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 Fludir, while just on the other side of the ridge to the west, could have been twenty kilometres away. Fifty kilometres away.
The pastor turned to look at his beloved church. It was a small building with white-painted corrugated sides and a red-painted corrugated roof, standing in the lee of a rock-strewn ridge. The church was about eighty years old, but the gravestones around it were gnarled weather-beaten grey stone. Like everywhere in Iceland, the structures were new, but the places were old.
The pastor had just come back from ministering to one of his flock, an eighty-year-old farmer’s wife who was terminally ill with cancer. For all his forbidding presence the pastor was good with his congregation. Some of his colleagues in the Church of Iceland might have a better understanding of God, but the pastor understood the devil, and in a land that lay under constant threat of earthquake, volcano or storm, where trolls and ghosts roamed the countryside, and where dark winters suffocated isolated communities in their cold grip, an understanding of the devil was important.
Every one of the congregation of Hruni was aware of the awful fate of their predecessors who had danced with Satan and been swallowed up into the ground for their sins.
Martin Luther had understood the devil. Jon Thorkelsson Vidalin, from whose seventeenth-century sermons the pastor borrowed heavily, understood him. Indeed, at the farmer’s wife’s request, the pastor had used a blessing from the old pre-1982 liturgy to ward off evil spirits from her house. It had worked. Colour had returned to the old lady’s cheeks and she had asked for some food, the first time she had done that for a week.
The pastor had an air of authority in spiritual matters that gave people confidence. It also made them afraid.
In years gone by, he used to perform an effective double act with his old friend Dr Asgrimur, who had understood how important it was to give his patients the will to heal themselves. But the doctor had been dead nearly seventeen years. His replacement, a young woman who drove over from another village fifteen kilometres away, put all her faith in medicine and did her best to keep the pastor away from her patients.
He missed Asgrimur. The doctor had been the second-best chess player in the area, after the pastor himself, and the second most widely read. The pastor needed the stimulation of a fellow intellectual, especially during the long winter evenings. He didn’t miss his wife, who had walked out on him a few years after Asgrimur’s death, unable to understand or sympathize with her husband’s increasing eccentricity.
Thoughts of Asgrimur reminded the pastor of the news he had read the previous day about the professor who had been found murdered in Lake Thingvellir. He frowned and turned towards his house.
To work. The pastor was writing a major study of the medieval scholar Saemundur the Learned. He had already filled twenty-three exercise books with longhand writing: he had at least another twenty to go.
He wondered whether his own reputation would ever match that of Saemundur’s, that a future pastor of Hruni would write about him. It seemed absurd. But perhaps one day he would be called upon to do something that the whole world would notice.
One day.
CHAPTER NINE
Arni was having trouble locating Elvish speakers in Iceland, especially on a Saturday.
The couple of professors at the university he called were dismissive of his request. Tolkien was not a subject of serious study, and the only person who had any interest in the British author had been Agnar himself, but his colleagues doubted that he spoke any Elvish. So Magnus suggested that Arni dive into the Internet and see what he came up with.
Magnus himself decided to make use of the Internet to try to track down Isildur. Isildur was clearly the senior partner in the relationship with Steve Jubb and probably the one putting up the money. If Steve Jubb wouldn’t tell them anything about the deal he was discussing with Agnar, maybe Isildur would. If they could find him.
The more Magnus thought about it, the less likely it seemed to him that Isildur would be a friend of Jubb’s from Yorkshire. That kind of nickname was more common in the online world than the physical one.
But before he got to work, there was an e-mail waiting for him, forwarded by Agent Hendricks, who fortunately seemed to be working on a Saturday.
It was from Colby.
Magnus took a deep breath and opened it.
Magnus
The answer must be no. I can tell you don’t really mean it, so don’t pretend you do.
Don’t bother sending me any more e-mails, I won’t reply to them. C.
Magnus felt a rush of anger. She was right, of course, he didn’t really want to marry her, and there was no chance that he would be able to persuade her that he did. But he was worried about her safety. He typed rapidly.
Hi Colby,
I am very worried about you. I need to get you to safety. Now. If you don’t want to come with me then I will try to arrange something else. So please get in touch with me, or if not me, with the FBI, or with Deputy Superintendent Williams at Schroeder Plaza. If you do contact him, speak to him directly and only him.
Please do this one thing for me,
Love
Magnus
It probably wouldn’t work, but it was worth a try.
Magnus spent the rest of the afternoon in the murky waters of the Internet, feeling his way around forums and chat rooms. There were an awful lot of Lord of the Rings fans out there. They seemed to split into the amateurs and the obsessives. The amateurs were mostly thirteen-year-old boys who couldn’t spell and had seen the movies and thought the Balrogs were really cool. Or they were thirteen-year-old girls who couldn’t spell and had seen the movies and thought that Orlando Bloom was really hot.
These brief posts were outweighed by mighty articles from the obsessives, who wrote thousands of words on obscure aspects of Middle Earth, Tolkien’s invented world. There were disputes about whether those Balrogs had real wings or metaphysical ones, or about why there were no young ents, or about exactly who or what was Tom Bombadil.
Magnus hadn’t read The Lord of the Rings since he was thirteen himself, and he had only a vague recollection of all these characters. But it wasn’t just the obscurity of the arguments that surprised him, it was the passion and occasionally vitriol that accompanied them. To a great many people all over the world, The Lord of the Rings was clearly very, very important.