He would have to play for time, until they had gone.
‘Do you want me to turn myself in?’ he asked his sister.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Why should I?’ said Petur.
For two minutes they continued a halting conversation, with Petur watching the couple through his peripheral vision. He saw them set up the tripod, move it, and then take it down. Whether they had taken a picture of the falls or decided against the shot, Petur didn’t know. But he was relieved to see them disappear back over the rim of the hollow.
He took another step towards his sister.
Jubb didn’t stay in the car. He looked around the car park, and then made his way to the information office. A middle-aged woman inside wished him a good afternoon in English, having sized him up as a foreigner.
‘Have you seen two people here?’ Jubb asked. ‘A man and a woman? The man is bald, and the woman is blonde. Icelanders.’
‘No, I don’t think so. I did just speak to a German couple. The man had a woolly hat so I couldn’t see if he was bald. But the woman had dark hair, I am sure of it. They were going to take photographs of the falls.’
‘But no Icelanders?’
‘No, I am sorry. Of course, I don’t have a good view of the car park from here.’
‘Thank you,’ said Jubb.
As he stepped out of the information centre, he saw the German couple the woman had mentioned, walking down into the car park from the hill above, huddling together against the weather. The man had a tripod slung over his shoulder.
Jubb trotted over to them. ‘Hello?’ he called. ‘Do you speak English?’
‘Yes, I do,’ said the woman.
‘Have you seen a man and a woman up there? The man is bald and the woman is blonde?’
‘Yes,’ said the woman. ‘Just over the top of this hill here.’
Jubb thought for a second. Should he run up there himself, or should he get Magnus?
Get Magnus.
He ran down from the car park towards the falls.
Petur decided against hitting Ingileif, at least right away. He turned and sauntered over towards the edge of the gorge.
‘Where are you going?’ Ingileif called after him.
‘To look at the falls.’
‘Are you listening to me?’
‘Yes, I’m listening.’
As he had hoped Ingileif followed. She was still arguing with him, pleading with him to give himself up. But she was keeping her distance.
Petur paused, talked and then moved on again. This seemed to work. Finally he was within a few feet of the rim of the gorge. He had to shout to be heard.
Ingileif had stopped dead. She wasn’t moving any further.
Then he saw in her eyes that she understood what he was doing – tempting her forward to her death. She took a few steps back-wards and then turned and ran. Petur lunged after her. His legs were longer, he was stronger, fitter, he caught her up, throwing her to the ground.
She screamed, but the scream was killed by the mist and the roar of the water. He pinned her to the grass, but she raised her right hand and scratched at his face.
Damn! That would be very hard to explain to the cops. He would think of something.
He hit her in the face. She screamed, but continued to writhe beneath him. He hit her again, harder. She lay still.
He swallowed. His eyes were hot with tears. But he had had no choice. He had never had a choice.
He dragged her over towards the rim of the gorge. That spot wouldn’t quite work. Below the cliff a grassy slope dropped down to the water. It was steep, but not quite steep enough. He would have to go a few metres upstream.
He pulled her along a rough path, her legs and body knocking against bare rock. She seemed to be coming round. But he was nearly to a good spot; the top of a rock jutting out with a near vertical drop down to the river hurtling towards the falls.
The ring! She had the ring. Damn it. Perhaps she had dropped it when they had fought. Or perhaps it was in her pockets.
He lay her down. She groaned. He began to search her pockets.
And then, out of nowhere, a large shape flew through the air and bowled him over.
Magnus never heard Steve Jubb’s shouts above the din of the waterfall. But he did pause and look back up the way he had come.
He saw the portly figure of Jubb wobbling down the path towards him, his arms waving.
Magnus ran. It was uphill and it was steep but he sprinted.
He usually kept himself very fit, running several miles a day if he could. In Iceland he hadn’t had the chance, and already the edge was off his fitness. His heart was pounding and the breaths were hard to take. It was a steep path, but he took it as fast as he could.
