Like it or not, Magnus’s best shot at hurting Soto and protecting Colby was to lie low, stay in Iceland, and testify at Lenahan’s trial.
He handed the key card to the receptionist. As he was leaving the hotel, he passed a small man with a scruffy beard coming in, wheeling a suitcase behind him. The man was wearing a green baseball cap proclaiming ‘Frodo Lives’.
Magnus held the door open.
‘Oh, er, thank you very much, sir,’ the man said, nervously. The language was English, the accent American.
‘No problem,’ said Magnus.
The Hótel Borg shared a square with the Parliament building, the site of the weekly Saturday afternoon demonstrations over the winter. As Magnus walked across it towards the police-department silver Skoda that he had signed out that morning, he wondered about the cap. Strange, he had never thought about
Lord of the Rings
memorabilia before. Was he going to be stopped short by every Gollum or Gandalf T-shirt he came across? Were there really that many of them?
No. There weren’t.
He turned on his heel and returned to the lobby in time to see the elevator door closing behind the wheeled suitcase.
‘What was the name of the guest who just checked in?’ he asked the receptionist.
‘Mr Feldman,’ she said. Then, glancing at her computer screen. ‘Lawrence Feldman.’
‘Which room?’
‘Three-ten.’
‘Thank you.’
Magnus gave Feldman a minute to get himself into his room and then took the elevator up to the third floor. He knocked on the door of Room 310.
The man answered.
‘Isildur?’ said Magnus.
Feldman blinked. ‘Who are you?’
‘My name is Sergeant Detective Jonson. I’m working with the Reykjavik Metropolitan Police. Can I come in?’
‘Er, I guess so,’ said Feldman. His suitcase and his jacket were on the bed, together with the baseball cap. Magnus could hear the sound of the lavatory cistern refilling from the bathroom.
‘Take a load off,’ said Magnus, indicating the bed. Feldman sat on it, and Magnus pulled out the chair behind the desk.
Feldman looked tired. His brown eyes were quick and intelligent, but rimmed with red blood vessels. His skin was a waxy pale underneath the scrappy beard.
‘Just flown in?’ Magnus asked.
‘You followed me in from the airport?’ said Feldman. ‘I guess you knew I would check in at the Borg.’
Magnus just grunted. Feldman was right, they should have known there was a good chance that he would show up in Iceland sooner or later. They should have been checking the airports. And the Hótel Borg was the natural place to stay. But Magnus decided not to explain to Feldman that it was just dumb luck that he had spotted him.
He thought about Árni, currently high over the Midwest on his way to California. It was all he could do not to smile to himself.
‘Should I get a lawyer here?’ Feldman asked.
‘Good question,’ said Magnus. ‘There’s no doubt you’re in deep shit. And if this was the States, then I would definitely advise it. But here? I don’t know.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, here they can lock you up for three weeks if they think you’re a suspect. That’s what happened to Steve Jubb. He’s in the
top-security jail at Litla Hraun now. I could easily send you in there with him, if you don’t cooperate. I mean we’re looking at conspiracy to murder.’
Feldman just blinked.
‘These Icelandic places are tough. Full of these big blond beefy Vikings. Oh, don’t worry, they’ll like you. They like little guys.’ Feldman shifted uncomfortably on the bed. ‘A lot of them are shep-herds, you know, stuck up on a hillside all alone with a flock of sheep. They break the law – rape, incest, indecent acts with herbivores, that kind of thing. They get caught. They go to prison. No women, no sheep. What’s a big blond Viking guy going to do?’ Magnus smiled. ‘That’s where you come in.’
For a moment Magnus thought he had gone too far, but Feldman seemed to be buying it. He was tired, disoriented, in a foreign country.
Of course Magnus had absolutely no idea what conditions at Litla Hraun were really like. Knowing Iceland he rather suspected that the warders brought the prisoners hot cocoa and slippers every night as the inmates watched the latest soap on TV and knitted themselves scarves.
‘So, if I talk to you now, you’ll guarantee you won’t send me there?’
Magnus looked directly at Feldman. ‘That kinda depends on what you tell me.’
