Where the Shadows Lie

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

It was no more than a ten-minute walk from police headquarters to the Hofdi House, where Ingileif had asked to meet Magnus. He was feeling a little better after the sausage he had picked up from the coffee shop in the bus station on his way back from the Commissioner’s office, but he still needed to do all he could to clear his head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Thank you for coming,’ Ingileif said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Oh, it’s authentic.’

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

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

‘Well?’ he said.

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

‘So you say.’

‘Don’t you believe me?’

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

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

‘Maybe,’ said Magnus.

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

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

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

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

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

Merton College

Oxford

12 October 1948

Dear Isildarson

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

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

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

With best wishes,

Yours sincerely,

J.R.R. Tolkien

‘This says your grandfather found the ring,’ Magnus said.

Ingileif nodded. ‘It does.’

Magnus shook his head. ‘It’s incredible.’

Ingileif sighed. ‘No it’s not. It explains everything.’

‘Explains what, exactly?’

‘My father’s obsession. How he died.’

‘What do you mean?’

Ingileif stared out to sea. Magnus watched her face closely as she wrestled with her emotions. Then she turned to Magnus, moisture in the corners of his eyes. ‘I think I told you my father died when I was about twelve?’

‘Yes.’

‘He was looking for the ring. It always seemed absurd to me that an educated man should be so convinced that it still existed. But of course he knew. His own father must have told him.’

‘But not told him exactly where it was hidden?’

‘Precisely. My father started searching right after my grandfather died. My guess is that Grandpa had forbidden him to look for it. Dad used to spend days scouring the area around the Thjorsa Valley in all weathers. And then one day he never came back.’

Ingileif bit her lip.

‘When did you find this letter?’ Magnus asked.

‘Very recently. After I had approached Agnar. He had already seen the first letter from Tolkien, the one written in 1938, which I showed you yesterday. But he asked me if I could find any more evidence, so I went back to Fludir and looked through my father’s papers. There was a bundle of letters from Tolkien to Grandpa, and this was one of them.’

‘Did you tell Agnar?’

‘Yes.’

‘I bet he was excited.’

‘He drove straight over to Fludir to see me. And the letter.’

Magnus took out his notebook. ‘What day was that?’

‘It was Sunday last week.’ She did a quick mental calculation. ‘The nineteenth.’

‘Four days before he was killed,’ said Magnus. He remembered Agnar’s e-mail to Steve Jubb saying that he had found something else. And Jubb’s text message to Isildur suggesting more or less the same thing. Something valuable. Could it have been the ring?

‘Do you have any idea where the ring is?’

Ingileif shook her head. ‘No. There is that part in the saga about the ring being hidden beneath the head of a hound. There are all kinds of strangely shaped outcrops of lava that could be hounds when looked at from certain directions. That was what my father was looking for. Presumably my grandfather found the cave and my father didn’t.’

‘What about Agnar? Did he have any idea where it might be?’

Ingileif shook her head. ‘No. He asked me, of course. He was very aggressive about it. I more or less threw him out.’

‘So, as far as you know, the ring is still hidden in a small cave somewhere?’

‘I think so,’ said Ingileif. ‘You still don’t believe me, do you?’

Magnus examined the upright precise handwriting. It looked real. But of course if it had been written by a careful forger it would look real. He glanced up at Ingileif. She seemed to be telling the truth, unlike her previous two conversations with him when she had been lying badly. Of course she could have feigned her earlier awkwardness to lull him into thinking she was telling the truth this time, but she would have to be a consummate actress to pull that off. And very cunning.

Could he believe that the ring in Gaukur’s Saga had really survived?

It was tempting. There was great scholarly debate about how historically accurate Iceland’s sagas really were. Most of the people and many of the events mentioned in them had really existed, but then there were also passages that were obviously pure invention. Whenever Magnus read them, the matter-of-fact style and the realistic characters lulled him into suspending disbelief until he felt medieval Iceland was almost close enough to touch.

The homicide detective in him resisted the temptation. First of all, Magnus couldn’t even be sure that the saga itself was authentic. And even if it was, then the ring could be fictional. And even if a gold ring had existed, it would probably be either buried under tons of ash, or long since have been found and sold by a poor shepherd. The whole thing was unlikely. Highly unlikely. But speculation was pointless. It didn’t really matter what Magnus thought: what mattered was what Agnar believed, and Steve Jubb and Isildur.

For if a true Lord of the Rings fanatic thought he had a chance of getting his hands on the ring, the One Ring, then he might be tempted to kill for it.

‘I don’t know what I think,’ said Magnus. ‘But thank you for telling me. Eventually.’

Ingileif shrugged.

‘Of course, it would have been better if you had come out with all this up front.’

Ingileif sighed. ‘It would have been better if I had never let the damn saga out of my safe in the first place.’