He opened the door of Hafnargata 38 with a single swift movement of a strip of flexible plastic and stepped inside, clicking the door to behind him.
***
It was close to midnight when the whole team assembled again in the incident room. Bara, Snorri and Gunna were haggard after the long day.
Bjossi was his usual self. He always looked as if he had just woken up, regardless of whether he had been on his feet all day or had just started his shift.
Gunna was surprised to see Vilhjalmur Traustason still on his feet. His face was paler than usual and Gunna guessed that he hadn’t closed his eyes either.
‘So,’ Gunna began, flexing her fingers in front of her and yawning. ‘He’s given us the slip. He was undoubtedly at Keflavik airport this afternoon and either we didn’t get there in time, or else he saw us coming and slipped away. We’re pretty sure we know how and I’m positive that half-strangling that poor Danish bloke was a red herring. With Vilhjalmur’s agreement —’ she gestured towards Vilhjalmur Traustason standing by the back wall near the door with the brooding presence of Ivar Laxdal at his side — ‘we have informed the media and a report was carried on every TV news report this evening, with a photo of Harde, and an announcement that members of the public should not approach him. It’ll be in every newspaper in the morning as well,’ she added. ‘Anything else?’
‘We’ve interviewed everyone we could get hold of at the airport,’ Snorri said. ‘We’re fairly sure our man’s still in the country, but no idea where.’
‘We need traffic surveillance ramped up as much as possible overnight. If he’s not within a few kilometres of the airport, then Harde must have got hold of transport somehow. I can’t imagine him not being mobile, judging by the way he’s worked up to now,’ Gunna concluded.
‘And Erna Danielsdottir?’ Vilhjalmur asked quietly.
‘Landed safely in Madrid, and jumped on a transfer to Tangier.’ Bjossi yawned.
‘Tangier?’
‘That’s it, Morocco. The Madrid airport police questioned her at our request, but nothing useful. We’d like her to come straight back and answer a few questions, but as she hasn’t committed a crime, it’s not as if we can have the woman shipped home. We just have to wait until she comes back. Unless there’s a chance of a trip to the Mediterranean to interview her, in which case, I’d be happy to volunteer. I know it’s a tough job, but someone has to do it.’
Vilhjalmur blanched, until he realized that Bjossi was joking.
‘All right, back here tomorrow, please, ladies and gentlemen,’ Gunna announced. ‘Bjossi and me at six. Snorri and Bara, I don’t want to see you here before ten.’
‘Do you want a lift home, chief?’ Snorri asked.
Gunna thought briefly and brightened inwardly at the prospect of seeing Gisli for an hour or two. Then she remembered that Laufey would be at Sigrun’s house and Gisli would hardly be likely to be waiting for his mum to come home when he could be in Reykjavik with the girlfriend he hadn’t seen for weeks.
‘No. I’ll just get my head down here tonight, if Vilhjalmur has an empty cell I can use. But thanks anyway.’
Harde left his shoes by the door and padded from room to room, trying to decide his next move. One room was clearly a child’s, probably the one he had seen walking down the street, with bunk beds, posters on the walls and a row of neglected fluffy toys looking down from a high shelf. A smaller room looked like a guest bedroom, sparsely furnished but obviously recently used.
A third small bedroom was the domain of someone older and Harde could see that the clutter of washed but unironed clothes on the dressing table belonged to the whole family. The double bed that filled much of the room was unmade and smelled both musty and inviting as Harde remembered just how tired he was after a short night in Erna’s demanding company followed by a long day.
He shook himself, reminding himself as he did so that he had to find two days of seclusion and that this was not the place for it. He left the fat policewoman’s bedroom and scanned the long living room. He peered at pictures placed between books on the shelves along one wall, first of a smaller version of the girl he had seen walking down the street, then at a black-trimmed formal photograph of a man in some kind of military uniform, looking serious but with the same impish look of mischievous good humour that was evident in the girl’s face. A second set of pictures showed a heavily built young man at varying ages with a tousled head and freckles, who was trying to look at ease and failing.
Harde nodded and made his decision. In the L-shaped kitchen he found a carrier bag and loaded it with a bottle of wine, another of water and all the fruit and pastries he could find before slipping back into his shoes and over the road to the car, clicking the door behind him.
As he started the engine and let the little car roll forward down the slope, a heavy Range Rover roared to a halt and parked outside number 38. Young people stepped down from it, a young woman with ginger hair in a loose bun and a broad-shouldered young man whom Harde instantly recognized from the pictures on the wall.
He drove away unobtrusively, taking the westbound road out of Hvalvik. He was relieved that he had not been interrupted in the fat policewoman’s house and pleased that he had not needed to make certain of the young couple’s silence, but annoyed with himself for giving in to curiosity and taking a chance of being seen without good reason.
33
Wednesday, 1 October
Gunna surfaced from sleep unwillingly. Something behind her eyeballs throbbed and told her not to open them. She forced her eyelids apart and the light immediately stabbed deep.
‘Morning,’ Bjossi called cheerfully. ‘Wakey, wakey, sweetheart.’
‘Belt up, will you?’ Gunna snapped back before the thought occurred to her that maybe Bjossi wasn’t going out of his way to be unpleasant.
He sat down on the bed in the station’s cellar in a room that was halfway between a cell and a storeroom and patted Gunna’s thigh under the heavy duvet that was wrapped around her.
‘Y’know, Gunna, my love? If that’s the way you are in the mornings, I can only say I don’t regret never having got you into the sack.’
‘Sorry, Bjossi. Didn’t mean to be short with you. What’s the time?’
‘Almost six.’
He held out a mug of coffee and Gunna took it with both hands as she sat up, Bjossi shielding his eyes in mock horror.
‘It’s all right. I’m decent enough,’ she growled. ‘I don’t suppose I’ve got anything you haven’t seen before.’
‘Possibly. But not as big,’ Bjossi answered seriously, ducking a swipe from the hand not clasped around the mug.
‘What’s been going on?’ Gunna asked with the first mouthful of coffee helping parts of her mind recall what had happened before she had closed her eyes a few short hours before.
‘Looks like we’ve pretty much traced our man’s movements up to when he left the airport. He’s in a hire car on our Danish guy’s credit card.’
‘I suppose Torbensen isn’t anything to do with Harde?’
‘Nope. Like you said, he’s a red herring. The man’s a salesman for an agricultural equipment manufacturer in some backwater in Jutland. Spoke to his managing director and he’s worked there for twelve years. The local company they supply confirmed who he is and that he’s been with them pretty much all the time he’s been in Iceland, all three days of it.’
‘So that’s him ruled out.’
‘Plenty of people think they might have seen Harde at the airport, most of them aren’t sure though. Apart from the girl behind the bar who thinks he might have spoken to a fair-haired woman who was sitting there, but
