Michael Ridpath - Where the Shadows Lie

‘Do you see much of her?’

‘Now and again. After my father died I drifted away from the family. Ran away, more like. I couldn’t handle it. All the ring stuff; it seemed to me that it had killed him. And I felt that I should have stopped him from looking for the ring, like my grandfather told me to. Of course, there was nothing I could do, I was only fifteen, but at that age you sometimes think you have more power than you really do.

‘I dropped out of high school, went to London. Then, after I came back, I started to see Ingileif a bit. She was angry with me: she thought I had abandoned our mother.’ Petur grimaced. ‘I guess she was right.’

‘Do you know if she was still involved with Agnar?’

‘I doubt it very much,’ Petur said. ‘But he was the natural person for her to go to when she wanted to sell the saga.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘You don’t suspect her of killing him, do you?’

Magnus shrugged. ‘We are keeping an open mind. She wasn’t altogether straight with us when we first spoke to her.’

‘She was just trying to cover up her mistake. She should never have tried to sell the saga, and she knew it. But Ingileif is honest through and through. It’s inconceivable she killed anyone; she’s incapable of it. I’m actually very fond of her, always have been. She’d do anything for her friends or her family. She was the one of the three of us who looked after Mum at the end, when she was dying of cancer. You know the gallery is in trouble?’

Magnus nodded.

‘Well, that’s why she needed the money from the saga. To pay out her partners. She blames herself. I told her not to worry too much about it; it’s business. A venture goes wrong, you drop it, pick yourself up, and go on to something else. But she doesn’t think that way. Everyone is going bust in Iceland these days.’

The door to the club opened and three more musicians came in, lugging big bags of musical instruments and electronics. This lot were a little older, a little hairier.

‘I’ll be with you in a minute,’ Petur said to them. Then, turning back to Magnus and Arni, ‘Ingileif’s had a tough life. First her father, then her stepfather, then her mother, all on top of losing her business.’

‘Stepfather?’ Magnus asked.

‘Yeah. Mum married again. A drunken arsehole called Sigursteinn. I never met him, it all happened when I was in London.’

‘They separated?’

‘No, he got drunk in Reykjavik. Fell off the harbour wall and killed himself. A good thing all round from what I have heard. Mum never got over it, though.’

Magnus nodded. ‘As you say, tough for her. And for you.’

Petur shrugged. ‘I ran away from it all. Ingileif stayed to do what she could. She always did.’

‘And your other sister? Birna?’

Petur shook his head. ‘She’s pretty much screwed up.’

‘Thank you, Petur,’ Magnus said, getting to his feet. ‘One last question. What were you doing the night Agnar died?’

At first Petur seemed taken aback by the question, but then he smiled. ‘I suppose that’s something you have to ask?’

Magnus waited.

‘What day was that?’

‘Thursday the twenty-third. The first day of summer.’

‘The clubs were busy that night. I spent the evening moving from one to the other. Now if you will excuse me, I have some music to listen to. I just hope these guys are better than the last lot.’

Arni drove Magnus out towards Birna Asgrimsdottir’s house in Gardabaer, a suburb of Reykjavik.

Magnus’s headache was getting worse. ‘Check out Petur’s alibi, Arni,’ Magnus said.

‘Is he a suspect?’ Arni said, surprised.

‘Everyone’s a suspect,’ Magnus said.

‘I thought you were certain Steve Jubb killed Agnar.’

‘Just do it!’ Magnus growled.

They drove through the grey suburbs. ‘By the way, I heard back from the Australian Elvish expert,’ Arni said. ‘He figured out what kallisarvoinen means.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘It’s Finnish. Apparently Tolkien liked the Finnish language, found it interesting. A lot of Quenya words come from Finnish as does much of the grammar. Our friend wondered whether Jubb and Isildur might have used Finnish vocabulary when there wasn’t an existing Quenya word. So he looked up kallisarvoinen in a Finnish dictionary.’

‘And?’

‘It means “precious”.’

‘Precious? That’s the word Gollum used for the ring in Lord of the Rings.’

‘That’s right.’

Magnus recalled the SMS from Steve Jubb. Saw Agnar. He has kallisarvoinen. ‘So Steve Jubb thought that Agnar had the ring,’ he said. ‘That’s what he wanted to sell for five million bucks.’

‘We haven’t found an old ring amongst Agnar’s stuff,’ Arni said.

‘Perhaps Steve Jubb took it,’ Magnus said. ‘After he killed him.’

‘And did what with it? We didn’t find it in his hotel room.’

‘Hid it perhaps.’

‘Where?’

Magnus sighed. ‘God knows. Or perhaps he mailed it back to Isildur in California. No one remembered Steve Jubb mailing a package at the Post Office, but he could easily have slipped a ring into an envelope and dropped it in a mail box.’

‘But Jubb sent the text message to Isildur after he had come back from seeing Agnar. That suggests that Agnar still had it, or at least Jubb thought he had.’

Magnus saw Arni’s point.

‘Do you really think that Agnar found the ring?’ Arni said. ‘He only heard about it on Sunday. The e-mail was sent on Tuesday. People have devoted years to looking for it and haven’t found it. Unless it was a fake?’

‘That would be just as hard to arrange in a hurry. Harder. Faking a thousand-year-old ring is a major job. And you can bet that Isildur wouldn’t shell out five million bucks without checking out what he was buying pretty thoroughly.’

‘You’re not suggesting it’s real?’ said Arni. ‘That the ring that Gaukur took from Isildur survived?’

‘Of course not,’ said Magnus irritably. But then, as he had just pointed out, it was hard to see how the ring could be a fake. Perhaps it was an older fake, the work of Ingileif’s grandfather? Patience. All would become clear in time.

Chastened, Arni was silent for a minute. ‘So what do we do?’ he asked eventually.

‘Tell Baldur. Look for likely hiding places. See if we’ve missed anything.’ Magnus glared at Arni. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?’

‘I only got the response this morning.’

‘You could have told me back at the station.’

‘Sorry.’

Magnus turned away to look out of the window at the grey boxes. He was lumbered with an idiot. And he wished his headache would go away.

Birna Asgrimsdottir lived in a new concrete house with a bright red roof in a new development. Each house had its patch of lawn, together with optimistically planted saplings. Expensive SUVs littered the driveways. Wealthy. Comfortable. Soulless.

Birna herself was softer, rounder and older than Ingileif. She had big blue eyes and pouting lips. She could have been attractive, but there was something sagging and sloppy about her. Two lines pointed downwards from the corners of her mouth. She was wearing tight, bulging jeans and a bright orange top.

When she saw Magnus, she smiled, her eyes lingering over his body before moving up to his face.

‘Hello,’ she said.

‘Hello,’ said Magnus, disconcerted despite himself. ‘We are from the Metropolitan Police. We have come to ask you about the murder of Professor Agnar Haraldsson.’

‘How nice,’ said Birna. ‘Come in. Can I get you something to drink?’

‘Just coffee,’ said Magnus.

Arni nodded. ‘Me too,’ he said, his voice a little hoarse. This woman had presence.