Where the Shadows Lie fai-1

by Michael Ridpath

  ‘I don’t know, man, I swear I don’t know!’ Ollie shouted.

  ‘Hey, quiet!’ Diego narrowed his eyes. ‘You know, I still don’t believe you.’ He pulled the trigger again.

  Click.

  Ollie cracked. ‘Oh God, don’t shoot me, please don’t shoot me! I’d tell you if I could, I swear I would! Some guys from the FBI came to get his stuff. I asked where they were taking him, but they wouldn’t tell me.’

  Diego heard a low hissing sound and smelled warm urine. He glanced down at the rapidly spreading dark patch on Ollie’s boxers. In his experience, once they pissed themselves, they were usually telling the truth.

  But he pulled the trigger for the third time, just for the hell of it.

  Click.

  He’d discussed this situation with Soto. There were two schools of thought. One was you waste every relative and associate of the witness to send a clear message to him and anyone else who might be tempted to follow his lead. But when the witness was a cop, that wasn’t such a good idea. You’d be declaring a major war on a heavily armed and well-organized opposition. The most successful drugs businesses operated under the radar, making as little fuss as possible, keeping business conditions nice and calm.

  Ollie didn’t know where Magnus was. There was no point in stirring things up.

  ‘OK, man, I’m gonna quit this game now,’ Diego said. ‘Let’s call it a tie. But don’t you go to the cops telling them I’m looking for your bro’, you know what I’m saying? Otherwise we don’t play no games, I just blow you away with the first shot.’

  ‘All right, man. All right. That’s cool.’ Ollie sobbed as tears streamed down his face.

  Diego leaned over and turned out the light. ‘You go back to bed now. Sweet dreams.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Magnus followed the stocky frame of Officer O’Malley towards the bright lights of the 7-Eleven. His fingers twitched an inch or so above his gun.

  O’Malley turned and smiled. ‘Hey. Loosen up, Swede. Keep your eyes open but don’t get too tense. If you’re tense, you make mistakes.’

  O’Malley had decided to call Magnus ‘Swede’ in honour of his Scandinavian ancestry, and an old Swedish partner he had worked with twenty years before. Magnus hadn’t set him straight: if his training officer wanted him to be Swedish, he would be Swedish. He’d been on the streets for only two weeks, but already he had a great respect for O’Malley.

  ‘Looks quiet,’ O’Malley said. They had been given no information by the dispatcher as to the nature of the disturbance at the convenience store.

  Magnus saw a thin figure move towards them from out of the shadows. O’Malley hadn’t seen him. The figure was making a direct line for O’Malley. Magnus tried to reach for his gun, but his arm wouldn’t move. The figure raised his own weapon, a three fifty-seven Magnum, and pointed it at O’Malley. In a panic Magnus managed to get his fingers around his own gun, but he couldn’t lift it. Try as he might, it was too heavy. Magnus opened his mouth to shout a warning to his partner, but no sound came.

  The man turned to Magnus and laughed, still pointing his gun at O’Malley. He was young, scrawny and looked as if he hadn’t washed for a week. His eyes were bloodshot and unfocused, he had bad teeth and his complexion, lit up by the light emanating from the convenience store, was like wax. It was if he were dead already, some kind of walking zombie.

  O’Malley still hadn’t seen him.

  Magnus tried to shout, tried to lift his gun. Nothing. Just an eerie cackle from the gunman.

  Then there was a shot. Two. Three. Four. They went on and on.

  Finally, O’Malley fell to the ground. Magnus’s gun arm responded. He raised his weapon and fired into the laughing face of the dopehead. He fired and fired again, and again and again…

  Magnus woke up.

  There was noise outside his window. Reykjavik 101 at play on a Saturday night: laughter, accelerating cars, shrieks, singing, vomiting, and underneath it all, the persistent bass rumble of powerful amplifiers.

  The chunky volume of The Lord of the Rings lay open on the floor where he had let it drop a couple of hours earlier. It smothered the slimmer edition of the Saga of the Volsungs.

  He checked his watch. 5.05 a.m.

