The Wanderer

Michael Ridpath

• Publisher: Corvus
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782398745
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Literature

A dark secret lies buried in the icy landscapes of Iceland and Greenland. When a young Italian tourist is brutally murdered in a remote Icelandic church, Detective Magnus Jonson returns to Reykjavík to investigate. He soon discovers the victim was part of a documentary crew filming the life of Viking Gudrid the Wanderer, and their controversial find: evidence that Christopher Columbus knew about America long before he sailed the ocean blue.

As Magnus delves deeper, he suspects the film crew knows more than they admit. Jealousies surface, old friendships fray, and a shocking second murder forces Magnus to confront a chilling truth: history is being rewritten, and someone will do anything to keep it that way.

PART ONE

Iceland, 2017

CHAPTER 1

EYGLÓ GAZED OVER the valley to the rank of mountains on the other side, a wall of bulging hard grey rock, flexing its muscles in scraps of August sunshine. The valley was broad, flattened by a series of volcanic floods caused by eruptions under the glacier a hundred kilometres to the south. A river, narrow at this spot, threaded its way through sand and meadows where multicoloured horses grazed, dozens of them. A raindrop fell on her nose. She ignored it. She immersed herself in the view. The place. She took a long slow breath. She smiled.

She spoke.

‘This is the view Gudrid saw a thousand years ago. I am standing at Glaumbaer, in northern Iceland, the farm to which Gudrid came with her husband Thorfinn Karlsefni after so many years away from Iceland.’

Eygló turned and walked towards the back of a tiny church, clad in corrugated metal, squatting behind a row of turf-covered farmhouses.

‘Of course, she had married Thorfinn in Greenland. And they brought back to Iceland with them their little son Snorri, the first European to be born in North America.’

Eygló turned to face left as she walked and talked. She was speaking English, in which she was fluent, but with soft esses and a clear Icelandic trill that English speakers seemed to love.

More raindrops on her nose. And on the far side of the church a large black cloud was rolling towards her from the west. She resisted the urge to gabble her way through the rest of her story before it burst upon her.

‘Gudrid had travelled thousands of miles, farmed a new island – Greenland – explored a new continent – America – suffered shipwreck and attacks from Skraelings – what we now call Native Americans. It was here in Glaumbaer that Gudrid the Wanderer hoped to come to rest, to settle down with her small family.’

Eygló stopped. She was now in front of the church, next to a bronze sculpture of Gudrid standing in a ship with her infant Snorri on her shoulder. The drops were falling harder; Eygló resisted the temptation to wipe one from her eyebrow. She cocked her head to one side.

‘But Gudrid’s travels were not yet over. She had one more journey to take. A pilgrimage to Rome.’

The drops became a torrent. Eygló couldn’t help hunching her shoulders, as the cold water flattened her spiky blonde hair.

‘Cut!’

Eygló smiled with relief as Suzy, her English producer, waved them towards the church door.

‘Let’s get under cover!’

Eygló, Suzy, Tom the cameraman and Ajay the sound guy all ran to the shelter of the doorway, where a tall man was talking to a young woman with short dark hair, streaked with yellow. The woman hurried away as they approached.

‘Can we use those takes?’ Eygló asked.

‘What do you think, Tom?’ said Suzy. She hunched over Tom’s camera, examining the digital images they had just captured.

Eygló stood next to the tall man, who was staring out at the turf farmhouses beside the churchyard: an eighteenth-century reincarnation of that Viking Glaumbaer farm, and now a folk museum.

‘“It was here Gudrid the Wanderer hoped to come to rest,”’ he said, sarcasm lacing his words. ‘You have no idea what Gudrid hoped. For all you know, she wished she was back in Greenland shagging Erik the Red.’

‘You mean I should have said: “Gudrid stood here and dropped an earring, thereby spawning a hundred pages of bullshit in an archaeological journal ten centuries later”?’

‘Ouch.’

Einar Thorsteinsson had been patronizing Eygló ever since she had first come across him when he was a graduate student and she an undergraduate at the University of Iceland. He was now a senior lecturer in archaeology at the university. Very tall, with longish blonde hair and a neatly trimmed beard, he was irredeemably pleased with himself. Eygló had to admit he had some right to be. He was a magician of the past: he could conjure a story out of the most obscure elements – physical elements. Ancient sites of dirt and tiny lumps of material spoke to him. The sagas less so.

And he could be so arrogant.

Gudrid and her son were getting very wet. Eygló liked the statue. Although it was consciously modern in an ancient place like this, it was lithe and elegant, evoking Gudrid as the young adventurous woman she was then, rather than the thousand-year-old Viking she had become today.

