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put the phone to his ear.
    Inspector Baldur Jakobsson was the head of the Violent Crimes Unit. A good, traditional Icelandic cop, he was suspicious of Magnus and his big-city methods. Magnus understood, but he still thought he was a pain in the ass.
    It looked to Magnus like a big breakthrough with the macaw. Árni’s eyebrows shot up as he listened, and his Adam’s apple started bobbing wildly. His cheeks flushed with excitement.
    ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes… Yes. Yes, right away.’
    Magnus’s interest was piqued.
    ‘What was that?’ Magnus said, as soon as Árni hung up.
    ‘I’ve got to get back to headquarters,’ Árni said. ‘You know Óskar Gunnarsson?’
    ‘I think so,’ Magnus said. ‘Isn’t he a banker?’ That was Magnus’s problem. Although he had done a good job of brushing up on his language so he was fluent with barely an accent, Reykjavík was a small town where everyone knew everyone else. Apart from Magnus who had never heard of anyone.
    Árni hurried to pull on his clothes. ‘Ex-CEO of Ódinsbanki. He was fired a year ago. He’s under investigation by Financial Crimes and the Special Prosecutor. Anyway, he was shot dead in London last night.’
    ‘Is there an Icelandic angle?’
    ‘The British cops haven’t found one yet, but Baldur wants us all out checking.’
    ‘I bet he does.’
    ‘You should get yourself involved,’ Árni said, as he pulled on his jacket. ‘With the foreign angle.’
    ‘Baldur won’t like it,’ Magnus said.
    ‘Since when has that stopped you?’ said Árni, as he grabbed his bag and hurried out of the changing room.
    *
     
    Magnus unlocked the front door of the little house in 101, the postcode for the centre of Reykjavík. The outside walls were cream concrete, and like most Icelandic houses the roof was brightly painted corrugated metal, in this case lime green. The house actually belonged to Árni and his sister, although only his sister Katrín lived there. Magnus paid her a very reasonable rent.
    Magnus climbed the stairs to his room. He pulled a Viking beer out of the refrigerator, flopped into a chair and opened it. Icelanders might not drink during the week, saving their efforts for heroic binges at the weekend, but Magnus was enough of an American cop to need a beer when his shift ended.
    His body tingled after the swim. The room was small, but it was enough for Magnus. He didn’t have much stuff. Before coming to Iceland he had shared a place with his former girlfriend, Colby, but he had always felt a guest, his possessions overwhelmed by hers. He did have books, though, which spilled out from the bookshelf along one wall on to the floor. In the middle of this chaos stood in a neat row his beloved sagas, in Icelandic, many of them bought by his father many years ago, their pages ragged with use.
    Outside his window, a couple of blocks up the hill, the Hallgrímskirkja lurked, its sweeping spire clad in scaffolding like a spaceship ready for launch, surrounded by gantries.
    Magnus sighed as he sipped the cold fizzy liquid. That was good.
    In Boston, a shift would frequently include a dead body. Solving the crime didn’t usually involve random shooting of bad guys, as Árni had suggested, but it did take a whole lot of talking to people: people whose lives had just been destroyed by the loss of someone they loved, people whose lives were already destroyed by the hell that was their everyday existence, witnesses who wanted to talk, witnesses who didn’t. Most of the time was spent on making sure the prosecution case went smoothly, the witness statements were typed up accurately and the forensic evidence was all in the proper place with the chain of evidence intact.
    It was long hours, painstaking, frustrating, depressing, butMagnus could never get enough of it. Every victim had a family,
someone
who cared that they had died, and Magnus would do his best for that someone.
    Of course he knew that he was doing it for himself as well. His own father had