Cold Steal

Book 4: Gunnhildur Mystery

by Quentin Bates

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

A successful housebreaker who leaves no traces and no clues as he strips Reykjavík homes of their valuables has been a thorn in the police's side for months. But when one night the thief breaks into the wrong house, he finds himself caught in a trap as the stakes are raised far beyond anything he could have imagined. Gunnhildur Gísladóttir of the Reykjavík police finds herself frustrated at every turn as she searches for a victim who has vanished from the scene of the crime, and wonders if it could be linked to the murders of two businessmen with dubious reputations that her bosses are warning her to keep clear of.

Release date: May 1, 2014

Publisher: C & R Crime

Print pages: 336

Sample

Soft feet made no sound on the track leading through the trees. The two men said nothing to each other, communicating instead with pointing fingers, lifted eyebrows and nods. The taller one of the two went ahead, spying out the route and watching their objective while the stockier man came behind and watched the other’s back, looking into the distance to see if they had been observed and occasionally looking behind to check for anyone following.

Summer was still a few months away and most of the chalets were empty, boarded up and mothballed for winter. Beneath the bare branches of the trees that surrounded it a warm light illuminated the windows of one chalet and tendrils of woodsmoke drifted upwards, twisting and disappearing in the evening breeze while their smell carried downwind to where two figures in dark clothing left their car tucked away out of sight of the road.

They stopped in front of the chalet as darkness fell, and listened before moving closer and crouching on the veranda each side of the door. The stocky man looked questioningly at the other, who nodded back. Gradually, the tall man lifted his head to peer through the glass of the door, quickly dropping back down and grinning. He pulled at his woollen hat, rolling it down over his face to leave only eyes and mouth visible in the firelight flickering inside, and pointed at the window with a wink.

The stocky man covered his face with a scarf and stood up next to the window. He leaned cautiously to bring one eye in line with the glass and looked inside. He stepped back out of sight and the tall man could see the laughter in his eyes. He pointed to the door questioningly and the shorter man nodded.

He took a hammer from the pack on his back, a sledgehammer with the handle cut off short to make it easily portable. He lifted it, feeling its weight. The tall man took a pistol from the pocket of his camouflage jacket, and although he had checked it only a few minutes earlier, he checked it again.

They took up stations each side of the door, the gunman on the handle side, his broad-shouldered companion opposite him with the hammer ready for a two-handed grip to smash the door inwards in case it should turn out to be locked. The tall man held up four fingers and they counted silently together.

Four, three, two, one, and the gunman pushed the door handle down and stepped into the doorway with the pistol raised, knees bent and feet spread in a fighting stance. His colleague dropped the hammer there had been no need for and stepped inside the room behind him, a pistol now in his hand as the two of them took in the scene in front of them.

The brightness of the girl’s white socks, the only thing she was wearing other than a gold chain, stood out against her tanned skin. She stared at them first in confusion, then anger and finally in terror as she screeched at the sight of the weapons trained on them. She scrambled to her feet, trying to cover herself with her hands while the man she had until a moment before been enthusiastically straddling looked dazed, his hands straying instinctively to his wilting erection.

‘Who . . . ? Who the hell are you?’

The stocky man took two rapid steps and grabbed a handful of the girl’s abundant black hair close to her scalp, pulling her head to one side and forcing her down.

‘Quiet,’ he ordered, and she whimpered as he pushed her to her knees, holding her head still where she could not avoid watching.

The man on the floor did his best to scuttle backwards across the thick rug. ‘What do you want?’ His voice quavered thin and high. ‘Look, I have money. How much do you want?’

The taller of the pair took two rapid steps forward, aimed and fired a single shot that caught his target squarely in the throat. A second shot punched a neat hole in the man’s forehead and he dropped back to the floor, his head against the base of the iron stove, and the smell of singed hair immediately began to fill the room. It had all taken no more than a few seconds.

The tall man stepped forward and kicked his victim’s head clear of the stove, noticing that the sparse hair had already been burned off where it had landed against the metal. He looked at his colleague, who nodded in approval, still holding the girl who was staring at the corpse in shock, hands limp by her sides as she no longer tried to cover herself. He let go of her hair and she dropped to the floor. The stocky man jerked his head towards her questioningly and the tall man shook his head, eyes narrowed in disapproval.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Leave no traces. Just a witness.’

