Close to the Heel (19 page)

Karl's frown deepened.

“Let me get this straight,” he says slowly. “You think that Tryggvi killed Gudrun and that Einar knew about it?”

“I'm not sure who killed Gudrun,” I say. I'd been chewing over that one for a while. If she knew about the deal Baldur and Tryggvi had made with the Russians, and if she knew what was behind the Russians' willingness to invest in Baldur's resort, and if she was going to expose it all, bring it all down around their ears, sure, Tryggvi could have done it. Or Baldur. Or, for that matter, the Russians.

“And Baldur? What happened to him?” Karl asks.

“He's dead.”

“I suppose Tryggvi killed him too.” He thinks I'm crazy. I can tell by his voice.

“I'm not one-hundred-percent sure about that either,” I say.

“That's a lot of
not sures
, son.”

“Maybe Baldur panicked and Tryggvi killed him. Or maybe the Russians killed him. Or maybe it was Einar. But I know where Baldur is, and Einar and Tryggvi both knew it. That's why they tried to kill me. And when I talked to Freyja—”

“You talked to Freyja?”

I nod. “Einar knows it too. He saw me come out of her place. She told me that Baldur's car was found down near the port and everyone figured he left the country. But that's not what happened.” I tell him what the old man said about seeing something bad, and where the old man had pointed. It had nothing to do with Kerstin. “I think Sigurdur saw Tryggvi, and maybe Einar, hide Baldur's body.”

Karl thinks over what I've said. He looks far from certain.

“Let's go,” he says finally. “Show me.”

EIGHTEEN

Karl radios back to the police station and speaks to someone there in Icelandic. Then we drive the short distance to Sigurdur's place. On the way, I ask about the old man.

“He's still in the hospital,” Karl says. “But the doctors think he'll be able to go home soon. Brynja's been pretty much camping out there. Oh, and she thinks you're an idiot for going to Askja on your own.”

“I already told you—I was nowhere near Askja.”

Karl turns off the road and onto the lane leading to Sigurdur's place. As we cross the bridge, I see that Einar's car is gone. I'm glad.

Karl parks and we get out. He pops the trunk and grabs a pick, a shovel and a flashlight. We walk side by side to the turf hut. My heart is beating fast. Finally I'm going to get a good look at what's on the other side of that stone wall. I'm going to see if what I saw glinting in the beam from my flashlight really is what it looked like. I think about Freyja and Brynja. Once that wall is broken down, they're both going to find out things they don't want to know.

“Look.” I point to the quarter-circle on the ground where the grass has been scraped away by the opening and closing of the door. “When I first saw this shed, Einar said no one ever went in it. But you can see that someone has gone in and out—a lot. And when I climbed up to that waterfall one day”—I nod to the fall behind the house—“I saw Einar over here. He's got a guilty conscience, just like that guy in the Poe story.”

“Poe?”

“Edgar Allan Poe. We read one of his stories in school.
The Tell-Tale Heart
. It's about a guy who kills someone and then goes crazy with guilt. I think Einar keeps checking the place, you know, to make sure no one has found out. Tryggvi must have told him he found me inside. Einar probably watched me after that and saw me go in again that night. Next thing I know, I'm in the middle of nowhere.”

Karl looks doubtful. I guess I can't blame him. He knows Einar. He works with Tryggvi, and even if the two of them aren't best buddies, they're cops. Cops have it beaten into their heads that they have to stick together. He continues to look doubtful right up to the moment when I show him where to point his flashlight. He hunkers down and stares between the tiny gaps in the stone wall.

“You see it?” I say. “It's under that pile of rocks, but you see it, right?” It was a watch—I was sure of it—peeking out from under a man-sized pile of rock in what I was willing to bet was originally part of this turf hut, which explained why the hut looked smaller from the inside than it did from the outside.

Karl straightens up slowly.

“Well, I think you're on to something.” He turns off the flashlight. “This fellow who gave you those notes in French, how come he didn't tell the police what was in them?”

“He didn't know. He doesn't read French, and I guess he didn't think they were important, not after Tryggvi returned the notebooks. When he heard I read French, he asked me to take a look at them and tell him what they said.”

