Where the Shadows Lie (Fire and Ice)

something else. But she doesn’t think that way. Everyone is going bust in Iceland these days.’
    The door to the club opened and three more musicians came in, lugging big bags of musical instruments and electronics. This lot were a little older, a little hairier.
    ‘I’ll be with you in a minute,’ Pétur said to them. Then, turning back to Magnus and Árni, ‘Ingileif’s had a tough life. First her father, then her stepfather, then her mother, all on top of losing her business.’
    ‘Stepfather?’ Magnus asked.
    ‘Yeah. Mum married again. A drunken arsehole called Sigursteinn. I never met him, it all happened when I was in London.’
    ‘They separated?’
    ‘No, he got drunk in Reykjavík. Fell off the harbour wall and killed himself. A good thing all round from what I have heard. Mum never got over it, though.’
    Magnus nodded. ‘As you say, tough for her. And for you.’
    Pétur shrugged. ‘I ran away from it all. Ingileif stayed to do what she could. She always did.’
    ‘And your other sister? Birna?’
    Pétur shook his head. ‘She’s pretty much screwed up.’
    ‘Thank you, Pétur,’ Magnus said, getting to his feet. ‘One last question. What were you doing the night Agnar died?’
    At first Pétur seemed taken aback by the question, but then he smiled. ‘I suppose that’s something you have to ask?’
    Magnus waited.
    ‘What day was that?’
    ‘Thursday the twenty-third. The first day of summer.’
    ‘The clubs were busy that night. I spent the evening moving from one to the other. Now if you will excuse me, I have some music to listen to. I just hope these guys are better than the last lot.’

CHAPTER NINETEEN
    Á RNI DROVE MAGNUS out towards Birna Ásgrímsdóttir’s house in Gardabaer, a suburb of Reykjavík.
    Magnus’s headache was getting worse. ‘Check out Pétur’s alibi, Árni,’ Magnus said.
    ‘Is he a suspect?’ Árni said, surprised.
    ‘Everyone’s a suspect,’ Magnus said.
    ‘I thought you were certain Steve Jubb killed Agnar.’
    ‘Just do it!’ Magnus growled.
    They drove through the grey suburbs. ‘By the way, I heard back from the Australian Elvish expert,’ Árni said. ‘He figured out what kallisarvoinen means.’
    ‘And what’s that?’
    ‘It’s Finnish. Apparently Tolkien liked the Finnish language, found it interesting. A lot of Quenya words come from Finnish as does much of the grammar. Our friend wondered whether Jubb and Isildur might have used Finnish vocabulary when there wasn’t an existing Quenya word. So he looked up kallisarvoinen in a Finnish dictionary.’
    ‘And?’
    ‘It means “precious”.’
    ‘Precious? That’s the word Gollum used for the ring in Lord of the Rings .’
    ‘That’s right.’
    Magnus recalled the SMS from Steve Jubb. Saw Agnar. He has kallisarvoinen. ‘So Steve Jubb thought that Agnar had the ring,’ he said. ‘That’s what he wanted to sell for five million bucks.’
    ‘We haven’t found an old ring amongst Agnar’s stuff,’ Árni said.
    ‘Perhaps Steve Jubb took it,’ Magnus said. ‘After he killed him.’
    ‘And did what with it? We didn’t find it in his hotel room.’
    ‘Hid it perhaps.’
    ‘Where?’
    Magnus sighed. ‘God knows. Or perhaps he mailed it back to Isildur in California. No one remembered Steve Jubb mailing a package at the Post Office, but he could easily have slipped a ring into an envelope and dropped it in a mail box.’
    ‘But Jubb sent the text message to Isildur after he had come back from seeing Agnar. That suggests that Agnar still had it, or at least Jubb thought he had.’
    Magnus saw Árni’s point.
    ‘Do you really think that Agnar found the ring?’ Árni said. ‘He only heard about it on Sunday. The e-mail was sent on Tuesday. People have devoted years to looking for it and haven’t found it. Unless it was a fake?’
    ‘That would be just as hard to arrange in a hurry. Harder. Faking a thousand-year-old ring is a major job. And you can bet that Isildur wouldn’t shell out five million bucks without checking out what he was buying pretty thoroughly.’
    ‘You’re not suggesting it’s real?’ said Árni. ‘That the ring that Gaukur took from Ísildur survived?’
    ‘Of course not,’ said Magnus irritably. But then, as he had just pointed out, it was hard to see how the ring could be a fake. Perhaps it was an older fake, the work of Ingileif’s grandfather? Patience. All would become clear in time.
    Chastened, Árni was silent for a minute.