story.’
‘What was it before?’ Magnus asked.
‘Elrond. The lord of Rivendell.’
‘All right. So tell me about Isildur’s ring.’
‘I first heard about it three years ago. A Danish guy, Jens Pedersen, popped up on one of the websites saying he had found a letter from a poet who was an old friend of Arni Magnusson in Copenhagen. The poet had read Gaukur’s Saga. There were a couple of sentences about Isildur’s quest to throw the ring into Mount Hekla.
‘Now, this Danish guy was an academic doing his PhD thesis on the poet. He wanted some help from the forum to see if there was any link between Gaukur’s Saga and the Lord of the Rings. Of course, we all went wild: he didn’t know what had hit him. I tried to contact him directly to pay him to do more research on this saga. I think I tempted him at first; he said he had been in touch with a Professor of Icelandic at the University of Iceland named Agnar Haraldsson, who had given him some help about Gaukur and his lost saga. But then he went quiet.’ Feldman sighed. ‘I think he thought I was some kind of weirdo.’
Magnus let that ride. ‘Have you heard from him recently?’
Feldman shook his head. ‘No, but I know where he is.’
Magnus raised his eyebrows.
Feldman explained. ‘He finished his PhD and is now teaching history at a high school in a town in Denmark called Odense. I’m in touch with one of his students.’
‘What? A high-school student? How old is he?’
‘Seventeen, I think. He’s a big LOTR fan.’
There was something distinctly creepy about Lawrence Feldman being able to recruit a Danish schoolboy over the Internet to spy for him. In fact, there was something distinctly creepy about Lawrence Feldman.
‘So how does Steve Jubb fit into this?’ Magnus asked.
‘Gimli? I met him through the same forum. He mentioned a story his grandfather had told him. Apparently he was a student at Leeds University in the 1920s and was taught by Tolkien, who was a professor there. One evening he had been drinking beer with an Icelandic fellow student and Tolkien. The Icelander was a bit drunk and began telling Tolkien about Gaukur’s Saga, about the Ring of Andvari being found by a Viking called Isildur and how Isildur was told to throw it into Mount Hekla. The story made a big impression on Gimli’s grandfather, and on Tolkien, apparently.
‘Thirty years later, when he read Lord of the Rings, the grandfather was struck by the similarity of the stories.’
‘Did he write any of this down?’
‘No. He told Gimli about it when Gimli first read The Hobbit. Of course it fascinated him, and that’s why Gimli became a Lord of the Rings fan. I checked the grandfather out. His name was Arthur Jubb and he was a student at Leeds in the 1920s. Tolkien was a professor there and set up a Viking Club where they all seem to have gotten drunk and sung songs. But there’s nothing in Tolkien’s published correspondence about the saga. Have you seen the two letters to Hogni Isildarson?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you’ll know why. Tolkien had promised to keep the family saga secret.’
Magnus nodded.
‘So I teamed up with Gimli. I don’t like to travel. Matter of fact this is my first time outside the States, but Gimli’s a smart guy, and being a truck driver, he travels all the time. So I said I would provide the funding, and he would do the legwork and we would find Gaukur’s Saga.
‘Gimli’s grandfather never told him the name of the Icelandic student, so Gimli started out going to Leeds to look for it. No luck.’
‘I’d have thought the university would keep records.’
‘Bombed in World War Two, apparently. So then Gimli went to Iceland. Saw Professor Haraldsson, who was interested but couldn’t help very much. We’d kinda drawn a blank. Until a month or so ago, when Professor Haraldsson got in touch with Gimli. A former student had approached him with Gaukur’s Saga and wanted to sell it. You can imagine how excited Gimli and I were, but we had to give Haraldsson time to translate it into English.’
‘How much was he asking?’
‘Only two million dollars. But the deal was that the saga would have to be kept a secret. I kinda liked that idea. So we set a date for Gimli to fly to Iceland to see Haraldsson. Gimli went to meet him at the summer house on Lake Thingvellir, where he read the saga. But they couldn’t agree on a final price, and the professor didn’t actually have the original saga with him. So Gimli came back here to the hotel.’
‘From where he sent you an SMS?’
‘That’s right. I called him back and we figured out a strategy for how we were going to negotiate for the saga. He was going out to meet Agnar again the next day, but the next thing Gimli heard the professor was dead and he was a suspect for murder.’
‘What about the ring?’
‘The ring?’ Feldman said. He was trying to feign innocent surprise, but failing badly.
‘Yeah, the ring,’ said Magnus. ‘The kallisarvoinen. Your precious. It’s a Finnish word. We figured that out. And Agnar wanted five million bucks for it.’
Feldman sighed. ‘Yes, the ring. The professor said he knew where it was and he could get it for us, but it would cost us five million.’
‘So he didn’t have it at the summer house?’
‘No. He gave Gimli no idea where it might be. But he was confident he could get hold of it. For the right amount of money.’
‘Did you believe him?’
Feldman hesitated. ‘We wanted to believe him, of course. That would have been the coolest discovery in history. But we knew we were wide open to being ripped off. So I started to work on lining up an expert to examine the ring once we got a hold of it. Someone who would keep quiet about it afterwards.’
‘Steve Jubb never saw it?’
‘No,’ said Feldman.
Magnus leaned back in his chair and studied Feldman.
‘Did Jubb kill the professor?’
‘No,’ said Feldman immediately.
‘Are you sure?’
Feldman hesitated. ‘Pretty sure.’
‘But not absolutely positive?’
Feldman shrugged. ‘That wasn’t part of the plan. But I wasn’t there.’
Magnus accepted the validity of the point. ‘How well do you know Jubb?’
Feldman looked away from Magnus, out of the window at the naked branches of the trees in the square, and the top of the statue of a distinguished nineteenth-century Icelander. ‘That’s a difficult question to answer. I’ve never met him or spoken to him. I don’t know what he looks like, what he sounds like. But on the other hand I’ve been communicating with him online for the last couple of years. I know a lot about him.’
‘Do you trust him?’
‘I did,’ said Feldman.
‘But now you are not so sure?’
Feldman shook his head. ‘I genuinely don’t believe that Gimli killed the professor. There would be no reason to, and we never discussed anything like that. Gimli never struck me as being violent. People get aggressive online when they are anonymous, but Gimli never was. He thought flaming was plain dumb. But I can’t be one hundred per cent sure he’s innocent, no.’
‘So you came to Iceland to help him?’ Magnus asked.
‘Yeah,’ said Feldman. ‘To see what I can do. We’ve been communicating through the lawyer, Kristjan Gylfason, but I wanted to do what I could myself.’
‘And look for the ring,’ Magnus said.
‘I don’t even know if there is a ring,’ said Feldman.
‘But you want to find out,’ said Magnus.
