‘Come on,’ said the cop.
Then Magnus threw up all over the patrolman’s shoes.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Diego turned on the light. The two naked bodies entwined on top of the bed froze, but only for an instant.
Then the man leaped off the woman, twisted and sat up, all in one athletic movement. The woman opened her mouth to scream, but stopped when she saw the gun.
Fortunately, there was no way that either of them could know that there was only one bullet in the cylinder of the revolver.
Diego chuckled.
It was pretty funny. He had positioned himself in an armchair in the living room, gun drawn, out of line of sight of the door. He’d waited there happily all evening. Then two people had come in.
Diego decided to wait. Surprise them when they turned around. But he’d never got the chance!
The guy jumped the girl right away. And she seemed happy with that. For a moment it looked as if Diego was going to get a show right there on the living room floor, but then the woman led the guy into the bedroom. And neither of them even saw him!
He decided to wait until they had taken off whatever clothes they were going to take off. Naked was good, as far as he was concerned. Then he slipped through the open door into the bedroom, and watched the action in the dim glow of the streetlights outside for a few seconds.
Now they were both blinking in the glare of the electric light.
‘You!’ Diego jabbed the revolver at the man. ‘In the bathroom! Now! And if I hear a sound I’ll come right in there and pump your skinny ass full of bullets.’
The guy needed no more prompting. He was out of the bed and in the bathroom with the door shut in an instant.
He moved over towards the woman. Colby.
Nice body. A bit thin, but nice firm tits.
She saw where he was looking. ‘Do what you want,’ she said. ‘Just do it.’
‘Hey, all I want is a little talk,’ said Diego. ‘I ain’t gonna touch you, as long as you talk to me.’
Colby swallowed, her eyes wide.
In a swift movement, Diego grabbed her hair with one hand and jammed the revolver in her mouth with the other. ‘Where’s Magnus?’
‘Who?’ The woman was barely audible.
‘Magnus Jonson. Your boyfriend.’ He smiled and glanced at the bathroom. ‘Or one of your boyfriends. Looks like you’re the kind of girl that needs several men to keep you happy.’
‘I… I don’t know.’
Diego pulled the trigger. Click.
A strangled sob from Colby.
Diego explained the rules of his version of the Russian roulette game. He just loved that bit, loved watching the eyes of his victims. The fear. The uncertainty. Perfect.
‘OK. I’ll ask you again. Where is Magnus?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Colby. ‘I swear it. He said he was going away somewhere and he couldn’t tell me where.’
‘Did you guess?’
Colby shook her head.
Diego spotted weakness. ‘You guessed, didn’t you?’
‘N-no. No, I swear I didn’t.’
‘Thing is, I ain’t believing you.’
He pulled the trigger again.
Click.
‘Oh, God.’ Colby slumped backwards, trying to sob with the barrel of a gun crammed into her mouth.
Diego loved this game. ‘You guessed. OK. So now I’m gonna guess,’ said Diego. ‘Is he in state?’
Colby hesitated and then shook her head.
‘All right. In the country then?’
‘No.’
‘We talking Mexico?’
A shake of the head.
‘Canada?’
Another shake.
Diego was rather enjoying this. ‘Is it hot or cold?’
No answer.
He squeezed the trigger.
Click.
‘Cold. It’s somewhere cold.’
‘Good girl. But I give up now. My geography ain’t that good. Where’s he at?’
Another click. The game wasn’t strictly fair. Although Colby didn’t know which chamber the bullet was in, Diego knew it was in the last. That’s how he liked to play the game. It really would be too bad to blow her brains out before he had gotten the answer he wanted.
‘OK. OK. He’s in Sweden. I don’t know where in Sweden. Stockholm, I guess. It’s Sweden.’
‘You’re just a thick-headed Icelandic drunk, aren’t you?’
With difficulty Magnus focused on the red face of the National Police Commissioner in front of him. His mouth was dry, his head was pounding, his stomach growling.
‘I’m sorry, sir.’ He would call his superior officer ‘sir’. Screw Icelandic etiquette.
‘Do you do this often? Is this a once-a-week thing for you? Or perhaps you hit the bottle every day? I didn’t read anything about this on your file. You broke a few rules from time to time, but you never showed up for duty intoxicated.’
