‘All right,’ said Paulsen calmly. ‘I want you to tell me your precise movements from when you left your colleagues at Brattahlíd this morning until when we saw you this afternoon.’
Einar closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and muttered, ‘I can’t believe this,’ in Icelandic.
‘Please speak English, Einar,’ said Paulsen. She had a pen and notebook ready. ‘What time did you get the boat across the fjord?’
Magnus could see what Paulsen was doing: getting down the details which could be quickly checked by her colleagues when they arrived, before she started asking questions about motive and Einar’s relationship with his wife.
Einar’s description of his movements that day was incoherent. It looked as if he was having difficulty thinking straight, but of course he might just have been trying to confuse Paulsen — it was impossible to say. He claimed he had started out to follow Rósa to the Blomsterdalen, but had got as far as the site of the old US military hospital and given up and turned around. On his way back he had climbed the steep hill above the airport and sat up there for a while. Then he had descended to the village and stopped in the café for lunch. And that was where Paulsen and Magnus had found him. During this whole period he hadn’t looked at his watch, or so he claimed.
‘What about your clothes? Have you changed them today?’
Einar was wearing jeans, boots, a T-shirt, a cardigan and a jacket. ‘No.’
‘Are you quite sure?’
‘Of course I’m sure.’
‘Let me look,’ said Paulsen. ‘Stand up.’
He did so, as did she, and she inspected his clothing and his hands, looking for blood or other evidence. Magnus couldn’t see anything and neither could she. No doubt the forensics people would examine everything much more thoroughly later.
‘Empty your pockets.’
Einar did as he was instructed. A wallet, Danish and Icelandic change, a phone, two scrunched receipts and some keys. No knife.
‘Am I under arrest?’
‘Not yet,’ said Paulsen. ‘But I am going to handcuff you and ask you to stay here.’
Paulsen slapped a pair of cuffs on Einar, and then beckoned Magnus to follow her out of the police hut.
‘Can you watch him for me? By all means ask him questions if you write his answers down, but probably best to leave off anything he did today until I get back? Is that OK?’
Magnus nodded.
‘My police officers will be here soon, and I need to organize things. Oh, and Magnus?’ Paulsen looked at Magnus’s large frame.
‘Yes?’
Paulsen looked at Magnus’s large frame. ‘If you need to restrain him, do.’ She grinned.
‘I will,’ said Magnus and joined Einar back in the police hut.
They sat in silence. Magnus didn’t know whether Einar had killed Rósa. It was certainly a possibility and it was natural for Paulsen to detain him.
Einar glared at Magnus for a few seconds. Then his face cracked, he bowed, put his head in his cuffed hands and sobbed. Magnus watched.
Eventually, the sobbing stopped and Einar sat up. His eyes were red and he wiped his nose with his sleeve. They had been real tears. But Magnus had seen men who had killed their wives and wept afterwards.
‘You know Rósa followed Carlotta to Glaumbaer the evening she was murdered?’ said Magnus in Icelandic.
Einar’s eyes burned through the tears with anger. With hatred, even.
‘Did you know that?’ said Magnus.
Einar didn’t reply.
‘I think you did know that.’
Nothing.
‘Do you think Rósa killed Carlotta?’
Magnus waited. Einar held his eye for a few moments and then looked up at the ceiling. He sighed and squeezed his eyes shut. He was in pain. There was no doubt that if he hadn’t killed his wife, this conversation would be painful. But then it might be just as painful if he had killed her. The fact he was an emotional mess didn’t tell Magnus anything.
He met Magnus’s eyes again, the hatred subsiding. ‘I really don’t know,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I’d like to think she didn’t, but I just don’t know.’
Magnus had only known Einar a week. At the start of that week, his lined face could have been described as rugged. Now it was ravaged. His eyes were red, the sockets blackened as if they had been bruised. The cocky self-assurance had gone. Einar was falling apart.
‘Tell me,’ Magnus said quietly.
‘Tell you what?’ said Einar, with an attempt at defiance.
‘Tell me about Rósa and Carlotta.’
Einar slumped back in his chair and nodded to himself. ‘All right. You know that Carlotta and I had an affair several years back, but then Rósa found out about it and told me to stop? And I did?’
Magnus nodded.
‘OK. And, as I told you in Ólafsvík, I had arranged to see Carlotta in Saudárkrókur last week, and Rósa knew nothing about it?’
‘Yes.’
‘So when I saw Carlotta behind that church with her head cracked open, my first thought, my very first thought, was that Rósa had killed her. I knew how angry Rósa would be if she had discovered we were meeting. Then, well, then I thought I was being paranoid; I mean, Rósa can be an angry woman, but she wouldn’t actually kill anyone. But I decided to keep quiet about recognizing Carlotta. It wasn’t just so that Rósa wouldn’t find out that Carlotta and I were meeting; it was also because I thought maybe she had killed her. And if it wasn’t her, but someone else, then you would find the killer and it wouldn’t matter that I knew Carlotta. I thought at the time Eygló hadn’t recognized her from Greenland, so... well... so I kept quiet.’
‘Even though you thought Rósa might be a murderer?’
‘If she had killed Carlotta then it was all my fault. Or mostly my fault. She’s my wife, goddammit, I wasn’t going to shop her to you!’
‘OK,’ said Magnus. ‘Did you talk to her about it?’
‘How could I? She called me when she saw the murder on the news. I didn’t know how to ask her if she had killed Carlotta, at least on the phone. So I just kept it matter of fact. I was expecting her to ask me all about it, to demand to know what Carlotta was doing in Iceland, but the thing is she didn’t.’ Einar’s expression became even more pained. ‘Afterwards I wondered why she didn’t.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It felt like she had known all along. That Carlotta was in Iceland. That Carlotta was dead. I mean before she had heard it on the news. Which implied...’
‘... that she had killed her?’
Einar nodded. ‘That’s what I thought, although I couldn’t admit it to myself, so I just didn’t think too hard about it. But I decided to keep quiet about knowing Carlotta in the hope you guys would turn up someone else — that rapist in Akureyri or something.’
Einar swallowed. ‘But the thing is, I was devastated when I saw Carlotta’s dead body. And if Rósa had killed her... She shouldn’t have done that. I was angry. I was ashamed. I was suspicious. I blamed myself, I blamed her, I blamed Carlotta — she shouldn’t even have been in Glaumbaer.’
He gathered himself. ‘So, Rósa and I agreed not to talk about it until I got back to Reykjavík.’
‘Which wasn’t until the night before you came out here?’
‘That’s right.’ Einar breathed deeply. ‘The problem was that I spent the night before that in Ólafsvík with Eygló.’
‘We know,’ said Magnus.
‘Yes, your partner saw me, didn’t she? Whatever it may look like, we didn’t sleep together, or at least we didn’t have sex. But after the whole Carlotta thing, I couldn’t hide that from Rósa. We had to be completely honest. I had to stop hiding things, so I told her, that evening.’