A hint of bitterness touched Pétur’s voice. ‘So Grandfather decided to tell me of the existence of the ring a few months before
he
died. He impressed upon me the importance of leaving the ring undisturbed. He scared the living daylights out of me. He persuaded me that if I, or my father, were to find the ring and take it from its hiding place then a terrible evil would be unleashed throughout the whole world.’
‘What kind of evil?’ Magnus asked.
‘I don’t know. He wasn’t specific. In my imagination it was some kind of nuclear war. I had just read
On the Beach
by Nevil Shute – you know, the story about survivors of a nuclear war in Australia – and it scared me witless. But the day after my grandfather died, my father set out on an expedition to Thjórsárdalur to find the ring. I was furious. I told him he shouldn’t go, but he wouldn’t listen.’
‘You didn’t go with him?’
‘No. I was away at high school in Reykjavík. But I wouldn’t have gone in any case. My father was close friends with the local pastor. As soon as my grandfather died, my father told him all about
Gaukur’s Saga
, and the ring. It was something else I was upset about: letting the secret out to someone outside the family. The pastor was an expert on folk legends and the two of them discussed where the ring might be. So they went off on expeditions together.
‘My mother didn’t like them going off, either. She thought all this Ísildur and Gaukur and magic ring stuff was very weird. I honestly don’t think my father told her anything about it until after they were married and it was too late.’
He smiled. ‘Of course they never found it.’
‘Do you believe it exists?’ Árni asked, wide eyed.
‘I did then,’ Pétur said. ‘I’m not at all sure now.’ A note of anger crept into his voice. ‘I don’t think about the ring or the damned saga at all now. My stupid father went off into the hills when a snowstorm was forecast and blundered over a cliff. Gaukur and his ring did that. It didn’t need to exist to kill him.’
‘What about your sister, Ingileif?’ Magnus asked. ‘Was she involved in all this?’
‘No,’ said Pétur. ‘She knew about the saga, of course, but not about the ring.’
‘Do you see much of her?’
‘Now and again. After my father died I drifted away from the family. Ran away, more like. I couldn’t handle it. All the ring stuff;
it seemed to me that it had killed him. And I felt that I should have stopped him from looking for the ring, like my grandfather told me to. Of course, there was nothing I could do, I was only fifteen, but at that age you sometimes think you have more power than you really do.
‘I dropped out of high school, went to London. Then, after I came back, I started to see Ingileif a bit. She was angry with me: she thought I had abandoned our mother.’ Pétur grimaced. ‘I guess she was right.’
‘Do you know if she was still involved with Agnar?’
‘I doubt it very much,’ Pétur said. ‘But he was the natural person for her to go to when she wanted to sell the saga.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘You don’t suspect her of killing him, do you?’
Magnus shrugged. ‘We are keeping an open mind. She wasn’t altogether straight with us when we first spoke to her.’
‘She was just trying to cover up her mistake. She should never have tried to sell the saga, and she knew it. But Ingileif is honest through and through. It’s inconceivable she killed anyone; she’s incapable of it. I’m actually very fond of her, always have been. She’d do anything for her friends or her family. She was the one of the three of us who looked after Mum at the end, when she was dying of cancer. You know the gallery is in trouble?’
Magnus nodded.
‘Well, that’s why she needed the money from the saga. To pay out her partners. She blames herself. I told her not to worry too much about it; it’s business. A venture goes wrong, you drop it, pick yourself up, and go on to something else. But she doesn’t think that way. Everyone is going bust in Iceland these days.’
The door to the club opened and three more musicians came in, lugging big bags of musical instruments and electronics. This lot were a little older, a little hairier.
‘I’ll be with you in a minute,’ Pétur said to them. Then, turning back to Magnus and Árni, ‘Ingileif’s had a tough life. First her father, then her stepfather, then her mother, all on top of losing her business.’
‘Stepfather?’ Magnus asked.
‘Yeah. Mum married again. A drunken arsehole called Sigursteinn. I never met him, it all happened when I was in London.’
‘They separated?’
