Where the Shadows Lie fai-1

by Michael Ridpath

  ‘Last year there were three unsolved murders in Iceland, all related. We never knew who committed them until he volunteered himself at police headquarters. He was a Pole. We should have caught him after the first woman was killed, but we didn’t, so two more died. I think with someone like you working with us, we would have stopped him then.’

  ‘I hope so,’ said Magnus.

  ‘I’ve read a copy of your file and spoken to Deputy Superintendent Williams. He was very flattering.’

  Magnus raised his eyebrows. He didn’t know Williams did flattery. And he knew there were some serious black marks in his record from those times in his career when he hadn’t always done exactly what he had been told.

  ‘The idea is that you will go through a crash course at the National Police College. In the mean time you will be available for training seminars and for advice should something crop up that you can help us with.’

  ‘A crash course?’ said Magnus, wanting to check that he had understood correctly. ‘How long would that take?’

  ‘The normal course is a year, but since you have so much police experience, we would hope to get you through in less than six months. It’s unavoidable. You can’t arrest someone unless you know Icelandic law.’

  ‘No, I see that, but how long did you…’ Magnus paused as he tried to remember the Icelandic word for ‘envision’ ‘… see me being here?’

  ‘I specified a minimum of two years. Deputy Superintendent Williams assured me that would be acceptable.’

  ‘He never mentioned that kind of timeframe to me,’ said Magnus.

  Snorri’s blue eyes bored into Magnus’s. ‘Williams did, of course, mention the reason why you were so eager to leave Boston on a temporary basis. I admire your courage.’ His eyes flicked towards the uniformed police driver in the front seat. ‘No one here knows about it apart from me.’

  Magnus was about to protest, but he let it drop. As yet, he had no idea how many months it would be until the trial of Lenahan and the others. He would go along with the Police Commissioner until he was called to testify, then he would return to Boston and stay there, no matter what plans the Commissioner had for him.

  Snorri smiled. ‘But, as luck would have it, we have something to get your teeth into right away. A body was discovered this morning, in a summer house by Lake Thingvellir. And I am told that one of the initial suspects is an American. I am taking you straight there now.’

  Keflavik Airport was at the tip of the peninsula that stuck out to the west of Reykjavik into the Atlantic Ocean. They drove east, through a tangle of highways and grey suburbs to the south of the city, lined with small factories and warehouses and familiar fast-food joints: KFC, Taco Bell and Subway. Depressing.

  To his left, Magnus could see the multicoloured metal roofs of little houses that marked the centre of Reykjavik, dominated by the rocket spire of the Hallgrimskirkja, Iceland’s largest church, rising up from the top of a small hill. No sign of the clusters of skyscrapers that dominated the downtown areas of even small cities in America. Beyond the city was Faxafloi Bay, and beyond that the broad foot of Mount Esja, an imposing ridge of stone that reached up into the low cloud.

  They passed though bleak suburbs of square squat blocks of flats to the east of the city. Mount Esja rose up ever larger ahead of them, before they turned away from the bay and climbed up Mosfell Heath. The houses disappeared and there was just heath land of yellow grass and green moss, bulky rounded hills and cloud – low, dark, swirling cloud.

  After twenty minutes or so they descended and Magnus saw Lake Thingvellir ahead of him. Magnus had been there several times as a boy, visiting Thingvellir itself, a grass plain that ran along the floor of a rift valley at the northern edge of the lake. It was the spot where the American and European continental plates split Iceland in two. More importantly for Magnus and his father, it was the dramatic site of the Althing, Iceland’s annual outdoor parliament during the age of the sagas.

  Magnus remembered the lake as a beautiful deep blue. Now it was dark and foreboding, the clouds reaching down from the sky almost low enough to touch the black water. Even the hump of a small island in the middle was smothered by the dense blanket of moisture.

  They turned off the main road, past a large farm with horses grazing in its home meadow, down to the lake itself. They followed a stone track to a row of half a dozen summer houses, protected by a stand of scrappy birch trees, not yet in leaf. The only trees in sight. Magnus saw the familiar signs of a newly established crime scene: badly parked police cars, some with lights still flashing unnecessarily, an ambulance with its back doors open, yellow tape fluttering in the breeze and figures milling about in a mixture of dark police uniforms and white forensic overalls.

