‘Thanks, Skuli. I take it I can hold on to this?’ She brandished the pages he had printed out.
‘Yeah. But I’d appreciate it if you didn’t let on where they came from.’
He yawned and closed the laptop on his desk.
Gunna pressed her phone to her ear and listened to it ring.
‘Snorri? Hi, Gunna. Yup. No, it’s OK, nothing wrong. Something’s come up, so we’d better be early tomorrow. Pick me up at six outside my place and can you call Bara and the others, and ask them to be there for a meeting at seven?’
Skuli pulled on the jacket that was draped over the back of his chair and looked expectantly at Gunna as she spoke.
‘That’s all right. Yeah, sorry to disturb you,’ Gunna continued. ‘No, I’ll call Bjossi and let him know as well. Thanks, Snorri. Goodnight.’
She snapped the phone shut and dropped it back in her pocket.
‘Thank you, Skuli. I think I can forgive you for dragging an old lady out on a Sunday evening.’
‘I hope it’s some use to you. But you’d have seen it anyway on Tuesday.’
‘I doubt it.
‘No problem. Er, Gunna?’ he asked diffidently. ‘Any chance you could give me a lift home?’
Gunna parked Gisli’s Range Rover and sat in the driving seat, listening to the engine tick, continuing to run things through in her mind.
She was still muttering to herself as she opened the front door and kicked off her boots, flexing stiff toes that had been cooped up far too long. She noticed instinctively that Laufey’s trainers were in their place.
She peered past Laufey’s bedroom door and heard her breathing softly. In the kitchen she poured coffee and water into the percolator, and hung her cap on the door before hauling off her uniform jacket and slinging it over the back of the sofa. In the shower she let the scalding sulphur-smelling water run until the knotted muscles across her shoulders gradually untied themselves and she could hardly see for steam, and wondered what linked Arngrimur Orn Arnarson’s killing to those of Egill Grimsson and Einar Eyjolfur Einarsson.
The bloody man hadn’t been involved with Clean Iceland for years. So why knock him off? she asked herself.
Gunna wrapped herself in a dressing gown that had seen better days, but since she had stolen it herself from a hotel in Copenhagen on the honeymoon with Raggi all those years ago, it had enough sentimental value to be kept. She retrieved her glasses from her jacket pocket and perched them on her nose to flip through the Sunday newspaper that had been lying on the doormat since early that morning. Although she had called Snorri to bring the morning meeting forward, she deliberately hadn’t asked what progress he and Bara had made in chasing Osk Lindal for information.
‘Bloody shame, really,’ she muttered to herself. ‘Bloody good coppers those two. But I’d bet any money they’re both out of the force in two years.’
She reached for her mug on the table and realized that she had leafed through the paper automatically without taking a single thing in, so she sipped coffee and leaned back in the flat’s only comfortable chair to run the faces through her mind again.
‘Mum?’ Laufey inquired drowsily, padding softly into the room and dropping on to the sofa to wriggle under Gunna’s arm.
‘Hi, sweetheart. All right?’ Gunna asked tenderly, suppressing a pang of guilt at having been out for so long.
‘Yeah. I went to Sigrun’s and had dinner there and then I came home and did my homework,’ she said carefully.
‘All your homework?’
‘All of it.’
‘I’m sorry, my love, things are really busy at work at the moment.’
‘I know, Mum. You are going to catch this murderer, aren’t you?’
‘How do you know?’ Gunna asked in surprise.
‘Mum,’ Laufey explained patiently, ‘I do watch the news and I hear it when you’re on the phone. And Finnur said that when you catch him, he’ll get life. Is that right?’
‘We’ll see. I hope so,’ Gunna said as her mind flashed back to Einar Eyjolfur. ‘Come on, you’d best be off to bed again. I have an early start tomorrow, so you’ll have to sort yourself out in the morning. Did Sigrun say you could go to her for lunch again tomorrow?’
‘Hm. Yup,’ Laufey mumbled.
‘Go on, sweetheart. Off to bed. I’m going to sleep soon as well.’
Laufey dragged herself to her feet and shambled back to her room. Gunna heard the creak as she lay down and within a minute her thoughts were back to the case.
She was delighted to know that Matti Kristjans had run for shelter and had a good idea of where he had run to. The thought of her cousin being another victim would have been hard to bear. In spite of the rancour between them, she felt genuinely fond of Matti as one of those people who had always been part of the family scenery for as long as she could remember.
Gunna glanced at her watch on the table in front of her and saw to her surprise that it was almost eleven. She lifted her feet on to the coffee table and laid her head back in the chair on the headrest, intending to close her eyes for a minute.
Three hours later the front door clicked and she snapped awake. She realized that she had fallen asleep in the chair and her legs were aching. She lifted them stiffly to the floor as the living-room door swung silently open and the shadow of a tall figure appeared in the doorway.
She felt entirely helpless, wearing only a dressing gown and her mind fogged with sleep. The figure dropped a bag on the floor and stooped slightly to avoid cracking his head on the lintel as he stepped into the room.
Gunna sighed silently with relief and delight.
‘Hi, Mum. Thought you’d be asleep.’
‘Gisli! When did you get in?’
‘Docked an hour ago. Is there anything to eat?’
31
Monday, 29 September
Gunna’s head was aching. She should have gone back to sleep, not let herself be tempted to spend an hour in the middle of the night talking with Gisli as he devoured sandwich after sandwich and a jug of coffee. She was overjoyed to see him home after a month at sea and had a good idea he would spend much of his ten days ashore in Reykjavik, only returning to the house in Hvalvik for sleep and laundry.
‘What do we know that we didn’t know yesterday?’ Gunna asked to set the ball rolling once Ivar Laxdal and Vilhjalmur Traustason had taken their seats at the back of the room.
Bara, wide awake, answered first. ‘Marteinn Georg Kristjansson walked into Holmavik police station last night.’
‘Excellent. I thought he might do something like that,’ Gunna said with satisfaction. ‘Where is he now?’
‘Hverfisgata. Holmavik police drove him as far as Bru and Reykjavik sent a car to pick him up from there.’
‘Right. I’ll go and talk to Matti as soon as we’ve finished. What else?’
‘Arngrimur Orn Arnarson. Death certainly not accidental, but no indication of how or who as yet. The man was a computer whizz of some kind, ran his own company called Tenging. Snorri knows more about this kind of stuff.’ Bara looked sideways at Snorri.
‘He specialized in security, firewalls and things like that, stopping hackers and prying eyes from looking too closely into systems,’ Snorri offered. ‘I reckon he was setting up systems for people who are doing things that aren’t
