Cold Comfort

Book 2: Gunnhildur Mystery

by Quentin Bates

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Officer Gunnhildur, recently promoted from her post in rural Iceland to Reykjavík’s Serious Crime Unit, is tasked with hunting down escaped convict Long Ommi, who has embarked on a spree of violent score-settling in and around the city. Meanwhile, she’s also investigating the murder of a fitness guru in her own city-center apartment. As Gunna delves into the cases, she unearths some unwelcome secrets and influential friends shared by both guru and convict.

Set in an Iceland plagued by an ongoing financial crisis, Gunna has to take stock of the whirlwind changes that have swept through the country—and the fact that at the highest levels of power, the system’s endemic corruption still leads, inevitably, to murder.

Release date: January 15, 2013

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 336

Sample

1

‘Laufey!’ Gunna called for the second time. ‘Laufey Oddbjörg Ragnarsdóttir! School!’

She brushed her teeth hurriedly and examined herself critically in the mirror. Time for a haircut, she thought. Good teeth, strong nose, thick eyebrows … Cupping a hand to lift a mouthful of water, she swirled and spat as Laufey appeared in the mirror behind her.

‘Finished, sweetheart. All yours.’

Laufey nodded blearily and said nothing.

Gunna switched on the radio and waited for the kettle to boil while Channel 2’s morning talk show chattered in the background. Laufey shambled back to her room and shut the door behind her.

‘If she’s gone back to bed …’ Gunna muttered.

The kettle steamed itself to a climax and clicked off as Gunna poured cereal into a bowl.

‘Laufey!’ she called again. The bedroom door opened and Laufey appeared, dressed and holding her school bag. ‘You’ll have to be a bit smarter getting up if you’re going to college in Keflavík next year.’

‘Reykjanesbær, Mum. You shouldn’t call it Keflavík any more.’

‘Keflagrad they call it at the station, there’s so many foreigners there now.’

‘Mum, that’s a bit racist, isn’t it?’

Gunna sighed. ‘Maybe, but it’s too early in the morning to argue about it. D’you want some breakfast? There’s cereal or skyr.’


Suddenly the radio caught her attention and she turned the volume up quickly.

‘A prisoner who absconded recently from Kvíabryggja open prison is still at large and is reported to have been seen in the Reykjavík area. Police have issued a description of Ómar Magnússon, thirty-six years old. He’s one-ninety-nine in height, heavily built, with medium-length brown hair. He has heavily tattooed forearms and was last seen dressed in jeans and a dark jacket. People are warned not to approach him, but to report any sighting to the police on …’


Gunna spun the volume dial down to zero.

‘Friend of yours, Mum?’ Laufey asked slyly.

‘Yup, most definitely one of mine right now. Actually, he’s from here.’

‘A criminal from Hvalvík? Really?’

‘He left Hvalvík before we moved here. Come on, I’ve got to go in ten minutes if you want a lift.’

Laufey yawned. ‘It’s all right. I’ll walk.’

‘It’s raining,’ Gunna warned.

‘S’all right. I’m meeting Finnur and we’ll walk together.’

‘Fair enough. I should be back at five, unless something crops up. I’ll let you know.’

‘I might not go to college in Keflavík,’ Laufey said suddenly.

‘What?’ Gunna said, startled.

‘I might go to Hafnarfjördur instead. Their psychology department is better. If you’re driving every day now, you could give me a lift in the mornings, couldn’t you?’

Gunna thought for a moment of how early they would need to leave every morning to take Laufey to Hafnarfjördur and still get herself to work on time.

‘Psychology? I thought you wanted to do business studies?’

Laufey frowned. ‘Business studies is so 2007, just not cool any more.’

‘We’ll see, sweetheart. We can talk it over tonight. See you later,’ Gunna said, sweeping up car keys and her mobile phone.

 

‘Yah, Diddi. Remember this face, do you?’

A look of alarm spread rapidly across the young man’s heavy features.

