Tecumseh was a killer. He had become one at the age of seventeen in Kosovo, a period of his life he had managed to expunge from his memory until fifteen years later when, after moving to Germany, he had lost his wife and his job as an accountant at a plastics factory in Essen and he needed some money.
And, truth be told, some excitement.
He was well hidden in the shadows, away from any illumination of the street lights; nevertheless, he was worried about a passer-by noticing him. The only memorable item of clothing he was wearing was his green woolly hat, which hid his thinning dark hair and could safely be ditched once the job was done. The rest of his clothes were unbranded, nondescript. A dark jacket. Jeans. Brown shoes.
No one would see his face closely; if anyone saw him at all, they would remember him as a guy in a green hat. And glasses: not much he could do about those.
He had ditched the blue hat after the last job.
He hoped to God she appeared this evening. Tecumseh was getting nervous. This island was beginning to feel like a prison. Coronavirus infections were growing all over the world, and it wouldn’t be long before cross-border checks grew with them. He wanted to be safely back in Germany with the minimum of tests and quarantines and the accompanying paperwork.
Do the job, collect the eighty thousand dollars and get out of here, preferably on an early-morning flight to anywhere at all.
The door to the house opened and the target emerged.
She turned towards his doorway and set off at a rapid pace, right past him.
Tecumseh removed his expensive glasses, gripped the cord in his coat pocket and followed her.
Thirty-Five
Magnus had barely got to his desk the following morning when his phone rang.
It was Thelma, summoning him to her office. She didn’t sound happy.
She left him standing, never a good sign.
‘Have you been investigating Thomocoin?’
‘Not really.’
‘Not really?’
‘Just a little tidying up.’
‘I see. Didn’t you interview...’ The half-moon reading glasses came on as she consulted a scrap of paper on her desk. ‘Fjóla Rúnarsdóttir and Skarphédinn Gíslason last Thursday?’
‘Um. Yes.’
‘And hadn’t I told you that very morning to stay well clear of Thomocoin?’
‘You did. I’m sorry,’ Magnus said. He had been rumbled.
‘I did that for a reason. The shit has hit the fan, just like I said it would. Interpol has a red notice out for Skarphédinn. The British police tried to arrest him in London over the weekend but missed him. Did you know that?’
‘I did.’ Magnus had kept in touch with his FBI contact Agent Malley.
‘There is a very aggressive, nasty game of passing the buck going on in the ministries. I thought we were well out of it. Then, when someone from the Financial Services Authority questioned Fjóla Rúnarsdóttir, it turned out you had already been to see her. There are notes of the interview on the system.’
‘In connection with Helga Hafsteinsdóttir’s murder.’
‘That’s what I told them. But when the questions start flying around about who knew what when, I hope it won’t turn out that you knew anything. That we knew anything.’
Magnus found his patience stretched. He knew it was Thelma’s job to deal with this kind of crap, but someone had been murdered and as far as Magnus was concerned it was his job to know everything relevant.
He owed it to Dísa. He owed it to his younger self.
‘Don’t glare at me like that,’ said Thelma. ‘I’m covering your arse.’
‘There is something bad about Thomocoin,’ said Magnus. ‘And that may have been why Helga died.’
‘May have been? So tell me. What did you find? Apart from that Thomocoin was about to blow up.’
‘Taking half of Dalvík with it.’
‘Including Gunnar Snaer Sigmundsson who Ólafur has arrested for the crime.’
‘That’s true.’ Magnus considered passing on Árni’s doubts but decided against it. Not yet, anyway. He didn’t want to harm Árni’s already tarnished credibility with Thelma.
‘So, did you discover any direct involvement by anyone at Thomocoin into Helga’s death?’
‘No,’ said Magnus.
‘Any evidence of a conspiracy with Gunnar?’
‘No. The only person Gunni communicated directly with about Thomocoin was Helga, apart from a couple of emails from him to Fjóla worrying about the lack of a Thomocoin exchange. Neither she nor Sharp met him recently, although Sharp met him a couple of times when Gunnar was an MP in Reykjavík years ago.’
‘So nothing, then?’
‘The questions had to be asked.’
‘Did they? When I had specifically told you not to ask them?’
‘Sorry,’ said Magnus, seeing no point in arguing further.
His phone rang. It was Vigdís. He raised his eyebrows to Thelma, who nodded for him to take it.
Vigdís’s voice was urgent, concise. ‘Homicide. Female, about twenty years old, near the university. Found under a hedge, naked.’
‘Any sign of sexual assault?’
‘Not yet, but they are looking.’
‘I’ll be right down.’
The body was stuffed under a hedge on the network of small roads between the university and the sea. Three police cars with flashing lights marked the spot, together with police tape. No sign yet of Edda and her forensics team; they wouldn’t be long.
Magnus spoke to the constable who had been first at the scene. The police had been alerted by a dog walker, a man in his fifties standing a few metres away with his curious terrier, watching proceedings. Magnus and Vigdís put on their overalls, signed the log and approached the body.
No ID found as yet. Her wallet, if she had one, or phone — and she would definitely have had one of those — were gone.
She was so pale, a skin of white wax. Face down in the dirt. Magnus crouched and looked without touching. A bloody nose. Horizontal red line around her throat. Bruising at the nape of her neck. It looked as if rigor had set in throughout the body, including the legs. Carefully he touched her cheek. Cold.
No sign of bruising on the rest of her body, not even between her legs, from what he could see.
‘Well?’ said Vigdís. She was perfectly capable of drawing her own conclusions, but thanks to the years he had spent in Boston’s Homicide Unit, Magnus had seen far more murders than she.
They had worked together off and on since Magnus’s first assignment to Reykjavík in 2009. The mixed-race daughter of a black American serviceman at the airbase at Keflavik whom she had never met, Vigdís sometimes faced hostility or just bemusement in her own country. She was fed up with Icelanders assuming she was a foreigner and addressing her in English and so refused to reply to anyone in that language, ever. She was a very good detective and during the surge in virus infections the previous spring had proven herself adept at tracking and tracing people who had been in contact with carriers of the disease. Iceland’s expedient of using police detectives to help with that effort had worked out well.
‘Strangled with a ligature,’ Magnus said. ‘Probably last night. Probably moved to this spot.’
‘Probably sexual,’ said Vigdís. It was a statement, not a question.
‘Probably. But let’s not jump to any conclusions.’
They both stood up and exchanged glances. Vigdís was worried.
Murders were always worrying, but Magnus knew what she was thinking.
‘Wasn’t Albert DeSalvo from your old patch?’ Vigdís said.
The Boston Strangler. One of the most notorious serial killers ever.