Where the Shadows Lie E-Book

Michael Ridpath

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

From the million-copy bestselling author, perfect for fans of Stieg Larsson, Anne Holt, and The Killing. __________ "Michael Ridpath is on the war path, trouncing the Scandinavians on their home turf. This is international thriller writing at its best, fine characters, page turning suspense and a great, fresh location." PETER JAMES __________ One thousand years ago: An Icelandic warrior returns from battle, bearing a ring cut from the right hand of his foe. Seventy years ago: An Oxford professor, working from a secret source, creates the twentieth century's most pervasive legend. The professor's name? John Ronald Reuel Tolkein. Six hours ago: An expert on Old Iceland literature, Agnar Haraldsson, is murdered. Everything is connected, but to discover how, Detective Magnus Jonson must venture where the shadows lie... __________ Praise for the A Magnus Iceland Mystery series: 'International thriller writing at its best, fine characters, page turning suspense and a great, fresh location.' -- Peter James 'Ingenious and thrilling. Fascinating stuff.' -- Spectator 'A clever blend of murder mystery, myth and up-to-the-minute mayhem...' --The Times 'Entertaining stuff.' -- Daily Telegraph 'Terrific! Great plot and splendid pacing...' -- Simon Brett 'A first class mystery.' -- Booklist

Leseprobe

Copyright

First published in the UK in 2010 by Corvus, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

Copyright © Michael Ridpath, 2010. All rights reserved.

The moral right of Michael Ridpath to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

First eBook Edition: January 2010

ISBN: 978-1-848-87746-7

Corvus

An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

Ormond House

26-27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

www.corvus-books.co.uk

Contents

Cover

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

AUTHOR’S NOTE

A Message from Michael Ridpath: Get a FREE 60-page story

About The Author

Review This Book

for Barbara, as always

CHAPTER ONE

PROFESSOR AGNAR HARALDSSON folded the letter and slipped it back into its small yellowing envelope.

He glanced again at the address inscribed in an upright, ornamental hand: Högni Ísildarson, Laugavegur 64, Reykjavík, Iceland. The stamp bore the profile of a beardless British king, an Edward or a George, Agnar wasn’t certain which.

His heart thumped, the envelope performing a tiny dance in his shaking hand. The letter had arrived that morning enclosed within a larger envelope bearing a modern Icelandic stamp and a Reykjavík postmark.

It was all that Agnar could have hoped for. It was more than that; it was perfect.

As a professor of Icelandic at the University of Iceland, Agnar had been privileged to handle some of the oldest manuscripts of his country’s sagas, copied out by monks with infinite care on to sheaves of calf skins using black bearberry juice for ink, and feathers from the left wings of swans for pens. Those magnificent documents were Iceland’s heritage, Iceland’s soul. But none of them would cause as great a stir in the outside world as this single sheet of paper.

And none of them was his discovery.

He looked up from his desk over the serene lake in front of him. It glittered a rare deep blue in the April sunshine. Ten minutes before it had glinted steel grey, and in a few more minutes it would do so again as dark clouds from the west chased after those disappearing over the snow-topped mountains across the lake to the east.

A perfect location for a summer house. The cabin had been built by Agnar’s father, a former politician who was now in an oldpeople’s home. Although summer was still some time away, Agnar had escaped there for the weekend to work with no distractions. His wife had just given birth to their second child, and Agnar had a tight deadline to get through a pile of translation.

‘Aggi, come back to bed.’

He turned to see the breathtakingly beautiful figure of Andrea, ballet dancer and third-year literature student, naked as she glided across the bare wooden floor towards him, her blonde hair a tangled mess.

‘I’m sorry, darling, I can’t,’ he said nodding towards the mess of papers in front of him.

‘Are you sure?’ She bent down to kiss him, and ran her fingers under his shirt and through the hair on his chest, her mane tickling his nose. She broke away. ‘Are you really sure?’

He smiled and removed his spectacles.

Well, perhaps he would allow himself one distraction.

CHAPTER TWO

SERGEANT DETECTIVE MAGNUS Jonson trudged along the residential street in Roxbury towards his car. He had a load of typing to do back at the station before he could go home. He was tired, so tired: he hadn’t slept properly for a week. Which was perhaps why the smell had hit him so badly.

It was a familiar smell: raw beef a week past its sell-by date tinged with a metallic edge. He had experienced it many times in his years with the Boston Police Department’s Homicide Unit.

Maria Campanelli, white female, twenty-seven.

She had been dead thirty-six hours, stabbed by her boyfriend after an argument and left to decompose in her apartment. They were out looking for him now, and Magnus was confident he would be found. But to be certain of a conviction they needed to make sure they got the paperwork one hundred per cent accurate. A bunch of people to be interviewed; a bunch of forms to be filled out. The department had suffered a scandal a few years back with a series of slip-ups in the chain of evidence, documents misfiled, court exhibits lost. Since then defence lawyers had jumped on any mistakes.

