‘We should get going,’ said Anya. ‘Are you staying at the hostel in the village?’
‘No. In the hotel over in Narsarsuaq,’ said Eygló. ‘We’re there for a couple of days.’
‘Well, maybe we’ll come over and have a drink with you one evening?’
‘That would be great,’ said Eygló.
‘Einar Thorsteinsson is with us,’ said Suzy.
‘I remember Einar,’ said Anya. ‘I thought he and Carlotta had a thing going?’
Oh Christ, thought Eygló. This just gets worse. ‘Einar’s wife is here as well,’ she said.
Anya got it. ‘OK. See you later.’ And with that she and her troupe drove off back towards the village.
‘Ready?’ There was a hint of worry in Suzy’s glance; Eygló wasn’t sure whether she was afraid that Eygló had been put off her stride, or that Eygló had noticed that Suzy had shut down any conversation about the wampum.
Eygló nodded. ‘Let’s do it.’
But as she waded through the grass back to the ruins of the chapel, she couldn’t help thinking about what Anya had said. Carlotta had wanted to speak to her about the wampum. Eygló assumed that Carlotta had doubts and had communicated them to Anya. The police back in Iceland should be told. But Eygló sure as hell wasn’t going to tell them, and she wasn’t going to follow her original plan of quizzing Einar about the find either.
She took up her position by the outline of the tiny chapel. She stared down at the grass and the yellow flowers — buttercups, she thought — and took a couple more deep breaths, trying to force herself back to Gudrid and Erik and Thjodhild, Erik’s wife who had built the church.
She flinched as Tom approached, waving a light meter near her face. ‘You’ve been a good girl, haven’t you?’ he said softly. ‘No more questions about the wampum being planted?’
‘No,’ said Eygló. ‘No, I promise you.’ She was glad Tom hadn’t been there to listen to what Anya had told them, but he would no doubt hear it from Suzy, one way or another.
‘Excellent,’ Tom said. ‘Then you’ve got nothing to worry about.’ He winked. ‘Just get this take right, eh?’
He returned to his camera.
But his words, which he had meant to be comforting, wrenched Eygló crashing back to the twenty-first century. She thought of Carlotta, who had spent several months at this very spot and whom she had seen lying lifeless behind the church at Glaumbaer less than a week before. She thought of Rósa and her jealousy of Carlotta and now of Eygló herself. And she thought of Tom, only a few metres away from her.
She was destined to spend the next ten days with Tom and Rósa. There was no escape in Greenland — you couldn’t even drive from one settlement to the other.
She was trapped. She was scared. She was so very scared.
The fear, the awfulness of Carlotta’s death, overwhelmed her. She burst into tears.
‘Cut!’ Suzy said, her voice tense with frustration. ‘That’s all for today. We’ll try again tomorrow.’
Thirty-Seven
Aqqaluk said it would be an hour before the speedboat arrived to carry them back across the fjord to Narsarsuaq and their hotel, so Eygló wandered away from the others in search of solitude. There was an outcrop of red rocks just behind the village, on which perched a statue of Leif Erikson, and Eygló headed for it. As in Reykjavík, he was depicted staring towards America. Halfway there.
She sat on the grass at his feet and looked out over the water. A parade of small icebergs lay in the channel, drifting slowly up the fjord from where they had calved from the glacier out of sight just around the headland to her right. She had felt isolated in Iceland many times before, but this was a new kind of isolation. Brattahlíd was not connected to anywhere by road, except a couple of farms in the next fjord. She could easily see the dusty runway and buildings of Narsarsuaq on the other side of the water. That had been an American airbase built during the Second World War, and heavily populated with servicemen during the Cold War. Now it was a plain of dust, drab buildings and fuel tanks, surrounded by rocky hillsides and water. Oddly, it served as one of the two international airports into Greenland.
The nearest town was Qaqortoq, thirty kilometres down the fjord towards the sea, and only reachable by boat or helicopter. That place only had five thousand inhabitants.
And just out of sight, behind the rock faces to the north and east, the second largest icecap in the world heaved, pushed and slowly slid, stretching back for thousands of kilometres towards the North Pole.
It may have seemed a place of safety to Erik the Red, but it certainly didn’t to Eygló.
She heard the panting of someone climbing up the hill to her left, and she tensed. She hoped it was Einar and not Tom or Rósa, but she was relieved when Professor Beccari’s bald head and pink scarf appeared.
‘Do you mind if I join you?’ he asked.
‘No, please do,’ said Eygló. ‘It’s quite a view.’
The professor squatted down beside her. He was wrapped up warmly, even though it was fourteen degrees, hot for Greenland. His pink scarf peeked out of his windcheater.
‘You’ll be OK tomorrow,’ he said.
‘I hope so,’ said Eygló. ‘I feel so unprofessional!’
Beccari grinned. ‘It is your unprofessionalism that is your secret. Don’t lose it.’
‘Thank you,’ said Eygló. Although she had always wanted to be taken seriously as a proper academic, she knew Beccari was right.
‘It’s probably the shock of the murder of that poor woman. You were the one who found the body, weren’t you?’
Eygló nodded. ‘It was a shock. It still is.’
‘Is that why everyone is so miserable?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, it’s not just you. It’s Einar and his wife. What’s she doing on this trip? It seemed like he wasn’t expecting her to come, and he doesn’t seem happy that she’s here.’
‘I don’t think he is,’ said Eygló. It was true: Einar looked absolutely miserable.
‘I don’t know how to put this,’ Beccari said, ‘and of course it’s none of my business, but it seems as if there is the classic tension between a man, his wife and a — how shall I say? — a beautiful female friend.’
‘That’s me, right?’ said Eygló.
Beccari shrugged and waggled his hand in what Eygló assumed was an assenting motion.
Damn right it was none of his business, she thought. It was clear that despite his august status, Professor Beccari was a natural gossip who had spotted sources of tension and wanted to find out more. But at least he was being honest in his curiosity.
‘It’s not that straightforward,’ she said. ‘There is nothing going on between me and Einar. There might have been once, many years ago, but not now.’
‘Does Rósa understand that?’ Beccari asked.
‘Not sure,’ said Eygló. ‘I’ve seen you talking to her in the last couple of days. What do you think?’
‘I don’t know. I feel she is sad and she is angry, but I haven’t asked her why. She is an intelligent woman. Well read. And she knows her history. I enjoy talking to her.’
Rósa was very intelligent, and could be charming if she wanted to. She was also unlikely to be overawed even by someone with Professor Beccari’s ego.
‘I wish she would just go back to Iceland,’ Eygló said.
Beccari didn’t answer.
‘It’s good to have seen where this wampum was found,’ Beccari said. ‘Einar was very convincing that it was real.’
‘Einar is convincing.’
‘But is he right?’ Beccari asked. ‘You seemed to have had your own doubts earlier?’