‘Would she?’
Magnus knew Vigdís disapproved of the way Ingileif had treated him. And indeed their break-up had been caused by Ingileif sleeping with somebody else. Magnus tried to recall dates. It was probably four months between the last time he had last slept with Ingileif and the date he left Iceland. He hadn’t said goodbye to her in person. She could have been pregnant and he would never have known. And that was five years ago: Ási was four.
Magnus knew Ingileif well, or at least had known her then. And although Ingileif should have told him about a son, she might not have done.
He recalled Ási’s steady gaze.
He smiled. ‘To answer your question, Vigdís, I liked him.’
‘That’s good. Now, it’s time to call Saudárkrókur.’
There was a lot to talk about. The Akureyri police had presented Gudni Fridriksson, their rape suspect, with fibre evidence linking him to one of the rapes, and he had confessed, not only to that crime, but to three others as well, including one that had not been reported. But he was adamant that he hadn’t killed Carlotta.
He lived alone, but he had been seen returning to his flat by a neighbour early on the evening of Carlotta’s death, and he had called for a pizza at nine, which had been delivered at nine-thirty. In theory the alibi wasn’t 100 per cent cast iron, and it was possible that a suspect would admit to rapes but not to murder, but the investigating detectives were confident Gudni wasn’t hiding knowledge of Carlotta’s death.
Sergeant Tacchini had confirmed that the Italian texts were innocent messages to Carlotta’s friends in Padua about things she had seen in Reykjavík. The US number Carlotta had phoned from Iceland turned out to be Professor Beccari, which made sense since Carlotta and Einar were trying to persuade him to endorse the Columbus letter on the TV documentary. Still nothing from the University of Padua about Carlotta’s email account, and Vigdís hadn’t found much of interest in her Facebook posts. She wasn’t very active: no posts at all from her last trip to Iceland, and no sign of Einar on her page. In fact, her posts were all in Italian. Vigdís had had to laboriously paste everything into Google Translate to get a rough idea of what Carlotta was talking about.
The police in London had confirmed with Rósa’s hotel that she had actually stayed there.
Magnus distributed more tasks for the coming day, giving Vigdís the job of reviewing whatever data the forensics guys came up with from Einar’s computer. The documentary crew were due to fly to Greenland late morning, and Magnus decided he would speak to them at the airport before they left, and return Einar’s phone and laptop.
Vigdís started a more thorough analysis of what the computer guys had sent through. Magnus sat at his own desk and stared at his screen.
So he was a father? Huh. He liked the idea.
Without really thinking about it, he had always assumed he would become a father, but at some time well in the future and with an as yet unspecified woman. Now it looked like it had already happened. And with Ingileif.
For all her faults, she would be a good mother. And if you were going to bring up a child alone, Iceland was the place to do it.
There were many questions to be answered. Would Ingileif allow him access to Ási? The boy had his own family, his own stepfather in the shape of Hannes. Or perhaps this Hannes guy acted as Ási’s dad. Presumably Ási had no idea who his real father was.
There would be problems, but Magnus would find a way to see his son again.
There were a lot of things Magnus could or should be doing. There were the previous day’s interview reports from Saudárkrókur to go through, and he wanted to do some of his own research on the Columbus letter. How likely was it to be real? Were there a lot of Columbus forgeries out there?
But instead he typed ‘Tryggvi Thór Gröndal’ into the criminal records database. There was just a brief mention that Detective Sergeant Tryggvi Thór had been charged with corruption in 1996, but that the charges had been dropped. No explanation.
Nineteen ninety-six was before the digitization of all criminal records, so, with a glance at Vigdís scrolling through her own computer screen, Magnus called Records and asked them for the file from their archives. Half an hour later one of the clerks brought it up and dropped it on his desk. It was extremely thin.
‘Is this it?’
‘That’s all we’ve got,’ said the clerk. She didn’t hang around to chat.
Magnus opened the file. Just one sheet of paper, from the court, recording that charges had been dropped.
That wasn’t right. Even if Tryggvi Thór had only been under arrest for a few days, a few hours, there should be much more paperwork than that. Especially if a policeman was the suspect: a case like that would have lawyers all over it and good record-keeping would become doubly important.
The file had been emptied. By whom? And when?
Thirty
Kelly emerged from her hotel and consulted the map she had grabbed from the front desk. The hotel was situated halfway up the hill in the middle of Reykjavík, and she decided to begin with the big concrete church at its top. Nancy had said she was feeling tired and had urged Kelly to go out for a stroll, while she went back to bed for an hour or two. Kelly was supposed to knock on her door at eleven.
Kelly loved Reykjavík. It was small enough to be manageable, large enough to be busy. The view from the top of the hill was amazing: mountains and sea on all sides, and those cute little red, white and blue houses. She liked just looking in the stores; with the exception of the odd tacky tourist joint, they were original and imaginative. And expensive. Kelly had quickly realized the whole of Iceland was expensive, and had decided to let Grammy pay for everything. She had saved some money over the summer in Nantucket, but she would need it over the coming semester at college.
In the end, she decided to splash out on a cup of coffee in a café that looked more Moroccan than Icelandic. She thought about what her grandmother had told her the day before, about the wampum and the Columbus letter being fake, about the whole thing being a hoax. She still couldn’t believe her grandmother, normally so proper and so sensible, had done that. Part of her admired the old lady; part of her was shocked. Nancy herself seemed to regret it deeply.
Kelly believed her father really had been joking when he had said that Nancy had planted the wampum in Greenland, but it was his intuition about his mother that had sprung the idea into his mind. Kelly had been mortified back in ’Sconset when she thought she had misled Eygló. Turned out she hadn’t misled her after all.
And now Kelly was the bearer of the secret.
Nancy said that she had done her duty now she had told the TV people; it was up to them what they did with the information. It sounded as if they were going to go ahead with the documentary anyway and bury the whole thing. Nancy had said she was happy to go along with what they decided. Part of Kelly fervently agreed; part of her knew it was deeply wrong.
Now she wished her grandmother hadn’t told her anything about it. She would just have to place her trust in the old lady and her decision.
She got back to the hotel and knocked on Nancy’s door. No reply. She knocked a couple more times and listened. Nothing.
Kelly was worried as she made her way back to her own room down the corridor. She knew she had no reason to be: Nancy was very tired and must be sleeping soundly.
She tried to read a book, all the while wondering how long to leave it until she tried again.
She gave it thirty minutes. Still no reply. She was becoming more worried; she knew she shouldn’t be, but she was. She considered asking the hotel to open the door, then rejected the idea. But the worst that could happen was that Nancy would be a little upset with her. Nancy had looked pale — maybe she was ill rather than just exhausted.