Magnus had read the first two chapters of
The Lord of the Rings
only the night before. The first was indeed ‘A Long-Expected Party’, which celebrated Bilbo Baggins’s eleventy-first birthday, a jolly affair full of hobbits and food and fireworks at the end of which Bilbo put on his magic ring and disappeared. In the second, ‘The Shadow of the Past’, the wizard Gandalf returned to lecture Bilbo’s nephew Frodo on the strange and evil powers of the ring, and to give him the task of destroying it in the Crack of Doom.
It was clear that between the first and the second chapters lay
Gaukur’s Saga
.
‘Can I see?’ said Árni.
Magnus exhaled – he hadn’t even realized he had been holding his breath. He handed the letter to him.
‘You showed this to Agnar?’
Ingileif nodded. ‘I let him have it for a few days. He wanted anything I could find to authenticate the saga. He was pleased with this. He was convinced it would help us get a better price.’
‘I’ll bet he was. So Högni Ísildarson was your grandfather?’
‘That’s right. His father, Ísildur, founded a furniture store in Reykjavík at the end of the nineteenth century. Then, as now, many Icelanders travelled abroad to study, and in 1923 Högni went to England, to Leeds University, where he studied Old English under J.R.R. Tolkien.
‘Tolkien made a big impression on my grandfather, he inspired him. I remember him telling me about him.’ Ingileif smiled. ‘Tolkien wasn’t really that much older than my grandfather, only in his early thirties, but apparently he had an old-fashioned air about him. As if he lived in a time before industrialization, before big cities and smoke and machine guns. They corresponded on and off for as long as Tolkien was alive. My grandfather even arranged for one of his nieces to work for Tolkien in Oxford as a nanny.’
‘It would have been a good thing all around if you had shown me this the last time I was here,’ Magnus said.
‘Yes, I know,’ said Ingileif. ‘And I’m sorry.’
‘Sorry isn’t really good enough.’ Magnus looked straight at her. ‘Do you have any idea why Agnar was killed?’
This time she held his gaze. ‘No. I told myself that all this was irrelevant to his death, which is why I had no need to tell you about it, and I know of no connection.’ She sighed. ‘It’s not my job to guess, but doesn’t it seem likely that these people you were talking about thought that they could get hold of the saga without paying Agnar?’
‘Unless you killed him,’ Magnus said.
‘And why would I do that?’ She returned his gaze defiantly.
‘To shut him up. You told me yourself that you wanted to withdraw the sale of the saga and he threatened to tell the world about it.’
‘Yes, but I wouldn’t kill him for that reason. I wouldn’t kill anyone for any reason,’ Ingileif said.
Magnus stared hard. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘We’ll be in touch.’
M
AGNUS LET THE
hundred and twenty pages of
Gaukur’s Saga
fall on to Baldur’s desk with a thump.
‘What’s this?’ Baldur asked, glaring at Magnus.
‘The reason Steve Jubb killed Agnar.’
‘What do you mean?’
Magnus reported what he and Árni had found at the summer house and his subsequent interview with Ingileif. Baldur listened closely, his long face drawn, lips pursed.
‘Did you get this woman Ingileif ’s prints?’ Baldur asked.
‘No,’ said Magnus.
‘Well, bring her in and take them. We need to see if those are the missing set at the scene. And we should get this authenticated.’ He tapped the typescript in front of him.
He raised his fingers into a steeple and touched his chin. ‘So, this must be the deal they were discussing. But that still doesn’t explain why Agnar was killed. We know that Steve Jubb didn’t get a copy of the saga. We didn’t find it in his hotel room.’
‘He could have hidden it,’ Magnus said. ‘Or mailed it the next morning. To Lawrence Feldman.’
‘Possibly. The Central Post Office is just around the corner from the hotel. We can check if anyone remembers him. And if he sent it registered mail, there will be a record of it, as well as the address it was sent to.’
‘Or perhaps the deal went bad? They had a fight about the price.’
‘Until they had the original saga in their possession, Feldman and Jubb would want Agnar alive.’ Baldur sighed. ‘But we are getting somewhere. I’ll have another go with Steve Jubb. We’ll get him back from Litla Hraun tomorrow morning.’
‘May I join you?’ Magnus asked.
‘No,’ said Baldur, simply.
‘What about Lawrence Feldman in California?’ Magnus said. ‘It’s even more important to speak to him now.’ Magnus could feel Árni stiffening in anticipation behind him.
‘I said, I would think about it, and I will think about it,’ said Baldur.
‘Right,’ said Magnus, and he made for the door of Baldur’s office.
‘And Magnus,’ Baldur said.
‘What?’
‘You should have reported this
before
you saw Ingileif. I’m in charge of the investigation here.’
Magnus bristled, but he knew that Baldur was right. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’
Árni went to fetch Ingileif and bring her in to the station to be fingerprinted. Magnus called Nathan Moritz, a colleague of Agnar’s at the university who had been interviewed earlier by the police. Moritz was at home, and Magnus asked him to come into the station to look at something. The professor sounded doubtful at first, but when Magnus mentioned it was an English translation of a lost saga about Gaukur and his brother Ísildur, Moritz said he would be right over.
Moritz was an American, a small man of about sixty with a neat pointed beard and messy grey hair. He spoke perfect Icelandic, which wasn’t surprising for a lecturer on the subject, and explained that he was on a two-year secondment to the University of Iceland from the University of Michigan. They slipped into English, when Magnus admitted that he was operating under a similar arrangement.
Magnus fetched him a coffee and they sat down in an interview room, the typescript from the summer house in front of Magnus. Moritz had brought his own exhibit, a big hardback book. He was so excited he could barely sit still, and he ignored his coffee.
‘Is that it?’ he said. ‘
Gaukur’s Saga
?’