‘You know Gudrid was a real person, Einar. And the sagas tell us enough to know what kind of person she was.’

‘You’re just guessing,’ said Einar. ‘It’s make-believe.’

Suzy joined them. They had been speaking Icelandic and the Englishwoman hadn’t understood them.

‘The rain has screwed us,’ Suzy said. ‘We’ve still got to do a wide with Eygló against the mountains in the background, that’s really important. We’ll try again early tomorrow morning – we’re going to have to shoot the whole lot again so we get the light consistent. According to my weather app it’s fine until about midday, and this valley would look beautiful in morning sunlight. Do you think it will rain tomorrow, Einar?’

Einar didn’t answer. Meteorology was beneath him.

‘You can never be sure the forecast will be correct in Iceland,’ said Eygló. ‘But it’s always worth a try.’

‘OK, we come back tomorrow morning.’

They walked back to the Land Cruiser that Suzy had hired. ‘Who was that you were talking to?’ Eygló asked Einar.

‘Who?’

‘The woman at the church door.’

‘I don’t know. Some tourist asking me whether it was open. Foreign.’

‘Are you seeing her later? Showing her the Glaumbaer nightlife?’

‘Oh, Eygló, you do so misunderstand me,’ Einar said. ‘That kind of thing is long in my past.’

‘Of course it is, Einar.’

Einar’s womanizing was legendary; in fact, Eygló had witnessed it at first hand. He had been married for something like twelve years, but that hadn’t stopped him. Eygló hadn’t seen quite as much of him in recent times, but she doubted Einar would ever change.

A familiar scent tugged at her nostrils, sneaking its way through the fug of damp clothing. It was aftershave, a subtle perfume she remembered Einar bought in Paris. She remembered the night, or morning rather, when she had asked him about it, lying in his bare arms.

But that was a long time ago. And much best forgotten.

Suzy had booked them into one of Iceland’s oldest hotels in the small town of Saudárkrókur, just a few kilometres north of Glaumbaer. Eygló smiled when she saw she had been given the Gudrídur Thorbjarnardóttir room, Gudrid’s room, and she took a quick picture of the wooden door with her phone to tweet. It was the best room in the hotel.

She gazed out of the window towards the harbour, crowded with small fishing boats and a couple of trawlers, out to the fjord behind. She could just see the big rectangular block of rock that was the island of Drangey, moored a few kilometres offshore like a massive supertanker from a bygone age.

She flopped on the bed, pulled out her phone and called her son, who was excited by Liverpool’s rumoured purchase of a new attacking midfielder from Arsenal and wanted to tell her all about it. It was coming up to the end of the transfer window for the new football season, one of Bjarki’s favourite times of year, and Eygló just liked to hear the enthusiasm in his voice. He was staying with his cousins for a few days – yet another few days. Eygló thanked God she had a patient and helpful sister.

After they had finished, Eygló checked out the Arsenal player on her phone – it was important to be properly prepared for future conversations with her son – and then caught up on Twitter and Facebook. Since the success of Viking Queens in America earlier that year, Eygló’s social media presence had exploded. Sometimes it was a chore, but actually she enjoyed the attention. And Suzy was keen for her to develop her fan base as widely as possible before The Wanderer was broadcast the following year.

She put down the phone and looked around her room. Old wooden furniture, old wooden beams. Elegant, cosy, expensive.

She grinned. This was her life now. She didn’t know how long it was going to last, but she was going to enjoy it.

Because, mostly, her life had been crap. Eygló was an optimistic person, famous among her friends for her ability to put a sunny spin on the numerous bad things that seemed to happen to her. There had been a succession of bad men, including Hermann, her husband for two years. She loved history and felt she had real empathy for those Viking men and especially women who had lived in Iceland a thousand years before, but she wasn’t brilliant at writing about them, at least in the dry, rigorous style that was expected of historians. She wasn’t a total disaster – in fact she was just good enough to cling on to the academic world by her fingertips, first at the University of Iceland and then at York University in England, from where she had eventually been let go as a junior lecturer three years before. It was Einar who had hired her there, but once he left to return to Iceland, she had lost her protector.

The only undeniably good thing that had happened to her was Bjarki, who was now eleven, innocent and enthusiastic, and whose life was definitely not crap.

But in 2012 she had been put forward by her boss at York to be a talking head f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Prologue
• Part One: Iceland, 2017
• Part Two: Greenland
• Author’s Note
• A Message From Michael Ridpath
• Where the Shadows Lie
• 66° North (Far North in the US)
• Meltwater
• Sea of Stone
• The Wanderer
• About the Author
• Review this Book