‘Vigdís, can you do me a favour? Check up on Tryggvi Thór yourself. And if he tries to tell you it was an accident, don’t believe him.’
‘Magnús! I’m in the middle of a murder investigation!’
‘Thanks, Vigdís. Got to go.’
Magnus was worried about the old man. Something was going on there, something bad.
He hung up and showed the woman at the gate his boarding pass and passport. There was not much he could do about it now.
Part Two
Greenland
Thirty-Six
‘Cut!’
Eygló stopped talking. She was standing ankle-deep in lush green grass a couple of metres from the neat outline of the walls of a tiny square chapel, built by Gudrid’s mother-in-law a thousand years before. Erik the Red’s longhouse stood just a short distance down the hill. Eygló was talking to Tom, who was pointing his camera towards her, Ajay’s boom mic hovering above him, and Suzy standing just behind the two of them.
It was their first day’s filming in Greenland and it was not going well, or at least her scenes weren’t. It had been a long, frustrating afternoon for everyone.
Einar was standing a few metres away, next to his wife, Rósa, both glaring at her.
Professor Beccari, too, was watching, his face set in a frown of concerned sympathy. Aqqaluk, the Greenlandic fixer Suzy had hired, was off to one side murmuring on his mobile.
‘Take ten,’ said Suzy to her assembled crew, which really only numbered Tom and Ajay. She approached Eygló, smiling. ‘Here, walk with me.’
They waded through the grass, scattered with wildflowers of yellow, blue and delicate pink. At each step a cloud of tiny moths rose a metre into the air and subsided. They were only a hundred metres from the edge of what had been known as Erik’s Fjord, on the other side of which spread the airfield at Narsarsuaq, where they had landed the day before.
Erik’s longhouse had stood at one end of the straggling village of Qassiarsuk, the modern name for Brattahlíd, a sparse community of farms, green meadows, a school, a church, a hostel and a dock. This was where Erik the Red had built his farm, where Gudrid had lived, and from where Erik’s sons Leif, Thorvald and Thorstein, his daughter Freydís, and Gudrid and Thorfinn Karlsefni had all set out on their various voyages to Vinland. It was a key focus of the whole documentary.
And Eygló was screwing it up.
Suzy led Eygló a few metres down the little gully of the stream that ran down to the fjord, so that they were out of sight of the others. ‘What’s wrong, Eygló?’
‘Wasn’t that last take good enough?’ Eygló said. She had tried really hard to make it better.
‘It was OK,’ said Suzy. ‘But you can do so much better than “OK”. Where is the excitement that you do so well? Imagine what it would be like for Erik, an outlaw who had been kicked out of Norway and then Iceland, to arrive at this beautiful green empty place where he could finally settle down without interference? All this free land! And imagine his family setting off on those voyages to Vinland. You can do that, Eygló. You can imagine that. You can imagine that better than anyone else I know, better than Einar, better than Mr Grand Professor Beccari. You know you can do that, don’t you?’
Eygló nodded.
‘What’s the problem? Is it Einar? Is it Rósa?’
‘No, no, she’s fine.’
‘It is Rósa, isn’t it?’ said Suzy. ‘Ever since she joined us, you and Einar have looked miserable. I don’t need to know what’s going on between the three of you—’
‘There’s nothing going on between the three of us!’ Eygló interrupted sharply.
‘All right,’ said Suzy. ‘But you just stay here for a couple of minutes, and I’ll go back and tell Rósa to take herself away. Einar too. What about Beccari?’
‘No. No, he’s fine,’ said Eygló, who had a feeling that the professor was on her side.
‘OK, he stays. And then you’ll come back, and we will try again. And this time, you will do it as well as I know you can.’
Suzy took Eygló’s shoulders and looked into her eyes. ‘OK?’
Down here, by the stream, out of sight of the others, Eygló could feel Suzy’s confidence in her give her strength. She nodded.
Suzy turned and climbed up the small slope over the lip of the gully.
Eygló stood by the stream and took some deep breaths. The brook babbled loudly and half a dozen wagtails bobbed and darted around her. Somewhere in the distance some twenty-first-century farm machinery rumbled. A gentle scent rose up from the wildflowers, mixing with a touch of twenty-first-century cow manure. It was a rare cloudless day, another reason Suzy was keen to get as many scenes in the can as she could.
Gudrid would have come down to this very stream to fetch water, to wash clothes. Eygló grinned. Perhaps to escape her in-laws.
Eygló could do this. She was ready.
But when she climbed up the slope, Suzy was speaking to a small group of people gathered around an old Land Rover and a pickup truck down by the road.
‘Eygló!’ Suzy called. ‘Over here!’
As Eygló approached the group she could tell they were archaeologists: the clothes, the facial hair, the spectacles, the doughty muddiness of them. The smallest of the group, an Asian-looking woman with long shiny dark hair, smiled when she saw Eygló.
‘Hi, Eygló. I don’t know if you remember me? Anya? Anya Kleemann.’
‘Yes, I do remember you!’ said Eygló with a smile. ‘You were on the dig with us here back in 2011.’ She was a Greenlander of about Eygló’s age doing a PhD at Aarhus University in Denmark, as far as Eygló could remember.
‘That’s right. I heard you were going to be filming here.’
‘You look like you’ve come from your own excavation somewhere?’
‘Tasiusaq. It’s just a few kilometres over the hill that way.’ She pointed northwards. ‘In the next fjord. A thirteenth-century farmhouse.’ She gave a shy smile. ‘It’s my first dig as supervisor.’
‘Cool.’
‘I thought Viking Queens was brilliant, by the way,’ Anya said.
‘Thanks,’ said Eygló. ‘It was Suzy’s idea. She produced it.’
‘And now we’re doing Gudrid the Wanderer,’ said Suzy.
‘Great subject,’ said Anya. She looked over to the meadow under which lay the ruins of the Brattahlíd longhouse. ‘Presumably you are talking about the wampum?’
‘Of course,’ said Suzy. ‘Were you there when it was found?’
‘I was,’ said Anya. ‘But it was an Italian girl who found it. Carlotta, isn’t that right, Eygló?’
Eygló nodded. She could tell Anya had spotted the change in her and Suzy’s expression. But Eygló didn’t want to explain, not in front of Suzy.
Fortunately, Suzy took charge. ‘I’m afraid Carlotta died recently. She was murdered. In Iceland.’
‘Oh, no!’ said Anya. ‘That’s dreadful. What happened?’
‘The police are trying to figure it out,’ said Suzy. ‘And not doing a very good job of it.’
‘My God.’ Anya looked stunned. ‘I didn’t know her well — I only met her on that dig, but I liked her. That’s horrible.’
Eygló nodded. It was. It was definitely horrible.
‘You know she contacted me a couple of weeks ago? Out of the blue, really. I hadn’t heard from her since the dig. It was about the wampum.’
Please shut up, thought Eygló. A few days before she would have been eager to hear what Anya had to say about why Carlotta wanted to talk to her about wampum, but now Eygló just wanted to change the subject.
As did Suzy. ‘Would you excuse us, Anya?’ she said. ‘We are on a tight schedule, and I need my archaeologist back.’