Magnus was good at the paperwork, which was one of the reasons he had recently been promoted to sergeant. Perhaps Colby was right, perhaps he should go to law school.

Colby.

For the twelve months they had been living together she had gradually turned up the pressure: why didn’t he quit the department and go to law school, why didn’t they get married? And then, six days ago, when they were walking arm in arm back from their favourite Italian restaurant in the North End, a Jeep had driven past with its rear window wound down. Magnus had thrown Colby to the sidewalk just as a rapid succession of shots rang out from a semi-automatic rifle. Maybe the shooters thought they had hit their target, maybe there were too many people around, but the Jeep had driven off without finishing the job.

That was why she had kicked him out of her apartment. That was why he had spent sleepless nights in the guest room of his brother’s house in Medford. That was why the smell had gotten to him: for the first time in a long time the smell of death had become personal.

It could have been him splayed out on the floor of that apartment. Or Colby.

It was the hottest day of the year so far, which had, of course, made the smell worse, and Magnus was sweating in his suit jacket. He felt a touch on his elbow.

It was a guy of about fifty, Latin, bald, short and overweight, unshaven. He was wearing a large blue shirt which hung out over jeans.

‘Detective?’

Magnus stopped. ‘Yeah?’

‘I think I saw something. The night the girl was stabbed.’ The man’s voice was gruff, urgent.

Magnus was tempted to tell the guy to beat it. They had a witness who had seen the boyfriend come, another who had seen him leave six hours later, three who had heard a loud argument, one who had heard a scream. But you could never have enough witnesses. Another statement to type up when he got back to the station.

Magnus sighed as he reached for his notebook. There were still several hours to go before he could go home and take the run and shower he needed to get the smell out of his system. If he wasn’t too exhausted for a run by then.

The man looked nervously up and down the street. ‘Not here, I don’t want nobody to see us talking.’

Magnus was about to protest – the victim’s boyfriend was a cook at the Boston Medical Center, hardly someone to be scared of – but then he shrugged and followed the man as he hurried down a small side street, between a dilapidated grey clapboard house and a small red-brick apartment building. Little more than an alley, with some kind of construction site with a high wire fence at the end. A heavily tattooed kid with a yellow T-shirt stood at the street corner. He smoked a cigarette, his back to Magnus.

As they entered the alleyway, the bald guy seemed to speed up. Magnus lengthened his stride. He was about to yell to the guy to slow down, when he stopped himself.

Magnus had been asleep. Now he was awake.

Among the forest of tattoos on the kid’s arms, Magnus had noticed a small dot above one elbow, and a pattern of five dots above the other. One five, fifteen, the tattoo of the Cobra-15 gang. They didn’t operate in Roxbury. This kid was way outside of his territory, by at least three miles, maybe four. But the Cobra-15 were customers of Soto’s operation, local distribution agents. The guys in the Jeep in the North End had been working for Soto, Magnus was sure.

Magnus’s instinct was to straighten up and turn, but he forced himself not to break his stride and alert the kid. Think. Think fast.

He could hear footsteps behind him. Gun or knife? The sound of a gun would be risky this close to the crime scene – there were still one or two cops milling around. But the kid knew Magnus was armed and no one brings a knife to a gunfight. Which meant gun. Which meant the kid was probably pulling it out of the waistband of his pants right then.

Magnus dived to the left, grabbed a garbage can and threw it to the ground. As he hit the ground he rolled once, reached for his gun and pointed it towards the kid, who was raising his own weapon. Magnus’s finger curled around the trigger, and then his training kicked in. He hesitated. The rule was clear: don’t fire if there is a chance of hitting a civilian.

In the mouth of the alleyway stood a young woman, grocery bags in both arms, staring at Magnus, her mouth open. She was wide, real wide, and directly behind the kid in the yellow T-shirt in Magnus’s line of fire.

The hesitation gave the kid time to raise his own gun. Magnus was looking straight down the barrel. A stand off.

‘Police! Drop your weapon!’ Magnus shouted, even though he knew the kid wouldn’t.

What would happen next? If the kid fired first, he might miss Magnus, and then Magnus could get away his own shot. Although he was six foot four and weighed over two hundred pounds, Magnus was lying prone on the street, partially hidden by the dislodged trash can, a smallish target for a panicked kid.

Perhaps the kid would back off. If only the woman would move. She was still rooted to the spot, her mouth open, trying to scream.

Then Magnus saw the kid’s eyes flick upwards and behind Magnus. The bald guy.