  The focus of attention was the fifth house, at the end of the row. Magnus checked the other summer houses. It was still early in the season, so only one, the second, showed signs of habitation, a Range Rover parked outside.

  The police car pulled up next to the ambulance and the Commissioner and Magnus got out. The air was cold and damp. He could hear the rustle of the wind and a haunting bird call that he recognized from his childhood. A curlew?

  A tall, balding man with a long face, wearing forensic overalls, approached them.

  ‘Let me introduce Inspector Baldur Jakobsson of the Reykjavik Metropolitan Police CID,’ the Commissioner said. ‘He is in charge of the investigation. Lake Thingvellir is covered by the police at Selfoss to the south of here, but once they realized this could be a murder investigation they asked me to arrange for assistance from Reykjavik. Baldur, this is Sergeant Detective Magnus Jonson from the Boston Police Department…’ He paused and looked at Magnus quizzically. ‘Jonson?’

  ‘Ragnarsson,’ Magnus corrected him.

  The Commissioner smiled, pleased that Magnus was reverting to his Icelandic name. ‘Ragnarsson.’

  ‘ Good afternoon,’ said Baldur stiffly, in halting English with a thick accent.

  ‘ Godan daginn,’ replied Magnus.

  ‘Baldur, can you explain to Magnus what’s happened here?’

  ‘Certainly,’ Baldur said, his thin lips showing no smile or other sign of enthusiasm. ‘The victim was Agnar Haraldsson. He is a professor at the University of Iceland. This is his summer house. He was murdered last night, hit over the head in the house, we think, and then dragged down into the lake. He was found by two children from the house just back there at ten o’clock this morning.’

  ‘The house with the Range Rover out front?’ asked Magnus.

  Baldur nodded. ‘They fetched their father and he dialled 112.’

  ‘When was he last seen alive?’ Magnus asked.

  ‘Yesterday was a holiday – the first day of summer.’

  ‘It’s Iceland’s little joke,’ said the Commissioner. ‘The real summer is a few months off yet, but we need anything we can get to cheer ourselves up after the long winter.’

  Baldur ignored the interruption. ‘The neighbours saw Agnar arrive at about eleven o’clock in the morning. They saw him park his car outside his house and go in. They waved to him, he waved back, but they didn’t speak. He did receive a visitor, or visitors, that evening.’

  ‘Description?’

  ‘None. They just saw the car, small, bright blue, something like a Toyota Yaris, although they are not precisely sure. The car arrived about seven-thirty, eight o’clock. Left at nine-thirty. They didn’t see it, but the woman remembered what she was watching on TV when she heard it drive past.’

  ‘Any other visitors?’

  ‘None that the neighbours know of. But they were out all afternoon at Thingvellir, so there could have been.’

  Baldur answered Magnus’s questions simply and directly, his long face giving an air of serious intensity to his responses. The Commissioner was listening closely, but let Magnus do the talking.

  ‘Have you found the murder weapon?’

  ‘Not yet. We’ll have to wait for a post-mortem. The pathologist might give us som
e clues.’

  ‘Can I see the body?’

  Baldur nodded and led Magnus and the Commissioner past the side of the house down a narrow earth pathway to a blue tent, erected on the edge of the lake, about ten metres from the house. Baldur called for overalls, boots and gloves. Magnus and the Commissioner put them on, signed a log held by the policeman guarding the scene and ducked into the tent.

  Inside, a body was stretched out on the boggy grass. Two men in forensic overalls were preparing to lift it into a body bag. When they saw who had joined them they stopped what they were doing and squeezed out of the tent to give their senior officers room to examine the corpse.

  ‘The paramedics from Selfoss who responded to the call dragged him out of the lake when they found him,’ Baldur said. ‘They thought he had drowned, but the doctor who examined the body was suspicious.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There was a blow on the back of his head. There are some rocks on the bottom of the lake and there was a chance that he might have struck one of them if he had fallen in, but the doctor thought the blow was too hard.’

