Where the Shadows Lie (20 page)

Authors: Michael Ridpath

Tags: #Thriller

BOOK: Where the Shadows Lie

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Eventually, she would probably be allowed to sell the saga. In the open, under the glare of publicity, she would no doubt get a handsome price, if the Icelandic government didn’t somehow manage to confiscate it from her. If she could just keep the gallery going for a few months longer, it might survive.

Until Agnar’s death, keeping the gallery open was the most important thing in her life. Now she appreciated how wrong she was.

The gallery was going bust because she had made a poor business judgment. The
kreppa
made matters worse, but she should never have trusted Nordidea. She was to blame and she should have taken the consequences.

Outside, the professor and the police climbed into their cars and drove off. Ingileif felt trapped in the tiny gallery. She grabbed her bag, switched off the light and locked up. So what if she lost a sale or two that morning?

She walked down the hill, her mind in incoherent turmoil. She soon reached the bay, and walked along the bike path which ran along the shore. She headed east, towards the solid block of Mount Esja, its top smothered in cloud. The breeze skipping in from across the water chilled her face. The sounds of Reykjavík traffic merged with the cries of seagulls. A pair of ducks paddled in circles a few yards out from the red volcanic pumice that served as a sea wall.

She felt so alone. Her mother had died a few months before, her
father when she was twelve. Birna, her sister, wouldn’t care or understand. She would be sympathetic for a few minutes, but she was too self-absorbed, stuck in her nice house and her bad marriage and her bottles of vodka. She had never been interested in
Gaukur’s Saga
, and after their father died she had picked up their mother’s hostility to the family legend. She had told Ingileif she couldn’t care less what Ingileif did with it.

Ingileif knew she should speak to Pétur, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. He had hated the saga with a passion for what he thought it had done to their father. Yet, even he had believed that it would be wrong to sell. She had assured him that Agnar would be able to do a deal while keeping the secret safe, and only then had Pétur reluctantly agreed. He would be angry with her now, and justifiably so. Not much sympathy there.

He must have read about Agnar’s murder in the papers, but he hadn’t been in touch with her yet. Thank God.

It was ironic. She had been determined not to let her father’s death screw her up like it had screwed up the other members of her family. She was the sane, down-to-earth one, or so she thought.

And now poor Aggi had been murdered. Foolishly she had tried to hide the existence of the saga from the police. As a plan, that was never going to work. And even now she was hiding something.

She glanced down at her bag. Where she had slipped the envelope just before the police came to take away the saga. The
other
envelope.

She recalled the big red-haired detective with the slight American accent. He was trying to catch the man who had murdered Agnar, and she had some information that would be certain to help him. It was far too late to try to keep it quiet, the police would find out in the end. The betrayal had been committed, the mistake had been made, the consequences were playing themselves out. There was nothing she could do to put the saga back in its safe.

She stopped in front of the Höfdi House, the elegant white-timbered mansion where Gorbachev had met Reagan when she was six years old.

She dug the detective’s number out of her purse, and punched it into her mobile phone.

Colby was waiting on the sidewalk outside the bank when it opened. Walked straight in to the cashier, first in line, and withdrew twelve thousand dollars in cash. Then she drove to an outdoor equipment store and bought camping gear.

When the thug with the gun had left her apartment she had been too scared to scream. Richard hadn’t been any help: he had scurried out of the bathroom muttering how his legal career was too important to be caught up with criminals, and she should rethink her friendships. She had watched dully as he had scrambled to get into his clothes and left her. He forgot his jacket.

Tough.

She was glad she hadn’t told the thug about Iceland. It had been a close call, she had been so scared that she had almost given it away, but the change to Sweden at the last minute was inspired. Magnus had told her that he used to have the nickname ‘Swede’, and that had stuck in her brain.

The thug had believed her. She was sure of it.

She hoped it would take him and his friends some time to realize their mistake, but she wasn’t going to hang around. She certainly wasn’t going anywhere near Magnus. Now she took Magnus’s warnings seriously. She wasn’t taking any risks with credit cards, or hotels or friends. No one would know where she was.

She was going to disappear.

From the camp shop she went to the supermarket. Then, with the trunk full of supplies, she drove west. Her plan was eventually to head north, to Maine or New Hampshire or somewhere, and to lose herself in the wilderness. But first she had something to do. She pulled off the highway in the suburb of Wellesley. She found an Internet café, grabbed a cup of coffee.

The first e-mail was to her boss, telling him that she was not going to be at work and she couldn’t explain why, but he shouldn’t
worry. The second was to her mother, saying more or less the same thing. There was no way to phrase it so that her mother wouldn’t drive herself demented with panic, so Colby didn’t even try.

The third was to Magnus.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I
T WAS NO
more than a ten-minute walk from police headquarters to the Höfdi House, where Ingileif had asked to meet Magnus. He was feeling a little better after the sausage he had picked up from the coffee shop in the bus station on his way back from the Commissioner’s office, but he still needed to do all he could to clear his head.

He felt so stupid. His apology to the National Police Commissioner had been sincere; he appreciated all the man had done for him, and Magnus had let him down. His fellow detectives had initially appeared to be in awe of him; now they would just think he was a joke. Not a good start.

He was also scared. Alcoholism ran in families. If there was a gene for it, he suspected that he had it. It had been a very close call in college. And learning about his father’s infidelity had disturbed something deep inside him. Even now, with his ears ringing with the consequences of his stupidity, part of him just wanted to take a detour to the Grand Rokk and buy a beer. And then another. Of course it would screw everything up. But that was why he wanted to do it.

