The Wanderer

Thirty-Six

‘Cut!’

Eygló stopped talking. She was standing ankle-deep in lush green grass a couple of metres from the neat outline of the walls of a tiny square chapel, built by Gudrid’s mother-in-law a thousand years before. Erik the Red’s longhouse stood just a short distance down the hill. Eygló was talking to Tom, who was pointing his camera towards her, Ajay’s boom mic hovering above him, and Suzy standing just behind the two of them.

It was their first day’s filming in Greenland and it was not going well, or at least her scenes weren’t. It had been a long, frustrating afternoon for everyone.

Einar was standing a few metres away, next to his wife, Rósa, both glaring at her.

Professor Beccari, too, was watching, his face set in a frown of concerned sympathy. Aqqaluk, the Greenlandic fixer Suzy had hired, was off to one side murmuring on his mobile.

‘Take ten,’ said Suzy to her assembled crew, which really only numbered Tom and Ajay. She approached Eygló, smiling. ‘Here, walk with me.’

They waded through the grass, scattered with wildflowers of yellow, blue and delicate pink. At each step a cloud of tiny moths rose a metre into the air and subsided. They were only a hundred metres from the edge of what had been known as Erik’s Fjord, on the other side of which spread the airfield at Narsarsuaq, where they had landed the day before.

Erik’s longhouse had stood at one end of the straggling village of Qassiarsuk, the modern name for Brattahlíd, a sparse community of farms, green meadows, a school, a church, a hostel and a dock. This was where Erik the Red had built his farm, where Gudrid had lived, and from where Erik’s sons Leif, Thorvald and Thorstein, his daughter Freydís, and Gudrid and Thorfinn Karlsefni had all set out on their various voyages to Vinland. It was a key focus of the whole documentary.

And Eygló was screwing it up.

Suzy led Eygló a few metres down the little gully of the stream that ran down to the fjord, so that they were out of sight of the others. ‘What’s wrong, Eygló?’

‘Wasn’t that last take good enough?’ Eygló said. She had tried really hard to make it better.

‘It was OK,’ said Suzy. ‘But you can do so much better than “OK”. Where is the excitement that you do so well? Imagine what it would be like for Erik, an outlaw who had been kicked out of Norway and then Iceland, to arrive at this beautiful green empty place where he could finally settle down without interference? All this free land! And imagine his family setting off on those voyages to Vinland. You can do that, Eygló. You can imagine that. You can imagine that better than anyone else I know, better than Einar, better than Mr Grand Professor Beccari. You know you can do that, don’t you?’

Eygló nodded.

‘What’s the problem? Is it Einar? Is it Rósa?’

‘No, no, she’s fine.’

‘It is Rósa, isn’t it?’ said Suzy. ‘Ever since she joined us, you and Einar have looked miserable. I don’t need to know what’s going on between the three of you—’

‘There’s nothing going on between the three of us!’ Eygló interrupted sharply.

‘All right,’ said Suzy. ‘But you just stay here for a couple of minutes, and I’ll go back and tell Rósa to take herself away. Einar too. What about Beccari?’

‘No. No, he’s fine,’ said Eygló, who had a feeling that the professor was on her side.

‘OK, he stays. And then you’ll come back, and we will try again. And this time, you will do it as well as I know you can.’

Suzy took Eygló’s shoulders and looked into her eyes. ‘OK?’

Down here, by the stream, out of sight of the others, Eygló could feel Suzy’s confidence in her give her strength. She nodded.

Suzy turned and climbed up the small slope over the lip of the gully.

Eygló stood by the stream and took some deep breaths. The brook babbled loudly and half a dozen wagtails bobbed and darted around her. Somewhere in the distance some twenty-first-century farm machinery rumbled. A gentle scent rose up from the wildflowers, mixing with a touch of twenty-first-century cow manure. It was a rare cloudless day, another reason Suzy was keen to get as many scenes in the can as she could.

Gudrid would have come down to this very stream to fetch water, to wash clothes. Eygló grinned. Perhaps to escape her in-laws.

Eygló could do this. She was ready.

But when she climbed up the slope, Suzy was speaking to a small group of people gathered around an old Land Rover and a pickup truck down by the road.

‘Eygló!’ Suzy called. ‘Over here!’

As Eygló approached the group she could tell they were archaeologists: the clothes, the facial hair, the spectacles, the doughty muddiness of them. The smallest of the group, an Asian-looking woman with long shiny dark hair, smiled when she saw Eygló.

‘Hi, Eygló. I don’t know if you remember me? Anya? Anya Kleemann.’

‘Yes, I do remember you!’ said Eygló with a smile. ‘You were on the dig with us here back in 2011.’ She was a Greenlander of about Eygló’s age doing a PhD at Aarhus University in Denmark, as far as Eygló could remember.

‘That’s right. I heard you were going to be filming here.’

‘You look like you’ve come from your own excavation somewhere?’

‘Tasiusaq. It’s just a few kilometres over the hill that way.’ She pointed northwards. ‘In the next fjord. A thirteenth-century farmhouse.’ She gave a shy smile. ‘It’s my first dig as supervisor.’

‘Cool.’

‘I thought Viking Queens was brilliant, by the way,’ Anya said.

‘Thanks,’ said Eygló. ‘It was Suzy’s idea. She produced it.’

‘And now we’re doing Gudrid the Wanderer,’ said Suzy.

‘Great subject,’ said Anya. She looked over to the meadow under which lay the ruins of the Brattahlíd longhouse. ‘Presumably you are talking about the wampum?’

‘Of course,’ said Suzy. ‘Were you there when it was found?’

‘I was,’ said Anya. ‘But it was an Italian girl who found it. Carlotta, isn’t that right, Eygló?’

Eygló nodded. She could tell Anya had spotted the change in her and Suzy’s expression. But Eygló didn’t want to explain, not in front of Suzy.

Fortunately, Suzy took charge. ‘I’m afraid Carlotta died recently. She was murdered. In Iceland.’

‘Oh, no!’ said Anya. ‘That’s dreadful. What happened?’

‘The police are trying to figure it out,’ said Suzy. ‘And not doing a very good job of it.’

‘My God.’ Anya looked stunned. ‘I didn’t know her well — I only met her on that dig, but I liked her. That’s horrible.’

Eygló nodded. It was. It was definitely horrible.

‘You know she contacted me a couple of weeks ago? Out of the blue, really. I hadn’t heard from her since the dig. It was about the wampum.’

Please shut up, thought Eygló. A few days before she would have been eager to hear what Anya had to say about why Carlotta wanted to talk to her about wampum, but now Eygló just wanted to change the subject.

As did Suzy. ‘Would you excuse us, Anya?’ she said. ‘We are on a tight schedule, and I need my archaeologist back.’

‘We should get going,’ said Anya. ‘Are you staying at the hostel in the village?’

‘No. In the hotel over in Narsarsuaq,’ said Eygló. ‘We’re there for a couple of days.’

‘Well, maybe we’ll come over and have a drink with you one evening?’

‘That would be great,’ said Eygló.

‘Einar Thorsteinsson is with us,’ said Suzy.

‘I remember Einar,’ said Anya. ‘I thought he and Carlotta had a thing going?’

Oh Christ, thought Eygló. This just gets worse. ‘Einar’s wife is here as well,’ she said.

Anya got it. ‘OK. See you later.’ And with that she and her troupe drove off back towards the village.

‘Ready?’ There was a hint of worry in Suzy’s glance; Eygló wasn’t sure whether she was afraid that Eygló had been put off her stride, or that Eygló had noticed that Suzy had shut down any conversation about the wampum.

Eygló nodded. ‘Let’s do it.’

But as she waded through the grass back to the ruins of the chapel, she couldn’t help thinking about what Anya had said. Carlotta had wanted to speak to her about the wampum. Eygló assumed that Carlotta had doubts and had communicated them to Anya. The police back in Iceland should be told. But Eygló sure as hell wasn’t going to tell them, and she wasn’t going to follow her original plan of quizzing Einar about the find either.

She took up her position by the outline of the tiny chapel. She stared down at the grass and the yellow flowers — buttercups, she thought — and took a couple more deep breaths, trying to force herself back to Gudrid and Erik and Thjodhild, Erik’s wife who had built the church.

She flinched as Tom approached, waving a light meter near her face. ‘You’ve been a good girl, haven’t you?’ he said softly. ‘No more questions about the wampum being planted?’

‘No,’ said Eygló. ‘No, I promise you.’ She was glad Tom hadn’t been there to listen to what Anya had told them, but he would no doubt hear it from Suzy, one way or another.

‘Excellent,’ Tom said. ‘Then you’ve got nothing to worry about.’ He winked. ‘Just get this take right, eh?’

He returned to his camera.

But his words, which he had meant to be comforting, wrenched Eygló crashing back to the twenty-first century. She thought of Carlotta, who had spent several months at this very spot and whom she had seen lying lifeless behind the church at Glaumbaer less than a week before. She thought of Rósa and her jealousy of Carlotta and now of Eygló herself. And she thought of Tom, only a few metres away from her.

She was destined to spend the next ten days with Tom and Rósa. There was no escape in Greenland — you couldn’t even drive from one settlement to the other.

She was trapped. She was scared. She was so very scared.

The fear, the awfulness of Carlotta’s death, overwhelmed her. She burst into tears.

‘Cut!’ Suzy said, her voice tense with frustration. ‘That’s all for today. We’ll try again tomorrow.’

Thirty-Seven

Aqqaluk said it would be an hour before the speedboat arrived to carry them back across the fjord to Narsarsuaq and their hotel, so Eygló wandered away from the others in search of solitude. There was an outcrop of red rocks just behind the village, on which perched a statue of Leif Erikson, and Eygló headed for it. As in Reykjavík, he was depicted staring towards America. Halfway there.

She sat on the grass at his feet and looked out over the water. A parade of small icebergs lay in the channel, drifting slowly up the fjord from where they had calved from the glacier out of sight just around the headland to her right. She had felt isolated in Iceland many times before, but this was a new kind of isolation. Brattahlíd was not connected to anywhere by road, except a couple of farms in the next fjord. She could easily see the dusty runway and buildings of Narsarsuaq on the other side of the water. That had been an American airbase built during the Second World War, and heavily populated with servicemen during the Cold War. Now it was a plain of dust, drab buildings and fuel tanks, surrounded by rocky hillsides and water. Oddly, it served as one of the two international airports into Greenland.

The nearest town was Qaqortoq, thirty kilometres down the fjord towards the sea, and only reachable by boat or helicopter. That place only had five thousand inhabitants.

And just out of sight, behind the rock faces to the north and east, the second largest icecap in the world heaved, pushed and slowly slid, stretching back for thousands of kilometres towards the North Pole.

It may have seemed a place of safety to Erik the Red, but it certainly didn’t to Eygló.

She heard the panting of someone climbing up the hill to her left, and she tensed. She hoped it was Einar and not Tom or Rósa, but she was relieved when Professor Beccari’s bald head and pink scarf appeared.

‘Do you mind if I join you?’ he asked.

‘No, please do,’ said Eygló. ‘It’s quite a view.’

The professor squatted down beside her. He was wrapped up warmly, even though it was fourteen degrees, hot for Greenland. His pink scarf peeked out of his windcheater.

‘You’ll be OK tomorrow,’ he said.

‘I hope so,’ said Eygló. ‘I feel so unprofessional!’

Beccari grinned. ‘It is your unprofessionalism that is your secret. Don’t lose it.’

‘Thank you,’ said Eygló. Although she had always wanted to be taken seriously as a proper academic, she knew Beccari was right.

‘It’s probably the shock of the murder of that poor woman. You were the one who found the body, weren’t you?’

Eygló nodded. ‘It was a shock. It still is.’

‘Is that why everyone is so miserable?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, it’s not just you. It’s Einar and his wife. What’s she doing on this trip? It seemed like he wasn’t expecting her to come, and he doesn’t seem happy that she’s here.’

‘I don’t think he is,’ said Eygló. It was true: Einar looked absolutely miserable.

‘I don’t know how to put this,’ Beccari said, ‘and of course it’s none of my business, but it seems as if there is the classic tension between a man, his wife and a — how shall I say? — a beautiful female friend.’

‘That’s me, right?’ said Eygló.

Beccari shrugged and waggled his hand in what Eygló assumed was an assenting motion.

Damn right it was none of his business, she thought. It was clear that despite his august status, Professor Beccari was a natural gossip who had spotted sources of tension and wanted to find out more. But at least he was being honest in his curiosity.

‘It’s not that straightforward,’ she said. ‘There is nothing going on between me and Einar. There might have been once, many years ago, but not now.’

‘Does Rósa understand that?’ Beccari asked.

‘Not sure,’ said Eygló. ‘I’ve seen you talking to her in the last couple of days. What do you think?’

‘I don’t know. I feel she is sad and she is angry, but I haven’t asked her why. She is an intelligent woman. Well read. And she knows her history. I enjoy talking to her.’

Rósa was very intelligent, and could be charming if she wanted to. She was also unlikely to be overawed even by someone with Professor Beccari’s ego.

‘I wish she would just go back to Iceland,’ Eygló said.

Beccari didn’t answer.

‘It’s good to have seen where this wampum was found,’ Beccari said. ‘Einar was very convincing that it was real.’

‘Einar is convincing.’

‘But is he right?’ Beccari asked. ‘You seemed to have had your own doubts earlier?’

‘No, not really doubts,’ said Eygló. Certainly while she was in Greenland she was not going to question the wampum, or the letter. She was going to remain a true believer and get out of Greenland alive.

Beccari looked at Eygló closely, and then smiled. ‘I’m glad to hear it.’

They sat in silence for a minute or two.

‘I think I will leave this evening,’ he said.

‘Don’t go.’

Beccari raised his eyebrows in surprise.

‘It’s good to have you here,’ Eygló said. Although it was hard to imagine Professor Beccari actually protecting her, the presence of someone unconnected with the madness of Carlotta and her death was reassuring. With him around, she just felt safer.

‘I’ve seen what I came for: Brattahlíd. And I would like to see a couple of other places in Greenland before I go back to the States. I’ll take the helicopter to Qaqortoq this evening and stay there. It sounds interesting.’

Eygló had visited the town once on her previous trip to Brattahlíd. It was picturesque on the surface, a jumble of multicoloured houses tumbling down three hillsides to the sea, but she had remembered sensing an undercurrent of bored desperation.

‘Yeah, it’s pretty,’ she said. ‘But we are heading up to the Western Settlement once we have finished here. You would enjoy that.’

‘I don’t have time for that, and you must admit your colleagues are not very congenial travel companions at the moment. Good luck with the rest of the filming. I am sure you will be brilliant.’ He reached over to pat her hand, and then stood up to leave.

Eygló let him go. There were still twenty minutes till the boat left, and she wanted solitude.

‘Eygló?’

She turned in panic as she recognized the voice. It was Rósa. Where the hell had she come from?

Rósa sat down next to her, right next to her so they were almost touching. Rósa was a big woman. Eygló tensed.

‘Eygló. We need to talk.’

Thirty-Eight

Vigdís made her way to Ward Three of the National Hospital in Reykjavík. She was very familiar with the layout; a police officer was a regular visitor to hospitals one way or another. She asked at the nurse’s station which bed was Tryggvi Thór’s.

She was busy with all the activity following Nancy Fishburn’s murder and she didn’t have time for this. Fortunately, the hospital wasn’t far from the hotel where Nancy had died, and so she could slip away for half an hour. The crime scene was being processed, witnesses were being interviewed, reports were being written, but Magnus was right: all the answers lay in Greenland.

As she approached his bed, she saw a man she recognized standing next to it. He was in his fifties, tall, with close-cropped brown hair turning to grey and a thin red beard: Jakob Ingibergsson, the famous businessman who had cut quite a dash before the financial crash, and whose companies were still operating.

Tryggvi Thór obviously had friends in high places.

The businessman saw her hovering, and said a swift goodbye to Tryggvi Thór before leaving, ignoring her as he brushed past her.

Tryggvi Thór’s head was bandaged and a large rose of purple blood vessels blossomed on his cheek. Sharp brown eyes stared out at her from his ravaged face.

‘You’re Vigdís, aren’t you?’ he said before she had a chance to introduce herself. ‘Magnús’s pal?’

‘That’s right,’ said Vigdís.

‘I don’t know what you’re doing here. I told your colleague it was just an accident.’

‘Magnús asked me to check up on you. Can I sit down?’ Vigdís indicated the grey plastic chair next to his bed.

‘No.’

Vigdís sat on it anyway. It was still warm from the millionaire businessman’s arse. Magnus had warned her Tryggvi Thór would be difficult. She was sure she could handle him.

‘Róbert told me that you slipped and fell,’ she said, taking out her notebook. ‘Can you tell me exactly what happened?’

‘I slipped and fell.’

Vigdís gave him one of her ‘don’t bullshit me’ looks. She had several. ‘You expect me to believe that? Only a few days after you were attacked at home?’

‘Yes, I do.’ They stared at each other for a couple of moments. ‘OK. I don’t remember exactly what happened. I think I must have fainted as a result of the head injury earlier this week, and I hit my head as I fell.’

Vigdís had to admit that sounded plausible.

‘You have to admit that sounds plausible,’ said Tryggvi Thór with a hint of a smile.

‘You would have died if that tourist hadn’t found you,’ said Vigdís.

The shadow of the smile dissolved. ‘I know. I was lucky.’

‘You might not be as lucky next time.’

Tryggvi Thór didn’t respond.

‘Magnús is concerned about you.’

‘Magnús should mind his own business. Now please leave.’

Vigdís sat there watching him.

A minute passed.

‘OK. If you’re not going to leave, tell me what it’s like being a black Icelander.’

Vigdís rolled her eyes. ‘You have got to be kidding! That’s none of your business.’

‘Neither is my head injury any of yours.’

‘It is my business if someone is trying to kill you,’ said Vigdís. ‘Actually, I don’t care too much about that, but I know Magnús does.’

‘Is he honest?’ Tryggvi Thór asked.

‘Of course he’s honest! He’s a policeman.’

Tryggvi Thór snorted. ‘I used to be a policeman. You and I know they are not all honest.’

‘Yes, you would know that since you got drummed out of the force for corruption.’

‘Well?’ said Tryggvi Thór.

Vigdís sighed. ‘Yes. Yes, Magnús is honest. Irritatingly, inflexibly honest.’

Tryggvi Thór smiled. ‘And you?’

Vigdís refused to respond to his smile, even though she wanted to. She nodded. ‘Yes. I’m honest too. Almost as bad as him.’

‘Good,’ said Tryggvi Thór. ‘I think I believe you.’

Vigdís snorted.

‘The reason I asked you what it was like being a black Icelander, Vigdís, is that my daughter is black. Very black: about the same shade as you.’

Vigdís knew from the reports on the earlier attack in Álftanes that Tryggvi Thór had returned from twenty years in Africa. She hadn’t read of a daughter.

‘What’s her name?’ she asked, in spite of herself.

‘Greta.’

‘And is she here in Iceland?’

‘She visits occasionally, but she is in medical school in Kampala. So. What’s it like?’

Vigdís sighed. Despite herself she was intrigued by a half-Icelandic, half-African woman whose father was a cop.

‘It’s crap, basically. I never met my dad: he was an American serviceman who left my mum before I was born. So I have been brought up entirely an Icelander. I’m just as much an Icelander as you: more in fact, because I have lived my whole life in this country.’

‘OK,’ said Tryggvi Thór. ‘So why is that crap?’

‘People don’t treat me like that. Icelandic people. I know we’re not supposed to be racist, but many of them can’t handle someone who is black and speaks Icelandic as well or better than them. They keep trying to speak to me in English. I don’t speak English.’

‘That’s a shame.’

‘And why is that?’

‘Because Greta barely speaks any Icelandic. I would like her to be Icelandic. Like you.’

‘What does her mother think about that?’

Tryggvi Thór’s face sagged. Vigdís knew she had made a mistake. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

Tryggvi Thór said nothing.

‘Next time Greta comes to Iceland, tell her to get in touch with me.’ Vigdís left her card on Tryggvi Thór’s table. ‘We’ll communicate by tribal dance.’

Thirty-Nine

The white glare of the Greenland icecap emerged in the distance through Magnus’s aeroplane window. There were plenty of questions he needed to ask the TV crew in Greenland. What they knew about the hoax. Which of them had met Nancy Fishburn on Snaefellsnes. What their movements had been the morning Nancy had been killed.

But his first priority had to be Rósa, who was emerging as a prime suspect for Carlotta’s murder. The connection between Carlotta’s death and Nancy Fishburn’s was as yet unclear, but there would be one, and it would probably involve Rósa. Maybe she was covering for Einar? Magnus didn’t know.

