Where the Shadows Lie fai-1

by Michael Ridpath

  A tear appeared Erna’s eye.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And your father was the only true friend Hakon ever had. Sometimes I think, well I know, that Hakon was fonder of him than of me. He was quite broken up by your father’s death. It almost destroyed him.’ She sniffed and dabbed her eye with her finger. ‘He started behaving even more strangely, neglecting his parish duties, listening to Tomas’s dreadful music. He became impossible to live with after that. Impossible.’

  Ingileif realized she would get no further on the subject of Hakon. She would leave grilling Erna to the police. She still thought Hakon had killed her father, but she was convinced that Erna didn’t, and she didn’t feel the need to argue with her.

  ‘But what has all this got to do with Tomas?’ Erna asked.

  ‘The police think he was there with Hakon and my father. The sheep farmers who Hakon went to for help saw him. Or at least they saw a boy, who the police think was Tomas.’ Ingileif didn’t want to confuse the issue with talk of hidden people.

  ‘Oh, that really is too absurd,’ said Erna. ‘Do they think Tomas killed Dr Asgrimur? But he was only twelve then!’

  ‘Thirteen,’ said Ingileif. ‘And yes they do think he was there. He might have witnessed what happened at the very least.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Erna. ‘It must have been someone else.’ And then her eyes lit up. ‘Wait a minute. It can’t have been Tomas!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because he was with me that weekend. In Reykjavik. He was singing in the Hallgrimskirkja with the village choir. I went to listen. We stayed with my sister in Reykjavik that Saturday night.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Oh, I’m quite sure. We didn’t get back until Sunday evening. I can remember seeing Hakon when we arrived home. He had only just got back from the hills. He was in a terrible state.’ She smiled at Ingileif. ‘You see. My son is innocent!’

  The three men were squashed into Axel’s car, parked a hundred metres down the road from the house which Ingileif had entered. Axel was at the wheel, Isildur was in the back, and Gimli was in the passenger seat, a computer opened on his lap. With expense no object, Axel had planted four bugs on Ingileif when he had broken in in the small hours of the previous night. One in her bag, one in her coat, one in her studio bedroom – that had been the trickiest – and one in the car. The bug in the car doubled as a tracking device, and the location of the car was flashing on the GPS map on the computer.

  The tracker had allowed them to follow Ingileif at a safe distance all the way from Reykjavik to Hella. They had driven by the house at which she had stopped and then parked out of sight. The bug in the coat was transmitting loud and clear, but in Icelandic, through a receiver which was plugged into the laptop. Axel mumbled half-translations as he listened, but they were frustratingly incomplete.

  When Axel started muttering about a ring, Isildur couldn’t contain his impatience to find out more, but Axel refused to explain further, not wanting to miss any of the conversation.

  As soon as Ingileif left the house, Isildur asked Axel for a translation.

  ‘Shouldn’t we follow her?’ said Axel.

  ‘We can catch her up later. The tracker will show us where she is. I want a full translation, and I want it now!’

  Axel pulled the computer off Gimli’s lap and tapped some keys. The conversation was recorded on the computer’s hard drive. He went through the whole thing slowly and methodically.

  Isildur was beside himself with excitement. ‘Where’s this church?’ he demanded. ‘The place where the ring is hidden?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Axel. ‘The nearest church to Hella is a place called Oddi. It’s not far.’

  ‘It sounds like they were neighbours when Ingileif was young,’ said Gimli. ‘This Hakon is obviously Tomas Hakonarson’s father. Do we know where he was born? Where he grew up? Or for that matter where Ingileif grew up? It might not have been Hella. It sounded to me as if this Erna woman had moved out, or moved away.’

  ‘Google him,’ said Isildur. ‘You got Google in Iceland, right?’

  ‘Google who?’

  ‘Tomas Hakonarson. If he’s a big star in this country, there will be a bio on him somewhere.’

  Axel called up the search engine, tapped out some words, clicked and scrolled. ‘Here he is. He was born in a village in the West Fjords, but was brought up in Fludir. That’s not too far from here.’

  ‘Well, let’s go to Fludir church, then!’ said Isildur. ‘Get a move on!’

