Michael Ridpath - Where the Shadows Lie

He had woken up a few hours later with his head exploding, his bladder full and his mouth dry. He crawled back into the police station at about ten o’clock. The rest of the detectives grinned and whispered as he sat at his desk. Within a minute Baldur had told him with a thin smile that the Big Salmon wanted to see him.

‘I am very sorry I have let you down, Commissioner,’ Magnus repeated. ‘I do appreciate what you have done for me here, and I am sure I can help.’

The Commissioner grunted. ‘Thorkell seems to think you have made a good start. How is the Agnar Haraldsson case going? I heard about the discovery of the saga. Is it genuine?’

‘Possibly, but we don’t know yet for sure. It looks like the Brit Steve Jubb was trying to buy it from Agnar. There was a problem, they had a dispute, and Jubb killed him.’

‘Jubb still isn’t talking?’

‘Not yet. But there’s this guy Lawrence Feldman who goes by the Internet alias of Isildur, who seems to have financed the deal. We know where he lives. If I put some pressure on him, I’m sure he’ll talk.’

‘So why don’t you?’

‘He’s in California. Baldur won’t authorize it.’

The Commissioner nodded. ‘Can you work today, or do you need to take the day off sick?’

Magnus suspected that this wasn’t a kind offer from a concerned superior. It was a direct question of his commitment.

‘I can work today.’

‘Good. And don’t let me down again. Or else I will send you straight back to Boston and I don’t care who is after you.’

Ingileif watched as Professor Moritz carefully carried the envelope containing the old scraps of vellum to his car outside while a female colleague took the bigger seventeenth-century volume. A couple of uniformed police officers and the young detective called Arni danced around in attendance.

She had expected to feel relief. She felt nothing of the kind. She was drowning, drowning beneath a wave of guilt.

The secret that her family had kept for so many generations, hundreds and hundreds of years, was disappearing out of the door. It had been an astounding achievement to keep it so quiet for so long. She could imagine her ancestors, fathers and eldest sons, huddled over a peat fire in their simple turf-roofed farmhouse, reading the saga over and over to each other during the long winter nights. It must have been difficult keeping its existence from extended family, neighbours, in-laws. But they had succeeded. And they hadn’t sold out. A farmer’s life in Iceland during the last three centuries was extremely precarious. Even when they had endured unimaginable poverty and starvation, they hadn’t taken the easy way. They had needed the money more than her.

What right did she have to cash it in now?

Her brother, Petur, had spoken the truth when he had urged her not to sell. And he hated the saga even more than she did.

She looked around the gallery. The objects on display – the vases, the fish-skin bags, the candle-holders, the lavascapes – were truly beautiful. But did they matter so much?

The police said that the saga would be needed for evidence. They would keep its existence quiet while the investigation was still under way. But eventually everyone would know. Not just Icelanders, but the whole world. Tolkien fans from America, England, the rest of Europe would want to find out everything about the document. Every corner of the secret would be raised to the glare of global publicity.

Eventually, she would probably be allowed to sell the saga. In the open, under the glare of publicity, she would no doubt get a handsome price, if the Icelandic government didn’t somehow manage to confiscate it from her. If she could just keep the gallery going for a few months longer, it might survive.

Until Agnar’s death, keeping the gallery open was the most important thing in her life. Now she appreciated how wrong she was.

The gallery was going bust because she had made a poor business judgment. The kreppa made matters worse, but she should never have trusted Nordidea. She was to blame and she should have taken the consequences.

Outside, the professor and the police climbed into their cars and drove off. Ingileif felt trapped in the tiny gallery. She grabbed her bag, switched off the light and locked up. So what if she lost a sale or two that morning?

She walked down the hill, her mind in incoherent turmoil. She soon reached the bay, and walked along the bike path which ran along the shore. She headed east, towards the solid block of Mount Esja, its top smothered in cloud. The breeze skipping in from across the water chilled her face. The sounds of Reykjavik traffic merged with the cries of seagulls. A pair of ducks paddled in circles a few yards out from the red volcanic pumice that served as a sea wall.

She felt so alone. Her mother had died a few months before, her father when she was twelve. Birna, her sister, wouldn’t care or understand. She would be sympathetic for a few minutes, but she was too self-absorbed, stuck in her nice house and her bad marriage and her bottles of vodka. She had never been interested in Gaukur’s Saga, and after their father died she had picked up their mother’s hostility to the family legend. She had told Ingileif she couldn’t care less what Ingileif did with it.

Ingileif knew she should speak to Petur, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. He had hated the saga with a passion for what he thought it had done to their father. Yet, even he had believed that it would be wrong to sell. She had assured him that Agnar would be able to do a deal while keeping the secret safe, and only then had Petur reluctantly agreed. He would be angry with her now, and justifiably so. Not much sympathy there.

He must have read about Agnar’s murder in the papers, but he hadn’t been in touch with her yet. Thank God.

It was ironic. She had been determined not to let her father’s death screw her up like it had screwed up the other members of her family. She was the sane, down-to-earth one, or so she thought.

And now poor Aggi had been murdered. Foolishly she had tried to hide the existence of the saga from the police. As a plan, that was never going to work. And even now she was hiding something.

She glanced down at her bag. Where she had slipped the envelope just before the police came to take away the saga. The other envelope.

She recalled the big red-haired detective with the slight American accent. He was trying to catch the man who had murdered Agnar, and she had some information that would be certain to help him. It was far too late to try to keep it quiet, the police would find out in the end. The betrayal had been committed, the mistake had been made, the consequences were playing themselves out. There was nothing she could do to put the saga back in its safe.

She stopped in front of the Hofdi House, the elegant white-timbered mansion where Gorbachev had met Reagan when she was six years old.

She dug the detective’s number out of her purse, and punched it into her mobile phone.

Colby was waiting on the sidewalk outside the bank when it opened. Walked straight in to the cashier, first in line, and withdrew twelve thousand dollars in cash. Then she drove to an outdoor equipment store and bought camping gear.

When the thug with the gun had left her apartment she had been too scared to scream. Richard hadn’t been any help: he had scurried out of the bathroom muttering how his legal career was too important to be caught up with criminals, and she should rethink her friendships. She had watched dully as he had scrambled to get into his clothes and left her. He forgot his jacket.

Tough.

She was glad she hadn’t told the thug about Iceland. It had been a close call, she had been so scared that she had almost given it away, but the change to Sweden at the last minute was inspired. Magnus had told her that he used to have the nickname ‘Swede’, and that had stuck in her brain.