August 13, 1922. Went with Matthías to Skerjafjördur to practice target shooting with my rifle…
September 4, 1922. The minister has entrusted me with calculating the cost of the railroad. Its total length will be 65.52 km, the gauge 1.067 m, the rails 18 kg/m…
September 12, 1922. I am assuming that the track bed will need 316 thousand cubic meters of material at a cost of 2,085,000 kr. With good management, this should be ample…
September 15, 1922. For the rails, I am going to use the unit price as delivered to a railroad station in Norway, i.e. inclusive of inland freight charges. I am assuming that a special ship will be chartered to transport the material to Reykjavik. It would amount to 3,300 tons of rails and 2,400 cubic meters of cross ties…
September 17, 1922. The cross ties (1.60 x 0.22 x 0.11 m) will be made of impregnated pinewood mounted with 12-cm-wide baseplates. The price, 6.00 kr. per item, is a little high, but is based on the present high price of timber and the cost of creosote being 150 kr./ton.
Around noon Hrefna went to see the historian who had written about the royalist affair. He lived in an old timber house on Vesturgata. She recognized the house by the sign in a ground-floor window that read “Yngvi Jónsson, historian,” and beneath the sign, a square piece of paper had been taped up with the words “Genealogical Services” written in thick lettering.
A fat boy wearing a black-and-white KR football shirt adorned with red ketchup stains opened the door when she knocked.
“Is Yngvi Jónsson in?” she asked politely.
“Yeah, hang on,” the boy replied. He disappeared into the house and Hrefna heard him yell, “Dad! There’s some woman wants to talk to you.”
She couldn’t hear a reply, but there must have been one, as the boy returned to the door and asked her in.
Hrefna followed him along a narrow corridor and past a kitchen, where a woman of an uncertain age sat at a table smoking. Her graying black hair was gathered into two plaits, and she wore a colorful batik tunic. She gave a friendly smile when Hrefna greeted her.
“He’s downstairs,” the boy said, pointing down a steep timber staircase.
Hrefna carefully descended the battered stairs to a large, low-ceilinged basement room; every piece of furniture was covered with stacks of papers and books, and atop one of the stacks lay a fat tabby cat. Yngvi Jónsson, historian, was also fat, very fat. Sitting on an old castored desk chair, he swiveled round toward Hrefna and gave her a cheery greeting. He wore a shabby pair of jeans and a red-checked flannel shirt; his friendly face was completely round and pink, with several double chins, and his colorless hair and beard were unruly. He seemed to be in his fifties, but was clearly younger than that in spirit. He got up with some difficulty, removed a stack of dusty papers from an easy chair, and offered Hrefna a seat.
“And what can I do for you, my dear?” he asked with a smile, taking the cat into his arms before sitting down again.
“I am from the detective division,” Hrefna said. “We are investigating the death of Jacob Kieler.”
Yngvi heaved with laughter. “I didn’t shoot him,” he gasped.
“Was I supposed to think that?”
Yngvi laughed again, and his stomach and double chins shook.
“No, not seriously,” he said.
“Have you any idea who might have done it?”
Yngvi became serious for a moment. “No. I hadn’t thought about it. To be honest, I haven’t considered those Kieler chaps at all of late. You probably saw the article I wrote about the German king?”
“Yes.”
“When I come across material like that, I sometimes write newspaper articles about it and sell them for a bit of money, but I didn’t take it too far. It would be an interesting project for a keen writer to look into that family’s history. There’s plenty of material there.”
“Really?”
Yngvi stroked the cat thoughtfully and then continued. “Yes, there’s some stuff there. First of all, there’s the myth about old Jacob the store manager, the Danish shop assistant who moved here to Iceland and became a wealthy merchant. Then there was that engineer’s railroad nonsense and the royalist business, Matthías’s misfortunes in Germany during the war years, the engineer’s murder, and now, the boy’s murder.”
“He was hardly a boy.”
“Oh, well. He was my contemporary and you tend to talk about your contemporaries as boys.”
“All right. Let’s take things in order,” Hrefna suggested. “What myth are you talking about?”
“I once reported a story about events that were supposed to have happened in the last century, involving a Danish store manager who was particularly loyal to his boss and made everyone suffer for it, both staff and customers. Later it was said that this Dane had been Jacob Kieler the first—the shop assistant that became a real big shot. Do you want to hear the story?”