‘No, he got drunk in Reykjavík. Fell off the harbour wall and killed himself. A good thing all round from what I have heard. Mum never got over it, though.’
Magnus nodded. ‘As you say, tough for her. And for you.’
Pétur shrugged. ‘I ran away from it all. Ingileif stayed to do what she could. She always did.’
‘And your other sister? Birna?’
Pétur shook his head. ‘She’s pretty much screwed up.’
‘Thank you, Pétur,’ Magnus said, getting to his feet. ‘One last question. What were you doing the night Agnar died?’
At first Pétur seemed taken aback by the question, but then he smiled. ‘I suppose that’s something you have to ask?’
Magnus waited.
‘What day was that?’
‘Thursday the twenty-third. The first day of summer.’
‘The clubs were busy that night. I spent the evening moving from one to the other. Now if you will excuse me, I have some music to listen to. I just hope these guys are better than the last lot.’
Á
RNI DROVE MAGNUS
out towards Birna Ásgrímsdóttir’s house in Gardabaer, a suburb of Reykjavík.
Magnus’s headache was getting worse. ‘Check out Pétur’s alibi, Árni,’ Magnus said.
‘Is he a suspect?’ Árni said, surprised.
‘Everyone’s a suspect,’ Magnus said.
‘I thought you were certain Steve Jubb killed Agnar.’
‘Just do it!’ Magnus growled.
They drove through the grey suburbs. ‘By the way, I heard back from the Australian Elvish expert,’ Árni said. ‘He figured out what
kallisarvoinen
means.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘It’s Finnish. Apparently Tolkien liked the Finnish language, found it interesting. A lot of Quenya words come from Finnish as does much of the grammar. Our friend wondered whether Jubb and Isildur might have used Finnish vocabulary when there wasn’t an existing Quenya word. So he looked up
kallisarvoinen
in a Finnish dictionary.’
‘And?’
‘It means “precious”.’
‘Precious? That’s the word Gollum used for the ring in
Lord of the Rings
.’
‘That’s right.’
Magnus recalled the SMS from Steve Jubb.
Saw Agnar. He has kallisarvoinen.
‘So Steve Jubb thought that Agnar had the ring,’ he said. ‘That’s what he wanted to sell for five million bucks.’
‘We haven’t found an old ring amongst Agnar’s stuff,’ Árni said.
‘Perhaps Steve Jubb took it,’ Magnus said. ‘After he killed him.’
‘And did what with it? We didn’t find it in his hotel room.’
‘Hid it perhaps.’
‘Where?’
Magnus sighed. ‘God knows. Or perhaps he mailed it back to Isildur in California. No one remembered Steve Jubb mailing a package at the Post Office, but he could easily have slipped a ring into an envelope and dropped it in a mail box.’
‘But Jubb sent the text message to Isildur
after
he had come back from seeing Agnar. That suggests that Agnar still had it, or at least Jubb thought he had.’
Magnus saw Árni’s point.
‘Do you really think that Agnar found the ring?’ Árni said. ‘He only heard about it on Sunday. The e-mail was sent on Tuesday. People have devoted years to looking for it and haven’t found it. Unless it was a fake?’
‘That would be just as hard to arrange in a hurry. Harder. Faking a thousand-year-old ring is a major job. And you can bet that Isildur wouldn’t shell out five million bucks without checking out what he was buying pretty thoroughly.’
‘You’re not suggesting it’s real?’ said Árni. ‘That the ring that Gaukur took from Ísildur survived?’
‘Of course not,’ said Magnus irritably. But then, as he had just pointed out, it was hard to see how the ring could be a fake. Perhaps it was an older fake, the work of Ingileif’s grandfather? Patience. All would become clear in time.
Chastened, Árni was silent for a minute. ‘So what do we do?’ he asked eventually.
‘Tell Baldur. Look for likely hiding places. See if we’ve missed anything.’ Magnus glared at Árni. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?’
‘I only got the response this morning.’
‘You could have told me back at the station.’
‘Sorry.’
