Ingileif bit her lip, her cheeks reddening again. She took a deep breath. 'OK. All right. I did have an affair with Agnar when I was his student. He was divorced from his first wife then, it was before he remarried. And it was hardly an affair, we slept together a few times, that was all.'

'Did he finish it, or did you?'

'I suppose it was me. He did have a real magnetism for women then, in fact he still had it when I last saw him. He had this way of making you feel special, intellectually interesting as well as beautiful. But he was sleazy, basically. He wanted to sleep with as many girls as he could just to prove to himself what a good-looking guy he was. He was deeply vain. When I saw him the other day he tried to flirt with me again, but I saw through it this time. I don't mess around with married men.'

'One last question,' said Vigdis. 'Where were you on Friday evening?'

Ingileif's shoulders lowered marginally as she relaxed, as if this was one difficult question she could answer. 'I went to a party for a friend who was launching an exhibition of her paintings. I was there from about eight until, maybe, eleven-thirty. There were dozens people there who know me. Her name is Frida Josefsdottir. I can give you her address and phone number if you want.'

'Please,' said Vigdis, passing her her notebook. Ingileif scribbled something on a blank page and handed it back.

'And afterwards?' asked Vigdis.

'Afterwards?'

'After you left the gallery.'

Ingileif smiled shyly. 'I went home. With someone.'

'And who would that be?'

'Larus Thorvaldsson.'

'Is he a regular boyfriend?'

'Not really,' said Ingileif. 'He's a painter: we've known each other for years. We just spend the night together sometimes. You know how it is. And no, he's not married.'

For once in the conversation, Ingileif seemed completely unembarrassed. So did Vigdis for that matter. She obviously knew how it was.

Vigdis passed the notebook across again and Ingileif scribbled down Larus's details.

'She's not a very good liar,' Magnus said when they were back out on the street.

'I knew there was something going on between her and Agnar.'

'But she was convincing that that was all in the past.'

'Possibly,' said Vigdis. 'I'll check her alibi, but I expect it will hold up.'

'There must be some connection with Steve Jubb,' Magnus said. 'The name Isildur, or isildur is significant, I know it. Did you notice she didn't seem surprised we were asking about her long-dead brother? And if she saw the Lord of the Rings movie the name Isildur would have jumped out at her. She didn't mention that connection at all.'

'You mean she was trying to downplay the isildur name?'

'Exactly. There's a connection there she's not talking about.'

'Shall we bring her in to the station for questioning?' Vigdis suggested. 'Perhaps Baldur should see her.'

'Let's leave it a while. Let her relax, drop her guard. We'll come back and interview her again in a day or two. It's easier to find the hole in a story second time around.'

They checked with the woman who owned the boutique next door. She confirmed she had dropped into Ingileif's gallery one afternoon earlier that week to borrow some tea bags, although she wasn't absolutely sure whether it was the Monday or the Tuesday.

Vigdis drove up the hill past the Hallgrimskirkja. Magnus peered up at a large bronze statue on a plinth in front of the church. The first vestur-islenskur, Leifur Eiriksson, the Viking who had discovered America a thousand years before. He was staring out over the jumble of brightly coloured buildings in the middle of town to the bay to the west, and on towards the Atlantic.

'Where are you from originally?' Magnus asked. Although his Icelandic was already improving rapidly, he was finding it tiring, and there was something familiar about sitting in a car with a black partner that tempted him to slip back into English.

'I don't speak English,' Vigdis replied, in Icelandic.

'What do you mean you don't speak English? Every Icelander under the age of forty can speak English.'

'I said I don't speak English, not I can't speak it.'

'OK. Then, where are you from?' Magnus asked again, this time in Icelandic.

'I'm an Icelander,' Vigdis said. 'I was born here, I live here, I have never lived anywhere else.'

'Right,' Magnus said. A touchy subject, clearly. But he had to admit that Vigdis was an incontrovertibly Icelandic name.

Vigdis sighed. 'My father was an American serviceman at the Keflavik airbase. I don't know his name, I've never met him, according to my mother he doesn't even know I exist. Does that satisfy you?'

'I'm sorry,' said Magnus. 'I know how difficult it can be to figure out your identity. I still don't know whether I am an Icelander or an American, and I just get more confused the older I get.'

'Hey, I don't have a problem with my identity,' said Vigdis. 'I know exactly who I am. It's just other people never believe it.'

'Ah,' said Magnus. A couple of raindrops fell on the windscreen. 'Do you think it will rain all day?'

Vigdis laughed. 'There you are, you are an Icelander. When in doubt discuss the weather. No, Magnus, I do not think it will rain for more than five minutes.' She drove down the other side of the hill towards the police headquarters on Hverfisgata. 'Look, I'm sorry, I just find it easier to straighten out those kind of questions up front. Icelandic women are a bit like that, you know. We say what we think.'