This was dangerous. Somehow he had to cram what Sigurbjörg had told him back in its box.

Throwing himself into the Agnar case would help. He wondered what it was that Ingileif wanted to speak to him about. She had sounded tense on the phone.

He didn’t trust her. The more he thought about it, the more
likely it seemed that the saga was a forgery drawn up by Agnar. Ingileif was his accomplice, to add authenticity. Their relationship had been very close, perhaps it still was very close, the ballet-dancing literature student notwithstanding.

The Höfdi House stood all alone in a grassy square between two busy roads that ran along the shore. A solitary figure was perched on a low wall beside the squat white building.

‘Thank you for coming,’ Ingileif said.

‘No problem,’ said Magnus. ‘That’s why I gave you my number.’

He sat next to Ingileif on the wall. They were facing the bay. A steady breeze rolled small clouds through the pale blue sky, their shadows skittering over the sparkling grey water. In the far distance Magnus could just make out the glacier of Snaefellsnes, a white blur floating above the sea.

Ingileif was tense, sitting bolt upright on the wall, shoulders back, forehead knitted in a frown accentuating the nick in her eyebrow. She looked like so many other girls in Reykjavík, slim, blonde with high cheekbones. But there was something about her that set her apart, a determination, a purposefulness, a sense that despite the doubts and worries that were obviously troubling her, she knew what she wanted and was going to get it, that Magnus found appealing. She seemed to be debating with herself whether or not to tell him something.

He sat in silence. Waiting. He saw that there was also a small scar on her left cheek. He hadn’t noticed that before.

Eventually she spoke. Someone had to. ‘You know this place is haunted?’

‘The Höfdi House?’ Magnus looked over his shoulder at the elegant white building.

‘Yes. The ghost is a young girl who poisoned herself after she was convicted of incest with her brother. She scared the wits out of the people who used to live here.’

‘Icelanders have got to learn to be a little braver about ghosts,’ said Magnus.

‘Not just Icelanders. It used to be the British consulate. The
consul was so terrified that he demanded that the British Foreign Ministry allow him to move the consulate to another address. Apparently she keeps turning the lights on and off.’ Ingileif sighed. ‘I feel quite sorry for her.’

Magnus thought he detected a quiver in her voice. Odd. Most ghosts had had a tough time in life, but still. ‘Is that what you wanted to speak to me about?’ he asked. ‘You want me to check it out? All the lights seem to be off at the moment.’

‘Oh, no,’ she replied, smiling weakly. ‘I just wanted to find out how the investigation was going.’

‘We’re making progress,’ Magnus said. ‘We need to track down Steve Jubb’s accomplice. And we haven’t verified the authenticity of the saga yet.’

‘Oh, it’s authentic.’

‘Is it?’ said Magnus. ‘Or is it an elaborate hoax dreamed up by Agnar? Is that why he was killed? Steve Jubb found out he was being taken for a ride?’

Ingileif laughed. The tension seemed to flow from her body. Magnus waited for her to finish.

‘Well?’ he said.

‘I’d love you to be right,’ Ingileif said. ‘And I can see why you might think that. But, of course, I
know
it’s genuine. It has over-shadowed my whole life, and that of every member of my family for generations.’

‘So you say.’

‘Don’t you believe me?’

‘Not really,’ Magnus said. ‘You don’t have a great track record for telling me the truth.’

The smile disappeared. Ingileif sighed. ‘I don’t, do I? And I can see how from your point of view you have to consider the possibility that it’s a forgery. But your lab guys will do tests on it, carbon-14 or whatever, and they’ll tell you how old the vellum is. And the seventeenth-century copy.’

‘Maybe,’ said Magnus.

Ingileif’s grey eyes looked straight at his. For a moment Magnus
found it unsettling, but he held her gaze. ‘I want to show you something,’ she said.

She rummaged in her bag and pulled out a yellowing envelope.

She handed it to Magnus. A British stamp, same king as last time, and the same handwriting.

‘This is the reason I asked you to meet me. I should have shown it to you yesterday, but I didn’t.’

Magnus opened the envelope. Inside was a sheet of notepaper.

Merton College

Oxford

12 October 1948

Dear Ísildarson

Thank you for your extraordinary letter. What an astonishing tale! The part I found the most amazing was the inscription ‘The Ring of Andvari’ in runes. One never knows with the Icelandic sagas. They are so realistic, yet the scholarly fashion is to dismiss them as fiction. Yet here is the very ring, at least a thousand years old, that appears in Gaukur’s Saga! After the discovery of his farm buried under all that ash, the saga has much more credence than I originally gave it.

I would have loved the opportunity to see the ring, to hold it, to touch it. But I think you were absolutely right to return it to its hiding place. Either that or take it to the mouth of Mount Hekla yourself and toss it in! It would be altogether wrong to hold up the evil magic of the ring to scientific archaeological testing. And please do not worry, I will not mention your discovery to anyone.

I have at last brought the Lord of the Rings to its conclusion after 10 years of toil. It is a vast sprawling book, which will probably run to at least 1200 pages, and one of which I am very proud. It will be difficult to produce in these hard times
when paper is so scarce, but my publishers remain enthusiastic. When it is eventually published, as I hope it will be, I will be sure to send you a copy.