Magnus turned away to look out of the window at the grey boxes. He was lumbered with an idiot. And he wished his headache would go away.
Birna Ásgrímsdóttir lived in a new concrete house with a bright red roof in a new development. Each house had its patch of lawn, together with optimistically planted saplings. Expensive SUVs littered the driveways. Wealthy. Comfortable. Soulless.
Birna herself was softer, rounder and older than Ingileif. She had big blue eyes and pouting lips. She could have been attractive, but there was something sagging and sloppy about her. Two lines pointed downwards from the corners of her mouth. She was wearing tight, bulging jeans and a bright orange top.
When she saw Magnus, she smiled, her eyes lingering over his body before moving up to his face.
‘Hello,’ she said.
‘Hello,’ said Magnus, disconcerted despite himself. ‘We are from the Metropolitan Police. We have come to ask you about the murder of Professor Agnar Haraldsson.’
‘How nice,’ said Birna. ‘Come in. Can I get you something to drink?’
‘Just coffee,’ said Magnus.
Árni nodded. ‘Me too,’ he said, his voice a little hoarse. This woman had presence.
They sat in the living room, waiting for the coffee. The furniture was new and characterless, and the room was dominated by a truly massive television, on which was some daytime American TV show in English that Magnus vaguely recognized. Satellite.
Dotted around the living room were photographs. Most of them were of a stunning blonde girl of about eighteen wearing swimsuits and various sashes. Birna. A younger Birna. There were also a couple of pictures of a suave, dark-haired man wearing the uniform of Icelandair.
Birna returned with the coffee. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t think I can help you much, but I’ll try.’
‘Did you ever meet Agnar?’
‘No, never. You know about the family saga, I take it?’
‘Yes, yes we do.’
‘Well, Ingileif was handling all the negotiations. She did ask me whether I objected to her selling the thing, and I told her I didn’t give a toss.’
‘Did she tell you how the negotiations were progressing?’
‘No. In fact I haven’t spoken to her since then.’
‘Did she mention a ring?’
Birna laughed out loud. ‘You don’t mean Gaukur’s ring?’
‘It seems that your grandfather found it sixty years ago, but then he hid it again. Agnar may have found it more recently, or he may have claimed he did.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Birna said. ‘If there ever was a ring it was lost centuries ago. Let me tell you something,’ she said, leaning forward towards Magnus. He could smell some kind of alcohol on her breath. In his current state it was all he could do not to recoil. ‘That ring and that saga are just trouble. It’s all a load of bullshit. Don’t believe a word of it. I tell you Ingileif should have sold the damn thing, especially if she could have done it in secret.’
‘Are you and Ingileif close?’
Birna leaned back in her chair. ‘That’s a good question. We were once, very. After my father died my mother married again, and I had some trouble with my stepfather. Even though she was two years younger than me, Ingileif helped me a lot. Got me through it. But after that, we kind of drifted apart. We lead different lives now. I married a jerk, and Ingileif does her designer stuff.’
‘Trouble with your stepfather?’
Birna looked at Magnus again, this time at his eyes, as if deciding whether to trust him. ‘Is this relevant to your investigation?’
Magnus shrugged. ‘It might be. I won’t know until you tell me.’
Birna pulled out a packet of cigarettes, and after offering one to Magnus and Árni, lit up.
‘I was fourteen when my father died. I was a pretty girl.’ She nodded towards the photographs. ‘My mother got it into her head that I should become Miss Iceland. She became obsessed with it. As bad as Dad and his saga. I think it might have been a way of trying to deal with his death, putting it out of her mind. Of course it didn’t work.’
She smiled. ‘I never managed better than third, but Mum and I tried really hard. In the middle of all that, she married Sigursteinn, who was some kind of car dealer from Selfoss. I could tell the minute I met him that Sigursteinn fancied me. It took him less than a month after he got married before he, well …’ she took a deep drag of her cigarette. ‘Well, he raped me really. I didn’t think that at the time, but it
was
rape. He wanted sex with me, I was scared of him. It happened. Lots of times.’