wine always, always bottles to throw away. Always lots for bathroom, empty packets.”
Gunna raised an eyebrow and Justyna curled thumb and forefinger into a circle that she slid sharply down the index finger of the other hand to indicate a condom.
“Also make-up, lots of make-up, hair dye, stuff to look younger. All rubbish. Sleep good, eat good, you look younger.”
“How about the keys? Do you have a key?” Gunna asked.
“Key at agency. We collect keys for all the houses each day. Sign for them, give back when we finish.”
“And the alarm code?”
“Is new code every week. Also get from agency.”
“And the day you found Svana, did you have a code?”
“Yes, I go with code and key, but everything open.”
“So you wouldn’t be able to get into a house on a day when you weren’t cleaning?”
“No. Only if the code is not changed. But still no key.”
“Understood,” Gunna said, reflecting what an opportunity such an arrangement provided for scams of all kinds to be set up. “It’s a very security-conscious operation.”
“Of course. Rich people in smart houses don’t trust foreigners in their homes,” Justyna said with a mischievous smile that lifted the fatigue from her face. “Too many criminals come from other countries.”
GUNNA BROUGHT THE car to a halt in a puddle that widened visibly as the rain pelted down from a belt of black sky chased by a distant blue promise of sunshine to come. She waited, toying with the idea of going for a hot dog at B?jarins Bezta, until the sight of Skuli running through the rain towards her put the idea out of her mind.
“Not going to drip everywhere, are you?” she asked as Skuli sat in the passenger seat trying not to shake excess water from his head. “Can’t help it. I’m soaked.”
“You could have waited a couple of minutes. But it’s all right, this is a rental car,” Gunna told him as the rain stopped beating on the roof and sunlight began to glimmer again on the puddles.
“You rent cars?” Skuli asked.
She hauled the Golf out into the stream of traffic and kept pace behind a lorry as it trundled towards the harbour. “When there aren’t enough in the pool, they rent a few for us to use.”
“A fine use of taxpayers’ cash,” Skuli observed, and lapsed into silence as Gunna drove the short distance to pull up outside Kaffivagninn. They sat in the cafe as a second wave of rain hammered on the iron roof over their heads.
“What’s happening at Dagurinn, then?” Gunna asked when Skuli had made short work of a sandwich. He shrugged.
“No idea. I’m on compulsory unpaid holiday. Got to keep the wage bill down, or so they say.”
“Oh, right. I thought you were still at work.”
“I am. I’m doing some freelance stuff for Reykjavik Voice.
And Dagurinn doesn’t mind?”
“Dagurinn can go to hell,” Skuli said with a sudden flash of anger. A new side to him, Gunna thought. “It wouldn’t be a surprise if there’s no job to go back to when my two months off are up, so what the hell?”
“And this other one you’re working on, what’s that?”
“It’s a freesheet with daily news on the web, half in English, half in Icelandic. It’s not bad, but the money’s lousy.”
Gunna nodded and wondered at the change that had come over Skuli since the previous summer, when he had been finding his feet in his first real job since leaving university. Iceland’s financial crash had taken him by surprise, and Gunna had followed his growing disillusionment.
“But at least Reykjavik Voice is more or less independent and we’re not just plugging Rich Golli’s business interests and political chums, which is more or less what Dagurinn is there for,” Skuli grumbled.
“Will you go back to Dagurinn if you can?” Gunna asked.
“I’ll have to. Jobs aren’t easy to find, and even though it’s shit, if there is a job once my mandatory unpaid holiday is over, I’ll still have to stick with it. Unless Rich Golli’s closed it down by then.”
“Ach, you’ll be all right,” Gunna tried to reassure him. “Things’ll pick up soon enough.”
“Yeah. That’s the Icelandic way, isn’t it? ‘It’ll work out’ is what everyone always says. But I don’t know …”
“When the force finally decides to employ a press spokesman, I’ll put in a word for you,” Gunna said with a thin smile.
“Would you?” Skuli asked, the serious tone of his reply taking her by surprise.
“Of course. I don’t know if they’d even look at it, what with the state of the finances. There’s nothing spare anywhere. I’m even bringing in light bulbs and toilet paper myself now and again.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Skuli muttered. “You realize the amount of money the taxpayer will eventually have to fork out for the Icesave thing would be enough to run the Greater Reykjavik police force for more than a hundred years?”
“No, I didn’t,” Gunna admitted. “I’m afraid that with those sorts of figures it just becomes telephone numbers, completely unreal. Anyway, do you have anything you can tell me?”
“About Svana Geirs?”
“Anything from a new angle would be useful.”
Skuli sipped his coffee and grimaced.
“Strong.”
“Good grief. What do you expect in a dockers’ cafe? And people wonder why the descendants of the Vikings have become a bunch of weaklings,” Gunna observed seriously. “Now, Svana?”
“Prostitution,” Skuli said quietly, wiping his mouth and looking around him.
“You’re joking.”
“Nope. From what I can gather, and absolutely nobody wants to be quoted or interviewed on this, you understand, Svana Geirs had turned herself into a top-class hooker.”
“Bloody hell. That explains a few things,” Gunna said as Skuli put down his mug, fumbled in his coat pocket for a notebook and flipped through it.
“Here we are,” he said, reading with his finger on the page. “‘A skilled and enthusiastic purveyor of some highly specialized services who really enjoyed her work’ is what one bloke I spoke to said with a huge grin on his face, so I got the impression he was speaking from personal experience.”
“And who’s this guy?”
“Can’t say. He said it was a while ago, though, a good few years.”
“Fair enough. What I could really do with knowing is if she worked alone, or if there’s someone fronting for her. This is something that’s becoming a real problem these days.”
“Since the law was changed, it’s certainly been driven even further underground,” Skuli agreed.
“Didn’t you interview some Eastern European woman last year about this?”
“Yup. Could have been a fantastic front page, but it was the same week that the banks went belly-up and I suppose there was bigger news and my story got buried near the back.”
“All right. Tell me what you can, then. D’you want a refill?”
“Yes please.”
“Get one for me at the same time, will you? I’m going to nip to the loo.”
Gunna returned to find Skuli sitting in front of two mugs and reading through his notes.
“That’s better. Now, where were we?”
“Svana Geirs,” Skuli replied, and sipped. “As far as I can see, there wasn’t anyone fronting for her business, if that’s what you can call it. The whisper is that there’s a little club who quietly shared her services. I don’t know how many there are, but she didn’t do what you might call freelance work, and I gather she was well paid enough by her group of ‘friends’ not to need to.”
“Hell, so this was an organized operation, then?”
“Absolutely. Very small and discreet, the most exclusive club in town.”
“And some exclusive members, I suppose?”
“Very much so. Not men who would welcome publicity.”