  It was an old familiar dream: it had disturbed his nights for two years after that first shooting. Of course the reality had differed from the dream, the dopehead had only fired two shots into O’Malley before Magnus dropped him. But during those long nights Magnus had debated pointlessly with himself whether he could have fired sooner and saved O’Malley, or delayed longer and saved the dopehead.

  That was a long time ago. Magnus thought he had taken the second shooting much better than the first, now that he was an experienced cop. Maybe he had thought wrong. His subconscious demanded time to deal with it, and there was nothing he could do about it, however tough a cop he was.

  Bummer.

  *

  Reykjavik Metropolitan Police Headquarters was a busy place early on Sunday morning. Exhausted uniformed police led pale and shaky citizens along the corridors, taking them through the later stages of the weekly Saturday-night arrest cycle.

  As soon as Magnus arrived at his desk, he turned on his computer. He smiled as he saw the e-mail from Johnny Yeoh. The kid had come up with the goods.

  At the morning meeting, Baldur looked as if he hadn’t slept much either. Dark bags drooped under his eyes, and his cheeks were sunken and grey. Magnus surveyed his fellow detectives around the table; they had lost a lot of their earlier bounce.

  Baldur began with the latest reports from forensics. With Agnar, Steve Jubb and Andrea, three of the four sets of fingerprints in the house were accounted for. The footprints were confirmed as Steve Jubb’s. But there were no bloodstains on any of Jubb’s clothes, not even the tiniest spatter.

  Baldur asked Magnus if it would be difficult to smash someone over the head and then drag them out of the house and twenty metres down to the lake without getting any blood on your clothes. Magnus had to agree that it would be difficult, but he contended it was not impossible.

  ‘I spoke to Agnar’s wife yesterday,’ Baldur said. ‘She’s an angry woman. She had no idea of the existence of Andrea. She believed her husband had kept his promise to be a good boy.

  ‘Also she has been through Agnar’s papers and discovered that he was in a much deeper financial hole than she had realized. Debts, big debts.’

  ‘What has he been spending the money on?’ Rannveig, the assistant prosecutor asked.

  ‘Cocaine. She knew about the cocaine. And he gambled. She estimates he owed about thirty million kronur. The credit-card companies were beginning to complain, as was the bank that held the mortgage on their house. But now he’s dead, a life insurance policy will take care of that.’

  Magnus did a quick mental calculation. Thirty million kronur was a bit over two hundred thousand dollars. Even by the standards of Iceland’s debt-addicted citizens, Agnar owed a lot of money.

  ‘All in all, Linda had a motive to kill her husband,’ Baldur continued. ‘She says she was alone with her young children on the Thursday night. But she could easily have slung them in the back of the car and driven to Thingvellir. It’s not as if they could tell us, one’s a baby and the eldest isn’t even two yet. We need to keep her in the frame. Now, Vigdis. Did you speak to the woman from Fludir?’

  Vigdis ran through the interview with Ingileif. She had checked out Ingileif’s alibi: she had indeed been at her artist friend’s party until eleven-thirty on the evening Agnar was murdered. And with her ‘old friend’ the painter afterwards.

  ‘She might have been telling the truth about that, but we think she was lying about other stuff,’ said Magnus.

  ‘What other stuff?’

  ‘She was very coy about Agnar,’ said Vigdis. ‘My hunch is there was more going on there than she let on.’

  ‘We’ll go back and talk to her in a couple of days,’ said Magnus. ‘See if her story sticks.’
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br />   ‘Any progress on Isildur?’ Baldur asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Magnus. ‘I found someone calling himself Isildur on a Lord of the Rings forum on the Internet. I got hold of his e-mail details and asked a buddy of mine in the States to check him out.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s the same one?’

  ‘We can’t be absolutely sure, but it looks highly likely to me. This man is obsessed with magic rings and Icelandic sagas, just like Steve Jubb.’

  Baldur grunted.

  Magnus went on. ‘His name is Lawrence Feldman and he lives in California. He has two houses, one in Palo Alto and one in Trinity County, which is two hundred and fifty miles north of San Francisco. That’s where the e-mail message came from.’

  ‘Two houses?’ said Baldur. ‘Do we know if he is wealthy?’

