"What time will you be home? You"re not working late again, are you?"
It was an instruction rather than a question.
"No. I"m not feeling great. I"ll do another hour or so and then I"ll be home. Do you need the car?"
"No. Why?"
"I thought I"d walk home if you don"t need it."
"All right then." She sounded dubious. "I"m going to my sister"s for an hour. Text me when you leave work and I"ll be home at the same time as you. All right?" Agnes asked, sounding brighter.
"No problem, darling. Will do."
He did nothing but sit at his computer for the following hour, and at the end of it he stood up, knotted his white scarf around his neck and pulled on his coat.
"Not feeling well. Not sure I"ll be in tomorrow," he said to the girl at reception and was gone before she could reply.
Outside on the street he looked around him, watching out for the parka and baseball cap. Neither could be seen so he set off uphill, slowly, stretching his legs with each step after his day in the cramped office. With the car left behind he hoped to have thrown off his pursuer, but it also meant that he would have to forgo his visit to the gym in the morning. Maybe a workout at lunchtime would be in order? His head was roaring and he felt slightly faint, but he carried on all the same, glancing to the left and right, occasionally stopping to look in the window of a shop so he had an opportunity to look behind him.
A blonde woman with a small backpack and a purposeful look about her strode smartly past him, stepping with one booted foot into the slush of the gutter as she pa.s.sed. Once she had gone, Joel Ingi seemed to have the street to himself. Relieved, he pushed open the door of a smart block of flats, where his apartment occupied the top floor, and waited for the lift to arrive, just as the woman with the backpack peered around the corner, nodded to herself and quickly thumbed a text message into her phone.
Eirikur wrote down instructions as Gunna barked them out, his head down over his pad.
"Any questions?" she asked once Helgi and Eirikur had been given their orders.
"Straight away?" Eirikur asked.
"Straight away. You"re on shift until tonight, so you can start with the hotels this afternoon. This isn"t serious enough to warrant any overtime, so just do what you can. All right?"
"Do you think it could get that way?" Helgi asked.
Gunna ran her fingers through her hair and sat back. "You know, I"m really not sure. I"m trying to decide whether this is a bizarre one-off of the kind that we won"t see again for twenty years, or if there"s something bigger going on that we haven"t had a sniff of until now. That"s why I want a few questions asked, quietly. I really don"t want to ring any alarm bells."
"You mean you don"t want to get hauled over the coals again for upsetting people with important friends?"
"It"s not so much that. I don"t want to get a roasting for something you two reprobates have done. Right. Tomorrow. Helgi and I are on an early shift, Eirikur. If you"re starting at twelve, I suggest we meet at the bus station for lunch, compare notes and move on from there. Show of hands?"
Helgi and Gunna put their hands up. Eirikur sat on his. "Why do you two always want to meet up at places full of old people?"
"Because they serve sheep heads and mashed swede at the bus station," Helgi said, almost salivating at the thought. "Proper old-fashioned food. The kind I don"t get at home any more."
"Plus you can park at the bus station. It"s not far from here and it"s not full of yuppies and terrible music. So, motion carried two to one. The bus station it is."
Baddo leafed through the phone book. There were a few Haraldur Samuelssons there, but only one outside Reykjavik. Using a mobile phone with a pay-as-you-go SIM card bought that morning at a petrol station, he dialled the mobile number next to Haraldur Samuelsson"s phone book listing and waited. There was no answer and the number switched to voicemail and a pleasant avuncular voice. Baddo closed the connection.
Next he tried the landline and was rewarded with yet another voicemail, this time a pleasant female voice informing him that there was n.o.body home right now, and inviting him to leave a message for Halli or Svava.
So he"s married, Baddo thought with delight, hoping that the repeated ducking had concentrated Magnus"s mind enough to remember the name right. It was just as well, because when he called the hotel at four, an irritable woman had simply told him that Magnus had called in sick. He thought of using his usual trick of hinting at something official without saying outright that he was a police officer, but instead he thanked her politely and left it at that.
