Kaffibrennslan, weren't you?'
He stood up and looked down at her, his expression far from pleasant. 'Yes, I was at Kaffibrennslan. Where were you?' He walked away.
Briet was upset. She leaped to her feet and said: 'I didn't mean it like that, I'm sorry. I just meantwhy go to the police?'
Dori stopped dead in his tracks and spun round. 'You knowI can't understand any longer why you and Marta Mist are so set against it. The day of reckoning always comes. Don't forget that.' He strode off.
Briet had no idea how to react. A few moments later she took out her mobile and punched in a number.
Laura Amaming headed for the lobby of the Manuscript Institute where Gloria was struggling to vacuum the mat. Laura had not had the chance to talk to her alone all morning and she gladly seized the opportunity. 'I need to ask you something.'
Gloria looked up in surprise. 'What? I'm doing exactly what you taught me.'
Laura waved her hand dismissively. 'I'm not talking about cleaning. I want to know if you noticed anything unusual in the common room over the weekend of the murder. You cleaned it then. Before the body was found.'
Gloria's dark eyes widened. 'I told youand the police. There was nothing.'
Laura gave her a stern look. She was lying. 'Gloria. Tell me the truth. You know lying's a sin. God knows what you saw in there. Are you going to lie to him, too, when the time comes for you to stand in front of him?' Laura took the girl by the shoulder and forced her to look her in the eye. 'It's all right. You couldn't know there'd been a murder. No one went into the printer room that weekend. What did you see?'
A tear rolled down Gloria's cheek. Laura was unruffled; this was not the first tear that the girl had shed at work. 'Gloria. Pull yourself together. Tell meI found traces of blood on the window handle of the common room. What was in there?'
The tear became two, then three, then they poured out in a steady flood. Gloria blurted out between sobs: 'I didn't knowI didn't know.'
'I'm aware of that, Gloria. Everyone is. How could you have known?' She wiped the tears from the girl's cheeks. 'What was in there anyway?'
'Blood,' the girl said, looking at Laura in terror. 'But it wasn't a pool of blood or something like that. It was more like someone had tried to clean up and missed a few spots. I didn't realize until it was up off the floor and on my cloth. I didn't think any more of it thenI didn't know aboutyou know.'
Laura heaved a sigh of relief. Traces of bloodnothing more than that. So Gloria was safe, she surely wouldn't land in trouble for concealing it. Laura had kept her own cloth with the blood from the window and could now give it to Tryggvi to pass on to the police. They had methods for tracing the owner of the blood. In her mind Laura had no doubt that the murder was committed in that room. 'Gloriadon't worry about it. It's just a trivial matter. You'll just need to make a new statementjust tell the truth, that you didn't realize the importance of this information.' She smiled, but the girl was still crying.
'There's something else,' she said, still sniveling.
'Something else?' Laura asked, amazed. 'Like what?'
'I found something else in there that morning. In the drawer where the knives are kept. I'll show you,' Gloria said, and burst into tears again. 'I kept it. Come with me.'
Laura followed Gloria into one of the cleaning closets on the first floor. Her eyes still shiny with tears, Gloria climbed onto a small set of steps and reached up to the top shelf. Bringing down a small object wrapped in a paper towel, she handed it to Laura. 'I kept it because I knew it was rather strange. And when the body was found, I realized what it was, and I got so scared. My fingerprints are on it and I was sure the police would think I killed him. I didn't kill him.'
Laura cautiously unwrapped the paper towel. When she saw what was inside, she shrieked and made the sign of the cross. Gloria began to weep again.
Gudrun, or Gurra as her friends called her, repressed the urge to bite her nails with great difficulty. It was such a long time since she had stopped the habit that she could not even remember whenfor example, whether it was before or after she married Alli. She looked at her well-manicured hands. Unfortunately she was not wearing nail polish; picking that off was a good way to vent frustration. She wondered whether to paint them for the sole purpose of being able to pick it off again when the polish dried, but she abandoned the idea.
Instead she stood up and went into the kitchen. It was a Saturday and she had planned to make a nice meal. Alli worked every day except Sundays, so Saturday evening was their only time to relax together. Gurra looked at the clockit was far too early to make dinner yet. She sighed. Everything was clean and tidythere was no housework left to do. But if she could not find something to keep herself occupied she would go mad. Something to take her mind off her fear. She recalled how scared she'd been when the police knocked on their door with a search warrant for the upstairs apartment. Then nothing had happened. Incredible but true. All her worrying had been unfounded and she had begun to relax again. Until the other day.
Why were those people prying into the case again? Weren't the police satisfied with their findings? So why stir it all up again? She groaned. What had she been thinking? Even though Alli was normally a complete pig and had lost all interest in their marriage, she still didn't want to get rid of him. She even did a thing or two to hold on to him. At forty-three, she was too old to go back out on the market.
How stupid she had been. Sleeping with her lodger. And, the funny thing was, that apartment had often had much more attractive tenants than that freaky German. She could not have been in her right mindignoring the fact that it happened more than once, and indeed more than twice. Sex with him had been funthere was no denying that. There was an air of adventure about it, presumably because she knew she should not be doing it. Harald was also much, much younger than her husband and much more frisky. If only he hadn't been covered in all those awful scars and rings and studs.
Think, thinkshe took a deep breath. How could they ever find out? No one knew about it; she had never told a soul at least. Common sense alone had stopped her boasting about the affair to her best friend. Harald would hardly have talked about it. He had no need to bragthere was an endless stream of young women through his apartment. He could boast about them if he felt the urge to discuss his sexual conquests. She corrected herselfthat 'endless stream' had really been only two girls for the most part: a tall redhead and a petite blonde. He would surely never have mentioned his affair with her, and the police certainly had no inkling of it. She had spoken to them briefly a few times and nothing in their words or attitude ever implied that they considered her relationship with Harald to be more than that between a landlady and tenant. Which was actually how it had become toward the end. Harald had told her he couldn't be bothered anymore, he had other fish to fry. She grimaced at the thought.
She would have preferred to be the one who broke it off. To his credit he thanked her very nicely for the memories, but that did not stop her from losing it completely. She blushed at the recollection. How shamefully uncivilized of her. She was really annoyed about his true reason, although he had never actually admitted it to her. He had found himself a steady girlfriend. Gurra had seen them entering and leaving his flat several times during the week before he was murdered. This was a new girl who had not visited Harald before as far as Gurra knew. They spoke German together so she was presumably a compatriot of hisperhaps Icelandic women were not quite good enough for him when it came down to it. She was furious at Harald's hypocrisy; it was fine for her to cheat on her husband but he couldn't cheat on his girlfriend. No, he was too good for that.
So what, it was over and done with and what mattered now was not dwelling on something that might never come to light. She went into the laundry room. It was a long time since she had cleaned it properly. It was located off the corridor and could be reached from her own apartment and the hallway off Harald's. That was one of the few modifications they had made when they decided to buy the house and rent out the upper floor. She put the latch up and went inside.
Yes, there was work to be done here. The floor was still covered with pawprints from the police dogs who had