  Axel handed the laptop back to Gimli and started up the car.

  ‘Hruni is the nearest church to Fludir,’ said Axel. ‘This man must be the pastor of Hruni.’ He grinned.

  ‘What’s so special about that?’

  ‘Let’s just say it fits.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  As Magnus drove up the valley of the Thjorsa towards Mount Hekla, lurking behind the cloud somewhere to the south-east, the landscape became progressively bleaker. Grass gave way to black rock and mounds of sand, like the detritus of a massive abandoned coalfield. The river flowed past the rounded lump of stone several hundred feet high known as Burfell, home to trolls in the old folk tales. Just beyond, the road crossed a smaller river, the Fossa, a tributary of the Thjorsa, but still powerful, and Magnus came to a junction and a sign. Well, two signs. One said Stong. The other Road Closed.

  Magnus turned. It wasn’t a road. It wasn’t even a track. There were twists, turns, steep hills, sharp drops. At one point the road was nothing but black sand. Mist swirled around Magnus as he cajoled his car through the blackened terrain. Below and to the left, the Fossa surged. Fingers of snow reached down from the mountains above, and indeed the road would have been completely impassable a couple of weeks earlier, before the snow had melted. Once or twice, Magnus debated turning back. But of course Hakon’s four-wheel-drive would have had an easier time of it.

  Then he rounded a bend and saw it. The red Suzuki. It was parked on a brief stretch of road fifty feet above the river. Magnus pulled up next to it and checked the plate. Definitely the Reverend Hakon’s vehicle.

  He turned off his engine and climbed out of his car.

  The damp air hit his nostrils. After the whine of his own car engine and the clanking of stones and rock against the chassis, everything seemed quiet, damply quiet. Except there was a low roar, the sound of water rushing by below.

  Somewhere in the fog a duck quacked. Odd to hear the sound of a living thing in that landscape.

  Magnus walked over to the Suzuki. Empty. He tried the door handle. Unlocked. No keys in the ignition.

  He looked around. Visibility was only a couple of hundred feet. He couldn’t see Hakon. Mist swirled around the pinnacles of twisted lava all about Magnus, odd grotesque shapes, volcanic gargoyles. Under his feet was black grit and chips of obsidian, rock melted into black glass deep within the earth and then spewed out on to the very spot where he stood.

  Perhaps Hakon had abandoned the car here to walk on to Stong on foot? A possibility, Magnus could not see far enough along the road to evaluate its quality. But Hakon was an Icelander and he was driving a four-wheel-drive. He was unlikely to give up that easily.

  The man was crazy, Magnus knew that. He could have set out on a long hike to God-knows-where over the bleak landscape. To the cave near Alfabrekka, perhaps? To Mount Hekla? He could be away for days.

  Magnus looked around the Suzuki for footprints. There were some, but they were muddled. He moved away from the vehicle in expanding circles, but the ground was too hard to betray which direction Hakon might have gone. He did find something of interest, though.

  Tyre marks. About thirty feet away from the Suzuki on a small patch of soft ground. Another car had parked there. But when?

  Magnus had no idea of the last time it had rained at that particular spot. It had been beautiful in the Thjorsardalur when he and Ingileif had driven to Alfabrekka the previous day. It was possible that it might not
have rained since then. Or it could have rained twenty minutes before.

  He debated whether to drive on to Stong. He recalled the abandoned farm from his childhood. It lay in a small patch of green by a stream. But first he had to report what he had seen to Baldur.

  He pulled out his phone. No signal, which was hardly surprising. And there wasn’t a police radio in the car.

  So he decided to drive back towards the main road until he found a signal to make the call.

  After a bone-shattering two kilometres, his phone, which he had placed on the seat beside him, began to ring.

  He pulled over and picked it up. He couldn’t drive with only one hand on that road.

  ‘Hi, Magnus, it’s Ingileif.’

  ‘Hello,’ said Magnus, wary, yet pleased that it was her.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine.’

  ‘It’s just I heard on the radio this morning that there had been a shooting. A police officer was in hospital. An American had been arrested. I assumed one of the two was you.’