'It must be tough being the only black detective in the country.'

'You're damn right. I'm pretty sure that Baldur didn't want me to join the department. And I don't exactly blend in when I'm out on the streets, you know. But I did well in the exams and I pushed for it. It was Snorri who got me the job.'

'The Commissioner?'

'He told me my appointment was an important symbol for Reykjavik's police force to be seen as modern and outward looking. I know that some of my colleagues think a black detective in this town is absurd, but I hope I have proved myself.' She sighed. 'The problem is I feel like I have to prove myself every day.'

'Well, you seem like a good cop to me,' Magnus said.

Vigdis smiled. 'Thanks.'

They reached police headquarters, an ugly long concrete office block opposite the bus station. Vigdis drove her car into a compound around the back and parked. The rain began to fall hard, thundering down on the car roof. Vigdis peered out at the water leaping about the parking lot and hesitated.

Magnus decided to take advantage of Vigdis's direct honesty to find out a bit more about what he had got himself into. 'Is arni Holm related to Thorkell Holm in some way?'

'Nephew. And yes, that is probably why he is in the department. He's not exactly our top detective, but he's harmless. I think Baldur might be trying to get rid of him.'

'Which is why he dumped him on me?'

Vigdis shrugged. 'I couldn't possibly comment.'

'Baldur isn't very happy with me being here, is he?'

'No, he isn't. We Icelanders don't like being shown what to do by the Americans, or anyone else for that matter.'

'I can understand that,' Magnus said.

'But it's more than that. He's threatened by you. We all are, I suppose. There was a murderer on the loose last year, he killed three women before he turned himself in.'

'I know, the Commissioner told me.'

'Well, Baldur was in charge of the investigation. We failed to find the killer and there was a lot of pressure on Snorri and Thorkell to do something. People wanted heads to roll. Moving Baldur on would have been the easiest thing to do, but Snorri didn't do that. I'd say Baldur isn't out of the woods yet. He needs to solve this case and he needs to do it himself.'

Magnus sighed. He could understand Baldur's position, but it wasn't going to make his life in Reykjavik easy. 'And what do you think?'

Vigdis smiled. 'I think I might learn something from you, and that's always good. Come on. The rain is easing off, just like I said it would. I don't know about you, but I've got work to do.'

CHAPTER EIGHT.

INGILEIF WAS SHAKEN by the visit of the two detectives. An odd couple: the black woman had a flawless Icelandic accent, whereas the tall red-haired man spoke a bit hesitantly with an American lilt. Neither of them had believed her, though.

As soon as she had read about Agnar's death in the newspaper, she had expected the police. She thought she had perfected her story, but in the end she didn't think she had done very well. She just wasn't a good liar. Still, they had gone now. Perhaps they wouldn't come back, although she couldn't help thinking that somehow they would.

The shop was empty so she returned to her desk, and pulled out some sheets of paper and a calculator. She stared at all the minus signs. If she delayed the electricity bill, she might just be able to pay Svala, the woman who made the glass pieces in the gallery. Something in her stomach flipped, and an all-too familiar feeling of nausea flowed through her.

This couldn't go on much longer.

She loved the gallery. They all did, all seven women who owned it and whose pieces were sold there. At first they had been equal partners: her own skill was making handbags and shoes out of fish skin tanned to a beautiful luminescent sheen of different colours. But it emerged that she had a natural talent for promoting and organizing the others. She had increased sales, jacked up prices and insisted on concentrating on the highest quality articles.

Her breakthrough had been the relationship she had developed with Nordidea. The company was based in Copenhagen, but had shops all over Germany selling to interior designers. Icelandic art fitted well into the minimalist spaces that were so highly fashionable there. Her designers made glassware, vases and candleholders of lava, jewellery, chairs, lamps, as well as abstract landscapes and her own fish-skin leather goods. Nordidea bought them all.

The orders from Copenhagen had grown so fast that Ingileif had had to recruit more designers, insisting all the time on the best quality. The only problem was that Nordidea were slow payers. Then, as the credit crunch bit in Denmark and Germany, they became even slower. Then they just stopped paying at all.

There were repayments on a big loan from the bank to be made. On the advice of their bank manager the partners had borrowed in low-interest euros. The rate may well have been low for a year or two, but as the krona devalued the size of the loan had ballooned to the point where the women had no chance of meeting their original repayment schedule.

More importantly for Ingileif, the gallery still owed its designers millions of kronur and these were debts that she was absolutely determined to meet. The relationship with Nordidea had been entirely her doing; it was her mistake and she would pay for it. Her fellow partners had no inkling of how serious the problem was, and Ingileif didn't want them to find out. She had already spent her legacy from her mother, but that wasn't enough. These designers weren't just her friends: Reykjavik was a small place and everyone in the design world knew Ingileif.

If she let all these people down, they wouldn't forget it, and neither would she.

