Read Online Where the Shadows Lie by Michael Ridpath - Free Book Online

than a hero, safe in Iceland when his brother and his girlfriend were in danger.
    But then the ancient Icelandic reaction kicked in. If they touched a hair of Colby’s or Ollie’s head, he would make the bastards pay. All of them.
    Baldur held another conference at two o’clock that afternoon. The team were still fresh and enthusiastic.
    He began with the initial findings from the autopsy. It looked likely that Agnar had drowned; there was some mud found in his lungs, which suggested that he was still breathing when he hit the water. As Magnus had suspected, the fragments of stone in the victim’s head wound were from the dirt road rather than the lake floor.
    There were small traces of cocaine in the victim’s blood, and some alcohol, but not nearly enough to cause intoxication. The pathologist’s conclusion was that the victim was struck on the back of the head with a stone, fell unconscious and was dragged into the lake where he drowned. No surprises there.
    Baldur and Vigdís had interviewed Andrea. She had admitted that her affair with Agnar had been going on for about a month. She was besotted with him, she had spent most of the previous year trying to seduce him, and had finally succeeded after a drunken student party to which he had been invited. She hadspent one weekend with him at the summer house. Her finger-prints were indeed one of the two sets that remained unidentified.
    Andrea said that Agnar had seemed terrified that his wife would discover what had happened. He had promised her after she had caught him with a student four years before that he would remain faithful, and until Andrea he had kept his word. Andrea’s impression was that Agnar was scared of Linda.
    Magnus outlined the theory that Isildur was a nickname for a
Lord of the Rings
fan, and that Steve Jubb was one himself. One or two of the faces around the table looked a little uncomfortable. Maybe Árni wasn’t the only one to have seen the
Lord of the Rings
movie.
    Baldur handed round the list of entries from Agnar’s appointments diary. Dates, times, and the names of people he had met, mostly fellow academics or students. He had been away on a two-day seminar at the University of Uppsala in Sweden three weeks before. And one afternoon the previous week was blocked out with the word ‘Hruni’.
    ‘Hruni is near Flúdir, isn’t it?’ Baldur said.
    ‘Just a couple of kilometres away,’ Rannveig, the assistant prosecutor, said. ‘I’ve been there. There’s nothing but the church and a farm.’
    ‘Perhaps the entry refers to the dance rather than the place,’ Baldur said. ‘Something collapsing that afternoon? A disaster?’
    Magnus had heard of Hruni. Back in the seventeenth century the pastor of Hruni was notorious for the wild parties he held in his church at Christmas. One Christmas Eve the devil was seen hanging around outside, and the following morning the whole church and its congregation had been swallowed up by the earth. Since then the phrase ‘Hruni dance’ had slipped into the language to mean something that was falling apart.
    ‘The little boy who died young came from Flúdir,’ said Vigdís. ‘Ísildur Ásgrímsson. And here’s his sister.’ She pointed to a name on the list of appointments. ‘Ingileif Ásgrímsdóttir, sixth of April, two-thirty.At least, I’m pretty sure that she was the boy’s sister. I can check.’
    ‘Do that,’ said Baldur. ‘And if you are right, track her down and interview her. We’re assuming that Isildur is a foreigner but we need to keep an open mind.’
    He picked up a sheet of paper on the conference table in front of him. ‘We have searched Steve Jubb’s hotel room and the forensics people are examining his clothes. We found a couple of interesting text messages that had been sent on his mobile phone. Or we think they might be interesting, we just don’t know. Take a look at the transcriptions.’
    He passed around the sheet, on which two short sentences had been typed.