Jakob Ingibergsson.
The man whom she had seen at Tryggvi Thór’s bedside.
Forty-Six
After a businesslike meeting at the prosecutor’s office in Qaqortoq, where they tackled the bureaucracy of international police cooperation, Magnus and Paulsen took a helicopter back up the fjord to Narsarsuaq. He told her he wanted to speak to the archaeologist who had been on the dig with Carlotta, Einar and Eygló at Brattahlíd in 2011. Paulsen was surprised, but was happy to proceed on the Rósa case without him. As far as she was concerned, unless they found one, or preferably two, witnesses who were certain Einar was somewhere other than the Blomsterdalen when Rósa was murdered, he was going down.
Magnus called Eygló from the airport at Narsarsuaq and asked her if she would help him track down Anya Kleemann. Paulsen found a local to take them across the fjord: a short Greenlander named Noah who didn’t speak any English. They picked up Eygló at the hotel and drove down to the harbour. Within a couple of minutes they were speeding across the water in a small motorboat, weaving around the icebergs.
About half a mile downstream, towards the sea, a water jet spouted several feet into the air. A moment later a tail fin flapped and disappeared beneath the surface.
Noah turned to them and grinned. ‘Hval,’ he said in Danish. The same as the Icelandic word. Whale.
‘Tom came to see me last night,’ said Eygló.
‘Did he threaten you? If he threatens you I can warn him off. Or get Inspector Paulsen to arrest him.’
Eygló grinned. ‘He did threaten me. I was scared at first. But I handled him. He was bluffing.’
Despite all that had happened, she seemed to Magnus to be stronger that morning.
‘Where is Einar?’ she asked.
‘In a police cell in Qaqortoq police station.’
‘It doesn’t look good for him, does it?’
Magnus shook his head.
‘I’m still sure he didn’t kill Rósa.’
‘That’s up to Inspector Paulsen to decide,’ said Magnus. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wondered why he had passed the buck so easily.
They reached the little harbour at Brattahlíd, and Noah tied up the boat. He told Eygló to wait in Danish. Magnus and Eygló stood next to a wall running along the side of the dock, surrounded by empty pallets, a pile of tyres, some gas canisters and a couple of trailers. The red kiosk was empty, but an old Land Rover was parked a few yards down the track.
It was low tide, and about a hundred yards further along the shore, a berg had become stranded on a patch of brown sand, a giant ice cube sweating in the sun. Two local boys, dressed only in swimming trunks, were trying to push it, but it wouldn’t budge. To Magnus’s amazement, one of them turned and sprinted into the sea, splashing and laughing. The other joined him with no hesitation. The sea temperature couldn’t have been more than a few degrees above freezing; even the craziest of Icelanders, and there were some pretty crazy Icelanders, wouldn’t have tried that.
A hairy hiker carrying a massive rucksack trudged into view. He sat down a few feet away, dislodged his load and swigged water from a bottle. The aroma of a week in the wilderness assailed Magnus’s nostrils.
‘How far is it to Anya’s site?’ said Magnus.
‘About seven or eight kilometres.’
‘I hope Noah is coming up with transport.’
They waited a moment, Eygló examining her phone.
‘Did Professor Beccari call you this morning?’ Magnus asked.
‘Yes,’ said Eygló. ‘He had heard about a murder at Narsarsuaq and was worried it might be one of us. I told him it was.’
‘Did he seem surprised when you said it was Rósa?’
‘Er...’ Eygló hesitated. ‘I’m not sure. Concerned, yes. Agitated. But actually, it was as if he was expecting it.’
Magnus told her about Beccari’s brief conversation with Rósa and Rósa’s message for Carlotta’s parents, if that was indeed whom it was intended for.
‘Wow,’ said Eygló.
‘It struck me that your conversation with her was similar,’ Magnus said. ‘When she told you about her cancer.’
‘Yes, that’s true.’
‘Was it definitely cancer she was talking about? Could it be that she thought her life was in danger? That someone was about to murder her?’
Eygló considered the question. ‘No, she was definitely talking about cancer. But maybe she was doing the same thing with me: preparing for her death. It was just sooner than she led me to believe.’
She frowned. ‘This really doesn’t look good for Einar, does it? I mean, if Rósa told Professor Beccari something was going to happen to her soon, it implies she thought she was going to be killed. And Einar is the obvious killer.’
Magnus nodded. ‘That’s what Inspector Paulsen thinks.’
‘And you?’
‘I think that too,’ Magnus admitted.
His phone rang. It was Vigdís describing her interview with Emil, and seeing Jakob Ingibergsson at Tryggvi Thór’s bedside: the man who owned the insurance company and who had got Tryggvi Thór thrown out of the police force.
‘It stinks, Vigdís.’
‘To high heaven.’
‘If Tryggvi Thór really was taking a bribe, why cover it up?’
‘Because other people were involved?’ said Vigdís.
‘Possibly. Probably. But who?’
‘Thorkell Holm was the guy who sacked Tryggvi Thór.’
‘Thorkell is a good guy,’ Magnus said. But so too was Tryggvi Thór.
He heard the whine and clank of petrol engine and metal and Noah appeared at the helm of an all-terrain vehicle.
‘I’ve got to go, Vigdís, and you had better get back to investigating Rósa. But thanks for doing that for me.’
As he hung up, Noah motioned for Magnus and Eygló to hop on, and conducted a quick discussion in Danish with Eygló about where exactly they were going. The hiker tried to ask Noah in German-accented English about boats across the fjord, but Noah ignored him.
The ATV seemed to be the vehicle of choice in Brattahlíd — they encountered three as Noah drove along the road that ran the length of the village past the yellow Leif Erikson Hostel, a bright blue school building, a red church with a spire and the remains of Erik the Red’s farm. There was no sign of past excavations there now, just low mounds of lush green grass and wildflowers tracing out the lines of ancient walls.
‘You know the trench from the nineteen thirties was open until the nineteen nineties?’ shouted Eygló above the roar of the ATV. ‘Einar tidied up much better after his excavation. So when Nancy Fishburn came here in the early eighties, there would have been tempting earthworks to tamper with.’
Magnus envisaged a younger version of the old lady he had seen in the Nantucket TV footage scrabbling in the earth with her wampum shells while her husband kept watch to make sure no one was coming. An arresting image.
‘Maybe I shouldn’t say this,’ he shouted back. ‘But you could put the hoax into your documentary, as well as the real Gudrid. That might be a way of rescuing it.’
‘Not a bad idea. I’ll suggest it to Suzy.’
Magnus was unsure whether he liked his own suggestion. Suzy should have come clean the moment Nancy had told her about the hoax. But Eygló deserved a break.
Past the site of the real longhouse lay a modern reconstruction, fenced off and covered in a turf roof. Noah turned left up a rough track which climbed the hill above Brattahlíd. Magnus looked over his shoulder at Erik’s Fjord and Narsarsuaq airfield on its far side, and then the view disappeared and they were in a wilderness of close-cropped grass and bare rock, dotted with sheep. The track was made of a deep red earth and stone, and Noah seemed to enjoy the jolts as they headed west — Magnus had the impression he was trying to get airborne wherever he could.