He pulled out his notebook and jotted down notes for the interview. Rósa was a smart lawyer. Once she figured out she was a serious suspect for Carlotta’s murder, she would probably keep shtum. Magnus thought he could just about get away with interviewing her as a witness rather than a suspect, at least initially. It was an important distinction in Icelandic criminal law and one Rósa would be aware of. Magnus needed to tempt her to divulge as much information as possible before she realized that he knew she had lied to the police about her trip to London.

The plane descended over massive icebergs the size of ocean liners, reached the mountainous coastline and picked up the flow of a fat ribbon of glacier that darkened from white to grey and blue as it cracked and wrinkled in a frozen tumult of centuries-old ice the closer it came to the sea. The aircraft banked low around a cliff and into a long thin fjord with a drab plain bisected by a runway on one side and green hills on the other: the green of Brattahlíd, part of a narrow strip of vegetation clinging to the south-west edge of an enormous block of granite and ice.

Because of Greenland’s semi-autonomous status with Denmark, there was no immigration control for flights from Copenhagen in the small terminal, but two uniformed police officers, one male and one female, watched the arriving tourists and returning Greenlanders.

Magnus approached them and held out his hand. ‘Hi, I’m Magnus Jonson,’ he said in English, using the American version of his name. His father’s name was Ragnar Jónsson, which meant that in Iceland Magnus was known as Magnús Ragnarsson, but when he had arrived in America at the age of twelve, using his father’s last name had proved much easier all round.

‘Josepha Paulsen,’ said the female officer. ‘And this is Constable Jens Frandsen.’

Vigdís had been in touch with Inspector Paulsen, who was the police chief from Qaqortoq, the nearest big town further down the fjord towards the sea. Paulsen was Inuit, with wide, strong cheekbones and a firm mouth that broke into an unexpectedly sweet smile. Frandsen was twenty years younger than her, Danish, with fine blonde hair that was cut so short you could barely see it.

‘Taler du dansk?’ Paulsen asked. It was a fair question. Both Iceland and Greenland had been colonies of the Danish Crown, and until recently Danish had been compulsory in Icelandic schools. But there was also a linguistic dance when Icelanders and Danes met: the Icelanders preferring to speak English rather than be at a disadvantage in the colonial language.

Magnus had no choice. ‘I’m sorry. I left Iceland when I was twelve, so I never really learned Danish.’

‘That’s OK,’ Paulsen replied in heavily accented English. ‘Your colleague in Reykjavík said that you would prefer to approach Rósa Helgadóttir yourself, so we haven’t detained her. They are all filming at Brattahlíd on the other side of the fjord. We can take you there now.’

‘Great. Let’s go.’

There wasn’t much to Narsarsuaq. It was dominated by the airport, outside of which ran a long straight road which led to a cluster of large rectangular functional buildings: warehouses, sheds, small apartment blocks. Paulsen and Frandsen led Magnus over the road to a police car parked next to a little green hut bearing the word Politi. They sped down the straight road, scattering suitcase-dragging tourists from the Copenhagen flight, to its end at a small harbour of three or four jetties.

They dropped into a marked police speedboat, and soon they were zipping across the fjord, dodging sedate icebergs on their way. Frandsen was driving.

‘Can you give me some background on Rósa Helgadóttir?’ Paulsen asked.

Magnus described as succinctly as he could Carlotta’s murder and the possible relationship of Einar, Rósa and the Italian tourist, and also Vigdís’s discovery that Rósa was in the north of Iceland at the time of the crime. He mentioned Nancy Fishburn’s murder and the need to establish a connection with Carlotta’s death.

Paulsen seemed to pick it all up quickly; her English was good, and she was sharp. ‘It looks like you may want to make an arrest,’ she said.

‘It’s possible,’ said Magnus. ‘I don’t know about the paperwork?’ Although Denmark and Iceland had very good police links, international arrests were always problematic. The fact that the Icelandic criminal justice system was closely based on the Danish model would help.

‘We can hold her for twenty-four hours without charging her,’ Paulsen said. ‘We would take her to the station in Qaqortoq. Our prosecutor here is efficient; that should give you time to get a request from Reykjavík.’

‘How do we get to Qaqortoq?’ Magnus asked.

‘Helicopter,’ said Paulsen. ‘Or boat; but that’s slow.’

Magnus had seen a number of red helicopters bearing the Air Greenland livery on the tarmac at Narsarsuaq.

The boat pulled up at the dock on the other side of the fjord, where an unoccupied police car was waiting for them. ‘We don’t have a policeman in Brattahlíd, but we do keep a vehicle here,’ Paulsen explained, and she fetched the keys from a man in an unkempt red kiosk by the harbour.

They drove along an undulating road past half a dozen large farms and a church, before they reached a small group of people standing a few metres away from the road.

As Magnus approached, he noticed that there were only five of them: Eygló, Suzy, Tom the cameraman, Ajay the young sound guy and a Greenlander whom he didn’t recognize. No Rósa. And no Einar for that matter.

Suzy made no attempt to hide her unhappiness at seeing him. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ she said. ‘Can’t you give us a moment’s peace?’

Magnus glanced at the others. Tom looked inscrutable, Ajay and the Greenlander curious, and Eygló scared. That was interesting.

‘I’m here to see Rósa to ask her some questions. And actually I will probably have more questions for all of you.’

‘How many times is this?’ Suzy protested. ‘If you weren’t so incompetent you would know what questions to ask, and you would only need to ask us once.’

‘That’s not the way murder investigations work,’ said Magnus patiently. ‘By their nature, new evidence comes to light, which leads to new lines of inquiry. But to start with, it’s Rósa I really need to see. Where is she?’

‘She is back at Narsarsuaq. I told her to stay away from our filming, at least today.’

‘Why was that?’

‘She was distracting the others,’ said Suzy, with a quick glance towards Eygló.

Interesting, Magnus thought. Maybe it was Rósa who was scaring Eygló and not him. He saw Tom move a little closer to Eygló and mutter something to her. Just for a second, there was real fear on her face, and then she regained her composure.

More interesting. Clearly, all was not sweetness and light in the documentary team.

‘What about Einar? Is he with her?’ Magnus asked.

‘Probably. We did a couple of takes with him first thing this morning, and then the boat took him back across the fjord.’

Magnus turned to Paulsen, who had been listening. He had plenty of questions for Suzy and her colleagues, but they could wait. Rósa first. ‘Looks like it’s back to Narsarsuaq.’

There was a guest house and a hotel at Narsarsuaq, and the TV crew were staying in the hotel. It, too, was a rectangular functional building, two storeys high, with a rank of flagpoles standing to attention outside it. Neither Rósa nor Einar were there. The receptionist said that Rósa had left the hotel soon after the others that morning, and that Einar had arrived later, at about ten o’clock, and had asked after her. Then he too had left.

It was now two-forty-five.

As they drove back towards the airport terminal and the police hut, Magnus spotted Einar at a wooden table outside a tourist office hut just next to the airport perimeter, sipping from a plastic cup. Sandwich wrappings testified to lunch.

Einar didn’t look especially pleased to see him. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.

‘Looking for your wife. Do you know where she is?’

‘She’s gone for a hike. A place called the Blomsterdalen. It’s that way.’ Einar pointed north of the airport, where the road became a track before it curved out of sight into low hills. He frowned. ‘I don’t understand why you have come all this way to speak to her.’

He looked worried.

‘I’ll want to speak to you too,’ Magnus said. ‘But later.’ He

turned to Paulsen. ‘What’s this Blomsterdalen?’

‘The valley of flowers,’ Paulsen translated into English for Magnus’s benefit — unnecessarily, for the Icelandic word was almost the same. ‘It’s on the route up to the nearest glacier.’

‘Can we drive?’ Magnus asked.

‘We can part of the way,’ said Paulsen.

‘Let’s go then.’

Frandsen drove the police 4 × 4 north past the airport and along the banks of a riverbed, probably half a mile wide, with a narrow stream meandering through it. Magnus recognized the destructive signs of glacial flooding. The road was empty of people until they came to a couple with small backpacks studying a lone stone chimney.

‘That’s all that remains of a massive American military hospital,’ said Paulsen. ‘The rest burned down in the 1970s. I’ll go and ask them if they have seen her.’

She jumped out of the vehicle and strode over to the couple. She was back in a minute. ‘No sign of her.’

The river disappeared to their left as they drove on an increasingly rough track. They crested a small hill, and then there was the Blomsterdalen, a bowl of deep green surrounded by steep cliffs and the riverbed. There were indeed flowers everywhere, blue, purple, yellow, and the bobbing white heads of bog cotton. On the far side of the valley, a couple of miles away, the river emerged from a gorge, and high up, above the wall of rock, Magnus could see the smooth white tip of a glacier, one of the southernmost fingers of Greenland’s icecap.

The road petered out to a footpath crossing a ditch, and the three police officers climbed out of the vehicle.

No Rósa. No obvious sign of any human being.

Frandsen grabbed a pair of binoculars, and carefully surveyed the valley.

Silence. Apart from a twitter of a bird and the hungry buzzing of a bee behind them. And the rustle of the grass in the breeze.

‘What now?’ said Magnus.

‘She might have gone up to the glacier. You need to climb that rock over there.’ Paulsen pointed to the cliff at the far end of the valley. ‘There is a path, but it’s difficult. Is she in good shape?’

Magnus remembered Rósa’s swimmer’s physique. ‘Probably.’

‘Do you want me to go and see?’ said Frandsen. He was young, fit and ready for a rapid hike.

While Paulsen was considering the constable’s suggestion, Magnus heard the familiar croak of a raven, followed swiftly by another. Not far away, a couple of hundred yards into the valley, five of them were circling above a clump of dwarf willow trees next to a stream. One of them dived down.

‘Over there!’ Magnus pointed. ‘See anything? By those birds.’

Frandsen swung his binoculars in the direction of the ravens.

‘What do you think they are circling over?’ Magnus said. He had spent four years of his childhood at the farm at Bjarnarhöfn, long enough to know that ravens behaving like that meant a dead lamb. Or sheep.

Paulsen threw him a worried glance. Greenlanders were hunters; she knew what the ravens meant. ‘There are no sheep here.’

Magnus set off at a trot through the grass and bushes, followed by the inspector. It could be any animal. A fox. A very lost sheep. Another bird.

Or it might be Rósa.

He pushed his way through the low willow bushes, yelling and waving his arms to scare the ravens away. They were reluctant to leave their feast.

It was Rósa. And the birds had got to her.

Forty

There were only two police officers to deal with the crime scene: Magnus was out of his jurisdiction. Paulsen left Frandsen to guard the scene and keep the birds off, and she and Magnus sped back to Narsarsuaq in the car, with Paulsen calling Qaqortoq on the radio in urgent Greenlandic for reinforcements.

There was one obvious suspect and Paulsen named him. ‘From what you’ve told me, Einar had a motive to murder his wife if he thought she had killed Carlotta. Revenge.’

‘That’s true,’ said Magnus.

‘OK. We’ll pick him up now and ask him a few questions. Then I’ll need to coordinate the other officers from Qaqortoq when they get here. There should be a police doctor on his way as well.’

‘What about forensics?’

‘They’ll come down from Nuuk.’ Nuuk was the capital of Greenland, a few hundred miles up the coast.

Einar was no longer sitting outside the tourist office café. One of the staff said they had seen him go into the small US airbase museum next door. They found him there, staring at large wall-mounted photographs of Bluie West One, as Narsarsuaq airfield was called during the Second World War, teeming with aircraft and servicemen. He was the only visitor in the room.

‘Einar!’ Paulsen said.

He turned, a spark of irritation disappearing rapidly when he saw the two police officers’ expressions.

‘I am sorry to tell you we have found your wife. She is dead.’

Shock struck Einar hard in the face.

Paulsen and Magnus waited and watched. The surprise looked genuine, but Magnus had seen surprise faked just as well many times in the past.

‘Where?’ Einar said.

‘In the Blomsterdalen.’

‘How? Was it an accident? Or...’

‘She was stabbed,’ said Paulsen. ‘At least we think she was stabbed.’ It looked as if her chest had been slashed, but the ravens had made a mess of the area, and of her face, so it was hard to be certain.

The little colour there was in Einar’s face left it, and his mouth opened. He seemed dazed.

‘Can you come with us, please, Einar? We have a few questions.’

The police hut was close by. Paulsen sat Einar down on one side of a crowded desk while she took the other, and Magnus took a seat on the side of the little room. For a moment Magnus was worried that she would do the interview in Danish, which Einar probably spoke, but she kept to English for his benefit.

‘Did you kill your wife, Einar?’

That was direct, thought Magnus.

‘What? You think I killed her?’ Einar looked in disbelief at Paulsen and Magnus. ‘Fair enough you might think I killed Carlotta, but not Rósa. She’s my wife, for God’s sake! Why would I kill her?’

‘Answer the question, Einar,’ Paulsen said. ‘Did you kill Rósa?’

‘No,’ said Einar. ‘No, no, no!’ The last word was shouted.

‘All right,’ said Paulsen calmly. ‘I want you to tell me your precise movements from when you left your colleagues at Brattahlíd this morning until when we saw you this afternoon.’

Einar closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and muttered, ‘I can’t believe this,’ in Icelandic.

‘Please speak English, Einar,’ said Paulsen. She had a pen and notebook ready. ‘What time did you get the boat across the fjord?’

Magnus could see what Paulsen was doing: getting down the details which could be quickly checked by her colleagues when they arrived, before she started asking questions about motive and Einar’s relationship with his wife.

Einar’s description of his movements that day was incoherent. It looked as if he was having difficulty thinking straight, but of course he might just have been trying to confuse Paulsen — it was impossible to say. He claimed he had started out to follow Rósa to the Blomsterdalen, but had got as far as the site of the old US military hospital and given up and turned around. On his way back he had climbed the steep hill above the airport and sat up there for a while. Then he had descended to the village and stopped in the café for lunch. And that was where Paulsen and Magnus had found him. During this whole period he hadn’t looked at his watch, or so he claimed.

‘What about your clothes? Have you changed them today?’

Einar was wearing jeans, boots, a T-shirt, a cardigan and a jacket. ‘No.’

‘Are you quite sure?’

‘Of course I’m sure.’

‘Let me look,’ said Paulsen. ‘Stand up.’

He did so, as did she, and she inspected his clothing and his hands, looking for blood or other evidence. Magnus couldn’t see anything and neither could she. No doubt the forensics people would examine everything much more thoroughly later.

‘Empty your pockets.’

Einar did as he was instructed. A wallet, Danish and Icelandic change, a phone, two scrunched receipts and some keys. No knife.

‘Am I under arrest?’

‘Not yet,’ said Paulsen. ‘But I am going to handcuff you and ask you to stay here.’

Paulsen slapped a pair of cuffs on Einar, and then beckoned Magnus to follow her out of the police hut.

‘Can you watch him for me? By all means ask him questions if you write his answers down, but probably best to leave off anything he did today until I get back? Is that OK?’

Magnus nodded.

‘My police officers will be here soon, and I need to organize things. Oh, and Magnus?’ Paulsen looked at Magnus’s large frame.

‘Yes?’

Paulsen looked at Magnus’s large frame. ‘If you need to restrain him, do.’ She grinned.

‘I will,’ said Magnus and joined Einar back in the police hut.

They sat in silence. Magnus didn’t know whether Einar had killed Rósa. It was certainly a possibility and it was natural for Paulsen to detain him.

Einar glared at Magnus for a few seconds. Then his face cracked, he bowed, put his head in his cuffed hands and sobbed. Magnus watched.

Eventually, the sobbing stopped and Einar sat up. His eyes were red and he wiped his nose with his sleeve. They had been real tears. But Magnus had seen men who had killed their wives and wept afterwards.

‘You know Rósa followed Carlotta to Glaumbaer the evening she was murdered?’ said Magnus in Icelandic.

Einar’s eyes burned through the tears with anger. With hatred, even.

‘Did you know that?’ said Magnus.

Einar didn’t reply.

‘I think you did know that.’

Nothing.

‘Do you think Rósa killed Carlotta?’

Magnus waited. Einar held his eye for a few moments and then looked up at the ceiling. He sighed and squeezed his eyes shut. He was in pain. There was no doubt that if he hadn’t killed his wife, this conversation would be painful. But then it might be just as painful if he had killed her. The fact he was an emotional mess didn’t tell Magnus anything.

He met Magnus’s eyes again, the hatred subsiding. ‘I really don’t know,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I’d like to think she didn’t, but I just don’t know.’

Magnus had only known Einar a week. At the start of that week, his lined face could have been described as rugged. Now it was ravaged. His eyes were red, the sockets blackened as if they had been bruised. The cocky self-assurance had gone. Einar was falling apart.

‘Tell me,’ Magnus said quietly.

‘Tell you what?’ said Einar, with an attempt at defiance.

‘Tell me about Rósa and Carlotta.’

Einar slumped back in his chair and nodded to himself. ‘All right. You know that Carlotta and I had an affair several years back, but then Rósa found out about it and told me to stop? And I did?’

Magnus nodded.

‘OK. And, as I told you in Ólafsvík, I had arranged to see Carlotta in Saudárkrókur last week, and Rósa knew nothing about it?’

‘Yes.’

‘So when I saw Carlotta behind that church with her head cracked open, my first thought, my very first thought, was that Rósa had killed her. I knew how angry Rósa would be if she had discovered we were meeting. Then, well, then I thought I was being paranoid; I mean, Rósa can be an angry woman, but she wouldn’t actually kill anyone. But I decided to keep quiet about recognizing Carlotta. It wasn’t just so that Rósa wouldn’t find out that Carlotta and I were meeting; it was also because I thought maybe she had killed her. And if it wasn’t her, but someone else, then you would find the killer and it wouldn’t matter that I knew Carlotta. I thought at the time Eygló hadn’t recognized her from Greenland, so... well... so I kept quiet.’

‘Even though you thought Rósa might be a murderer?’

‘If she had killed Carlotta then it was all my fault. Or mostly my fault. She’s my wife, goddammit, I wasn’t going to shop her to you!’

‘OK,’ said Magnus. ‘Did you talk to her about it?’

‘How could I? She called me when she saw the murder on the news. I didn’t know how to ask her if she had killed Carlotta, at least on the phone. So I just kept it matter of fact. I was expecting her to ask me all about it, to demand to know what Carlotta was doing in Iceland, but the thing is she didn’t.’ Einar’s expression became even more pained. ‘Afterwards I wondered why she didn’t.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It felt like she had known all along. That Carlotta was in Iceland. That Carlotta was dead. I mean before she had heard it on the news. Which implied...’

‘... that she had killed her?’

Einar nodded. ‘That’s what I thought, although I couldn’t admit it to myself, so I just didn’t think too hard about it. But I decided to keep quiet about knowing Carlotta in the hope you guys would turn up someone else — that rapist in Akureyri or something.’

Einar swallowed. ‘But the thing is, I was devastated when I saw Carlotta’s dead body. And if Rósa had killed her... She shouldn’t have done that. I was angry. I was ashamed. I was suspicious. I blamed myself, I blamed her, I blamed Carlotta — she shouldn’t even have been in Glaumbaer.’

He gathered himself. ‘So, Rósa and I agreed not to talk about it until I got back to Reykjavík.’

‘Which wasn’t until the night before you came out here?’

‘That’s right.’ Einar breathed deeply. ‘The problem was that I spent the night before that in Ólafsvík with Eygló.’

‘We know,’ said Magnus.

‘Yes, your partner saw me, didn’t she? Whatever it may look like, we didn’t sleep together, or at least we didn’t have sex. But after the whole Carlotta thing, I couldn’t hide that from Rósa. We had to be completely honest. I had to stop hiding things, so I told her, that evening.’

‘And she didn’t like it?’

‘No. She didn’t believe nothing happened. She started a row. It lasted all night. And, eventually, I asked her about Carlotta.’

‘What did she say?’

‘At first she denied she knew Carlotta was in Iceland before she saw her murder on the news, but by that stage I could tell she was lying. And then she told me the truth. Or I think it was the truth; at least I did then. When she was telling it to me.’

Magnus waited.

‘She knew I was seeing Carlotta. She read my emails, even though I had password-protected them — she guessed the password, and they were on my Gmail account so she could access them any time from her own computer. So she knew Carlotta was coming to Iceland, and where we were meeting in Saudárkrókur. She told me she was furious, and she wanted to catch us. She was going to scare both of us into stopping the affair, or what she assumed was an affair.