  ‘He’s loaded.’ Although Johnny hadn’t been able to pull the police files on Feldman, if indeed there were any, he had found plenty of stuff on the Internet about him. ‘He was one of the founders of a software company in Silicon Valley, 4Portal. The company was sold last year, and each of the founders walked away with forty million bucks. Feldman was only thirty-one. Not bad going.’

  ‘So he could easily afford an expensive lawyer,’ said Baldur.

  ‘And a room at the Hotel Borg for Steve Jubb.’

  ‘OK. We need to get this guy’s police record, if he has one,’ said Baldur. ‘Can you do that?’

  ‘I could, but it’s probably easier if the request came from the Reykjavik police,’ said Magnus. ‘More official, fewer favours called in.’

  ‘We’ll organize that,’ said Baldur.

  ‘But I could go see him,’ Magnus said.

  ‘In California?’ Baldur looked doubtful.

  ‘Sure. It would take a day to get there, a day to get back, but I might get him to tell me what he and Jubb are up to.’

  Baldur frowned. ‘We don’t know for sure that this is the same Isildur that Steve Jubb is working for. And anyway, he won’t talk. Why should he? Steve Jubb isn’t saying anything, and we have him in custody.’

  ‘Depends how I ask him.’

  Baldur shook his head. ‘It will cost money. I’m not sure I can get authorization for a trip that will probably be a waste of time. Haven’t you heard of the kreppa? ’

  It was impossible to spend more than a few hours in Iceland without hearing about the kreppa. ‘Just an economy fare and perhaps one night in a motel,’ Magnus said. He looked at the bodies around the table. ‘You’re putting a whole lot of resource into this investigation. An airplane ticket won’t make much difference.’

  Baldur glared at Magnus. ‘I’ll think about it,’ he said, giving Magnus the distinct impression that he wouldn’t.

  ‘OK,’ Baldur continued, addressing the group. ‘It looks like someone calling himself Isildur was behind the negotiations with Agnar. If this Lawrence Feldman was that man, he had the cash to back a significant deal.’

  ‘But what could they have been negotiating over?’ said Vigdis.

  ‘Something to do with The Lord of the Rings?’ Magnus said. ‘Or the Saga of the Volsungs, maybe. I read it again last night. A magic ring plays an important part in both books. There’s a theory that Tolkien was inspired by the Volsung Saga.’

  ‘All the old copies of the saga will be in the Arni Magnusson Collection at the University of Iceland,’ said Baldur. Arni Magnusson was a Danish-educated antiquarian who travelled around Iceland in the seventeenth century gathering up all the sagas he could find. He transported them to Denmark, but they were returned to Iceland in the 1970s, where they were housed in an institute bearing the great collector’s name. ‘Are you saying Agnar had stolen a copy?’

  ‘He might have switched it for a facsimile,’ suggested Vigdis.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Magnus. ‘Or perhaps he had some wacko theory that he was selling to Isildur. Maybe he was going to do some research for him.’

  Baldur frowned and shook his head.

  ‘It could be narcotics,’ Rannveig said. ‘I know it’s boring, but in Iceland, if it’s an illicit deal, it’s nearly always drugs.’

  There was silence for a moment around the table. The assistant prosecutor had a point.

  ‘Was there anything in Agnar’s papers suggesting what this deal could be?’ Rannveig asked.

  ‘No, I checked most of them myself,’ Baldur said. ‘Apart from those e-mails on his computer, there is nothing about a deal with Steve Jubb. And the files on his laptop are all work related.’

  ‘What was he working on?’ Magnus asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean what was he researching when he died?’

  ‘I’m not sure he was researching anything. He was marking exam papers. And translating a couple of sagas into English and French.’

  Magnus leaned forward. ‘Which sagas?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Baldur said, defensively. He clearly didn’t appreciate being interrogated in his own meeting. ‘I didn’t read through all his working papers. There are piles of them.’

  Magnus restrained himself from pushing the point. He didn’t want to put Baldur’s back up any more than he had to. ‘Can I take a second look? At his working papers, I mean.’

  Baldur stared at Magnus, making no attempt to hide his irritation. ‘Of course,’ he said drily. ‘That would be a good use of your time.’