‘No, sir. It’s been years since I got that drunk.’
‘Then why did you do it?’
‘I don’t know,’ Magnus said. ‘I got some bad news. Personal news. It won’t happen again.’
‘It had better not,’ said the Commissioner. ‘I have an important role in mind for you, but that role demands that my officers should respect you. Within three days you have made yourself a laughing stock.’
The night was a blur, but Magnus could remember the laughter. The desk sergeant had heard about the new hot-shot detective over from America and had thought it highly amusing that this man was now in his drunk tank. As had the patrolmen who had arrested him. And the other uniformed officers coming off duty. And the next shift coming on.
They had had the kindness to drive him back to his house. He had passed out in the car, but vaguely remembered Katrin getting his clothes off and putting him to bed.
He had woken up a few hours later with his head exploding, his bladder full and his mouth dry. He crawled back into the police station at about ten o’clock. The rest of the detectives grinned and whispered as he sat at his desk. Within a minute Baldur had told him with a thin smile that the Big Salmon wanted to see him.
‘I am very sorry I have let you down, Commissioner,’ Magnus repeated. ‘I do appreciate what you have done for me here, and I am sure I can help.’
The Commissioner grunted. ‘Thorkell seems to think you have made a good start. How is the Agnar Haraldsson case going? I heard about the discovery of the saga. Is it genuine?’
‘Possibly, but we don’t know yet for sure. It looks like the Brit Steve Jubb was trying to buy it from Agnar. There was a problem, they had a dispute, and Jubb killed him.’
‘Jubb still isn’t talking?’
‘Not yet. But there’s this guy Lawrence Feldman who goes by the Internet alias of Isildur, who seems to have financed the deal. We know where he lives. If I put some pressure on him, I’m sure he’ll talk.’
‘So why don’t you?’
‘He’s in California. Baldur won’t authorize it.’
The Commissioner nodded. ‘Can you work today, or do you need to take the day off sick?’
Magnus suspected that this wasn’t a kind offer from a concerned superior. It was a direct question of his commitment.
‘I can work today.’
‘Good. And don’t let me down again. Or else I will send you straight back to Boston and I don’t care who is after you.’
Ingileif watched as Professor Moritz carefully carried the envelope containing the old scraps of vellum to his car outside while a female colleague took the bigger seventeenth-century volume. A couple of uniformed police officers and the young detective called Arni danced around in attendance.
She had expected to feel relief. She felt nothing of the kind. She was drowning, drowning beneath a wave of guilt.
The secret that her family had kept for so many generations, hundreds and hundreds of years, was disappearing out of the door. It had been an astounding achievement to kee
p it so quiet for so long. She could imagine her ancestors, fathers and eldest sons, huddled over a peat fire in their simple turf-roofed farmhouse, reading the saga over and over to each other during the long winter nights. It must have been difficult keeping its existence from extended family, neighbours, in-laws. But they had succeeded. And they hadn’t sold out. A farmer’s life in Iceland during the last three centuries was extremely precarious. Even when they had endured unimaginable poverty and starvation, they hadn’t taken the easy way. They had needed the money more than her.
What right did she have to cash it in now?
Her brother, Petur, had spoken the truth when he had urged her not to sell. And he hated the saga even more than she did.
She looked around the gallery. The objects on display – the vases, the fish-skin bags, the candle-holders, the lavascapes – were truly beautiful. But did they matter so much?
The police said that the saga would be needed for evidence. They would keep its existence quiet while the investigation was still under way. But eventually everyone would know. Not just Icelanders, but the whole world. Tolkien fans from America, England, the rest of Europe would want to find out everything about the document. Every corner of the secret would be raised to the glare of global publicity.
Eventually, she would probably be allowed to sell the saga. In the open, under the glare of publicity, she would no doubt get a handsome price, if the Icelandic government didn’t somehow manage to confiscate it from her. If she could just keep the gallery going for a few months longer, it might survive.
Until Agnar’s death, keeping the gallery open was the most important thing in her life. Now she appreciated how wrong she was.