He leaned down and grabbed the girl’s wrist, pulling her back to her feet while his colleague whistled his admiration at the slim hips, long legs and supermodel breasts.

‘Please don’t hurt me. I’ve seen nothing,’ she said, her voice choking.

‘Little girl, you’ve seen everything,’ the stocky man said.

‘I won’t say anything. Believe me, I won’t say a word.’

‘Don’t you get it?’ Lines formed around the tall man’s eyes as his face crinkled into a grin behind the scarf. ‘You don’t understand, darling. You can tell them whatever you like.’

 

Gunna stretched her hands high above her head, arching her back as the yawn threatened to lock her jaw in position and Steini took the opportunity to shoot an arm under her back and squeeze as she relaxed into the sofa.

‘Have I missed anything?’

‘An American comedy with canned laughter and no jokes, and a British cookery programme in which the chef didn’t even manage to fillet a haddock properly, so the answer to your question is no.’

The credits on the TV rolled and this time Steini yawned.

‘It must be catching. Where are the kids?’

‘Laufey went to see Drífa and promised to be back before ten, and as the news is just about to start, I’d say that’s a promise about to be broken.’

The titles of the late evening news began as the outside door banged.

Gunna lifted her feet onto the sofa and leaned against Steini’s shoulder. ‘I’d say that promise may well have been kept, this time, and only just,’ she said as the grey-haired newsreader appeared on screen looking more serious than usual as the opening sequence showed a view through trees swaying in the wind.

‘Suspicious death in Borgarfjördur, police are at the scene,’ the newsreader intoned as the picture flashed to a light aircraft soaring into the sky. ‘Reykjavík city council faces uproar over airport plans. Questions continue to be raised regarding IceLine’s bankruptcy as eighty jobs are lost in Iceland, London and Singapore,’ the newsreader said in a flat voice as a street scene from somewhere in Asia appeared.

The door burst open and Laufey appeared, puffing with exertion. ‘I’m not late, am I? I said I’d be back by ten.’

‘Shhh,’ Gunna said, sitting up and with her attention on the screen as it returned to the story with footage of a secluded summer house clearly taken from some distance away and with blue flashing lights casting shadows between the trees.

‘A forty-year-old man was found dead at a summer chalet earlier today,’ the newsreader said in a suitably sombre tone. ‘Police have not identified the deceased and have issued no details beyond stating that they are seeking the driver and passenger of a grey Audi A5.’

The camera cut away to a bearded police officer under an umbrella that raindrops dripped from as he spoke. Gunna could see a familiar barrel-chested figure in the background, a phone at his ear.

‘Know anything about this, Mum?’ Laufey asked.

‘Nope. I’ve been on leave for a week, and I haven’t heard anything. If it was anything to do with me, I guess Ívar Laxdal would have called by now,’ she said and looked at Steini with pursed lips as her phone began to buzz. ‘Speak of the devil,’ she added.

With her fingers encased in mittens encrusted with clinging snow, making them more clumsy than usual, Gunna fumbled with the rifle in her hands. It was an old-fashioned bolt-action weapon and although she had never fired one before, she instinctively knew what to do. There were only three cartridges. One was in the rifle’s breech and the safety catch was off. Another was in her hand, safely inside the mitten to be sure of not losing it, the last one tucked away inside layers of clothing. They were precious and she knew that every one would be needed.

The house was an old one. It looked forlorn and abandoned from her position on the bank above it. The door hung half open and broken, the interior of the old place in deep darkness. Sharp grains of snow carried by the wind stung Gunna’s face as she watched intently, her attention fixed on the door. The snow around it had been churned up, streaked with black and red, raked with prints.

Gradually her attention on the door relaxed as she felt she herself was being watched. There was no sound other than the whisper of wind that tugged at the ripped curtain hanging on the smashed door. She looked around and then quickly back at the door, waiting for movement, not knowing if it would come from inside or out.

When it came, it took her by surprise, and from behind. A rushing sound and a sharp animal smell made her look over her shoulder in alarm and she rolled over to aim the rifle, hoping to be fast enough. The animal seemed on top of her, a vast dirty-white presence that appeared in front of her face, and she knew already that she was too late to bring the rifle to bear. She could see the calmness in its eyes as it grunted and felt the animal’s raw power as a paw as big as her head and set with claws swung towards her.

