was very conspicuous. Magnus stooped over the corpse and examined its eyes. “No, he’s unlikely to have drowned at sea,” he said. “Salty water is a strong irritant of the mucous membrane of the eyes, so if he had, they’d be redder than that. The man probably drowned in clean freshwater.”
Magnus pulled the sheet back over the body and said, “It should be added that the man had a damaged liver and that he would have died within a few years if he hadn’t stopped drinking.”
“There’s just one thing I don’t get,” said Dagbjartur. “The report that my colleagues who went to the island sent said that the body was covered in blood on the scene. But if he’d been dead when he was carved up, there shouldn’t have been any bleeding, isn’t that right?”
“Exactly,” said Magnus with a tinge of recognition in his voice. “Everything therefore indicates that he died lying on his back and even with his legs in the air. The blood accumulated in the back and the cuts then released it. The arteries were also severed, so one could expect to see a lot of blood on the outside of the body.”
“Can you imagine how he might have drowned in such a position?” Dagbjartur asked.
“I don’t have any explanation that I could put down on paper with a clear conscience.”
“But could you hazard an off-the-record guess?”
Magnus glanced at the detective over his glasses and reflected a moment. Finally, he said, “I once read about a case in a specialized magazine about a man who murdered his three wives at various intervals of a period of some years. He approached them all when they were lying in the bathtub, grabbed them by the calves, and hoisted their legs in the air. That way their heads hit the bottom and they drowned without being able to save themselves. There were no wounds on the body, so it was always considered to be an accident. This happened in three different cities, so no one knew of the previous wife when the next one died. Finally someone recognized a pattern between them and the case was investigated. The police tested the method, so a woman who was a good swimmer was asked to lie in the bathtub and then her legs were hoisted in the same way. The woman almost died in the experiment. Don’t quote me on this, but that’s what could have happened, and the man could have been lying with his legs in the air like that for quite some time. The bruise on the head could have been caused by the brim of the bathtub.”
Question thirty-three: Bui’s response to losing his chin. Fifth letter. In the battle between the Jomsvikings and Earl Hakon, Thorkel jumped from his ship on board Bui’s with a sword in his hand and cut off Bui’s chin and lip, causing a row of his teeth to drop onto the deck. After Bui received the wound, he said, “That Danish woman in Borgundarholm won’t be as keen to kiss me now, if I ever get home.” Bui then struck Thorkel, striking him in the middle and slicing him in two.
“My father thinks the answer is in the words ‘that Danish woman.’ The fifth letter is d.”
Kjartan looked at the note containing the list of answers and said, “The guest’s answer was ‘sliced Thorkel in two.’”
“That means there are two possible answers to this question, the letters d and e.”
CHAPTER 50
Thorolfur took a short break from the questioning when a member of the crew from the coast guard ship appeared with a big envelope, which he handed to him. Johanna stood up and stepped outside to breathe in some fresh air. Both inspectors were smoking, and the classroom was getting very stuffy. Grimur stood up from his seat in the school corridor and walked outside with her. Hogni had gone over to Gudjon in Radagerdi to help him build the casket for Bjorn Snorri.
“Still raining,” she said.
Grimur looked at the weather. “Someone once said don’t wish for rainfall if you don’t like getting your feet wet. The fields were getting pretty dry and the wells were low.”
“I still need to learn that all weather serves its purpose,” said Johanna.
They stood there in silence until Thorolfur came out and told Johanna that the interview could resume. She took a deep breath and walked back in.
Thorolfur asked Grimur to look for Kjartan, the magistrate’s assistant, and to summon him for the final interview. Then he went back into the classroom and sat opposite Johanna.
“We just got a message from Reykjavik,” he said. “We sent them a list of all the people who were on the island and compared it with a list of all the names that cropped up in their investigation into Bryngeir down south, and it turns out that your name pops up.”
“That’s not unlikely.”
“When did you first meet Bryngeir?”
“In my second year at high school.”
“How did you meet?”
Johanna thought a moment and finally said, “I wrote an essay about the Tale of Sarcastic Halli in the Flatey Book. I sometimes used the Flatey Book as assignment material in high school when I was lazy. I knew the material so well, having listened to my father’s countless lectures about it in five different languages over the years, so I could write pretty good essays on the subject quite fast. I got good grades for this assignment, and it appeared in the school magazine. Bryngeir was taking his finals that year and was really into Icelandic philology. He was reading the printed edition of the Flatey Book every night at the time and felt the urge to meet me after reading my essay. I wasn’t enthusiastic about it because I was engaged to Einar Fridriksson, whom I mentioned earlier. I’d met Einar in Copenhagen when I was fifteen years old and he was seventeen. We were good friends back then and later developed a crush on each other when we got a bit older. His parents were studying and working in Denmark. As I told you, they moved back to Iceland at the same time as my dad and I did. At that time Einar was in his last year at the high school, in the same class as Bryngeir.”
“You mentioned he died?”
“Yes, he died in a horrible accident.”
“What happened?”
“Einar was invited to join a weird students’ cultural club called the Jomsviking Society. It was a semi-secret club for snobby, vain young men. New members were initiated into the society through some ridiculous ritual, and there was a terrible accident at it and Einar died.”
“What kind of accident?”
“The initiation involved a reenactment of the execution of the Jomsvikings after their defeat in battle against Earl Hakon. The members acted out the scene from the saga, reciting the dialogue between the Jomsvikings and the earl’s men like in a play. The initiate had to kneel under a sword, which was then dropped. Naturally, he was supposed to move his head out of the way at the last second, just like Sveinn Buason did in the story. It was a perfectly harmless game, even though the sword was sharp and heavy. On this occasion, however, they were unusually drunk. Something went wrong, and the sword landed on Einar’s head.”
“Who was it that swung the sword?” Thorolfur asked.
“Don’t you know?”
“Yes, but I want to hear it from you.”
Johanna stared at the policeman for a long moment without betraying any emotion and then finally said, “It was Kjartan, the magistrate’s assistant in Patreksfjordur.”
Thorolfur broke into a numb smile. “Yes, it was Kjartan, and he was convicted of manslaughter and spent a few years in prison. It must have been a tough experience for him to meet you here again. The man who killed your boyfriend?”
Johanna sank into a long silence.
“Yes, it was difficult, but not in the way you imagine,” she finally said.
“In what way then?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I love long stories.”
“Very well then, you’ll get a long story. I was devastated when Einar died. He was a particularly bright and good young man. I’m not just saying that because of our teenage romance. Now that I’m an adult I can still recall