‘She decided to come back early from her trip to London. She drove up to Blönduós and tailed Carlotta to Glaumbaer. She saw us filming and Carlotta talking to me. Then she followed Carlotta up to the fjord near Drangey and then back to Glaumbaer later. She assumed Carlotta had arranged to meet me there: she wanted to catch us red-handed.’

Magnus was making notes as he listened. ‘And Carlotta didn’t spot her?’ It was difficult to follow people on empty Icelandic roads.

Einar shrugged. ‘Never underestimate Rósa,’ he said. ‘And Carlotta wouldn’t have been looking out for her.’

‘OK. Then what happened at Glaumbaer?’

‘She says...’ Einar hesitated. ‘She said that she saw Carlotta go into the churchyard. And then after about twenty minutes a man came out to Carlotta’s car, took something out and then returned to the churchyard. Rósa waited, but there was no sign of Carlotta, although she did see the man leave the folk museum car park on foot and walk along the road. Rósa waited ten minutes and then sneaked into the churchyard herself. There she saw Carlotta’s body.’

‘Did she say why she didn’t report it?’ said Magnus.

‘She was going to. And then she thought, just like I did the next morning, that she would be the obvious suspect. So she just left. Drove straight back to Reykjavík.’

Magnus remembered it was possible to get from the churchyard at Glaumbaer to the folk museum round the back of the church away from the road.

‘Who was this man? Did she recognize him?’

‘No.’

‘Was he young or old? Did he look like an Icelander? What did he take out of Carlotta’s car?’

‘I don’t know!’ protested Einar. ‘I didn’t ask anything about him, so she didn’t tell me. I wasn’t even sure there was a man.’

‘I can see that,’ Magnus acknowledged. But he was pretty sure he knew the answer to his last question: Carlotta’s HP laptop.

‘So we kind of made peace,’ Einar said. ‘Or at any rate we fell asleep. But the next morning, we started arguing again. Did we trust each other? I wasn’t going to believe that she hadn’t killed Carlotta if she wasn’t going to accept that I hadn’t had sex with Eygló.’ Einar sighed. ‘It was stupid, but we were both tired. Me especially. I wasn’t making a lot of sense.’

‘So then she came after you. To Greenland?’

‘Yes,’ said Einar.

‘Why was that? To try to straighten things out?’

‘Yes. But not just that. She had something else to tell me.’

‘Which was?’

‘Her cancer was back. And it was going to kill her. Soon.’

Forty-One

‘Did you know that the wampum find and the Columbus letter are an elaborate hoax?’

Magnus looked steadily at Einar, whose eyes flicked briefly up towards him.

‘They are not a hoax. They’ve been thoroughly checked out.’

‘They are a hoax, Einar. A hoax perpetrated by a woman named Nancy Fishburn and her husband and a friend of theirs who was a rare-book dealer. You met her in Nantucket.’

Einar stared at Magnus. ‘You are not serious?’

‘I am. Her granddaughter told me so.’

‘Her granddaughter is lying. Or confused. She was the one who confused Eygló back in Nantucket in a bar. She was drunk.’

‘I don’t think so. Nancy told her all about it last week, and she told me. Are you surprised?’

The anger in Einar’s eyes fizzled out. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. ‘Why should I be surprised? Everything else has fallen apart, why shouldn’t that?’

‘Did you suspect they were fakes?’

‘No,’ said Einar.

‘Did anyone else?’

Einar hesitated. ‘Eygló, maybe. But Professor Beccari authenticated the letter. And the wampum was genuinely from Nantucket, I’m certain of that.’

‘Oh yes, it was. But it was planted by Nancy Fishburn herself nearly forty years ago in the open trench at Brattahlíd.’

‘Oh, great. I hope you have arrested her!’

‘We can’t. She was murdered on Friday morning before you all left for Greenland. In a hotel in Reykjavík.’

‘Oh God,’ said Einar. ‘I suppose you suspect me of that as well?’

‘When did you last see her?’

‘I don’t know. Three weeks ago in Nantucket, I suppose. When we were filming at the lagoon Gudrid and Thorfinn landed at.’ Einar winced. ‘The lagoon we thought they had landed at.’

‘What did you do Friday morning? Take me through that day up to the point I saw you at the City Airport.’

‘You do suspect me! I don’t believe it.’

‘What time did you wake up?’ Magnus asked, notebook at the ready.

Einar claimed he had stayed at home that morning. Suzy had asked him to meet the rest of them for breakfast so they could discuss what they were going to do in Greenland, but after his tense night with Rósa, Einar hadn’t bothered to show up. He had stayed at home until it was time to go to the airport. He doubted any of his neighbours would have seen him.

Rósa had gone to work as usual that morning, or she had said she had. Einar had no idea then that Rósa was going to jump on the plane to Greenland with him, and although she hadn’t told him this herself, Einar suspected she had booked her ticket at the last minute — probably that morning.

As for the Thursday morning in Snaefellsnes, Einar insisted he hadn’t gone to meet Nancy Fishburn — he didn’t even know she was in Iceland. Einar reminded Magnus that he had handed over his computer and phone at the police station in Ólafsvík that morning, and after that he had gone straight back to his own hotel. The others had driven off later to film at Ingjaldshóll, but that was well after the meeting with Nancy.

The door of the police hut opened and Paulsen reappeared with a constable, who led Einar away in handcuffs. Magnus followed them outside, where other police officers freshly arrived from Qaqortoq were busying themselves. Two of them jumped into an unmarked pickup truck and sped off up the road towards the Blomsterdalen.

‘We’ve set up an incident room in the school,’ Paulsen said. ‘There isn’t enough room in the hut.’

Magnus watched as the constable inserted Einar into a police vehicle and drove him away.

‘Did you ask Einar whether Rósa killed Carlotta?’ Paulsen asked.

‘He says he doesn’t know,’ Magnus replied. ‘But he suspects she might have. He knew she followed Carlotta to Glaumbaer — that’s where the murder took place. I’ll write up the interview as soon as I can.’

‘Thanks. I’ll talk to him myself again soon. Our working assumption must be that he thought Rósa killed Carlotta, and then he killed Rósa in revenge.’

Magnus nodded.

‘So we’ll need any evidence you have from Iceland that Rósa murdered Carlotta. Can you get on to your people there?’

‘Sure. Am I staying at Narsarsuaq tonight?’

‘Can we leave that open for now?’ said Paulsen. ‘I might need you in Qaqortoq for the prosecutor.’ Then she gave Magnus that oddly sweet smile she had flashed before. ‘Thanks for your help on this, Magnus. I know we were supposed to be helping you.’

‘No problem,’ said Magnus. ‘If we do this right we should both get a result.’

He retrieved his bag from the back of the police vehicle, where it was still stowed, walked the quarter-mile to the hotel and found a quiet corner of the lobby to make some phone calls and write up his interview with Einar on his laptop for Paulsen.

He called Vigdís and told her the news about Rósa. He also explained Paulsen’s theory about Rósa killing Carlotta and Einar killing Rósa. Vigdís liked the part about who had murdered Carlotta. Magnus wasn’t so sure, but he would keep an open mind; it was certainly the correct priority to pursue. He asked Vigdís to send summaries of the evidence in the Carlotta case to Paulsen in Greenland and to coordinate with Árni and Jón Kári in Saudárkrókur about building a case against Rósa.

Vigdís reported back on the investigation into Nancy’s murder: no forensic evidence of any note, and nothing from all the interviews the police had carried out. Now they would have to go back and ask the hotel staff if anyone had seen Rósa that morning. She could have gone to the hotel and murdered Nancy in her room before going on to the airport. But Magnus wasn’t clear why Rósa would have done that. To protect her husband from the scandal that his discoveries were a hoax? That didn’t sound right.

Gather the evidence and then make sense of it.

‘Did you see Tryggvi Thór?’ Magnus asked her.

‘I did. In hospital. He’s a bit of a mess. And he is a miserable old bastard.’

‘Do you think he was attacked?’

‘For sure. He didn’t admit it; he claims he must have fainted and fallen, but he was pretty comprehensively beaten up. Again. His daughter seems to think so too. She is one angry woman. She claims he needs protection.’

‘Can we give it to him? Will Thelma sign off on it?’

‘This woman says he needs protection from the police. It’s weird; I mean, she’s in the diplomatic service, she should know better. She has clearly lost it.’

‘What does Thelma say?’

‘Nothing. She hasn’t taken any interest. If I were you, I’d find somewhere new to live when you get back here.’

Magnus grunted. He could feel his stubbornness kicking in. He wasn’t going to be moved out of a perfectly nice house because its owner had been beaten up twice, even if the owner refused to admit to it. And in Tryggvi Thór he suspected his stubbornness had found a soulmate.

‘There’s something going on there, Vigdís. Can you ask around? Maybe an old-timer who was in the force when Tryggvi Thór was there?’

‘I don’t want to feed your paranoia,’ said Vigdís. ‘But if the police really are covering stuff up, we have to be careful who we ask.’

‘Maybe a retired policeman?’ Magnus paused to think. ‘What about Emil?’

Emil was a detective from Akranes whom Vigdís and Magnus had worked with when Magnus was last in Iceland. ‘He retired, didn’t he? If he’s still alive.’ Emil’s health had not been good.

‘Yeah. I can go and see Emil,’ said Vigdís. ‘I’m pretty sure he worked as a detective in Reykjavík before transferring to Akranes, in which case he might have known Tryggvi Thór well. He probably is still around; I think I would have heard if he had died.’

Magnus called Árni and repeated what he had told Vigdís. Árni and Jón Kári had been working on sightings of Rósa and her car. But it was already a week and people’s memories were fading. They had one sighting of Rósa from a resident of one of the farms around Glaumbaer, a young farm labourer who thought he had seen her waiting in a car, but he was hesitant about the time, or even the day. Árni promised he would step up the investigation of that angle.

Magnus wrote up his interview with Einar and then sent it by email to Paulsen. A muffled thudding roar erupted outside, as two red Air Greenland helicopters lined up to land — they seemed to be always buzzing in and out of the airport. Magnus could see the school the police were using as an incident room from the hotel, a shed distinguishable from the others by a swing and a see-saw outside it, and a mural of an elephant and a giraffe surrounded by sunshine and jungle on one of the walls. They looked cold.

A police vehicle and a pickup pulled up outside the building and disgorged the TV crew: Eygló, Suzy, Tom, Ajay and the Greenlander, who must have just returned from Brattahlíd over the water. Two police officers led them inside.

Magnus asked to interview the crew one by one after Paulsen and her colleagues had finished with them. They agreed that Paulsen would speak to them about Rósa, and Magnus about Nancy Fishburn. He was given a classroom to himself for the purpose, the grey breeze-block walls brightened by a collage of posters and kids’ pictures.

First up was Suzy Henshaw. Magnus and she perched on two ludicrously small children’s chairs with an undersized table between them.

She looked harried, dark smudges underpinned her dark eyes, and the lines in her face had deepened, but she sat upright and defiant on the little plastic chair.

‘I’m so sorry hear about Rósa,’ she said. ‘What’s going on?’

‘That’s what I’m going to find out,’ said Magnus. ‘With your help.’

‘It can’t have anything to do with us,’ said Suzy. ‘But I will answer your questions, obviously.’

‘Did you meet Nancy Fishburn on Thursday morning at the Hótel Búdir on Snaefellsnes?’ Magnus asked.

Suzy hesitated, examining Magnus before answering. Gauging how much she could say.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘She wanted to talk about the documentary. About Gudrid. We had interviewed her in Nantucket and she had been very helpful.’

‘Did she have anything to tell you?’

‘Not really,’ said Suzy. ‘Nothing important. She had some ideas about Gudrid; she had written a book about her back in the seventies. Nothing that we could use.’

‘Did you know she was murdered on Friday? In Reykjavík?’

Suzy’s eyes widened. She swallowed. ‘No, I didn’t know that.’

‘And do you still say she had nothing to tell you?’

‘No,’ said Suzy, swallowing again, the confidence visibly draining from her face.

‘So she didn’t mention that she had placed the wampum at Brattahlíd? Or that her Italian book-dealer friend had forged the Columbus letter?’

‘No.’ Suzy drew herself up, but Magnus could tell she was on the verge of cracking.

‘Suzy. I know this whole thing is a hoax. The world will know very soon. It’s over. It’s all over.’

Suzy blinked.

‘The secret is out. But this is a murder investigation — three people have died. I don’t know why, and you have to help me. So, I ask you again, what did Nancy tell you?’

Suzy’s back bowed a little, but then she raised her chin in an attempt to hang on to her defiance. ‘You are right. Nancy told me it was all a hoax. That she, her husband and their Italian friend had cooked the whole thing up. I didn’t believe it at first, I thought she was just a scatty old lady, but she was very convincing with the details.’

‘What did you say to her?’

‘I was furious. I asked her why she hadn’t said anything when the wampum was found. Why she hadn’t told Einar when he tracked her down in Nantucket last year, or why she hadn’t admitted it to us when we had asked her about the Columbus letter on camera. I mean she screwed us well and truly. My house is on the line. My marriage is on the line. I need this to work; I need the cash or it’s bankruptcy. I told her all that.’

‘And what did she say?’

‘To be fair to her, she was upset. She understood. I asked her what she was planning to do, and she said she would leave it up to me. She said she was very sorry; it was her duty to tell me what she had done, but it was up to me to decide what to do. She would keep quiet.’

‘And you decided to ignore it all, and carry on making the film?’

Suzy nodded. ‘Basically, yes. What choice did I have?’

‘Didn’t you think it would come out eventually?’

‘It might have done. But as long as I had been paid I would survive. And maybe I would seem like the innocent victim, as long as Nancy kept quiet. I am an innocent victim.’

‘“As long as Nancy kept quiet”?’ Magnus said. ‘She’s quiet now.’

‘Oh no,’ said Suzy, her voice gaining strength. ‘I know what you are doing now. You’re going to blame me for killing her!’

‘Did you?’ said Magnus.

‘No! No way.’

‘Where were you between nine a.m. and eleven on Friday morning?’

Suzy paused. ‘That was the morning we flew here, wasn’t it? I met up with the others at our hotel. The Centrum in Reykjavík. We met at eight-thirty for breakfast to discuss what we were going to do in Greenland. We talked for about three hours. Then we went back to our rooms and packed, and I got a taxi with Tom and Ajay to the City Airport. We got there a bit over an hour before the flight left — just after twelve-thirty I would guess.’

Magnus did some calculations. Kelly had first knocked on Nancy’s door at about eleven that morning. The Hótel Centrum was near the Parliament downtown, about a kilometre away from Nancy’s hotel in Thingholt. If the others confirmed Suzy’s story, then Suzy hadn’t killed Nancy. And it did agree with what Einar had told him.

‘The hotel staff at the Centrum would remember it,’ Suzy said. ‘We kind of took over the dining room.’

‘What about Einar?’

‘Einar wasn’t there. I had asked him to come along, but he didn’t show up. He sent me a text saying he had things to do. I was pissed off with him and told him so.’

‘Had you told anyone else about what Nancy had said about the hoax?’

‘No.’

‘Einar? Eygló? Professor Beccari?’

‘No. None of them. And certainly not Beccari. Eygló had had some suspicions in Nantucket; she had spoken to Nancy Fishburn’s granddaughter who had had some doubts about the wampum, but I managed to convince Eygló that they were blown out of proportion.’

‘Did you have your own doubts?’

‘I was worried, yes. But I couldn’t afford to have doubts.’

She turned away from Magnus and stared at a poster on the wall showing a brightly coloured map of Denmark, with a piglet grinning at its centre. Her shoulders slumped.

‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘That’s the end of Moorhen Productions. It’s all over.’

She pursed her lips. ‘This is going to be a nightmare. I’m going to have to call my husband. I deserve it, though. When Nancy told me it was all a hoax I should have called the whole thing off right then. Then maybe she would still be alive.’ She paused. ‘Who do you think killed her? And what has Rósa’s death got to do with this?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Magnus. ‘But I will find out.’

Magnus spoke to Tom next and then Eygló. Tom was surly and uncommunicative, beyond confirming that he, Suzy, Eygló and Ajay had met at the Hótel Centrum the morning Nancy was killed.

Eygló was distraught to hear that Nancy had been killed. ‘I really liked her,’ she said. ‘She was very smart and her book on Gudrid is great. Who did it?’

Everyone had the same question. Magnus didn’t have the answer.

Eygló was also devastated to hear that the letter and the wampum were fakes, although — as Magnus knew — she had suspected it.

Last up was Ajay. He had less at stake in the success of The Wanderer than the others, but he was overwhelmed by the murders taking place around him. He corroborated the others’ story about the Friday morning meeting, but as Magnus dismissed him, he hesitated.

‘What is it, Ajay?’

‘It’s probably nothing,’ he said. ‘But when we were filming in Iceland, I overheard Tom talking to Eygló. We were carrying our equipment back to the vehicle, and she joined us. It sounded to me like he was threatening her.’

‘Threatening her?’ said Magnus. ‘Threatening her how?’

Ajay repeated what he had heard: Tom warning Eygló that the filming of this documentary was vital to Suzy, and that Eygló should keep her mouth shut. Or else what had happened to Carlotta might happen to her.

‘Did Tom ever talk about Rósa?’

‘No, I don’t think so. In fact, I never saw him speak to her. He isn’t very talkative.’

‘I’ve noticed,’ said Magnus. ‘You didn’t think to tell us this before?’

‘No,’ said Ajay, looking unhappy. ‘To tell you the truth, I’m a bit scared of Tom myself. Could he have killed Carlotta?’

Forty-Two

Magnus returned to the hotel and found himself a nice bench on a little deck outside, ordered a beer, and watched the sun set. It was cool, but the sky was still clear, and he was wearing his coat. The brown, dusty runway stretched out in front of him, and behind that the fjord slunk southwards, a thoughtful milky blue. Magnus was fascinated by the stately icebergs lined up in its central channel, drifting oh-so-slowly up towards the head of the fjord. Which seemed to be the wrong direction: maybe they were being pushed somehow by the glacier disgorging them into the neighbouring fjord, or maybe it was the wind or the tide. The bergs were a subtle mix of gleaming, slippery white and translucent blue. One looked like a sculpture of a motorboat, and another was in the shape of a fist with its middle finger raised towards Erik the Red’s farm at Brattahlíd on the far shore.

Or maybe it was raised at Magnus, the modern Icelandic interloper.

Magnus didn’t feel the euphoria of a case closed. Although Paulsen was doing all the right things, they weren’t there yet. Einar looked a broken man: in the space of a week he had lost his lover, his wife and, when the hoax was made public, his career. At this point Magnus couldn’t tell if it was grief or remorse that was crushing him, but he suspected that if Einar had killed Rósa, he would soon confess. Maybe Paulsen was coaxing a confession at that very moment.

Magnus frowned. Maybe not.

As for Nancy’s murder, it looked as if Einar had no alibi, and it was quite possible Rósa didn’t either — Vigdís was checking. It was most likely that one or other of them had killed Nancy, having found out somehow that she was going to blow the whistle on the hoax. If Einar confessed to Rósa’s murder, he may well tell the police which of the two of them had killed Nancy.

But there were a lot of loose ends. It didn’t quite make sense.

‘Hi.’ Magnus turned to see Eygló holding a large glass of wine. ‘May I join you?’

‘Sure.’

She sat down. She looked out over the water towards Brattahlíd. ‘Is that iceberg giving us the finger?’

‘I was wondering that myself.’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised. You know, I was really looking forward to coming to Greenland, but I think this will be my last time. This has been a shitty week.’

Eygló looked very small as she sat hunched up in her jacket opposite him, small and pale. And yet there was a toughness there that was absent from Einar.

‘Yeah,’ said Magnus.

‘Of course, it was a worse week for Rósa. You know she told me she was going to die?’

‘What!’

‘Yes, yesterday. We had done some really bad takes, and Suzy had called it off for the day. I was sitting on the hill overlooking Brattahlíd, talking to Professor Beccari, and then Rósa showed up and sat herself down right next to me. She said she was going to die soon and I could have Einar. She meant cancer — apparently her breast cancer has come back with a vengeance. But maybe she knew someone would kill her.’

‘Did she seem afraid?’

‘Of the cancer? Or of someone else?’

‘Of either,’ Magnus said.

‘No,’ said Eygló. ‘No; she was a brave woman. She seemed determined, though. I told her I didn’t want Einar, but I don’t think she believed me.’

‘You told Inspector Paulsen all this, presumably?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Eygló. ‘I’m getting pretty experienced at giving interviews to the police.’ She sipped her drink. ‘At least this time no one thinks I killed anybody.’

