Michael Ridpath - Where the Shadows Lie

With best wishes,

Yours sincerely,

J.R.R. Tolkien

‘This says your grandfather found the ring,’ Magnus said.

Ingileif nodded. ‘It does.’

Magnus shook his head. ‘It’s incredible.’

Ingileif sighed. ‘No it’s not. It explains everything.’

‘Explains what, exactly?’

‘My father’s obsession. How he died.’

‘What do you mean?’

Ingileif stared out to sea. Magnus watched her face closely as she wrestled with her emotions. Then she turned to Magnus, moisture in the corners of his eyes. ‘I think I told you my father died when I was about twelve?’

‘Yes.’

‘He was looking for the ring. It always seemed absurd to me that an educated man should be so convinced that it still existed. But of course he knew. His own father must have told him.’

‘But not told him exactly where it was hidden?’

‘Precisely. My father started searching right after my grandfather died. My guess is that Grandpa had forbidden him to look for it. Dad used to spend days scouring the area around the Thjorsa Valley in all weathers. And then one day he never came back.’

Ingileif bit her lip.

‘When did you find this letter?’ Magnus asked.

‘Very recently. After I had approached Agnar. He had already seen the first letter from Tolkien, the one written in 1938, which I showed you yesterday. But he asked me if I could find any more evidence, so I went back to Fludir and looked through my father’s papers. There was a bundle of letters from Tolkien to Grandpa, and this was one of them.’

‘Did you tell Agnar?’

‘Yes.’

‘I bet he was excited.’

‘He drove straight over to Fludir to see me. And the letter.’

Magnus took out his notebook. ‘What day was that?’

‘It was Sunday last week.’ She did a quick mental calculation. ‘The nineteenth.’

‘Four days before he was killed,’ said Magnus. He remembered Agnar’s e-mail to Steve Jubb saying that he had found something else. And Jubb’s text message to Isildur suggesting more or less the same thing. Something valuable. Could it have been the ring?

‘Do you have any idea where the ring is?’

Ingileif shook her head. ‘No. There is that part in the saga about the ring being hidden beneath the head of a hound. There are all kinds of strangely shaped outcrops of lava that could be hounds when looked at from certain directions. That was what my father was looking for. Presumably my grandfather found the cave and my father didn’t.’

‘What about Agnar? Did he have any idea where it might be?’

Ingileif shook her head. ‘No. He asked me, of course. He was very aggressive about it. I more or less threw him out.’

‘So, as far as you know, the ring is still hidden in a small cave somewhere?’

‘I think so,’ said Ingileif. ‘You still don’t believe me, do you?’

Magnus examined the upright precise handwriting. It looked real. But of course if it had been written by a careful forger it would look real. He glanced up at Ingileif. She seemed to be telling the truth, unlike her previous two conversations with him when she had been lying badly. Of course she could have feigned her earlier awkwardness to lull him into thinking she was telling the truth this time, but she would have to be a consummate actress to pull that off. And very cunning.

Could he believe that the ring in Gaukur’s Saga had really survived?

It was tempting. There was great scholarly debate about how historically accurate Iceland’s sagas really were. Most of the people and many of the events mentioned in them had really existed, but then there were also passages that were obviously pure invention. Whenever Magnus read them, the matter-of-fact style and the realistic characters lulled him into suspending disbelief until he felt medieval Iceland was almost close enough to touch.

The homicide detective in him resisted the temptation. First of all, Magnus couldn’t even be sure that the saga itself was authentic. And even if it was, then the ring could be fictional. And even if a gold ring had existed, it would probably be either buried under tons of ash, or long since have been found and sold by a poor shepherd. The whole thing was unlikely. Highly unlikely. But speculation was pointless. It didn’t really matter what Magnus thought: what mattered was what Agnar believed, and Steve Jubb and Isildur.

For if a true Lord of the Rings fanatic thought he had a chance of getting his hands on the ring, the One Ring, then he might be tempted to kill for it.

‘I don’t know what I think,’ said Magnus. ‘But thank you for telling me. Eventually.’

Ingileif shrugged.

‘Of course, it would have been better if you had come out with all this up front.’

Ingileif sighed. ‘It would have been better if I had never let the damn saga out of my safe in the first place.’

The canteen was almost full. Officer Pattie Lenahan looked around for someone she knew, and saw Shannon Kraychyk from Traffic, sitting alone at the table in the back of the room next to a bunch of civilian geeks from the computer department. She carried her tray over.

‘How you doin’, Shannon?’

‘I’m doin’ good. Other than my dumb-ass sergeant giving me a hard time because we’re behind on our quota for this month. Like there’s anything I can do about it! What am I supposed to do if Boston’s citizens suddenly decide they’re all gonna respect the speed limit?’

Pattie and Shannon traded grumbles happily for a while until Shannon excused herself and left Pattie alone with the rest of her chef’s salad.

The geeks were talking about a case the previous year. Pattie remembered it. The kidnapping of a woman in Brookline by her next door neighbour; it had dominated the newspapers and the station gossip for a couple of weeks.

‘I haven’t seen Jonson around here recently,’ one of them said.

‘Haven’t you heard? He’s been disappeared. He’s a witness on the Lenahan case.’

‘You mean Witness Protection Programme?’

‘I guess.’

‘I heard from him the other day.’ Pattie glanced quickly at the speaker. A Chinese guy, small, talked real fast. ‘Sent me an e-mail out of the blue. He wanted me to check out an e-mail header for him, same as in the Brookline case.’

‘Did you nail it?’

‘Yeah. It was nowhere near as difficult. Some guy in California. He made no real attempt to hide the IP.’

The conversation moved on and Pattie finished her salad. She got herself a cup of coffee and took it back to the squad room.

Uncle Sean’s arrest had caused a big stir in her family. It was hardly surprising, everyone in her family were cops, had been for three generations, and none of them was a bad one, especially not Uncle Sean. That was the problem with the department, it was all bound up in rules and regulations, in cops snooping on cops. Cops like Magnus Jonson.

Pattie wasn’t entirely sure she agreed with the family consensus. It seemed to her that Uncle Sean was accused of something pretty serious. And she had never really trusted him: he was just a little too glib, too flaky. She didn’t know Magnus Jonson; but what she did know was that you didn’t rat out a fellow cop. Ever.

Should she tell her father what she had heard? He, at least, was a straight guy. He’d know what to do, whether to tell anyone else.

And besides, if she didn’t tell him and he ever found out, he would have her hide.

Better tell him.

The noise was appalling. Magnus and Arni were sitting at the back of a long low room, deep underground, listening to a group of teenage no-hopers called Shrink Wrapped. They were playing a bizarre mixture of reggae and rap, with their own Icelandic twist. Original, perhaps, but painful. Especially in combination with Magnus’s malingering hangover. He had thought that food and fresh air had taken care of his headache, but now it was back with a vengeance.