  ‘Yeah, it happened right after I went to your place last night. My partner Arni was shot. I got the guy who did it.’

  ‘And he was after you?’

  ‘He was after me.’

  There was a brief silence. Then Ingileif spoke again. ‘I’ve just been to see Erna, Tomas’s mother. She lives in Hella.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘She is sure that Tomas didn’t kill my father. He couldn’t have been there. He was singing with the village choir in the Hallgrimskirkja in Reykjavik that weekend.’

  ‘Or so she says. She is his mother, remember?’

  ‘That can be checked, though, can’t it? Even seventeen years later?’

  ‘Yes, it can,’ admitted Magnus. Ingileif was right. It was an unlikely lie. ‘What did she say about Hakon?’

  ‘She’s certain that he didn’t kill Dad either. But she doesn’t have any evidence.’

  ‘I think we can safely ignore that,’ Magnus said.

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Ingileif. ‘But she did sound convincing. She also told me where Hakon hides the ring.’

  ‘In the altar in the church?’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Tomas told me yesterday.’

  ‘Have you found him? Hakon?’

  Magnus looked back up the road. ‘No. But I did find his car a few minutes ago. On the road to Stong. He must have gone on a hike or something. Or met someone. I found another set of tyre tracks nearby.’

  There was silence at the other end of the phone. For a moment Magnus thought the connection had been dropped. The signal was still poor. ‘Ingileif? Ingileif, are you there?’

  ‘Yes, I’m here. Bye, Magnus.’

  And she was gone.

  Petur was under his car, wiping the chassis with a cloth. He had driven home from the car wash, grabbed a cloth and a bucket and then parked in a residential street a kilometre away. He didn’t want his neighbours to see him washing his car so carefully.

  His phone, stuffed in his jeans pocket, rang. He rolled out from under the BMW and answered it.

  ‘Pesi? It’s Inga.’

  He scrambled to his feet. He need to gather his wits for this conversation.

  ‘Inga! Hi! How are you?’

  ‘Why didn’t you want me to say I saw you yesterday?’

  ‘You were with that big cop, weren’t you?’ ‘Yes. We had just been to see the sheep farmers who went to look for Dad with Hakon. Pesi, I am pretty sure that Dad was killed. It wasn’t an accident.’

  Petur realized she had given him the opportunity to go on the offensive. ‘I thought we had agreed to leave all that alone,’ he said. ‘Why were you talking to the cops about it? What could it achieve?’

  ‘Pesi, where were you going yesterday?’

  Petur took a deep breath. ‘I can’t say, Inga. I’m sorry. Don’t ask me any more.’

  ‘That won’t do, Pesi. I need to know what’s going on here. Were you going to meet Hakon? On the road to Stong?’

  ‘Look, where are you now?’

  ‘Just outside Hella.’

  ‘OK. You’re right. You do deserve an explanation. And I’ll give you one, a full one.’

  ‘Go on, then.’

  ‘Not over the phone. We need to do this face to face.’

  ‘OK. I’ll be back in Reykjavik this afternoon.’

  ‘No, not here. You remember where Dad used to take us for picnics? The spot he said was his favourite place in Iceland?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK, meet me there. In, say, an hour and a half.’

  ‘Why there?’

  ‘I often go there, Inga. It’s where Dad is. I go there to talk to him. And I want him to be there when I talk to you.’

  There was silence on the other end of the phone. Ingileif would know that such sentimentalism was unlike Petur, but then she also knew how much their father’s death had affected him.

  ‘OK. An hour and a half.’

  ‘See you then. And promise me you won’t say anything to the police. At least until after I’ve had a chance to explain things.’

  ‘I promise.’

  Now he had a signal, Magnus called Baldur.

  ‘I’ve found Hakon’s car,’ he said, before the inspector had a chance to hang up on him.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On the road to Stong. There’s no sign of him. And it’s too misty to see very far.’

  ‘Are you there now?’ barked Baldur.

  ‘No. I had to go back down the road a couple of kilometres until I could get a signal to call you.’

  ‘I’ll send a team up to look at it.’

  ‘And to search for him,’ said Magnus.

  ‘That won’t be necessary.’

