‘Well, here they can lock you up for three weeks if they think you’re a suspect. That’s what happened to Steve Jubb. He’s in the top-security jail at Litla Hraun now. I could easily send you in there with him, if you don’t cooperate. I mean we’re looking at conspiracy to murder.’
Feldman just blinked.
‘These Icelandic places are tough. Full of these big blond beefy Vikings. Oh, don’t worry, they’ll like you. They like little guys.’ Feldman shifted uncomfortably on the bed. ‘A lot of them are shep-herds, you know, stuck up on a hillside all alone with a flock of sheep. They break the law – rape, incest, indecent acts with herbivores, that kind of thing. They get caught. They go to prison. No women, no sheep. What’s a big blond Viking guy going to do?’ Magnus smiled. ‘That’s where you come in.’
For a moment Magnus thought he had gone too far, but Feldman seemed to be buying it. He was tired, disoriented, in a foreign country.
Of course Magnus had absolutely no idea what conditions at Litla Hraun were really like. Knowing Iceland he rather suspected that the warders brought the prisoners hot cocoa and slippers every night as the inmates watched the latest soap on TV and knitted themselves scarves.
‘So, if I talk to you now, you’ll guarantee you won’t send me there?’
Magnus looked directly at Feldman. ‘That kinda depends on what you tell me.’
Feldman swallowed. ‘I didn’t have anything to do with Agnar’s murder. And I really don’t think that Gimli did either.’
‘OK,’ said Magnus. ‘Let’s start from the beginning. Tell me about Gaukur’s ring.’
‘I like to call it Isildur’s ring,’ said Feldman. ‘I changed my online nickname to Isildur when I first heard the story.’
‘What was it before?’ Magnus asked.
‘Elrond. The lord of Rivendell.’
‘All right. So tell me about Isildur’s ring.’
‘I first heard about it three years ago. A Danish guy, Jens Pedersen, popped up on one of the websites saying he had found a letter from a poet who was an old friend of Arni Magnusson in Copenhagen. The poet had read Gaukur’s Saga. There were a couple of sentences about Isildur’s quest to throw the ring into Mount Hekla.
‘Now, this Danish guy was an academic doing his PhD thesis on the poet. He wanted some help from the forum to see if there was any link between Gaukur’s Saga and the Lord of the Rings. Of course, we all went wild: he didn’t know what had hit him. I tried to contact him directly to pay him to do more research on this saga. I think I tempted him at first; he said he had been in touch with a Professor of Icelandic at the University of Iceland named Agnar Haraldsson, who had given him some help about Gaukur and his lost saga. But then he went quiet.’ Feldman sighed. ‘I think he thought I was some kind of weirdo.’
Magnus let that ride. ‘Have you heard from him recently?’
Feldman shook his head. ‘No, but I know where he is.’
Magnus raised his eyebrows.
Feldman explained. ‘He finished his PhD and is now teaching history at a high school in a town in Denmark called Odense. I’m in touch with one of his students.’
‘What? A high-school student? How old is he?’
‘Seventeen, I think. He’s a big LOTR fan.’
There was something distinctly creepy about Lawrence Feldman being able to recruit a Danish schoolboy over the Internet to spy for him. In fact, there was something distinctly creepy about Lawrence Feldman.
‘So how does Steve Jubb fit into this?’ Magnus asked.
‘Gimli? I met him through the same forum. He mentioned a story his grandfather had told him. Apparently he was a student at Leeds University in the 1920s and was taught by Tolkien, who was a professor there. One evening he had been drinking beer with an Icelandic fellow student and Tolkien. The Icelander was a bit drunk and began telling Tolkien about Gaukur’s Saga, about the Ring of Andvari being found by a Viking called Isildur and how Isildur was told to throw it into Mount Hekla. The story made a big impression on Gimli’s grandfather, and on Tolkien, apparently.
‘Thirty years later, when he read Lord of the Rings, the grandfather was struck by the similarity of the stories.’
‘Did he write any of this down?’