Feldman swallowed. ‘I didn’t have anything to do with Agnar’s murder. And I really don’t think that Gimli did either.’
‘OK,’ said Magnus. ‘Let’s start from the beginning. Tell me about Gaukur’s ring.’
‘I like to call it Isildur’s ring,’ said Feldman. ‘I changed my online nickname to Isildur when I first heard the story.’
‘What was it before?’ Magnus asked.
‘Elrond. The lord of Rivendell.’
‘All right. So tell me about Isildur’s ring.’
‘I first heard about it three years ago. A Danish guy, Jens Pedersen, popped up on one of the websites saying he had found a
letter from a poet who was an old friend of Árni Magnússon in Copenhagen. The poet had read
Gaukur’s Saga
. There were a couple of sentences about Ísildur’s quest to throw the ring into Mount Hekla.
‘Now, this Danish guy was an academic doing his PhD thesis on the poet. He wanted some help from the forum to see if there was any link between
Gaukur’s Saga
and the
Lord of the Rings
. Of course, we all went wild: he didn’t know what had hit him. I tried to contact him directly to pay him to do more research on this saga. I think I tempted him at first; he said he had been in touch with a Professor of Icelandic at the University of Iceland named Agnar Haraldsson, who had given him some help about Gaukur and his lost saga. But then he went quiet.’ Feldman sighed. ‘I think he thought I was some kind of weirdo.’
Magnus let that ride. ‘Have you heard from him recently?’
Feldman shook his head. ‘No, but I know where he is.’
Magnus raised his eyebrows.
Feldman explained. ‘He finished his PhD and is now teaching history at a high school in a town in Denmark called Odense. I’m in touch with one of his students.’
‘What? A high-school student? How old is he?’
‘Seventeen, I think. He’s a big LOTR fan.’
There was something distinctly creepy about Lawrence Feldman being able to recruit a Danish schoolboy over the Internet to spy for him. In fact, there was something distinctly creepy about Lawrence Feldman.
‘So how does Steve Jubb fit into this?’ Magnus asked.
‘Gimli? I met him through the same forum. He mentioned a story his grandfather had told him. Apparently he was a student at Leeds University in the 1920s and was taught by Tolkien, who was a professor there. One evening he had been drinking beer with an Icelandic fellow student and Tolkien. The Icelander was a bit drunk and began telling Tolkien about
Gaukur’s Saga
, about the Ring of Andvari being found by a Viking called Ísildur and how Ísildur was told to throw it into Mount Hekla. The story
made a big impression on Gimli’s grandfather, and on Tolkien, apparently.
‘Thirty years later, when he read
Lord of the Rings
, the grandfather was struck by the similarity of the stories.’
‘Did he write any of this down?’
‘No. He told Gimli about it when Gimli first read
The Hobbit
. Of course it fascinated him, and that’s why Gimli became a
Lord of the Rings
fan. I checked the grandfather out. His name was Arthur Jubb and he was a student at Leeds in the 1920s. Tolkien was a professor there and set up a Viking Club where they all seem to have gotten drunk and sung songs. But there’s nothing in Tolkien’s published correspondence about the saga. Have you seen the two letters to Högni Ísildarson?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you’ll know why. Tolkien had promised to keep the family saga secret.’
Magnus nodded.
‘So I teamed up with Gimli. I don’t like to travel. Matter of fact this is my first time outside the States, but Gimli’s a smart guy, and being a truck driver, he travels all the time. So I said I would provide the funding, and he would do the legwork and we would find
Gaukur’s Saga
.
‘Gimli’s grandfather never told him the name of the Icelandic student, so Gimli started out going to Leeds to look for it. No luck.’
‘I’d have thought the university would keep records.’
‘Bombed in World War Two, apparently. So then Gimli went to Iceland. Saw Professor Haraldsson, who was interested but couldn’t help very much. We’d kinda drawn a blank. Until a month or so ago, when Professor Haraldsson got in touch with Gimli. A former student had approached him with
Gaukur’s Saga
and wanted to sell it. You can imagine how excited Gimli and I were, but we had to give Haraldsson time to translate it into English.’
