Where the Shadows Lie (Fire and Ice)

the ring to scientific archaeological testing. And please do not worry, I will not mention your discovery to anyone.
I have at last brought the Lord of the Rings to its conclusion after 10 years of toil. It is a vast sprawling book, which will probably run to at least 1200 pages, and one of which I am very proud. It will be difficult to produce in these hard times when paper is so scarce, but my publishers remain enthusiastic. When it is eventually published, as I hope it will be, I will be sure to send you a copy.
With best wishes ,
Yours sincerely ,
J.R.R. Tolkien
    ‘This says your grandfather found the ring,’ Magnus said.
    Ingileif nodded. ‘It does.’
    Magnus shook his head. ‘It’s incredible.’
    Ingileif sighed. ‘No it’s not. It explains everything.’
    ‘Explains what, exactly?’
    ‘My father’s obsession. How he died.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    Ingileif stared out to sea. Magnus watched her face closely as she wrestled with her emotions. Then she turned to Magnus, moisture in the corners of his eyes. ‘I think I told you my father died when I was about twelve?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘He was looking for the ring. It always seemed absurd to me that an educated man should be so convinced that it still existed. But of course he knew. His own father must have told him.’
    ‘But not told him exactly where it was hidden?’
    ‘Precisely. My father started searching right after my grandfather died. My guess is that Grandpa had forbidden him to look for it. Dad used to spend days scouring the area around the Thjórsá Valley in all weathers. And then one day he never came back.’
    Ingileif bit her lip.
    ‘When did you find this letter?’ Magnus asked.
    ‘Very recently. After I had approached Agnar. He had already seen the first letter from Tolkien, the one written in 1938, which I showed you yesterday. But he asked me if I could find any more evidence, so I went back to Flúdir and looked through my father’s papers. There was a bundle of letters from Tolkien to Grandpa, and this was one of them.’
    ‘Did you tell Agnar?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I bet he was excited.’
    ‘He drove straight over to Flúdir to see me. And the letter.’
    Magnus took out his notebook. ‘What day was that?’
    ‘It was Sunday last week.’ She did a quick mental calculation. ‘The nineteenth.’
    ‘Four days before he was killed,’ said Magnus. He remembered Agnar’s e-mail to Steve Jubb saying that he had found something else. And Jubb’s text message to Isildur suggesting more or less the same thing. Something valuable. Could it have been the ring?
    ‘Do you have any idea where the ring is?’
    Ingileif shook her head. ‘No. There is that part in the saga about the ring being hidden beneath the head of a hound. There are all kinds of strangely shaped outcrops of lava that could be hounds when looked at from certain directions. That was what my father was looking for. Presumably my grandfather found the cave and my father didn’t.’
    ‘What about Agnar? Did he have any idea where it might be?’
    Ingileif shook her head. ‘No. He asked me, of course. He was very aggressive about it. I more or less threw him out.’
    ‘So, as far as you know, the ring is still hidden in a small cave somewhere?’
    ‘I think so,’ said Ingileif. ‘You still don’t believe me, do you?’
    Magnus examined the upright precise handwriting. It looked real. But of course if it had been written by a careful forger it would look real. He glanced up at Ingileif. She seemed to be telling the truth, unlike her previous two conversations with him when she had been lying badly. Of course she could have feigned her earlier awkwardness to lull him into thinking she was telling the truth this time, but she would have to be a consummate actress to pull that off. And very cunning.
    Could he believe that the ring in Gaukur’s Saga had really survived?
    It was tempting. There was great scholarly debate about how historically accurate Iceland’s sagas really were. Most of the people and many of the events mentioned in them had really existed, but then there were also passages that were obviously pure invention. Whenever Magnus read them, the matter-of-fact style and the realistic characters lulled him into suspending disbelief until he felt medieval Iceland was almost close enough to touch.
    The homicide detective in him resisted the temptation. First of all, Magnus couldn’t even be sure that the saga itself was authentic. And even if