Gunna sat bolt upright, her eyes wide open with the vision of the bear in front of her until it faded. The room was dark, with only a narrow strip of weak light coming under the door. She breathed deeply, the dream still vivid, and pushed hair damp with sweat from her face.

‘What’s the matter?’ Steini mumbled, stretching out a hand from under the duvet to rest it on her thigh. ‘You all right?’

‘Yeah. Bad dream, that’s all.’

‘Reckon you can get back to sleep?’

‘Hope so,’ Gunna said, lying back on the pillow as she tried to convince herself that the dream, in utterly convincing technicolour, even down to the animal’s piercing reek, had been nothing but her imagination playing tricks. She knew it would be hopeless trying to get back to sleep and she could feel her heart still racing while Steini’s steady breathing told her that he was having no such problems.

Gunna swung her legs out of bed, eased open the door and slipped into the kitchen.

 

Orri had left Lísa in bed. Their relationship was an odd one, dominated by them both working shifts, Lísa managing a canteen at a factory where production was only ever halted for a day at Christmas, and him at a freight company’s depot on an industrial estate on the city outskirts. His other activities also ate into his time and he had never got round to telling Lísa that he had volunteered to work reduced hours when the company had been forced to make cuts. In fact, all but a few of the mostly middle-aged staff had taken a cut in hours, and it didn’t seem to have mattered. The old boys just worked harder to make up for it, which was something Orri failed to understand.

He yawned as he clocked in, already wearing his overalls and steel toecap boots, his helmet under his arm. He looked into the coffee room where two of the old boys were leafing through newspapers a week old and grumbling about the state of the country.

‘Good morning.’

‘Good morning, Orri,’ the one facing him replied while the other one, a corpulent man with a roll of fat at the back of his neck, the sight of which made Orri feel queasy, continued to look through last week’s small ads. ‘And how might you be this fine day?’

‘Not so bad.’

‘You’re early today. Your Lísa must have been at work last night?’

‘Nope. She’s still asleep.’

‘The lazy bitch. I’d have kicked her out of bed, demanded eggs, bacon and coffee be brought to me, and an early morning roll in the hay to kick off with.’

Orri snorted with laughter. ‘Yeah, right,’ he retorted. ‘I’ve seen your old woman and it’d be a brave man who told her to do anything.’

At the next table, Dóri the foreman closed his newspaper and stood up with a slow smile. ‘That’s what you youngsters can’t get into your heads. Gentle touches. That’s all it needs. That’s what has them eating out of your hand and running to get your breakfast when you whistle for it.’

‘If you say so,’ Orri said, already bored with the non-stop talk of women and their bizarre habits that seemed to obsess his older colleagues. ‘What are we starting with today?’

‘Six pallets to go to Akureyri. Two for Raufarhöfn on the same truck, so those need to go to Reykjavík today. There’s a couple of crates to go to Djúpivogur and another shipment for the Westmann Islands, but that’s not on pallets yet. Eight collections to make in Reykjavík, two in Keflavík and there’s a delivery from Akranes due at eleven that’s being forwarded to somewhere or other. It has to go to the airport, anyway,’ Dóri reeled off in a flat monotone as he read the list from a clipboard.

Orri yawned. ‘What am I doing then, boss?’

‘I’m not the boss, young man, but I’d suggest Alex does the Keflavík run from Hafnarfisk in the fridge truck as usual and you do the Reykjavík collections in the Trafic. Does that meet with your agreement?’

‘Alex is in today?’

‘He’d better be if he wants to keep his job, that’s all I can say,’ Dóri said, taking off his glasses and folding them away in the breast pocket of his overall. ‘Late yesterday. Late today and late twice last week. Not good enough and I wouldn’t put up with it, but I’m not the boss, as you know.’

‘I’ll have a word.’

Dóri looked at him with his face screwed into a frown. ‘Up to you. But the old man doesn’t need to put up with Alex being a dick. There are a dozen immigrants a week knocking on the door asking for work.’

As the old man left him to it, Orri tapped at his phone, put it to his ear and listened to Alex’s voicemail kick in with a few sentences of rapid Latvian that he ignored.

‘Hi. It’s Orri. Where are you, man? You’re going to get sacked if you keep coming in late,’ he said in bland English as he walked through the door and saw Alex swagger towards him with a smile. He paused and dug in his pocket, raising a finger at Orri as he did so.

