Where the Shadows Lie

CHAPTER SIX

Steve Jubb’s new lawyer, Kristjan Gylfason, was smooth: intelligent face, prematurely silver hair, an air of calm competence and wealth. His very presence seemed to give Jubb comfort. Not good.

There were now five men in the interview room: Jubb, his lawyer, Baldur, Magnus and the interpreter.

Baldur flung an English copy of The Lord of the Rings onto the desk. There was silence in the room. Jubb’s eyes flicked down to it. Arni had rushed out and bought it from the Eymundsson book-shop in the middle of town.

Baldur tapped the book. ‘Ever read this before?’

Jubb nodded.

Baldur slowly and deliberately opened the book at chapter two and passed it over to Steve Jubb. ‘Now, read that and tell me you don’t know who Isildur is.’

‘It’s a character in a book,’ Jubb said. ‘That’s all.’

‘How many times have you read this book?’ Baldur asked.

‘Once or twice.’

‘Once or twice?’ Baldur snorted. ‘Isildur is a nickname, isn’t it? He’s a friend of yours. A fellow Lord of the Rings fan.’

Steve Jubb shrugged.

Magnus glanced at the lower extremity of a tattoo peeking out beneath Jubb’s sleeve. ‘Take off your shirt.’

Steve Jubb shrugged and removed the denim shirt he had been wearing since his arrest. He revealed a plain white T-shirt, and on his forearm a tattoo of a helmeted man with a beard wielding an axe.

A man? Or perhaps a dwarf.

‘Let me guess,’ said Magnus. ‘Your nickname is Gimli.’ He remembered that Gimli was the name of the dwarf in Lord of the Rings.

Jubb shrugged again.

‘Is Isildur a buddy from Yorkshire?’ Magnus asked. ‘You meet in a pub every Friday, have a few beers and talk about old Icelandic sagas?’

No answer.

‘You get cop shows in England?’ Magnus asked. ‘ CSI, Law and Order?’

Jubb frowned.

‘Well, in those shows the bad guy gets to remain silent while the good guys ask all the questions. But it doesn’t work that way in Iceland.’ Magnus leaned forward. ‘In Iceland if you keep quiet we think you’ve got something to hide. Isn’t that right, Kristjan?’

‘My client’s decision not to answer your questions is his own,’ the lawyer said. ‘I have explained the consequences.’

‘We will find out what you are hiding,’ Baldur said. ‘And your failure to cooperate will be remembered when it comes to trial.’

The lawyer was about to say something, but Jubb put a hand on his arm. ‘Look, if you two are so bloody clever, you’ll eventually figure out that I had bugger all to do with Agnar’s death, and then you’ll have to let me go. Until then, I’m saying nowt.’

The arms folded, the jaw jutted out. Steve Jubb didn’t utter another word.

Vigdis was waiting for them outside the interview room.

‘There’s someone from the British Embassy to see you.’

Baldur swore. ‘Damn it. He’s only going to waste my time. But I must speak to him, I suppose. Is there anything else?’ Baldur could tell from the look of suppressed excitement on Vigdis’s face that there was.

‘Agnar had a lover,’ Vigdis said, with a small smile of triumph.

Baldur raised his eyebrows. ‘Did he indeed?’

‘Andrea Fridriksdottir. She is one of Agnar’s Icelandic literature students at the university. She came forward as soon as she heard he had been killed.’

‘Where is she?’

‘Downstairs.’

‘Excellent. Let’s go and talk to her. Tell the man from the British Embassy I will be with him as soon as I can. But I want to speak to this Andrea first.’

Realizing that he was not invited, Magnus returned to his desk, where a woman from the National Police Commissioner’s office was waiting for him. Cell phone, bank account, daily allowance, payment of salary, cash advance, even the promise of a car in a few days, she had it all prepared. Magnus was impressed. He was quite sure that the Boston Police Department could never match her for efficiency.

She was followed by a man from the IT Department. He gave Magnus his password, and spent a few minutes showing him how to use the computer system, including how to access e-mail.

Once the man had gone, Magnus stared at the screen in front of him. The time had come. Magnus could put it off no longer.

