Authors: Michael Ridpath
She held out her hand and Fearon shook it. He ushered her towards the door.
‘Wait a moment, young lady,’ said Mrs Fearon. ‘Did you really come all the way from Iceland this morning?’
Ingileif nodded. ‘I drove here straight from the airport.’
‘And where are you going now?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose I will find a hotel somewhere.’
‘Have you eaten?’
Ingileif had been too tense to eat anything on the plane. She shook her head. ‘Not for hours.’
‘Then why don’t you stay here? I’ve got some meatloaf left over from dinner. Do you like meatloaf?’
Ingileif had no idea what meatloaf was, but nodded.
‘You don’t mind, do you, Jim?’
Fearon smiled, unwilling to stand up to his wife’s hospitality. ‘As long as we don’t talk about lab results.’
And they didn’t. They sat in the kitchen as Mrs Fearon, or Pattie as she asked to be called, warmed up the meatloaf. Ingileif liked Pattie, who had all kinds of questions about Iceland. She had a friend who was nuts about Icelandic knitting patterns, and she had tried some herself. Ingileif knew a lot about the subject, and the conversation became quite detailed. Pattie claimed that she had always wanted to travel to Iceland and hinted that it was only her husband’s lack of imagination that had stopped her.
The meatloaf turned out to be delicious. Jim Fearon clearly thought so, helping himself to more. Ingileif found herself relaxing in the warm welcome of the kitchen. The Fearons were parents and grandparents. Ingileif had lost both her own parents and her brother. She had left her homeland to go to live in Germany. She suddenly realized how much she missed family, home.
‘It’s strange thinking of Magnús growing up here,’ she said. ‘I never know whether to think of him as an Icelander or an American. Neither does he, for that matter.’
‘His father’s death hit him badly,’ said Fearon.
‘He hasn’t got over it,’ said Ingileif. ‘It drives him on in almost everything he does. I sometimes worry that if he ever did really discover what happened to his dad there would be a huge hole in his life. He wouldn’t know what to do with himself.’
‘Tell me about him,’ said Pattie. ‘I can see you are very fond of him.’
‘Can you?’ said Ingileif. ‘Yes, I suppose I am.’ She paused. ‘He’s a good man. He cares about me. I mean really cares about me. I tease him about it sometimes, about how serious he can be, but I suppose I like it really. I just can’t admit it to myself.’ She pulled herself up short, marvelling about how she was saying
things to these two perfect strangers that she could scarcely say to herself. But thousands of miles from home in this little house in the Tinkertown woods she felt safe.
‘I was having a bad time when we met last year. Magnús helped me a lot. He’s a private person and I’m not really, but I think the two of us understand each other. I’ve had lots of relationships, but Magnús is different. He knows who I am. And he likes who I am.’ She smiled. ‘I’m sorry, I must not be making any sense.’
‘Oh, yes you are,’ said Pattie. ‘So what went wrong? If you want to tell us.’
Ingileif did want to tell them. She wanted to tell someone.
‘It was my fault. I went to work in Germany. I think Magnús wanted to continue the relationship, but I didn’t. I don’t like to be tied down. I sort of think Magnús does. And now… Now he’s locked up in jail and they think he murdered someone. Which he didn’t, by the way. I’m quite sure he didn’t.’
She paused to see whether she had convinced the retired detective. He showed no sign of it, although he was listening closely.
‘So I came over here to help him. To show him and me that I…’ She stopped. The Fearons stayed silent, letting her say what she wanted to say. ‘I suppose that I love him.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I’m an optimistic person; I believe in myself usually. It never really occurred to me that you wouldn’t give me the lab results. But of course there’s no reason why you should. I don’t know if they are important, anyway. It may not even matter.’
‘Oh, I think they are important,’ said Fearon quietly.
Ingileif glanced at him. ‘Oh, I wasn’t trying to get you to tell me, I promise.’
Fearon laughed. ‘I know.’ His blue eyes, suspicious before, now twinkled. ‘That’s the point. But I will tell you. And you should find a way to tell Magnus.’
Vigdís went to bed early. She was staying in the same small hotel in Stykkishólmur as Ollie. In fact, her room was only two
down the corridor from his, empty for the night. Despite her early start that morning, and several nights of poor sleep, her brain was tumbling. Davíd, Magnus, Baldur. Although technically she was restricted to working with Baldur on the attempted shooting of the farmer’s wife, she had picked up some information about Hallgrímur’s murder and Magnus’s supposed role in it.
It didn’t look good. And however long she tossed things around in her sleep-deprived brain, it didn’t become any better.