‘Hey, Ommi. Good to see you,’ he said, his voice hollow. ‘Didn’t know you were out yet.’

‘I’m not. Not officially,’ Ommi leered, dropping a long arm heavily across Diddi’s shoulders and sauntering with him along the deserted street.


‘What? Did a runner? So it’s you they’re looking for, is it? Brilliant!’

‘Yeah. Where d’you live now, Diddi?’

‘Just round there. Not far.’

‘Yeah, Diddi, but where?’

Diddi quailed and blanched. ‘Just up the road.’

Ommi used the hand draped across Diddi’s shoulders to haul him round in a half-circle, slamming him face-first against a raw grey concrete wall, a fist planted squarely over his kidneys. Diddi wanted to yell for help, but knowing that nothing would be forthcoming in a neighbourhood where people avoided involving themselves in other folk’s problems, he steeled himself to stay quiet.

‘What’s the matter, Ommi?’ he warbled.

Ommi leaned close. ‘Diddi, you let us down. You owe.’

‘Wha-what’s that, Ommi?’

‘You know.’

With one hand Ommi gripped a handful of greasy hair, swinging with the other to land a smack to the side of Diddi’s head that raised a whimper and left his victim in a daze. Ommi loved the satisfying smack of fist on flesh, the rush of adrenalin, the flush of power. He’d missed this in prison.

‘You know,’ he repeated. ‘You owe. Soon you’ll have to pay up. All debts will be honoured in full. Understood?’

Diddi nodded. Blood was starting to seep from his right ear on to the shoulder of his denim jacket, and his head was buzzing. ‘Yeah, I get it, whatever.’

‘Hope so. You haven’t seen me. Don’t know where I am.’

‘I didn’t do it, Ommi.’

‘That’s what you say,’ Ommi hissed, delivering a punch to the kidneys that left Diddi unable to stand on his own feet.

The whole thing had taken no longer than a minute, and already Ommi was nowhere to be seen. Cross-eyed with pain, Diddi wondered if Long Ómar Magnússon had really appeared and beaten him up in the broad light of morning. The ringing in his ears and the taste of bile convinced him that it had been all too real, as he threw up messily across the pavement. Across the street, an overcoated gentleman in a peaked cap kept his eyes to the front and his chin high, making sure that he saw nothing.


 

The address was only a few hundred metres from the police station at Hverfisgata and Gunna decided to go on foot. She strode through the encroaching darkness of the windy afternoon with Helgi loping at her side. There was already a patrol car and an ambulance outside with lights flashing as they arrived at the stairwell of the block of modern flats and found a young officer fending off interested people claiming to live there.

‘Crime scene. No admittance,’ he announced as they pushed through.

‘Serious Crime Unit,’ Gunna growled, watching the young man take a step back.

‘Straight up. Fourth floor. The lift’s not working,’ he said.

Helgi eyed the stairs. ‘Four flights?’

The young man nodded.

‘Oh well.’

Helgi set off up the steps with Gunna taking them two at a time behind him. As they reached the open door of the flat, he was breathing hard.

‘This must be it?’ he gasped, battling to keep the fight for air under control.

‘You want to pack in smoking, Helgi,’ Gunna admonished, stepping past him.

Another young officer stood at the door, this time one who recognized Gunna and stood aside to let them in.

‘It’s not a pleasant sight,’ he said dourly as Gunna snapped on surgical gloves and handed a pair to Helgi. She bent to pull covers over her shoes and again handed a second pair to Helgi as he fiddled with the gloves.

In the corridor, a young woman in police uniform, her face pale as the apartment’s ivory walls, stepped back from the kitchen door to let Gunna and Helgi through to where a paramedic hunched low with his back to them. Gunna went carefully around him and Helgi stayed in the doorway.

‘Are you all right, sweetheart?’ he muttered to the young policewoman, who merely nodded back, eyes fixed on the paramedic.


‘Dead, I suppose?’ Gunna asked, crouching next to the man in his green overalls as she surveyed the scene.