‘Up there!’ Jubb said. ‘Above the waterfall.’
Magnus didn’t wait for more explanation but continued running uphill.
His chest felt like it was going to explode as he scrambled over the rim of the hill.
He saw them. Two figures, a few feet from the edge of the cliff, one lying on the ground, the other crouching over her.
Magnus ran faster downhill towards them. There was no chance of Petur hearing him in all the noise, and he was concentrating too hard on Ingileif to see what was coming at him.
Magnus threw himself at Petur and together they rolled to the cliff edge.
Petur writhed, broke away, and hauled himself to his feet. He stood swaying on the edge of the cliff above the river.
Magnus stared at him, keeping his distance of a few feet. He had no desire to plunge over the cliff in a death-grapple with Petur. Arrest was going to be difficult. For a start, Magnus didn’t have any handcuffs with him. He didn’t know what he would do if he managed to overpower Petur – perhaps get Steve Jubb to sit on him for an hour until Vigdis showed up. Of course, if he hadn’t been in some Mickey-Mouse country, he would have a gun, in which case things would be much simpler. As it was…
As it was, Magnus could see Petur sizing him up. Petur was tall and rangy. But Magnus was big, and he knew he looked like he could look after himself. People usually didn’t mess with Magnus.
Magnus heard a groan behind him. Ingileif. That was good news: at least she was alive.
‘OK, Petur,’ Magnus said evenly. ‘You had better give yourself up. There’s no way out for you now. Come with me.’
Petur hesitated. Then he glanced behind him, at the boiling river and the jagged rocks rising out of it. In a moment, he had turned and was gone.
Magnus took a few steps and looked over the rim. There was a kind of path, or rather a series of hand-and footholds that led down to some rocks on the edge of the river. He could see that it would just be possible to clamber along these, down almost at the level of the river, and to climb up again further upstream.
Magnus descended after Petur. The spray had left the rocks extremely slippery, and Magnus had real trouble keeping his footing. Petur was taking more risks, widening the gap. Magnus realized he would have been much better off keeping to the cliff top; he could probably have run upstream to the point Petur was aiming for before Petur reached it. It was too late now.
Magnus felt his footing slip. He grabbed hold of the rock with one hand. Below, the river rushed headlong to the top edge of the waterfall. The water was a beautiful deadly mixture of green and white.
Pure cold death.
Magnus hauled himself up with both arms and lay panting on the rock. He saw Petur skip across three rocks barely five feet above the river. The man’s balance was extraordinary.
But then Petur slipped. Like Magnus he grabbed hold of the rock with one arm and held on. But unlike Magnus, he couldn’t find a hold for his other hand. He dangled there, swinging, his legs bunched up beneath him, desperately trying to keep his feet out of the water, lest the river grabbed them and snatched him down.
Magnus leaped on to one rock. Another. His sense of balance was not as good as Petur’s. The rocks were about ten feet from the cliff
edge now, out in the river.
This was stupid.
Petur stared at him, his face wincing in agony at the effort of hanging on with one arm, his bald head dripping with moisture.
He couldn’t hold on much longer.
Magnus turned. He could see Ingileif standing on the edge of the cliff shouting and waving. She was beckoning to him to come. Magnus couldn’t hear what she was yelling above the roar, but he could see her lips. ‘Leave him!’ they seemed to be shouting.
Magnus turned back to Petur. Ingileif was right. He watched the man who had murdered four people, including his own father, and who had just tried to murder his own sister, fight for his life.
Petur’s eyes met Magnus’s. Petur knew that Magnus had given up trying to reach him.
He closed his eyes, his grip slipped and he fell without a cry. His body was whisked along the top of the spate and over the rim of the waterfall.
Within two seconds he was gone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Magnus saw Ingileif standing next to her brother’s white BMW four-wheel-drive, with the snow-covered mountain rising above her.
