Michael Ridpath - Where the Shadows Lie

The thug had believed her. She was sure of it.

She hoped it would take him and his friends some time to realize their mistake, but she wasn’t going to hang around. She certainly wasn’t going anywhere near Magnus. Now she took Magnus’s warnings seriously. She wasn’t taking any risks with credit cards, or hotels or friends. No one would know where she was.

She was going to disappear.

From the camp shop she went to the supermarket. Then, with the trunk full of supplies, she drove west. Her plan was eventually to head north, to Maine or New Hampshire or somewhere, and to lose herself in the wilderness. But first she had something to do. She pulled off the highway in the suburb of Wellesley. She found an Internet cafe, grabbed a cup of coffee.

The first e-mail was to her boss, telling him that she was not going to be at work and she couldn’t explain why, but he shouldn’t worry. The second was to her mother, saying more or less the same thing. There was no way to phrase it so that her mother wouldn’t drive herself demented with panic, so Colby didn’t even try.

The third was to Magnus.

It was no more than a ten-minute walk from police headquarters to the Hofdi House, where Ingileif had asked to meet Magnus. He was feeling a little better after the sausage he had picked up from the coffee shop in the bus station on his way back from the Commissioner’s office, but he still needed to do all he could to clear his head.

He felt so stupid. His apology to the National Police Commissioner had been sincere; he appreciated all the man had done for him, and Magnus had let him down. His fellow detectives had initially appeared to be in awe of him; now they would just think he was a joke. Not a good start.

He was also scared. Alcoholism ran in families. If there was a gene for it, he suspected that he had it. It had been a very close call in college. And learning about his father’s infidelity had disturbed something deep inside him. Even now, with his ears ringing with the consequences of his stupidity, part of him just wanted to take a detour to the Grand Rokk and buy a beer. And then another. Of course it would screw everything up. But that was why he wanted to do it.

This was dangerous. Somehow he had to cram what Sigurbjorg had told him back in its box.

Throwing himself into the Agnar case would help. He wondered what it was that Ingileif wanted to speak to him about. She had sounded tense on the phone.

He didn’t trust her. The more he thought about it, the more likely it seemed that the saga was a forgery drawn up by Agnar. Ingileif was his accomplice, to add authenticity. Their relationship had been very close, perhaps it still was very close, the ballet-dancing literature student notwithstanding.

The Hofdi House stood all alone in a grassy square between two busy roads that ran along the shore. A solitary figure was perched on a low wall beside the squat white building.

‘Thank you for coming,’ Ingileif said.

‘No problem,’ said Magnus. ‘That’s why I gave you my number.’

He sat next to Ingileif on the wall. They were facing the bay. A steady breeze rolled small clouds through the pale blue sky, their shadows skittering over the sparkling grey water. In the far distance Magnus could just make out the glacier of Snaefellsnes, a white blur floating above the sea.

Ingileif was tense, sitting bolt upright on the wall, shoulders back, forehead knitted in a frown accentuating the nick in her eyebrow. She looked like so many other girls in Reykjavik, slim, blonde with high cheekbones. But there was something about her that set her apart, a determination, a purposefulness, a sense that despite the doubts and worries that were obviously troubling her, she knew what she wanted and was going to get it, that Magnus found appealing. She seemed to be debating with herself whether or not to tell him something.

He sat in silence. Waiting. He saw that there was also a small scar on her left cheek. He hadn’t noticed that before.

Eventually she spoke. Someone had to. ‘You know this place is haunted?’

‘The Hofdi House?’ Magnus looked over his shoulder at the elegant white building.

‘Yes. The ghost is a young girl who poisoned herself after she was convicted of incest with her brother. She scared the wits out of the people who used to live here.’

‘Icelanders have got to learn to be a little braver about ghosts,’ said Magnus.

‘Not just Icelanders. It used to be the British consulate. The consul was so terrified that he demanded that the British Foreign Ministry allow him to move the consulate to another address. Apparently she keeps turning the lights on and off.’ Ingileif sighed. ‘I feel quite sorry for her.’

Magnus thought he detected a quiver in her voice. Odd. Most ghosts had had a tough time in life, but still. ‘Is that what you wanted to speak to me about?’ he asked. ‘You want me to check it out? All the lights seem to be off at the moment.’

‘Oh, no,’ she replied, smiling weakly. ‘I just wanted to find out how the investigation was going.’

‘We’re making progress,’ Magnus said. ‘We need to track down Steve Jubb’s accomplice. And we haven’t verified the authenticity of the saga yet.’

‘Oh, it’s authentic.’

‘Is it?’ said Magnus. ‘Or is it an elaborate hoax dreamed up by Agnar? Is that why he was killed? Steve Jubb found out he was being taken for a ride?’

Ingileif laughed. The tension seemed to flow from her body. Magnus waited for her to finish.

‘Well?’ he said.

‘I’d love you to be right,’ Ingileif said. ‘And I can see why you might think that. But, of course, I know it’s genuine. It has over-shadowed my whole life, and that of every member of my family for generations.’

‘So you say.’

‘Don’t you believe me?’

‘Not really,’ Magnus said. ‘You don’t have a great track record for telling me the truth.’

The smile disappeared. Ingileif sighed. ‘I don’t, do I? And I can see how from your point of view you have to consider the possibility that it’s a forgery. But your lab guys will do tests on it, carbon-14 or whatever, and they’ll tell you how old the vellum is. And the seventeenth-century copy.’

‘Maybe,’ said Magnus.

Ingileif’s grey eyes looked straight at his. For a moment Magnus found it unsettling, but he held her gaze. ‘I want to show you something,’ she said.

She rummaged in her bag and pulled out a yellowing envelope.

She handed it to Magnus. A British stamp, same king as last time, and the same handwriting.

‘This is the reason I asked you to meet me. I should have shown it to you yesterday, but I didn’t.’

Magnus opened the envelope. Inside was a sheet of notepaper.

Merton College

Oxford

12 October 1948

Dear Isildarson

Thank you for your extraordinary letter. What an astonishing tale! The part I found the most amazing was the inscription ‘The Ring of Andvari’ in runes. One never knows with the Icelandic sagas. They are so realistic, yet the scholarly fashion is to dismiss them as fiction. Yet here is the very ring, at least a thousand years old, that appears in Gaukur’s Saga! After the discovery of his farm buried under all that ash, the saga has much more credence than I originally gave it.

I would have loved the opportunity to see the ring, to hold it, to touch it. But I think you were absolutely right to return it to its hiding place. Either that or take it to the mouth of Mount Hekla yourself and toss it in! It would be altogether wrong to hold up the evil magic of the ring to scientific archaeological testing. And please do not worry, I will not mention your discovery to anyone.

I have at last brought the Lord of the Rings to its conclusion after 10 years of toil. It is a vast sprawling book, which will probably run to at least 1200 pages, and one of which I am very proud. It will be difficult to produce in these hard times when paper is so scarce, but my publishers remain enthusiastic. When it is eventually published, as I hope it will be, I will be sure to send you a copy.