‘Well there’s not much reason for us to be here, if that’s what you mean,’ he replied shortly.

The body of a woman lay on the chequered tiles, arms splayed in front and legs crossed awkwardly. A mass of fair hair spread around her and a pool of dark blood had seeped over the floor.

‘Touched anything?’ Gunna asked the paramedic.

‘Checked for pulse, that’s it. Nothing’s been moved.’

‘Good man. Not a chance that she fell and banged her head, I suppose?’

‘Not a hope,’ the paramedic volunteered cheerfully. ‘Blunt instrument, this one.’


Gunna looked up at the faces in the doorway. ‘Helgi, would you get everyone out and bring the technical boys in here right away? This one definitely needs to be sealed up and gone over before we do any snooping ourselves. Do we have any identification?’

Helgi and the paramedic both stared back at her.

‘You mean you don’t recognize her?’ the paramedic asked.

Gunna took in thewoman’s long, ample figure, dressed only in tracksuit bottoms and a white singlet. The taut skin emerging from the sleeveless top was tanned to the point she would have described as being crispy.

‘Something about her rings a bell, but I couldn’t say,’ she admitted finally.

‘That’s Svana Geirs, that is. Was,’ the paramedic said with a mournful shake of his head.

‘Ah, in that case you’d better make sure we don’t get any intrusion from the gentlemen of the press. And not a word, all right?’

‘Of course.’

The paramedic stood up and stretched. Gunna looked at the woman’s face, half obscured by waves of hair. The skin at the corners of the wide-open green eyes looked stretched, parchment-like, in a way Gunna felt would have been more usual in someone past retirement age. The abundant blonde hair was coarse and thick, and she wondered if its natural colour had been seen in the last twenty years. She tried to estimate Svana Geirs’s age and put it at around thirty-five.

‘We’d better get ourselves out and leave the place to the technical team. Are you off?’ she asked the yawning paramedic.


‘As soon as the doc gets here to declare mortality,’ he replied, stepping back and carefully not touching walls or worktops.

‘So, is this your first celebrity?’

‘Sort of. I had a city councillor once. Heart attack jogging on the beach at Nautholtsvík. Stone dead by the time we got there. Shame about Svana, though,’ he sighed. ‘I used to have a poster of her on my wall when I was a student.’

 

Gunna and Helgi left the technical team swarming over the flat and met on the first-floor landing to compare notes. As many uniformed officers as could be found had already been dispatched to scour the area for anything that could be a murder weapon, and to start the long process of knocking on doors.

‘Tell me about Svana Geirs, then,’ she demanded. ‘The name’s familiar, but that’s it.’

‘Well we’ll have to do a bit of digging. I suppose she was one of those people who are famous for being famous, if you know what I mean.’

‘You mean she didn’t actually do anything?’

‘She was on telly for a while with a fitness show on Channel 2. My first missus used to watch it, so that has to be five years ago at least, doing these daft exercises in front of the box. Never did her any good. The show was less about keeping fit than Svana’s tits bouncing up and down in a tight top. That’s about it. She sort of disappeared from view after that, but she still pops up in the gossip mags.’

‘All right. So who wants to knock off a failed TV presenter? There was some real force behind it, and that was a single blow as far as I could see,’ Gunna said. She would dearly have liked a cigarette, but a promise is a promise, and Laufey would know the second she walked in that Mum had been cheating.

‘Time of death?’ Helgi asked.

‘Don’t know. Miss Cruz will give us an accurate idea later. It’s getting on for six now, so I reckon this afternoon sometime. She was still warm when we got here.’

The police’s only forensic pathologist was on long-term leave and the post had been covered by a series of replacements recruited from overseas. The latest was a woman from Spain with a double-barrelled surname who had replaced a tall Irishman and had instantly been christened Miss Cruz by her new colleagues.


‘Who raised the alarm?’ Gunna continued.

‘The cleaner. Found the lift wasn’t working, climbed the stairs and saw the front door was open.’