He pulled up beside her and got out of his car.
‘You’re late,’ she said. Her face was pink in the cold, her eyes shining.
‘Sorry.’
‘Never mind. I’m glad you came.’
Magnus smiled. ‘I’m glad you asked me.’
‘I thought you might have gone back to America.’
‘Tomorrow. Although everyone in the police department thinks I’ve already left.’
‘So where are you staying?’
‘I can’t really tell you.’
Ingileif frowned. ‘I would have thought that by now you would have trusted me.’
‘Oh, no. It’s not that. Let’s just say I’ve learned the hard way that the fewer people who know where I am the better.’
There was a remote possibility that Soto would send out a replacement for the hit man who had shot Arni, so the Police Commissioner had decided to let everyone think that Magnus had flown back to Boston. Actually, he had sent Magnus to stay with his brother at his farm an hour and a half to the north of Reykjavik. It was a beautiful spot, on the edge of a fjord, with outstanding views. And the Commissioner’s brother and his family were hospitable.
Nobody had heard anything from Colby. That was a good sign. All she had to do was lie low for a couple more days.
‘So, what do we do now?’ Magnus said, staring up at Mount Hekla rising above them.
‘Climb it, of course.’
‘Dare I ask why?’
‘What kind of Icelander are you?’ Ingileif said. ‘It’s a lovely day, so we’re going up a mountain. Don’t you want to?’
‘Oh, I’d like to,’ said Magnus. ‘Is it difficult?’ He had borrowed boots from the farmer, and he was more or less properly dressed for the occasion.
‘It’s easy in summer. It will be more difficult now. This early in May there’s still a lot of snow about, but we’ll manage. Let’s go.’
So they set off up the side of the volcano. It was a glorious day, the sky was clear and cold and there was already a magnificent view stretching out behind them. The snow lay on lava and pumice, and was actually easier underfoot than the black rock and stone. Magnus felt good. The air was crisp, the exercise was invigorating, and it was nice to have Ingileif beside him. Or ahead of him. She set a rapid pace, which Magnus was happy to follow.
‘How’s your friend?’ she asked as they paused to catch their breath and admire the view. ‘The one who was shot?’
‘Arni is doing well, thank God. They say he’s going to make a full recovery.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Ingileif said. Ahead of them was the blackened valley of the River Thjorsa, and beyond that the broad plain through which the Hvita ran. And beyond that more mountains.
‘So you’re going tomorrow?’ Ingileif said.
‘That’s right.’
‘Are you coming back?’ There was something a little hesitant in the way she asked the question.
‘I don’t know,’ said Magnus. ‘At first I was dead set against it. But the Commissioner has asked me to stay. I’m thinking about it.’
And he was thinking about it, seriously. Partly he felt a sense of obligation – gratitude for what the Commissioner and Arni had done for him. But also the seed of suspicion that had planted itself in his mind on the road up the Thjorsardalur three days before was nagging at him. The suspicion that the answers to his father’s murder might lie in Iceland rather than the streets of Boston.
As he had anticipated, the seed had taken root. It was growing. It wasn’t going to die away now.
‘If it makes any difference,’ Ingileif said. ‘I’d like you to.’
She looked at him, smiling shyly. Magnus felt himself grinning back. He noticed the nick on her eyebrow, already so familiar. It was strange how he felt that he knew her so well, as though it was much longer than ten days since he had first interviewed her in her gallery.
‘Yes. That makes a difference.’
She moved closer to him, reached up and kissed him, long and deep.
Then she broke away. ‘Come on, we’ve still got a long way to go.’
As they ascended, the mountain became stranger. There was no single neat round cone at the top of Mount Hekla. Rather, a series of old craters from previous eruptions dotted the ridge. Sulphurous steam rose out of fissures, narrow cracks in the mountain. The snow became thinner, the bare patches more common. As Magnus put his hand on the bare black lava, he realized why. It was warm. Underneath, and not very far underneath, the volcano was bubbling away.
