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print and examined the wall.
    He never knew where the hell to put Ollie.
    His phone rang.
    ‘Magnús.’
    ‘Hi, it’s Vigdís. There has been a murder in the Hvolsvöllur district. Niccolò Andreose, thirty-eight, Italian national. They want our help. I’m coming to pick you up with Árni.’
    Magnus’s pulse quickened. Murders in Iceland were few and far between, unlike his old beat in South Boston where every week brought several. But most homicides in this country were quite straightforward to solve: one drunk hitting another too hard. The role of the detective was merely to get the paperwork right. He had been transferred to Iceland from the Homicide Unit of the Boston Police Department at the request of the National Police Commissioner to help out the local cops with the more complex big-city crimes that the Commissioner feared would become more common. Magnus had worked the odd interesting case in his first year; perhaps this would be another one. ‘Are there any suspects?’
    ‘Not yet,’ said Vigdís. ‘They’ve rounded up the witnesses at the Hvolsvöllur Police Station. That’s where we’re going now.’
    ‘What about the scene of the crime?’
    ‘That’s a little inaccessible at the moment. It’s on the rim of the Fimmvörduháls volcano. And there’s a blizzard blowing.’
    It was past midnight by the time they reached Hvolsvöllur, a small agricultural town on the broad floodplain to the south-east of Reykjavík. With Magnus were two other detectives from the Violent Crimes Unit: Vigdís, one of the few female detectives in Reykjavík and certainly the only black one; and Árni, who was young, keen and error-prone. It was Árni’s sister who was Magnus’s landlady. Vigdís had left her car outside Magnus’s place and the three of them had piled into Magnus’s Range Rover, which was better suited to the terrain outside Reykjavík. Magnus was glad he had only had a few sips of his beer; it would have been a shame to miss the case because he had had a skinful.
    The police station was a square modern building opposite the Saga Centre on the edge of town. Inside, lights were on.
    They were met by Chief Superintendent Kristján Sveinsson, a neat, dark-haired man of about forty, displaying the three yellow stars of his rank on his black uniform. Although a chief superintendent, Kristján – whatever their rank or title Icelanders always called each other by their first names – had only nine officers reporting to him. For serious cases such as a murder, he needed reinforcements from Reykjavík.
    Kristján showed the three detectives into his office, small but modern and tidy.
    ‘What happened?’ asked Magnus.
    ‘A group of foreign journalists went up to see the volcano with a couple of Icelanders. The weather was bad; there weren’t many other sightseers up there. Two of them – Nico the murder victim and an American woman named Erika – wandered away from the others. They were attacked by a single assailant and Nico was stabbed.
    ‘Erika ran away, with the assailant chasing her. Other members of the group came back to look for her and Nico. When the assailant saw them, he gave up the chase and disappeared.’
    ‘Anything at the scene?’ Magnus asked. ‘Murder weapon?’
    ‘The assailant took his knife with him. The crime scene is a blizzard. I have two men up there now, but I doubt we’ll find anything. Forensics will come out from Reykjavík first thing in the morning.’
    ‘And the body?’
    ‘Still up there waiting for the forensics guys.’
    Magnus grunted. Normally, you wanted crime-scene investigators at the scene as soon as possible, but Magnus understood why it didn’t make sense to crawl around a volcano with a pair of tweezers in a blizzard in the dark.
    ‘I pity your guys,’ Magnus said.
    ‘They’re used to it,’ said the chief superintendent. ‘We’ve spent all our time up there over the last three weeks, trying to control the sightseers. I feared someone would