The kid wouldn’t have taken his eyes off Magnus’s gun if the bald guy was holding back. He would only risk that if the bald guy was relevant to the situation, if he was his saviour, if he had his own gun and was approaching Magnus from behind. Hold off for a couple of seconds until the bald guy shot Magnus in the back, that was the kid’s plan.

Magnus pulled his trigger, just once, not the twice he had been trained. He wanted to keep the numbers of bullets flying towards the fat woman to a minimum. The kid was hit in the chest; he jerked and fired his own gun, missing Magnus.

Magnus reached out to the trash can and flung it behind him. He turned to see the empty container hitting the bald guy in the shins. The man was reaching under his belly for his own gun, but doubled over as he tripped on the can.

Magnus fired twice hitting the guy each time, once in the shoulder and once in the bald crown of his head. A mess.

Magnus pulled himself to his feet. Noise kicked in. The fat woman had dropped her groceries and was screaming now, loud, very loud. It turned out there was nothing wrong with her lungs. A police siren started up somewhere close. There was the sound of shouting and running feet.

The bald guy was still, but the kid was sprawled on his back on the ground, his chest heaving, his yellow T-shirt now stained red. His fingers were curled around his gun as he tried to summon up the strength to point it towards Magnus. Magnus stamped hard on his wrist and kicked the gun out of the way. He stood panting over the boy who had tried to kill him. Seventeen or eighteen, Hispanic, close-cropped black hair, a broken front tooth, a scar on his neck. Taut muscles under swirls of ink on his arms and chest, intricate gang tattoos. A tough kid. A kid his age in Cobra-15 could already have several dead bodies to his name.

But not Magnus’s. At least not today. But tomorrow?

Magnus could smell gunpowder and sweat and fear and once again the metallic bite of blood. Too much blood for one day.

‘I’m taking you off the street.’

Deputy Superintendent Williams, the chief of the Homicide Unit, was firm. He was always firm, that was one of the things Magnus appreciated about him. He also appreciated that he had come all the way from his office on Schroeder Plaza in downtown Boston to make sure that one of his men was safe. They were in an anonymous motel room in an anonymous motel somewhere off I-91 between Springfield, Massachusetts and Hartford, Connecticut, chaperoned by FBI agents with Midwestern accents. Magnus hadn’t been allowed back in the station since the shooting.

‘I don’t think that’s necessary,’ Magnus said.

‘Well, I do.’

‘Are we talking Witness Protection Programme?’

‘Possibly. This is the second time someone has tried to kill you within a week.’

‘I was tired. I let my guard down. It won’t happen again.’

Williams raised his eyebrows. His black face was deeply lined. He was small, compact, determined, a good boss, and honest. That was why Magnus had gone to him six months before when he had overheard his partner, Detective Lenahan, talking on his cell phone to another cop about tampering with evidence in a homicide investigation.

They were on a bullshit stakeout. Magnus had gone for a walk and was returning to the car when he stopped in the fall sunshine just behind the passenger window. The window was open a crack. Magnus could hear Lenahan clearly, wheedling, cajoling and threatening a Detective O’Driscoll to do the right thing and smudge the fingerprint evidence on a gun.

Magnus and Lenahan had not been partners for long. At fifty-three, Lenahan was twenty years older than Magnus. He was experienced, smart, popular, and he seemed to know everyone in the Boston Police Department, especially those with Irish last names. But he was lazy. He used his three decades of experience and knowledge of police methods to do as little work as possible.

Magnus saw things differently. As soon as he had closed one case he was eager to move on to the next; his determination to nail the perp was legendary within the department. Lenahan thought there were good guys and there were bad guys, there always were and there always would be. There was not very much that he or Magnus or the whole Boston police force could do about that. Magnus thought that every victim, and every victim’s family, deserved justice, and Magnus would do his very best to get it for them. So the Jonson–Lenahan partnership was hardly made in heaven.

But until that moment, Magnus had not imagined that Lenahan was crooked.

There are two things that a cop hates more than anything else. One is a crooked cop. Another is a cop who rats on one of his colleagues. For Magnus the choice was easy – if people like Lenahan were allowed to get away with destroying evidence of a homicide, then everything he had devoted his career towards was worthless.

Magnus knew that most of his colleagues would agree with him. But some would turn a blind eye, convince themselves that Magnus had misheard, that good old Sean Lenahan could not be one of the bad guys. And others would think that if good old Sean got himself a little retirement nest egg by taking money off one bad guy who had just killed another, then good luck to him. He deserved it after serving the citizens of Boston so loyally for thirty years.

