Tolkien fans from America, England, the rest of Europe would want to find out everything about the document. Every corner of the secret would be raised to the glare of global publicity.
Eventually, she would probably be allowed to sell the saga. In the open, under the glare of publicity, she would no doubt get a handsome price, if the Icelandic government didn’t somehow manage to confiscate it from her. If she could just keep the gallery going for a few months longer, it might survive.
Until Agnar’s death, keeping the gallery open was the most important thing in her life. Now she appreciated how wrong she was.
The gallery was going bust because she had made a poor business judgment. The kreppa made matters worse, but she should never have trusted Nordidea. She was to blame and she should have taken the consequences.
Outside, the professor and the police climbed into their cars and drove off. Ingileif felt trapped in the tiny gallery. She grabbed her bag, switched off the light and locked up. So what if she lost a sale or two that morning?
She walked down the hill, her mind in incoherent turmoil. She soon reached the bay, and walked along the bike path which ran along the shore. She headed east, towards the solid block of Mount Esja, its top smothered in cloud. The breeze skipping in from across the water chilled her face. The sounds of Reykjavik traffic merged with the cries of seagulls. A pair of ducks paddled in circles a few yards out from the red volcanic pumice that served as a sea wall.
She felt so alone. Her mother had died a few months before, her father when she was twelve. Birna, her sister, wouldn’t care or understand. She would be sympathetic for a few minutes, but she was too self-absorbed, stuck in her nice house and her bad marriage and her bottles of vodka. She had never been interested in Gaukur’s Saga, and after their father died she had picked up their mother’s hostility to the family legend. She had told Ingileif she couldn’t care less what Ingileif did with it.
Ingileif knew she should speak to Petur, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. He had hated the saga with a passion for what he thought it had done to their father. Yet, even he had believed that it would be wrong to sell. She had assured him that Agnar would be able to do a deal while keeping the secret safe, and only then had Petur reluctantly agreed. He would be angry with her now, and justifiably so. Not much sympathy there.
He must have read about Agnar’s murder in the papers, but he hadn’t been in touch with her yet. Thank God.
It was ironic. She had been determined not to let her father’s death screw her up like it had screwed up the other members of her family. She was the sane, down-to-earth one, or so she thought.
And now poor Aggi had been murdered. Foolishly she had tried to hide the existence of the saga from the police. As a plan, that was never going to work. And even now she was hiding something.
She glanced down at her bag. Where she had slipped the envelope just before the police came to take away the saga. The other envelope.
She recalled the big red-haired detective with the slight American accent. He was trying to catch the man who had murdered Agnar, and she had some information that would be certain to help him. It was far too late to try to keep it quiet, the police would find out in the end. The betrayal had been committed, the mistake had been made, the consequences were playing themselves out. There was nothing she could do to put the saga back in its safe.
She stopped in front of the Hofdi House, the elegant white-timbered mansion where Gorbachev had met Reagan when she was six years old.
She dug the detective’s number out of her purse, and punched it into her mobile phone.
Colby was waiting on the sidewalk outside the bank when it opened. Walked straight in to the cashier, first in line, and withdrew twelve thousand dollars in cash. Then she drove to an outdoor equipment store and bought camping gear.
When the thug with the gun had left her apartment she had been too scared to scream. Richard hadn’t been any help: he had scurried out of the bathroom muttering how his legal career was too important to be caught up with criminals, and she should rethink her friendships. She had watched dully as he had scrambled to get into his clothes and left her. He forgot his jacket.
Tough.
She was glad she hadn’t told the thug about Iceland. It had been a close call, she had been so scared that she had almost given it away, but the change to Sweden at the last minute was inspired. Magnus had told her that he used to have the nickname ‘Swede’, and that had stuck in her brain.
The thug had believed her. She was sure of it.
She hoped it would take him and his friends some time to realize their mistake, but she wasn’t going to hang around. She certainly wasn’t going anywhere near Magnus. Now she took Magnus’s warnings seriously. She wasn’t taking any risks with credit cards, or hotels or friends. No one would know where she was.
She was going to disappear.
From the camp shop she went to the supermarket. Then, with the trunk full of supplies, she drove west. Her plan was eventually to head north, to Maine or New Hampshire or somewhere, and to lose herself in the wilderness. But first she had something to do. She pulled off the highway in the suburb of Wellesley. She found an Internet cafe, grabbed a cup of coffee.
The first e-mail was to her boss, telling him that she was not going to be at work and she couldn’t explain why, but he shouldn’t worry. The second was to her mother, saying more or less the same thing. There was no way to phrase it so that her mother wouldn’t drive herself demented with panic, so Colby didn’t even try.
The third was to Magnus.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It was no more than a ten-minute walk from police headquarters to the Hofdi House, where Ingileif had asked to meet Magnus. He was feeling a little better after the sausage he had picked up from the coffee shop in the bus station on his way back from the Commissioner’s office, but he still needed to do all he could to clear his head.
He felt so stupid. His apology to the National Police Commissioner had been sincere; he appreciated all the man had done for him, and Magnus had let him down. His fellow detectives had initially appeared to be in awe of him; now they would just think he was a joke. Not a good start.
He was also scared. Alcoholism ran in families. If there was a gene for it, he suspected that he had it. It had been a very close call in college. And learning about his father’s infidelity had disturbed something deep inside him. Even now, with his ears ringing with the consequences of his stupidity, part of him just wanted to take a detour to the Grand Rokk and buy a beer. And then another. Of course it would screw everything up. But that was why he wanted to do it.
This was dangerous. Somehow he had to cram what Sigurbjorg had told him back in its box.
Throwing himself into the Agnar case would help. He wondered what it was that Ingileif wanted to speak to him about. She had sounded tense on the phone.
He didn’t trust her. The more he thought about it, the more likely it seemed that the saga was a forgery drawn up by Agnar. Ingileif was his accomplice, to add authenticity. Their relationship had been very close, perhaps it still was very close, the ballet-dancing literature student notwithstanding.
The Hofdi House stood all alone in a grassy square between two busy roads that ran along the shore. A solitary figure was perched on a low wall beside the squat white building.
‘Thank you for coming,’ Ingileif said.
‘No problem,’ said Magnus. ‘That’s why I gave you my number.’
He sat next to Ingileif on the wall. They were facing the bay. A steady breeze rolled small clouds through the pale blue sky, their shadows skittering over the sparkling grey water. In the far distance Magnus could just make out the glacier of Snaefellsnes, a white blur floating above the sea.
Ingileif was tense, sitting bolt upright on the wall, shoulders back, forehead knitted in a frown accentuating the nick in her eyebrow. She looked like so many other girls in Reykjavik, slim, blonde with high cheekbones. But there was something about her that set her apart, a determination, a purposefulness, a sense that despite the