The gallery was going bust because she had made a poor business judgment. The kreppa made matters worse, but she should never have trusted Nordidea. She was to blame and she should have taken the consequences.
Outside, the professor and the police climbed into their cars and drove off. Ingileif felt trapped in the tiny gallery. She grabbed her bag, switched off the light and locked up. So what if she lost a sale or two that morning?
She walked down the hill, her mind in incoherent turmoil. She soon reached the bay, and walked along the bike path which ran along the shore. She headed east, towards the solid block of Mount Esja, its top smothered in cloud. The breeze skipping in from across the water chilled her face. The sounds of Reykjavik traffic merged with the cries of seagulls. A pair of ducks paddled in circles a few yards out from the red volcanic pumice that served as a sea wall.
She felt so alone. Her mother had died a few months before, her father when she was twelve. Birna, her sister, wouldn’t care or understand. She would be sympathetic for a few minutes, but she was too self-absorbed, stuck in her nice house and her bad marriage and her bottles of vodka. She had never been interested in Gaukur’s Saga, and after their father died she had picked up their mother’s hostility to the family legend. She had told Ingileif she couldn’t care less what Ingileif did with it.
Ingileif knew she should speak to Petur, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. He had hated the saga with a passion for what he thought it had done to their father. Yet, even he had believed that it would be wrong to sell. She had assured him that Agnar would be able to do a deal while keeping the secret safe, and only then had Petur reluctantly agreed. He would be angry with her now, and justifiably so. Not much sympathy there.
He must have read about Agnar’s murder in the papers, but he hadn’t been in touch with her yet. Thank God.
It was ironic. She had been determined not to let her father’s death screw her up like it had screwed up the other members of her family. She was the sane, down-to-earth one, or so she thought.
And now poor Aggi had been murdered. Foolishly she had tried to hide the existence of the saga from the police. As a plan, that was never going to work. And even now she was hiding something.
She glanced down at her bag. Where she had slipped the envelope just before the police came to take away the saga. The other envelope.
She recalled the big red-haired detective with the slight American accent. He was trying to catch the man who had murdered Agnar, and she had some information that would be certain to help him. It was far too late to try to keep it quiet, the police would find out in the end. The betrayal had been committed, the mistake had been made, the consequences were playing themselves out. There was nothing she could do to put the saga back in its safe.
She stopped in front of the Hofdi House, the elegant white-timbered mansion where Gorbachev had met Reagan when she was six years old.
She dug the detective’s number out of her purse, and punched it into her mobile phone.
Colby was waiting on the sidewalk outside the bank when it opened. Walked straight in to the cashier, first in line, and withdrew twelve thousand dollars in cash. Then she drove to an outdoor equipment store and bought camping gear.
When the thug with the gun had left her apartment she had been too scared to scream. Richard hadn’t been any help: he had scurried out of the bathroom muttering how his legal career was too important to be caught up with criminals, and she should rethink her friendships. She had watched dully as he had scrambled to get into his clothes and left her. He forgot his jacket.
Tough.
She was glad she hadn’t told the thug about Iceland. It had been a close call, she had been so scared that she had almost given it away, but the change to Sweden at the last minute was inspired. Magnus had told her that he used to have the nickname ‘Swede’, and that had stuck in her brain.
The thug had believed her. She was sure of it.
She hoped it would take him and his friends some time to realize their mistake, but she wasn’t going to hang around. She certainly wasn’t going anywhere near Magnus. Now she took Magnus’s warnings seriously. She wasn’t taking any risks with credit cards, or hotels or friends. No one would know where she was.
She was going to disappear.
From the camp shop she went to the supermarket. Then, with the trunk full of supplies, she drove west. Her plan was eventually to head north, to Maine or New Hampshire or somewhere, and to lose herself in the wilderness. But first she had something to do. She pulled off the highway in the suburb of Wellesley. She found an Internet cafe, grabbed a cup of coffee.
The first e-mail was to her boss, telling him that she was not going to be at work and she couldn’t explain why, but he shouldn’t worry. The second was to her mother, saying more or less the same thing. There was no way to phrase it so that her mother wouldn’t drive herself demented with panic, so Colby didn’t even try.
The third was to Magnus.
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.’
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