‘Like who?’ Baldur said.
‘Isildur. This Lawrence Feldman guy.’ As soon as he said it Magnus regretted it.
Baldur spotted the flaw immediately. ‘You contacted Isildur two days later, and he replied from a computer located in California.’
‘An Icelandic accomplice. There are Lord of the Rings fans in this country.’
‘There is no record of any Icelandic number on Steve Jubb’s mobile phone, apart from Agnar’s. We know that Steve Jubb never left his hotel from the time he arrived in Reykjavik in the morning to the time he went out to Lake Thingvellir late afternoon. None of the hotel staff recalls anyone visiting him at the hotel.’
‘Someone could have gone directly to his room without stopping at the front desk.’
Baldur just raised his eyebrows.
‘Don’t tell me you’re going to spring him?’ Magnus asked.
‘Not yet. And I’m not ruling him out as a suspect. But we need to widen the investigation. Look at the more real-world circumstances.’ Baldur counted them off on his fingers. ‘Agnar saw a lover and a former lover in the weeks before he died. His wife was seriously angry about his infidelity. He had big money problems. He bought drugs. Maybe he had debts we don’t know about? Maybe he owed his dealer money? Someone else was there that night and we need to find out who.’
‘So it’s just a coincidence he was negotiating this deal with Jubb and Isildur?’
‘Why not?’ said Baldur. ‘Look. We shouldn’t rule out this saga deal completely. If you like, you can focus on that. But there are plenty of other things for the rest of the team to look at.’
‘I’m sure if I went to California I could get Isildur to-’
‘No,’ said Baldur.
Several time zones to the west, it was early morning in the woods of Trinity County, Northern California. Isildur looked out of his study over the little valley towards the waterfall tumbling down from the bare rock face opposite. The morning sunlight glistened off the rain-washed greenery. In the garden he could see the life-sized shapes of Gandalf, Legolas and Elrond, bronze sculptures he had commissioned at great expense from a San Francisco artist.
It was a beautiful spot. He had bought it with a fraction of the money he had made from selling his share in 4Portal the year before. He had been looking for a hideaway in the woods to concentrate on his projects and had found the perfect place. Alpine mountains on three sides, a small winding road on the fourth leading down through forests to the nearest very small town ten miles away.
It was a place where he could think.
He had named it Rivendell, naturally, after the sanctuary that the Fellowship of the Ring had rested in. He remembered when he had first read of Rivendell, when he was seventeen, and he had had a clear vision in his mind of the place, surrounded by woods, mountains, running water, peace, tranquillity.
This was it.
He had been working on two projects. The one that had taken most of his time was his attempt to coordinate the collation of an online dictionary of two of Tolkien’s Elvish languages, Quenya and Sindarin. The project had turned out to be much more frustrating than he had thought. Tolkien had never laid down hard and fast grammar rules and vocabulary, so there were many differing interpretations of the two languages. Isildur knew that: the whole point about his dictionary was that it would be flexible enough to deal with the different dialects that had grown up over time. Trouble was his collaborators were not of a flexible frame of mind.
The project had descended into acrimony and abuse. He had hoped that as the provider of the money he would have the final say. It turned out that he was indeed a unifying figure: the authority they all loved to hate.
His other project was to try to track down Gaukur’s Saga. He had first become aware of it a few years before, through an Internet forum. He had put together a Danish academic who had discovered echoes of the lost saga in an eighteenth-century letter he had turned up, with Gimli, an Englishman whose grandfather had studied at Leeds University under Tolkien. The details were frustratingly vague, but Isildur was willing to spend big money to flesh them out.
And he did all this from the computer in his study at Rivendell.
He had never been overseas. He had been brought up in New Jersey, and spent all his vacations as a child with his family on the Jersey Shore. He had majored in electrical engineering at Stanford in California, and spent his career in Silicon Valley. He was a gifted programmer, intuitive, focused, able to make connections. 4Portal was his second venture, a company that developed software for advertising portals on cell phones. It was spectacularly successful, and Isildur’s six per cent share had been converted to many millions when he and his more commercial minded partners sold out.
The plan was that after a year or so in Rivendell, he would go back to the Valley and try something else.
Once he had Gaukur’s Saga in his possession. And the ring.
The last few weeks had been a rollercoaster ride of rising expectations and disappointments. First, the message from Agnar that he had found the saga. Then, a couple of weeks later that he had actually found Isildur’s ring. Gimli’s excited reports that the saga might indeed be real and that there was a deal to be done, and then it had all gone wrong.
Agnar was dead. Gimli was in jail. The police had the saga.
And the ring was out there, somewhere in Iceland, and he had no way of knowing where.
Isildur had done what he could from Rivendell. He had procured the best legal representation for Gimli. But it was becoming clear that if he was to find the ring, he would have to go to Iceland himself.
He had a passport, ordered before a planned trip to New Zealand to see where the movies were made. He had abandoned the trip at the last minute in a fit of nervousness. Had gotten as far as the airport, but never made it on to the plane.
That nervousness had to be overcome.
He turned to his computer screen and called up a travel website.
Magnus spent the rest of the day talking to the police officers who had searched the summer house and Agnar’s house, as well as Steve Jubb’s hotel room. No sign of anything resembling a ring.
He went to see Linda, Agnar’s wife at her house in Seltjarnarnes. She tolerated his intrusion with barely concealed irritation. She was tall and thin with blonde hair and a drawn face. With a baby and a toddler to look after, she was barely holding things together.
She was an angry woman. Angry with her husband, angry with the police, angry with the bank, the lawyers, the fridge door that wouldn’t shut properly, the broken window that Agnar hadn’t got fixed, angry at the great big enormous hole in her life.
Magnus felt for her, and for her two children. Whatever Agnar’s sins, whatever his infidelities, he hadn’t deserved to die.
Yet another family blown apart by murder. Magnus had seen so many over the course of his career. And he did all he could for each and every one of them.
Of course she hadn’t seen any bloody ring. He searched the house for possible hiding places, but found nothing. At eight o’clock he left, taking the bus back to the centre of Reykjavik. He hadn’t yet been allocated the use of a police-owned car, and he had left Arni behind.
His conversation with Baldur had shaken him. He understood Baldur’s point, that was the trouble. He couldn’t figure out how Steve Jubb could have murdered Agnar and disposed of his body without getting his feet dirty.
But he just couldn’t accept that Jubb had gone to see Agnar about a secret multi-million dollar deal, and then Agnar had been murdered for some totally unrelated reason a couple of hours later.
His intuition told him that just didn’t make sense. And, like Baldur, he trusted his intuition.
He stopped off at the Krambud convenience store opposite the Hallgrimskirkja, and bought himself a Thai curry to heat up. When he got back to Katrin’s house, he shoved it in to the microwave.
‘How are you feeling?’
He turned around to see the landlady of the house making her way to the refrigerator. She was speaking English. She took out a skyr and opened it.
‘So so.’
‘Quite a night last night.’
‘Thank you for getting me into bed,’ said Magnus. He meant it, although he would rather have avoided the
