Magnus turned to Paulsen, who had been listening. He had plenty of questions for Suzy and her colleagues, but they could wait. Rósa first. ‘Looks like it’s back to Narsarsuaq.’
There was a guest house and a hotel at Narsarsuaq, and the TV crew were staying in the hotel. It, too, was a rectangular functional building, two storeys high, with a rank of flagpoles standing to attention outside it. Neither Rósa nor Einar were there. The receptionist said that Rósa had left the hotel soon after the others that morning, and that Einar had arrived later, at about ten o’clock, and had asked after her. Then he too had left.
It was now two-forty-five.
As they drove back towards the airport terminal and the police hut, Magnus spotted Einar at a wooden table outside a tourist office hut just next to the airport perimeter, sipping from a plastic cup. Sandwich wrappings testified to lunch.
Einar didn’t look especially pleased to see him. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.
‘Looking for your wife. Do you know where she is?’
‘She’s gone for a hike. A place called the Blomsterdalen. It’s that way.’ Einar pointed north of the airport, where the road became a track before it curved out of sight into low hills. He frowned. ‘I don’t understand why you have come all this way to speak to her.’
He looked worried.
‘I’ll want to speak to you too,’ Magnus said. ‘But later.’ He
turned to Paulsen. ‘What’s this Blomsterdalen?’
‘The valley of flowers,’ Paulsen translated into English for Magnus’s benefit — unnecessarily, for the Icelandic word was almost the same. ‘It’s on the route up to the nearest glacier.’
‘Can we drive?’ Magnus asked.
‘We can part of the way,’ said Paulsen.
‘Let’s go then.’
Frandsen drove the police 4 × 4 north past the airport and along the banks of a riverbed, probably half a mile wide, with a narrow stream meandering through it. Magnus recognized the destructive signs of glacial flooding. The road was empty of people until they came to a couple with small backpacks studying a lone stone chimney.
‘That’s all that remains of a massive American military hospital,’ said Paulsen. ‘The rest burned down in the 1970s. I’ll go and ask them if they have seen her.’
She jumped out of the vehicle and strode over to the couple. She was back in a minute. ‘No sign of her.’
The river disappeared to their left as they drove on an increasingly rough track. They crested a small hill, and then there was the Blomsterdalen, a bowl of deep green surrounded by steep cliffs and the riverbed. There were indeed flowers everywhere, blue, purple, yellow, and the bobbing white heads of bog cotton. On the far side of the valley, a couple of miles away, the river emerged from a gorge, and high up, above the wall of rock, Magnus could see the smooth white tip of a glacier, one of the southernmost fingers of Greenland’s icecap.
The road petered out to a footpath crossing a ditch, and the three police officers climbed out of the vehicle.
No Rósa. No obvious sign of any human being.
Frandsen grabbed a pair of binoculars, and carefully surveyed the valley.
Silence. Apart from a twitter of a bird and the hungry buzzing of a bee behind them. And the rustle of the grass in the breeze.
‘What now?’ said Magnus.
‘She might have gone up to the glacier. You need to climb that rock over there.’ Paulsen pointed to the cliff at the far end of the valley. ‘There is a path, but it’s difficult. Is she in good shape?’
Magnus remembered Rósa’s swimmer’s physique. ‘Probably.’
‘Do you want me to go and see?’ said Frandsen. He was young, fit and ready for a rapid hike.
While Paulsen was considering the constable’s suggestion, Magnus heard the familiar croak of a raven, followed swiftly by another. Not far away, a couple of hundred yards into the valley, five of them were circling above a clump of dwarf willow trees next to a stream. One of them dived down.
‘Over there!’ Magnus pointed. ‘See anything? By those birds.’
Frandsen swung his binoculars in the direction of the ravens.
‘What do you think they are circling over?’ Magnus said. He had spent four years of his childhood at the farm at Bjarnarhöfn, long enough to know that ravens behaving like that meant a dead lamb. Or sheep.
Paulsen threw him a worried glance. Greenlanders were hunters; she knew what the ravens meant. ‘There are no sheep here.’
Magnus set off at a trot through the grass and bushes, followed by the inspector. It could be any animal. A fox. A very lost sheep. Another bird.
Or it might be Rósa.
He pushed his way through the low willow bushes, yelling and waving his arms to scare the ravens away. They were reluctant to leave their feast.
It was Rósa. And the birds had got to her.
Forty
There were only two police officers to deal with the crime scene: Magnus was out of his jurisdiction. Paulsen left Frandsen to guard the scene and keep the birds off, and she and Magnus sped back to Narsarsuaq in the car, with Paulsen calling Qaqortoq on the radio in urgent Greenlandic for reinforcements.
There was one obvious suspect and Paulsen named him. ‘From what you’ve told me, Einar had a motive to murder his wife if he thought she had killed Carlotta. Revenge.’
‘That’s true,’ said Magnus.
‘OK. We’ll pick him up now and ask him a few questions. Then I’ll need to coordinate the other officers from Qaqortoq when they get here. There should be a police doctor on his way as well.’
‘What about forensics?’
‘They’ll come down from Nuuk.’ Nuuk was the capital of Greenland, a few hundred miles up the coast.
Einar was no longer sitting outside the tourist office café. One of the staff said they had seen him go into the small US airbase museum next door. They found him there, staring at large wall-mounted photographs of Bluie West One, as Narsarsuaq airfield was called during the Second World War, teeming with aircraft and servicemen. He was the only visitor in the room.
‘Einar!’ Paulsen said.
He turned, a spark of irritation disappearing rapidly when he saw the two police officers’ expressions.
‘I am sorry to tell you we have found your wife. She is dead.’
Shock struck Einar hard in the face.
Paulsen and Magnus waited and watched. The surprise looked genuine, but Magnus had seen surprise faked just as well many times in the past.
‘Where?’ Einar said.
‘In the Blomsterdalen.’
‘How? Was it an accident? Or...’
‘She was stabbed,’ said Paulsen. ‘At least we think she was stabbed.’ It looked as if her chest had been slashed, but the ravens had made a mess of the area, and of her face, so it was hard to be certain.
The little colour there was in Einar’s face left it, and his mouth opened. He seemed dazed.
‘Can you come with us, please, Einar? We have a few questions.’
The police hut was close by. Paulsen sat Einar down on one side of a crowded desk while she took the other, and Magnus took a seat on the side of the little room. For a moment Magnus was worried that she would do the interview in Danish, which Einar probably spoke, but she kept to English for his benefit.
‘Did you kill your wife, Einar?’
That was direct, thought Magnus.
‘What? You think I killed her?’ Einar looked in disbelief at Paulsen and Magnus. ‘Fair enough you might think I killed Carlotta, but not Rósa. She’s my wife, for God’s sake! Why would I kill her?’
‘Answer the question, Einar,’ Paulsen said. ‘Did you kill Rósa?’
‘No,’ said Einar. ‘No, no, no!’ The last word was shouted.