Not very romantic hardly the right way to start a life together. Although he was attracted to Colby, loved her even, the more he got to know her the more sure he was that they shouldn't get married. It wasn't just his fear of commitment, although Colby was absolutely right that he did suffer from that. He just knew that if there was a woman out there somewhere that he could spend the rest of his life with, it wasn't Colby. Her latest high-stakes ploy was an example of why.

But he had no choice. She had given him no choice.

He composed a brief report to Williams, telling him he was safe and in e-mail contact should Williams learn anything about the trial date.

He thought of writing to Ollie, as his brother now called himself, but decided against it. The FBI had informed Ollie that Magnus was disappearing, and an agent had taken his stuff from the guestroom in Ollie's house. That would have to be enough the less Magnus had to do with Ollie the better. He realized that it wasn't just Colby who was at risk from the Soto gang, his brother might be too.

Magnus closed his eyes. Nothing he could do about that now except hope that the gangsters would ignore them all.

Oh, God. Maybe Colby was right. Maybe he should just have pretended that he hadn't heard Lenahan's conversation.

Of course, in his beloved sagas, the heroes always did their duty. But then most of their relatives came to a bloody end before the story was finished. It was easy to be brave with your own skin, much harder with other people's. He felt more like a coward than a hero, safe in Iceland when his brother and his girlfriend were in danger.

But then the ancient Icelandic reaction kicked in. If they touched a hair of Colby's or Ollie's head, he would make the bastards pay. All of them.

Baldur held another conference at two o'clock that afternoon. The team were still fresh and enthusiastic.

He began with the initial findings from the autopsy. It looked likely that Agnar had drowned; there was some mud found in his lungs, which suggested that he was still breathing when he hit the water. As Magnus had suspected, the fragments of stone in the victim's head wound were from the dirt road rather than the lake floor.

There were small traces of cocaine in the victim's blood, and some alcohol, but not nearly enough to cause intoxication. The pathologist's conclusion was that the victim was struck on the back of the head with a stone, fell unconscious and was dragged into the lake where he drowned. No surprises there.

Baldur and Vigdis had interviewed Andrea. She had admitted that her affair with Agnar had been going on for about a month. She was besotted with him, she had spent most of the previous year trying to seduce him, and had finally succeeded after a drunken student party to which he had been invited. She had spent one weekend with him at the summer house. Her finger-prints were indeed one of the two sets that remained unidentified.

Andrea said that Agnar had seemed terrified that his wife would discover what had happened. He had promised her after she had caught him with a student four years before that he would remain faithful, and until Andrea he had kept his word. Andrea's impression was that Agnar was scared of Linda.

Magnus outlined the theory that Isildur was a nickname for a Lord of the Rings fan, and that Steve Jubb was one himself. One or two of the faces around the table looked a little uncomfortable. Maybe arni wasn't the only one to have seen the Lord of the Rings movie.

Baldur handed round the list of entries from Agnar's appointments diary. Dates, times, and the names of people he had met, mostly fellow academics or students. He had been away on a two-day seminar at the University of Uppsala in Sweden three weeks before. And one afternoon the previous week was blocked out with the word 'Hruni'.

'Hruni is near Fludir, isn't it?' Baldur said.

'Just a couple of kilometres away,' Rannveig, the assistant prosecutor, said. 'I've been there. There's nothing but the church and a farm.'

'Perhaps the entry refers to the dance rather than the place,' Baldur said. 'Something collapsing that afternoon? A disaster?'

Magnus had heard of Hruni. Back in the seventeenth century the pastor of Hruni was notorious for the wild parties he held in his church at Christmas. One Christmas Eve the devil was seen hanging around outside, and the following morning the whole church and its congregation had been swallowed up by the earth. Since then the phrase 'Hruni dance' had slipped into the language to mean something that was falling apart.

'The little boy who died young came from Fludir,' said Vigdis. 'isildur asgrimsson. And here's his sister.' She pointed to a name on the list of appointments. 'Ingileif asgrimsdottir, sixth of April, two-thirty. At least, I'm pretty sure that she was the boy's sister. I can check.'

'Do that,' said Baldur. 'And if you are right, track her down and interview her. We're assuming that Isildur is a foreigner but we need to keep an open mind.'

He picked up a sheet of paper on the conference table in front of him. 'We have searched Steve Jubb's hotel room and the forensics people are examining his clothes. We found a couple of interesting text messages that had been sent on his mobile phone. Or we think they might be interesting, we just don't know. Take a look at the transcriptions.'

He passed around the sheet, on which two short sentences had been typed. They were in a language that Magnus didn't recognize, didn't even begin to recognize. 'Does anyone know what this is?' Baldur asked.

