yellow tape fluttering in the breeze and figures milling about in a mixture of dark police uniforms and white forensic overalls.
The focus of attention was the fifth house, at the end of the row. Magnus checked the other summer houses. It was still early in the season, so only one, the second, showed signs of habitation, a Range Rover parked outside.
The police car pulled up next to the ambulance and the Commissioner and Magnus got out. The air was cold and damp. He could hear the rustle of the wind and a haunting bird call that he recognized from his childhood. A curlew?
A tall, balding man with a long face, wearing forensic overalls, approached them.
‘Let me introduce Inspector Baldur Jakobsson of the Reykjavik Metropolitan Police CID,’ the Commissioner said. ‘He is in charge of the investigation. Lake Thingvellir is covered by the police at Selfoss to the south of here, but once they realized this could be a murder investigation they asked me to arrange for assistance from Reykjavik. Baldur, this is Sergeant Detective Magnus Jonson from the Boston Police Department…’ He paused and looked at Magnus quizzically. ‘Jonson?’
‘Ragnarsson,’ Magnus corrected him.
The Commissioner smiled, pleased that Magnus was reverting to his Icelandic name. ‘Ragnarsson.’
‘ Good afternoon,’ said Baldur stiffly, in halting English with a thick accent.
‘ Godan daginn,’ replied Magnus.
‘Baldur, can you explain to Magnus what’s happened here?’
‘Certainly,’ Baldur said, his thin lips showing no smile or other sign of enthusiasm. ‘The victim was Agnar Haraldsson. He is a professor at the University of Iceland. This is his summer house. He was murdered last night, hit over the head in the house, we think, and then dragged down into the lake. He was found by two children from the house just back there at ten o’clock this morning.’
‘The house with the Range Rover out front?’ asked Magnus.
Baldur nodded. ‘They fetched their father and he dialled 112.’
‘When was he last seen alive?’ Magnus asked.
‘Yesterday was a holiday – the first day of summer.’
‘It’s Iceland’s little joke,’ said the Commissioner. ‘The real summer is a few months off yet, but we need anything we can get to cheer ourselves up after the long winter.’
Baldur ignored the interruption. ‘The neighbours saw Agnar arrive at about eleven o’clock in the morning. They saw him park his car outside his house and go in. They waved to him, he waved back, but they didn’t speak. He did receive a visitor, or visitors, that evening.’
‘Description?’
‘None. They just saw the car, small, bright blue, something like a Toyota Yaris, although they are not precisely sure. The car arrived about seven-thirty, eight o’clock. Left at nine-thirty. They didn’t see it, but the woman remembered what she was watching on TV when she heard it drive past.’
‘Any other visitors?’
‘None that the neighbours know of. But they were out all afternoon at Thingvellir, so there could have been.’
Baldur answered Magnus’s questions simply and directly, his long face giving an air of serious intensity to his responses. The Commissioner was listening closely, but let Magnus do the talking.
‘Have you found the murder weapon?’
‘Not yet. We’ll have to wait for a post-mortem. The pathologist might give us some clues.’
‘Can I see the body?’
Baldur nodded and led Magnus and the Commissioner past the side of the house down a narrow earth pathway to a blue tent, erected on the edge of the lake, about ten metres from the house. Baldur called for overalls, boots and gloves. Magnus and the Commissioner put them on, signed a log held by the policeman guarding the scene and ducked into the tent.
Inside, a body was stretched out on the boggy grass. Two men in forensic overalls were preparing to lift it into a body bag. When they saw who had joined them they stopped what they were doing and squeezed out of the tent to give their senior officers room to examine the corpse.
‘The paramedics from Selfoss who responded to the call dragged him out of the lake when they found him,’ Baldur said. ‘They thought he had drowned, but the doctor who examined the body was suspicious.’
‘Why?’
‘There was a blow on the back of his head. There are some rocks on the bottom of the lake and there was a chance that he might have struck one of them if he had fallen in, but the doctor thought the blow was too hard.’
‘Can I take a look?’
Agnar was, or had been, a man of about forty, longish dark hair with flecks of grey at the temples, sharp features, stubble of the designer variety. Under the bristle, his face was pale and taut, his lips thin and a bluish-grey colour. The body was cold, which was no surprise after spending the night in the lake. It was also still stiff, suggesting he had been dead more than eight and less than twenty-four hours, which meant between four o’clock the previous afternoon and eight o’clock that morning. That was no help. Magnus doubted whether the pathologist would be able to come up with anything very precise about time of death. It was often difficult to be certain of a drowning, whether the victim had died before or after immersion in water. Sand or weed in the lungs was a clue, but that would have to wait for the autopsy.
Gently Magnus parted the professor’s hair and examined the wound at the back of his skull.
He turned to Baldur. ‘I think I know where your murder weapon is.’
‘Where?’ Baldur asked.
Magnus pointed out to the deep grey waters of the lake. Somewhere out there the rift between the continental plates at Thingvellir continued downwards to a depth of several hundred feet.
Baldur sighed. ‘We need divers.’
‘I wouldn’t bother,’ said Magnus. ‘You’ll never find it.’
Baldur frowned.
‘He was hit by a rock,’ Magnus explained. ‘Something with jagged edges. There are still flecks of stone in the wound. I have no idea where the rock came from, possibly the dirt road back there, some of those stones are pretty big. Your lab could tell you. But my guess is the killer threw it into the lake afterwards. Unless he was very stupid – it’s the perfect place to lose a rock.’
‘Do you have forensic training?’ Baldur asked, suspiciously.
‘Not much,’ said Magnus. ‘I’ve just seen a few dead people with dents in their heads. Can I see inside the house?’
Baldur nodded. They walked back up the path to the summer house. The place was getting the full forensics treatment, powerful lamps, a vacuum cleaner, and at least five technicians crawling around with tweezers and fingerprint powder.
Magnus looked around. The door opened directly into a large living area, with big windows overlooking the lake. Walls and floor were soft wood, the furniture was modern but not expensive. Lots of bookshelves: novels in English and Icelandic, history books, some specialist literary criticism. An impressive collection of CDs: classical, jazz, Icelanders Magnus had never heard of. No television. A desk covered with papers occupied one corner of the room, and in the middle were chairs and a sofa around a low table, on which was a glass half filled with red wine, and a tumbler containing the dregs of what looked like Coke. Both were covered in a thin film of smudged fingerprint powder. Through one open door Magnus could see a kitchen. There were three other doors that led off the living room, presumably to bedrooms or a bathroom.
‘We think he was struck over here,’ said Baldur, pointing towards the desk. There were signs of fresh scrubbing on the wooden floor, and a few inches away, two chalk marks surrounded tiny specks.
‘Can you do DNA analysis on this?’
‘In case the blood came from the murderer?’ Baldur asked.
Magnus nodded.
‘We can. We send it to a lab in Norway. It takes a while for the results to come back.’
‘Tell me about it,’ said Magnus. In Boston the DNA lab was permanently backed up; everything was a rush