Which is why Magnus had gone straight to Williams and only Williams. Williams had understood the situation. A couple of weeks later Magnus’s promotion came through and he and Lenahan were split up. An undercover team from the FBI was brought in from out of state. A major investigation was launched and Lenahan was linked with two other detectives, O’Driscoll and Montoya. The Feds discovered the gang that was paying them off; it was Dominican, led by a man named Pedro Soto, who operated out of Lawrence, a faded mill town just outside Boston. Soto supplied cocaine and heroin wholesale to street gangs all over New England. The three crooked detectives were arrested and charged. Magnus was billed as the star witness when the case eventually came to trial.

But the FBI hadn’t yet amassed enough evidence to charge Soto. He was still out there.

‘Your guard slips once, it can slip again,’ said Williams. ‘If we don’t do something you’ll be dead within two weeks. They want your ass and they’ll get it.’

‘But I don’t see why they want to kill me,’ Magnus said. ‘Sure, my testimony will nail Lenahan, but I can’t point to Soto or the Dominicans. And you said Lenahan isn’t cooperating.’

‘The FBI thinks it’s figured out Lenahan’s angle. The last thing he wants is to wind up in a maximum-security prison with a bunch of convicted killers, no cop would want that, he’d be better off dead. But without your testimony, he’ll walk. Our guess is that he has given the Dominicans an ultimatum: they get rid of you or he’ll give them to us. And if he doesn’t, his buddy Montoya will. If you die, Lenahan and the other two go free, and Soto’s operation continues as if nothing has happened. But if you live to testify, Lenahan does a deal with the FBI, and Soto and his boys will have to close down business and head home to the Dominican Republic. If we don’t get to them first.’

Williams looked Magnus right in the eye. ‘Which is why we have to figure out what to do with you.’

Magnus saw Williams’s point. But full witness protection would mean starting up a new life with a new identity on the other side of the country. He didn’t want that. ‘Got any ideas?’ he asked Williams.

‘Matter of fact, I do.’ Williams smiled. ‘You’re an Icelandic citizen, right?’

‘Yes. As well as US. I have dual.’

‘Do you speak the language?’

‘Some. I spoke it as a child. I moved here with my dad when I was twelve. But I haven’t spoken it since he died.’

‘Which was when?’

‘When I was twenty.’

Williams allowed a brief pause to express his sympathy. ‘Well, I guess you speak it better than most of the rest of us, then.’

Magnus smiled. ‘I guess so. Why?’

‘An old buddy in the NYPD called me a couple months ago. Said he’d heard I had someone who spoke Icelandic in my unit. He’d just had a visit from the National Police Commissioner of Iceland. He was looking for the NYPD to loan him a detective as an advisor. He didn’t necessarily want someone senior, just someone experienced in the many and varied crimes that our great country has to offer. Apparently, they don’t get many homicides in Iceland, or at least they didn’t until recently. Obviously, if that detective happened to speak Icelandic, that would be a bonus.’

‘I don’t remember anybody telling me about this,’ Magnus said.

Williams smiled. ‘They didn’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Same reason I’m telling you now. You’re one of my best detectives and I don’t want to lose you. Except now I would rather have you alive in an igloo in Iceland than dead on a sidewalk in Boston.’

Magnus had given up long ago telling people that there were no igloos in Iceland. Nor were there any Eskimos, and only very rarely polar bears. He hadn’t been to Iceland since just after his father’s death. He had his doubts about going back, severe doubts, but at that moment it seemed like the least bad option.

‘I called the Icelandic Police Commissioner an hour ago. He’s still looking for an advisor. He sounded very excited by the idea of a detective who speaks the language. So, what do you think?’

There really was no choice.

‘I’ll do it,’ Magnus said. ‘On one condition.’

Williams frowned. ‘Which is?’

‘I take my girlfriend with me.’

Magnus had seen Colby angry before, but never this angry.

‘What do you think you are doing, getting your goons to kidnap me? Is this some kind of joke? Some kind of weird romantic gesture where you think I’m going to take you back? Because if it is, I can tell you right now it’s not going to work. So tell these men to take me back to the office!’

They were sitting in the back seat of an FBI van in the parking lot of a Friendly’s restaurant. Two agents had cruised by the offices of the medical-equipment company where Colby was in-house counsel and whisked her away. They were gathered around their car fifty feet away, with the two agents who had driven Magnus.

‘They tried to kill me again,’ Magnus said. ‘Almost succeeded this time.’

He still couldn’t believe how stupid he had been, how he had let himself be led off the main street down an alley. Since the shooting he had been interviewed at great length by two detectives from the Firearm Discharge Investigative team. They had been told they would only have one chance to talk to him, so they had been very thorough, focusing especially on his decision to pull the trigger when there was an innocent civilian in the line of fire.

