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.’
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Arni drove Magnus out towards Birna Asgrimsdottir’s house in Gardabaer, a suburb of Reykjavik.
Magnus’s headache was getting worse. ‘Check out Petur’s alibi, Arni,’ Magnus said.
‘Is he a suspect?’ Arni 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,’ Arni 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,’ Arni 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 Arni’s point.
‘Do you really think that Agnar found the ring?’ Arni 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 Arni. ‘That the ring that Gaukur took from Isildur 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, Arni 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 Arni. ‘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 Asgrimsdottir 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.
Arni 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?’