  ‘Can I take a look?’

  Agnar was, or had been, a man of about forty, longish dark hair with flecks of grey at the temples, sharp features, stubble of the designer variety. Under the bristle, his face was pale and taut, his lips thin and a bluish-grey colour. The body was cold, which was no surprise after spending the night in the lake. It was also still stiff, suggesting he had been dead more than eight and less than twenty-four hours, which meant between four o’clock the previous afternoon and eight o’clock that morning. That was no help. Magnus doubted whether the pathologist would be able to come up with anything very precise about time of death. It was often difficult to be certain of a drowning, whether the victim had died before or after immersion in water. Sand or weed in the lungs was a clue, but that would have to wait for the autopsy.

  Gently Magnus parted the professor’s hair and examined the wound at the back of his skull.

  He turned to Baldur. ‘I think I know where your murder weapon is.’

  ‘Where?’ Baldur asked.

  Magnus pointed out to the deep grey waters of the lake. Somewhere out there the rift between the continental plates at Thingvellir continued downwards to a depth of several hundred feet.

  Baldur sighed. ‘We need divers.’

  ‘I wouldn’t bother,’ said Magnus. ‘You’ll never find it.’

  Baldur frowned.

  ‘He was hit by a rock,’ Magnus explained. ‘Something with jagged edges. There are still flecks of stone in the wound. I have no idea where the rock came from, possibly the dirt road back there, some of those stones are pretty big. Your lab could tell you. But my guess is the killer threw it into the lake afterwards. Unless he was very stupid – it’s the perfect place to lose a rock.’

  ‘Do you have forensic training?’ Baldur asked, suspiciously.

  ‘Not much,’ said Magnus. ‘I’ve just seen a few dead people with dents in their heads. Can I see inside the house?’

  Baldur nodded. They walked back up the path to the summer house. The place was getting the full forensics treatment, powerful lamps, a vacuum cleaner, and at least five technicians crawling around with tweezers and fingerprint powder.

  Magnus looked around. The door opened directly into a large living area, with big windows overlooking the lake. Walls and floor were soft wood, the furniture was modern but not expensive. Lots of bookshelves: novels in English and Icelandic, history books, some specialist literary criticism. An impressive collection of CDs: classical, jazz, Icelanders Magnus had never heard of. No television. A desk covered with papers occupied one corner of the room, and in the middle were chairs and a sofa around a low table, on which was a glass half filled with red wine, and a tumbler containing the dregs of what looked like Coke. Both were covered in a thin film of smudged fingerprint powder. Through one open door Magnus could see a kitchen. There were three other doors that led off the living room, presumably to bedrooms or a bathroom.

  ‘We think he was struck over here,’ said Baldur, pointing towards the desk. There were signs of fresh scrubbing on the wooden floor, and a few inches away, two chalk marks surrounded tiny specks.

  ‘Can you do DNA analysis on this?’

  ‘In case the blood came from the murderer?’ Baldur asked.

  Magnus nodded.

  ‘We can. We send it to a lab in Norway. It takes a while for the results to come back.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ said Magnus. In Boston the DNA lab was permanently backed up; everything was a rush job and so nothing was. Somehow Magnus suspected that the Norwegian lab might treat its neighbour’s lone request with a bit more respect.

  ‘So we think that Agnar was hit on the back of the head here as he was turning towards the desk. Then dragged out of the house and dumped in the lake.’

  ‘Sounds plausible,’ said Magnus.

  ‘Except…’ Baldur hesitated. Magnus wondered if he was wary about expressing doubts in front of his boss.

  ‘Except what?’

  Baldur glanced at Magnus, hesitating. ‘Come and look at this.’ He led Magnus through to the kitchen. It was tidy, except for an open bottle of wine and the makings of a ham and cheese sandwich on the counter.

