Michael Ridpath: Where the Shadows Lie

Petur paused, talked and then moved on again. This seemed to work. Finally he was within a few feet of the rim of the gorge. He had to shout to be heard.

Ingileif had stopped dead. She wasn’t moving any further.

Then he saw in her eyes that she understood what he was doing – tempting her forward to her death. She took a few steps back-wards and then turned and ran. Petur lunged after her. His legs were longer, he was stronger, fitter, he caught her up, throwing her to the ground.

She screamed, but the scream was killed by the mist and the roar of the water. He pinned her to the grass, but she raised her right hand and scratched at his face.

Damn! That would be very hard to explain to the cops. He would think of something.

He hit her in the face. She screamed, but continued to writhe beneath him. He hit her again, harder. She lay still.

He swallowed. His eyes were hot with tears. But he had had no choice. He had never had a choice.

He dragged her over towards the rim of the gorge. That spot wouldn’t quite work. Below the cliff a grassy slope dropped down to the water. It was steep, but not quite steep enough. He would have to go a few metres upstream.

He pulled her along a rough path, her legs and body knocking against bare rock. She seemed to be coming round. But he was nearly to a good spot; the top of a rock jutting out with a near vertical drop down to the river hurtling towards the falls.

The ring! She had the ring. Damn it. Perhaps she had dropped it when they had fought. Or perhaps it was in her pockets.

He lay her down. She groaned. He began to search her pockets.

And then, out of nowhere, a large shape flew through the air and bowled him over.

Magnus never heard Steve Jubb’s shouts above the din of the waterfall. But he did pause and look back up the way he had come.

He saw the portly figure of Jubb wobbling down the path towards him, his arms waving.

Magnus ran. It was uphill and it was steep but he sprinted.

He usually kept himself very fit, running several miles a day if he could. In Iceland he hadn’t had the chance, and already the edge was off his fitness. His heart was pounding and the breaths were hard to take. It was a steep path, but he took it as fast as he could.

‘Up there!’ Jubb said. ‘Above the waterfall.’

Magnus didn’t wait for more explanation but continued running uphill.

His chest felt like it was going to explode as he scrambled over the rim of the hill.

He saw them. Two figures, a few feet from the edge of the cliff, one lying on the ground, the other crouching over her.

Magnus ran faster downhill towards them. There was no chance of Petur hearing him in all the noise, and he was concentrating too hard on Ingileif to see what was coming at him.

Magnus threw himself at Petur and together they rolled to the cliff edge.

Petur writhed, broke away, and hauled himself to his feet. He stood swaying on the edge of the cliff above the river.

Magnus stared at him, keeping his distance of a few feet. He had no desire to plunge over the cliff in a death-grapple with Petur. Arrest was going to be difficult. For a start, Magnus didn’t have any handcuffs with him. He didn’t know what he would do if he managed to overpower Petur – perhaps get Steve Jubb to sit on him for an hour until Vigdis showed up. Of course, if he hadn’t been in some Mickey-Mouse country, he would have a gun, in which case things would be much simpler. As it was…

As it was, Magnus could see Petur sizing him up. Petur was tall and rangy. But Magnus was big, and he knew he looked like he could look after himself. People usually didn’t mess with Magnus.

Magnus heard a groan behind him. Ingileif. That was good news: at least she was alive.

‘OK, Petur,’ Magnus said evenly. ‘You had better give yourself up. There’s no way out for you now. Come with me.’

Petur hesitated. Then he glanced behind him, at the boiling river and the jagged rocks rising out of it. In a moment, he had turned and was gone.

Magnus took a few steps and looked over the rim. There was a kind of path, or rather a series of hand-and footholds that led down to some rocks on the edge of the river. He could see that it would just be possible to clamber along these, down almost at the level of the river, and to climb up again further upstream.

Magnus descended after Petur. The spray had left the rocks extremely slippery, and Magnus had real trouble keeping his footing. Petur was taking more risks, widening the gap. Magnus realized he would have been much better off keeping to the cliff top; he could probably have run upstream to the point Petur was aiming for before Petur reached it. It was too late now.

Magnus felt his footing slip. He grabbed hold of the rock with one hand. Below, the river rushed headlong to the top edge of the waterfall. The water was a beautiful deadly mixture of green and white.

Pure cold death.

Magnus hauled himself up with both arms and lay panting on the rock. He saw Petur skip across three rocks barely five feet above the river. The man’s balance was extraordinary.

But then Petur slipped. Like Magnus he grabbed hold of the rock with one arm and held on. But unlike Magnus, he couldn’t find a hold for his other hand. He dangled there, swinging, his legs bunched up beneath him, desperately trying to keep his feet out of the water, lest the river grabbed them and snatched him down.

Magnus leaped on to one rock. Another. His sense of balance was not as good as Petur’s. The rocks were about ten feet from the cliff edge now, out in the river.

This was stupid.

Petur stared at him, his face wincing in agony at the effort of hanging on with one arm, his bald head dripping with moisture.

He couldn’t hold on much longer.

Magnus turned. He could see Ingileif standing on the edge of the cliff shouting and waving. She was beckoning to him to come. Magnus couldn’t hear what she was yelling above the roar, but he could see her lips. ‘Leave him!’ they seemed to be shouting.

Magnus turned back to Petur. Ingileif was right. He watched the man who had murdered four people, including his own father, and who had just tried to murder his own sister, fight for his life.

Petur’s eyes met Magnus’s. Petur knew that Magnus had given up trying to reach him.

He closed his eyes, his grip slipped and he fell without a cry. His body was whisked along the top of the spate and over the rim of the waterfall.

Within two seconds he was gone.

Magnus saw Ingileif standing next to her brother’s white BMW four-wheel-drive, with the snow-covered mountain rising above her.

He pulled up beside her and got out of his car.

‘You’re late,’ she said. Her face was pink in the cold, her eyes shining.

‘Sorry.’

‘Never mind. I’m glad you came.’

Magnus smiled. ‘I’m glad you asked me.’

‘I thought you might have gone back to America.’

‘Tomorrow. Although everyone in the police department thinks I’ve already left.’

‘So where are you staying?’

‘I can’t really tell you.’

Ingileif frowned. ‘I would have thought that by now you would have trusted me.’

‘Oh, no. It’s not that. Let’s just say I’ve learned the hard way that the fewer people who know where I am the better.’

There was a remote possibility that Soto would send out a replacement for the hit man who had shot Arni, so the Police Commissioner had decided to let everyone think that Magnus had flown back to Boston. Actually, he had sent Magnus to stay with his brother at his farm an hour and a half to the north of Reykjavik. It was a beautiful spot, on the edge of a fjord, with outstanding views. And the Commissioner’s brother and his family were hospitable.