‘No. He told Gimli about it when Gimli first read The Hobbit. Of course it fascinated him, and that’s why Gimli became a Lord of the Rings fan. I checked the grandfather out. His name was Arthur Jubb and he was a student at Leeds in the 1920s. Tolkien was a professor there and set up a Viking Club where they all seem to have gotten drunk and sung songs. But there’s nothing in Tolkien’s published correspondence about the saga. Have you seen the two letters to Hogni Isildarson?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you’ll know why. Tolkien had promised to keep the family saga secret.’
Magnus nodded.
‘So I teamed up with Gimli. I don’t like to travel. Matter of fact this is my first time outside the States, but Gimli’s a smart guy, and being a truck driver, he travels all the time. So I said I would provide the funding, and he would do the legwork and we would find Gaukur’s Saga.
‘Gimli’s grandfather never told him the name of the Icelandic student, so Gimli started out going to Leeds to look for it. No luck.’
‘I’d have thought the university would keep records.’
‘Bombed in World War Two, apparently. So then Gimli went to Iceland. Saw Professor Haraldsson, who was interested but couldn’t help very much. We’d kinda drawn a blank. Until a month or so ago, when Professor Haraldsson got in touch with Gimli. A former student had approached him with Gaukur’s Saga and wanted to sell it. You can imagine how excited Gimli and I were, but we had to give Haraldsson time to translate it into English.’
‘How much was he asking?’
‘Only two million dollars. But the deal was that the saga would have to be kept a secret. I kinda liked that idea. So we set a date for Gimli to fly to Iceland to see Haraldsson. Gimli went to meet him at the summer house on Lake Thingvellir, where he read the saga. But they couldn’t agree on a final price, and the professor didn’t actually have the original saga with him. So Gimli came back here to the hotel.’
‘From where he sent you an SMS?’
‘That’s right. I called him back and we figured out a strategy for how we were going to negotiate for the saga. He was going out to meet Agnar again the next day, but the next thing Gimli heard the professor was dead and he was a suspect for murder.’
‘What about the ring?’
‘The ring?’ Feldman said. He was trying to feign innocent surprise, but failing badly.
‘Yeah, the ring,’ said Magnus. ‘The kallisarvoinen. Your precious. It’s a Finnish word. We figured that out. And Agnar wanted five million bucks for it.’
Feldman sighed. ‘Yes, the ring. The professor said he knew where it was and he could get it for us, but it would cost us five million.’
‘So he didn’t have it at the summer house?’
‘No. He gave Gimli no idea where it might be. But he was confident he could get hold of it. For the right amount of money.’
‘Did you believe him?’
Feldman hesitated. ‘We wanted to believe him, of course. That would have been the coolest discovery in history. But we knew we were wide open to being ripped off. So I started to work on lining up an expert to examine the ring once we got a hold of it. Someone who would keep quiet about it afterwards.’
‘Steve Jubb never saw it?’
‘No,’ said Feldman.
Magnus leaned back in his chair and studied Feldman.
‘Did Jubb kill the professor?’
‘No,’ said Feldman immediately.
‘Are you sure?’
Feldman hesitated. ‘Pretty sure.’
‘But not absolutely positive?’
Feldman shrugged. ‘That wasn’t part of the plan. But I wasn’t there.’
Magnus accepted the validity of the point. ‘How well do you know Jubb?’
Feldm
an looked away from Magnus, out of the window at the naked branches of the trees in the square, and the top of the statue of a distinguished nineteenth-century Icelander. ‘That’s a difficult question to answer. I’ve never met him or spoken to him. I don’t know what he looks like, what he sounds like. But on the other hand I’ve been communicating with him online for the last couple of years. I know a lot about him.’
‘Do you trust him?’
‘I did,’ said Feldman.
‘But now you are not so sure?’
Feldman shook his head. ‘I genuinely don’t believe that Gimli killed the professor. There would be no reason to, and we never discussed anything like that. Gimli never struck me as being violent. People get aggressive online when they are anonymous, but Gimli never was. He thought flaming was plain dumb. But I can’t be one hundred per cent sure he’s innocent, no.’
‘So you came to Iceland to help him?’ Magnus asked.
