Michael Ridpath - Where the Shadows Lie

‘OK, Johnny, I got one question for you,’ the man said.

Johnny tried to speak, but he couldn’t. He didn’t know whether it was the fear or the metal pressed on his tongue.

The man withdrew the gun so that it was an inch away from his mouth.

Johnny tried to speak again. No sound. It was the fear.

‘Say what?’

This time Johnny squeezed out some words. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘You done some work for a cop by the name of Magnus Jonson?’

Johnny nodded vigorously.

‘You found the address of some guy in California he was looking for?’

Johnny nodded again.

‘How about you write that down for me, man?’ The guy glanced around the room. He was tall, slim, with a smooth face and hard brown eyes. Eyes which alighted on some paper and a pen. ‘Over there!’

‘I need to check my computer,’ Johnny said.

‘Go right ahead. I’ll be watching you. So don’t go typing no messages to nobody.’

Intensely aware of the gun in the back of his head, Johnny Yeoh went over to the desk and sat in front of his computer. He clenched his buttocks, trying desperately hard to stop his bowels moving. He wanted to pee too.

Within less than a minute he had found Lawrence Feldman’s address. He wrote it down: his hand was shaking so badly it took him two attempts, and even then the words were illegible.

‘Did Jonson say where he’s at?’ the guy asked.

‘No,’ said Johnny, turning to look up at the man, his eyes wide. ‘I didn’t speak to him. He sent me an e-mail.’

‘Where’d it come from?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Sweden?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Then look!’ The gun was crammed into his skull.

Johnny called up his e-mail folder and found the one from Magnus. The truth was he hadn’t checked the address. The domain name was lrh. is. Where the hell was that? A country beginning with ‘IS’. Isreal? No, that was ‘. il’. ‘Iceland, perhaps?’

‘Hey, I’m asking you.’

‘All right, all right. I’ll check.’ It took Johnny less than a minute to confirm that the domain was indeed in Iceland. The Icelandic police to be precise.

‘Now, Iceland ain’t in Sweden, is it?’

‘No,’ said Johnny.’

‘Is it near Sweden?’

‘Not really,’ said Johnny. ‘I mean it’s in Scandinavia but it’s right in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. A thousand miles away. Two thousand.’

‘All right, all right.’ The man with the gun grabbed the scrap of paper and backed off towards the door. ‘You know, you ain’t no fun, man.’

Then the gunman did something very strange. He looked Johnny Yeoh right in the eye. Put the revolver to his own temple. Smiled.

And pulled the trigger.

The pastor carried the newspaper he had just bought from the shop down in Fludir into his study. There was a short article on page five about the investigation into Agnar’s murder. It sounded as if little real progress had been made since the initial arrest of the Englishman. The pastor smiled as he remembered how he had so disconcerted the black policewoman. But he shouldn’t be complacent. The police were making a plea for any witnesses who had seen anyone at all driving down to that part of the shore of Lake Thingvellir on the First Day of Summer to come forward.

That worried him.

He thought about making a phone call, but he knew the best thing to do was to stay calm, and stay quiet. There was no reason why the police should pay him another visit, but he would be wise to be prepared nonetheless.

He glanced at the pile of books on his desk, and the exercise book open at the page he had left off working the night before. He should get back to the life of Saemundur. But he couldn’t dispel the anxiety the article in the newspaper had awakened. He needed some comfort.

He put down the paper and examined his small CD collection on the bottom shelf of a long bookshelf, and selected one. Led Zeppelin IV. He slipped it into his CD player and turned up the volume.

He smiled when he remembered the time fifteen years before when he had shouted at his son for listening to devil worship, and then how he had surreptitiously listened to the music himself when his son was away at school. He liked it; it was somehow apt. He stood for a moment, closed his eyes and let the music wash over him.

After a couple of minutes he left the house and crossed the fifty yards over to the church, nestled beneath the rocky crag. Heavy, insistent chords rang out of the parsonage behind him, echoing off the rocks behind, swirling around the valley.

The church was bright and airy inside. The sunlight streamed in through the clear glass windows. The ceiling was painted light blue and decorated with gold stars, the walls were cream wooden planks and the pews were painted pink. The pulpit and the small electric organ were made of blond pine. He walked towards the altar, draped with red velvet. Behind it was a painting of the Last Supper.

On mornings like this, some of his congregation claimed that they could feel God in the church. But only the pastor knew what was really hidden in there.

Beneath its finery, the altar was actually a tatty old pine cupboard, inside which were piles of old copies of the Logbirtingablad , official notices going back several decades. The pastor reached under the pile to the right of the cupboard. His fingers felt for the familiar round shape.

The ring.

He drew it out and pulled it on to the fourth finger of his right hand, where it fitted snugly. The pastor had big hands, he had been a good handball player in his youth, yet the ring was not too tight. It had been made for the fingers of warriors.

And now it belonged to the pastor of Hruni.

Baldur ignored Magnus in the morning meeting.

He was amassing a case against Tomas Hakonarson. No one had seen Tomas come home that evening, either when he said he did at around five or six o’clock, or much later. There was little obvious sign of mud on the trainers Tomas said he had worn that night, but then they had been soaked the previous Saturday when he had walked through puddles wearing them. The lab was working on a more thorough examination, and attempts to match the fibres on his socks with three still-unexplained fibres from the summer house.

Tomas himself had asked for a lawyer and was sticking to his story, refusing to admit how unconvincing it sounded.

During the whole meeting, Baldur never directed a single comment to Magnus, nor asked his opinion, nor gave him any tasks in the investigation. And all this was watched by Thorkell Holm.

Screw Baldur.

Magnus’s head hurt. He had had quite a bit more than one beer in the Grand Rokk the night before, but had managed to go easy on the chasers. He was suffering from more of a thick head than a full blown hangover. But it was enough to put him in an uncooperative mood.

Magnus would tell Baldur all about Tomas’s father in his own good time. When he had spoken to the pastor himself.

Lawrence Feldman sat in the back seat of the black Mercedes four-wheel-drive and surveyed the prison buildings ahead of him. He was in the car park of Litla Hraun. The buildings themselves weren’t too bad, white, functional, surrounded by two layers of wire fencing. But the landscape surrounding them was bleak: flat, bare and brown, stretching across to the mountain slopes to the north. To the south lay the wide grey expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. At least there was some sunshine on this side of the pass.

The journey from Reykjavik, only an hour away, had been exhilarating, as they drove up through the lava field into the clouds. Feldman thought he could well have been in Middle Earth, perhaps on the edge of Mordor, the home of the Dark Lord Sauron. There was no grass, no greenery, or not the greenery of home. Weird lichens and mosses, some of them a bright lime colour, some grey, some orange, clung to the rock. Patches of snow stretched up the mountainsides into the clouds. To the side of the road, plumes of steam rose up from the ground.