‘Don’t bother. It’s a message from me,’ Orri called out. ‘Telling you not to turn up late again if you want to keep your job.’

‘Hey, don’t worry. He can’t fire me,’ Alex said with a grin. ‘I didn’t mean to be late.’ He whistled. ‘That girl. Man. She just wouldn’t let me go. Know what I mean?’

‘Yeah, yeah. I know. But she won’t like you so much if you’re under her feet at home all day, will she?’ Orri said.

‘You have some stuff for me? I have space next week if you have some goods to deliver.’

 

She was early for her midday shift, arriving at the Hverfisgata station with an hour to spare, certain that Ívar Laxdal would be looking for her. In two years with what had been formed as the Serious Crime Unit, she had found that serious crime seemed to occur in fits and starts, and Gunna and her colleagues had found themselves investigating anything from car theft to a cartel of youthful but computer-savvy mobile phone thieves, as well as the occasional crime so brutal that she asked herself repeatedly if this was something new. She wondered if people were reporting things that had previously been sorted out behind closed doors, often with more discreet violence.

Ívar Laxdal found her in the detectives’ office as her computer was powering up.

‘Gunnhildur,’ she heard behind her as she typed in her password. ‘I hope you feel better for the break?’

She swung her chair around and saw the granite face of the National Commissioner’s deputy, his blue eyes sparkling with an intelligence and humour his deadpan expression rarely betrayed.

‘Not bad, I suppose. Another week would have been good, but you can’t have everything.’

‘Indeed, and someone has to right wrongs and lock up bad guys.’ He looked around the deserted office. ‘Where’s Helgi?’

‘On leave, as of yesterday. Gone up north for a week.’

‘And Eiríkur?’

‘He should be here at twelve – first day after a month’s paternity leave.’

‘Paternity leave,’ Ívar Laxdal said as if the words hurt him. ‘In my day there was no such thing. I was at sea when my eldest was born and didn’t even see him until he was almost a month old.’

‘Thanks for the call yesterday. I was just watching the news when you rang up. Anything new?’

Ívar Laxdal rubbed his chin, his thumbnail rasping against the bristles.

‘Yes. The victim is Vilhelm Thorleifsson, forty-one years old, resident in Copenhagen since 2009. His name hasn’t been released yet.’

‘He was shot? Any more details yet?’

‘Strangely, it was two rounds from a .22 weapon. I’d have gone for something heavier if I wanted to finish someone off, but if you’re accurate and it’s at close range, it’ll do the job well enough. There’s a witness as well, not that it seems she can tell us much.’

‘Serious stuff.’

‘As you say, serious stuff,’ Ívar Laxdal said. ‘The witness is nineteen years old, saw the whole thing at close quarters and is now traumatized and sedated. So we’ll see what comes out of it all.’

Gunna saw with dismay that the screen of her computer was filled with emails demanding immediate attention.

‘What do you want me to do? Is Sævaldur looking after this one?’

Ívar Laxdal let fall a rare smile. He was aware of the friction between Gunna and her chief inspector colleague and she knew that he preferred them not to clash.

‘Of course Sævaldur is involved. He was at the scene half the night with the forensic team and they’re still up there knocking on doors, if they can find anyone at this time of year. But this one is mine, I’m afraid, instructions from . . .’ He lifted his eyes to the ceiling. ‘You know what I mean. To start with I want Sævaldur and his team investigating the scene. I want you and Eiríkur working on the victim’s background.’

‘You said he lived in Copenhagen?’

‘That’s right. His wife and daughter will be here this evening. I’m sure she’ll be delighted when she finds out what he was up to.’

‘All right. You want me to meet her at the airport, or is that being done by family?’

‘Leave her until tomorrow. Start on his business background today.’

‘Another shady businessman?’

Another rare smile. ‘I know how much you enjoy the company of men in smart suits, even if they’re dead,’ he said, silently leaving the room and contriving not to bang the door.

‘Yeah, right. Especially when they’re dead,’ Gunna muttered to herself.

 

Natalia dragged hard on the last millimetres of her cigarette and threw the butt out of the window, where it joined the ones from the week before and the week before that on the roof of the garage.

‘Someone has been here,’ Emilija said, as if that were an offence of some kind. ‘The toilet has been used. I’m sure of it.’

Natalia shrugged. ‘So? Somebody must live here, surely?’

