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Where the Shadows Lie (Fire and Ice)

Where the Shadows Lie (Fire and Ice)

Titel: Where the Shadows Lie (Fire and Ice) Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Michael Ridpath
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to raise all kinds of objections.
    Another sign that there was big money somewhere in the background of this case.
    ‘This your kind of music, Árni?’ Magnus asked.
    Árni looked at him with contempt. Magnus was relieved. At least the boy had some taste. He knew very little about Icelandic bands himself, but had recently formed a fondness for the ethereal Sigur Rós. A far cry from this bunch.
    The band stopped. Silence, wonderful silence.
    Pétur Ásgrímsson stood up from his chair in the middle of the floor and took a few paces towards the band. ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ he said.
    There were cries of protest from the five blond teenage rap’n’reggae stars. ‘Come back next year, when you have refined things a little,’ he said. ‘And lose the drummer.’
    He turned towards his visitors and pulled up one of the chairs lining the back of the room. He was a tall, imposing figure with a spare frame but square shoulders, and Ingileif’s high cheekbones. His cranium, shaved smooth, bulged above his long thin face. His grey eyes were hard and intelligent, swiftly assessing the two policemen.
    ‘You’ve come to speak to me about Agnar Haraldsson, I take it?’
    ‘Are you surprised?’ Magnus asked.
    ‘I thought you would have been here earlier.’
    There was a hint of rebuke in the comment, an accusation that they were a little slow.
    ‘We would have been if your sister had only told us the full story up front. Or if you had contacted us yourself.’
    Pétur raised his fair eyebrows. ‘What would I have to say?’
    ‘You knew that Ingileif was trying to sell Gaukur’s Saga through Agnar?’
    Pétur nodded. ‘Much against my will.’
    ‘Did you ever meet him?’
    ‘No. Or at least not recently. I think I might have bumped into him a couple of times when Ingileif was a student. But not since then. I was quite clear that I would play no part in the negotiations over the saga.’
    ‘But you would take your share of the sale proceeds?’ Árni asked.
    ‘Yes,’ said Pétur simply. He looked around his nightclub. ‘Times are tough. The banks are getting difficult. Like everyone else, I borrowed too much.’
    ‘Is this your only club?’ They were in the depths of Neon, on Austurstraeti, a short shopping street in the centre of town.
    ‘No,’ Pétur replied. ‘This is my third. I started with Theme on Laugavegur.’
    ‘Sorry, I don’t know it,’ said Magnus. ‘I’ve been away from Iceland a long time.’
    ‘I thought from your accent you were American,’ Pétur said. ‘It was the most popular place in Reykjavík a few years ago. I spent a few years in London on the edges of the music scene there, learning the trade you could say, but when Reykjavík was setting itself up as the Ibiza of the north I thought I had better come home. Theme was just a small café, but I squeezed in a dance floor and got lucky. It became the place to go, and because it was so small, everyone had to queue outside. There’s no one happier than a seventeen-year-old Icelandic girl wearing a crop top, shivering outside a club at three o’clock in the morning in the snow.’
    ‘What happened to it?’ Magnus asked.
    ‘It’s still going, but it’s much less popular than it used to be. I saw that coming, so I opened Soho, and now Neon .’ Pétur smiled. ‘This town is fickle. You have to stay one step ahead or you get trampled.’
    Pétur exuded confidence. He wasn’t going to get trampled.
    ‘Have you read Gaukur’s Saga ?’ Magnus asked.
    ‘Read it? I think I know it off by heart. I certainly used to.’
    ‘Your sister said you have no interest in it.’
    Pétur smiled. ‘That’s certainly true now. But not when I was a boy. My father and grandfather were obsessed, and they passed that obsession on to me. Have you read it?’
    Magnus and Árni nodded.
    ‘I adored my grandfather, and I loved the stories he told me about Ísildur and Gaukur and Ásgrímur from when I was little. I was groomed to be the keeper of the saga, you see, the keeper of the secret. And it wasn’t just Gaukur’s Saga that interested me, it was all the others.’
    ‘Did you know that your grandfather found the ring?’ Magnus asked.
    Pétur frowned. ‘My sister told you about that? I didn’t know she even knew about it.’
    Magnus nodded. ‘She turned up a letter from Tolkien to your grandfather Högni, which mentioned that Högni had found the ring.’
    ‘And replaced it,’ said Pétur. ‘He put it back, you

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