damned if I can find out where he’s holed himself up. Normally there’s someone who’s only too ready to pipe up and it takes about two days to track these deadbeats down, but I don’t know what Ommi’s doing right this time.”
“I’d better leave you to it. Can you put Eirikur on to this tomorrow?”
Helgi’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not here tomorrow?”
“Yeah, afternoon shift. See you at lunchtime,” Gunna said, pulling on her anorak.
“H?! ANYBODY LIVE here?” Gunna called out, kicking off her shoes in the back kitchen of Sigrun’s house among all the boots scattered in front of the wire-mesh cage that occupied the corner. She swung open the kitchen door to be greeted by steam and the aroma of fish soup from the pot on the stove. Baleful eyes glared from the cage.
Sigrun looked up and gently closed the laptop on the kitchen table in front of her. “All right? Good day?”
“Not bad, apart from a smarmy git trying to smooch his way into my knickers.”
“But you say it like it’s a bad thing?” Sigrun grinned.
“Hallur Hallbjornsson.”
“The handsome-and-knows-it MP?”
“Yup.”
“Yuck. You can lock people up for trying it on with a police officer, can’t you?”
“If only.”
Gunna fumbled in her pocket for the packet that wasn’t there any more while lifting a mug from the tree on the worktop behind her without having to look. She placed it in front of her and Sigrun poured.
“Is Laufey here?”
“I sent her to the Co-op with Jens.”
“Ah, peace and quiet for five minutes.”
“Not for long.” Sigrun looked preoccupied and frowned.
“What’s up?” Gunna asked, recognizing the signs. “Jorundur behaving himself?”
“Well …” Sigrun began.
Gunna sipped her scalding coffee and waited.
“I don’t know what you think… and I really hope it’s not going to be a problem for you, what with Laufey and everything. But Jorundur and I have been, well, you know, talking about everything. And he’s been offered a job.”
“That’s great,” Gunna said warmly. Sigrun’s surly bear of a husband had been one of the first victims of Iceland’s financial turmoil, as the construction business had ground to a halt even before the banks had admitted that their coffers were empty. “But it means moving, right?”
Sigrun nodded. “Norway.”
“Norway? Good grief.”
Gunna wondered, as so many times before, how she would ever have managed to juggle work and family without Sigrun down the street to feed the children when police business called. With Gisli now away at sea much of the time and Laufey turning into an independent young woman in her next to last year of secondary school, Sigrun’s help was less frequently needed, but still invaluable.
“He’s been unemployed for the best part of a year, and things don’t look like getting any better. It seems that one of the guys he used to work with up at the Karahnjukar dam got a job there on some tunnel-building project and they need people with experience, so he called Jorundur up and told him to apply. Jorundur’s good at what he does, you know. They told him to come over as soon as he can and the job’s his.”
Sigrun looked suddenly tearful before taking a deep breath.
“We’ve been over it again and again, but he’s set on it,” she continued. “I’ve told him often enough that if we’re careful we can live on what I bring in. There wouldn’t be any holidays in the sun, but I can live with that.”
“But not Jorundur?”
“Ach. You know what blokes are like, and my Jorundur’s not what you’d call a new man. As far as he’s concerned, a man provides, and if he can’t, he’s a waste of space. I suggested he could go back to college for a year and retrain, but that was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard.”
“So when are you leaving?” Gunna asked softly.
“Next month, probably.”
“You’ll be fine,” she forced herself to say. “Something new.”
“We thought about him commuting. You know, a week at home and two weeks over there, something like that,” Sigrun continued as if Gunna hadn’t spoken. “But that’d never work out. You know what Jorundur’s like. A couple of beers with the boys and he’d be off on one again.”
“I understand. What about your job? What happens there?”
“That’s no problem. The council’s so desperate to cut the wage bill that they couldn’t wait to tell me I could have a year’s unpaid leave whenever I want.”
“So it’s there if you want to come back to it?”
“That’s it. But it’s not as if work’s going to disappear. People keep on having children, so the demand for nursery school teachers isn’t going to go away.”
“More, if anything. There seem to be more and more pregnant women than ever around these days. You’d have thought the recession would put people off having kids, but it seems it’s the opposite.”
“Got to find something to cheer yourself up when times are hard,” Sigrun grinned, a smile returning to her round face at last. “There’s nothing like do-it-yourself entertainment. Are you eating? There’s enough fish for everyone.”
Suddenly the back door opened and swung in with a bang as the wind caught it.
“Mum! Guess what?” Laufey yelled from behind the gurgling toddler as she steered the pushchair through the door.
“H?, sweetheart. What should I guess?”
“Didn’t Sigrun tell you? She’s moving to Norway and she said we could look after Krummi.”
Gunna sighed.
“All right, young lady,” she said, trying to sound stern. “But you’ll have to look after him. And I still think Krummi’s a ridiculous name for a rabbit.”
JON LAY IN the dark, unable to sleep. The sofa wasn’t as comfortable as it had looked, but it was better than sleeping in the workshop. That afternoon he’d toyed with the idea of splashing petrol over the house and putting a match to it before handing the keys over to the bank’s representative, a silver-haired man in a long overcoat who had seemed genuinely sorry to be doing his job.
The sofa belonged to Jon’s younger half-brother Samuel, a secondary school teacher in his twenties who lived alone during the week but at weekends shared the flat with a boyfriend, another teacher who arrived joyfully every Friday evening from his weekday job in a flyblown town a couple of hours east of Reykjavik.
Jon and Sammi were too far apart in age to have spent much of their youth together. Sammi was the late and accidental result of their mother’s second marriage, and had been pampered in ways that had made Jon furious with envy over the toys and treats he had never enjoyed. Sammi had made it plain enough that the sofa was Jon’s during the week, but when the boyfriend turned up on a Friday evening, the two of them preferred to have some privacy. The trouble was, Jon didn’t have anywhere else to go.
He tried to blot out the murmurs of conversation and the muffled laughter coming through the thin wall of the flat’s only bedroom, and concentrated instead on the faces of people he held grudges against. First was that bastard at the bank, the one who had encouraged him to borrow so much. It wasn’t even as if the personal financial adviser was someone with experience; just a lad with a stupid haircut and a pink shirt who had done a week’s personal banking course.
Second was the bastard who owned all those flats. It had been a big job and just what a small company keen to make a name with the quality of its workmanship needed. It had meant working evenings and weekends, as well as calling in a few favours and bringing in some mates from the trade as sub-subcontractors. But it had been worth it, and Jon had proudly handed over a completed set of kitchens and bathrooms a week ahead of schedule in time for the flats’ buyers to move in before winter.
Unfortunately Ingi Larusson’s company had gone into receivership a few weeks later. No money was available and Jon could only become one of a great many creditors. When he finally spoke to Ingi, he understood that the