‘Open? So whoever did this was out pretty quick without waiting to cover their tracks,’ Gunna said. ‘Did you check the lift?’

‘Jammed between the third and fourth floors. Been like that for a week, the maintenance man says.’

‘Top flat. Nobody comes up here without a reason. What about next door?’

‘Nobody home. No sign of life.’ Helgi frowned and rolled his shoulders as if they ached. ‘Well, whoever lives there is going to get a bit of a shock when he comes home from work. How do you want to organize this, Gunna?’

For a moment she wondered why he was asking her. Being in charge of a new investigation unit was a change that would take some getting used to after the years running the police station in rural Hvalvík, where weeks could pass with nothing more serious than a stolen bicycle. The offer of promotion and the shift to the Reykjavík city force had come as a surprise, and working as part of a larger set-up was already taking some getting used to. Although she had lived there in the past and knew the city intimately, Gunna felt vaguely uncomfortable in Reykjavík. Much had changed during the years she had taken it easy in her coastal backwater. The city’s pace of life had accelerated steadily for years until the crisis that saw the banks nationalized and the country plunged into a recession stopped progress dead in its tracks.

She had moved into the Serious Crime Unit’s new office as the protests outside Parliament were becoming steadily angrier, watching her uniformed colleagues disconcerted at the public fury they were on the receiving end of at demonstrations every weekend, while many of them felt a secret sympathy with the protesters and their impotent rage.

Gunna had flatly refused to move house from Hvalvík, and the forty-minute drive was proving a challenge in the mornings, but the journey home had become an oasis of valuable thinking time.

‘Gunna?’ Helgi asked again.


‘Æi, sorry. Thinking hard for a moment. If you try and figure out what the lady’s movements were over the last couple of days, I’ll tackle the next of kin.’


‘Fine by me. I’m still looking for Long Ommi as a priority as well, you know?’

‘Fair enough. Eiríkur should be here in half an hour and you’d better fill him in on all this so he can collect everything that comes in from the knocking on doors. I’m sure the lad will have some kind of theory he read in a book that’ll boil down to ordinary common sense. Pathology will tell us what they can, but I reckon we’ve seen it already. Blunt instrument to the head, single blow aimed to kill.’

‘Any ideas?’ Helgi asked hopefully.

‘I was about to ask you that,’ Gunna sighed. ‘On the surface, it looks straightforward enough. When someone’s killed like this, it’s either a junkie who doesn’t know what he’s doing, or it’s money or anger. Svana Geirs must have pissed someone off, or else she’d ripped someone off.’

‘Jealousy?’

‘Certainly a possibility. You’d better find out who she was shagging, in that case. I can’t imagine she lived like a nun. It’d be handy to know what she did for a living. I doubt somehow that a flat like this comes cheap.’

‘I’ll see what I can dig out by the morning. Be in early, will you?’ Helgi asked.

‘Nope. Bjössi in Keflavík asked me to stop by the hospital there and look in on someone in the morning, a friend of your chum Long Ommi, as it happens.’

‘All right. Give him my regards, will you? Bjössi, that is, not anyone who might be a friend of Long Ommi’s.’




2

A network of lines fanned out from the corners of the nurse’s eyes.

Working too hard, Gunna thought.

‘This way, please,’ the nurse said quietly, her gaze flickering back and forth.

‘How is he?’

‘Not great. But he’ll live.’

‘Can he speak?’

‘Not easily.’

She thrust open heavy double doors, strode along an echoing corridor and gently pushed aside a door that was already ajar.

‘Óskar? There’s someone to see you.’

The man lay back in bed, a wild tangle of black hair against the white pillow and fury in his eyes.

‘Good morning, Óskar,’ Gunna said with as much warmth as she could muster at the sight of the man’s lower jaw swathed in bandages. She tried not to imagine the splintered bones underneath, in addition to the split lip, puffed black eyes and the livid bruise colouring one cheekbone.

