Magnus’s foul mood deepened. He knew that Baldur was trying to needle him, and he fought to control his anger.
‘Of course I don’t believe that the ring is really a thousand years old,’ Magnus said. ‘Look. We know Steve Jubb murdered Agnar. But since he won’t tell us why, we need to figure it out for ourselves. We also know that Agnar was trying to sell a saga – we’ve both seen it. It exists.’
Baldur shook his head. ‘All we’ve seen is a hundred and twenty pages that was spat out of a computer printer two weeks ago.’
Magnus leaned back. ‘Fair enough. Maybe the saga is a forgery. Maybe there is a ring, but it’s a fake too. If anything, that would create a bigger motive for Steve Jubb to kill Agnar. We still need to find it.’
‘The thing is, I’m not sure that Steve Jubb did murder Agnar.’
Magnus snorted.
‘I’ve just interviewed him again. He wouldn’t tell me anything about sagas or rings. But he did deny he murdered Agnar.’
‘And you believe him?’
‘Yes, actually. My hunch is he’s telling the truth.’
‘Your hunch?’
Baldur found a sheet of paper in the pile on his desk. ‘Here’s a report from the forensics lab.’
Magnus scanned it. It was an analysis of the soil samples on Steve Jubb’s size forty-five shoes.
‘It shows that there were no traces of the kind of mud on the path from the summer house down to the lake shore, or the mud on the shore itself.’
Magnus read the report, his mind buzzing. ‘Maybe Jubb cleaned his shoes. Thoroughly.’
‘There was soil from the area right in front of the summer house. So he was at the front that evening, but not at the back. And he didn’t clean his shoes.’
‘Perhaps he changed into boots? Ditched them afterwards?’
‘We’d have found footprints in or around the house,’ Baldur said. ‘And that’s pretty unlikely, isn’t it?’
Magnus stared at the piece of paper, not reading the words, just trying to figure out how Jubb could have dragged the body down to the lake without getting mud on his shoes. He found it impossible to believe that Jubb’s presence at the summer house that evening was just coincidence.
‘Someone else moved Agnar,’ Baldur said. ‘ After Steve Jubb had left. And it’s quite probable that someone else killed him.’
‘Did you find footprints near the lake?’
Baldur shook his head. ‘Nothing useful. It had rained overnight. And the scene was well and truly compromised. The kids, their father, the paramedics, the police officers from Selfoss. They left footprints all over the place.’
‘An accomplice then,’ said Magnus.
‘Like who?’ Baldur said.
‘Isildur. This Lawrence Feldman guy.’ As soon as he said it Magnus regretted it.
Baldur spotted the flaw immediately. ‘You contacted Isildur two days later, and he replied from a computer located in California.’
‘An Icelandic accomplice. There are Lord of the Rings fans in this country.’
‘There is no record of any Icelandic number on Steve Jubb’s mobile phone, apart from Agnar’s. We know that Steve Jubb never left his hotel from the time he arrived in Reykjavik in the morning to the time he went out to Lake Thingvellir late afternoon. None of the hotel staff recalls anyone visiting him at the hotel.’
‘Someone could have gone directly to his room without stopping at the front desk.’
Baldur just raised his eyebrows.
‘Don’t tell me you’re going to spring him?’ Magnus asked.
‘Not yet. And I’m not ruling him out as a suspect. But we need to widen the investigation. Look at the more real-world circumstances.’ Baldur counted them off on his fingers. ‘Agnar saw a lover and a former lover in the weeks before he died. His wife was seriously angry about his infidelity. He had big money problems. He bought drugs. Maybe he had debts we don’t know about? Maybe he owed his dealer money? Someone else was there that night and we need to find out who.’
‘So it’s just a coincidence he was negotiating this deal with Jubb and Isildur?’
‘Why not?’ said Baldur. ‘Look. We shouldn’t rule out this saga deal completely. If you like, you can focus on that. But there are plenty of other things for the rest of the team to look at.’
‘I’m sure if I went to California I could get Isildur to-’
‘No,’ said Baldur.
Several time zones to the west, it was early morning in the woods of Trinity County, Northern California. Isildur looked out of his study over the little valley towards the waterfall tumbling down from the bare rock face opposite. The morning sunlight glistened off the rain-washed greenery. In the garden he could see the life-sized shapes of Gandalf, Legolas and Elrond, bronze sculptures he had commissioned at great expense from a San Francisco artist.
It was a beautiful spot. He had bought it with a fraction of the money he had made from selling his share in 4Portal the year before. He had been looking for a hideaway in the woods to concentrate on his projects and had found the perfect place. Alpine mountains on three sides, a small winding road on the fourth leading down through forests to the nearest very small town ten miles away.
It was a place where he could think.
He had named it Rivendell, naturally, after the sanctuary that the Fellowship of the Ring had rested in. He remembered when he had first read of Rivendell, when he was seventeen, and he had had a clear vision in his mind of the place, surrounded by woods, mountains, running water, peace, tranquillity.
This was it.
He had been working on two projects. The one that had taken most of his time was his attempt to coordinate the collation of an online dictionary of two of Tolkien’s Elvish languages, Quenya and Sindarin. The project had turned out to be much more frustrating than he had thought. Tolkien had never laid down hard and fast grammar rules and vocabulary, so there were many differing interpretations of the two languages. Isildur knew that: the whole point about his dictionary was that it would be flexible enough to deal with the different dialects that had grown up over time. Trouble was his collaborators were not of a flexible frame of mind.
The project had descended into acrimony and abuse. He had hoped that as the provider of the money he would have the final say. It turned out that he was indeed a unifying figure: the authority they all loved to hate.
His other project was to try to track down Gaukur’s Saga. He had first become aware of it a few years before, through an Internet forum. He had put together a Danish academic who had discovered echoes of the lost saga in an eighteenth-century letter he had turned up, with Gimli, an Englishman whose grandfather had studied at Leeds University under Tolkien. The details were frustratingly vague, but Isildur was willing to spend big money to flesh them out.
And he did all this from the computer in his study at Rivendell.
He had never been overseas. He had been brought up in New Jersey, and spent all his vacations as a child with his family on the Jersey Shore. He had majored in electrical engineering at Stanford in California, and spent his career in Silicon Valley. He was a gifted programmer, intuitive, focused, able to make connections. 4Portal was his second venture, a company that developed software for advertising portals on cell phones. It was spectacularly successful, and Isildur’s six per cent share had been converted to many millions when he and his more commercial minded partners sold out.
The plan was that after a year or so in Rivendell, he would go back to the Valley and try something else.
Once he had Gaukur’s Saga in his possession. And the ring.
The last few weeks had been a rollercoaster ride of rising expectations and disappointments. First, the message from Agnar that he had found the saga. Then, a couple of weeks later that he had actually found Isildur’s ring. Gimli’s excited reports that the saga might indeed be real and that there was a deal to be done, and then it had all gone wrong.
Agnar was dead. Gimli was in jail. The police had the saga.