There were frowns and slowly shaking heads around the table. Someone tentatively suggested Finnish, someone else was sure it wasn't. But Magnus noticed that arni was shifting uncomfortably again.

'arni?' Magnus said.

arni glared at Magnus, and then swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing. 'Elvish,' he said, very quietly.

'What?' Baldur demanded. 'Speak up!'

'They might be in Elvish. I think Tolkien created some Elvish languages. This might be one of them.'

Baldur put his head in his hands and then glared at his subordinate. 'You're not going to tell me the huldufolk did this, are you now arni?'

arni shrank. The huldufolk, or hidden people, were elf-like creatures who were supposed to live all over Iceland in rocks and stones. In everyday conversation Icelanders were proud of their belief in these beings, and, famously, highways had been diverted to avoid removing rocks in which they were known to live. Baldur did not want his murder investigation to be derailed by the most troublesome of all Iceland's many superstitions.

'arni could be right,' said Magnus. 'We know Steve Jubb and Isildur, whoever he is, were doing a deal with Agnar. If they needed to communicate with each other about it they could have used a code. They are both Lord of the Rings fans: what better than Elvish?'

Baldur pursed his lips. 'All right, arni. See if you can find someone in Iceland who speaks Elvish, and ask them if they recognize what this says. And then get them to translate it.'

Baldur glanced around the table. 'If Steve Jubb won't tell us, we need to find out who this Isildur is ourselves. We need to get in touch with the British police in Yorkshire to see if they can help us with Jubb's friends. And we need to check all the bars and restaurants in Reykjavik to find out if Jubb met anyone else apart from Agnar. Perhaps Isildur is here in town; we won't know until we ask around. And I am going to interview Agnar's wife.' He doled out specific tasks for everyone around the table, except Magnus, and the meeting was over.

Magnus followed the inspector into the corridor. 'Do you mind if I join Vigdis to interview the sister of the kid who died?'

'No, go ahead,' said Baldur.

'What do you think so far?' Magnus asked.

'What do you mean, what do I think?' Baldur said, stopping.

'Oh, come on. You have to have a hunch.'

'I keep an open mind. I gather evidence until it points to one conclusion. Isn't that what you do in America?'

'Right,' Magnus said.

'Now, if you want to help, find me Isildur.'

CHAPTER SEVEN.

INGILEIF aSGRiMSDoTTIR OWNED an art gallery on Skolavordustigur, which was a bit of a mouthful, even for an Icelander. New York had Fifth Avenue, London had Bond Street and Reykjavik had Skolavordustigur. The street led up from Laugavegur, the busiest shopping street in town, to the Hallgrimskirkja at the top of a hill. Small stores lined the road, part concrete, part brightly painted corrugated metal, selling art supplies, jewellery, designer clothes and fancy foods. But the credit crunch had made its mark: some premises were discreetly empty, displaying small signs showing the words Til Leigu, meaning For Rent.

Vigdis parked her car a few metres below the gallery. Above her and Magnus the massive concrete spire of the church thrust upwards. Designed in the nineteen thirties, it was supported by two great wings that swept up from the ground; it looked like Iceland's very own intercontinental ballistic missile, or possibly a moon rocket.

As Magnus climbed out of the car, he was almost knocked over by a blonde girl of about twenty dressed in a lime green sweater with a short leopard-skin skirt and a two foot tail hurtling down the hill on a bicycle. Where were the traffic cops when you needed them?

Vigdis pushed open the door to the gallery and Magnus followed her in. A woman, presumably Ingileif asgrimsdottir, was speaking to a tourist couple in English. Vigdis was about to interrupt them, when Magnus touched her arm. 'Let's wait until she's finished.'

So Magnus and Vigdis examined the objects on sale in the gallery, as well as Ingileif herself. She was slim with blonde hair that came down in a fringe over her eyes and was tied back in a ponytail. A quick broad smile beneath high cheekbones, a smile which she was using to maximum effect on her customers. An English couple, they had begun by picking up a small candle holder made of rough red lava, but had ended up buying a large glass vase and an abstract painting that hinted of Reykjavik, Mount Esja and horizontal layers of pale grey cloud. They spent tens of thousands of kronur.

After they had left the store, the owner turned to Magnus and Vigdis. 'Sorry to keep you waiting,' she said in English. 'Can I help you?'

Her Icelandic accent was delicious, as was her smile. Magnus hadn't appreciated that he looked so obviously American; then he realized it was Vigdis who had prompted the choice of language. In Reykjavik, black meant foreigner.

Vigdis herself was all business. 'Are you Ingileif asgrimsdottir?' she asked in Icelandic.

The woman nodded.

