‘Yes, I suppose so. He always was charming, and that hasn’t changed.’
‘Have you ever had an affair with him?’ Magnus asked.
‘No,’ said Ingileif, her voice hoarse again. Her fingers drifted up towards her earring.
‘Ingileif, this is a murder investigation,’ Vigdís said slowly and firmly. ‘If you lie to us now then we can arrest you. It will be a serious matter, I can assure you. Now, once more, did you ever have an affair with Agnar?’
Ingileif bit her lip, her cheeks reddening again. She took a deep breath. ‘OK. All right. I did have an affair with Agnar when I was his student. He was divorced from his first wife then, it was before he remarried. And it was hardly an affair, we slept together a few times, that was all.’
‘Did he finish it, or did you?’
‘I suppose it was me. He did have a real magnetism for women then, in fact he still had it when I last saw him. He had this way of making you feel special, intellectually interesting as well as beautiful. But he was sleazy, basically. He wanted to sleep with as many girls as he could just to prove to himself what a good-looking guy he was. He was deeply vain. When I saw him the other day he tried to flirt with me again, but I saw through it this time. I don’t mess around with married men.’
‘One last question,’ said Vigdís. ‘Where were you on Friday evening?’
Ingileif’s shoulders lowered marginally as she relaxed, as if this was one difficult question she could answer. ‘I went to a party for a friend who was launching an exhibition of her paintings. I was there from about eight until, maybe, eleven-thirty. There were dozens people there who know me. Her name is Frída Jósefsdóttir. I can give you her address and phone number if you want.’
‘Please,’ said Vigdís, passing her her notebook. Ingileif scribbled something on a blank page and handed it back.
‘And afterwards?’ asked Vigdís.
‘Afterwards?’
‘After you left the gallery.’
Ingileif smiled shyly. ‘I went home. With someone.’
‘And who would that be?’
‘Lárus Thorvaldsson.’
‘Is he a regular boyfriend?’
‘Not really,’ said Ingileif. ‘He’s a painter: we’ve known each other for years. We just spend the night together sometimes. You know how it is. And no, he’s not married.’
For once in the conversation, Ingileif seemed completely unembarrassed. So did Vigdís for that matter. She obviously knew how it was.
Vigdís passed the notebook across again and Ingileif scribbled down Lárus’s details.
‘She’s not a very good liar,’ Magnus said when they were back out on the street.
‘I knew there was something going on between her and Agnar.’
‘But she was convincing that that was all in the past.’
‘Possibly,’ said Vigdís. ‘I’ll check her alibi, but I expect it will hold up.’
‘There must be some connection with Steve Jubb,’ Magnus said. ‘The name Isildur, or Ísildur is significant, I know it. Did you notice she didn’t seem surprised we were asking about her long-dead brother? And if she saw the
Lord of the Rings
movie the name Isildur would have jumped out at her. She didn’t mention that connection at all.’
‘You mean she was trying to downplay the Ísildur name?’
‘Exactly. There’s a connection there she’s not talking about.’
‘Shall we bring her in to the station for questioning?’ Vigdís suggested. ‘Perhaps Baldur should see her.’
‘Let’s leave it a while. Let her relax, drop her guard. We’ll come back and interview her again in a day or two. It’s easier to find the hole in a story second time around.’
They checked with the woman who owned the boutique next door. She confirmed she had dropped into Ingileif’s gallery one afternoon earlier that week to borrow some tea bags, although she wasn’t absolutely sure whether it was the Monday or the Tuesday.
Vigdís drove up the hill past the Hallgrímskirkja. Magnus peered up at a large bronze statue on a plinth in front of the church. The first
vestur-íslenskur
, Leifur Eiríksson, the Viking who had discovered America a thousand years before. He was staring out over the jumble of brightly coloured buildings in the middle of town to the bay to the west, and on towards the Atlantic.
‘Where are you from originally?’ Magnus asked. Although his Icelandic was already improving rapidly, he was finding it tiring, and there was something familiar about sitting in a car with a black partner that tempted him to slip back into English.