‘Ah,’ said Magnus. His automatic response was to justify his and Vigdís’s suspicions as being an inevitable part of a professional investigation. But he knew it was no fun being a suspect in a murder inquiry. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘We got that wrong.’

At least his interview with her in the classroom that afternoon had been short and straightforward.

Eygló nodded, accepting his apology. ‘You know, I was afraid myself when Rósa showed up on the plane at Reykjavík.’

‘What were you afraid of?’ Magnus asked.

‘Einar had told me that she knew about us spending the night together in Ólafsvík. What an idiot!’

‘You or him?’

‘Good question. Both of us. I shouldn’t have let him stay. I’m too soft on Einar, I always have been. And he definitely shouldn’t have told Rósa about it. For someone who is naturally so sneaky he does have these fits of random honesty, especially where she is concerned.’

‘And you thought she was jealous?’

‘I knew she was jealous. The question is what she would do about it. I didn’t know whether she had somehow killed Carlotta, or got her killed. Have you figured that one out yet?’

Magnus hesitated before replying. ‘I’m not sure.’

‘Well, I thought she might do the same to me. And then it was her that wound up being killed. Which makes me feel bad.’

‘Why?’

‘You know. Thinking bad thoughts about her. I suppose the Greenlandic police think Einar killed her?’

‘He was wandering around somewhere in Narsarsuaq when she was murdered, and the rest of you were at Brattahlíd.’

‘Do you think Einar killed her?’

‘It’s certainly a possibility worth exploring,’ said Magnus. ‘And he may well have killed Nancy Fishburn as well.’

‘Oh, you’re such a policeman!’

‘I try,’ said Magnus with a smile.

‘Well, I know he didn’t kill Rósa.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘He loved her too much.’

‘They had had a long and emotional argument. People sometimes lose their heads after those. Especially with people they love. I’ve seen it many times, sadly.’

‘Yes, but not the way Einar loved her. She loved him too.’

‘She seemed like a tough woman to me.’

‘That’s a big part of why he loved her. Einar manipulates women: he manipulated me. But she was different from the others; he never could control her. He would escape her for a bit, but then she would reel him back. Always. She was in charge; her power over him gave him a sense of security that he couldn’t get from another woman. Look, if they hadn’t loved each other so much, they would have split up years ago.’

Over the years, Magnus had cleared up several murders in Boston where a man had killed his wife. Marital tension, a loss of temper, drink. Mostly the husbands had had a violent past, but not always. Often they loved their wives. But it was true; they weren’t really like Einar.

He didn’t answer.

‘And if he knew she was going to die soon, why murder her anyway?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Magnus. Because he didn’t.

Eygló sipped her wine thoughtfully.

‘I expect it doesn’t matter much now,’ she said. ‘But there is a Greenlandic archaeologist working at a site in the next fjord west of here, Anya Kleemann. She was on the dig with me and Einar and Carlotta in 2011. She told me that Carlotta had been in touch with her recently asking about the wampum. Very recently, like in the last couple of months or something.’

‘Really? Did she say what Carlotta was worried about?’

‘No. I changed the subject. Suzy was there and I didn’t want to stir things up. But you might want to go talk to her. To Anya.’

‘I might,’ said Magnus. Then a thought struck him. ‘Why were you so concerned about stirring things up?’

Eygló was silent for a while. The sun was setting over a mountain to the west, a golden streak glinting off the grey waters of the fjord.

‘I was scared. I’m still scared.’

‘Why?’

‘Isn’t it obvious? Carlotta. Then Rósa. Why not me?’

‘But if Einar killed Rósa because she killed Carlotta, and we have Einar in custody, then there is nothing to be scared of.’

‘Yeah, but I don’t believe Einar did kill Rósa. Which means someone else did. The same person who killed Carlotta.’

‘OK, I can see how you were scared of Rósa. But she’s not a threat any more. So who else is there?’

Eygló glanced at Magnus. She shrugged.

‘Tom?’ Magnus suggested.

Eygló’s eyes widened. ‘Tom?’ she said, with an attempt at innocence.

Magnus felt a flash of anger. At this point he expected honesty from Eygló.

Eygló seemed to understand. ‘Sorry. Yes, Tom. I’m afraid of Tom. How did you know?’

‘Ajay overheard him threatening you back in Iceland. Hinting that you might suffer the same fate as Carlotta. And I saw the way you looked at him at Brattahlíd earlier today.’

‘It was more than a hint.’

‘Do you think he was implying he killed Carlotta?’

‘I don’t know. I assume so.’

‘Could he just have been taking advantage of Carlotta’s death to scare you?’

‘Yes, I’ve thought of that; he could. But he’s such a creep. I thought his strong-silent-type act was almost cute, but now it weirds me out. I mean, it’s all very well being a loyal employee, but that’s loyalty bordering on obsession.’

‘So what exactly is Tom’s relationship with Suzy, do you think?’

‘I don’t know. They are clearly a good team and she respects him as a cameraman. I doubt they have a sexual relationship, if that’s what you mean. But he seems to idolize her. And there’s something creepy about him. Who knows what’s going on inside his head?’ Eygló shuddered. ‘Ugh.’

‘Was he definitely at Brattahlíd all day today?’

Eygló nodded. ‘Yes. We were filming, and he’s the guy with the camera, so nothing much happens without him. We had a break for lunch, and he went off by himself like he often does, but that was only half an hour, tops.’ She sighed. ‘Actually the filming today went pretty well, especially compared to yesterday. I was rubbish yesterday.’

‘So we know Tom couldn’t possibly have killed Rósa today,’ said Magnus. ‘On the other hand, Einar could.’

‘Einar didn’t kill her,’ said Eygló. ‘And I’m still scared. I don’t know what’s going on.’ She looked at Magnus with something close to pity. ‘And I’m not sure you do, either.’

She sighed. ‘It was too good to be true.’

‘What?’

‘These documentaries. My new life. You know, I thought I was good at it.’

‘You are good at it,’ said Magnus.

Eygló shook her head. ‘I’m just a talking head. A blonde talking head. A short blonde talking head.’

‘No. No!’ Magnus was surprised at the vehemence of his insistence. ‘You really get what it was like to be a Viking a thousand years ago. And you make it seem fascinating; and important. I was glued to Viking Queens.’

Eygló smiled. ‘Yeah. But you are a bit of a history nerd, aren’t you, Inspector Magnús?’

Magnus grinned. ‘OK, that’s true. But that means I know a bit about it. I’m your target audience. And you hooked me.’

Eygló looked as if she was about to make some barbed comment, but then she smiled shyly. ‘Thanks.’

‘So don’t give it up.’

‘I’ll have no choice. Suzy will go bankrupt. Everyone will know Einar and I fell for a hoax, and I’ll never get any job related to archaeology in Iceland again.’

‘Can’t you try your luck in Britain?’

‘After Brexit? They probably wouldn’t let me in. And the States won’t be any easier these days.’

‘Don’t give up, Eygló.’

Eygló sipped her wine. ‘At least I’ll still have Bjarki. And he will still have Liverpool Football Club.’

‘Is Bjarki your son?’

‘Yeah. He’s eleven. He’s a straightforward guy. You can rely on him.’

‘Lucky you,’ Magnus said.

‘Yeah. Do you have children, Magnús?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know!’ Eygló raised her eyebrows. ‘Do you know how bad that sounds?’

Magnus grinned sheepishly. ‘Doesn’t sound good, does it?’

‘So what is it? A kid in every port?’

‘Not quite. I saw my ex-girlfriend a few days ago. And she had this little boy with her. Ási.’

‘And she said he was yours?’

‘She hasn’t said anything. I didn’t ask. I didn’t even think about it, but afterwards my partner, Vigdís, said there was a similarity. And the age matches up.’

‘Not much of a detective, are you?’

‘Er. No,’ said Magnus. ‘But Vigdís is pretty good.’

‘So, are you going to talk to her? Your ex?’

‘Do you think I should?’

‘Of course you should! You might be a crap detective, but you’re a lucky man. Seriously, kids might be inconvenient, but when the world treats you like shit, sometimes that’s all you’ve got.’

‘Maybe you’re right. But I think you are underestimating my detection skills.’

‘I’ll rethink that as soon as you finally figure out that Einar didn’t kill Rósa.’

A police car drew up in front of the hotel and Paulsen jumped out. ‘Hey, Magnus, come on!’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Qaqortoq. Bring your bag. We are taking Einar into custody there. And I’d like you to talk to the prosecutor in the morning.’

Forty-Three

It was a dramatic hop from Narsarsuaq to the town of Qaqortoq. The sun had set, but the three-quarters moon had already risen, bathing the rock, water and icebergs in an eerie grey-blue tinge. The great Greenland icecap ran out of steam a few miles north-east of Narsarsuaq, and from there fingers of fjords stretched twenty miles down to the Atlantic. Water and land became a tangle of grey, black and silver, except that everywhere there were shards of ice glinting in the water, some as big as ships. Magnus was fascinated by them.

Paulsen was sitting next to him on the left side of the helicopter facing outwards. Einar was in cuffs on the central seats at the back, wedged between two police officers. Magnus could feel how keyed up Paulsen was by the excitement of the investigation. Magnus was impressed: she seemed to be doing a good job of organizing resources in difficult circumstances. He had been involved in a number of cases in rural Iceland — Carlotta’s murder being a typical example — and they were tricky. Because of the sparseness of the population, and hence the tiny numbers of local police, expertise had to be drafted in from long distances. In Iceland, this often involved much driving; in Greenland it involved helicopters. Lots of them. Thelma would have hated the expense.

But despite Paulsen’s efficiency, or perhaps because of it, Magnus was feeling sidelined. That was fair enough when it came to Rósa’s murder, but not Carlotta’s nor Nancy Fishburn’s. It now looked likely that Rósa had murdered Carlotta in Glaumbaer, but that still had to be properly investigated and evidence gathered; it wasn’t good enough for Paulsen to assume it just because she needed to support her own theory about Rósa’s death.

There were other possibilities. Tom perhaps. Or Einar himself.

But Tom and Einar had alibis for the night of Carlotta’s murder.

What about Suzy? She had supposedly gone to bed with an incipient migraine that evening. She could have driven out to Glaumbaer; she had the keys to the rental car. And she certainly had a motive for shutting Carlotta up if she realized that Carlotta was going to expose the whole documentary as a hoax.

Maybe Suzy. Maybe Suzy and Tom working together?

And then there was Nancy Fishburn’s death. That was still a mystery.

Within twenty minutes, the helicopter scooted up and over a looming mountain to reveal a giant cruise ship glimmering in the moonlight. Right next to it, as if anchored, crouched an iceberg, almost as big, its centre hollowed out by some celestial hand. Little yellow lights spilled over the hillside facing the two vessels.

Qaqortoq.

The helicopter lowered itself on to a helipad jutting out from a rock thirty feet above the sea. As soon as the aircraft touched down, Paulsen grinned at him and undid her seatbelt. Magnus grinned back, but he wasn’t happy to be this far from the investigation.

He could feel the stubbornness kicking in.

When Eygló got back to her room at the hotel in Narsarsuaq, she flopped on to her bed and closed her eyes, her phone lying impotently beside her. Facebook could wait. She had nothing to tell her followers except she was a loser.

Her life was going to be crap again.

Why had she ever thought it would be anything else? Suzy, Viking Queens, The Wanderer, all had seemed too good to be true. And that was because they were. How could she or Einar have ever believed in the wampum? And as for Professor Beccari, if he was such a goddamned all-important genius, he should have figured out that the letter from Christopher Columbus to his brother was a forgery.

It was such a shame! Because the story of Gudrid was a great one anyway, and one she would love to have told. They hadn’t needed the Nantucket angle. They had been greedy: greedy for fame, greedy for the excitement of discovery, the thrill of the new theory. Treasure hunters who had discovered fool’s gold. And all Eygló had really wanted to do was share her love for her heroine with other people. If they had only stuck to that.

Oh, well. She had lived a crap life before. She would live one again.

She was pretty sure Liverpool were in the Champions League that year; maybe they would win it! Eygló smiled. That would make Bjarki happy.

She glanced at the tupilak she had bought him from the hotel gift shop, sitting on her bedside table. It was kind of creepy: a small carving of a Greenlandic monster made from caribou antler. She liked to buy Bjarki little souvenirs from the places she went, and he dutifully lined them up on his bookshelf, but she was having second thoughts about this one. Too creepy.

She threw it in the bin.

She had to speak to him. She just prayed that Rósa’s death hadn’t made it to the RÚV television news yet, or that if it had, Bjarki hadn’t seen it.

He was on his laptop when she called him up on Skype. She recognized his cousin’s bookshelf behind his head, lined with thick volumes of Harry Potter in Icelandic.

‘Hi, Mum. Did you see that guy didn’t go to Chelsea after all? He’s coming to Liverpool! What did I tell you?’

‘No, I missed that,’ said Eygló, smiling broadly. ‘That’s good, isn’t it? I haven’t had a chance to watch much news here.’

‘You’ve got keep up, Mum,’ said Bjarki. ‘We still need a defender, though, probably two, and there’s not much time until the transfer window closes. I’m worried we’re buying too many midfielders.’

‘That could be a problem.’

‘I wonder if they ever play Football Manager? They would make so much better decisions if they did.’

For a wonderful ten minutes, Eygló was immersed in Bjarki’s world, which was almost entirely one of football. He didn’t ask about Greenland once. Ordinarily, Eygló would have been a little put out by her son’s lack of interest in her life, but not just then.

There was a knock at her door. ‘I have to go, darling,’ she said. ‘Goodnight. Speak to you tomorrow.’

‘’Night, Mum.’

She closed Skype and, still smiling, walked across her bedroom and opened the door.

Then, and only then, did she remember she shouldn’t have. Because there was Tom.

She tried to shut the door in his face, but he was too quick. Within a couple of seconds, he was in her room with the door closed behind him.

She stepped back. Why the hell had she let him in? She should have stopped for a moment to think who would be knocking on her door at ten o’clock at night. Talking to Bjarki had lowered her guard.

‘Leave, Tom. I didn’t invite you in here.’

Tom was wearing a grey T-shirt and shorts. He wasn’t tall, but he was taller than Eygló. And he had muscles — large biceps and rippling hairy forearms. She knew he was strong: she had seen him lugging around prodigious amounts of equipment.

Tom took a step towards her. She took two steps back.

‘The cops have discovered it was all a hoax,’ he said.

‘I know. They told me.’

‘How did they know that?”

‘Uh. I think the old lady’s granddaughter told them.’

‘And why do you think that that Icelandic cop Magnus asked her about it?’

Eygló swallowed. ‘I don’t know.’

‘When he interviewed me this afternoon he said he had had reason to suspect the wampum was a fake. Now, why would he think that?’

Eygló opened her mouth to scream, but Tom was quick. She found herself pinned against the wall, with his hand over her mouth. ‘No screaming. No screaming, Eygló, or I hurt you.’

Eygló could feel the rough strength of Tom’s hand against her face, his fingers on her cheeks. His blue eyes were ablaze with anger. His nostrils flared millimetres away from her face, and she noticed a tiny spot of snot stuck to a hair sticking out where it shouldn’t. This close up she could see that Tom had suffered from acne when he was a kid, and he hadn’t shaved for a day or two. Droplets of stale beer tickled her nostrils.

‘OK, if I let you go, will you keep quiet?’

Eygló didn’t answer.

‘Well?’ He tightened his grip on her mouth.

She was terrified. What would he do to her? She nodded.

He pushed her on to the bed and stood over her.

‘You spoke to that American policeman in Iceland, didn’t you?’ he demanded.

She tried to answer, but she couldn’t. He looked furious. What would he do to her?

She had to answer. She nodded again.

‘Why?’ It wasn’t exactly a shout, more of an urgent growl. ‘I told you what would happen if you spoke to the cops.’

He had. Oh, God, he had.

Wait a minute. Eygló’s brain cleared. What was he going to do to her?

She tried to say something.

‘What?’

She cleared her throat and tried again. ‘You didn’t kill Carlotta, did you?’

This threw Tom for a moment. ‘I could have done.’

‘No you couldn’t,’ said Eygló, sensing a chink in what she was beginning to realize was Tom’s bravado. ‘Very few people kill other people. At least not these days.’ They had in Viking times, she had to admit, if only to herself. If they were in a saga, she would indeed be dead now. But they were not. They were in a hotel room in the twenty-first century and Tom was a cameraman, not a gangster.

‘I warned you,’ said Tom. ‘I told you that if this series gets pulled, Suzy will go to the wall. I’m not prepared to let that happen.’

‘What is it with you and Suzy, Tom?’

Tom’s face flushed under his beard. ‘What’s that supposed to mean? There’s nothing between us. I’ve known Suzy a long time; we just look after each other, that’s all.’

‘Well, it’s happened, Tom,’ said Eygló. ‘This little town is crawling with cops. If you hurt me, I’ll tell them and you’ll end up in jail.’

‘No you won’t.’

‘Yes I will.’ Eygló held his eyes. She would tell them if he touched her. And now she knew and he knew he wasn’t going to hurt her.

‘Sit down, Tom.’ She nodded towards the only chair in the room, tucked under a desk.

Tom hesitated, and then pulled out the chair and sat on it.

‘This is going to be really bad for all of us. But the problem isn’t that the hoax has been discovered: that was always going to happen. The problem is that we believed it in the first place. That’s Einar, that’s me, that’s Professor Idiot Beccari. And that’s Suzy. That’s why we’re in this mess. Because we all made a mistake. A big mistake.’

‘I never believed any of it,’ said Tom.

‘Then why didn’t you say anything?’ said Eygló. ‘Why didn’t you tell Suzy what you thought?’

Tom didn’t answer, but he reddened.

‘You can keep up your silent, brooding jungle-man pretence if you want, but then you have to take responsibility for what happens when you don’t speak up. Don’t you?’

Tom’s blush deepened. He breathed in through those flared nostrils. He was listening.

‘Look, I’m really sorry for the mess Suzy is in. I hope she finds a way out of it. But I’m not sorry I tipped off Magnus. It would all be so much worse if this came out when the programmes aired.’

‘If you had only—’

‘No, Tom,’ said Eygló gently. ‘No. They would have uncovered it anyway. Or someone would have done.’

That was too much for Tom. He glared at Eygló, stood up and left the room, slamming the door behind him.

Forty-Four

A police car picked up Magnus from his hotel just before eight o’clock the following morning, and drove him down the hill to the police station. It was only about a quarter of a mile, and Magnus would rather have walked.

The sunshine of the previous day had gone, and a low cloud was pressing down on the mountaintops above the little town. But despite the gloom, Qaqortoq had a jolly appearance, certainly much jollier than its Icelandic counterparts. Unlike an Icelandic fishing village with its houses of white and grey concrete or metal siding, the houses here were made of a brightly coloured imported wood: mostly red, but also blue and yellow. A harbour was dominated by the shape of the mighty cruise liner and its almost-as-mighty pet iceberg.

The car drove down to a small square with a silent fountain in its centre and an old low wooden building, similar to the Pakkhúsid in Ólafsvík, guarding the corner next to the water. This, it transpired, was the police station.

Magnus had been awake for a while, emailing Árni and Vigdís in Iceland. They had applied for a warrant to search Rósa’s home and office and seize any computers she might have there; it should be granted that morning. The circumstantial evidence was strong that Rósa was at Glaumbaer when Carlotta had died, but there was as yet no proof that would stand up in court that she had killed her.

The standard of proof required was lower now, because she was no longer alive to be prosecuted and there were no inquests in Iceland, but the police had to be certain that she had indeed killed Carlotta, not least to be sure that Carlotta’s murderer wasn’t still at large.

Magnus wasn’t yet convinced. It was probable they would turn up the evidence to convince him; it would just require patience, thoroughness and a little imagination.

And he was still wondering about Suzy Henshaw.

As for Nancy Fishburn’s murder, the staff at Rósa’s law firm confirmed that she had been in the office all morning, until dashing off for the airport — presumably she had stopped at home to pick up a suitcase, but that needed to be checked. Rósa’s assistant recalled that Rósa had booked the flight to Greenland that morning, just after she had got into the office, and had announced that she was taking a couple of days off at the beginning of the following week.

So, Rósa hadn’t killed Nancy Fishburn. Once again, Einar was looking the best bet for that. The Reykjavík police would interview their neighbours to see if anyone saw Einar leave home that morning early enough to have met Nancy at her hotel.

