get, dead drunk, from Reykjavik to be found floating in the dock at Hvalvik, especially after our investigation came to an end and S?valdur took it over.’
Vilhjalmur looked at Gunna as if she were a recalcitrant child and sighed audibly. ‘There are other factors involved, Gunnhildur. We have to tread a delicate path on occasions and we also have to allocate resources where they are most needed. I don’t have to remind you that we are facing a very different enforcement environment to the one you might remember from before you took over in Hvalvik. Hm?’
‘That’s as may be, but now we have to reallocate some resources to this matter,’ broke in Ivar Laxdal, the National Commissioner’s deputy, who had been silent until now with a sheaf of newspapers in front of him, topped by a front page bearing the same picture of Einar Eyjolfur Einarsson as had already been on every TV report. Gunna knew Ivar Laxdal, who had already been a senior officer when she joined the force, only by his reputation for blunt speaking. Now he voiced everyone’s thoughts.
‘This Skandalblogger’s allegations have been picked up by the media and splashed over the front pages. Regardless of the circumstances of the case, it hardly reflects well that this could have been investigated more thoroughly at the time,’ he continued. Vilhjalmur Traustason looked hurt, as if he had been punched in the kidneys by a trusted colleague.
‘So what are we doing?’ Bjossi asked with ill-concealed irritation. Gunna could see that he was desperate to go outside for a smoke and sympathized with him.
Ivar Laxdal stood up. ‘There will be a press announcement this afternoon and I need you there for that, Vilhjalmur. I expect to see progress by the end of the day. I need to have an evaluation this afternoon, please,’ he said brusquely, putting on his gold-braided cap. ‘I’m sure I can leave you to organize everything and I’ll see you at headquarters at one. Email it through to me when you’re ready.’
He swept from the room, leaving Vilhjalmur pale with suppressed anger as he swiftly detailed three of his own officers to liaise with Gunna and CID, and followed his superior’s example by sweeping from the room, after having called a further meeting for that afternoon.
The tension relaxed as the door banged shut in his wake.
‘Right, then. So what the hell are we going to do?’ Bjossi asked, looking at Gunna. ‘You’re the man here with the experience, sweetheart.’
Gunna looked at Bjossi and Bara, the young woman Gunna had chosen Snorri over for secondment to Hvalvik.
‘How many people do we have to play with?’
‘Us,’ Bjossi said. ‘As well as your guys from Hvalvik, plus whatever Reykjavik decides to help us out with. We’ve already set aside an incident room.’
‘We can call on a couple of the guys here when they’re available for legwork,’ Bara added.
‘OK. Let’s start with Reykjavik, we need liaison straight away with the computer crime division to try and track this oddball down. What is it he calls himself?’
‘Skandalblogger.’
‘Ideally we need to contact the person behind it and find out what else he or she knows. We need to go through the records of the original investigation and find out more about Einar Eyjolfur’s background. Bara, you can pull my reports off the system so you’re not going over the same ground twice. We already know quite a lot, but we haven’t gone as deep as we ought to. Anything on friends, colleagues, whatever. His girlfriend’s name is Disa and she lives in Vogar. No idea if she still works at Spearpoint; find out. I have her full name and address at the station in Hvalvik and I can email those to you later.’
Gunna drew breath. She was already enjoying the buzz of running a team, wondering how long it would be before someone more senior would be assigned to the case.
‘Bjossi, will you please do your thing as far as you can with what’s available? Go through the pathology again and the forensics, then come back and tell me where the holes are. And if you feel like it, you can get on with that right now and go for a puff on the way.’
Bjossi needed no second invitation and was out of the room before Gunna had finished speaking.
‘Bara. Clean Iceland. Do we have any contact with these people? Do we have any intelligence on them? I’m sure there’s something, but it’s a question of which department is holding it. Einar Eyjolfur was involved with Clean Iceland, so we need to speak to them. Find out who to talk to and talk to them, who’s driving that bunch and what exactly was our boy’s role.’
Gunna’s words came out in a torrent and she could not restrain a fizz of excitement at the activity she was kicking off.
‘You all have a couple of officers to make use of, so make use of them. Delegate. Ask questions. All right? Now let’s get on with it. The trail’s gone cold, but that shouldn’t slow us down too much. You know what number to find me on and I’ll be back this afternoon.’
Gunna clapped her hands once and found herself in an empty room. Outside, she ran into Bjossi sheltering from the stiff breeze in the lee of the building and grinding the butt of a cigarette under his heel.
‘Hi, Gunna. What d’you reckon on all this, then?’
‘That’s better.’
‘What is?’
‘Less of the sweetheart for the moment.’
Bjossi laughed and coughed. ‘Ach, you know I don’t say it to wind you up. Hey, what about Vilhjalmur, then?’
‘Got his bollocks in a vice.’
‘Well, let’s hope they don’t stay there. Because when the people at the top are suffering, they tend to squeeze the bollocks of the people underneath them. Not that you have bollocks, sweetheart, but you do, if you know what I mean.’
‘Point taken, and coming from you, I’ll treat that as a compliment. But all the same, this wasn’t investigated properly and that was Vilhjalmur’s decision.’
‘Under pressure.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What I mean is that Vilhjalmur was being pressured from higher up not to make it a priority. He’s been expected to put as much effort as possible on narcotics, and that’s what he’s done.’
‘All right, so he’s not such a bad guy, just misguided.’
‘He’s always done everything by the book. Just following orders, is what he’d say, and rightly so. Hey, where are you off to?’
‘I feel like a day off,’ Gunna shot back as she started the second-best Volvo.
Matti was worried, more worried than he had been the time he’d been stranded in Grimsby after failing to reach his ship just as the last Cod War broke out, more worried than the time his first — or second? — wife’s brothers had threatened to pay him a visit when he’d staked and lost her parents’ house on what should have been a cast-iron winning hand.
This could be serious. Although Matti had watched Hardy carefully on their various journeys together over the summer around the south-west, acting as a combination of guide, driver and interpreter when necessary, he was still wondering just what Hardy’s business was about. He speculated that Hardy was American, disguised with a neutral enough accent to pass as a European. He felt sure that Hardy’s business was something to do with the spate of heavy industry projects springing up around the country, but this hardly concerned him. He knew that while Hardy paid on the nail and treated him with the respect due to an equal, his passenger in the understatedly expensive clothes was not someone to tangle with lightly. The air of authority and the hidden menace were unmistakable to someone with a professional interest in gauging the desires or the gullibility of the person in the passenger seat.
At the time he had thought nothing of the trip to pick Hardy up on the dockside at Sandeyri in March. The man had wanted to go to many unlikely places at odd times and had been dropped off and collected from several unfamiliar places that Matti had been forced to search for when the time came.
But he had to admit to himself that he was intrigued when the TV news had shown a short item about a car being recovered from the dock at Sandeyri. He wondered idly about it and put it from his mind. But now he had something to be concerned about — the possible loss of a valued client and an excellent source of tax-free, back