It had turned out that the FBI agents who had escorted Magnus in his last days in Massachusetts were out of the Cleveland Field Office. One, Agent Hendricks, had been designated his contact man. Magnus had agreed never to use the phone to the United States, even to Deputy Superintendent Williams. Especially to Deputy Superintendent Williams. The fear, that was never articulated but which was in the minds of Magnus, the FBI and Williams himself, was that the three police officers who had been arrested were not alone. That they had accomplices, or perhaps just friends in the Boston PD, friends for whom tracing Magnus’s whereabouts would all be in a day’s work.

So the idea was that the only form of communication would be e-mails. Even those Magnus could not send directly, but via Agent Hendricks in Cleveland. That was the method that Magnus would have to use if he wanted to contact Colby.

And he needed to contact Colby. It had become clear to him that he couldn’t take the risk that she would be attacked or killed on his account. She had outmanoeuvred him, and he had to accept that.

He stared at the screen for several minutes more, trying out arguments, justifications, explanations, but he knew Colby, and he was aware of the danger of giving her the opportunity to complicate things. So in the end he kept it simple.

The answer to your question is yes. Now please come with me. I am very worried about you.

With all my love

Magnus.

Not very romantic – hardly the right way to start a life together. Although he was attracted to Colby, loved her even, the more he got to know her the more sure he was that they shouldn’t get married. It wasn’t just his fear of commitment, although Colby was absolutely right that he did suffer from that. He just knew that if there was a woman out there somewhere that he could spend the rest of his life with, it wasn’t Colby. Her latest high-stakes ploy was an example of why.

But he had no choice. She had given him no choice.

He composed a brief report to Williams, telling him he was safe and in e-mail contact should Williams learn anything about the trial date.

He thought of writing to Ollie, as his brother now called himself, but decided against it. The FBI had informed Ollie that Magnus was disappearing, and an agent had taken his stuff from the guestroom in Ollie’s house. That would have to be enough – the less Magnus had to do with Ollie the better. He realized that it wasn’t just Colby who was at risk from the Soto gang, his brother might be too.

Magnus closed his eyes. Nothing he could do about that now except hope that the gangsters would ignore them all.

Oh, God. Maybe Colby was right. Maybe he should just have pretended that he hadn’t heard Lenahan’s conversation.

Of course, in his beloved sagas, the heroes always did their duty. But then most of their relatives came to a bloody end before the story was finished. It was easy to be brave with your own skin, much harder with other people’s. He felt more like a coward than a hero, safe in Iceland when his brother and his girlfriend were in danger.

But then the ancient Icelandic reaction kicked in. If they touched a hair of Colby’s or Ollie’s head, he would make the bastards pay. All of them.

Baldur held another conference at two o’clock that afternoon. The team were still fresh and enthusiastic.

He began with the initial findings from the autopsy. It looked likely that Agnar had drowned; there was some mud found in his lungs, which suggested that he was still breathing when he hit the water. As Magnus had suspected, the fragments of stone in the victim’s head wound were from the dirt road rather than the lake floor.

There were small traces of cocaine in the victim’s blood, and some alcohol, but not nearly enough to cause intoxication. The pathologist’s conclusion was that the victim was struck on the back of the head with a stone, fell unconscious and was dragged into the lake where he drowned. No surprises there.

Baldur and Vigdis had interviewed Andrea. She had admitted that her affair with Agnar had been going on for about a month. She was besotted with him, she had spent most of the previous year trying to seduce him, and had finally succeeded after a drunken student party to which he had been invited. She had spent one weekend with him at the summer house. Her finger-prints were indeed one of the two sets that remained unidentified.

Andrea said that Agnar had seemed terrified that his wife would discover what had happened. He had promised her after she had caught him with a student four years before that he would remain faithful, and until Andrea he had kept his word. Andrea’s impression was that Agnar was scared of Linda.

Magnus outlined the theory that Isildur was a nickname for a Lord of the Rings fan, and that Steve Jubb was one himself. One or two of the faces around the table looked a little uncomfortable. Maybe Arni wasn’t the only one to have seen the Lord of the Rings movie.