Vigdis pulled out her badge. 'My name is Detective Vigdis Audarsdottir of the Metropolitan Police, and this is my colleague, Magnus Ragnarsson. We have some questions for you relating to the murder of Agnar Haraldsson.'

The smile disappeared. 'You'd better sit down.' The woman led them to a cramped desk at the back of the gallery and they sat on two small chairs. 'I saw something about Agnar on the news. He taught me Icelandic literature when I was at the university.'

'You saw him recently,' Vigdis said, checking her notebook. 'On the sixth of April, at two-thirty?'

'Yes, that's right,' said Ingileif, her voice suddenly hoarse. She cleared her throat. 'Yes, I bumped into him in the street, and he asked me to drop in on him some time at the university. So I did.'

'What did you discuss?'

'Oh, nothing, really. My design career, mostly. This gallery. He was very attentive, very charming.'

'Did he say anything about himself?'

'Not much had changed really. He had married again. He said he had two children.' She smiled briefly. 'Difficult to imagine Agnar with kids, but there you are.'

'You come from Fludir, don't you?'

'That's right,' said Ingileif. 'I was born and brought up there. Best farmland in the country, biggest courgettes, reddest tomatoes. Can't think why I ever left.'

'Sounds like quite a place. It's near Hruni, isn't it?'

'Yes. Hruni is the parish church. It's three kilometres away.'

'Did you meet Agnar at Hruni on the afternoon of the twentieth of April?'

Ingileif frowned. 'No, I didn't. I was in this shop all day.'

'It only takes a couple of hours to drive there.'

'Yes, but I didn't go there to meet Agnar.'

'He met someone in Hruni that day. Doesn't it strike you that it's a bit of a coincidence that he should go to Fludir, the village where you grew up?'

Ingileif shrugged. 'Not really. I have no idea what he was doing there.' She forced a smile. 'This is a small country. Coincidences happen all the time.'

Vigdis looked at her doubtfully. 'Is there anyone who could confirm that you were in the shop that afternoon?'

Ingileif thought a moment. 'That was Monday, wasn't it? Disa in the boutique next door. She dropped in to borrow some tea bags. I am pretty sure that was Monday.'

Vigdis glanced at Magnus. He realized that she was holding off on pushing Ingileif directly on her relationship with Agnar, and so he decided on a different tack. They could always come back to Agnar later. 'You had a brother, named isildur, who died young?'

'Yes,' said Ingileif. 'It was several years before I was born. Meningitis, I think. I never knew him. My parents didn't speak about him much. He was their first child, it hit them badly, as you can imagine.'

'Isn't isildur an unusual name?'

'I suppose it is. I hadn't really thought about it.'

'Do you know why your parents gave him that name?'

Ingileif shook her head. 'No idea.' She seemed nervous and was frowning slightly. Magnus noticed a V-shaped nick above one of her eyebrows, partly hidden by her fringe. Her fingers were fiddling with an intricate silver earring, no doubt designed by one of her colleagues. 'Except that isildur was my great-grandfather's name, I think. On my father's side. Maybe my dad wanted to honour his own grandfather. You know how names recur in families.'

'We'd like to ask your parents,' Magnus asked. 'Can you give us their address?'

Ingileif sighed. 'I'm afraid they are both dead. My father died in 1992, and my mother last year.'

'I'm sorry,' Magnus said, and he meant it. Ingileif appeared to be in her late twenties, which would mean she had lost her father at about the same age Magnus was when he lost his mother.

'Were either of them fans of the Lord of the Rings?'

'I don't think so,' said Ingileif. 'I mean, we had a copy in the house so one of them must have read it, but they never mentioned it.'

'And you? Have you read it?'

'When I was a kid.'

'Seen the movies?'

'I saw the first one. Not the other two. I didn't really like it. When you've seen one orc you've seen them all.'

Magnus paused, waiting for more. Ingileif's pale cheeks blushed red.

'Have you ever heard of an Englishman named Steve Jubb?'

Ingileif shook her head firmly. 'No.'

Magnus glanced at Vigdis. Time to get back to Ingileif and Agnar. 'Ingileif, were you having an affair with Agnar?' she asked.

'No,' Ingileif replied angrily. 'No, absolutely not.'

'But you found him charming?'

'Yes, I suppose so. He always was charming, and that hasn't changed.'

'Have you ever had an affair with him?' Magnus asked.

'No,' said Ingileif, her voice hoarse again. Her fingers drifted up towards her earring.

'Ingileif, this is a murder investigation,' Vigdis said slowly and firmly. 'If you lie to us now then we can arrest you. It will be a serious matter, I can assure you. Now, once more, did you ever have an affair with Agnar?'