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she do that? Well, I knew why. It was my story.’
    At this point Egill paused and stared at Vigdís. His beady little eyes shone with anger. ‘Halldór did nothing to stop her. He had plenty of time to shout to her, or to drag her back, but he didn’t. He just aimed his rifle and shot the bear.’
    ‘You think he should have got the child back into the car?’
    ‘Of course!’ Egill seemed suddenly agitated. ‘Halldór need not have shot the bear at all. He could have coaxed the child back into his car and taken her off to the farmhouse. Then he could have called for help and they could have captured the bear and taken it back to Greenland. It was small and weak – it would have been possible to do.’
    ‘Surely Halldór had to shoot the bear?’ Vigdís said.
    ‘No, he didn’t. In fact, I think he put Anna’s life at risk so that he could get a good shot. But what if he had missed? Anna would be dead now.’
    Vigdís saw the farmer’s point.
    ‘Did you tell Anna’s parents this?’
    ‘Yes, I did. But they think I am just an old fool. They wanted to believe Constable Halldór was a hero for saving their daughter. But he wasn’t. He wasn’t at all. Was he? What do you think?’
    Vigdís’s instinct was to prevaricate. But if the old man was right about what he had seen – and he seemed very lucid on the subject – then he had a point. And despite herself, Vigdís did feel sorry for the starving polar bear.
    ‘Perhaps he wasn’t such a hero after all.’
    Egill smiled a small smile of triumph.
    ‘The next day I went into town and talked to some people in the café at the petrol station. Everyone seemed to think Halldór was a hero. I started trying to explain what I had seen, but no one was listening to me. Except maybe the waitress, Lilja. No one listens to me much anymore apart from her.’ He smiled. ‘And Anna.’

CHAPTER FOUR
    V igdís returned to town to find Ólafur in a very bad mood. Neither Alex nor Martin Fiedler had confessed. In Martin’s case that wasn’t very surprising with his hotshot lawyer sitting next to him. The German Embassy official and the lawyer had protested vigorously, and Ólafur’s telephone conversation with María, the Húsavík prosecutor, had not gone well. She was young and inexperienced, and unwilling to stand up to Kristján. But Ólafur had to admit that the real problem was that Vigdís was right: they had no real evidence. That just pissed him off more.
    He knew one or either or both of the tourists were guilty – there was nobody else and neither of them seemed to care about a policeman’s life as much as a polar bear’s. Inspector Ólafur was determined not to let them get away with it, especially the smart-arsed German. It would just require a bit of patience. The trouble was, Ólafur was not a patient man.
    Alex Einarsson had driven their hire car out of town on the long journey back to Reykjavík. He lived with his parents and assured the police that he would be contactable there. Martin Fiedler remained stranded in Raufarhöfn, and Ólafur had taken custody of his passport. Detective Björn had been despatched to Húsavík to get the warrant to search the two men’s computers.
    Vigdís told Ólafur what she had discovered about Halldór’s family and the shooting of the polar bear, but Ólafur didn’t listen closely. If it didn’t help him build a case against the German, it didn’t interest him.
    Magnus called Vigdís from Reykjavík to report on his investigations of Halldór’s son, Sveinn. As Gudrún had intimated, he had a minor criminal record: he had been arrested for possession of cannabis twice and assault once. Magnus had gone to Sveinn’s apartment in Breidholt, where a half-stoned woman – who was probably Sveinn’s girlfriend, although she didn’t admit to it – said that Sveinn was at that moment on his way to Raufarhöfn. She also said he worked in a café downtown.
    The café proprietor, a brisk woman in her thirties, told