Baldur handed round the list of entries from Agnar’s appointments diary. Dates, times, and the names of people he had met, mostly fellow academics or students. He had been away on a two-day seminar at the University of Uppsala in Sweden three weeks before. And one afternoon the previous week was blocked out with the word ‘Hruni’.

‘Hruni is near Fludir, isn’t it?’ Baldur said.

‘Just a couple of kilometres away,’ Rannveig, the assistant prosecutor, said. ‘I’ve been there. There’s nothing but the church and a farm.’

‘Perhaps the entry refers to the dance rather than the place,’ Baldur said. ‘Something collapsing that afternoon? A disaster?’

Magnus had heard of Hruni. Back in the seventeenth century the pastor of Hruni was notorious for the wild parties he held in his church at Christmas. One Christmas Eve the devil was seen hanging around outside, and the following morning the whole church and its congregation had been swallowed up by the earth. Since then the phrase ‘Hruni dance’ had slipped into the language to mean something that was falling apart.

‘The little boy who died young came from Fludir,’ said Vigdis. ‘Isildur Asgrimsson. And here’s his sister.’ She pointed to a name on the list of appointments. ‘Ingileif Asgrimsdottir, sixth of April, two-thirty. At least, I’m pretty sure that she was the boy’s sister. I can check.’

‘Do that,’ said Baldur. ‘And if you are right, track her down and interview her. We’re assuming that Isildur is a foreigner but we need to keep an open mind.’

He picked up a sheet of paper on the conference table in front of him. ‘We have searched Steve Jubb’s hotel room and the forensics people are examining his clothes. We found a couple of interesting text messages that had been sent on his mobile phone. Or we think they might be interesting, we just don’t know. Take a look at the transcriptions.’

He passed around the sheet, on which two short sentences had been typed. They were in a language that Magnus didn’t recognize, didn’t even begin to recognize. ‘Does anyone know what this is?’ Baldur asked.

There were frowns and slowly shaking heads around the table. Someone tentatively suggested Finnish, someone else was sure it wasn’t. But Magnus noticed that Arni was shifting uncomfortably again.

‘Arni?’ Magnus said.

Arni glared at Magnus, and then swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. ‘Elvish,’ he said, very quietly.

‘What?’ Baldur demanded. ‘Speak up!’

‘They might be in Elvish. I think Tolkien created some Elvish languages. This might be one of them.’

Baldur put his head in his hands and then glared at his subordinate. ‘You’re not going to tell me the huldufolk did this, are you now Arni?’

Arni shrank. The huldufolk, or hidden people, were elf-like creatures who were supposed to live all over Iceland in rocks and stones. In everyday conversation Icelanders were proud of their belief in these beings, and, famously, highways had been diverted to avoid removing rocks in which they were known to live. Baldur did not want his murder investigation to be derailed by the most troublesome of all Iceland’s many superstitions.

‘Arni could be right,’ said Magnus. ‘We know Steve Jubb and Isildur, whoever he is, were doing a deal with Agnar. If they needed to communicate with each other about it they could have used a code. They are both Lord of the Rings fans: what better than Elvish?’

Baldur pursed his lips. ‘All right, Arni. See if you can find someone in Iceland who speaks Elvish, and ask them if they recognize what this says. And then get them to translate it.’

Baldur glanced around the table. ‘If Steve Jubb won’t tell us, we need to find out who this Isildur is ourselves. We need to get in touch with the British police in Yorkshire to see if they can help us with Jubb’s friends. And we need to check all the bars and restaurants in Reykjavik to find out if Jubb met anyone else apart from Agnar. Perhaps Isildur is here in town; we won’t know until we ask around. And I am going to interview Agnar’s wife.’ He doled out specific tasks for everyone around the table, except Magnus, and the meeting was over.

Magnus followed the inspector into the corridor. ‘Do you mind if I join Vigdis to interview the sister of the kid who died?’

‘No, go ahead,’ said Baldur.

‘What do you think so far?’ Magnus asked.

‘What do you mean, what do I think?’ Baldur said, stopping.

‘Oh, come on. You have to have a hunch.’

‘I keep an open mind. I gather evidence until it points to one conclusion. Isn’t that what you do in America?’

‘Right,’ Magnus said.

‘Now, if you want to help, find me Isildur.’