Emilija let herself sink deep into the leather sofa that filled one end of the apartment’s living room, directly opposite a vast TV screen that filled almost the whole of the opposite wall.

‘If whoever lives here had left the remote on the table, then we could have TV on while we work,’ she said wistfully.

‘Nobody lives here,’ Natalia said.

All winter the three Reindeer Cleaners had arrived to clean houses in this smart, half-built suburb. Today’s job was to scrub the kitchen and the luxurious bathrooms, vacuum the living room and dust the bedrooms that rarely appeared to be slept in. The job had become easier and easier as there was so little to be done. The apartment was always as spotlessly clean as it had been when they left it the previous week. Nothing was ever out of place. The kitchen was never used and the bathroom remained pristine.

‘Who lives in this place?’ Emilija asked. ‘I want to know who can afford to leave a place like this empty. If I knew who it was, hell, I’d screw the life out of him and live here myself.’

A wicked smile flashed across Natalia’s sharp face. ‘A rich man, yeah. If I knew, I’d have him first.’

‘As long as he’s old and won’t last too long,’ Emilija mused.

‘Men again?’ Valmira asked, appearing in the doorway with the vacuum cleaner tucked under one arm. ‘Are we finished?’ She put the vacuum cleaner down by the door and ticked the boxes on her list. Everything had been done, even though nothing had needed to be done, but she still walked around the place to check.

‘Why do we clean this place, do you think?’ Emilija asked, letting herself fall backwards onto the deep sofa next to Natalia and lifting her feet onto the long coffee table, a deep grey slab of stone on four steel legs. There were bags under her eyes and she wanted to close them and spend the rest of the afternoon on that welcoming sofa.

‘A friend of the boss owns it,’ Natalia said. ‘I heard him talk about it once on the phone. He said he’d have the place cleaned every week. He thinks I don’t understand what he says,’ she added, grinning wickedly.

‘I’m not so sure. I reckon he wants you to think that,’ Emilija said.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘No, Viggó’s a pretty stupid guy.’

‘It belongs to a friend of Viggó’s father,’ Valmira said thoughtfully, appearing in the doorway from the echoing hall and walking to the window. ‘Natalia, you’d better stop throwing those cigarette ends out of the window. Someone’s going to notice them. Anyhow, we’re back here tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow? Not possible,’ Natalia said with a flash of anger in her voice as she sat up straight.

‘Down the street. Booked for tomorrow afternoon.’

‘Shit, why not now?’ Emilija asked, getting to her feet. ‘That means we have to come all the way out here tomorrow and we’re not paid for travel, are we?’

Valmira walked stiffly away from the window and the others recognized the look on her face, knowing there was a depth of trauma in her that they could not understand properly and had never felt comfortable asking about.

‘Ready, are we?’ She asked, trying to sound bright.

 

Middle-aged people were the best. Orri preferred not to steal from the elderly, not because his conscience might trouble him, but because there was something about the old that disturbed him. People who had retired had a strange smell about them, they lived among clutter and rubbish, and their valuables were scattered in the unlikeliest places.

Middle-aged people had more of the easily disposable toys that were worth money, computers and gadgets that fetched good money and which the Baltic boys could sell easily enough. While the younger generation had its own expensive toys as well, those houses were more likely to have an alarm that worked or, worse, small children in the house.

No, people in comfortable middle age with cash to spare and their offspring long gone were the best option. They were the people with everything in order: cash in a sensible place, a wad of dollars or euros left over from that last holiday, a smart laptop that had hardly been used, antiques on display in glass cabinets rather than at the backs of drawers full of ancient oddments. These were the people who had sat on their cash, not the mortgaged-to-the-hilt people in their thirties who had come out of the crash so badly.

Orri wondered why he was in the old couple’s house, considering his aversion to the young and the elderly. But the answer was simple enough. The back door had been left unlocked. Hidden by a hedge on one side and in the shadow of the garage, it was just too easy to walk in and help himself. With a slim torch held between his teeth to cast a pool of light in front of him, Orri went through the bedroom drawers systematically. Some housebreakers would gleefully scatter everything in their wake, breaking anything that might be in the way and leaving trails of muddy footprints and worse. That wasn’t Orri’s style. He felt that making a mess was unprofessional. Ideally, he wouldn’t leave a trace, and sometimes days or weeks would pass before people realized there had been a visitor, by which time any trail had long gone cold and the goods had been safely disposed of.

