‘Well, my lad. It’s definitely not one of mine,’ she said. ‘Far too small.’
‘Sorry, Mum.’
‘Company?’
‘Yeah. She’s still asleep.’
‘All right. I won’t disturb you. I’ve just nipped in for a shower and a change. Got to be back at the station soon again anyway.’
Gisli grunted and went past her to the kitchen, and soon the flat was filled with the aroma of brewing coffee.
For some reason she couldn’t put her finger on, her bedroom felt different, as if there were a fleeting aroma of someone else that she couldn’t quite catch hold of. Gunna threw clothes in a corner of her bedroom, wrapped herself up for Gisli’s benefit and made for the shower. A few minutes later she was towelling off vigorously, and was soon feeling properly awake again in a clean uniform shirt at the kitchen table as Gisli poured fresh coffee into a mug.
‘Mm, hello. The smell woke me up,’ a small voice behind her said.
Gunna turned to see a round freckled face and flood of red hair streaming over the shoulders of one of Gisli’s shirts.
‘Mum, this is Soffia,’ Gisli announced with sheepish pride.
‘Hello, Soffia, pleased to meet you. I’m Gisli’s witch of a mum, but you call me Gunna.’
‘I know who you are. Gisli said you were in the police,’ she said slowly, sitting on Gisli’s knee and moulding herself to him.
‘When are you sailing, Gisli?’ Gunna said, draining her mug.
‘Not until next week. There’s no hurry since they cut the bloody quotas again.’
‘Fine. Are you staying here? It’s up to you. I’ve no idea when I’ll be back.’
‘We’ll stay here for a while, I think,’ Soffia said carefully. ‘If that’s all right with you?’
‘No problem. I’ll be back sometime. Just make sure my lad washes up after himself, won’t you?’ she said, standing up and making for the door, by which time the young couple were already wrapped precariously around each other.
In the lobby, she half closed the door and bent to pull her boots on again, looking out through the narrow window by the door to see that the rain was beating down outside harder than ever.
***
He drove slowly through Hafnarfjordur, down the hill from the town’s southern entrance and stopped at the lower quayside, thought about going into the cafe on the dock where he had eaten several times with Matti, but decided against it.
With the wipers struggling to clear water from the windscreen, Harde drove slowly up the slope and along the southern edge of the harbour area, through a small industrial estate crowded with fork-lift trucks, badly parked vans and large plastic tubs of fish waste along the sides of the road. Looking for a suitable opportunity, he carried on past the industrial zone, before taking a U-turn to double back, this time passing the bay towards the town itself.
Confidence, that’s the key, he reminded himself. A man with a smile and a purpose doesn’t normally get asked what he’s doing.
He parked neatly in a bay in the town centre and got out of the car to reconnoitre on foot, the collar of his jacket turned up, hands deep in his pockets. The small precinct of shops where he bought a couple of pastries had a few people walking around, but both the post office and the bank in particular were busy with longish queues. Chewing a sweet roll, he timed a middle-aged lady as she entered the bank — it took her an encouraging eleven minutes to get her business concluded and leave. He went back to the car, where he sat watching the passers-by while he ate a second roll and drank the carton of fruit juice he had bought.
He unfolded the free newspaper he had picked up without looking at it carefully and was jolted awake at the sight of a photo of himself at the bottom of the front page, one that he recognized as the Swedish police’s mug shot of him.
He swore, anger rising inside him until he carefully stifled it. Only the woman serving at the shop counter had seen him clearly, and she had been a foreigner as well, not likely to read an Icelandic newspaper. Nobody else would need to see him anyway, so the photo in the paper needn’t be an issue.
What had caught him off guard was that the fat policewoman was obviously further ahead of him than he had imagined. Maybe that stupid taxi driver had told them something? Or Sigurjona, a person he would never be able to trust.
He looked back at the paper and saw to his surprise that Sigurjona was there on the cover too, one scarlet- taloned hand shielding a sour pout from a photographer’s flash, and he chuckled grimly to himself, well able to imagine what would be going on now that InterAlu had dropped its Icelandic partners.
Agust Vilmundsson wasn’t having a good day. He had been late for work that morning, one of his men hadn’t turned up and he had had to reorganize the whole schedule for the day to fit in the six jobs that seven men would have to do between them, knowing full well that finishing four jobs of out of six would be good going.
After the coffee break, he left the first job with two of the lads getting on well with the old lady’s new floor and decided that he would have to go and give a bit of moral support to the two finishing off fitting a kitchen in Kopavogur, but on the way he remembered that the sheaf of bills on the passenger seat would have to be paid and now was as good a time as any to stop off at the bank.
Agust Vilmundsson cursed the rain as he drove into Hafnarfjordur, cursed it as he tried to find a spot to park and cursed yet more as he hurried across the car park to the bank with the rain fogging his glasses.
Ten minutes later, he stepped back out into the rain, reminding himself for the hundredth time to get internet banking set up so he could pay bills in the evenings instead of having to do it when it didn’t suit him.
At first he thought the drops of rain on his glasses were playing tricks on him, so he took them off and peered myopically about the car park. There was no doubt about it. He perched his glasses back on his nose and peered about him, spying a police car in the distance making sedate progress along the road between the bay and the rows of shops. He ran as fast as he could towards the road, crashing through sparse hedging plants along the road and waving.
The police car drew to a gentle halt beside him and a window hissed down.
‘Got a problem?’ the young officer inside asked, looking over at him.
‘Some bastard’s stolen my truck,’ Agust Vilmundsson announced bitterly, as if the day hadn’t been miserable enough already.
Sightings of Harde trickled in, with each report filled and passed over to Gunna’s team. By late morning they had chased up a dozen leads, liaising with police in Reykjavik to coordinate inquiries in and around the city.
‘No, that’s perfectly all right. Thank you for your help.’ Gunna heard Snorri finishing a call and swearing under his breath the moment the receiver was on the hook.
‘What was that?’ she asked as Snorri scrawled ‘No further action’ across the report sheet in big letters.
‘Ach, you know how it is when there’s an appeal on the TV. That was an elderly lady in Husavik. It seems there’s a Polish fishworker living in the flat above her who she thinks might be Harde. The guy’s been living there for the best part of a year, he’s short and fat with a black beard, but as he’s foreign she thought it might be him in disguise.’
‘Sure you don’t want to check it out?’ Bara asked sweetly.
‘Please . . .’ Snorri said as the phone trilled again.
Bara followed Gunna outside to the smoking spot by the back door and watched as Gunna lit up, frowning.
‘If you were in a strange country and needed to stay out of sight for a while, what would you do?’ Bara asked her.
Gunna inhaled deeply and thought. ‘I’ve no idea off the top of my head. What about you?’
‘I reckon either somewhere very unobtrusive, right off the beaten track, or smack in the centre of things. If I was trying to stay out of sight and didn’t have to worry about cash, I’d book into the smartest hotel I could find. You remember how snobby and unhelpful they were at Hotel Gullfoss?’