‘I don’t speak English,’ Vigdís replied, in Icelandic.
‘What do you mean you don’t speak English? Every Icelander under the age of forty can speak English.’
‘I said I don’t speak English, not I can’t speak it.’
‘OK. Then, where are you from?’ Magnus asked again, this time in Icelandic.
‘I’m an Icelander,’ Vigdís said. ‘I was born here, I live here, I have never lived anywhere else.’
‘Right,’ Magnus said. A touchy subject, clearly. But he had to admit that Vigdís was an incontrovertibly Icelandic name.
Vigdís sighed. ‘My father was an American serviceman at the Keflavík airbase. I don’t know his name, I’ve never met him, according to my mother he doesn’t even know I exist. Does that satisfy you?’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Magnus. ‘I know how difficult it can be to figure out your identity. I still don’t know whether I am an Icelander or an American, and I just get more confused the older I get.’
‘Hey, I don’t have a problem with my identity,’ said Vigdís. ‘I know exactly who I am. It’s just other people never believe it.’
‘Ah,’ said Magnus. A couple of raindrops fell on the windscreen. ‘Do you think it will rain all day?’
Vigdís laughed. ‘There you are, you
are
an Icelander. When in doubt discuss the weather. No, Magnús, I do not think it will rain for more than five minutes.’ She drove down the other side of the hill towards the police headquarters on Hverfisgata. ‘Look, I’m sorry, I just find it easier to straighten out those kind of questions up front. Icelandic women are a bit like that, you know. We say what we think.’
‘It must be tough being the only black detective in the country.’
‘You’re damn right. I’m pretty sure that Baldur didn’t want me to join the department. And I don’t exactly blend in when I’m out on the streets, you know. But I did well in the exams and I pushed for it. It was Snorri who got me the job.’
‘The Commissioner?’
‘He told me my appointment was an important symbol for Reykjavík’s police force to be seen as modern and outward looking. I know that some of my colleagues think a black detective in this town is absurd, but I hope I have proved myself.’ She sighed. ‘The problem is I feel like I have to prove myself every day.’
‘Well, you seem like a good cop to me,’ Magnus said.
Vigdís smiled. ‘Thanks.’
They reached police headquarters, an ugly long concrete office block opposite the bus station. Vigdís drove her car into a compound around the back and parked. The rain began to fall hard, thundering down on the car roof. Vigdís peered out at the water leaping about the parking lot and hesitated.
Magnus decided to take advantage of Vigdís’s direct honesty to find out a bit more about what he had got himself into. ‘Is Árni Holm related to Thorkell Holm in some way?’
‘Nephew. And yes, that is probably why he is in the department. He’s not exactly our top detective, but he’s harmless. I think Baldur might be trying to get rid of him.’
‘Which is why he dumped him on me?’
Vigdís shrugged. ‘I couldn’t possibly comment.’
‘Baldur isn’t very happy with me being here, is he?’
‘No, he isn’t. We Icelanders don’t like being shown what to do by the Americans, or anyone else for that matter.’
‘I can understand that,’ Magnus said.
‘But it’s more than that. He’s threatened by you. We all are, I suppose. There was a murderer on the loose last year, he killed three women before he turned himself in.’
‘I know, the Commissioner told me.’
‘Well, Baldur was in charge of the investigation. We failed to find the killer and there was a lot of pressure on Snorri and Thorkell to do something. People wanted heads to roll. Moving Baldur on would have been the easiest thing to do, but Snorri didn’t do that. I’d say Baldur isn’t out of the woods yet. He needs to solve this case and he needs to do it himself.’
Magnus sighed. He could understand Baldur’s position, but it wasn’t going to make his life in Reykjavík easy. ‘And what do you think?’
Vigdís smiled. ‘I think I might learn something from you, and that’s always good. Come on. The rain is easing off, just like I said it would. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got work to do.’