  There were two places to look: Agnar’s room at the university, or the summer house. There would be more papers at the university, and it was closer. On the other hand, if Agnar had been working on something relevant to Steve Jubb it was likely to be at the summer house where it would be available for his meeting.

  So Arni drove Magnus out to Lake Thingvellir. ‘Do you think Baldur will let you go to California?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know. He didn’t seem excited by the idea.’

  ‘If you do go, can you take me with you?’ Arni glanced at Magnus sitting in the passenger seat and noticed his hesitation. ‘I did my degree in the States so I am familiar with US police procedures. Plus, California is my spiritual home.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know. The Gubernator.’

  Magnus shook his head. Arni would be demanding a personal interview with Arnold Schwarzenegger next. Besides, Magnus would rather approach Lawrence Feldman in his own way without his Icelandic puppy at his heels. ‘We’ll see.’

  Deflated, Arni drove over the pass beyond Mosfell Heath and down towards the lake. It wasn’t actually raining, but there was a stiff breeze that ruffled the surface. Their approach was watched by a posse of sturdy Icelandic horses from the farm behind the cottages, their long golden forelocks flopping down over their eyes.

  Magnus noticed a boy and a girl playing by the shore of the lake – the boy was about eight, the girl much smaller. Again, only the one summer house with the Range Rover was occupied. Agnar’s property was still a crime scene, with yellow tape fluttering in the wind and a police car parked outside, in which sat a solitary constable reading a book. Crime and Punishment by one F.M. Dostojevski, it transpired. Magnus smiled. Cops everywhere liked to read about crime; it wasn’t surprising that the Icelanders had a more literary approach to it than their American counterparts.

  The policeman was glad of the company and let Magnus and Arni into the house. It was cold and still. Fingerprint dust covered most of the smooth surfaces, adding to the sense of desolation, and there were chalk marks around the traces of blood on the floor.

  Magnus examined the desk: drawers full of papers, most of them printouts from a computer. There was also a low cupboard just to the left of the desk, in which more reams of paper lay.

  ‘OK, you check out the cabinet, I’ll check out the desk,’ Magnus said, slipping on a pair of white latex gloves.

  The first bundle he examined was a French translation of the Laxdaela Saga, on which were scribbled comments in French. These only covered the first half of the manuscript. Magnus had learned some French at school, and he gues
sed that Arni had been correcting or commenting on the work of another translator, probably an Icelandic-speaking Frenchman.

  ‘What have you got, Arni?’

  ‘ Gaukur’s Saga,’ he said. ‘Have you ever heard of it?’

  ‘No,’ said Magnus. That wasn’t necessarily a surprise. There were dozens of sagas, some well-known, some much less so. ‘Wait a minute. Wasn’t Gaukur the guy who lived at Stong?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Arni. ‘I went there when I was a kid. I was scared out of my wits.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Magnus. ‘My father took me there when I was sixteen. There was something really creepy about that place.’

  Stong was an abandoned farm about twenty kilometres north of the volcano, Mount Hekla. It had been smothered in ash after a massive eruption some time in the middle ages, and had only been rediscovered in the twentieth century. It lay at the end of a rough track which wound its way through a landscape of blackened destruction: mounds of sand and small outcrops of lava twisted into grotesque shapes. When Magnus read of the apocalypse, he thought of the road to Stong.

  ‘Let me take a look.’

  Arni handed the manuscript to Magnus. It was about a hundred and twenty crisp, newly printed pages, in English. On the cover were the simple words: ‘Gaukur’s Saga, translated by Agnar Haraldsson’.

  Magnus turned the page, scanning the text. On the second page he came upon a word that brought his eyes to an abrupt halt.

  Isildur.

  ‘Arni, look at this!’ He flicked rapidly through more pages. Isildur. Isildur. Isildur. Isildur.

  The name cropped up several times on each page. Isildur wasn’t a bit player in this saga, he was a main character.

  ‘Wow,’ said Arni. ‘Shall we take it back to headquarters to get forensics to look at it?’

  ‘I’m going to read it,’ Magnus said. ‘Then forensics can take a look.’