Magnus didn’t regret that decision. He had traded the near certainty of his own death for a small probability that the woman would be harmed. But he had a better answer for the detectives. If the gangsters had shot him, they would probably have shot the woman next, as a witness. The Firearms Discharge guys liked this idea. They were careful not to ask him whether he had thought of that before or after he had pulled the trigger. They were going to do things by the book, but they were on his side.

This was the second time he had shot and killed someone while on duty. After the first, when he was a rookie patrol officer in uniform two months into the job, he had suffered weeks of guilt-filled sleepless nights.

This time he was just glad to be alive.

‘Too bad they failed,’ muttered Colby. Two tiny red dots of anger sizzled on each cheek; the corners of her brown eyes glistened with fury. Her mouth was set firm. Then she bit her lip, pulling strands of dark curly hair back behind her ears in a familiar gesture. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that. But it’s got nothing to do with me. I don’t want it to have anything to do with me, that’s the whole point.’

‘It already does have to do with you, Colby.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The chief wants me to go. Leave Boston. He doesn’t think the Dominicans will stop until they’ve killed me.’

‘That sounds like a good idea.’

Magnus took a deep breath. ‘And I want you to come with me.’

The expression on Colby’s face was a mixture of shock and contempt. ‘Are you serious?’

‘It’s for your own safety. If I’m gone they might go after you.’

‘What about my work? What about my job, dammit?’

‘You’ll just have to leave that. It’ll only be for a few months. Until the trial.’

‘Was I right the first time? Is this just some weird way for you to get me back?’

‘No,’ said Magnus. ‘It’s because I’m worried for you if you stay.’

Colby bit her lip again. A tear ran down her cheek. Magnus reached out and touched her arm. ‘Where would we go?’

‘I’m sorry, I can’t tell you until I know you will say yes.’

‘Will I like it?’ She glanced at him.

He shook his head. ‘Probably not.’ They had discussed Iceland many times during their relationship, and Colby had been consistent in her distrust of the country, its volcanoes and its bad weather.

‘It’s Iceland, isn’t it?’

Magnus just shrugged.

‘Wait a minute, let me think.’ Colby turned away from him and stared out over the parking lot. A large family of four waddled out to their car carrying tubs of ice cream, smiles of anticipation on their faces.

Magnus waited.

Colby turned and stared him right in the eye. ‘Do you want to get married?’

Magnus returned her stare. He couldn’t believe she was serious. But she was very serious.

‘Well?’

‘I don’t know,’ Magnus hesitated. ‘We could talk about it.’

‘No! I don’t want to talk about it, we’ve talked about it for months. I want to decide right now. You want me to decide to drop everything and go away with you. Fine. I’ll do it. If we get married.’

‘But this is totally the wrong way to make a decision like that.’

‘What do you mean? Do you love me?’

‘Of course I love you,’ Magnus replied.

‘Then let’s get married. We can go to Iceland and live happily ever after.’

‘You’re not thinking clearly,’ Magnus said. ‘You’re angry.’

‘You bet I’m angry. You’ve asked me to commit to going away with you, and I’ll do it if you commit to me. Come on, Magnus, decision time.’

Magnus took a deep breath. He watched the family climb into the car which sagged on its axles. They pulled out past the other FBI vehicle, the one that had picked up Colby. ‘I want you to come with me for your own safety,’ he said.

‘So that’s a no, then?’ Her eyes bored into his. Colby was a determined woman, that was one of the things Magnus loved about her, but he had never seen her this determined. ‘No?’

Magnus nodded. ‘No.’

Colby pursed her lips and reached for the door handle. ‘OK. We’re done here. I’m going back to work.’

Magnus grabbed her arm. ‘Colby, please!’

‘Get your hands off me!’ Colby shouted and threw open the door. She walked rapidly over to the four agents standing around the other car and muttered something to them. Within a minute the car was gone.

Two of the agents returned to the van and climbed in.

‘I guess she’s not going with you,’ said the driver.

‘I guess she’s not,’ said Magnus.

CHAPTER THREE

MAGNUS LOOKED UP from his book and out of the airplane window. It had been a long flight, made longer by the five-hour delay in their departure from Logan. The plane was descending. Beneath him was a blanket of coarse grey clouds, torn only in a couple of places. As the aircraft approached one of these Magnus craned his neck to try to get a glimpse of land, but all he could see was a patch of crumpled grey sea, flecked with white caps. Then it was gone.

He was worried about Colby. If the Dominicans did come after her it would unequivocally be his fault. When he had first told her about Lenahan’s conversation she had counselled against going to Williams. She claimed she had always thought law enforcement a stupid profession. And if he had agreed to marry her in the parking lot of Friendly’s, she would be in the seat next to him on her way to safety, instead of in her apartment in the Back Bay, waiting for the wrong guy to knock at the door.

