had said no.
It wasn’t that she didn’t find him attractive. Quite the contrary. She loved to pull herself tightly into his broad chest. She loved the sense of latent power and danger that hovered around him. He could be frightening when he lost his temper, but she even loved that about him. He was smart too, a great listener, and she could spend all evening just talking to him. He wasn’t Jewish, but she could deal with that, even if her mother had problems with it.
The trouble was, he was a loser. And he always would be.
It was the job, of course. With his degree from Brown he could have done much better than police work, as she had frequently pointed out to him. But he never would. He was obsessed with the job, with solving the murder of one deadbeat after another. Often Magnus was the only person anywhere who cared who had shot whom. She knew it all had to do with his father, but all that knowledge did was make her realize how hard it would be to change him.
Not hard. Impossible.
Her friend Tracey had told her it was a waste of time to try to change boyfriends. An even bigger waste of time to go into a marriage with the aim of changing your husband. It just didn’t work.
His decision to tell his Chief about the crooked detective was the last straw. It was all very honest and honourable, but it was dumb. Boston wasn’t nearly the nest of corruption it had been twenty years before, but people who took on the city establishment would never find themselves a part of it.
In her own company, a manufacturer of medical instruments, there were times when they looked the other way, didn’t ask questions. You had to, if you wanted the company to succeed. Her job was to protect the company from the legal risks of doing business, not to purge the world of dishonesty.
Magnus would never go to law school. He probably wouldn’t even make it any further up the ladder in the police department.
A loser.
Which was why when a slim, well-dressed lawyer with whom she had dealt the year before had bumped into her on the ‘T’ and asked her for a cup of coffee, she had said yes.
And why when he had called her to ask her out to dinner, she had also said yes.
His name was Richard Rubinstein. Cute, if a little too neat for her taste. Jewish, of course. She had googled him and discovered that he had just been made a partner of his downtown law firm. Which wasn’t necessarily important, but did mean he wasn’t a loser. And unlike almost everyone else she knew, he didn’t know Magnus, had never even heard of Magnus, didn’t know that she had had a boyfriend for the last three years.
She was going to enjoy herself. But not with Magnus’s earrings.
She unfastened them, replaced them with a pair of simple pearls, and headed out into the warm evening.
From a car parked across the street, Diego watched her. Checked a photograph on his lap. It was the same girl all right.
By the way she was dressed she was going out for a while. That would give him plenty of time to sneak into the building and then into her apartment without being seen.
There was still the problem of the lone cop sitting in his patrol car right outside the building. But if Diego knew anything about cops the guy would be getting hungry.
Sure enough, once the woman disappeared down the street, the patrol car started up and pulled out.
Time enough to grab a pizza or a burger before the girl returned.
Diego got out of his car and crossed the street.
Magnus walked back to his new place in Thingholt from police headquarters. He needed the exercise and the fresh air. And you could at least say this for the air in Reykjavik, it was fresh.
His mind was buzzing with the day’s events. It was way too early to tell, but according to Professor Moritz, there was nothing in the translation of Gaukur’s Saga to suggest it was a forgery. The professor was clearly desperate to believe that the saga was authentic, but he admitted that if anyone could forge a saga, Agnar could.
Which raised another interesting possibility. Perhaps Steve Jubb had somehow discovered that the document Agnar was trying to sell him for so many millions of dollars was a fake, and he had killed him because of it.
Magnus still wasn’t convinced that Ingileif was telling the whole truth. But she had seemed much more sincere when he had spoken to her that afternoon. And he had to admit that he found her mixture of vulnerability and determination attractive.
He smiled when he remembered Officer O’Malley’s wise words of advice when Magnus started on the job: ‘Just because a girl has a nice ass, it don’t mean she’s telling the truth.’
There was no doubt Ingileif had a nice ass.
Steve Jubb wasn’t going to give them anything, especially if he was as guilty as Magnus thought he was. They needed to get on a plane to California and talk to Isildur. Threaten him with a conspiracy to commit murder rap and let him sing. Magnus could do that, he was sure he could.
‘Magnus!’
He was in a little street not far from Katrin’s house, quite high up the hill. He turned to see a woman he vaguely recognized walking hesitantly towards him. She was about forty, short reddish hair, a broad face with a wide smile. Although the hair was a different colour, her face reminded him strongly of his mother. Especially here, so close to the house in which he had grown up.
She stared at him closely, frowning. ‘It is Magnus, isn’t it? Magnus Ragnarsson?’ She spoke in English.
‘Sigurbjorg?’ It was a bit of a guess on Magnus’s part. Sigurbjorg was his cousin on his mother’s side of the family. The side that he had hoped to avoid in Reykjavik.
The smile broadened. ‘That’s right. I thought it was you.’
‘How did you recognize me?’
‘I noticed you walking along the street. For a second I thought you were my father, except you’re a whole lot younger and he’s in Canada. Then I realized it must be you.’
‘We haven’t met for what, fifteen years?’
‘About that. When you came to Iceland after your father’s death.’ Sigurbjorg must have seen Magnus grimace. ‘Not an enjoyable trip for you, I seem to remember.’
‘Not really.’
‘I apologize for Grandpa. He behaved appallingly.’
Magnus nodded. ‘I haven’t been to Iceland since.’
‘Until now?’
‘Until now.’
‘Let’s get a cup of coffee and you can tell me all about it, eh?’
They walked down the hill to a funky cafe on Laugavegur. Sigurbjorg ordered a slice of carrot cake with her coffee, and they sat down next to an earnest man with glasses who was plugged in to his laptop.
‘So you came back from Canada?’ Magnus said. ‘Weren’t you in graduate school?’
‘Yes. At McGill. Actually, I had just finished when I saw you. I stayed on in Iceland. Got a law degree: I’m a partner in one of the law firms here. I’ve also picked up a husband and three kids.’
‘Congratulations.’
‘Dad and Mom are still in Toronto. Retired, of course, now.’
Sigurbjorg’s father, Magnus’s Uncle Vilhjalmur, had emigrated to Canada in the seventies and worked as a civil engineer. Like Magnus, Sigurbjorg had been born in Iceland but spent most of her childhood in North America.
‘And you? I had no idea you were in Iceland. How long have you been here?’
‘Only two days,’ Magnus replied. ‘I stayed in Boston. Became a cop. Homicide detective. Then my chief got a call that the National Police Commissioner of Iceland wanted a body to come over here and help them. He picked me.’
‘Picked you? You didn’t want to come?’
‘Let’s say I had mixed feelings.’
‘After your last visit?’ Sigurbjorg nodded. ‘That must have been rough. Especially just after your dad died.’