‘Can I leave you to it?’ the nurse asked. ‘We’re short-staffed today.’

‘Of course. Thanks. I’ll come and find you when I’m finished,’ Gunna said, looking sideways at the patient as if he were a naughty schoolboy.

The nurse nodded and padded silently away. Gunna sat at the bedside and opened her folder. She took her time to read the notes, while the bed’s occupant looked at her stonily through his bruises.

‘Right, then. Óskar Óskarsson, isn’t it? Your mates call you Skari?’ she asked without waiting for a reply. ‘You know who I am?’


‘A cop,’ he mumbled with difficulty, his voice a hoarse baritone.

‘Ah, so you can talk. That’s good. Just so you know, I’m Gunnhildur Gísladóttir. Until a few weeks ago I was the station sergeant at Hvalvík, and now I’m with the Serious Crime Unit. Your file has stopped with us. So, now then. What can you tell me?’

Gunna scanned the notes as Óskar glared truculently at her.

‘Your legal address is Sundstræti 29, Hvalvík. Full name, Óskar Pétur Óskarsson, married to Erla Smáradóttir. Three children.’

‘Five.’

‘Five?’

‘Erla got two already.’

‘Fromwhat I’ve been told, you turned up atCasualty in a right old state and declined to explain how you managed to get in this condition. So you’d better tellmewhat happened, and don’t say you fell down the stairs.’

‘Pissed. Argument,’ Óskar muttered sourly.

‘Argument? Who with?’

‘Bloke.’

‘Who? Where?’

‘Keflavík.’

‘Who was this person?’

‘Dunno,’ Óskar replied slowly. ‘Big bloke. Polish.’

‘Ah, so what were you arguing about?’

‘Can’t remember. Pissed.’

Gunna scanned the notes in her file. ‘It doesn’t mention intoxication when you arrived at Casualty, only hypothermia.’

‘Pissed,’ Óskar replied firmly.

‘No. You weren’t pissed. What was this about? If we’ve got someone on the loose beating people up with this kind of savagery, then we need to find them as soon as possible. Skari, you’re lucky to be alive. You could have been dead of exposure.’

Óskar’s eyes focused on the wall behind her, and Gunna recognized the determination in them. This would be a battle, and the whole story would probably never come out.

‘Heard from Long Ommi recently, have you?’ she asked, throwing out the question without expecting a reply as there was a tap at the door.

‘Are you finished yet?’ asked the nurse. ‘I can’t leave you too long. He’ll tire quickly.’


‘It’s all right. I’m finished,’ Gunna said, looking at Óskar and noticing the sudden panic in his bruised face. ‘But I’ll be back. If you’ve a minute, I could do with a word.’

The nurse nodded. ‘I’ll be at reception.’

‘I might as well come with you,’ Gunna said, rising to her feet and slotting her notes under one arm. ‘See you soon, Skari. Look after yourself.’

The injured man looked balefully back but said nothing. He fumbled with his uninjured hand for the remote control and his eyes glazed as the TV blared into life.

By the reception desk, Gunna and the nurse sat on a sofa for waiting relatives behind a coffee table stacked with thumbed gossip magazines in a variety of languages.

‘So, what can you tell me about this guy?’

The nurse shrugged. ‘His jaw’s broken in a couple of places and I don’t suppose he’ll ever be able to eat or speak easily again. The other injuries are broken ribs, broken fingers on one hand, plus some cuts and bruises across his face and shoulders that’ll heal quickly enough. He’s been given a beating, as far as I can see, and a very heavy one. Somebody really wanted to hurt him.’

Gunna scribbled quickly. ‘He was brought in yesterday?’

‘About six.’

‘No ideas who may have done this?’

‘Nothing at all.’

‘Right. I need your name for the notes.’

‘Sjöfn Stefánsdóttir.’

‘I don’t think I’ve seen you before. Been here long?’

‘Just a few months. We moved here from Akureyri.’

‘I see. Well, welcome to the wonderful Reykjanes Peninsula.’

