knowing that nothing would be forthcoming in a neighbourhood where people avoided involving themselves in other folk’s problems, he steeled himself to stay quiet.
“What’s the matter, Ommi?” he warbled.
Ommi leaned close. “Diddi, you let us down. You owe.”
“Wha-what’s that, Ommi?”
“You know.”
With one hand Ommi gripped a handful of greasy hair, swinging with the other to land a smack to the side of Diddi’s head that raised a whimper and left his victim in a daze. Ommi loved the satisfying smack of fist on flesh, the rush of adrenalin, the flush of power. He’d missed this in prison.
“You know,” he repeated. “You owe. Soon you’ll have to pay up. All debts will be honoured in full. Understood?”
Diddi nodded. Blood was starting to seep from his right ear on to the shoulder of his denim jacket, and his head was buzzing. “Yeah, I get it, whatever.”
“Hope so. You haven’t seen me. Don’t know where I am.”
“I didn’t do it, Ommi.”
“That’s what you say,” Ommi hissed, delivering a punch to the kidneys that left Diddi unable to stand on his own feet.
The whole thing had taken no longer than a minute, and already Ommi was nowhere to be seen. Cross-eyed with pain, Diddi wondered if Long Omar Magnusson had really appeared and beaten him up in the broad light of morning. The ringing in his ears and the taste of bile convinced him that it had been all too real, as he threw up messily across the pavement. Across the street, an overcoated gentleman in a peaked cap kept his eyes to the front and his chin high, making sure that he saw nothing.
THE ADDRESS WAS only a few hundred metres from the police station at Hverfisgata and Gunna decided to go on foot. She strode through the encroaching darkness of the windy afternoon with Helgi loping at her side. There was already a patrol car and an ambulance outside with lights flashing as they arrived at the stairwell of the block of modern flats and found a young officer fending off interested people claiming to live there.
“Crime scene. No admittance,” he announced as they pushed through.
“Serious Crime Unit,” Gunna growled, watching the young man take a step back.
“Straight up. Fourth floor. The lift’s not working,” he said.
Helgi eyed the stairs. “Four flights?”
The young man nodded.
“Oh well.”
Helgi set off up the steps with Gunna taking them two at a time behind him. As they reached the open door of the flat, he was breathing hard.
“This must be it?” he gasped, battling to keep the fight for air under control.
“You want to pack in smoking, Helgi,” Gunna admonished, stepping past him.
Another young officer stood at the door, this time one who recognized Gunna and stood aside to let them in.
“It’s not a pleasant sight,” he said dourly as Gunna snapped on surgical gloves and handed a pair to Helgi. She bent to pull covers over her shoes and again handed a second pair to Helgi as he fiddled with the gloves.
In the corridor, a young woman in police uniform, her face pale as the apartment’s ivory walls, stepped back from the kitchen door to let Gunna and Helgi through to where a paramedic hunched low with his back to them. Gunna went carefully around him and Helgi stayed in the doorway.
“Are you all right, sweetheart?” he muttered to the young policewoman, who merely nodded back, eyes fixed on the paramedic.
“Dead, I suppose?” Gunna asked, crouching next to the man in his green overalls as she surveyed the scene.
“Well there’s not much reason for us to be here, if that’s what you mean,” he replied shortly.
The body of a woman lay on the chequered tiles, arms splayed in front and legs crossed awkwardly. A mass of fair hair spread around her and a pool of dark blood had seeped over the floor.
“Touched anything?” Gunna asked the paramedic.
“Checked for pulse, that’s it. Nothing’s been moved.”
“Good man. Not a chance that she fell and banged her head, I suppose?”
“Not a hope,” the paramedic volunteered cheerfully. “Blunt instrument, this one.”
Gunna looked up at the faces in the doorway. “Helgi, would you get everyone out and bring the technical boys in here right away? This one definitely needs to be sealed up and gone over before we do any snooping ourselves. Do we have any identification?”
Helgi and the paramedic both stared back at her.
“You mean you don’t recognize her?” the paramedic asked.
Gunna took in the woman’s long, ample figure, dressed only in tracksuit bottoms and a white singlet. The taut skin emerging from the sleeveless top was tanned to the point she would have described as being crispy.
“Something about her rings a bell, but I couldn’t say,” she admitted finally.
“That’s Svana Geirs, that is. Was,” the paramedic said with a mournful shake of his head.
“Ah, in that case you’d better make sure we don’t get any intrusion from the gentlemen of the press. And not a word, all right?”
“Of course.”
The paramedic stood up and stretched. Gunna looked at the woman’s face, half obscured by waves of hair. The skin at the corners of the wide-open green eyes looked stretched, parchment-like, in a way Gunna felt would have been more usual in someone past retirement age. The abundant blonde hair was coarse and thick, and she wondered if its natural colour had been seen in the last twenty years. She tried to estimate Svana Geirs’ age and put it at around thirty-five.
“We’d better get ourselves out and leave the place to the technical team. Are you off?” she asked the yawning paramedic.
“As soon as the doc gets here to declare mortality,” he replied, stepping back and carefully not touching walls or worktops. “So, is this your first celebrity?”
“Sort of. I had a city councillor once. Heart attack jogging on the beach at Nautholtsv’k. Stone dead by the time we got there. Shame about Svana, though,” he sighed. “I used to have a poster of her on my wall when I was a student.”
GUNNA AND HELGI left the technical team swarming over the flat and met on the first-floor landing to compare notes. As many uniformed officers as could be found had already been dispatched to scour the area for anything that could be a murder weapon, and to start the long process of knocking on doors.
“Tell me about Svana Geirs, then,” she demanded. “The name’s familiar, but that’s it.”
“Well we’ll have to do a bit of digging. I suppose she was one of those people who are famous for being famous, if you know what I mean.”
“You mean she didn’t actually do anything?”
“She was on telly for a while with a fitness show on Channel 2. My first missus used to watch it, so that has to be five years ago at least, doing these daft exercises in front of the box. Never did her any good. The show was less about keeping fit than Svana’s tits bouncing up and down in a tight top. That’s about it. She sort of disappeared from view after that, but she still pops up in the gossip mags.”
“All right. So who wants to knock off a failed TV presenter? There was some real force behind it, and that was a single blow as far as I could see,” Gunna said. She would dearly have liked a cigarette, but a promise is a promise, and Laufey would know the second she walked in that Mum had been cheating.
“Time of death?” Helgi asked.
“Don’t know. Miss Cruz will give us an accurate idea later. It’s getting on for six now, so I reckon this afternoon sometime. She was still warm when we got here.”
The police’s only forensic pathologist was on long-term leave and the post had been covered by a series of replacements recruited from overseas. The latest was a woman from Spain with a double-barrelled surname who had replaced a tall Irishman and had instantly been christened Miss Cruz by her new colleagues.
“Who raised the alarm?” Gunna continued.
