Where the Shadows Lie (Fire and Ice)

wall. They were facing the bay. A steady breeze rolled small clouds through the pale blue sky, their shadows skittering over the sparkling grey water. In the far distance Magnus could just make out the glacier of Snaefellsnes, a white blur floating above the sea.
    Ingileif was tense, sitting bolt upright on the wall, shoulders back, forehead knitted in a frown accentuating the nick in her eyebrow. She looked like so many other girls in Reykjavík, slim, blonde with high cheekbones. But there was something about her that set her apart, a determination, a purposefulness, a sense that despite the doubts and worries that were obviously troubling her, she knew what she wanted and was going to get it, that Magnus found appealing. She seemed to be debating with herself whether or not to tell him something.
    He sat in silence. Waiting. He saw that there was also a small scar on her left cheek. He hadn’t noticed that before.
    Eventually she spoke. Someone had to. ‘You know this place is haunted?’
    ‘The Höfdi House?’ Magnus looked over his shoulder at the elegant white building.
    ‘Yes. The ghost is a young girl who poisoned herself after she was convicted of incest with her brother. She scared the wits out of the people who used to live here.’
    ‘Icelanders have got to learn to be a little braver about ghosts,’ said Magnus.
    ‘Not just Icelanders. It used to be the British consulate. The consul was so terrified that he demanded that the British Foreign Ministry allow him to move the consulate to another address. Apparently she keeps turning the lights on and off.’ Ingileif sighed. ‘I feel quite sorry for her.’
    Magnus thought he detected a quiver in her voice. Odd. Most ghosts had had a tough time in life, but still. ‘Is that what you wanted to speak to me about?’ he asked. ‘You want me to check it out? All the lights seem to be off at the moment.’
    ‘Oh, no,’ she replied, smiling weakly. ‘I just wanted to find out how the investigation was going.’
    ‘We’re making progress,’ Magnus said. ‘We need to track down Steve Jubb’s accomplice. And we haven’t verified the authenticity of the saga yet.’
    ‘Oh, it’s authentic.’
    ‘Is it?’ said Magnus. ‘Or is it an elaborate hoax dreamed up by Agnar? Is that why he was killed? Steve Jubb found out he was being taken for a ride?’
    Ingileif laughed. The tension seemed to flow from her body. Magnus waited for her to finish.
    ‘Well?’ he said.
    ‘I’d love you to be right,’ Ingileif said. ‘And I can see why you might think that. But, of course, I know it’s genuine. It has over-shadowed my whole life, and that of every member of my family for generations.’
    ‘So you say.’
    ‘Don’t you believe me?’
    ‘Not really,’ Magnus said. ‘You don’t have a great track record for telling me the truth.’
    The smile disappeared. Ingileif sighed. ‘I don’t, do I? And I can see how from your point of view you have to consider the possibility that it’s a forgery. But your lab guys will do tests on it, carbon-14 or whatever, and they’ll tell you how old the vellum is. And the seventeenth-century copy.’
    ‘Maybe,’ said Magnus.
    Ingileif’s grey eyes looked straight at his. For a moment Magnus found it unsettling, but he held her gaze. ‘I want to show you something,’ she said.
    She rummaged in her bag and pulled out a yellowing envelope.
    She handed it to Magnus. A British stamp, same king as last time, and the same handwriting.
    ‘This is the reason I asked you to meet me. I should have shown it to you yesterday, but I didn’t.’
    Magnus opened the envelope. Inside was a sheet of notepaper.
Merton College
Oxford
12 October 1948
Dear Ísildarson
Thank you for your extraordinary letter. What an astonishing tale! The part I found the most amazing was the inscription ‘The Ring of Andvari’ in runes. One never knows with the Icelandic sagas. They are so realistic, yet the scholarly fashion is to dismiss them as fiction. Yet here is the very ring, at least a thousand years old, that appears in Gaukur’s Saga! After the discovery of his farm buried under all that ash, the saga has much more credence than I originally gave it.
I would have loved the opportunity to see the ring, to hold it, to touch it. But I think you were absolutely right to return it to its hiding place. Either that or take it to the mouth of Mount Hekla yourself and toss it in! It would be altogether wrong to hold up the evil magic of