I
NGILEIF WAS SHAKEN
by the visit of the two detectives. An odd couple: the black woman had a flawless Icelandic accent, whereas the tall red-haired man spoke a bit hesitantly with an American lilt. Neither of them had believed her, though.
As soon as she had read about Agnar’s death in the newspaper, she had expected the police. She thought she had perfected her story, but in the end she didn’t think she had done very well. She just wasn’t a good liar. Still, they had gone now. Perhaps they wouldn’t come back, although she couldn’t help thinking that somehow they would.
The shop was empty so she returned to her desk, and pulled out some sheets of paper and a calculator. She stared at all the minus signs. If she delayed the electricity bill, she might just be able to pay Svala, the woman who made the glass pieces in the gallery. Something in her stomach flipped, and an all-too familiar feeling of nausea flowed through her.
This couldn’t go on much longer.
She loved the gallery. They all did, all seven women who owned it and whose pieces were sold there. At first they had been equal partners: her own skill was making handbags and shoes out of fish skin tanned to a beautiful luminescent sheen of different colours. But it emerged that she had a natural talent for promoting and organizing the others. She had increased sales, jacked up prices and insisted on concentrating on the highest quality articles.
Her breakthrough had been the relationship she had developed with Nordidea. The company was based in Copenhagen, but had shops all over Germany selling to interior designers. Icelandic art fitted well into the minimalist spaces that were so highly fashionable there. Her designers made glassware, vases and candleholders of lava, jewellery, chairs, lamps, as well as abstract landscapes and her own fish-skin leather goods. Nordidea bought them all.
The orders from Copenhagen had grown so fast that Ingileif had had to recruit more designers, insisting all the time on the best quality. The only problem was that Nordidea were slow payers. Then, as the credit crunch bit in Denmark and Germany, they became even slower. Then they just stopped paying at all.
There were repayments on a big loan from the bank to be made. On the advice of their bank manager the partners had borrowed in low-interest euros. The rate may well have been low for a year or two, but as the króna devalued the size of the loan had ballooned to the point where the women had no chance of meeting their original repayment schedule.
More importantly for Ingileif, the gallery still owed its designers millions of krónur and these were debts that she was absolutely determined to meet. The relationship with Nordidea had been entirely her doing; it was her mistake and she would pay for it. Her fellow partners had no inkling of how serious the problem was, and Ingileif didn’t want them to find out. She had already spent her legacy from her mother, but that wasn’t enough. These designers weren’t just her friends: Reykjavík was a small place and everyone in the design world knew Ingileif.
If she let all these people down, they wouldn’t forget it, and neither would she.
She picked up the phone to call Anders Bohr at the firm of accountants in Copenhagen that was trying to salvage something from Nordidea’s chaotic finances. She telephoned him once a day, using a mixture of charm and chastisement in the hope of badgering him into giving her something. He seemed to enjoy talking to her, but he hadn’t cracked yet. She could only
try. She wished she could afford a plane ticket to have a go at him in person.
A hundred kilometres to the east, a red Suzuki four-wheel-drive pulled up outside a cluster of buildings. There were three structures: a large barn, a large house and a slightly smaller church. A big man climbed out of the car – he was well over six feet tall, with dark hair greying at the temples, a strong jaw hidden by a beard, and dark eyes glittering under bushy eyebrows. He looked more like forty-five than his real age, which was sixty-one.
He was the pastor of Hruni.
He stretched and took a deep gulp of cool, clear air. White puffs of clouds skittered through a pale blue sky. The sun was low, it never rose very high at this latitude, but it emanated a clear light that picked out in shadow the lines of the hills and mountains surrounding Hruni.
Far to the north the sunlight was magnified white on the smooth horizontal surface of the glacier which filled the gaps between mountains. Low hills, meadows that were still brown at this stage of spring, and rock surrounded the hamlet. The village of Flúdir, while just on the other side of the ridge to the west, could have been twenty kilometres away. Fifty kilometres away.