“Did you?”

“Not yet. I haven't had a chance.”

A shadow falls across the sunlight streaming in through the turf shed's door; then the light is blotted out as someone steps inside.

Einar.

“What's going on?” he demands. His eyes flick to me. He doesn't look surprised to see me.

“This boy was just showing me something interesting behind that wall, Einar,” Karl says.

Einar looks at the wall and then back at me. “I don't understand.”

“There's something back there,” Karl says. “We need to break down the wall.”

Einar stands motionless in the doorway. Any minute now he's going to turn and run, and Karl, like all Icelandic police, isn't wearing a gun.

“Well, Einar?” Karl says. “What do you have to say about this?”

“What do you want me to say?” Einar's voice is as dull as his eyes.

“It's Baldur, isn't it?” I say. “Did you kill him? Or was it—?”

“Hold on there, Rennie,” Karl says. “Suppose you leave the questions to me.”

No way. Not after everything I've been through.

“He tried to kill me,” I say. “I deserve to know. Hell, if it wasn't for me,
you
wouldn't know. You wouldn't be here.”

Karl heaves another sigh.

“That's true,” he allows. He turns to Einar. “Well?”

Einar looks down at the packed-earth floor for a few seconds, like a kid staring at the toes of his sneakers after having been caught cheating on a test. And then he meets my eyes. I don't know the man well. But I know shame when I see it. Regret too.

“It was an accident,” Einar says. “Baldur killed my Gudrun. I know he did. But there wasn't any proof—nothing the cops could use. He was going to get away with it. So I went to him. I tried to get him to do the right thing, to tell what he did. But he refused. And then—” He breaks off and draws in a few deep breaths to steady himself. “I just wanted him to do the right thing. I tried to make him go to the police. But he fought me. What could I do? I fought back. I didn't mean to kill him. It was an accident.”

I almost believe him about the accident part.

Almost.

“If that's true,” I say, “if it was an accident, why didn't you tell the police what happened?” I'm on a roll. I know it. He's confessed to killing Baldur. Now I want him to tell the rest. I want him to spill whatever he knows, right here, right now—what he knew, what Tryggvi knew, what Gudrun knew.

“They would never believe me. Everyone knew I suspected Baldur. Everyone heard me call him a murderer. I would go to prison, and then what would happen to Brynja?” He gets a faraway look in his eyes, like he's staring into the past, reliving what he's done. “I should never have let Gudrun take that job. I don't understand why she wanted it. If she had stayed home, if she had never got it into her head to be a reporter, none of this would have happened. She would never have found out what Baldur did. He never would have killed her, and I never would have done what I did.”

“Does Brynja know what you did?” I ask.

It takes a few seconds before Einar's eyes meet mine. He shakes his head.

Karl tosses him the pick. He's going to make Einar break down the wall. He going to make Einar expose what has lain hidden for the past year.

I'm watching him holding that pick. I'm wondering how he's going to explain this to Brynja. I'm wondering, too, how she will react.

Then I say, “How did you know?” because all of a sudden it's bothering me.

Einar doesn't even look at me.

“You said you knew that Baldur killed Gudrun,” I say. “How did you know? Did she tell you she was going to meet him that night?” I pull the sheet of paper from my pocket. “She says here she's afraid of how you're going to react when she tells you something. She can't decide whether to confront you or go straight to the police. Did she tell you where she was going, is that it? Did she tell you what she suspected and what she was going to do, and you let her go? You let her meet Baldur and that's why you're so sure he killed her?” That had to be it. “You feel guilty,” I say as the thought occurs to me. “You could have stopped her. You could have made her stay home that night. But you didn't.”

“She didn't tell me anything,” Einar says in a hushed voice. “She said she had to go out. She was acting strange. Quiet. She left and she never came back. Baldur killed her.”

“But if you don't know where she went…” My voice trails off.

I think.