Wheels. I need to get some wheels, he thought. He had borrowed Maria"s car that morning to pay Magnus"s flat a visit, but he wouldn"t be able to do that often as it could be traced back to him. Besides, Maria needed the car to get to her lousy minimum-wage job that just about paid the rent.
He took the bus, an unlikely pa.s.senger among the few elderly and very young people making their way home on a cold evening. It was just as well that Magnus"s girlfriend only lived in Kopavogur. His guess was right. Outside her parents" house a shabby Golf had been badly parked between a Volvo and a bright yellow Toyota.
Baddo wondered how long he might have to wait. Waiting wasn"t a problem after what must have added up to several years of solitary confinement; he generally preferred his own company. What could be a problem was to be observed waiting, especially if the weather turned even colder. As it happened, there was no need to wait for long. Baddo stood motionless in a bus shelter across the road for almost an hour watching the house. A corpulent man in a sheepskin coat emerged and kicked the tyre of the badly parked Golf before reversing the Volvo out into the street and driving away. Another half an hour and a light in one room clicked off. Then another, over the front door, clicked on before the door opened a crack.
Baddo left the shelter and was across the road in a few steps, squatting on the Golf"s pa.s.senger side out of sight as he listened intently to two people arguing on the steps.
"Come on, Sara. We"re adults now, aren"t we?"
"You heard what my dad said. I"m sorry, Maggi."
Baddo wondered if Magnus had told his girlfriend about his uncomfortable experience that morning and waited.
"I"ve had a f.u.c.king s.h.i.t day. Now you"re chucking me out and I don"t want to go home."
Baddo frowned in the shadows. Maybe he had told her.
"Oh, don"t be so stupid, Maggi. I"ll come and stay at your place over the weekend, but I"m not staying if you haven"t cleared up all that stuff in the hall."
"AEi. It"s not that simple. Look, I have to leave and find somewhere else. The landlord wants me out already."
Baddo heard Sara sniff dismissively. "Don"t be so silly. He can"t throw you out if you have a rental contract. He must know that."
"Yeah. It"s not that easy . . ." Magnus said plaintively.
"Call me tomorrow, will you? At work, not at home. I don"t want to upset them any more. Come on. You"d best be gone before my dad comes back," Baddo heard her say and imagined her standing behind a half-closed door, ready to shut it.
"Oh, all right," Magnus finally said in a sulky tone that made Baddo want to laugh. The door closed with a click and he could hear footsteps descending the flight of steps down from the front door. He counted six steps across the frozen gravel of the drive. The Golf"s central locking opened all the doors simultaneously, and as Magnus got into his car, he found himself staring incredulously at Baddo grinning at him from the pa.s.senger seat.
"Hae, Magnus. Didn"t expect to see me so soon?" Baddo greeted him and shot out a hand that grabbed Magnus by the throat as he turned to open the door. "Less of the hurry, young man. Let"s go for a little drive, shall we? Nothing hasty, Magnus, or I might have to do something unpleasant."
As soon as Gunna left the city behind her and pa.s.sed the aluminium plant at Hafnarfjordur, all the worries and concerns that had plagued her came flooding back. What was Gisli going to do, and how was she going to tell Svanur that her son had made his stepdaughter pregnant a.s.suming he didn"t know already.
Reykjanesbraut was dark, and when Gunna saw the streetlights on either side of the road waving dolefully in the wind she realized she needed to concentrate, as a gust of wind hit the car and threatened to send it spinning into the central barrier.
With barely sixteen years between them, she and Gisli had almost grown up together. They had always been close, to Gunna"s mind closer than her contemporaries were to their children, especially as Gisli"s father had played no part in his son"s life. The narrow age gap had forged a bond that others found difficult to understand, though it had been threatened several times. When Gunna had met and married Ragnar Saemundsson, it was as if Gisli, then only eight, had drifted into his own little world, from where Raggi"s attention and perseverance had eventually drawn him out. When Laufey was born, though, there was nothing to indicate that he resented the arrival of a little sister.