This time he was lucky. There was gold and silver to be had, a dozen krugerrands, a heavy necklace and a couple of bracelets and chunky pendants that he quickly stowed in his bag without looking too carefully. Metal was good and the Baltic boys would give him a price for it. Melted down, it became untraceable, and there was always a market for it.

A leather wallet made of some soft skin yielded a handful of cash in a variety of currencies, which he stuffed into a trouser pocket before he decided that enough was enough for a few quick minutes of easy work. It might take weeks for the couple whose bedroom he had invaded to notice that the cash and jewellery had vanished, and he made a swift exit. He clicked the back door locked. He dropped the torch into his jacket pocket and froze, standing with his back to the wall between the house and the garage.

He heard car doors slam twice in quick succession and a bang as the house’s front door shut, and he hurried on silent feet to the corner and saw a BMW parked squarely in the drive. Lights were being switched on inside as he looked around and made a dash for the street. It took a matter of only a few seconds before he was off the drive and walking along the road towards where he had parked the van around the corner, still loaded with boxes to be delivered.

His heart still in his mouth, he got in the van and was gone in a few seconds, still waiting to hear cries of anger and the slap of flat feet on the wet pavement. At the traffic lights at the end of the road he watched the mirrors carefully, but there was nothing to be seen, no cars behind him, nobody on foot. He peeled off his latex gloves and dropped them into the passenger side footwell as he congratulated himself on a job well done, laughing out loud as he left the quiet street behind him.

 

It was Eiríkur’s first day back and he looked tired, with bags under his eyes and a hangdog look about him.

‘Welcome back,’ Gunna greeted him. ‘And congratulations. How’s the little one doing?’

Eiríkur’s smile lit up his wan face. ‘He’s the most beautiful baby in the world, of course. But he’s been keeping us up, and so has his sister.’

‘Jealous, is she?’

‘A little. But we’ve been trying to give her as much attention as we can, but it’s not easy.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Gunna said. ‘I’m afraid you have to be firm as well as loving, unfortunately, and it can’t always be painless.’

‘I know. I’m not really sorry to be back at work, to be honest,’ he said, dropping his voice as if he were confessing a sin.

‘Don’t worry about it. I could never have stopped working. I’d have happily sold both mine if I’d had to spend all day every day with them.’

‘Where’s Helgi?’ Eiríkur asked, looking at Helgi’s unusually tidy and clearly empty desk.

‘On holiday. He’s driving to Blönduós today and he’ll spend the next two weeks in some remote valley helping sweet baby lambs into the world, and I imagine in the autumn he’ll want another week’s holiday to go and help his brother round up those same lambs and send them off to be slaughtered.’

‘Oh,’ Eiríkur said, and sat down at his own desk and watched his computer start up. ‘I didn’t realize he was on holiday. Are we busy? You want me to take over any of Helgi’s caseload?’

‘There’s an assault case that Helgi’s working on which I need you to do some work on. It’s a hit-and-run thing, but it seems that it might have been deliberate. You’ll find the notes on the system, so you’d best have a read through it and I’ll fill you in on the details afterwards. Then there’s a couple of muggings that seem to have got out of hand, with a little more violence than usual. That’s a lowlife by the name of Thór Hersteinnsson. We know it’s him, but there’s precious little hard evidence and nobody he knows wants to give a statement.’

Eiríkur’s face fell. ‘I’ve encountered this Thór before. Not the pleasantest of people, I have to say.’

‘He has an alibi for both muggings, provided by various of his friends and therefore dubious, so if you could crack one or both of those, we’ll be doing nicely.’

‘That’s it?’

‘Oh, no. We have a dead businessman to deal with. Don’t you watch the news?’

‘I thought Sævaldur would have been looking after that as we were both off?’

‘He is, but so are we. All of us under the Laxdal’s eagle eye. Briefing at two, so I’d better find something out about this man. You’ll be on this as well.’

Eiríkur sat back in his chair and gazed at the computer screen in front of him and the piles of paper between it and him, all of which demanded attention. Gunna could see his eyes starting to glaze over at the prospect.

 

‘Small, Medium and Large,’ Viggó announced from behind the desk in the corner of the garage. ‘Bang on time, my darlings.’

‘You