‘Yeah,’ said Feldman. ‘To see what I can do. We’ve been communicating through the lawyer, Kristjan Gylfason, but I wanted to do what I could myself.’
‘And look for the ring,’ Magnus said.
‘I don’t even know if there is a ring,’ said Feldman.
‘But you want to find out,’ said Magnus.
‘Are you going to arrest me?’ Feldman asked.
‘Not for the moment, no,’ said Magnus. ‘But I’ll take your passport. You’re not leaving Iceland. And let me tell you something. If you do find a ring, whether it’s a real one or a hoax, I want to know about it, know what I’m saying? Because it’s evidence.’ Feldman recoiled from Magnus’s stare.
Magnus doubted he had the authority to confiscate Feldman’s passport, but he also doubted that Feldman would know that. ‘And if I catch you withholding evidence, you’ll definitely be spending some nights in an Icelandic jail.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Ingileif was absorbed in her drawing, her eyes flicking from her emerging design to the piece of tanned fish skin in front of her. It was Nile perch – the scales larger than the salmon she often used, the textures rougher. It had a wonderful light blue, translucent colour. She was designing a credit-card holder, always a popular item.
Ingileif didn’t work in the gallery on Tuesday afternoons, her partner Sunna, the painter, was minding the store. She had plenty to worry about, but it felt good to lose herself in the design process for an hour or two. She had spent a year in Florence after she had graduated from university learning how to work with leather. When she returned to Iceland she had attended the Academy of Arts where she experimented with fish skin. Each skin was different. The more she worked with the material, the more possibilities she saw.
The bell rang. Ingileif lived in a tiny one-bedroom flat on the upper floor of a small house in 101, not too far from the gallery. The bedroom was her studio and occasional guest room – she slept in the living area. The flat was stark: Icelandic minimalist with white walls, lots of wood and not much clutter. Despite that, it was cramped, but it was all she could afford in Reykjavik 101, the central postal area. And she didn’t want to live in one of those soulless apartments in the suburbs of Kopavogur or Gardabaer.
She went downstairs to the front door. It was Petur.
‘Pesi!’ She felt a sudden urge to throw herself into her brother’s arms. He held her tight for a few moments, stroking her hair.
They broke apart. Petur smiled at her awkwardly, surprised at her sudden show of affection. ‘Come on up,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch,’ said Petur.
‘You mean since Agnar’s murder?’ She flopped back on to the white counterpane on her bed, leaning back against the wall. Petur took one of the two low chrome chairs.
He nodded.
‘In a way I’m glad you haven’t,’ Ingileif said. ‘You must be so angry with me.’
‘I told you you shouldn’t have tried to sell the saga.’
Ingileif glanced at her brother. There was as much sympathy as anger in his eyes. ‘You did. And I’m sorry. I wish I hadn’t: I need the money.’
‘Well, you’ll get it now,’ said Petur. ‘I assume you’ll still be able to sell it?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Ingileif. ‘I haven’t asked. I don’t care about the money any more. The whole thing was just a big mistake.’
‘Have the police been round?’
‘Yes. Lots of times. And you?’
‘Once,’ Petur said. ‘There wasn’t much I could tell them.’
‘They seem to think an Englishman killed Agnar. The guy who was acting for the American Lord of the Rings fan who wanted to buy the saga.’
‘I haven’t seen anything in the news about the saga,’ Petur said.
‘No. The police are keeping its existence quiet while the investigation is proceeding. They’ve taken it away for analysis. The detective I spoke to seemed to think it’s a forgery, which is ridiculous.’
‘It’s no forgery,’ said Petur. He sighed. ‘But they’ll make it public eventually, won’t they? And then the world’s press will be all over it. We’ll have to give interviews, talk about it, see it on the cover of every Icelandic magazine.’
‘I know,’ said Ingileif. ‘I’ll do all that if you like. I know how much you hate the saga. And this is all my fault, after all.’
‘That’s kind of you to offer,’ Petur said. ‘We’ll see.’
‘There’s something else I should show you,’ Ingileif said. She fetched her bag from behind the door and handed Petur Tolkien’s letter. The second one, the one written in 1948.
He opened it and read, frowning.
