us, we could use the extra hands. We couldn’t pay you, but we can feed you well.’
‘Maybe I will,’ said Sindri. ‘Do you know yet when you will have to sell the farm?’
‘The bank are holding off for the time being. But there’s no chance I can ever meet the payments. Why they lent Matti so much money, I will never understand.’
‘I’m sorry about that,’ said Sindri. ‘About what he did.’
Freyja shrugged.
‘What will you do?’ Sindri asked.
‘I’d like to carry on farming if I can, for the girls to have the same upbringing I had. But I don’t know how. My brother works in Reykjavik, he runs a small software company. He thinks he might be able to get me a job. I don’t want to move to Reykjavik, but perhaps we will have to.’
‘Well, let me know what happens,’ Sindri said. ‘Good luck, Freyja.’ He kissed her on the cheek.
As he walked back to his car and the long drive back to Reykjavik he thought that perhaps Bjartur did live on after all.
He felt sick with shame. It was urban dwellers like him who had shafted the farmers; not just the bankers and the politicians like Olafur Tomasson, but the shoppers in the boutiques on Laugavegur, the easy spenders, the borrowers, the speculators. It was true Sindri had always protested about the capitalist system, but he had abandoned the countryside himself. His brother had succumbed to the allure of easy money.
He liked to blame others for what had happened to Iceland, but the truth was he felt as guilty as the rest of them.
He owed Freyja. And Frida. And he would do something about it.
Back at the station, Magnus phoned Detective Sergeant Piper, with Arni and Vigdis listening in. After seeing Emilia, Magnus and Arni had interviewed Oskar’s younger brother at his house in the Laugardalur district of Reykjavik. He was clearly put out that the family fortune had disappeared, but he was more inclined to praise Oskar for making the money than blame him for losing it.
Vigdis had visited the distraught parents, and searched Oskar’s empty house in Thingholt. Nothing. The banker hadn’t lived there for nine months. The only visitors had been a cleaner every fortnight and a secretary from OBG Investments checking for mail.
Magnus relayed the information, or rather lack of it, to Piper. ‘So no real signs of an Icelandic connection from this end,’ he said. ‘Nor Russian. How about you? Any luck with the motorbikes?’
‘Some. One of the owners is a small-time drug dealer to the wealthy in Kensington. He claims he has never heard of Gunnarsson. We are inclined to believe him. Besides, his bike was a nine-hundred-cc Kawasaki, and one of the witnesses said he thought the killer’s sounded smaller than that.’
Didn’t seem like much of a suspect to Magnus. He was wary of the tendency for policemen the world over to fall upon the nearest small-time dealer and try to pin big crimes on him. At least the British police were resisting the temptation. ‘Anything on any of the others?’
‘Yeah. One of the bikes was nicked last week in Hounslow. A Suzuki one-two-five. We are trying to trace it. Might be something there.’
‘What about the Russian girl?’
‘We pulled her in again. Nothing. She’s cool as a cucumber, though: she could be hiding something. But we have turned up one lead.’
‘What’s that?’
‘A neighbour said a bloke came round a few days ago with a package for Gunnarsson. Didn’t have the right number house. She didn’t know where Gunnarsson lived, but when we asked the other neighbours, one of them remembered pointing him to the right address.’
‘Interesting. Did you get a description?’
‘Yes. Young guy, early twenties, short fair hair. Five-eight or five-nine.’ Magnus was pleased to hear the familiar feet and inches. He still found heights in metres difficult to translate. ‘Broad face, slight dimple on his chin, blue eyes. Black leather jacket, jeans and checked shirt, but neat. Very neat. Too neat for a genuine courier, the neighbour thought. Foreign accent.’
‘What kind of foreign accent?’
‘Ah, that’s the question. The witness is French herself, although she speaks good English. Virginie Rogeon. And she remembered him well. Fancied him, we think, said he was good-looking. She thought the accent might be Polish, but she didn’t know. Northern or Eastern European rather than Italian or Spanish.’
‘Could it be Icelandic?’
‘Is an Icelandic accent distinctive?’
Magnus thought about it. ‘Yes. Yes, I guess it is. You could get some Icelanders to speak to the witness, see if it sounds familiar.’
‘Good thought. We could try the embassy. Or some of Gunnarsson’s friends in London.’
‘So apart from that, no real leads then?’
‘No. It’s early days, but we are struggling a bit. The guv’nor wants me to go to Iceland, if that’s OK with you guys.’
‘Sure,’ said Magnus. ‘Glad to have you. When are you coming?’
‘Probably tomorrow. I’ll let you know when I’ve booked my flight.’
‘Do that. I’ll meet you at the airport.’
‘I’ve never been to Iceland before,’ Piper said. ‘A bit parky is it?’
‘Parky?’
‘You know. Cold. Chilly.’
‘There’s no snow on the ground yet, but the latitude is sixty-six degrees north. You can safely leave the sunscreen at home.’
‘Baldur’s going to love that,’ said Arni when Magnus had hung up. ‘A British bobby on his patch.’
‘I’ll look after her,’ said Magnus. It did seem a bit of a waste of time, but it would be nice to have a native English speaker around.
‘So what now?’ said Vigdis.
Magnus leaned back in his chair and thought. It was quite likely that there was indeed no Icelandic connection, but they had to keep an open mind; more than that, they should operate on the basis that there
There were still people to talk to, files to read. But he asked himself the key question: from what he had learned so far, what felt wrong?
‘Arni?’
‘Yes?’
‘Tell me more about Gabriel Orn’s death.’
‘I’m sure that doesn’t have any relevance.’
‘Tell me.’
‘OK,’ said Arni. ‘It was last January, right at the peak of the demonstrations. The department was stretched to the limit. We were all out there on the lines, even the detectives, we were working round the clock. We were knackered.
‘Anyway, a body washed up on the shore at Straumsvik by the aluminium smelter. It was naked. The clothes were found ten kilometres up the coast, just by the City Airfield, next to that bike path that runs along the shore. It was Gabriel Orn Bergsson. It turned out he had sent two suicide texts before he went for a swim, one to his mother who raised the alarm, and another to his ex-girlfriend, Harpa Einarsdottir, who didn’t, or not until the following morning.
‘I went to interview Harpa. She had some story about how she was supposed to meet him at a bar, but he never showed up.’
‘And you didn’t believe her?’
‘She had an alibi. She was seen at the bar, waiting. In fact she got in some kind of argument there. But no, it didn’t seem quite right.’
‘Why not?’
Arni scrunched up his face, frowning deeply, painfully. ‘I don’t know. Nothing I can put my finger on. That’s why I said it was irrelevant.’