She must have gone to sleep eventually because her mobile phone’s insistent tone woke her up. She checked her watch before answering. One-thirty.
‘Yeah?’
‘Vigdís? It’s Ingileif.’
Vigdís sat up, the urgency and excitement in Ingileif’s voice jolting her to wakefulness. ‘What is it?’
‘I’m in America. In Duxbury.’
‘You’re where?’
‘Yeah. I, er, I flew to Boston this afternoon. And now I’m at Jim Fearon’s house. The detective who worked on Magnus’s father’s murder.’
‘OK,’ said Vigdís.
‘He can’t give me the lab results he had for Magnus, but he did tell me what’s in them. If I tell you, can you get the message to Magnus?’
‘Um. Yes. I can call Sibba, his lawyer. She can go see him at Litla-Hraun.’
‘Good,’ said Ingileif. ‘Because I think he’ll want to hear them.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Wednesday, 21 April 2010
S
IBBA WAS FIDGETING
with her pen as Magnus walked into the interview room at Litla-Hraun. She smiled when she saw him, and stood up to kiss him on the cheek, but Magnus could feel the tension.
‘You’re early,’ he said. It was barely past eight o’clock.
‘I’ve got some news. Lots of news,’ Sibba said.
‘Good, I hope.’
Sibba sat down and looked Magnus in the eye. She took a deep breath.
‘Aníta was shot yesterday. She was taken down to the National Hospital in Reykjavík. She’s alive but in a bad way.’
‘Shot? Where? By who?’
‘In the Berserkjahraun on her horse. A rifle. And they have no idea who shot her. At first they thought it was Ollie, but it turned out it couldn’t have been.’
‘Will she make it?’
Sibba shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She was shot in the chest. It was Kolbeinn’s rifle, but they know he wasn’t responsible; he was working on the farm in view of the police at the time. And Ollie was on an island in Breidafjördur.’
‘What was he doing there?’
‘Hiding from the police. They caught him, though.’
‘I’m sure they did. Is he under arrest?’
‘He is being held for questioning. About Grandpa’s murder.’
Magnus paused, taking it in. He liked Aníta. In fact, with the exception of Sibba, she was the only one of what remained of the maternal side of his family he did like. Why would anyone want to shoot her?
‘You seem to have good information,’ he said.
Sibba glanced at a computer on her right. ‘Do you know how to work this thing?’ she said. ‘Is it switched off?’
‘You mean is anyone listening?’ The computer controlled the recording equipment in the interview room. They both knew that it was absolutely forbidden for the police to listen in to discussions between client and lawyer, but they also knew of a recent case where the recording equipment had ‘accidentally’ been left on in an interview room. Magnus got up to check the computer.
‘It’s off,’ he said.
‘Good,’ said Sibba. ‘I don’t want anyone to hear this. You’re right – I do have a good source. They’ve drafted in Inspector Baldur to investigate Aníta’s shooting, and he has taken Vigdís with him up to Stykkishólmur. She told me.’
‘She should be careful,’ Magnus said. ‘She could lose her job.’
Sibba nodded. She took another deep breath. She was definitely anxious.
‘There is something else Vigdís told me.’
‘Yes?’
‘Ingileif is in America. Duxbury. She saw the detective you spoke to.’
‘In America! How the hell did she get there?’
‘She seems quite resourceful, your girlfriend.’
‘She is,’ Magnus said. ‘Don’t tell me Jim Fearon gave her the results?’
‘He did,’ Sibba said. ‘Or at least he told her what was in them; he didn’t give her a hard copy.’
‘And?’
Sibba paused. ‘The mitochondrial DNA suggests that the hair found in the house where your father was killed belonged to a
close relative on your mother’s side, and it wasn’t you or Ollie. As you probably know, the DNA in hair only allows analysis of the mother’s genes.’
A broad grin spread across Magnus’s face. ‘Well done, Ingileif,’ he said. Then he glanced at Sibba and the grin disappeared.
Magnus stood up and walked over to the window. There was a view north of the little car park outside the prison, over the flood plain to the snow-streaked ridge of hills above the towns of Selfoss and Hveragerdi.
‘You know, this is the only room in Litla-Hraun where I can see the outside world.’
Sibba was silent.
He turned. ‘Sibba, I have two important questions for you. I remember that you and your family came to visit us at Bjarnarhöfn one Christmas.’
‘That’s right. We came over to Iceland for Christmas several times, but only once when you were living at Bjarnarhöfn.’
‘I don’t remember what year it was. Do you?’