When they had been hit by Raggi"s death only a few years later, Laufey remembered almost nothing of him, while Gisli had been left with fond and enduring memories of the stepfather who had only been with them a few years, but who had made a lasting impression on him. The shock had battered them all, but Gisli proved to be the pillar Gunna leaned on in order to get herself through those tough early months as well as, she reminded herself, the black moments that still returned occasionally.
Picking over the past and asking herself what had gone wrong, Gunna almost missed the turning to Grindavik that would take her across the lava fields to Hvalvik, the run-down coastal village where she had been the village copper until just recently.
She wondered if Gisli would appear that evening and hoped that he would. She worried that her reaction to his news the day before could have been taken the wrong way. The news a few months earlier that Gisli"s long-term girlfriend Soffia was pregnant had been a surprise, but not an unwelcome one. It only took Gunna a week or two to get used to the idea of becoming a grandmother before her fortieth birthday. Soffia had been radiant, planning and looking forward to motherhood.
Skirting Grindavik, she saw that there was spray coming over the harbour walls and hoped there would be some time for the weather to abate before Gisli"s next trip to sea, then she scolded herself for worrying unnecessarily about him. The ship he sailed on as a deckhand was big and modern enough to cope with the worst weather the North Atlantic could throw at it.
There were far more dangers for a young man on sh.o.r.e, she reflected bitterly, coasting down the road into Hvalvik and through the village, stopping outside the terraced houses in a row right on the edge of the lava fields. She sat in the car for ten minutes outside the darkened house. The absence of lights indicated that Laufey was either at some club or else with Sigrun, the friend who once used to babysit the precociously clever girl when police business called for Gunna to work awkward hours.
She wondered how Drifa must be feeling. She struggled to recall much about the stepdaughter her elder brother Svanur had taken on all those years ago when he"d moved in with a woman with three small children. Drifa was the eldest, a quiet, studious girl who had blossomed in her first year away from home at university in Reykjavik. A year later she had become unrecognizable as the same person. Still vivacious and outgoing, Drifa had started dressing in black, colouring her hair and wearing heavy silver jewellery, while her university course in accountancy had been abandoned as she switched to sociology and immersed herself in politics.
Gunna held her head in her hands. She wondered what Drifa saw in Gisli, a stolid young man with no radical views and who seemed to have a career path mapped out ahead of him. She wondered how Soffia had reacted when Gisli told her his news, imagining the anger and disappointment at what she would surely see as a betrayal of the worst kind. She couldn"t help sympathizing with Soffia"s situation, having parted company with Gisli"s father long before the boy was born all those years ago. She was also certain that Soffia was her preferred choice of daughter-in-law, a fiery but level-headed girl with a mind of her own. Drifa was an unknown quant.i.ty, as she"d only encountered the girl on a few occasions and had to trawl her memory to dig up any details about her.
A tap at the window shook her from her reverie and she looked around to see Laufey"s toothy smile beaming at her from underneath the hood of the parka that encircled her face.
"All right, Mum? Thought you were asleep there. Forgot your keys?"
"No. Sorry, sweetheart. Just miles away."
"OK. Sigrun says hi. What"s for dinner?"
Gunna was. .h.i.t by the realization that she hadn"t even thought that far.
"I have no idea. Open the door and I"ll be right with you, darling. There"s something I need to tell you about," she said with a feeling of dread.
Magnus drove carefully through Kopavogur, wondering what the brooding man in the pa.s.senger seat had in mind. Baddo merely pointed in which direction he wanted to go as he thought what to do next. The wind buffeted the car as they drove through Gardabaer and down the hill into Hafnarfjordur, keeping off the main roads and among the traffic.
As they cruised through Hafnarfjordur and joined the evening traffic leaving town, Baddo sighed.
"The tart at your hotel," he said suddenly. "Seen her before?"
Magnus was silent for a moment. "Where are we going?" he stammered finally.