  ‘Why not? Have you found him?’

  ‘Yes. At the bottom of the Hjalparfoss. A body was discovered there by a power worker half an hour ago. A large man with a beard wearing a clerical collar.’

  Hjalparfoss was a waterfall only a kilometre or so from the turn-off to Stong. Magnus had seen a sign to it. The powerful river below him, the Fossa, flowed into it.

  ‘He could have jumped,’ said Baldur.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Magnus. ‘I saw tyre tracks next to the Suzuki. He was pushed.’

  ‘Well, don’t go back to the scene,’ said Baldur. ‘I don’t want you taking any further part in this investigation. I’m on my way to Hjalparfoss and you had better not be there when I arrive.’

  Magnus felt the urge to snap back. He had had the hunch that Hakon had driven to Stong. He had found the car. But he held his tongue.

  ‘Glad I could be of assistance,’ he said, and hung up.

  Well, almost held his tongue.

  It would take Baldur at least an hour, probably more like two to get to Hjalparfoss from Reykjavik, which gave Magnus plenty of time.

  He drove steadily down the track to the main road. The foot of Burfell emerged eerily out of the mist ahead. The turn-off to Hjalparfoss was a much better track, but still through black heaps of rock and sand. After a few hundred metres, the waterfall itself appeared, two powerful torrents of water divided by a basalt rock, tumbling into a pool. A police car with lights flashing was parked down by the bank of the river below the waterfall, and a small group of three or four people were clustered around something.

  Magnus parked next to the police car and introduced himself. The officers were friendly and stood back to let him take a look at the body.

  It was Hakon, all right. Badly battered by his journey down the river and over the waterfall.

  Magnus looked at the pastor of Hruni’s fingers.

  They were bare.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Magnus drove back towards Reykjavik. The Thjorsa, which had sparkled the day before, flowed broad and ominously grey down towards the Atlantic Ocean.

  This changed things. This definitely changed things.

  It looked very much as if someone had killed Hakon. It wasn’
t Tomas, he was locked up safe and sound. So who was it?

  Steve Jubb and Lawrence Feldman?

  Since he had arrived in Iceland, Magnus had heard about a lot of people who had suffered sudden death over the years. Not just Agnar and now Hakon. But also Dr Asgrimur. And even Ingileif’s stepfather.

  Too many in such a peaceful country to be a coincidence.

  Another fall. Another drowning.

  Dr Asgrimur had fallen to his death. That was supposed to be an accident. Agnar had been hit over the head and then drowned. Even Ingileif’s stepfather had fallen into Reykjavik Harbour, hitting his head and drowning.

  That was it. It was that death that had raised doubts at the back of Magnus’s mind earlier when he was talking to the Commissioner.

  It was a classic MO, a modus operandi, a means of killing for which a murderer showed a preference. Even the smartest killers often stuck to the same familiar method.

  There were only two people who were linked to all these deaths. A brother and a sister. Petur and Ingileif.

  Magnus dismissed Ingileif. But Petur?

  He had alibis. He was at high school in Reykjavik when his father had died. But perhaps he had been able to get out that weekend without anyone knowing? Perhaps he was the hidden man that the old farmer had seen? He was supposed to have been in London when his stepfather had been killed, but he could easily have flown back to Reykjavik for a couple of days without anyone knowing. If he had heard of what the man had done to his sister, Birna, he might have been moved to take revenge. Especially if he had killed before.

  But what about Agnar’s murder? Petur had an alibi for that. He was at his clubs all night, Arni had checked it out.

  Magnus slammed his palm on the steering wheel. Arni! That was what he had been trying to say before he lost consciousness after he was shot. Not ‘Goodbye’ but ‘Alibi’. He was trying to tell Magnus about an alibi. Petur’s alibi.

  Magnus could imagine what had happened. Arni had been round each of Petur’s three clubs and had received assurances that Petur had been seen there at some point on the evening of the murder. He hadn’t cross-checked times, drawn up a precise time-line of exactly where Petur was and when during that night. It was just the kind of sloppy mistake he would make. But, to be fair to him, it was also the kind of thing he would feel guilty about later.