She picked up the phone to call Anders Bohr at the firm of accountants in Copenhagen that was trying to salvage something from Nordidea's chaotic finances. She telephoned him once a day, using a mixture of charm and chastisement in the hope of badgering him into giving her something. He seemed to enjoy talking to her, but he hadn't cracked yet. She could only try. She wished she could afford a plane ticket to have a go at him in person.

A hundred kilometres to the east, a red Suzuki four-wheel-drive pulled up outside a cluster of buildings. There were three structures: a large barn, a large house and a slightly smaller church. A big man climbed out of the car he was well over six feet tall, with dark hair greying at the temples, a strong jaw hidden by a beard, and dark eyes glittering under bushy eyebrows. He looked more like forty-five than his real age, which was sixty-one.

He was the pastor of Hruni.

He stretched and took a deep gulp of cool, clear air. White puffs of clouds skittered through a pale blue sky. The sun was low, it never rose very high at this latitude, but it emanated a clear light that picked out in shadow the lines of the hills and mountains surrounding Hruni.

Far to the north the sunlight was magnified white on the smooth horizontal surface of the glacier which filled the gaps between mountains. Low hills, meadows that were still brown at this stage of spring, and rock surrounded the hamlet. The village of Fludir, while just on the other side of the ridge to the west, could have been twenty kilometres away. Fifty kilometres away.

The pastor turned to look at his beloved church. It was a small building with white-painted corrugated sides and a red-painted corrugated roof, standing in the lee of a rock-strewn ridge. The church was about eighty years old, but the gravestones around it were gnarled weather-beaten grey stone. Like everywhere in Iceland, the structures were new, but the places were old.

The pastor had just come back from ministering to one of his flock, an eighty-year-old farmer's wife who was terminally ill with cancer. For all his forbidding presence the pastor was good with his congregation. Some of his colleagues in the Church of Iceland might have a better understanding of God, but the pastor understood the devil, and in a land that lay under constant threat of earthquake, volcano or storm, where trolls and ghosts roamed the countryside, and where dark winters suffocated isolated communities in their cold grip, an understanding of the devil was important.

Every one of the congregation of Hruni was aware of the awful fate of their predecessors who had danced with Satan and been swallowed up into the ground for their sins.

Martin Luther had understood the devil. Jon Thorkelsson Vidalin, from whose seventeenth-century sermons the pastor borrowed heavily, understood him. Indeed, at the farmer's wife's request, the pastor had used a blessing from the old pre-1982 liturgy to ward off evil spirits from her house. It had worked. Colour had returned to the old lady's cheeks and she had asked for some food, the first time she had done that for a week.

The pastor had an air of authority in spiritual matters that gave people confidence. It also made them afraid.

In years gone by, he used to perform an effective double act with his old friend Dr asgrimur, who had understood how important it was to give his patients the will to heal themselves. But the doctor had been dead nearly seventeen years. His replacement, a young woman who drove over from another village fifteen kilometres away, put all her faith in medicine and did her best to keep the pastor away from her patients.

He missed asgrimur. The doctor had been the second-best chess player in the area, after the pastor himself, and the second most widely read. The pastor needed the stimulation of a fellow intellectual, especially during the long winter evenings. He didn't miss his wife, who had walked out on him a few years after asgrimur's death, unable to understand or sympathize with her husband's increasing eccentricity.

Thoughts of asgrimur reminded the pastor of the news he had read the previous day about the professor who had been found murdered in Lake Thingvellir. He frowned and turned towards his house.

To work. The pastor was writing a major study of the medieval scholar Saemundur the Learned. He had already filled twenty-three exercise books with longhand writing: he had at least another twenty to go.

He wondered whether his own reputation would ever match that of Saemundur's, that a future pastor of Hruni would write about him. It seemed absurd. But perhaps one day he would be called upon to do something that the whole world would notice.

One day.

CHAPTER NINE.

arni was having trouble locating Elvish speakers in Iceland, especially on a Saturday.

The couple of professors at the university he called were dismissive of his request. Tolkien was not a subject of serious study, and the only person who had any interest in the British author had been Agnar himself, but his colleagues doubted that he spoke any Elvish. So Magnus suggested that arni dive into the Internet and see what he came up with.

Magnus himself decided to make use of the Internet to try to track down Isildur. Isildur was clearly the senior partner in the relationship with Steve Jubb and probably the one putting up the money. If Steve Jubb wouldn't tell them anything about the deal he was discussing with Agnar, maybe Isildur would. If they could find him.

The more Magnus thought about it, the less likely it seemed to him that Isildur would be a friend of Jubb's from Yorkshire. That kind of nickname was more common in the online world than the physical one.

But before he got to work, there was an e-mail waiting for him, forwarded by Agent Hendricks, who fortunately seemed to be working on a Saturday.

It was from Colby.