Far North - Michael Ridpath [93]
‘But half the country has suffered from the kreppa. And they don’t want to kill anybody. Icelanders don’t do that.’
‘Half the country might not do that. But we’re talking about three or four individuals. We know Sindri believes in violence. Maybe the others do too. Ísak is a politics student: his mother said he was a radical.’
Baldur shook his head. ‘I don’t buy that. Let’s think about alibis. If you are right, and some or all of these people are responsible for Óskar and Lister’s shooting, then at least one of them must have been in London last week and France yesterday? Now take me through them.’
Magnus knew that Baldur had found the hole in his theory. ‘Óskar was shot last Tuesday night. Harpa was working at the bakery in Seltjarnarnes, Björn was fishing on a boat from Grundarfjördur, Sindri was at a book launch, although we’ll have to check that.’
‘And Ísak?’
‘Was in Iceland, staying with his parents.’
‘All right,’ said Baldur. ‘And yesterday? Were any of them in Normandy?’
‘Harpa we interviewed late on Saturday afternoon – it would have been very hard for her to get to France in time, Björn I saw myself on Sunday, Sindri was in the Grand Rokk and Ísak was in church in London.’
‘So how did they shoot the two victims?’
‘The alibis are too pat, especially Ísak’s,’ Magnus said. ‘There is no good reason why he came back to Reykjavík last week. And the going to church seems like a deliberate attempt to set up an alibi.’
‘You’re struggling here, Magnús.’
Baldur was right, damn him. ‘Maybe there was someone else?’ Magnus said. ‘A fifth conspirator. The guy who pulled the trigger. The assassin.’
Baldur smiled thinly. ‘That’s my point, Magnús. Maybe someone else pulled the trigger. Two different someone elses, one in London and one in Normandy. And maybe neither of them had anything at all to do with Iceland.’
‘All right,’ Magnus said. ‘I may be wrong. But there is a chance, just a small chance, I may be right. I know there are more connections here: we just haven’t found them yet. I don’t know what these connections add up to. But let us keep on digging. Because if I am right, someone else is going to get shot very soon.’
Baldur sat back in his chair. Magnus knew Baldur didn’t like him, and this would be a chance for him to slap him down and send him back to college. Magnus had worked for bosses in Boston who would have done just that. But Baldur was an old-fashioned cop, a cop who respected gut instinct. The question was whether he respected Magnus.
‘Here’s what you do. Keep digging for a couple more days, the three of you. But dig quietly, do you understand? Keep this to the three of you, don’t talk about it even around the station. I don’t want to find myself defending a terrorist scare to the Commissioner. And if you don’t find hard evidence, we drop the case. Understand?’
‘I understand,’ said Magnus.
Sophie turned off the radio in the kitchen and rinsed out her coffee cup. She was in full procrastination mode, and she knew it. She should have been in the library hours ago. She had an essay on the rise of social inequality under socialist governments to write, and there was a ton of reading she still hadn’t done.
She didn’t know where her motivation had gone. It was the beginning of her final year and she really had to crank things up. Maybe living with Zak wasn’t such a good idea after all. He had no trouble with the work, he was very smart and had a genuine passion for politics, especially the old Marxist thinkers that were going out of fashion. His tutors loved him; he reminded them of the good old days when LSE was a hothouse of radical politics, and not just a passport into investment banking. He had iron discipline, but she just liked to hang around him wasting time.
She wondered what the police wanted with him. When she had asked he hadn’t answered. But she thought she knew what