‘Thanks. I’d have preferred to stay in the north, but my husband got a job down here, so here we are.’

‘I’m from the Westfjords, and I’ve never really got used to it here. It rains all the bloody time instead of snowing properly.’

‘Not looking forward to next winter.’

‘At least there’s a whole summer ahead of us yet. But down here winter just means the rain’s a bit colder than in summer. Anyway, I’ll have to leave it there for now. I’ll be back to ask our boy a few more questions.’


Gunna extracted a card from a pocket in her folder. ‘I’d appreciate it if you could give me a call if anything changes.’

 

‘Been busy already?’

‘Yup.’

‘Tell me, then,’ Gunna said, shrugging off her coat and wondering if she was overdressed. After years in uniform, deciding what to wear every morning wasn’t easy. The suits she had bought were too dressy for anything but formal wear, and she was already falling back on the comfortable, shapeless things that she habitually wore at home, or simply going to work in uniform. She reflected that, being in charge, maybe she ought to be a little more careful about dressing than her colleagues. Helgi always wore the same corduroy trousers and plain jacket that looked as if they had been inherited from an elderly relative, while Eiríkur, the youngest detective, shamelessly wore jeans to work.

‘All right,’ Helgi said, scanning his notes. ‘Svana Geirs. Real name Svanhildur Mjöll Sigurgeirsdóttir, born in Höfn eighteenth of December 1976, making her thirty-three,’ he added, peering across at Gunna.


‘You really were top of the class in maths at school, weren’t you?’

‘I was,’ Helgi replied, letting the sarcasm go over his head. ‘According to the technical team, we have a single wound to the head and secondary injuries where the victim hit the floor.’

‘Which we knew already.’

‘Yup. Undoubtedly the cause of death, as Miss Cruz will tell us later, along with every detail of the young woman’s physiology. We have plenty of fingerprints and quite a few full palm prints, at least half a dozen sets,’ Helgi continued. ‘We’ll find out soon enough if any of them match anyone we already know, but my feeling is that none of them will.’

‘Why’s that?’ Gunna demanded. ‘What’s your reasoning?’ she asked more softly.

‘Just intuition, I suppose,’ Helgi replied. ‘I get the impression that this wasn’t premeditated, happened on the spur of the moment, and whoever did it simply ran for it. Hence the open door.’


‘You may well be right, Helgi. Do we have a time of death?’

‘Miss Cruz says that Svana had probably been dead between six and three hours, and she may be able to narrow that down for us.’

‘So we can reckon she was knocked on the head between twelve and three.’

‘That’s it.’

‘What background did you manage to unearth?’

‘Ah, fascinating. Svana Geirs started out as a model, Miss South Coast when she was a teenager, then was part of a pop group called the Cowgirls in the nineties, though they didn’t do all that well. You know the ones, playing all over the country in bars and whatnot? Don’t you remember Eurovision about twelve, fourteen years ago? She sang the Icelandic entry and came nineteenth or something. Nowhere near the top, did abysmally, like they always do. Then she tried her best with a solo career and a bit of acting but didn’t get far. For five or six years she was on TV with the boob-bouncing fitness show. That ended three years ago. Since then, she doesn’t seem to have done a lot, although she’s part owner of a fitness club on Ármúli.’

‘Which one?’

‘Fit Club.’

‘That’s a new one on me. So where did you find all this out?’

‘I asked my daughter,’ he admitted.

‘Ah. Fine police work, Helgi.’

He beamed back at her. ‘Wasn’t it just? Parents are Sigurgeir Sigurjónsson and Margrét Thorvaldsdóttir, Tjarnarbraut 26, Höfn. Both living. They’ve been informed, probably on their way here already. Svana was married twice, and lots of squeezes, mostly sporty types, football players, plus a few businessmen. A popular lass, always in the papers, but never for having done much as far as I know. Just for looking good, I reckon.’

‘We’d better have some names.’

