‘Hello, professor.’
For a moment Beccari looked startled to see Magnus, but he swiftly recovered his composure.
‘Ah, inspector. How’s the investigation going?’
‘Pretty good,’ said Magnus.
Beccari nodded. ‘So you are sure that poor Dr Thorsteinsson is your man?’
‘No. Dr Thorsteinsson isn’t our man.’ Magnus fixed his eyes on Beccari.
‘Oh,’ said Beccari, unnerved by Magnus’s stare. ‘Do you have another suspect?’
‘Yes.’
‘Hm.’
Beccari looked away, down to the water below them. Out in the fjord the giant iceberg Magnus had seen the night before stood immobile in the water. The cruise ship had gone. Further in, just a few yards from the cliffs, an empty motorboat bobbed up and down on its mooring.
‘Marco’ — Magnus used his first name — ‘I know that you planted the Columbus letter in the book in the Vatican. And I know your father Emilio forged it.’
Beccari tensed. He was still staring hard at the sea beneath the cliffs. Magnus let the silence stretch as Beccari considered his response. ‘That doesn’t mean I killed anybody,’ he said eventually.
‘We have details of the car you rented at Keflavík Airport when you arrived in the country. We’re checking the cameras at the Hvalfjördur tunnel on the Ring Road for the day Carlotta was murdered. We will soon know what time you drove past them. We know you flew to Narsarsuaq yesterday, giving yourself just enough time to get to the Blomsterdalen and kill Rósa. And I am sure we will be able to place you at the hotel in Reykjavík where Nancy Fishburn was smothered with a pillow.
‘We’ve just started. Now we know where to look, the evidence will pile up. Forensics, fingerprints, DNA, witnesses. We will put you at the site of three murders in two countries, no problem.’
Magnus waited while Beccari digested all this. ‘Of course you will,’ he said eventually. ‘I’m amazed that I’ve gotten this far. I mean, I was so lucky that Rósa and then Einar presented themselves as suspects. If I’d had the chance to plan it properly, you might have found things more difficult.’
Magnus was amazed at the man’s ego and confidence in his own intelligence. Naturally the genius historian could have staged the perfect murder if he had had the time to put his extraordinary mind to the problem!
‘So you didn’t intend to kill Carlotta?’
‘No. I mean, at the back of my mind, I thought I might have to. But I hoped to persuade her.’
‘Persuade her of what?’
‘I don’t know how much of this you have figured out yet,’ said Beccari. He glanced at Magnus, who gave no response.
‘The reason Carlotta got in touch with me in the first place was that she had inquired at the Vatican who had checked out the volume in the past fifty years. There were only three names, and mine was one of them, so she got in touch with me to ask whether I had noticed a letter from Christopher Columbus to his brother. I said I hadn’t. Then she told me that a graduate student had found it, but the Vatican authorities suspected that it was a fake.
‘Naturally, I told her the Vatican must be correct. I wanted her to drop the whole thing.’
‘Presumably you knew your father had faked it?’
‘Yes. He told me all about it at the time, and about Nancy and John’s plan to plant the wampum in Greenland. I was studying at Pisa, and Papa knew I had been researching in the Vatican Secret Archives and so I could get access. I think that’s why he decided it was a good home for the fake. I should have refused him. He thought it was very amusing, and I knew the Fishburns and liked them, but as a professional historian I knew this was wrong. Not just criminally wrong, but morally wrong. It would mislead academics like me, cause them to waste time.’
Beccari sighed. ‘But Papa was very persuasive. He was charming and he was persistent. And beyond that, I was always trying to please him. That’s why I became a historian in the first place. That’s why it has always pained me that he never lived to see me become a professor at Princeton.’ Beccari smiled. ‘He would have loved that. He loved Americans and American universities, and not just because they were some of his best customers. So I said yes.’ For the first time Beccari looked up at Magnus. ‘I planted the letter.
‘I regretted it immediately, but then I just shoved it out of my mind. Which was really stupid. After Papa died I should have gone right back and extracted the letter; then everything would have been fine. But some part of me denied that I had ever planted it; the whole thing had nothing to do with me.’
Beccari shook his head. ‘And then Carlotta’s friend found it.’
‘I can understand why you told her it was a fake. But why did you change your mind and authenticate it?’
‘It became clear that Carlotta wasn’t going to take my word that it was a forgery and drop it. She said they had other evidence pointing to Gudrid settling in Nantucket, and that she and some Icelandic friends of hers were going to make a documentary about it. An international documentary. In that case it would be much better if everyone thought the letter was real.
‘So I went to Rome and took another look at my father’s work. It was extremely well done. So well done that it made me wonder whether he hadn’t actually made other forgeries, but that is by the by. I felt that my best bet was to be bold and bluff it out. So I told Carlotta the letter was real and I let her run with it.
‘I knew there was a good chance I would get found out in the end, but this seemed to me my best chance of escaping detection. I begged Carlotta not to tell anyone that I had missed the letter myself in 1979 — I said it would be embarrassing — and Carlotta was willing to go along with that. She was just so pleased to have my blessing, she would have done anything I asked.
‘So, it all looked good. Until Carlotta called me three weeks ago and said she wanted to speak to me again about the letter. She had doubts and she was going to talk to Einar about them. In fact, she was going to Iceland to see him.
‘I knew I was in trouble. I almost confessed then. But the consequences to my career would have been catastrophic. I have my enemies in the academic world, especially at Princeton, and they would have lost no time in plunging in the knife. For someone in my position to have planted a forgery would be a scandal. It would ruin my reputation and the reputation of the university. And... And my reputation is important to me. I have made a major contribution to the understanding of history, and I have more to do. Quite simply, I am one of the top historians in the world. Without history... I am nothing. I tried to imagine what would happen to me if I was unmasked as a forger, and I just couldn’t. It was too terrible.’
Beccari was searching Magnus’s face for understanding. Magnus could believe he wasn’t exaggerating. For someone with an ego like Beccari’s, the shame of being unmasked as a forger would be too horrible to contemplate.
‘I see,’ Magnus said. ‘So you agreed to meet Carlotta at Glaumbaer?’
‘Yes. At that point I didn’t plan to kill her. I just wanted to hear what she had to say and find some way to keep her quiet. I typed up an offer for her to take up a post in the history department at Princeton. It might have come in useful.’
‘And what did she have to say?’
‘She had just read some interview with me online from a few years back, where I had said that my father was a rare-book dealer. That he was the one who had gotten me interested in history — which was true, of course. Anyway, she remembered from her visit to Nancy Fishburn in Nantucket that Nancy’s husband had collected rare books. She had done some googling, and discovered that there used to be a rare-book dealer called Emilio Beccari and she even found the introduction of an obscure pamphlet on antiquarian books where his name was mentioned along with John Fishburn. So she wanted to know if Emilio was my father, and if I could explain the connection. Apparently she had been in touch with an archaeologist in Greenland who had some doubts about the wampum as well.