When Magnus arrived, a meeting was beginning, with Paulsen in charge. Most of the faces around the table were Inuit, with the exception of two Danes, one young, one old. All were in uniform — the police force in Greenland didn’t seem to run to detectives in civilian clothes, so Magnus felt out of place in his jeans. The discussion was in Danish, which Magnus found almost impossible to follow, but the grizzled Danish constable sitting next to him helped with the odd translation into English. At least the legal system wasn’t too different from Iceland’s.

From what Magnus could figure out, Einar hadn’t confessed. Nor were his whereabouts clear for a four-hour period in the late morning, when he claimed he had walked part way to the Blomsterdalen. A Danish tourist had seen him about a kilometre north of the airport on the track towards the Blomsterdalen; that tallied with Einar’s story. No one had seen him on Signal Hill, the hill above the airport. Another witness, a Dane who lived at an isolated summer cabin on the other side of a small lake from the route to the Blomsterdalen, reported seeing a lone figure on the road jump off it to hide behind a bush when a car drove by. The figure was far too far away to be identified, but the witness thought it was a man and that he wasn’t particularly tall. Which Einar was. But then the witness wasn’t absolutely sure.

The police needed better than that.

They had already received Rósa’s phone records from TELE Greenland, which was impressively quick work, and Magnus asked for a copy of them so he could send them to Reykjavík to be cross-referenced with Carlotta and Einar’s records from there.

Three forensics guys from Nuuk were present: they were police officers in uniform with specialist forensics training, but they hadn’t had time to do much the evening before. Constable Frandsen had found the murder weapon, a vicious-looking hunting knife of the kind that could be found in every Greenlandic home, tossed into the brush twenty metres from the body.

Paulsen invited Magnus to deliver a brief report in English on the investigation in Iceland of Carlotta’s and Nancy’s murders, and the possible connection to Rósa’s. But as Magnus spoke, he realized the connections didn’t quite make sense: something was missing. He was beginning to think it would only be when Paulsen persuaded Einar to confess that they would have the true picture.

Paulsen said something rapidly in Danish — Magnus wasn’t quite sure what it was, except that it included the word ‘Beccari’. Then she repeated it in English for his benefit. Professor Beccari had called the police first thing that morning to say he had some information to give them about Rósa. Paulsen had asked him to come into the station at nine-thirty and she invited Magnus to join her for the interview.

Paulsen doled out tasks to the assembled officers, most of which centred on finding witnesses to establish a precise timeline for Einar’s whereabouts during the day. Then she sent them off to the helicopters and Narsarsuaq.

Paulsen wanted Magnus to join her for a briefing with the local prosecutor, but first Professor Beccari was waiting to speak to them.

The professor was sitting in the station’s interview room, staring out of the window at a stall in the fish market by the harbour covered in seal flesh and blood. A gory sight.

‘I wasn’t expecting to see you here,’ he said to Magnus. ‘So there must be a link to Carlotta’s murder.’

‘We’ll see.’ Magnus noted that Beccari had already made the link himself. ‘But this is Inspector Paulsen’s investigation.’

‘What have you got to tell us, professor?’ Paulsen asked.

‘It’s about poor Rósa,’ Beccari said. ‘The moment I heard she had died, I knew I had to get in touch with you.’

‘How did you hear?’

‘At breakfast at the hotel some guests were talking about a murder at Narsarsuaq. A tourist. So I immediately called Eygló who told me it was Rósa. The poor woman! It was definitely murder?’

Beccari’s hands were flashing in much the same agitation as Magnus remembered when he had first interviewed him about Carlotta’s death.

‘She was stabbed,’ said Paulsen.

‘Right.’ Beccari paused. ‘Then I have something to tell you.’

He gathered himself and began his story. ‘I joined Rósa and the television crew coming over here to Greenland. I have always wanted to visit this country and it seemed like a great opportunity. But if you’ve spoken to them you’ll know that the atmosphere among the team was really bad. Something to do with Einar and Eygló and Rósa. It was obvious to anyone that they were all upset with each other, and it was becoming really unpleasant. So on Saturday I decided to leave them and explore Greenland by myself for a couple of days. I’ve been staying here.’

‘At the Hotel Qaqortoq?’ It was where Magnus was staying; it was probably the only decent hotel in town.

‘That’s right. Anyway, I ended up talking with Rósa a fair bit, because the rest of them were not speaking to each other. We got on well; she was an intelligent woman, and I like intelligent women. Saturday’s filming had been a disaster and Suzy ended it early. I was sitting in the back of the boat with Rósa, returning across the fjord to Narsarsuaq. Until that point she had always seemed cool and in control. But she looked scared.

‘I asked her what was wrong. She seemed to think for a few moments and then said that she had something important to tell me. If nothing happened to her, then I should just forget that she had said anything. But if something did happen to her then I should tell them that she was sorry for what she had done.’

‘“Them”? What did she mean by “them”?’ Paulsen asked.

‘That’s exactly what I asked! But Rósa said if something happened to her I would know whom to tell.’ Beccari looked at Magnus and Paulsen with incredulity. ‘I thought, how could I possibly know? I asked her what she had done, and of course she wouldn’t tell me. She said maybe nothing would happen to her, in which case I should just forget the whole conversation, but she begged me, if something did happen, to do what she had asked me.’

Beccari’s blue eyes were popping. ‘Well! What was I to do? She seemed deadly serious, and very upset. So I promised. What else could I do?

‘The boat arrived at Narsarsuaq and we all got off, and I didn’t get a chance to speak to her alone before I left them later that afternoon to catch a helicopter flight here. Except as I was saying goodbye, Rósa whispered: “You will do as I asked, won’t you?” And I said yes. And that’s the last I saw of her.’

‘So that’s why you have come to see us now?’ Paulsen asked.

‘Of course.’

Paulsen glanced at Magnus. They both knew what Rósa was talking about. Magnus raised his eyebrows and Paulsen gave a tiny nod of assent for Magnus to ask a question.

‘What do you think she meant?’

‘Then or now?’ Beccari said.

‘Both.’

‘When she said it, I had absolutely no idea. But afterwards, as you can imagine, I thought about it quite hard.’

‘And what did you think?’

‘Well, at first I thought it must have something to do with Einar and Eygló: the little ménage à trois or whatever it is they have going on. Rósa had done something that she needed to apologize to one of them for, but she couldn’t face doing it herself. But yesterday I took a trip to Hvalsey — you know, the old Viking church there — and I was just sitting there thinking about it. And it seemed to me that when Rósa said “if something happens” she meant something more permanent. And then I thought about Carlotta’s death. And, well, I wondered whether she had had anything to do with it.’

‘Which is why you thought I had come here?’ said Magnus.

Beccari nodded.

‘So who do you think you need to tell that Rósa was sorry?’

‘Carlotta’s parents, I assume. Don’t you think? I mean, once I heard from Eygló that Rósa had been murdered, it all made sense. Or have I got it completely wrong?’

‘I think you may have got it right,’ said Paulsen.

‘Why do you think she told you?’ said Magnus.

‘If you mean why me, I think it’s because I am an outsider and I have a certain authority, if you know what I mean. I guess I’m Italian so I can talk to Carlotta’s parents. Although I am not sure that they would find it particularly comforting to hear that their daughter’s murderer was sorry.

‘And if you mean why did she tell anyone, I have no idea. Guilt, maybe? Your guess is as good as mine. Better probably.’

Magnus shrugged.

‘So you reckon Rósa killed Carlotta?’ Beccari asked.

Paulsen nodded. ‘It’s looking that way.’

Beccari shook his head. ‘I would never have believed it. And now she wants me to tell the parents she’s sorry.’

‘You don’t have to do that,’ said Magnus.

‘I don’t know,’ said Beccari. ‘She seemed so upset when she asked me and I promised. But if she was a murderer, then I don’t really owe her anything, do I?’

‘I’d say not.’ A thought occurred to Magnus. ‘Before you knew she had been killed, yesterday, when you were at Hvalsey and you had figured out she murdered Carlotta: were you going to tell us?’

‘Hah!’ Beccari said. ‘I was afraid you would ask me that question. I really didn’t know what to do. It was just guesswork on my part — I could easily have been wrong. And I had promised her to keep quiet. The truth is I was going to mull it over. But then when I heard she was dead, my mind was made up.’

‘Thank you for coming in,’ said Paulsen. ‘When are you leaving Greenland?’

‘I’ve a flight booked back to Reykjavík later today, and from Keflavík on to New York tomorrow,’ said Beccari. ‘Can you let me know how the investigation goes, inspector?’ he said to Magnus. ‘Especially when you have decided whether Rósa did kill Carlotta. I will need to figure out what to do about her parents.’

‘OK,’ said Magnus. As Beccari stood up, Magnus hesitated. ‘I do have some bad news about the theory that Gudrid and Co. landed in Nantucket.’

Beccari looked at him sharply. ‘Oh yes?’

‘Yeah. It’s all a hoax. The wampum.’ Beccari’s face showed a mixture of horror and anger. ‘And the Columbus letter.’

‘I don’t know about the wampum,’ he said. ‘But I do know the Columbus letter is genuine.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Magnus. ‘I spoke with an old lady who lived in Nantucket who planted them. Or she planted the wampum; her friend planted the letter in the Vatican. It’s a fake.’

‘No! Are you sure? I don’t believe it! Who is this old lady? How do you know she’s telling the truth?’

All thoughts of Rósa and Carlotta had obviously left Professor Beccari’s mind as he contemplated the threat to his reputation.

‘I’m sure. Look, I can’t give you the details because it is related to an ongoing investigation, but I wanted to warn you.’

‘I think you are mistaken,’ said Professor Beccari, haughtiness having taken over from horror. ‘And I warn you that you and this old woman, whoever she is, must be careful about questioning my judgement, unless you are both on very solid ground.’

‘All right,’ said Magnus, all sympathy for the professor disappearing. ‘But I don’t think the old lady will care very much about your threats.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because she was murdered. On Friday morning in Reykjavík.’

Beccari seemed to realize he had gone too far. ‘Oh. That’s... that’s terrible. OK, look, I’m sorry. I’m sure you told me this in good faith. But that letter is authentic — I’m certain of it.’

‘Her name was Nancy Fishburn, ‘ Magnus said. ‘Did you know her?’

‘No. Wait — did she write a book on Gudrid?’

‘Yes, that’s her.’

‘I glanced at her book in the library. But I have never met her, no.’

Paulsen let Beccari go. ‘We’ll be in touch.

‘Sounds as if Rósa knew what was going to happen to her,’ she said once the professor had left.

‘I guess so,’ said Magnus. ‘Unless she was referring to her cancer? Eygló said Rósa told her it was killing her.’

‘That doesn’t sound right to me,’ said Paulsen. ‘It sounds to me as if she was expecting something more sudden.’

It sounded like that to Magnus too.

‘Einar must have threatened her,’ she said. ‘Perhaps there was a history of this? Maybe Einar had tried to kill her before. Or beaten her. Does that seem possible to you?’

‘Unlikely from what I’ve seen of their relationship.’

‘I don’t know about Iceland, but in this country you can never tell.’

‘No, that’s true of Iceland. And America.’ And pretty much anywhere else, Magnus suspected. You couldn’t tell what went on in anyone’s marriage, but you did know that there was more abuse than ever came to light. ‘But I’d have thought if he did threaten to kill her, it would be over something specific.’

‘Like he had just discovered she had murdered Carlotta? Or she had confessed it to him?’

Magnus nodded. ‘Maybe.’ He thought a moment. ‘I wonder if Professor Beccari would ever have mentioned it if Rósa had not been killed?’

‘I don’t know, but I’m glad he did,’ said Paulsen. ‘Now, let’s get to the prosecutor’s office.’

Forty-Five

Back in Iceland, Róbert was arranging the warrant to search Rósa’s home and office and seize her computers. While Vigdís was waiting, she decided to take the opportunity to drive out to Akranes and see Emil.

He actually lived on a farm twenty kilometres to the east of the town. For a property owned by a retired policeman, Vigdís was surprised at how prosperous it looked: a new barn, dozens of horses grazing in paddocks bordered by smart wooden fences, a yard that was almost gleaming. The farmhouse itself — stained white concrete walls and a red metal roof — was noticeably tattier than its yard.

The door was answered by a tall thin woman of about sixty: Linda, Emil’s wife. Despite only having met Vigdís once or twice, she recognized her immediately; people usually did. She greeted her warmly and led her through to a living room, where Emil was sitting in an armchair facing the home meadow, reading that morning’s Morgunbladid.

‘Someone to see you, Emil.’

He looked up, his eyes betraying confusion. Vigdís was shocked at what she saw. The last time she had seen him, he had been a large, very large, man in his late fifties, with a thick moustache and several robust chins. The moustache had gone, and so had much of the fat, leaving loose folds of skin around a haggard face. There was still a tiny little paunch above his jeans, but his legs appeared stick thin. Although he would only be in his sixties, he looked ten years older.

Two walking sticks leaned against the armchair.

‘Hi, Emil,’ she said, approaching him with a grin and holding out her hand. ‘Vigdís.’

The confusion left Emil’s eyes and a smile brightened half of his face. One corner of his mouth stubbornly pointed downwards. ‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘Vigdís! How lovely to see you. Forgive me if I don’t get up. Sit yourself down!’

Emil’s voice was slurred. Vigdís knew he had had a heart attack, but he had clearly suffered a stroke as well. She couldn’t help wondering what effect it had had on his brain. On his memory.

‘Can I get you some coffee?’ Linda asked.

‘Yes, thank you,’ she said, sitting on a chair next to Emil. ‘What a lovely farm you have here!’

Emil snorted. ‘It used to belong to Linda’s parents. Unfortunately we have been unable to keep it up, what with only my pension. We sold the farmland and the yard to some people from Reykjavík, but we managed to keep the house.’

That explained the difference between the well-kept yard and the run-down farmhouse.

‘How are you doing, Vigdís? Are you still in the Violent Crimes Unit? Or has it been reorganized again?’

Vigdís exchanged some departmental gossip with Emil, who said that the only policeman from Reykjavík whom he saw these days was Snorri — the Commissioner and a friend from his younger days. Emil asked about Magnus, and Vigdís told him he was back in Iceland.

‘Are you here on official business?’ Emil asked.

‘Semi-official,’ said Vigdís. ‘Do you remember a cop called Tryggvi Thór? Tryggvi Thór Gröndal?’

‘I certainly do,’ Emil said. ‘We worked together when I was at Hverfisgata. A good man. What about him? He went off to Africa, didn’t he? Is he back in Iceland?’

‘Yes, he is. He was the subject of an assault last week at his house in Álftanes. And then again a few days ago. He was quite badly beaten up.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry to hear that. Have you any idea who did it?’

‘No. He doesn’t want us to pursue it. In fact he claims the second assault was just a fall.’

‘I take it I’m not a suspect?’ he said with a lop-sided grin.

‘No,’ said Vigdís. ‘But we are trying to find out why he left the police force.’

Emil frowned and fiddled with one of the flaps of loose skin hanging around his neck. ‘Have you tried looking in his file?’

‘Yes. There is virtually nothing in it.’

Emil nodded and then closed his eyes. Vigdís waited. Just as she was beginning to fear that Emil had fallen asleep, his eyelids twitched open.

‘Hence your description of your business as “semi-official”?’

‘That’s right.’ Vigdís waited. ‘You said Tryggvi Thór was a “good man”. That’s a strange way to describe a corrupt cop.’

‘I never could believe Tryggvi Thór was a corrupt cop.’

‘So what happened?’

Linda came in with coffee and some little cakes. She sensed the tension in the room. ‘Are you all right, dear?’ she said.

‘Oh yes, yes,’ said Emil.

‘Don’t tire him out,’ Linda said to Vigdís, before retreating to the kitchen.

‘It was a long time ago,’ Emil said. ‘Tryggvi Thór was investigating a suspected case of fraud at an insurance company. He was just in the early stages. He said he had an inside source and he went to meet the guy by the Pearl.’ This was a prominent hot-water tower that overlooked the city from a wooded hill. ‘The guy gave him the information in a thick envelope bound with a couple of metres of strong packing tape. Tryggvi Thór tried to open it, but couldn’t. As he was struggling with it, he was arrested by two policemen.’

‘Arrested? Why?’

‘They had a tip-off it was a bribe. And sure enough, inside was half a million krónur in cash.’

‘That sounds like a set-up to me,’ said Vigdís.

‘It certainly does,’ said Emil. ‘That’s what Tryggvi Thór said and that’s what I think. But of course it depends how you tell the story.’

‘It should have been easy to check. Talk to the whistle-blower. Look for evidence of fraud at the company. Didn’t anyone do that?’

‘Yes. Or they say they did. They say they found some evidence of minor fraud. The perpetrator admitted to it and also claimed he had bribed Tryggvi Thór to keep quiet. He was the guy Tryggvi Thór claimed was the whistle-blower.’

‘Oh. Did it go to court?’

‘No. It was all hushed up. The insurance company agreed not to press charges. Tryggvi Thór was fired; the fraudster was fired from the insurance company. From what you say, nothing was put in the file.’

‘Why was it hushed up?’

‘That’s a good question,’ said Emil.

Vigdís frowned. ‘What was his name, this fraudster?’

‘I can’t remember. I may never have known. I didn’t work on the case.’ Emil’s voice was flagging, his words were now so slurred they were hard to make out.

‘Can you remember the name of the insurance company?’

Emil closed his eyes. Was he trying to remember, or was he going to sleep? ‘Emil?’

‘It was Hekla Fire and Accident,’ he said.

Vigdís made a note. ‘And who was Tryggvi Thór’s boss at that point? Who fired him?’

‘It was Thorkell. Thorkell Holm. He must have retired by now.’

He had. Three years previously.

‘What was Tryggvi Thór’s reaction?’

‘He was angry. He tried to fight it, but he didn’t get anywhere. In the end it was almost as though he quit in disgust. I saw him afterwards for a drink, and he said he was going to Africa to do some good. He was very angry.’

‘And you?’

‘It didn’t seem right to me. But then I’ve always liked Thorkell — I couldn’t believe he would get rid of Tryggvi Thór unless there was a good reason.’

‘And what do you think that reason was?’

‘That’s another good question,’ Emil said. Then he closed his eyes. Within seconds his face had relaxed and his breathing became lighter, more regular. He was fast asleep.

As Vigdís drove back to Reykjavík she pondered what Emil had told her. It certainly sounded like a set-up. But, as Emil himself had admitted, there were two sides to most stories. Vigdís too had liked Thorkell: he had been her ultimate boss, the chief superintendent in charge of CID in the Reykjavík Metropolitan Police. He was also Árni’s uncle.

Back at the station, Vigdís looked up Hekla Fire and Accident, a company she could dimly remember hearing of. It took a few minutes, but she eventually found it. It had been bought by a businessman in 1994, and in 1999 had been merged with another, larger insurance company recently acquired by the same man, and changed its name. Tryggvi Thór’s sacking would have happened in about 1996.

None of that particularly attracted her attention. But the name of the businessman did.

Jakob Ingibergsson.

The man whom she had seen at Tryggvi Thór’s bedside.

Forty-Six

After a businesslike meeting at the prosecutor’s office in Qaqortoq, where they tackled the bureaucracy of international police cooperation, Magnus and Paulsen took a helicopter back up the fjord to Narsarsuaq. He told her he wanted to speak to the archaeologist who had been on the dig with Carlotta, Einar and Eygló at Brattahlíd in 2011. Paulsen was surprised, but was happy to proceed on the Rósa case without him. As far as she was concerned, unless they found one, or preferably two, witnesses who were certain Einar was somewhere other than the Blomsterdalen when Rósa was murdered, he was going down.

Magnus called Eygló from the airport at Narsarsuaq and asked her if she would help him track down Anya Kleemann. Paulsen found a local to take them across the fjord: a short Greenlander named Noah who didn’t speak any English. They picked up Eygló at the hotel and drove down to the harbour. Within a couple of minutes they were speeding across the water in a small motorboat, weaving around the icebergs.

About half a mile downstream, towards the sea, a water jet spouted several feet into the air. A moment later a tail fin flapped and disappeared beneath the surface.

Noah turned to them and grinned. ‘Hval,’ he said in Danish. The same as the Icelandic word. Whale.

‘Tom came to see me last night,’ said Eygló.

‘Did he threaten you? If he threatens you I can warn him off. Or get Inspector Paulsen to arrest him.’

Eygló grinned. ‘He did threaten me. I was scared at first. But I handled him. He was bluffing.’

Despite all that had happened, she seemed to Magnus to be stronger that morning.

‘Where is Einar?’ she asked.

‘In a police cell in Qaqortoq police station.’

‘It doesn’t look good for him, does it?’

Magnus shook his head.