‘We think so.’
‘Where did you get it?’
‘It seems to be an English translation that Agnar made.’
‘So that’s what he was working on!’ Moritz said. ‘He was beavering away at something for the last few weeks. He claimed that he was commenting on a French translation of the
Laxdaela Saga
, but that sounded strange. I’ve known Agnar for years, worked with him on a couple of projects, and he was never one to bother himself unduly over deadlines.’ Moritz shook his head. ‘
Gaukur’s Saga
.’
‘I didn’t know it existed,’ said Magnus.
‘It doesn’t. Or at least we didn’t think it did. But it used to. Look.’
Moritz opened up the book in front of him. ‘This is a facsimile of the
Book of Mödruvellir
, from the fourteenth century, one of the most important collections of the sagas. There are eleven of them in all.’
Magnus walked around the table and stood behind Moritz’s shoulder. Moritz leafed through the book, each brown page a faithful copy of the vellum of the original manuscript. He paused at an empty page on which were written only a couple of faded lines. Indecipherable.
‘There is a big gap between
Njáls Saga
and
Egils Saga
. No one could read this line until the invention of ultra-violet light. Now they know what it says.’ Moritz quoted from memory. ‘“Insert here
Gauks Saga Trandilssonar
; I am told that Grímur Thorsteinsson Esq has a copy.”’ He turned to Magnus and smiled. ‘We knew that there once was a
Gaukur’s Saga
, but we thought it had been lost, like so many others. Gaukur is mentioned once, very briefly in
Njáls Saga
; that he was killed by Ásgrímur.’
‘When you read the saga, you will find out how,’ said Magnus with a smile, returning to his seat. The
Book of Mödruvellir
must have been the instance of the saga’s existence that Ingileif had mentioned.
‘The other place he crops up in is extraordinary,’ Moritz said. ‘There are some Viking runes in a tomb in Orkney, graffiti really, which were discovered in the nineteenth century. The runes claim that they were carved by the axe once owned by Gaukur Trandilsson of Iceland. So the man really did exist.’
Moritz looked at the sheaf of papers in front of Magnus.
‘And that’s the English translation? May I read it?’
‘Yes. Although you will have to use gloves and you will have to read it here. We need to give it to our forensics people before it can be copied.’
‘Do you know where the original is?’
‘Yes, I do. There are only scraps of the original vellum, but there’s an excellent seventeenth-century paper copy. We can show it to you tomorrow. Of course, we can’t be sure what we’ve found is genuine. We need you to authenticate it.’
‘With pleasure,’ said Moritz.
‘And keep this confidential. Don’t say a word to anyone.’
‘I understand. But don’t let your forensic people handle either document without my supervision.’
‘Of course,’ said Magnus. ‘If the saga
is
genuine, how much would it bring?’
‘It’s impossible to say,’ Moritz replied. ‘The last medieval manuscript on the market was sold by Sotheby’s in the nineteen sixties to a consortium of Icelandic banks. It had belonged to a British collector. Of course this time around the banks haven’t got any money, nor has the Icelandic government.’ He paused. ‘But for this? If it is authentic? There will be plenty of willing buyers outside Iceland. You’re talking millions of dollars.’
He shook his head. ‘Many millions.’
*
As Magnus returned to his desk, Árni was waiting for him, looking excited.
‘What is it? Did Ingileif’s fingerprints match?’
‘No. But I’ve heard back from Australia.’
‘The Elvish expert?’
Árni handed Magnus a printout of an e-mail.
Dear Detective Holm
,
I have been able to translate most of the two messages you sent me. They are in Quenya, the most popular of Tolkien’s languages. The translations are as follows:
1. I am meeting Haraldsson tomorrow. Should I insist on seeing the story?
2. Saw Haraldsson. He has (??). He wanted much more money. 5 million. We need to talk.
Note – I could not find a translation for the word ‘kallisarvoinen’, which I have marked (??).
It has been a pleasure to find that my knowledge of Quenya has finally been of practical assistance to someone!
Kind Regards
Barry Fletcher
Senior Lecturer
School of Languages and Linguistics
University of New South Wales
‘Well, the first message is pretty clear. The second was sent at eleven p.m., the night of the murder, right?’ Magnus said.
‘That’s right. As soon as Jubb got back to the hotel having seen Agnar.’
‘No wonder he needed to talk, if he had just pushed a dead body into the lake.’
‘I wonder what the kallisar— whatever-it-is word means?’ Árni asked.
Magnus pondered it for a moment. ‘Manuscript? “He has the manuscript.” That would make sense.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Árni.
‘What do you mean?’
‘That doesn’t sound right to me. It sounds as if Agnar has something
else.
Something he wants more money for. That Jubb wants to speak to Isildur to discuss whether he should pay for it.’
Magnus sighed. His patience was running low. ‘Árni! We know Agnar died that night. This message explains he was holding out for a lot more money. So Jubb killed him and he needed to speak to the boss once he had done it. Simple. Happens in drug deals back home all the time. Now, let’s show this to Baldur. He’s going to want to discuss this with Jubb.’
Árni followed Magnus to Baldur’s office. It didn’t seem quite that simple to him, but Árni was used to being wrong on police matters. He had learned the important thing was not to make too much of a fuss over his mistakes, and not to let them get him down.
Vigdís drove up the winding road to Hruni. It had taken her nearly two hours to get there from Reykjavík; a long way to go just to tick off a name on a list. But Baldur had insisted that every appointment in Agnar’s diary should be investigated, and so now it was time to check the mysterious entry
Hruni
.
She passed two or three cars coming the other way, and then she rounded a bend and came upon the valley in which Hruni nestled. As Rannveig had said there was nothing there apart from a church and a rectory beneath a crag. And a view over the meadows to distant mountains.