But Magnus had had to do what was right. He always had and he always would. It was right to go to Williams about Lenahan. It was right to shoot the kid in the yellow T-shirt. It would have been wrong to marry Colby because she forced him to. He had never been sure why his parents had gotten married, but he had lived with the consequences of that mistake.

Perhaps he was too nervous, perhaps the Dominicans would ignore her. He had demanded that Williams organize some police protection for her, a request that Williams had reluctantly agreed to; reluctantly because of her refusal to go to Iceland with Magnus.

But if the Dominicans did catch her, would he be able to live with the consequences of that? Perhaps he should just have said yes, agreed to whatever she wanted just to get her out of the country. That’s what she had been trying to force him into. He hadn’t allowed himself to be forced. And now she might die.

She was thirty, she wanted to get married and she wanted to marry Magnus. Or a modified Magnus, a successful lawyer pulling down a good salary, living in a big house in Brookline or maybe even Beacon Hill if he was really successful, driving a BMW or a Mercedes. Perhaps he would even convert to Judaism.

She hadn’t cared that he was a tough cop when they had first met. It was at a party given by an old friend of his from college, also a lawyer. The mutual attraction had been instantaneous. She was pretty, vivacious, smart, strong willed, determined. She liked the idea of an Ivy League graduate walking the streets of South Boston with a gun. He was safe but dangerous, even his occasional bad moods seemed to attract her. Until she started to view him not as a lover but as a potential husband.

Who did she want him to be? Who did he want to be? For that matter, who was he? It was a question Magnus often asked himself.

He pulled out his electric-blue Icelandic passport. The photograph was similar to the one in his US passport, except the Icelander was allowed to smile, whereas the American was not. Red hair, square jaw, blue eyes, traces of freckles on his nose. But the name was different. His real name, Magnús Ragnarsson. His name was Magnús, his father’s name was Ragnar, and his grandfather’s name was Jón. So his father was Ragnar Jónsson and he was Magnús Ragnarsson. Simple.

But of course the US bureaucracy could not cope with this logic. A son could not have a different last name to his father and his mother, whose name was Margrét Hallgrímsdóttir, and still have the government computers accept him as part of the same family. Obviously it couldn’t cope with the accents on the vowels, and it didn’t really like the non-standard spelling of Jonsson either. Ragnar had fought this for a few months after his son arrived in the country and then thrown in the towel. The twelve-year-old Icelandic boy Magnús Ragnarsson became the American kid Magnus Jonson.

He turned back to the book on his lap. Njáls Saga, one of his favourites.

Although Magnus had spoken very little Icelandic over the past thirteen years, he had read a lot. His father had read the sagas to him when Magnus had moved to Boston, and for Magnus they had become a source of comfort in the new confusing world of America. They still were. The word saga meant literally what is said in Icelandic. The sagas were the archetypal family histories, most of them dealing with the three or four generations of Vikings who had settled Iceland around 900 AD until the coming of Christianity to that country in 1000. Their heroes were complex men with many weaknesses as well as strengths, but they had a clear moral code, a sense of honour and a respect for the laws. They were brave adventurers. For a lone Icelander in a huge Junior High School in the United States, they were a source of inspiration. If one of their kinsmen was killed, they knew what to do: they demanded money in compensation and if that was not forth-coming they demanded blood, all strictly according to the law.

So when his father was murdered when Magnus was twenty, he knew what to do. Search for justice.

The police never found his father’s killer, and despite Magnus’s efforts, neither did he, but he decided after leaving college to become a policeman. He was still searching for justice, and despite all the murderers he had arrested over the last decade, he still hadn’t found it. Every murderer was his father’s murderer, until they were caught. Then the quest for just retribution went on, unsatisfied.

The plane descended. Another gap in the clouds; this time he could see the waves breaking against the brown lava field of the Reykjanes Peninsula. Two black stripes bisected the barren stone and dust: the highway from Reykjavík to the airport at Keflavík. Wisps of cloud, like smoke from a volcano, drifted over an isolated white house in a puddle of bright green grass, and then Magnus was over the ocean again. The clouds closed in beneath the airplane as it began its turn for the final approach.

He had the feeling, as Iceland came nearer and nearer, that he was moving towards solving his father’s murder, or at least resolving it. Perhaps in Iceland he could finally place it in some kind of perspective.

But the airplane was also bringing him closer to his childhood, closer to pain and confusion.