‘I’m still sure he didn’t kill Rósa.’

‘That’s up to Inspector Paulsen to decide,’ said Magnus. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wondered why he had passed the buck so easily.

They reached the little harbour at Brattahlíd, and Noah tied up the boat. He told Eygló to wait in Danish. Magnus and Eygló stood next to a wall running along the side of the dock, surrounded by empty pallets, a pile of tyres, some gas canisters and a couple of trailers. The red kiosk was empty, but an old Land Rover was parked a few yards down the track.

It was low tide, and about a hundred yards further along the shore, a berg had become stranded on a patch of brown sand, a giant ice cube sweating in the sun. Two local boys, dressed only in swimming trunks, were trying to push it, but it wouldn’t budge. To Magnus’s amazement, one of them turned and sprinted into the sea, splashing and laughing. The other joined him with no hesitation. The sea temperature couldn’t have been more than a few degrees above freezing; even the craziest of Icelanders, and there were some pretty crazy Icelanders, wouldn’t have tried that.

A hairy hiker carrying a massive rucksack trudged into view. He sat down a few feet away, dislodged his load and swigged water from a bottle. The aroma of a week in the wilderness assailed Magnus’s nostrils.

‘How far is it to Anya’s site?’ said Magnus.

‘About seven or eight kilometres.’

‘I hope Noah is coming up with transport.’

They waited a moment, Eygló examining her phone.

‘Did Professor Beccari call you this morning?’ Magnus asked.

‘Yes,’ said Eygló. ‘He had heard about a murder at Narsarsuaq and was worried it might be one of us. I told him it was.’

‘Did he seem surprised when you said it was Rósa?’

‘Er...’ Eygló hesitated. ‘I’m not sure. Concerned, yes. Agitated. But actually, it was as if he was expecting it.’

Magnus told her about Beccari’s brief conversation with Rósa and Rósa’s message for Carlotta’s parents, if that was indeed whom it was intended for.

‘Wow,’ said Eygló.

‘It struck me that your conversation with her was similar,’ Magnus said. ‘When she told you about her cancer.’

‘Yes, that’s true.’

‘Was it definitely cancer she was talking about? Could it be that she thought her life was in danger? That someone was about to murder her?’

Eygló considered the question. ‘No, she was definitely talking about cancer. But maybe she was doing the same thing with me: preparing for her death. It was just sooner than she led me to believe.’

She frowned. ‘This really doesn’t look good for Einar, does it? I mean, if Rósa told Professor Beccari something was going to happen to her soon, it implies she thought she was going to be killed. And Einar is the obvious killer.’

Magnus nodded. ‘That’s what Inspector Paulsen thinks.’

‘And you?’

‘I think that too,’ Magnus admitted.

His phone rang. It was Vigdís describing her interview with Emil, and seeing Jakob Ingibergsson at Tryggvi Thór’s bedside: the man who owned the insurance company and who had got Tryggvi Thór thrown out of the police force.

‘It stinks, Vigdís.’

‘To high heaven.’

‘If Tryggvi Thór really was taking a bribe, why cover it up?’

‘Because other people were involved?’ said Vigdís.

‘Possibly. Probably. But who?’

‘Thorkell Holm was the guy who sacked Tryggvi Thór.’

‘Thorkell is a good guy,’ Magnus said. But so too was Tryggvi Thór.

He heard the whine and clank of petrol engine and metal and Noah appeared at the helm of an all-terrain vehicle.

‘I’ve got to go, Vigdís, and you had better get back to investigating Rósa. But thanks for doing that for me.’

As he hung up, Noah motioned for Magnus and Eygló to hop on, and conducted a quick discussion in Danish with Eygló about where exactly they were going. The hiker tried to ask Noah in German-accented English about boats across the fjord, but Noah ignored him.

The ATV seemed to be the vehicle of choice in Brattahlíd — they encountered three as Noah drove along the road that ran the length of the village past the yellow Leif Erikson Hostel, a bright blue school building, a red church with a spire and the remains of Erik the Red’s farm. There was no sign of past excavations there now, just low mounds of lush green grass and wildflowers tracing out the lines of ancient walls.

‘You know the trench from the nineteen thirties was open until the nineteen nineties?’ shouted Eygló above the roar of the ATV. ‘Einar tidied up much better after his excavation. So when Nancy Fishburn came here in the early eighties, there would have been tempting earthworks to tamper with.’

Magnus envisaged a younger version of the old lady he had seen in the Nantucket TV footage scrabbling in the earth with her wampum shells while her husband kept watch to make sure no one was coming. An arresting image.

‘Maybe I shouldn’t say this,’ he shouted back. ‘But you could put the hoax into your documentary, as well as the real Gudrid. That might be a way of rescuing it.’

‘Not a bad idea. I’ll suggest it to Suzy.’

Magnus was unsure whether he liked his own suggestion. Suzy should have come clean the moment Nancy had told her about the hoax. But Eygló deserved a break.

Past the site of the real longhouse lay a modern reconstruction, fenced off and covered in a turf roof. Noah turned left up a rough track which climbed the hill above Brattahlíd. Magnus looked over his shoulder at Erik’s Fjord and Narsarsuaq airfield on its far side, and then the view disappeared and they were in a wilderness of close-cropped grass and bare rock, dotted with sheep. The track was made of a deep red earth and stone, and Noah seemed to enjoy the jolts as they headed west — Magnus had the impression he was trying to get airborne wherever he could.

They zoomed over the crest of a hill marked with a series of a dozen or so stone cairns and then they were on the other side. In front of them spread a large green bowl containing a couple of farm buildings, and behind it another fjord. Whereas the fjord they had just come from at Brattahlíd had contained ten to twenty stately icebergs drifting alone, this one was chock-full of shards of ice large and small. The green hillsides were scattered with purple, blue and yellow flowers, and farm machinery in various stages of disrepair. They zipped past an ancient Massey Ferguson tractor of rusty grey that looked like it hadn’t been moved for fifty years.

Noah slowed and turned to Eygló. He pointed to the far side of the valley, which was an impossibly bright deep green, and there, a hundred feet or so up a hillside, a small group of people clustered around a rectangle of bare earth, next to a large canvas awning. Eygló nodded.

Tasiusaq, the farm that dominated the valley, was a prosperous one, boasting major blue metal barns and an array of white plastic-covered rolls of hay. Noah roared past it, turned on to a lesser track and headed for the dig.

A tall kid with red hair and a wispy beard greeted them in an American accent. Magnus noticed his Brown Bears T-shirt. Eygló asked for Anya, and the kid led them to the group of archaeologists scraping, scratching and peering at the earth.

‘Are you still at Brown?’ Magnus asked the guy, whose name was Nate.

‘Junior year.’

‘I was there a couple of decades ago.’

‘Cool. You an archaeologist?’

‘Um. No. I’m an Icelandic policeman.’

‘Cool.’ Nate managed to inject so much doubt into that word.

‘Yeah. It’s true what they say: the world is your oyster with a degree from Brown.’

The slightest pause. Then, as Nate considered the possibility that he might wind up as a policeman in Reykjavík: ‘Cool.’

Behind them, the ATV’s engine gunned into life, and Magnus turned to see Noah whizzing off down the track towards the farm.

‘Is he coming back for us?’ he asked Eygló.

Eygló shrugged. ‘No idea.’

Anya waved and grinned when she saw Eygló approaching and gave her a hug. ‘It’s great to see you,’ she said in a fluent American accent.

‘And you,’ said Eygló. ‘This is Magnus from the Reykjavík police. He’s investigating Carlotta’s murder.’

‘OK,’ said Anya, more serious now.

‘Do you mind if I ask you some questions?’ Magnus said.

‘Sure,’ said Anya. ‘Let’s go over here.’

She led them to a table and chairs underneath the large awning and poured them a cup of coffee from a thermos. There were three tables in all, and the others were covered with archaeological paraphernalia — lots of trays, meshes, bags filled with tiny artefacts, labels, notebooks and a couple of microscopes. Nate took a seat at one of them and attacked what looked like a lump of mud with a toothbrush. Magnus felt a momentary pang that he hadn’t become the archaeologist Nate had assumed he was.

At first sight, Anya Kleemann looked like one of the Inuit Magnus was becoming familiar with. She was round — a round face and round body, but her eyes were also round, and blue. Magnus’s sketchy knowledge of genetics suggested European blood on both sides. She told Magnus a little of her own background: a childhood in Greenland, university in Denmark, a masters in America and then a PhD at Aarhus. She was an expert on Norse settlements in Greenland — this was her patch.

‘How’s the excavation going?’ Eygló asked Anya.

‘Usual story. It looked like we were getting nowhere, when we found something last week. A coin. English. Minted in the reign of Richard III.’

‘Richard III? The king they found buried in a car park? I remember him from York. Remind me of his dates?’

‘Fourteen eighty-three to eighty-five,’ said Anya with a grin.

‘Fourteen eighty-three? How the hell did it get there?’ Eygló asked.

‘Precisely,’ said Anya. She explained to Magnus: ‘The last written record we have of the Norse settlers in Greenland is a description of a wedding in 1409. We don’t know when they died out here, or even if they just upped and left. We do know they were still trading with the English after this time, but this looks like pretty strong evidence there were still Norsemen farming here in the 1480s. Or later.’

Magnus recalled Columbus’s trip to Iceland in 1477. And the letter to his younger brother he didn’t write describing it. So there were still Norse settlers in Greenland even then.

He asked Anya about the dig at Brattahlíd in 2011. She remembered the discovery of the wampum as one of the most exciting moments of her career. She described how Carlotta had found a couple of shells with holes in them, how Einar had revealed more, and how the American student had identified them as wampum clamshells.

‘Did anyone have any doubts about their authenticity?’ Magnus asked.

‘Not at the time, no,’ said Anya. ‘But I wondered about them afterward.’

‘What did you wonder?’

‘Well. You probably know that we were re-excavating an area that had been dug eighty years before. That meant that all the contexts were confused around the trench. They missed stuff: in those days they used shovels; now we use brushes. We found all kinds of things they didn’t see. So it’s perfectly possible, likely even, that those archaeologists would have missed a wampum shell. But all of them? I checked the reports of the excavation from the nineteen thirties, and there was nothing about finding a shell with a hole drilled into it.’

‘Did you mention your doubts to Einar?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Einar is a good archaeologist. He has a great reputation. And he is cautious, usually. Cynical, even.’

Magnus could believe that.

‘So I didn’t want to doubt him.’

‘Did he intimidate you?’ Magnus asked. ‘Threaten you?’

‘No, no, nothing like that. And my doubts were just that. It was my opinion, not evidence.’

‘What about Carlotta? Did you get to know her well?’

‘Pretty well. There weren’t many of us on the dig and we were thrust together for weeks on end. It was a pretty good bunch,’ Anya said, looking to Eygló for confirmation.

Eygló nodded.

‘Usually there is one jerk who annoys the hell out of everyone else, but I don’t remember that at Brattahlíd.’

‘What was she like, Carlotta?’

‘She was good fun. Lively. Smart. Quite frankly, it was good to have an Italian around. You can have too many Danes and Icelanders.’ This with a teasing glance at Eygló.

Eygló grinned. ‘It’s true.’

‘Did you notice anything between Carlotta and Einar?’

Anya smiled. ‘Oh yes. I think it started after Carlotta made the discovery. They tried to be discreet, but we were all packed together in that school building, and everyone noticed. It was almost like she’d gotten a gold star for finding the treasure.’

‘What was their relationship like? Could you tell?’

The smile disappeared. ‘It was classic professor — student. She worshipped him and was flattered he was interested in her; he thought she was young and attractive and wanted to get in her pants. And he did.’

Magnus nodded. ‘And did you stay in touch with Carlotta?’

‘Not really. We were friends on Facebook. I might have seen a couple of updates, but actually I think she usually posted in Italian. Until this summer when she contacted me.’

‘How did she contact you? Facebook?’

‘No. Email. She must have gotten my address from the university website.’

‘And what did she say?’

‘She asked me if I had any doubts about the wampum. I told her I was concerned that they hadn’t found a single shell in the nineteen thirties and that seemed odd.’

‘Did you ask her why she suddenly wanted to know?’

‘Yes. I mean, it did seem strange, since she was the one who discovered the shells. She would be the last person who would want to undermine her own discovery.’

Magnus nodded.

‘She said that she had found documentary evidence that Thorfinn Karlsefni and Gudrid had travelled to Nantucket. That sounded pretty cool to me. Carlotta said that it sounded cool to her, but she had just discovered something that put the evidence in doubt. And that had gotten her thinking about the wampum.’

‘Did she say what this thing was?’

‘No. And she wouldn’t be specific about the nature of the documentary evidence either, but she did say she suspected who had forged it, whatever “it” was, and who had planted it. I assumed it must be a new copy of a saga or something. She was being coy about it, and I didn’t like that — it didn’t seem necessary.’

‘And all this was by email?’

‘Yes.’

Magnus was frustrated. If the Italian police had got their act together, he would have had that information by now, without having to travel to a godforsaken hillside in Greenland to get it.

‘Do you know what it was, this documentary evidence?’ Anya asked.

Magnus nodded.

‘And?’

Magnus thought there was no reason to keep the information from Anya, so he told her about the Columbus letter. And then he told her that the wampum was fake; or that it was real wampum, but that it hadn’t arrived there by Viking longship but by modern airliner, and it had been planted at Brattahlíd in 1980.

‘My God!’ said Anya. ‘And that’s the story you were doing the documentary about?’

Eygló nodded.

‘It would be a great story.’

‘If it was true,’ Eygló said. ‘But it’s all a hoax.’

‘So you’ll have to cancel the TV documentary?’

‘No choice,’ said Eygló.

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ Anya winced in sympathy. Then she turned to Magnus. ‘But does all this have anything to do with Carlotta’s murder?’

It was a good question. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said, thinking of Rósa and Einar and jealousy.

Anya frowned. ‘Hmm,’ she said.

They sat in silence for a moment.

‘Yes?’ said Magnus. ‘You didn’t tell Einar when you had doubts before. You have doubts now?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Anya. ‘But it is similar. It seems like too much of a coincidence. Carlotta discovers that all this stuff is fake and is killed before she has a chance to tell anyone about it? I don’t know. It doesn’t sound right to me, but you’re the policeman.’

She had a point. ‘You may have heard a woman was murdered in the Blomsterdalen yesterday? An Icelandic woman.’

‘They told us at the hostel this morning,’ said Anya. ‘I was going to ask, is that related?’

‘Yes, we think so. She was Einar’s wife.’

‘Ah.’ Anya frowned. ‘Do you think Einar killed her?’

‘They do,’ said Eygló. ‘They’ve locked him up. But I know they are wrong.’

‘Without giving too much away about our investigation, we think Carlotta’s death has more to do with her sexual relationship with Einar than with the wampum or this Columbus letter.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Anya. Then she looked straight at Magnus. ‘It still doesn’t add up.’

Forty-Seven

There was no sign of Noah, and although Anya was willing to offer Magnus and Eygló a lift back to Brattahlíd, she couldn’t. One of her team had taken the Land Rover to the dock and crossed the fjord to Narsarsuaq to get supplies. She was expected back in an hour or so, and Anya suggested they wait.

Magnus said he would prefer to walk; good exercise, clean air and isolation might clear his head. It needed clearing and he wasn’t sure why. He was disappointed when Eygló volunteered to join him, but they strode the first couple of miles in silence. Magnus set a good pace, but Eygló was fit and intrepid. And her legs, although short, moved fast.

The hills were bustling with bees and small birds. A pair of ravens dodged in and out of thermals by a cliff high to their left. The red dirt track crunched underneath. The air bit cool and refreshing into their cheeks.

Magnus’s brain emptied.

But then Eygló broke the rhythm. ‘You know Einar didn’t kill Rósa, don’t you, Magnús?’

Magnus let his irritation show. ‘Can you shut up about that? Figuring out the identity of a perpetrator isn’t a question of what you believe. It’s a question of evidence.’

‘Well, in that case, your evidence is all wrong.’

‘Look. Inspector Paulsen is the investigating officer. She is working on the assumption that Rósa killed Carlotta at Glaumbaer and so Einar stabbed Rósa. She has got a team of well-trained police officers gathering evidence. They will find people who saw Einar near the scene of the crime. They will find forensic evidence that puts him there. It probably won’t take them that long.’

‘No they won’t,’ said Eygló.

Magnus ignored her.

They passed by a small pond. The pass reminded Magnus a little of the road from one side of Snaefellsnes to the other, just by the family farm at Bjarnarhöfn. Except Greenland was the land of icebergs, not lava.

‘Anya knows Einar didn’t do it,’ Eygló said.

‘Anya knows nothing about the case.’

‘Anya is a smart woman. She said that it must have something to do with what Carlotta had discovered.’

‘That was just her opinion.’

‘And you didn’t even tell her about Nancy Fishburn’s murder. That must be linked to the hoax somehow.’

Magnus didn’t respond.

‘You’re not comfortable about this, are you, Magnús? You know something’s not right.’

Magnus had had enough. He stopped and turned to face Eygló. But she was grinning at him.

She was right, damn it! Magnus wasn’t happy about it. And he didn’t know why.

They stood facing each other. ‘OK, look,’ Eygló said. ‘It’s going to be at least an hour until we get back to Brattahlíd. Just do me a favour. Assume that Rósa’s death had something to do with the hoax and whatever Carlotta had discovered about it. Think it through.’

Magnus’s initial reaction was not to do Eygló a favour. But he knew that what really irritated him about Eygló’s comments was that some part of him shared her doubts, and he wasn’t prepared to admit that either to her or to himself.

Those doubts wouldn’t go away until he dealt with them.

‘All right,’ said Magnus. ‘Let’s walk.’

‘So. What do you think Carlotta had discovered that made her want to contact Anya? It was something she wanted to tell Einar that was worth flying all the way to Iceland for. Something about the letter.’

‘OK, let’s say she suspected it was a fake,’ said Magnus. ‘Why would she do that?’

Eygló trudged on. ‘She found another expert? Someone who disagreed with Professor Beccari?’

‘Who might that be?’

‘Another Italian academic?’

‘Or someone at the Vatican,’ Magnus said. ‘Maybe they had a better reason than she originally thought to doubt the letter.’

‘You could ask them,’ Eygló said.

‘We could,’ said Magnus. ‘But let’s say that an expert at the Vatican did have proof that the letter was a fake. I’m really not sure why that would mean she was killed. The proof would come out from this expert anyway, whether Carlotta was alive or dead; nobody gains.’

They walked on. Magnus’s brain was working. To some extent, Eygló was correct. Although he had considered Carlotta and the wampum, he hadn’t thought much about her involvement with the Columbus letter. All those years ago, a rare-book dealer had forged it and inserted it into the Vatican Secret Archives.

‘You know Anya said just now that Carlotta had figured out who had forged it? What exactly did she say, can you remember?’

‘Oh, let me think,’ said Eygló. ‘She said that Carlotta “suspected who had forged it, whatever ‘it’ was, and who had planted it”. I think those were her words.’

‘So do I,’ said Magnus. ‘We know who forged it: Nancy Fishburn’s rare-book dealer friend. I think his name was Emilio. But from what Anya said, Carlotta was implying someone else planted it in the Vatican Secret Archives.’

‘Did she imply that?’ said Eygló.

‘Yeah, I know,’ said Magnus. ‘It’s vague. I’m trying to remember exactly what Kelly told me about who her grandmother had said had planted it, but I can’t. I suppose I assumed it was Emilio. But maybe it was an accomplice. Let’s assume for a moment that it was someone else, how could Carlotta have discovered who?’

They pondered that. ‘I have no idea,’ said Eygló after a minute.

‘What about you?’

‘I’m thinking.’

‘I’ll shut up, then.’

Kelly had said that the book had scarcely been taken out since the hoax was hatched. Maybe the Vatican Secret Archives kept records of who had taken the book out and when. It seemed like the kind of thing an ancient library might do. Or maybe not: lots of people, lots of books, many years. Worth checking, though.

‘You’ve thought of something,’ Eygló said.

‘I have,’ said Magnus.

‘Well?’

Magnus told her.

‘OK. Let’s call them. The Vatican.’

‘When we get back to Narsarsuaq.’

‘No, now.’

‘How would we do that?’

‘Look.’

Although they were still out of sight of Brattahlíd and the fjord, Eygló pointed to a couple of towers on a hilltop two miles away, no doubt providing phone coverage to the village. She pulled out her phone. ‘See?’ she said, showing him the screen. ‘Three bars. And 4G.’

She sat on a rock and worked her phone. ‘The Vatican Secret Archives, right?’

