They zoomed over the crest of a hill marked with a series of a dozen or so stone cairns and then they were on the other side. In front of them spread a large green bowl containing a couple of farm buildings, and behind it another fjord. Whereas the fjord they had just come from at Brattahlíd had contained ten to twenty stately icebergs drifting alone, this one was chock-full of shards of ice large and small. The green hillsides were scattered with purple, blue and yellow flowers, and farm machinery in various stages of disrepair. They zipped past an ancient Massey Ferguson tractor of rusty grey that looked like it hadn’t been moved for fifty years.
Noah slowed and turned to Eygló. He pointed to the far side of the valley, which was an impossibly bright deep green, and there, a hundred feet or so up a hillside, a small group of people clustered around a rectangle of bare earth, next to a large canvas awning. Eygló nodded.
Tasiusaq, the farm that dominated the valley, was a prosperous one, boasting major blue metal barns and an array of white plastic-covered rolls of hay. Noah roared past it, turned on to a lesser track and headed for the dig.
A tall kid with red hair and a wispy beard greeted them in an American accent. Magnus noticed his Brown Bears T-shirt. Eygló asked for Anya, and the kid led them to the group of archaeologists scraping, scratching and peering at the earth.
‘Are you still at Brown?’ Magnus asked the guy, whose name was Nate.
‘Junior year.’
‘I was there a couple of decades ago.’
‘Cool. You an archaeologist?’
‘Um. No. I’m an Icelandic policeman.’
‘Cool.’ Nate managed to inject so much doubt into that word.
‘Yeah. It’s true what they say: the world is your oyster with a degree from Brown.’
The slightest pause. Then, as Nate considered the possibility that he might wind up as a policeman in Reykjavík: ‘Cool.’
Behind them, the ATV’s engine gunned into life, and Magnus turned to see Noah whizzing off down the track towards the farm.
‘Is he coming back for us?’ he asked Eygló.
Eygló shrugged. ‘No idea.’
Anya waved and grinned when she saw Eygló approaching and gave her a hug. ‘It’s great to see you,’ she said in a fluent American accent.
‘And you,’ said Eygló. ‘This is Magnus from the Reykjavík police. He’s investigating Carlotta’s murder.’
‘OK,’ said Anya, more serious now.
‘Do you mind if I ask you some questions?’ Magnus said.
‘Sure,’ said Anya. ‘Let’s go over here.’
She led them to a table and chairs underneath the large awning and poured them a cup of coffee from a thermos. There were three tables in all, and the others were covered with archaeological paraphernalia — lots of trays, meshes, bags filled with tiny artefacts, labels, notebooks and a couple of microscopes. Nate took a seat at one of them and attacked what looked like a lump of mud with a toothbrush. Magnus felt a momentary pang that he hadn’t become the archaeologist Nate had assumed he was.
At first sight, Anya Kleemann looked like one of the Inuit Magnus was becoming familiar with. She was round — a round face and round body, but her eyes were also round, and blue. Magnus’s sketchy knowledge of genetics suggested European blood on both sides. She told Magnus a little of her own background: a childhood in Greenland, university in Denmark, a masters in America and then a PhD at Aarhus. She was an expert on Norse settlements in Greenland — this was her patch.
‘How’s the excavation going?’ Eygló asked Anya.
‘Usual story. It looked like we were getting nowhere, when we found something last week. A coin. English. Minted in the reign of Richard III.’
‘Richard III? The king they found buried in a car park? I remember him from York. Remind me of his dates?’
‘Fourteen eighty-three to eighty-five,’ said Anya with a grin.
‘Fourteen eighty-three? How the hell did it get there?’ Eygló asked.
‘Precisely,’ said Anya. She explained to Magnus: ‘The last written record we have of the Norse settlers in Greenland is a description of a wedding in 1409. We don’t know when they died out here, or even if they just upped and left. We do know they were still trading with the English after this time, but this looks like pretty strong evidence there were still Norsemen farming here in the 1480s. Or later.’
Magnus recalled Columbus’s trip to Iceland in 1477. And the letter to his younger brother he didn’t write describing it. So there were still Norse settlers in Greenland even then.
He asked Anya about the dig at Brattahlíd in 2011. She remembered the discovery of the wampum as one of the most exciting moments of her career. She described how Carlotta had found a couple of shells with holes in them, how Einar had revealed more, and how the American student had identified them as wampum clamshells.
‘Did anyone have any doubts about their authenticity?’ Magnus asked.
‘Not at the time, no,’ said Anya. ‘But I wondered about them afterward.’
‘What did you wonder?’
‘Well. You probably know that we were re-excavating an area that had been dug eighty years before. That meant that all the contexts were confused around the trench. They missed stuff: in those days they used shovels; now we use brushes. We found all kinds of things they didn’t see. So it’s perfectly possible, likely even, that those archaeologists would have missed a wampum shell. But all of them? I checked the reports of the excavation from the nineteen thirties, and there was nothing about finding a shell with a hole drilled into it.’
‘Did you mention your doubts to Einar?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Einar is a good archaeologist. He has a great reputation. And he is cautious, usually. Cynical, even.’
Magnus could believe that.
‘So I didn’t want to doubt him.’
‘Did he intimidate you?’ Magnus asked. ‘Threaten you?’
‘No, no, nothing like that. And my doubts were just that. It was my opinion, not evidence.’
‘What about Carlotta? Did you get to know her well?’
‘Pretty well. There weren’t many of us on the dig and we were thrust together for weeks on end. It was a pretty good bunch,’ Anya said, looking to Eygló for confirmation.
Eygló nodded.
‘Usually there is one jerk who annoys the hell out of everyone else, but I don’t remember that at Brattahlíd.’
‘What was she like, Carlotta?’
‘She was good fun. Lively. Smart. Quite frankly, it was good to have an Italian around. You can have too many Danes and Icelanders.’ This with a teasing glance at Eygló.
Eygló grinned. ‘It’s true.’
‘Did you notice anything between Carlotta and Einar?’
Anya smiled. ‘Oh yes. I think it started after Carlotta made the discovery. They tried to be discreet, but we were all packed together in that school building, and everyone noticed. It was almost like she’d gotten a gold star for finding the treasure.’
‘What was their relationship like? Could you tell?’
The smile disappeared. ‘It was classic professor — student. She worshipped him and was flattered he was interested in her; he thought she was young and attractive and wanted to get in her pants. And he did.’
Magnus nodded. ‘And did you stay in touch with Carlotta?’
‘Not really. We were friends on Facebook. I might have seen a couple of updates, but actually I think she usually posted in Italian. Until this summer when she contacted me.’
‘How did she contact you? Facebook?’
‘No. Email. She must have gotten my address from the university website.’