There was a golden period in Magnus’s life before the age of eight, when his family all lived together in a little house with white corrugated-metal walls and a bright blue corrugated-metal roof, close to the centre of Reykjavík. It had a tiny garden with a white-painted picket fence and a stunted tree, an old whitebeam, on which to clamber. His father went off to the university every morning, and his mother, who was beautiful and always smiling then, taught at the local secondary school. He remembered playing soccer with his friends during the long summer nights, and the excitement of the arrival of the thirteen mischievous Yuletide elves during the dark cosy winters, each dropping a small present in the shoe Magnus left beneath his open bedroom window.

Then it all changed. His father left home to go and teach mathematics at a university in America. His mother became angry and sleepy – she slept all the time. Her face became puffy, she got fat, she yelled at Magnus and his little brother Óli.

They moved back to the farm on the Snaefellsnes Peninsula where his mother had been brought up. That’s where the misery started. Magnus realized that his mother wasn’t sleepy all the time, she was drunk. At first she spent most of her time away in Reykjavík, trying to hold down her job as a teacher. Then she returned to the farm and a series of jobs in the nearest town, first teaching and then working cash registers. Worst of all Magnus and Óli were left for long periods in the care of their grandparents. Their grandfather was a strict, scary, angry man, who liked a drink himself. Their grandmother was small and mean.

One day, when Magnus and Óli were at school, their mother had drunk half a bottle of vodka, climbed into a car and steered it straight into a rock, killing herself instantly. Within a week, amid acrimony of nuclear proportions, Ragnar had arrived to take them both away to Boston with him.

Magnus returned to Iceland with his father and Óli on an annual basis for camping trips in the back country and to spend a couple of days in Reykjavík to see his grandmother and his father’s friends and colleagues. They had never gone near his mother’s family.

Until a month after his father died, when Magnus made the trip to try to effect a reconciliation. The visit had been a total disaster. Magnus had recoiled in stunned bewilderment at the strength of the hostility from his grandparents. They didn’t just hate his father, they hated him too. For an orphan whose only family was a mixed-up brother, and with no clear idea of which country he belonged to, that hurt.

Since then he had never been back.

The plane broke through the clouds only a couple of hundred feet above the ground. Iceland was cold and grey and windswept. To the left was the flat field of volcanic rubble, grey and brown covered with russet and green moss, and beyond that the para-phernalia of the abandoned American airbase, single-storey sheds, mysterious radio masts and golf balls on stilts. Not a tree in sight.

The plane hit the runway, and manoeuvred up to the terminal building. Improbably cheerful ground staff battled their way out into the wind, smiling and chatting. A windsock stuck out stiff and horizontal, as a curtain of rain rolled across the airfield towards them. It was 24 April, the day after Iceland’s official first day of summer.

Thirty minutes later Magnus was sitting in the back of a white car hurtling along the highway between Keflavík and Reykjavík. Across the car was emblazoned the word Lögreglan – with typical stubbornness Iceland was one of the very few countries in the world that refused to use a derivation of the word ‘police’ for its law-enforcement agency.

Outside, the squall had passed and the wind seemed to be dying down. The lavascape, undulating mounds of stones, boulders and moss, stretched across towards a line of squat mountains in the distance, still not a tree in sight. Thousands of years after the event this patch of Iceland hadn’t recovered from the devastation of a massive volcanic eruption. The thin layers of mosses nibbling at the rocks were only just beginning a process of restoration that would take millennia.

But Magnus wasn’t looking at the scenery. He was concentrating hard on the man sitting next to him, Snorri Gudmundsson, the National Police Commissioner. He was a small man with shrewd blue eyes and thick grey hair brushed back in a bouffant. He was speaking rapidly in Icelandic, and it took all Magnus’s powers of concentration to follow him.

‘As I am sure you must know, Iceland has a low per-capita homicide rate and low levels of serious crime,’ he was saying. ‘Most policing involves clearing up the mess on Saturday and Sunday mornings once the partygoers have had their fun. Until the kreppa and the demonstrations over this last winter, of course. Every one of my officers in the Reykjavík area was tied up with those. They did well, I am proud of them.’

Kreppa was the Icelandic word for the credit crunch, which had hit the country particularly badly. The banks, the government and many of the people were bankrupt, drowning under debt incurred in the boom times. Magnus had read of the weekly demonstrations which had taken place in front of the Parliament building every Saturday afternoon for months, until the government had finally bowed to popular pressure and resigned.

‘The trend is worrying,’ the Commissioner went on. ‘There are more drugs, more drug gangs. We have had problems with Lithuanian gangs and the Hells Angels have been trying to break into Iceland for years. There are more foreigners in our country now, and a small minority of them have a different attitude to crime to most Icelanders. The yellow press here exaggerates the problem, but it would be a foolish police commissioner who ignored the threat.’

He paused to check if Magnus was following. Magnus nodded to indicate he was, just.