I remember what Geir told me: there were originally six notebooks, but he could find only five. He said that one of them must have been misplaced when it was returned—either that or the police had neglected to return it. But there's a third possibility, namely that Tryggvi destroyed one of the notebooks because it contained information that linked him to Baldur. Once the death investigation was closed, who would bother to look any further? No one had—until I turned up and started asking questions.

“How do you know Baldur killed her? How do you know Tryggvi didn't do it?” I say.

It would be easy for a Quantico graduate like Tryggvi to get rid of evidence that a murder had been committed. It would be just as easy for him to commit a murder and cover up whatever evidence there might be.

My head is spinning. Things fall into place.

Gudrun suspects Tryggvi's involvement. She tries to decide whether to talk to Einar first or the cops, but maybe doesn't do either. Maybe she goes straight to Tryggvi and presents him with evidence that proves he's involved with Baldur. I can see how that might go. She calls Tryggvi—or maybe he knows from Baldur that she's getting close and he calls her. They arrange to meet. Tryggvi tells her where. She goes. He hears her out. He realizes he's cornered. He has no choice—he kills her and makes sure there's no evidence left behind. That explains the outcome of the autopsy—undetermined.

But now Tryggvi has a loose end—Baldur. What if Baldur found out what he'd done? Or what if he even suspected it? He probably hadn't counted on murder being part of the deal when he borrowed money from the Russians. So Tryggvi whispers in his brother-in-law's ear, “Gudrun was investigating Baldur, so he killed her. But there's no evidence. We'll never be able to prove it.” Einar goes to Baldur. Baldur denies killing Gudrun. He refuses to go to the police—why would he? They fight; Baldur ends up dead. And Tryggvi—lucky Tryggvi—tells his brother-in-law that they have to hide the body so that Einar won't be arrested for murder. Ta-dah!

“Tryggvi?” Einar says. “Why would Tryggvi hurt Gudrun?” I see confusion on his face, and it throws me.

“Tryggvi helped you hide Baldur's body, right?” I say. “He's the one who told you Baldur killed Gudrun, isn't he?”

“The boy knows what you did, Einar,” Karl says. “Now everyone is going to know. Brynja is going to know.” He nods at the pick in Einar's hand. “You know what you have to do.”

Einar looks at the pick like he can't figure out how it got there. He shakes his head. Doesn't he get it? Refusing to knock down the wall isn't going to change a thing. It's going to come down with or without him.

“What would Anders think if he knew what his grandson had become?” he says.

Anders?

The two men stare hard at each other.

“Who is Anders?” I say.

Something Geir told me hits me like a sledgehammer: the name of the cop who ran the death investigation on Gudrun.

“What's Tryggvi's father's name?” I ask.

At first I don't think anyone is going to answer. But finally Einar says, “Jens.”

So that makes him Tryggvi Jensson. The cop who ran the investigation—the cop who was trained in the States—was Andersson, not Jensson.

There's only one other cop around here who was trained in the States. I turn to Karl.

“Anders is
your
grandfather,” I say. According to Geir, Icelanders who emigrate have to adapt, and one of the things they have to adapt to is names frozen at a point in time. Karl's father, born here, would have taken Andersson as his surname when he moved to the States. Karl was born in the States, where he would have taken the same surname as his father. His name is Andersson too.

Karl is focused on Einar. “Do you want to go to prison, Einar? Because that's what's going to happen unless you do something.”

Einar doesn't answer.

I start to move away, but Karl grabs my arms and wrenches me back.

“You have no choice, Einar,” he says. “You tried to get rid of Rennie once and failed. You can't fail again.”

Einar looks at Karl with dull eyes.

“We haven't got all day,” Karl says.

“You said he would never survive out there,” Einar says. “You said the problem was solved.”

You
said. He means Karl. I try to wrench free, but Karl has a viselike grip on my arm.

“You killed Gudrun, didn't you?” I say to Karl.

Karl doesn't look at me. “Better to get it over with, Einar,” he says.

“Gudrun went to meet you,” I say. I stare at his face. I can't read a thing. In the shadows, it's as gray and flat as a blank screen, and it tells me everything I need to know. “You killed her and you told Einar that Baldur did it. He knew that Gudrun was investigating Baldur, but he didn't know about you.”