said Baldur. ‘Do we know if he is wealthy?’

‘He’s loaded.’ Although Johnny hadn’t been able to pull the police files on Feldman, if indeed there were any, he had found plenty of stuff on the Internet about him. ‘He was one of the founders of a software company in Silicon Valley, 4Portal. The company was sold last year, and each of the founders walked away with forty million bucks. Feldman was only thirty-one. Not bad going.’

‘So he could easily afford an expensive lawyer,’ said Baldur.

‘And a room at the Hotel Borg for Steve Jubb.’

‘OK. We need to get this guy’s police record, if he has one,’ said Baldur. ‘Can you do that?’

‘I could, but it’s probably easier if the request came from the Reykjavik police,’ said Magnus. ‘More official, fewer favours called in.’

‘We’ll organize that,’ said Baldur.

‘But I could go see him,’ Magnus said.

‘In California?’ Baldur looked doubtful.

‘Sure. It would take a day to get there, a day to get back, but I might get him to tell me what he and Jubb are up to.’