"Never you mind. That woman at your hotel. You"ve seen her more than once, haven"t you? Who does she work with?"
"I don"t know what you mean."
"It must be a racket. Who"s she working for? Or is she solo?"
Magnus shook his head wildly. "I"m telling you. I saw her a couple of times. I don"t know what she was doing there. We"re not supposed to ask."
Baddo grinned in satisfaction. "Ah. We"re getting somewhere at last. So you have seen her?"
"Er. Occasionally. There was yesterday, and the time before that was months ago, last summer."
"This businessman, Haraldur. He was in a bad way, wasn"t he?"
"He was very upset."
"Not too fast. Keep to eighty. Tell me what happened. Every detail," Baddo instructed as the lights of Reykjanesbraut flashed by, illuminating the beads of sweat running down Magnus"s face.
"He booked the room, paid in advance. She came to the hotel and asked for him. They sat in the bar for a while. I didn"t see them leave. I thought she"d left the building. About an hour and a half later there was a call to the front desk; said a man was in trouble in 406 and would we help him?"
"Was it a woman calling?"
"I don"t know. Someone else took the call."
"And you went and untied him?" Baddo said delightedly.
"Yeah. I don"t know what went on in there but I got housekeeping to clean the room and get it ready right away. The man, Haraldur, came down and checked out on the spot, even though he was due to stay for a few more days."
"So he left? What do you know about this guy?"
"Nothing. He"s in some sort of business. I don"t know what." They were past the lighted part of Reykjanesbraut and Magnus became increasingly nervous in the darkness as cars and trucks sped past them, throwing gritty slush in their wake. "Where are we going?"
"Not far. This woman, then, has she done this stunt before?"
"Stunt?"
"f.u.c.k me, boy. It"s obvious, isn"t it? Promises these old farts a spanking, ties them up and then clears out with their wallets. It"s not that hard to work out, is it?"
"Oh . . . I hadn"t thought of that."
"Well, has she?"
"What?"
"Done this before?"
"Er . . . I don"t know. Maybe. There was some talk a while ago, but we were all told not to say anything about it. Look, how far are we going? There"s not much petrol left in the tank."
"In that case, you can come off at the next roundabout."
Magnus slowed and eased the car down a slip road to a small roundabout at the bottom, where he stopped the car. He tensed and Baddo extended a bear-like hand.
"Don"t even think about it," he growled. "That way," he said, pointing to the right. "Into the car park. Kill the engine and switch the lights off."
Magnus obeyed. The car came to a standstill in a deserted car park large enough for only a dozen cars. A forlorn picnic table squatted on a raised area at the end, lit up by the pa.s.sing beams of cars speeding along Reykjanesbraut. Rain pattered on the windscreen. Magnus shivered.
"This is where we get out and go for a little walk, young man," Baddo said with the sigh of a man with an unpleasant job ahead of him.
Joel Ingi lounged on the sofa, practically sinking into it, fiddling with his phone while Agnes watched a movie. He hardly took in any of the film, while she sat entranced, her hand going to her mouth occasionally from the bowl of popcorn he had made and placed on her lap. The credits finally rolled and Agnes looked up.
"Are you all right?" she asked with a sideways look.
"Yeah. Me? I"m fine."
"Sure? You"ve been sulking all evening."
"I have not!" Joel Ingi retorted.
Agnes let a trickle of popcorn slide into her mouth and crunched suggestively. "You are so sulking," she sn.i.g.g.e.red. "What"s up with you?"
Joel Ingi sighed. "AEi. Work s.h.i.t, that"s all." He yawned.
Agnes leaned forward to put the bowl, now containing nothing more than a few unpopped kernels and a layer of salt, onto the vast coffee table. She let herself fall sideways and her cheek rested against his shoulder. "What"s the matter, big boy?" She whispered in a tone that normally had him eating out of her hand. "Done something you shouldn"t have?"
Joel Ingi frowned. For once there were things on his mind that drove his wife"s sure-fire seduction techniques right out of his mind.
"Or not done something you should have?"