‘How much was he asking?’
‘Only two million dollars. But the deal was that the saga would have to be kept a secret. I kinda liked that idea. So we set a date for Gimli to fly to Iceland to see Haraldsson. Gimli went to meet him at the summer house on Lake Thingvellir, where he read the saga. But they couldn’t agree on a final price, and the professor didn’t actually have the original saga with him. So Gimli came back here to the hotel.’
‘From where he sent you an SMS?’
‘That’s right. I called him back and we figured out a strategy for how we were going to negotiate for the saga. He was going out to meet Agnar again the next day, but the next thing Gimli heard the professor was dead and he was a suspect for murder.’
‘What about the ring?’
‘The ring?’ Feldman said. He was trying to feign innocent surprise, but failing badly.
‘Yeah, the ring,’ said Magnus. ‘The
kallisarvoinen
. Your precious. It’s a Finnish word. We figured that out. And Agnar wanted five million bucks for it.’
Feldman sighed. ‘Yes, the ring. The professor said he knew where it was and he could get it for us, but it would cost us five million.’
‘So he didn’t have it at the summer house?’
‘No. He gave Gimli no idea where it might be. But he was confident he could get hold of it. For the right amount of money.’
‘Did you believe him?’
Feldman hesitated. ‘We
wanted
to believe him, of course. That would have been the coolest discovery in history. But we knew we were wide open to being ripped off. So I started to work on lining up an expert to examine the ring once we got a hold of it. Someone who would keep quiet about it afterwards.’
‘Steve Jubb never saw it?’
‘No,’ said Feldman.
Magnus leaned back in his chair and studied Feldman.
‘Did Jubb kill the professor?’
‘No,’ said Feldman immediately.
‘Are you sure?’
Feldman hesitated. ‘Pretty sure.’
‘But not absolutely positive?’
Feldman shrugged. ‘That wasn’t part of the plan. But I wasn’t there.’
Magnus accepted the validity of the point. ‘How well do you know Jubb?’
Feldman looked away from Magnus, out of the window at the naked branches of the trees in the square, and the top of the statue of a distinguished nineteenth-century Icelander. ‘That’s a difficult question to answer. I’ve never met him or spoken to him. I don’t know what he looks like, what he sounds like. But on the other hand I’ve been communicating with him online for the last couple of years. I know a lot about him.’
‘Do you trust him?’
‘I did,’ said Feldman.
‘But now you are not so sure?’
Feldman shook his head. ‘I genuinely don’t believe that Gimli killed the professor. There would be no reason to, and we never discussed anything like that. Gimli never struck me as being violent. People get aggressive online when they are anonymous, but Gimli never was. He thought flaming was plain dumb. But I can’t be one hundred per cent sure he’s innocent, no.’
‘So you came to Iceland to help him?’ Magnus asked.
‘Yeah,’ said Feldman. ‘To see what I can do. We’ve been communicating through the lawyer, Kristján Gylfason, but I wanted to do what I could myself.’
‘And look for the ring,’ Magnus said.
‘I don’t even know if there
is
a ring,’ said Feldman.
‘But you want to find out,’ said Magnus.
‘Are you going to arrest me?’ Feldman asked.
‘Not for the moment, no,’ said Magnus. ‘But I’ll take your passport. You’re not leaving Iceland. And let me tell you something. If you do find a ring, whether it’s a real one or a hoax, I want to know about it, know what I’m saying? Because it’s evidence.’ Feldman recoiled from Magnus’s stare.
Magnus doubted he had the authority to confiscate Feldman’s passport, but he also doubted that Feldman would know that. ‘And if I catch you withholding evidence, you’ll definitely be spending some nights in an Icelandic jail.’
I
NGILEIF WAS ABSORBED
in her drawing, her eyes flicking from her emerging design to the piece of tanned fish skin in front of her. It was Nile perch – the scales larger than the salmon she often used, the textures rougher. It had a wonderful light blue, translucent colour. She was designing a credit-card holder, always a popular item.