In less than a minute, she tapped a key triumphantly and put the phone to her ear. ‘Yes, good afternoon,’ Eygló said in English. ‘I have Inspector Magnús Ragnarsson of the Reykjavík police here. He is investigating a murder, and he would like to speak to the head librarian.’

She nodded and then looked up at Magnus. ‘There you go.’

So Magnus sat on a rock in the wilderness of Greenland and spoke to the keeper of one of the world’s most exclusive libraries in Rome.

Magnus repeated Eygló’s introduction. ‘I am investigating the murder of Carlotta Mondini in Iceland on August twenty-first She was an Italian postgraduate student.’

‘Oh, yes, I remember her.’ The head librarian had a soft Italian accent, but his English was clear and precise. ‘She has been murdered? I am very sorry to hear that.’

Magnus’s heart beat faster. Eygló had placed herself next to him on the rock and could hear what the librarian was saying. She gave Magnus the thumbs up.

‘You say you remember her? Have you seen her recently?’

‘Short hair with blonde stripes? A postgraduate? From Padua, I think?’

‘That’s right,’ said Magnus.

‘Yes, then I certainly remember her. She came into the library last year. She was asking about a volume of memoirs written by a Genoese sea captain in the seventeenth century. Another student, a friend of hers, had found a letter crammed in the back pages of the book. It purported to be from Christopher Columbus to his brother. My colleagues analysed it: a fake of course, and we told him that. My impression was that this Carlotta Mondini believed that the letter was real. Absurd.’

‘So she asked to look at the book herself?’

‘No. She just wanted to know who had ordered the book up from the stacks in the past.’

‘And were you able to provide her with that information?’

‘With difficulty,’ said the librarian. ‘But we keep comprehensive records here.’

‘I don’t suppose you wrote the names down somewhere?’ said Magnus. ‘Or perhaps you could check your records again for me.’

‘There were three names,’ said the librarian. ‘Two of them I would have to look up, but one of them I remember. It is a famous one, at least in our country. Probably all over the world. In fact, he came back to look at the letter earlier this year. He seems to think it is genuine too.’

‘And what name is that?’ said Magnus. Although now he knew the answer.

‘Beccari. Marco Beccari.’

Forty-Eight

‘See?’ said Eygló.

‘Professor Beccari,’ said Magnus.

‘Carlotta discovered he inserted the fake letter.’

‘It could be a coincidence.’

‘Oh, come on!’ said Eygló. ‘How likely is that?’

‘Very unlikely. But I can find out.’ Magnus checked his notebook for Kelly Fishburn’s cell number. He dialled it.

She answered.

‘Kelly, it’s Inspector Ragnarsson. How are you doing?’

‘All right, I guess. My dad’s here now, which is great.’

‘Good. I have a question for you. Did your grandmother say that her friend Emilio placed the Columbus letter in the Vatican Secret Archives himself?’

There was a pause. ‘I assume it was him, but I really can’t remember. I’m sorry.’

That was disappointing. ‘Do you think Emilio or your grandmother might have known a man named Marco Beccari?’ Magnus asked. ‘He would have been about twenty, twenty-five at the time.’

‘I don’t know. Let me ask my dad. He’s right here.’

Magnus heard Kelly’s voice repeating his question. Then a man’s voice appeared on the phone.

‘This is John Fishburn, Kelly’s father. My mother knew Marco Beccari. So did, I as a matter of fact. I remember him when we were both kids. And of course Emilio knew him.’

Magnus felt foolish. He was missing something. ‘Why is that?’

‘Because Marco Beccari is Emilio Beccari’s son.’

Yep. He had missed that.

But Carlotta hadn’t.

Magnus thanked Kelly’s father and hung up. He and Eygló looked at each other. ‘Did you get that?’ Magnus asked her.

‘Yeah, I heard it,’ said Eygló. ‘So Beccari knew all along the letter was a hoax.’

‘Because his father had asked him to plant it in the Vatican Secret Archives.’

‘That would really screw him if it came out.’

‘You mean because of his reputation?’

‘Absolutely. It would all be over. There would be a massive scandal; the press would love it. He’d be fired from Princeton, no one else would hire him, no one would publish his books; it would be total humiliation. If the world finds out this is a hoax, it’s going to be bad for Einar and me, but it will be so much worse for him. We were duped; he was a perpetrator. And he has much further to fall than we do.’

‘He struck me as quite a proud man,’ said Magnus.

‘Very.’

‘He would be totally destroyed.’

The conclusion was obvious, and Eygló voiced it. ‘Does that mean Beccari killed Carlotta? To shut her up?’

‘It may well do,’ said Magnus, thinking it through. ‘We know Rósa was at Glaumbaer when Carlotta was killed. Rósa told Einar that she discovered the body, and that just before then she saw a man take something out of Carlotta’s car, and later saw him leave via the folk museum. Einar didn’t seem to believe she really saw anyone, and we didn’t either. But perhaps it was true.’

‘That man was Marco Beccari. And he killed Carlotta.’

‘Before she had a chance to meet Einar at Saudárkrókur as she had arranged. Do you know whether Beccari was in Iceland then?’

Eygló frowned. ‘No. He agreed to take part in the shoot at Ólafsvík at the last minute. Carlotta was killed on Monday, and we met Beccari in Ólafsvík on Wednesday. I’ve no idea when he flew into Iceland. Could have been before Monday, couldn’t it?’

‘We can check with the airlines,’ said Magnus.

‘All right.’ Eygló furrowed her brow. ‘But if Rósa did see Beccari at Glaumbaer, wouldn’t she have recognized him?’

‘Hm. Depends whether she had ever seen him before.’

Eygló’s eyes opened wide. ‘I think she only met him for the first time on the plane to Greenland.’

‘And she recognized him then,’ Magnus said. ‘He figured it out, and killed her.’

‘But wouldn’t she just have told the police?’ Eygló asked. ‘Called you in Iceland?’

‘Maybe she was intending to,’ said Magnus. ‘Or maybe she wanted to confront Beccari herself. So she agreed to meet him in the Blomsterdalen.’

‘That would be stupid.’

‘Depends on what she wanted to say. She was a cool customer.’

‘She certainly was,’ said Eygló. ‘She never gave the impression that she recognized Beccari, but then she would be quite capable of hiding that if she wanted to.’

‘And she didn’t tell Einar.’

‘That’s not necessarily surprising.’

‘Let me check something,’ Magnus said as he pulled up Vigdís’s number on his phone, turning away from Eygló.

As he was waiting for her to pick up, a ewe trotted into sight from behind some rocks, a black lamb almost her size close behind her. Both animals stared at him. He stared back. The lamb lost its nerve and darted back and forth, not sure whether to run for it or to stick close to Mom. The ewe ambled away.

Vigdís answered just as her phone was switching to voicemail. ‘Hi, Vigdís,’ Magnus said without preamble. ‘Can you check something for me? Can you find out when Professor Beccari arrived in Iceland last week? He will have rented a car. We need to know the registration, and whether it was caught on camera travelling north through the Hvalfjördur tunnel before Carlotta was murdered.’

Vigdís grasped the implication of Magnus’s question immediately. ‘Are you serious?’

‘I am.’

Silence.

‘Vigdís?’

‘I was thinking about Rósa’s phone records you sent me. There was a US number I recognized from Carlotta’s records.’

‘Beccari?’

‘That’s right. Hold on.’ Magnus could hear the taps of Vigdís’s keyboard as she looked something up on her computer. ‘Here it is. Rósa and Beccari spoke for nine minutes at twenty-one-fifty-two Greenland time on the twenty-fifth. That’s Saturday night.’

‘The evening before Rósa was killed. Beccari would already have left them in Narsarsuaq. He would have been in Qaqortoq.’

‘You can get the Greenland telecoms company to check the location.’

‘Good idea,’ said Magnus. ‘Thanks, Vigdís. And let me know as soon as you get anything on the Hvalfjördur tunnel.’

Magnus hung up and relayed his conversation to Eygló.

‘So Rósa and Beccari could have been arranging to meet?’ Eygló said.

‘They could have been. In which case either Beccari never left Narsarsuaq, or, more likely, he got a helicopter back that day just to meet her at the Blomsterdalen.’

‘I still think she would have been stupid to meet him somewhere quite so isolated. Rósa wasn’t that dumb.’

‘We’ll see,’ said Magnus. ‘Air Greenland will have the details if he did fly there and back. Time to call Inspector Paulsen.’

Paulsen didn’t answer so Magnus left a message on her voicemail. He and Eygló set off at a brisk pace on the track towards Brattahlíd. They had only been going for ten minutes before Paulsen called back.

‘Sorry, Magnus,’ she said. ‘I was just interviewing a French tourist. He is adamant that he saw Einar on Signal Mountain between twelve-fifteen and twelve-forty-five yesterday afternoon. No doubts about the ID — he had seen Einar with Eygló and Suzy before at breakfast at the hotel. Definitely the same guy. And if Einar was on Signal Mountain at that time, there was no way he could have had time to walk to the Blomsterdalen, murder his wife and get back to Narsarsuaq when we met him at two-fifty. And there was not enough time earlier that morning after he had returned from Brattahlíd. So we’ve lost our only suspect.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Magnus. ‘I think I’ve got another one for you.’

Forty-Nine

Paulsen and Magnus went straight from the airport at Qaqortoq to the hotel, with a local constable in tow. While Magnus had been making his way over the fjord to Narsarsuaq, Paulsen had checked with Air Greenland. Beccari had indeed made a day trip by helicopter from Qaqortoq to Narsarsuaq the day before, arriving at eight-fifteen and leaving at two. He had had time to meet Rósa in the Blomsterdalen and kill her. He was booked on a flight out from Narsarsuaq to Reykjavík later that afternoon. Paulsen and Magnus could have waited for him to show up at Narsarsuaq, but they had decided to go straight to Qaqortoq and arrest him there.

If Beccari had killed Carlotta and Rósa, he had probably killed Nancy as well, and for the same reason. Once Nancy became aware Marco Beccari was involved with the documentary, she would have realized that he hadn’t let on to the others that the letter was a fake. When Kelly had told her about Carlotta’s murder, Nancy may well have remembered the Italian girl from Einar’s visit in Nantucket. If she was the smart woman that everyone said she was, then she would have figured out that there was a possibility Marco Beccari might have killed Carlotta. And rather than coming to the Icelandic police, she might have contacted Beccari himself. And met him in her hotel, after sending Kelly away.

Beccari had just checked out of the Hotel Qaqortoq, and the hotel shuttle bus had taken him to the airport: Magnus recalled spotting the bus stopped outside the terminal. So Magnus and Paulsen retraced their steps.

The airport was no more than a small terminal building, a couple of sheds containing fire trucks and bowsers and a round concrete apron built on a rocky promontory sticking out into the sea. The Air Greenland clerk at the desk said that Beccari had just checked in, but his helicopter had been delayed for an hour. The woman thought she had seen him stroll out of the building.

Magnus and Paulsen made a quick circuit of the terminal and its toilets, which took them only five minutes, then Paulsen suggested they wait for Beccari to return. She began to make some calls.

Magnus kicked his heels for five minutes, but he was impatient. He left the terminal building and walked up to the road. To the left was the route into town: Beccari probably hadn’t gone that way, or they would have spotted him. The road twisted around to the right along the top of some small cliffs above the sea.

Magnus turned right. The road rounded an outcrop of rock and passed beneath a small playground. Two women were sitting on a bench watching three tiny children on a merry-go-round. And a few yards away, sitting on a raised slab of granite staring out to sea, was Professor Beccari.

Magnus climbed a narrow footpath and skirted around the playground behind Beccari. He crept up to him and took a seat right next to him on the granite.

‘Hello, professor.’

For a moment Beccari looked startled to see Magnus, but he swiftly recovered his composure.

‘Ah, inspector. How’s the investigation going?’

‘Pretty good,’ said Magnus.

Beccari nodded. ‘So you are sure that poor Dr Thorsteinsson is your man?’

‘No. Dr Thorsteinsson isn’t our man.’ Magnus fixed his eyes on Beccari.

‘Oh,’ said Beccari, unnerved by Magnus’s stare. ‘Do you have another suspect?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hm.’

Beccari looked away, down to the water below them. Out in the fjord the giant iceberg Magnus had seen the night before stood immobile in the water. The cruise ship had gone. Further in, just a few yards from the cliffs, an empty motorboat bobbed up and down on its mooring.

‘Marco’ — Magnus used his first name — ‘I know that you planted the Columbus letter in the book in the Vatican. And I know your father Emilio forged it.’

Beccari tensed. He was still staring hard at the sea beneath the cliffs. Magnus let the silence stretch as Beccari considered his response. ‘That doesn’t mean I killed anybody,’ he said eventually.

‘We have details of the car you rented at Keflavík Airport when you arrived in the country. We’re checking the cameras at the Hvalfjördur tunnel on the Ring Road for the day Carlotta was murdered. We will soon know what time you drove past them. We know you flew to Narsarsuaq yesterday, giving yourself just enough time to get to the Blomsterdalen and kill Rósa. And I am sure we will be able to place you at the hotel in Reykjavík where Nancy Fishburn was smothered with a pillow.

‘We’ve just started. Now we know where to look, the evidence will pile up. Forensics, fingerprints, DNA, witnesses. We will put you at the site of three murders in two countries, no problem.’

Magnus waited while Beccari digested all this. ‘Of course you will,’ he said eventually. ‘I’m amazed that I’ve gotten this far. I mean, I was so lucky that Rósa and then Einar presented themselves as suspects. If I’d had the chance to plan it properly, you might have found things more difficult.’

Magnus was amazed at the man’s ego and confidence in his own intelligence. Naturally the genius historian could have staged the perfect murder if he had had the time to put his extraordinary mind to the problem!

‘So you didn’t intend to kill Carlotta?’

‘No. I mean, at the back of my mind, I thought I might have to. But I hoped to persuade her.’

‘Persuade her of what?’

‘I don’t know how much of this you have figured out yet,’ said Beccari. He glanced at Magnus, who gave no response.

‘The reason Carlotta got in touch with me in the first place was that she had inquired at the Vatican who had checked out the volume in the past fifty years. There were only three names, and mine was one of them, so she got in touch with me to ask whether I had noticed a letter from Christopher Columbus to his brother. I said I hadn’t. Then she told me that a graduate student had found it, but the Vatican authorities suspected that it was a fake.

‘Naturally, I told her the Vatican must be correct. I wanted her to drop the whole thing.’

‘Presumably you knew your father had faked it?’

‘Yes. He told me all about it at the time, and about Nancy and John’s plan to plant the wampum in Greenland. I was studying at Pisa, and Papa knew I had been researching in the Vatican Secret Archives and so I could get access. I think that’s why he decided it was a good home for the fake. I should have refused him. He thought it was very amusing, and I knew the Fishburns and liked them, but as a professional historian I knew this was wrong. Not just criminally wrong, but morally wrong. It would mislead academics like me, cause them to waste time.’

Beccari sighed. ‘But Papa was very persuasive. He was charming and he was persistent. And beyond that, I was always trying to please him. That’s why I became a historian in the first place. That’s why it has always pained me that he never lived to see me become a professor at Princeton.’ Beccari smiled. ‘He would have loved that. He loved Americans and American universities, and not just because they were some of his best customers. So I said yes.’ For the first time Beccari looked up at Magnus. ‘I planted the letter.

‘I regretted it immediately, but then I just shoved it out of my mind. Which was really stupid. After Papa died I should have gone right back and extracted the letter; then everything would have been fine. But some part of me denied that I had ever planted it; the whole thing had nothing to do with me.’

Beccari shook his head. ‘And then Carlotta’s friend found it.’

‘I can understand why you told her it was a fake. But why did you change your mind and authenticate it?’

‘It became clear that Carlotta wasn’t going to take my word that it was a forgery and drop it. She said they had other evidence pointing to Gudrid settling in Nantucket, and that she and some Icelandic friends of hers were going to make a documentary about it. An international documentary. In that case it would be much better if everyone thought the letter was real.

‘So I went to Rome and took another look at my father’s work. It was extremely well done. So well done that it made me wonder whether he hadn’t actually made other forgeries, but that is by the by. I felt that my best bet was to be bold and bluff it out. So I told Carlotta the letter was real and I let her run with it.

‘I knew there was a good chance I would get found out in the end, but this seemed to me my best chance of escaping detection. I begged Carlotta not to tell anyone that I had missed the letter myself in 1979 — I said it would be embarrassing — and Carlotta was willing to go along with that. She was just so pleased to have my blessing, she would have done anything I asked.

‘So, it all looked good. Until Carlotta called me three weeks ago and said she wanted to speak to me again about the letter. She had doubts and she was going to talk to Einar about them. In fact, she was going to Iceland to see him.

‘I knew I was in trouble. I almost confessed then. But the consequences to my career would have been catastrophic. I have my enemies in the academic world, especially at Princeton, and they would have lost no time in plunging in the knife. For someone in my position to have planted a forgery would be a scandal. It would ruin my reputation and the reputation of the university. And... And my reputation is important to me. I have made a major contribution to the understanding of history, and I have more to do. Quite simply, I am one of the top historians in the world. Without history... I am nothing. I tried to imagine what would happen to me if I was unmasked as a forger, and I just couldn’t. It was too terrible.’

Beccari was searching Magnus’s face for understanding. Magnus could believe he wasn’t exaggerating. For someone with an ego like Beccari’s, the shame of being unmasked as a forger would be too horrible to contemplate.

‘I see,’ Magnus said. ‘So you agreed to meet Carlotta at Glaumbaer?’

‘Yes. At that point I didn’t plan to kill her. I just wanted to hear what she had to say and find some way to keep her quiet. I typed up an offer for her to take up a post in the history department at Princeton. It might have come in useful.’

‘And what did she have to say?’

‘She had just read some interview with me online from a few years back, where I had said that my father was a rare-book dealer. That he was the one who had gotten me interested in history — which was true, of course. Anyway, she remembered from her visit to Nancy Fishburn in Nantucket that Nancy’s husband had collected rare books. She had done some googling, and discovered that there used to be a rare-book dealer called Emilio Beccari and she even found the introduction of an obscure pamphlet on antiquarian books where his name was mentioned along with John Fishburn. So she wanted to know if Emilio was my father, and if I could explain the connection. Apparently she had been in touch with an archaeologist in Greenland who had some doubts about the wampum as well.

‘I didn’t do a good job. I admitted that my father’s name was Emilio, but I said I had no idea who his clients were. It was just a coincidence that I had taken out the volume in which the letter was found.’

Beccari shook his head. ‘She just didn’t believe me. Once she started considering the possibility that the letter was a fake, it was obvious that I must have been the one who planted it. She said she was going to Saudárkrókur that very evening, and that she would tell Einar.

‘I pleaded with her. I showed her the letter offering her the job at Princeton. I offered to outright bribe her, give her cash. But none of that worked. It just proved to her that the letter was a fake and that I had planted it.

‘She turned and walked away. We were standing at the back of the churchyard, away from the road, out of sight of anyone. I knew once she reached the front of the church and went through the gate, it would all be over. My reputation, my chair at Princeton, my books, my ideas, everything. In those seconds I realized that if I let her tell the world what she knew, I would kill myself. I would have to kill myself — I would have no choice. I couldn’t face my colleagues, my family, the memory of my father. Myself. I would have to end my life.

‘And then I thought: Why? Why should I have to end my life? Why not hers?’

Beccari licked his lips and swallowed.

‘I had no time to think it through: I had to act. There was a spade and a pickaxe leaning against the back wall of the church. So I grabbed the pickaxe and whacked her over the head — not with the pick itself, I couldn’t do that, but with the flat bit. She crumpled.’

He paused, swallowing again, staring at his feet. ‘I could tell right away she was dead. Then I started thinking. No one knew we were meeting — Carlotta had told me that. The churchyard was quiet, there was no one around, and although there were some neighbouring farms, they were quiet too. It was late — still daylight, but everyone was at home. I dragged her behind the church. I knew I had to get rid of the pickaxe, and then I had the idea of getting rid of Carlotta’s laptop and phone too, so you wouldn’t find her emails to me. Her phone was in her pocket, and the laptop was in her car. I threw them into the sea with the pickaxe on the way back to Reykjavík.

‘Then I went to meet the TV documentary crew a couple of days later in Ólafsvík as though nothing had happened. And it seemed to work. You never suspected me. It looked like I was going to be lucky.’

One of the little kids from the playground scrambled over to where Magnus and Beccari were sitting. He stopped right in front of them, inches away from a ten-foot drop down to the road. Magnus was alarmed and turned to look at the two women on the bench. They smiled and waved — they didn’t care that the kid was about to plunge to his death. Greenlanders clearly had a different sense of personal risk.