‘Will do.’ Helgi nodded. ‘Oh, that flat and the smart jeep outside weren’t hers. Both are owned by a company called Rigel Investment.’

‘Aha. Now that’s interesting. Eiríkur can look into that. Where is he, anyway?’

‘Going to be late. He called in to say his wife’s ill, so he has to hold the fort for an hour or so.’


‘Ah, the joys of parenthood.’

‘It’s all right for you. That’s all behind you now,’ Helgi said grimly. Gunna knew that Helgi lived at a frenetic pace. With a son and a daughter in their late teens and a failed marriage behind him, he had embarked in middle age on a second marriage that had resulted in two small children in rapid succession. She wondered how he managed the sleepless nights and the aggravation of living with toddlers a second time around. He was always in a hurry, generally had something child-related on his mind, and a pair of child seats were strapped permanently in the back of his venerable Skoda.

‘Too right,’ she said firmly. ‘I can just wait until the grandchildren start to show up.’

‘No sign of that, is there?’ Helgi asked with alarm.

‘I should bloody well hope my Gísli has more sense than that, for the moment at least. And Laufey’s still at school. Although that doesn’t seem to stop them a lot of the time,’ she added gloomily. ‘Anyway, when Eiríkur gets in, will you put him on to tracing the owner of Svana Geirs’s flat and car? You said her parents are on the way?’

‘Yup, flying here today or tomorrow morning.’

‘I suppose I’d better look after them. See if you can fix a time to meet them, would you?’

‘All right,’ Helgi said, as Gunna pulled her coat back on. ‘Hey, where are you off to?’

‘Not far. I’ll be back in an hour.’

 

Jón flipped through the pile of post and put the envelopes with windows at the bottom of the pile. Anything that looked like it might come from a lawyer or a bank received the same treatment, and this left him with a single postcard telling him that the jeep was overdue for a service.

As the jeep was no longer his, he dropped the card into the bin. After a moment’s thought, he dropped the rest of the post, unopened, on top of it. It felt good, but he knew that later in the day he’d retrieve the envelopes and open them.

The house echoed. Half of the rooms were already empty, as Linda had taken some of the furniture and virtually the entire contents of the kitchen, apart from the white goods, which would doubtless be repossessed sooner or later.


Some days were good ones, when Jón could shrug it off and convince himself that he didn’t care any more. This was a bad day, as he constantly ran through the trail of events that had tipped his little family over the brink into disintegrating. The smug face of the bank’s personal financial adviser, with his ridiculous gelled-up haircut, was the focal point that he had trouble excluding from his mind.

 

Café Roma was quiet. The pre-work customers had all gone to their desks and the mid-morning drinkers hadn’t got as far as a break yet. Gunna watched with amusement as Skúli came back with a mug of coffee that he put in front of her and a tall glass with froth on the top for himself. They sat on stools at the long bar in the window with a view of the bank opposite where a very few customers hurried about their business as the wind whipped fat drops of rain almost horizontally along Snorrabraut.

‘How’s the new job?’ Skúli asked shyly.

‘Different. And yours?’

He grimaced. ‘Not great. Everyone’s waiting for the chop. No idea who owns the paper now. The editor’s gone, went to set up some kind of Internet operation. Jumped before he was pushed, we all reckon.’

‘So things aren’t great in the world of newspapers right now?’

‘Things are, well, not easy. Got a story for me?’

‘Possibly.’

‘Anything to do with Svana Geirs?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘It’s common knowledge that she’s dead, but of course we can’t say anything more than “a woman was discovered dead in her apartment last night” until all the relatives have been informed. It’s not something you can keep quiet for long, though. The obituaries are already written, just waiting for the word to go.’

‘Actually I don’t have anything to tell you, Skúli. It’s more the other way around.’

Skúli looked expectant.


‘I’m after background, any dodgy deals, unpleasant friends or acquaintances. Who Svana’s friends were, any enemies she might have had. That sort of thing. But it needs to be a bit quick. The story’s all