  ‘We found some additional specks of blood here,’ Baldur said, pointing to the counter. ‘They look like high-velocity blood spatter, but that makes no sense. Perhaps Agnar hurt himself earlier. Perhaps he somehow staggered in here, but there are no other signs of a struggle in here at all. Perhaps the murderer came in here to clean himself up. Yet if that were the case, you would expect the spatters to be much bigger.’

  Magnus glanced around the room. Three flies were battering the window in a never-ending attempt to get out.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘It’s the flies.’

  ‘Flies?’

  ‘Sure. They land on the body, gorge themselves, then fly into the kitchen where it’s warm. There they regurgitate the blood – it helps them to digest it. Maybe they wanted some of the sandwich for dessert.’ Magnus bent down to examine the plate. ‘Yes. There’s some more there. You’ll be able to see better with a magnifying glass, or Luminol if you have any. Of course it means that the body must have been lying around in here long enough for the flies to have their feast. But that’s only fifteen, twenty minutes.’

  Baldur still wasn’t smiling, but the Commissioner was. ‘Thank you,’ was all the inspector could manage.

  ‘Footprints?’ asked Magnus, looking at the floor. Footprints should show up well on the polished wood.

  ‘Yes,’ said Baldur. ‘One set, size forty-five. Which is odd.’

  It was Magnus’s turn to look puzzled. ‘How so?’

  ‘Icelanders usually take their shoes off when they enter a house. Except perhaps if they are a foreign visitor and don’t know the customs. We spend as much time looking for fibres from socks as footprints.’

  ‘Ah, of course,’ said Magnus. ‘Anything in the papers on the desk?’

  ‘It’s mostly academic stuff, essays from students, draft articles on Icelandic literature, that kind of thing. We need to go through it more thoroughly. There was a fartolva which the forensics team have taken away to analyse.’

  ‘Sorry, what is a fartolva?’ asked Magnus, who was unfamiliar with the Icelandic word. He knew the difference between a halberd and a battleaxe, but some of the newer Icelandic words threw him.

  ‘A small computer you can carry around with you,’ explained Baldur. ‘And there is a diary with an entry; it tells us who was here last night.’

  ‘The Commissioner mentioned an American,’ Magnus said. ‘With size forty-five feet, no doubt?’ He had no idea what that was in US shoe sizes, but he suspected it was quite large.

  ‘American. Or British. The name is Steve Jubb and the time is seven-thirty yesterday evening. And a phone number. The number is for the Hotel Borg, the best hotel in Reykjavik. We’re picking him up now. In fact, if you’ll
excuse me, Snorri, I have to go back to headquarters and interview him.’

  Magnus was struck by the informality of Icelanders. No ‘Sir’, or ‘Commissioner Gudmundsson’. In Iceland everyone called everyone else by their first names, be it a street sweeper speaking to the president of the country, or a police officer speaking to his chief. It would take a little getting used to, but he liked it.

  ‘Be sure to include Magnus in the interviews,’ the Commissioner said.

  Baldur’s face remained impassive, but Magnus could tell that he was seething inside. And Magnus couldn’t blame him. This was probably one of Baldur’s biggest cases of the year, and he would not appreciate doing it under the eyes of a foreigner. Magnus might have more experience of homicides than Baldur, but he was at least ten years younger and a rank junior. The combination must have been especially irritating.

  ‘Certainly,’ he said. ‘I’ll get Arni to look after you. He’ll drive you back to Headquarters and get you settled in. And by all means come and chat to me about Steve Jubb later on.’

  ‘Thank you, Inspector,’ Magnus said, before he could stop himself.

  Baldur’s eyes flicked towards Magnus, acknowledging the evidence of this faux pas that Magnus wasn’t a real Icelander after all. He called over a detective to escort Magnus, and then left with the Commissioner back to Reykjavik.

  ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ said the detective in fluent American-accented English. ‘My name’s Arni. Arni Holm. You know, like the Terminator.’

  He was tall, painfully thin, with short dark hair and an Adam’s apple that bobbed furiously as he spoke. He had a wide friendly grin.

  ‘ Komdu saell,’ said Magnus. ‘I appreciate you speaking my language, but I really need to practise my Icelandic.’