‘I do, actually,’ Sibba said. ‘I was sixteen, so it was 1985. Christmas 1985.’
‘Benedikt Jóhannesson was killed on December twenty-eighth 1985.’
Sibba frowned
‘And is your father right-handed?’ Magnus asked.
‘Yes.’ Sibba’s frown deepened. ‘Wait a minute. What are you suggesting?’
‘Your father—’
‘No! The visit is a coincidence. It’s got to be a coincidence. And eighty per cent of the people on the planet are right-handed.’
‘I take your point about being right-handed. But I remember Fearon saying the hair colour was blond, and your father had blond hair before it went grey.’
‘Fair. Light brown, really,’ Sibba said. ‘Once again, like many people.’
‘I think they also described it as “sandy”,’ Magnus said. ‘And you really mean “like many Icelanders”. But the key point is that it’s a pretty big coincidence that a close relative of my mother’s was in the house with my father in Duxbury in July 1996, and your father was at Bjarnarhöfn in December 1985.’
‘He never left the farm, I’m sure. He didn’t go down to Reykjavík. I would have remembered.’
‘Two hours down, an hour there, two hours back. You wouldn’t have remembered unless he told you, and he wouldn’t have told you.’
‘Dad isn’t a killer!’ Sibba protested. ‘You know him. He’d never kill anyone.’
Magnus looked at his cousin. He had seen it so many times before in his career – children denying that their parent was a murderer, refusing to contemplate the possibility. On the other hand, he was pretty sure that was why Sibba had been so tense. She knew what Fearon’s DNA analysis implied.
He touched her arm. ‘I’m sorry.’
She shook him off. ‘No! I won’t accept that. It’s just circumstantial. You can’t make a case against him.’
‘Not yet,’ said Magnus. He returned to the chair opposite his cousin.
Sibba glared at Magnus. ‘Now I’m definitely going to have to resign as your lawyer.’
Magnus nodded. ‘Thanks for what you’ve done so far, Sibba.’
‘But I haven’t done anything!’ Sibba’s voice rose in frustration. ‘You wouldn’t let me!’
‘You did what I asked you to do, even when it didn’t seem to make any sense.’
Sibba shook her head and shrugged. ‘So who do you want to replace me?’ She paused for a moment, running through the possibilities. ‘What about Kristján Gylfason?’
Magnus had sparred against Kristján before. He didn’t like him much, but he was one of the best criminal lawyers in Reykjavík.
‘Maybe.’ He nodded. ‘But first can you do one last thing for me?’
Sibba collected herself, once more the lawyer. ‘What is it?’
‘Call Emil. Tell him that I have some information for him that he is going to want to hear. But tell him I will only talk if he brings me up to Stykkishólmur. No video link from here. No interviews at police headquarters. Stykkishólmur or nothing.’
Sibba nodded. ‘I’ll tell him.’ She hesitated. ‘Magnus?’
‘Yes.’
‘Now I’m not acting for you, can I make an observation?’
‘I guess.’
‘You didn’t kill Hallgrímur, did you? You think your brother did. You’re covering for him.’
‘I don’t know who killed our grandfather, Sibba,’ Magnus said. ‘But I fear it was someone very close to one or other of us.’
Half an hour later, Magnus was sitting in the back of a police car in handcuffs, speeding northwards along the banks of the broad river Ölfusá towards Selfoss. Over to his right he could see the high bent plume of Eyjafjallajökull. He marvelled at how Ingileif had managed to defy the volcano that seemed to have grounded the rest of the world.
It was clear, despite Sibba’s protestations, that her father, Magnus’s uncle Villi, was a suspect for the murder of Ragnar, and of the writer Benedikt Jóhannesson. Magnus could see that. Sibba could see that. Would Emil?
Magnus realized that the moment he had been waiting for for thirteen years was close. Very close. Soon he would know for sure who had murdered his father. The excitement bubbled up within him. He was grateful that Emil had agreed to his request to be driven up to Stykkishólmur. Given what he now knew, he would have found it very hard to stay cooped up in Litla-Hraun. He might be in handcuffs, but at least now he was moving – moving north towards the Snaefells Peninsula and an answer.
Of course, even if Villi had murdered two people in the past, it didn’t necessarily mean that he had killed Hallgrímur. Hallgrímur’s killer might indeed have been Ollie, who was at that moment being grilled by the police. And, in fact, Magnus would still be their prime suspect. But there must be some connection between those earlier murders and Hallgrímur’s, and Emil would be in the best position to find it, with some help from Magnus.