Ingileif had been expecting more of a reaction. ‘This shows that Grandpa actually found the ring.’
Petur looked up at his sister. ‘I knew that.’
‘You knew it! How? When?’
‘Grandpa told me. And he told me that he wanted the ring to remain hidden. He was worried that Dad would look for it once he died and he wanted me to stop him.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Ingileif asked.
‘It was another one of our family secrets,’ Petur said. ‘And after Dad died, I didn’t want to talk about it. Any of it.’
‘I wish you had stopped him,’ Ingileif said.
Anger flared in Petur’s eyes. ‘Don’t you think I do? I beat myself up about that for years. But what could I do? I was in high school in Reykjavik. Besides, I was his son, I couldn’t tell him what to do.’
‘No, of course not,’ said Ingileif quickly. ‘I’m sorry.’ They sat in silence for a moment, Petur’s anger subsiding.
‘I’ve been wondering recently, since I found this letter, wondering about Dad’s death,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, he went off with the pastor to look for the ring. Maybe they found it?’
‘No. We have no reason to think that.’
‘I should ask him.’
‘Who? The pastor? Don’t you think he would have told us if they had found anything?’
‘Maybe not.’
Petur closed his eyes. When he opened them, they were moist. ‘Inga, I don’t know why thinking about Dad’s death affects me like this, but it always does. I want to forget it. I have tried so hard over the years to forget it, but I never seem able to. I just can’t stop thinking that it’s all my fault.’
‘Of course it wasn’t your fault, Pesi,’ Ingileif said.
‘I know that. I know that.’ Petur dabbed his eye with a finger. It was strange for Ingileif to see her brother, usually so composed and aloof, so upset. He sniffed and shook his head. ‘Or else I think it’s that damned ring. When I was a kid I was obsessed with it, scared of it. Then when Dad died I thought it was a load of bullshit and I wanted nothing to do with it.’
He stared angrily at his sister. ‘And now? Now I wonder whether it hasn’t destroyed our family. Reached out from that moment a thousand years ago when Gaukur took it from Isildur on the summit of Hekla, reached out to destro
y us: Dad, Mum, Birna, me, you.’
He leaned forward, his moist eyes alight. ‘It doesn’t need to exist anywhere but in here.’ He tapped his temple with his finger. ‘It is lodged in the minds of all of us, all our family. That’s where it does its damage.’
Vigdis parked her car on one of the small streets leading down towards the bay from Hverfisgata, and she and Baldur jumped out. The renewed questioning at the university had turned up something. A uniformed officer had interviewed one of Agnar’s students, a dopey twenty-year-old, who had remembered someone asking around at the university for Agnar on the day he had died. The student had mentioned to the man that Agnar had a summer house by Lake Thingvellir and that he sometimes spent time there. Why the student hadn’t reported this before wasn’t clear, to the student or to the police, although he didn’t have a good explanation as to what he was doing on the university campus on a public holiday. The police let that drop.
No, the man hadn’t given his name. But the student recognized him. From TV.
Tomas Hakonarson.
He lived on the eighth floor of one of the new blocks of luxury apartments that had sprouted up in the Skuggahverfi, or Shadow District, along the shore of the bay. He answered the door, bleary eyed, as if he had just been woken up.
Baldur introduced himself and Vigdis, and barged in.
‘What’s this about?’ asked Tomas, blinking.
‘The murder of Agnar Haraldsson.’
‘Ah. You’d better take a seat then.’
The furniture was expensive cream leather. The view of the bay was spectacular, although at that precise moment a dark cloud was pressing down on the darker sea. Only the lowest hundred feet or so of Mount Esja was visible, and there was no chance of seeing Snaefellsnes glacier in the gloom. To the left, tall cranes dithered above the unfinished national concert hall, one of the casualties of the kreppa.
‘What do you know?’ Tomas asked.
‘I’d rather ask you what you know,’ Baldur said. ‘Starting with your movements on Thursday the twenty-third. Last Thursday.’
Tomas gathered his thoughts. ‘I got up late. Went out for a sand-wich for lunch and a cup of coffee. Then I drove over to the university.’
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