‘I am proud of our police force, they work hard and they have a good clear-up rate, but they are just not used to the kind of crimes that occur in big cities with large populations of foreigners. The greater Reykjavík area has a population of only a hundred and eighty thousand, the entire country has only three hundred thousand people, but I want us to be prepared in case the kinds of things that happen in Amsterdam, or Manchester, or Boston for that matter, happen here. Which is why I asked for you.

‘Last year there were three unsolved murders in Iceland, all related. We never knew who committed them until he volunteered himself at police headquarters. He was a Pole. We should have caught him after the first woman was killed, but we didn’t, so two more died. I think with someone like you working with us, we would have stopped him then.’

‘I hope so,’ said Magnus.

‘I’ve read a copy of your file and spoken to Deputy Superintendent Williams. He was very flattering.’

Magnus raised his eyebrows. He didn’t know Williams did flattery. And he knew there were some serious black marks in his record from those times in his career when he hadn’t always done exactly what he had been told.

‘The idea is that you will go through a crash course at the National Police College. In the mean time you will be available for training seminars and for advice should something crop up that you can help us with.’

‘A crash course?’ said Magnus, wanting to check that he had understood correctly. ‘How long would that take?’

‘The normal course is a year, but since you have so much police experience, we would hope to get you through in less than six months. It’s unavoidable. You can’t arrest someone unless you know Icelandic law.’

‘No, I see that, but how long did you …’ Magnus paused as he tried to remember the Icelandic word for ‘envision’ ‘… see me being here?’

‘I specified a minimum of two years. Deputy Superintendent Williams assured me that would be acceptable.’

‘He never mentioned that kind of timeframe to me,’ said Magnus.

Snorri’s blue eyes bored into Magnus’s. ‘Williams did, of course, mention the reason why you were so eager to leave Boston on a temporary basis. I admire your courage.’ His eyes flicked towards the uniformed police driver in the front seat. ‘No one here knows about it apart from me.’

Magnus was about to protest, but he let it drop. As yet, he had no idea how many months it would be until the trial of Lenahan and the others. He would go along with the Police Commissioner until he was called to testify, then he would return to Boston and stay there, no matter what plans the Commissioner had for him.

Snorri smiled. ‘But, as luck would have it, we have something to get your teeth into right away. A body was discovered this morning, in a summer house by Lake Thingvellir. And I am told that one of the initial suspects is an American. I am taking you straight there now.’

Keflavík Airport was at the tip of the peninsula that stuck out to the west of Reykjavík into the Atlantic Ocean. They drove east, through a tangle of highways and grey suburbs to the south of the city, lined with small factories and warehouses and familiar fast-food joints: KFC, Taco Bell and Subway. Depressing.

To his left, Magnus could see the multicoloured metal roofs of little houses that marked the centre of Reykjavík, dominated by the rocket spire of the Hallgrímskirkja, Iceland’s largest church, rising up from the top of a small hill. No sign of the clusters of skyscrapers that dominated the downtown areas of even small cities in America. Beyond the city was Faxaflói Bay, and beyond that the broad foot of Mount Esja, an imposing ridge of stone that reached up into the low cloud.

They passed though bleak suburbs of square squat blocks of flats to the east of the city. Mount Esja rose up ever larger ahead of them, before they turned away from the bay and climbed up Mosfell Heath. The houses disappeared and there was just heath land of yellow grass and green moss, bulky rounded hills and cloud – low, dark, swirling cloud.

After twenty minutes or so they descended and Magnus saw Lake Thingvellir ahead of him. Magnus had been there several times as a boy, visiting Thingvellir itself, a grass plain that ran along the floor of a rift valley at the northern edge of the lake. It was the spot where the American and European continental plates split Iceland in two. More importantly for Magnus and his father, it was the dramatic site of the Althing, Iceland’s annual outdoor parliament during the age of the sagas.

Magnus remembered the lake as a beautiful deep blue. Now it was dark and foreboding, the clouds reaching down from the sky almost low enough to touch the black water. Even the hump of a small island in the middle was smothered by the dense blanket of moisture.

They turned off the main road, past a large farm with horses grazing in its home meadow, down to the lake itself. They followed a stone track to a row of half a dozen summer houses, protected by a stand of scrappy birch trees, not yet in leaf. The only trees in sight. Magnus saw the familiar signs of a newly established crime scene: badly parked police cars, some with lights still flashing unnecessarily, an ambulance with its back doors open, 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 Reykjavík 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 Reykjavík. Baldur, this is Sergeant Detective Magnús 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.

‘Gódan daginn,’ replied Magnus.

‘Baldur, can you explain to Magnús 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 job and so nothing was. Somehow Magnus suspected that the Norwegian lab might treat its neighbour’s lone request with a bit more respect.