Birna looked at Magnus again, this time at his eyes, as if deciding whether to trust him. ‘Is this relevant to your investigation?’
Magnus shrugged. ‘It might be. I won’t know until you tell me.’
Birna pulled out a packet of cigarettes, and after offering one to Magnus and Arni, lit up.
‘I was fourteen when my father died. I was a pretty girl.’ She nodded towards the photographs. ‘My mother got it into her head that I should become Miss Iceland. She became obsessed with it. As bad as Dad and his saga. I think it might have been a way of trying to deal with his death, putting it out of her mind. Of course it didn’t work.’
She smiled. ‘I never managed better than third, but Mum and I tried really hard. In the middle of all that, she married Sigursteinn, who was some kind of car dealer from Selfoss. I could tell the minute I met him that Sigursteinn fancied me. It took him less than a month after he got married before he, well…’ she took a deep drag of her cigarette. ‘Well, he raped me really. I didn’t think that at the time, but it was rape. He wanted sex with me, I was scared of him. It happened. Lots of times.’
‘Ingileif found out, caught us at it, and she went crazy. She went at him with a broken bottle, but in the end it was she who was cut. Have you noticed she has a little scar on her eyebrow? And on her cheek?’
Magnus nodded.
‘Well, that was Sigursteinn. Ingileif told Mum, who didn’t believe her. There was the most almighty family row. Ingileif was thrown out of the house, I was too scared to say anything. Then, three months later, Sigursteinn was on a business trip to Reykjavik when he fell into the harbour. I was so relieved.’
‘How did your mother react?’
‘She was totally distraught. She went as far as accusing Ingileif of killing him, which was just stupid. Then I told her exactly what he had done to me, and eventually she believed it.’ Birna stared, her big blue eyes unblinking. ‘That pretty much mucked up our family.’
‘I can imagine,’ said Magnus.
‘Ingileif went away to Reykjavik. In recent years she started speaking to Mum again. She spent a lot of time with her just before she died.’
‘And you?’
Birna blinked. ‘Oh, I married Matthias and have lived a perfect life of happiness ever since.’
Magnus ignored the sarcasm. ‘And Petur?’
‘He missed all this. He came back to Reykjavik a couple of years later. We see each other occasionally. But whenever we do I get the impression he feels sorry for me. Can’t think why.’
God, what a family, Magnus thought. His own was bad enough. He remembered Ingileif’s quavering voice when she had told him about the ghost of the girl accused of incest at the Hofdi House. No wonder she felt sorry for her. She was thinking of Birna.
‘One last question. Where were you last Thursday night? The first day of summer?’
Birna laughed again. ‘You can’t be serious? You don’t think I killed the poor man, do you.’
‘Just answer the question.’
Birna hesitated. ‘Do I have to?’
Magnus knew what was coming next. He was beginning to get used to the sex life of Icelanders. ‘Yes, you do. And we will have to check out whatever you tell us. But we will do it discreetly, I can promise you. And it won’t come up in any eventual trial, unless it is relevant to the prosecution.’
Birna sighed. ‘Matthias was in New York. Probably in bed with a flight attendant.’
‘And you?’
‘I was with a friend named Dagur Tomasson. He’s married as well. We spent the night in a hotel in Kopavogur. It’s anonymous and as discreet as you can get in Iceland.’
‘Which one?’
‘The Merlin.’
‘And can we have his address?’
‘I’ll give you his mobile phone number,’ said Birna. ‘It’s nothing serious,’ she continued, staring straight at Magnus. The corners of her mouth twitched upwards. ‘I don’t like to restrict myself to any one man.’
‘I think she likes you,’ said Arni five minutes later as he was driving Magnus back to station.
‘Shut up,’ growled Magnus. ‘And check out the hotel. But somehow I suspect that alibi will hold up.’
CHAPTER TWENTY
Baldur listened closely as Magnus explained his theory that Agnar was trying to sell the ring from Gaukur’s Saga to Steve Jubb and the modern-day Isildur.
‘So what are you suggesting?’ he said, when Magnus had finished. ‘We go over Agnar’s house again, looking for a mythical ring that has been lost for a thousand years? Do you know how absurd that sounds?’ The expression on Baldur’s long face verged on contempt. ‘You were brought here to bring us some big-city homicide experience. Instead you start mumbling about elves and rings like the most superstitious Icelandic grandmother. You’ll be saying the hidden people did it next.’
Magnus’s foul mood deepened. He knew that Baldur was trying to needle him, and he fought to control his anger.
‘Of course I don’t believe that the ring is really a thousand years old,’ Magnus said. ‘Look. We know Steve Jubb murdered Agnar. But since he won’t tell us why, we need to figure it out for ourselves. We also know that Agnar was trying to sell a saga – we’ve both seen it. It exists.’
Baldur shook his head. ‘All we’ve seen is a hundred and twenty pages that was spat out of a computer printer two weeks ago.’
Magnus leaned back. ‘Fair enough. Maybe the saga is a forgery. Maybe there is a ring, but it’s a fake too. If anything, that would create a bigger motive for Steve Jubb to kill Agnar. We still need to find it.’
‘The thing is, I’m not sure that Steve Jubb did murder Agnar.’
Magnus snorted.
‘I’ve just interviewed him again. He wouldn’t tell me anything about sagas or rings. But he did deny he murdered Agnar.’
‘And you believe him?’
‘Yes, actually. My hunch is he’s telling the truth.’
‘Your hunch?’
Baldur found a sheet of paper in the pile on his desk. ‘Here’s a report from the forensics lab.’
Magnus scanned it. It was an analysis of the soil samples on Steve Jubb’s size forty-five shoes.
‘It shows that there were no traces of the kind of mud on the path from the summer house down to the lake shore, or the mud on the shore itself.’
Magnus read the report, his mind buzzing. ‘Maybe Jubb cleaned his shoes. Thoroughly.’
‘There was soil from the area right in front of the summer house. So he was at the front that evening, but not at the back. And he didn’t clean his shoes.’
‘Perhaps he changed into boots? Ditched them afterwards?’
‘We’d have found footprints in or around the house,’ Baldur said. ‘And that’s pretty unlikely, isn’t it?’
Magnus stared at the piece of paper, not reading the words, just trying to figure out how Jubb could have dragged the body down to the lake without getting mud on his shoes. He found it impossible to believe that Jubb’s presence at the summer house that evening was just coincidence.
‘Someone else moved Agnar,’ Baldur said. ‘ After Steve Jubb had left. And it’s quite probable that someone else killed him.’
‘Did you find footprints near the lake?’
Baldur shook his head. ‘Nothing useful. It had rained overnight. And the scene was well and truly compromised. The kids, their father, the paramedics, the police officers from Selfoss. They left footprints all over the place.’
‘An accomplice then,’ said Magnus.