When they reached the top, the view was extraordinary, as Iceland stretched all around them: broad rivers, craggy mountains, slow, powerful glaciers.
‘It’s amazing to think of the three brothers climbing this a thousand years ago,’ Magnus said. ‘You know, Isildur, Gaukur and Asgrimur.’
‘Yes.’
Magnus looked around. ‘I wonder where the crater they were trying to throw the ring into was then?’
‘Who knows?’ Ingileif replied. ‘My father used to fret about that. Needless to say, I first came up here with him. The mountain has rearranged itself many times since their day.’
‘What are you going to do with the saga now? Are you going to sell it?’
Ingileif shook her head. ‘We’re going to give it to the Arni Magnusson Institute. But before then, I’m going to let Lawrence Feldman have it for a year in return for enough money to bail out the gallery. Birna will get her share, of course.’
‘That’s a neat idea.’
‘Yes. It was Lawrence’s, but it looks like everyone can live with that. I think he feels guilty.’
‘As he should.’ Magnus thought about all that had happened over the previous two weeks. He wondered whether they would ever find the ring. Petur’s body had not turned up yet, apparently it could be days or weeks before it would be spat out by the water-fall. He rather hoped that somehow the ring would stay there, at the bottom of Gullfoss.
But he couldn’t say any of this to Ingileif. That was her brother down there, after all.
‘Let’s go,’ Ingileif said. She set off down the mountain to the left of the path they had used on the way up. The snow was thin or non-existent, the ground was so warm. She skirted an old crater and stopped by a small spiral of steam, coming out of a crack in the ground.
‘Careful!’ Magnus said. The snow and lava on which she was standing looked precarious. There was a strong smell of sulphur in the air.
Ingileif pulled something out of her pocket.
‘What’s that?’ asked Magnus.
‘The ring.’
‘The ring? I thought Petur had it!’
‘He gave it to me. I think he hoped it would change my mind.’
‘But you didn’t tell anyone that!’
‘I know.’
Magnus was only a few feet from Ingileif. He longed to examine the ri
ng, the cause of so much pain and anguish over the last couple of weeks. What did he mean, couple of weeks? The last millennium. ‘What are you going to with it?’
‘What do you think?’ said Ingileif. ‘I’m going to toss it into the mouth of hell, just like Tolkien suggested my grandfather do. Just like Isildur wanted to do.’
‘Don’t do that,’ said Magnus.
‘Why not? It’s the right thing to do.’
‘Why not? Because it’s one of the most significant archaeological discoveries this country has ever seen. I mean, is it real? Haven’t you wondered that all along? How old is it? Did Hogni or someone hide it eighty years ago? Or is it really centuries old? Or even older, perhaps it really did come from the Rhine at the time of Attila the Hun. Don’t you see? These are fascinating questions, even without the Tolkien connection. And they can all be answered by archaeologists.’
‘Oh yes, they are fascinating questions,’ Ingileif said. ‘I can tell you, it’s made of gold. There is an inscription in runes scratched on the inside, although I haven’t tried to decipher it. But whatever it is, it’s evil. It has caused enough damage to my family. I’m getting rid of it.’
‘No, Ingileif, wait.’ Magnus felt an overwhelming urge to grab the ring from her.
Ingileif smiled. ‘I wanted you to come up here with me to make sure I had the strength to do this. But now look at you.’
Magnus could see the ring between Ingileif’s thumb and fore-finger. He didn’t know what it was exactly, whether it was ten years old or a thousand. But he knew she was right.
He nodded.
Ingileif bent down and tossed the ring into the fissure.
There was no thunder. No lightning. The sun shone out of the pale blue Icelandic sky.
Ingileif climbed back up to Magnus and kissed him quickly on the lips.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s get going. If you’re flying back to Boston tomorrow, we’ve got things to do and not much time to do them.’
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