Where the Shadows Lie (Fire and Ice)

share in 4Portal the year before. He had been looking for a hideaway in the woods to concentrate on his projects and had found the perfect place. Alpine mountains on three sides, a small winding road on the fourth leading down through forests to the nearest very small town ten miles away.
    It was a place where he could think.
    He had named it Rivendell, naturally, after the sanctuary that the Fellowship of the Ring had rested in. He remembered when he had first read of Rivendell, when he was seventeen, and he had had a clear vision in his mind of the place, surrounded by woods, mountains, running water, peace, tranquillity.
    This was it.
    He had been working on two projects. The one that had taken most of his time was his attempt to coordinate the collation of an online dictionary of two of Tolkien’s Elvish languages, Quenya and Sindarin. The project had turned out to be much more frustrating than he had thought. Tolkien had never laid down hard and fast grammar rules and vocabulary, so there were many differing interpretations of the two languages. Isildur knew that: the whole point about his dictionary was that it would be flexible enough to deal with the different dialects that had grown up over time. Trouble was his collaborators were not of a flexible frame of mind.
    The project had descended into acrimony and abuse. He had hoped that as the provider of the money he would have the final say. It turned out that he was indeed a unifying figure: the authority they all loved to hate.
    His other project was to try to track down Gaukur’s Saga . He had first become aware of it a few years before, through an Internet forum. He had put together a Danish academic who had discovered echoes of the lost saga in an eighteenth-century letter he had turned up, with Gimli, an Englishman whose grandfather had studied at Leeds University under Tolkien. The details were frustratingly vague, but Isildur was willing to spend big money to flesh them out.
    And he did all this from the computer in his study at Rivendell.
    He had never been overseas. He had been brought up in New Jersey, and spent all his vacations as a child with his family on the Jersey Shore. He had majored in electrical engineering at Stanford in California, and spent his career in Silicon Valley. He was a gifted programmer, intuitive, focused, able to make connections. 4Portal was his second venture, a company that developed software for advertising portals on cell phones. It was spectacularly successful, and Isildur’s six per cent share had been converted to many millions when he and his more commercial minded partners sold out.
    The plan was that after a year or so in Rivendell, he would go back to the Valley and try something else.
    Once he had Gaukur’s Saga in his possession. And the ring.
    The last few weeks had been a rollercoaster ride of rising expectations and disappointments. First, the message from Agnar that he had found the saga. Then, a couple of weeks later that he had actually found Ísildur’s ring. Gimli’s excited reports that the saga might indeed be real and that there was a deal to be done, and then it had all gone wrong.
    Agnar was dead. Gimli was in jail. The police had the saga.
    And the ring was out there, somewhere in Iceland, and he had no way of knowing where.
    Isildur had done what he could from Rivendell. He had procured the best legal representation for Gimli. But it was becoming clear that if he was to find the ring, he would have to go to Iceland himself.
    He had a passport, ordered before a planned trip to New Zealand to see where the movies were made. He had abandoned the trip at the last minute in a fit of nervousness. Had gotten as far as the airport, but never made it on to the plane.
    That nervousness had to be overcome.
    He turned to his computer screen and called up a travel website.
    Magnus spent the rest of the day talking to the police officers who had searched the summer house and Agnar’s house, as well as Steve Jubb’s hotel room. No sign of anything resembling a ring.
    He went to see Linda, Agnar’s wife at her house in Seltjarnarnes. She tolerated his intrusion with barely concealed irritation. She was tall and thin with blonde hair and a drawn face. With a baby and a toddler to look after, she was barely holding things together.
    She was an angry woman. Angry with her husband, angry with the police, angry with the bank, the lawyers, the fridge door that wouldn’t shut properly, the broken window that