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then climbed into the car and drove off.
    “He’s going to get the ambassador,” Arngrímur said. “We held a press conference in the Felleshus earlier this morning to inform the media about the case, and then Konrad went home for a rest. But he wanted to meet you here as soon as possible. We’ve booked hotel rooms for you, but I assume that you’ll want to see the embassy immediately. Inspect the scene, and everything.”
    “Yes,” Birkir said. “The sooner the better.”
    “Exactly. Please follow me,” Arngrímur said, leading the way toward the entrance to the reception area. Anna was still smoking, so they stopped outside and waited while she finished her cigarette.
    Birkir looked up. Horizontally across the entrance were long glass plates, one above the other, with the inscription “Nordic Embassies” in six languages. The bottom one was in German; the Icelandic one was fourth from the top and the Finnish was on top, but Birkir couldn’t distinguish between the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish ones—the spellings were too similar for his limited knowledge of those languages.
    Sigmundur said, “I need to start by meeting with the embassy staffers. They’re here in the Felleshus, aren’t they?”
    “Yes,” Arngrímur said, and explained to Sigmundur where to find the conference room they were using. Sigmundur excused himself and disappeared into the building.
    “Can you keep him occupied?” Gunnar asked. “To stop him from interfering in our business?”
    “I can try,” Arngrímur said, not batting an eyelid.
    Anna stubbed out her cigarette, and Arngrímur showed them into the building and toward a reception window.
    “Please hand over your passports and exchange them for visitors’ passes,” he said.
    They were given white plastic cards bearing the Icelandic flag to clip on. Then they followed Arngrímur through double doors, which he opened with a pass card. They found themselves in the open plaza that linked the separate buildings.
    Arngrímur said, “The building we came through is shared by all the embassies and is open to the public. We call it the Felleshus. Besides the front desk area, there are rooms designed for conferences and exhibitions. There’s also a restaurant. We booked twoconference rooms there today as a temporary working facility for our people. The Danish embassy building is here to the left, and then, working around clockwise, we have the Icelandic building over there in the corner—then the Norwegian, the Swedish, and finally the Finnish one here to the right.”
    In front of the Finnish embassy a small children’s choir stood, singing.
    People had come out of the buildings to listen. It was comfortably warm in the sunshine. The buildings provided shelter from the breeze, and the air outside was refreshing. The Icelanders automatically stopped to listen to the pure sound of the unaccompanied singing. As the song came to an end, the audience applauded and the conductor, a young woman, bowed in acknowledgment. Then she gave the tone for the next song, and the choir started up again. At this point Arngrímur had walked on ahead, but as the first notes reached their ears, he stopped dead in his tracks. Birkir recognized the melody and could hear that the choir was singing in Icelandic. The pronunciation was, forgivably, not perfect, but the children sang beautifully and in tune. It was a well-known Icelandic song set to a poem by Jón Sváfnisson, the poet who’d been one of the ambassador’s visitors on the night of the killing. A strange coincidence, perhaps—though the song was very popular throughout Scandinavia as a choral arrangement.
As daylight grows longer and dreams multiply
a delicate breeze dusts your cheek, and you stir.
I question not whence it came, whereby,
nor whither its purposes were.
But you see that the springtime and freedom no slumber confer.
As mountain brooks babble and moorlands grow green,
A magic enthralls me, insistent, an ache.
I fetch you my