Beccari avoided the child’s big brown eyes. ‘Your mom wants you,’ Magnus said in English, pointing to the women. The child may or may not have understood the words, but he turned and ran back to the playground.

‘And then Nancy Fishburn showed up in Iceland?’

Beccari nodded. ‘The first I heard of it was an email she sent me. She said she had spoken to Suzy and now she wanted to speak to me. Could I meet her at her hotel in Reykjavík?

‘So I did. At first, it looked good. She had told Suzy about the hoax, but Suzy had wanted to keep it all a secret, and Nancy had agreed. But it turned out Nancy had just heard about Carlotta’s murder. I said that had nothing to do with me. I’m not sure whether or not she believed me, but she said she was going to have to speak to the police and tell them what she knew about me.

‘I couldn’t let her do that. So I smothered her with a pillow while she was sitting down in a chair in her hotel room. It wasn’t hard — she wasn’t strong. Then I lifted her on to the bed, and hoped people would think she had died of natural causes.’

‘It almost worked,’ said Magnus.

‘It was a shame — she was a good friend of my father’s, but she had to die.’

Fifty

‘So what about Rósa?’ Magnus asked.

‘Ah, Rósa. Apparently she was following Carlotta and saw me in Glaumbaer. I had no idea. She didn’t know me then, but she did recognize me when she met me getting on the plane to Greenland. Once again, I had no idea. In fact, she was quite friendly to me.’

‘So she didn’t say anything about identifying you?’

‘No, not then. But the evening I left the crew and came here to Qaqortoq, she called me. She told me she had seen me at Glaumbaer, and she was pretty sure I had killed Carlotta. She had also figured out that the whole thing was probably a hoax: she guessed that I must have been involved somehow — she was a smart woman.

‘I told her she was crazy, of course. But then she said she had a deal for me. She said she wouldn’t tell anyone she had recognized me if I told her all about the hoax. She realized that if she told the police she had seen me at Glaumbaer, the hoax would come out and it would be really damaging for Einar. She said she only had a few more months to live and all she cared about was him.

‘I thought about it, and decided to trust her. So I told her what I knew about the hoax: the Columbus letter and the wampum. I promised I would do my best to keep it quiet, and she said that as long as the hoax remained a secret, she wouldn’t tell the police about me.

‘Of course, I agreed. But then she said if she or Einar ever became serious suspects for Carlotta’s murder, she would have to tell the police she had seen me. And if the hoax did come out she would tell the police too.

‘I wasn’t happy with that, but I didn’t think I had much of a choice.’

Beccari glanced quickly at Magnus and then back at his feet.

‘That night, I couldn’t sleep. I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since Glaumbaer. But the more I thought about it, the less I thought I could trust Rósa. She was a smart lawyer; somehow she had gotten herself in a position where she had a hold over me. She seemed like the kind of woman who was always going to use that pressure. And at that point, she didn’t even know that Nancy had died. Once she found that out, she might put two and two together and realize I had killed the old lady as well.

‘All kinds of things could go wrong. I just couldn’t trust her to keep quiet.

‘It was clever of her to wait until I had left Narsarsuaq. With me at a distance, she was safe. If she had told me while we were all together, I could have figured out a way of catching her alone and then dealing with her permanently.

‘You know I told you she and I had a conversation on the boat crossing the fjord back to Narsarsuaq?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, we didn’t talk about her expecting someone to kill her — I just threw that in because Eygló had already told me Einar was a suspect for Rósa’s murder, and I wanted to put him further in the frame with you. What we did talk about was her plan to hike to the Blomsterdalen the following day.

‘She was going to be alone, miles from anywhere. I got out of bed and checked the Blomsterdalen online. It was a remote valley. I looked at the flight schedules and realized I could get a flight from Qaqortoq to Narsarsuaq first thing, and then fly back here in the afternoon. It was risky, but doing nothing was risky.

‘I went to the supermarket as soon as it opened and bought a knife. Then I flew out to Narsarsuaq and hiked to the Blomsterdalen myself to wait for her. And I killed her.’

So Eygló was right: Rósa hadn’t been stupid enough to arrange to meet Beccari alone in the valley. ‘Was that really necessary?’

‘I think so. Besides, she was going to die anyway. I just made it quicker. And once you have killed twice, it’s kind of easier to kill again.’

‘I’ve heard that before.’

Beccari sighed. He looked up at Magnus, tears in his eyes. Magnus had the feeling that Beccari was very sorry — sorry for himself.

‘So what happens now?’ Beccari asked.

‘Inspector Paulsen arrests you. You get tried for murder in two countries; we get to fight with the Greenlanders about who goes first. You spend a long time in jail.’

Beccari nodded.

‘You know, Marco,’ said Magnus. ‘It is a shame that your father never knew what you are really like.’

Anger flashed through the tears. Magnus didn’t care. Beccari deserved to be locked away for a long, long time. Magnus’s only regret was that he would be tried in Greenland or Iceland: he really needed to spend the rest of his life in a US penitentiary.

Magnus stood up, turned away from Beccari towards the airport, and called Paulsen, telling her he had found Beccari by the playground and she should come and arrest him.

He heard the scrabble of falling stones behind him, and saw Beccari slide down the rocks to the road below.

Magnus yelled as Beccari bounded across the road and leaped into the air.

It was only ten or fifteen feet to the sea below. Magnus heard the splash as he followed Beccari down the rocks and over the narrow road.

He could still see the ripples where Beccari had hit the water below him, but no sign of the man himself. Magnus stared at the slow swirl of the sea. Beccari didn’t look like much of a swimmer, but perhaps he had struck out under water. The surface broke as the long neck of a cormorant bobbed up. The bird looked around for a couple of seconds and then dived down.

People usually floated, didn’t they? Could Beccari have got stuck down there somewhere?

Then, slowly, the hump of Beccari’s light brown jacket broke the surface, his pink hooped scarf training behind it. He was face down.

His body was only a few yards from the rocky shore line.

Magnus couldn’t understand why Beccari hadn’t broken the surface face up.

Magnus was a good swimmer. He knew CPR; he knew mouth-to-mouth. If he got to Beccari quickly, he had a good chance of saving him.

But the water was cold, dangerously cold. He had no idea how long a healthy body could survive in water that cold before hypothermia kicked in, but he thought it must be at least ten minutes. Probably half an hour. Paulsen was on her way and there were helicopters and motorboats galore close by.

Was it worth risking his own life for Beccari? Eight years before Magnus had watched as a murderer had drowned in the waters of a powerful waterfall. Even though there was nothing he could reasonably have done to save the man once he had fallen in, he had relived the moment with regret: no, with guilt.

He could save Beccari.

He laid his phone on the rock, took off his coat and his shoes, paused for a moment and jumped.

Fifty-One

As he was in mid-air the realization hit Magnus he had no idea how deep the water was. Perhaps Beccari had banged his head on a rock just below the surface. Too late to do anything about that now, except to resolve to bunch his legs as soon as he hit the water to slow his descent.

Impact was like a giant fist smashing against his body, clutching him and squeezing. It wasn’t the resistance, it was the cold: cold like nothing he had ever felt before. All the nerves, all the muscles in his body seemed to convulse. He could feel his mouth attempting to open in an involuntary gasp; somehow he managed to keep it closed. His lungs exploded.

He did pull up his legs but he had no idea where he was, or even which way up. He opened his eyes. The sea was green; white bubbles from his splash surrounded him. His lungs demanded air immediately — holding his breath was not an option. He hadn’t quite managed to keep his mouth completely closed in the moment after impact; some water had trickled in, stimulating a coughing reflex. A surge of panic overwhelmed him, and a compulsion to flap his arms and legs. But which way?

He told himself to stay still, just for a couple of seconds so that he could tell which way was up. The bubbles cleared, slipping off together. Up. Sand, rock and seaweed appeared in one direction, a lighter shade of green and blue in another. He pushed with his arms to change his attitude so that his head was towards the surface and kicked and flapped.

Ordinarily, Magnus could hold his breath under water for a minute or more. Now he only had a few seconds. His chest was exploding. His clothes were dragging him down.

He couldn’t keep his mouth shut any more. It opened just as he broke the surface, he took two lungs full of air and then he was under again. He resisted the insistent messages from his body to flail wildly and took a couple of deliberate strokes upwards.

Once again, his face broke the surface and he kicked and flapped with arms and legs to keep his face above the surface.

The explosion in his lungs was joined by his heart. His heartbeat galloped, the blood roaring in his ears. Despite his face being above water and free to gasp air, his lungs were telling him that he didn’t have enough oxygen. He seemed to be breathing in without having time to breathe out.

Panic was tugging at his heels, pulling him down towards the bottom.

Hyperventilation.

Slow down. Calm down.

He held his breath. Froze his limbs. Let his body sink and his head go underwater just for a couple of seconds before kicking back to the surface.

It worked. He was still gasping, his pulse felt like it had hit two hundred, but a steady flow of oxygen was reaching his lungs.

He looked around him. Beccari was floating face down about ten yards away. The rocky shore was close, but there seemed nowhere to cling on safely. A better bet was the motorboat a little further out to sea. Maybe Magnus would be able to climb on board. If not, he could at least hang on to the mooring line.

He began to take some tentative strokes towards Beccari. After the initial shock, where the cold had felt like a blow, now it was painful. Magnus could see why Beccari had surfaced face down; he must have gasped for air as he had plunged beneath the surface, and filled his lungs with seawater. Magnus had been foolish to jump after him, but now he was in, he would do his best to extricate Beccari.

It was difficult to swim or to make any forward progress at all. He found himself making swift, useless strokes; once again he tried to calm himself, to swim slowly and deliberately.

After what seemed like an age, he reached Beccari. He was exhausted. He reached out to grab Beccari’s clothes to try and turn him face up, but his fingers wouldn’t grasp him. He got closer, reached out again. Beccari sank underwater. Surfaced. Magnus just couldn’t grip; his fingers wouldn’t obey instructions from his brain. His body was shutting down, extremities first.

He gave up trying to get a hold of Beccari, and instead pushed Beccari’s side upwards, trying to flip him over on to his back.

It took him four attempts, but eventually he succeeded.

Beccari wasn’t breathing. He had drowned; it was probably too late to resuscitate him, but Magnus was in the water now, he may as well try. It wasn’t far to the motorboat.

Off Duxbury Beach in Massachusetts, Magnus could have grabbed Beccari under the chin and pulled him the distance in less than a minute. But here, in Greenland, with both of them fully clothed, Magnus was making no progress.

Not just that, but his limbs were beginning to ignore messages from his brain. It was only with the greatest of difficulty that he could move his arms and his legs at all. It was bad.

And it was going to get worse.

In another couple of minutes Magnus would lose the ability to keep his own face above water. He had to get to the boat before that.

He let go of Beccari and struck out for the boat. But he was losing strength; not just strength, he was losing control over his body. For the first minute or so he made some progress, but then even that stopped. There was a tiny current which was gently tugging him away from the boat. Once again, in normal circumstances, he could easily have overcome it, but now all he could do was keep his head above water.

He wasn’t going to be able to do that for much longer.

He was going to drown.

His left arm went first. It would no longer move, and his right was barely making any upward pressure.

He was going to drown.

His life didn’t flash in front of his eyes, but he did think: Who would care? His parents were dead. His brother Ollie would be pleased. Vigdís and Árni would be upset, it was true, as would Ingileif.

And then he thought of the little boy with the red hair peering over the wall at him on Borgartún, with those piercing blue eyes.

He sank beneath the surface.

He flailed his remaining failing arm and kicked with both legs. His face met the air and he took a gulp.

And then he sank.

His right arm wasn’t working properly now, but he summoned all the strength he could in his legs for one more surge. He broke the surface, another gulp and under again.

A hand grabbed him under the chin and yanked. This time his face broke the surface and stayed out of the water.

‘Come on, Magnus, you big bastard, keep swimming!’ It was Paulsen’s voice. ‘You can do it. Help me now.’ He could feel her body in the water bumping behind him.

He tried, pushing downwards with his one arm, kicking feebly with his barely responsive legs.

He tried to say something to Paulsen, but all he could do was gasp for air. She was tugging him along towards the moored motorboat. He kicked and paddled, trying to do his bit to keep moving, keep his mouth and nose above the surface, keep alive.

His eardrums were underwater and he heard the urgent buzz of an engine. It became louder and half a minute later a large bright orange shape surged into his peripheral view.

‘Grab this,’ said Paulsen as she shoved a red and white plastic ring into his arms. He clutched it. It floated.

He floated.

Several strong arms grabbed him and heaved him upwards and over the edge of the boat. He was shivering uncontrollably as someone thrust a blanket over his shoulders.

Paulsen sat next to him. Her uniform was sodden, her long black hair hanging in damp strands down her broad face, but she was barely even shaking. She was a Greenlander: built to dive into near-freezing water and emerge unscathed.

Magnus wasn’t.

Paulsen flashed him that unexpected sweet smile. ‘Are you OK?’

Magnus tried to answer, but his teeth were chattering so much, he settled for a nod.

He fought to control his jaws. ‘Where’s Beccari?’

‘We’ll fish him out next,’ said Paulsen.

‘Good.’

Paulsen put a hand on Magnus’s shaking arm. ‘You know, Magnus? He wasn’t worth it.’

Fifty-Two

‘So, Inspector Magnús, who did you think was most likely to have killed Carlotta Mondini when you took on the case?’ Eygló looked up at Magnus, her eyes wide, her lips slightly parted as if the words he was about to utter would be the most fascinating she had ever heard. They were standing on the strip of green that ran beside the bay in front of the National Police Commissioner’s Office, more photogenic than the police headquarters, which was a squat office block around the corner by the bus station.

He couldn’t help responding with warmth. Suzy had told him not to act like a policeman following best procedure, but rather like an inquisitive sleuth. Magnus understood the difference, and Eygló made it easy. ‘I didn’t know. You always have to keep an open mind. It could have been a local who had never met her before: there had been a series of rapes in the north of Iceland. Or it might have been someone from her past life in Italy. But a tourist murdered in this way is unheard of in Iceland.’

‘Yet the cause of her death turned out to be an Icelandic woman who had been dead for nearly a thousand years.’

Magnus grinned. ‘That’s not so surprising. There were plenty of murders in Gudrid’s day. Iceland was a much less peaceful place.’

‘Cut!’ shouted Suzy. ‘That was great, Magnus.’ She glanced at Siggi, the new Icelandic cameraman, who nodded. ‘Ajay?’

‘It’s good,’ said the sound man.

‘That’s a wrap, then. Glaumbaer tomorrow!’

Suzy had come up with ingenious ways of interweaving the hoax and its discovery, as well as the murders of Carlotta and Nancy, into the existing documentary. The BBC had loved it when she had pitched it over the phone. The Greenland takes would have to stay as they were, but a few new scenes involving Magnus in Reykjavík and Glaumbaer should set the scene for the murder investigation. The National Police Commissioner had been more than happy to release Magnus for the job. The Ministry of Tourism was keen that Carlotta’s death should be seen as something other than the random murder of an unlucky tourist who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Carlotta’s parents had given their blessing too, and had even returned to Iceland to be interviewed.

Kelly had agreed to talk about her grandmother; in fact she had been eager to. Nancy Fishburn was emerging as a heroine of the story, a tragic heroine, given her death. Magnus had his qualms about murder as entertainment, and about bailing Suzy out after her attempts to keep the knowledge of the hoax to herself. But it was a story that should be told, and Magnus was enjoying his part in telling it.

They had decided to keep Rósa’s death out of it. It complicated things, and Eygló and Suzy had no desire to pile more pressure on Einar.

Rósa’s death had broken him. He didn’t care about the discovery of the hoax; he didn’t care about his academic reputation or even his post at the university, who had given him a term’s sabbatical. Eygló made sure she saw him every day, and did her best to convince Einar he had always done his best for Rósa.

‘That was very good, Magnus,’ said Suzy. ‘You and Eygló seem to have some real chemistry going, don’t you think, Halla?’

Halla was in charge of press relations for the Metropolitan Police, and was keeping an eye on proceedings. ‘Absolutely,’ she said, grinning at Magnus. For a press officer, she was not known for her discretion.

‘Magnus is a true professional,’ said Eygló neutrally.

‘Of course,’ said Suzy. ‘You’re sure you can give us a lift to Glaumbaer tomorrow, Magnus?’

‘No problem.’

Production costs had been cut right down to the bone. Tom had been sent back to England, never to work with Suzy again. Eygló had begged a friend of her sister’s to do the camera work for no payment up front and the risk of no payment at all. Ajay was still providing his labour free. Suzy was staying on Eygló’s sofa, and Ajay with one of her sisters. There would be post-production costs, but Suzy was doing this on a shoestring. Half a shoestring.

‘Have you got time for a walk?’ Eygló asked.

‘Sure,’ said Magnus. He was still working his way through the paperwork, or computerwork, brought about by three murders in two jurisdictions committed by a dual citizen of a third and a fourth. The paperwork wasn’t going anywhere.

The sun was out, at least temporarily, and a fresh breeze skipped in from the bay. On one side of them, manic Icelandic drivers misguided tons of metal in unpredictable directions along the Saebraut. On the other, a crowd of ducks, cormorants and swans went about their city business. On the far shore, Mount Esja overlooked it all, its rocky flanks glowing a soft, splendid gold.

‘You know this would all be so much more difficult if Professor Beccari had survived,’ said Magnus. ‘The investigation would have taken months; we would have had to stop you broadcasting anything that might have been prejudicial to his defence.’

It turned out that Beccari had suffered a fatal heart attack after leaping into the sea at Qaqortoq. The shock of the cold that had set Magnus’s heart racing had been too much for him. What wasn’t clear, and would never become clear, was whether his decision to jump in had been an ultimately successful suicide attempt, or a desperate bid to reach the motorboat and escape.

If the latter, it was never going to work. The boat’s engine needed a key, which was not on board.

‘He deserved it,’ said Eygló. ‘I’m just glad that you didn’t die too. That was a stupid thing to do, Magnús.’

‘I can’t argue with that.’

They were strolling past the elegant white Höfdi House, standing alone in a patch of green lawn, the former British Embassy where Reagan and Gorbachev had taken the first steps towards agreeing they had better things to do than blow up the world.

‘How was lunch with Ingileif?’ Eygló asked, as if reading Magnus’s mind. Outside the Höfdi House was where Magnus had had one of his first conversations with her, and since then the building had always been associated with her in his mind.

‘Polite. Civilized. Awkward.’

‘Did you ask her about Ási?’

‘I did.’

‘And?’

Magnus glanced across the ruffled bay at the broad shoulders of Esja. ‘I asked whether he was mine. She tried to laugh it off and asked me where I got that idea. I said Vigdís. She went quiet: she knows as well as I do how Vigdís is observant at that kind of thing. She wouldn’t actually say he was mine, but she didn’t deny it.

‘I asked if I could see him. She said no. I pushed it. She looked like she was going to cry, but she didn’t — she’s tough, Ingileif. She said her husband was leaving her. He’s gone off with a third-rate model, not much more than a schoolgirl really. She said she understood the irony.’

She had actually said more than that. During their constantly shifting relationship, Ingileif had had difficulty remaining monogamous. She had chided Magnus for caring about her occasional lapses. Now, she said, she knew what it felt like to be on the other end of it. She knew it felt bad.

There had been a long silence at the lunch table: they were in a quiet café in Thingholt. Ingileif had looked up at him, her face tight, her eyes tough yet pleading. Pleading for him to come back to her.

Magnus had paid the bill and left. Ingileif’s last words were: ‘I’ll think about Ási.’

Magnus and Eygló turned inland towards Borgartún and the route back to police headquarters.

They were approaching a café, a Kaffitár. Magnus was about to suggest they nip in for a quick coffee when he saw two figures emerge. They were still about fifty metres away. One, the woman, turned away from Magnus and Eygló to her car parked a little further down Borgartún. She had the rolling gate of a woman with a false leg. Thelma.

The other, an older man, headed towards Magnus and Eygló, frowning. He only recognized Magnus when he was ten metres away.

He hesitated, and then growled as he passed: ‘Move along now. Nothing to see here.’

But there was. Magnus was damned sure there was.

‘Magnús?’ said Eygló. ‘That was Tryggvi Thór, wasn’t it? What did he mean?’

‘I don’t know.’

Eygló slipped her fingers into his.

Magnus squeezed gently. Then he relaxed. He smiled. He forgot about Tryggvi Thór.

For the first time in a long time, he felt... good.