Where the Shadows Lie (Fire and Ice)

was doing there. He’s hiding something, and until he tells us otherwise, we’re going to assume it’s a murder. I’d say we have enough to hold him, and so will the judge.’
    ‘Sounds good to me,’ said Magnus. And it did. In the US what they had would not be nearly enough to hold a suspect, but Magnus could learn to like the Icelandic system.
    Baldur nodded curtly. ‘Now, what have we got?’
    Two detectives had interviewed Agnar’s wife, Linda, at their house in Seltjarnarnes, a suburb of Reykjavík. She was devastated. They had been married seven years and had two small children. It was Agnar’s second marriage: he was divorced when they met – like his first wife, Linda had been one of his students. He had gone to the summer house to catch up on some work – apparently he had a deadline looming for a translation. He had spent the previous two weekends there. His wife, stuck alone with the children in Seltjarnarnes, had not been too happy with that.
    Agnar’s laptop had not revealed any more interesting e-mails to Steve Jubb. There was a jumble of Word files and Internet sites visited, all of which would be analysed. There were piles of working papers in his office at the University and at the summer house which would be read through.
    Forensics had found four sets of fingerprints in the summer house: Agnar’s, Steve Jubb’s and two others as yet unidentified. None from Agnar’s wife, who had stated that she had not visited the summer house yet that year. There were no prints on the passenger door of Jubb’s rented Toyota, confirming his claim that he had visited Agnar alone.
    They had also found traces of cocaine use in the bedroom, and a one-gram bag of the drug hidden in a wardrobe.
    ‘Vigdís. Any luck with the name Isildur?’ Baldur asked.
    He turned to a tall elegant black woman of about thirty, who was wearing a tight black sweater and jeans. Magnus had noticed her as soon as he had walked into the room. She was the first black person Magnus had seen since he had arrived in Iceland. Iceland didn’t do ethnic minorities, especially blacks.
    ‘It seems that Ísildur, with an “í”, is a legitimate Icelandic name.’ She pronounced the Icelandic letter with a long “ee” sound. ‘Although it is very rare indeed. I have searched the National Registry database, and only come up with one entry for that name in the last eighty years, a child named Ísildur Ásgrímsson. Born 1974, died 1977 in Flúdir.’ Flúdir was a village in the south-west of Iceland, Magnus dimly remembered. It was pronounced Floothir , the ‘d’ being the Icelandic letter ‘’.
    Vigdís had a perfect Icelandic accent, Magnus noticed. It sounded very odd to him, he had worked with plenty of black female detectives in Boston, and he was half expecting a laconic Boston drawl, not a lilting Icelandic trill. ‘His father, Ásgrímur Högnason, was a doctor. He died in 1992.’
    ‘But no sign of anyone alive today with that name?’
    Vigdís shook her head. ‘I suppose he might be a vestur-íslenskur. ’ She meant a Western Icelander, one of those Icelanders, predecessors of Magnus himself, who had crossed over the Atlantic to North America a century before. ‘Or he could live in England. If he was born overseas he won’t be on our database.’
    ‘Anyone heard of an Ísildur?’ Baldur asked the room. ‘It does sound Icelandic.’ No one said anything, although Árni, who was sitting next to Magnus, seemed about to open his mouth and then thought better of it.
    ‘All right,’ said Baldur. ‘This is what we know. It’s clear that Steve Jubb went to the summer house for more than a chat with an acquaintance. He was doing some kind of deal with Agnar, something involving a man named Ísildur.’
    He stared around the room. ‘We need to find out what it is that Agnar had discovered, and what deal they were negotiating. We need to find out a lot more about Agnar. And most of all we need to find out who the hell this Ísildur is. Let’s hope Steve Jubb will begin to talk once he realizes that he is going to spend the next few weeks in jail.’
    When the meeting was over, Chief Superintendent Thorkell asked Magnus for a word. His office was big and comfortable, with a magnificent view of the bay and Mount Esja. The clouds were higher than the day before; far out into the bay a patch of sunlight reflected off the water. Three photographs of small fair-haired children were positioned on the chief