“Not any more,” Gunna replied after a pause.
Bjartmar leaned back and picked up his iPhone again.
“Like I said, it happens,” he said in triumph. “Walk out, did you? Or did he? Or maybe she?” he leered.
“He died,” Gunna said sharply. “Now, if you don’t mind, can we continue?”
HRAFN KRISTJANSSON SAID nothing as he drove into town with a silent and fearful Diddi at his side. There was plenty he wanted to say, but he refrained from commenting, certain that he would be unable to contain his fury at the people who had led his son astray.
Diddi stared out of the window at the street lights flashing past and knew deep inside that from now on nothing would be the same again. The people he had thought were his friends had let him down disastrously. He had both feared and admired people like Long Omar Magnusson, men who went their own way and did what they liked without bothering too much about tiresome rules and regulations.
Ommi had just taken the bag of money and grinned at him. There had been no pat on the back, no “Well done, Diddi,” nothing to say he had lived up to expectations. Diddi had just sat in the corner as Ommi and the man who had driven the car split the cash between them and ignored him, not even noticing as he left and went home to find his father sitting there waiting for him, his face like thunder.
Even at a few minutes to midnight, the place was busy when Hrafn pulled up outside the police station on Hverfisgata and turned to his son as he switched off the engine.
“Come on then,” was all he could find to say, and Diddi stepped out of the car into the cold evening air.
The old man took his son’s arm as they went up the steps and into the building, where he opened the door and made sure the boy went inside first.
The desk officer looked up and smiled.
“Haven’t seen you for a while, mate,” he began, until he saw the morose figures father and son made.
He picked up the phone and dialled.
“S?valdur? Yes, Sigvaldi on the front desk. You might want to come down here. The lad you’ve been looking for all day has just walked in the door.”
GUNNA TYPED BJARTMAR Arnarson’s name into the police computer network, waited for results to show up and drummed her fingers on the desktop when nothing appeared other than the man’s date of birth and records of a few speeding and parking tickets.
Frustrated, she went to an internet search engine instead and typed in the same name. A second later a list appeared and she set about reading the reports from newspapers, websites and gossip magazines. In ten minutes she had learned that Bjartmar Arnarson had made himself into one of Reykjavik’s lowest-profile millionaires with a fortune amassed from property speculation. It appeared that he had no expensive hobbies apart from a penchant for cars that did not extend to anything flashy, had only occasionally spent time fishing for salmon on exclusive riverbanks, and made a habit of travelling economy on scheduled airlines.
“Helgi?” Gunna called out, turning around in her chair.
“Yup?”
“Bjartmar. What do you know?”
“Probably about as much as you do.”
“Not much, then?”
“Nope.”
“Any joy with Omar Magnusson?”
“That bastard,” Helgi grumbled. “As far as I can make out, he’s been busy settling scores. There have been a few sightings, including an off-duty officer who says he saw him in a kiosk in Selfoss last weekend and a woman who’s certain she saw him in one of the petrol station snack bars in Borgarnes on the day he did a runner.”
“But nothing you can use to track him down?”
“Ah, you may well ask. I want a word with Daft Diddi as soon as Svaldur’s finished with him.”
Gunna frowned at the mention of the recently promoted S?valdur Bogason, an efficient but abrasive character she had always had difficulty getting on with. “He’s dealing with this ridiculous bank job yesterday, is he?”
“Yup. Pretty much done and dusted. Diddi admits he did it. All three cashiers and the bloke whose hand he sliced have identified him. But we don’t have the knife he used, we don’t have the million or so in cash and we don’t know how he disappeared after leaving the bank.”
“So, S?valdur has it all tied up, apart from the bits he doesn’t?” she asked wryly.
Helgi shrugged. “That’s more or less it. But Diddi turned up in Casualty the other day babbling that it wasn’t Ommi who beat him up. Which is what tells me that it was. So I have an idea that if Diddi doesn’t know where Iceland’s latest Jesse James is hiding, that’s probably where the cash disappeared to.”
“Seems logical,” Gunna agreed.
“The woman who saw him in Borgarnes the day he absconded said he was with a young woman, and the description matches our Ommi’s girlfriend, Selma. Better still, I searched around and found that Selma’s mother’s car, which is a flashy 5-series BMW, was caught by the speed camera at Fiskil?kur going north and again that afternoon in the Hvalfjordur tunnel going back to Reykjavik. So Selma’s mum gets two speeding fines in one day and the timing fits perfectly.”
“So Selma needs to answer a few questions?”
“Doesn’t she just?”
“And when are you going to ask them?”
“As soon as I can find the bloody girl. She’s been off work for months, supposedly sick, and she’s not at home with her mum, who says she has no idea where her daughter is.”
Gunna stood up and looked out of the window of the twoperson office that now contained three desks.
“Going out for a minute, Helgi. If Johnny Depp shows up, just ask him to get undressed and wait for me, would you?”
THE ECONOMIC CRIME Unit’s offices were larger than Serious Crime’s, as well as being in a building around the corner on Raudararstigur instead of in the old Hverfisgata police station. The Economic Crime officers all looked young and fresh, although the young man who took Gunna aside had bags under his eyes. She extended a hand.
“Gunnhildur. Serious Crime.”
“Ah. We all know who you are. I’m Bjorgvin.”
“Busy?” she asked.
“And how. If there were another dozen of us, we’d still have more than enough to keep them at work.”
“All right. I’ll keep it quick. Bjartmar Arnarson. Can you tell me anything about him?”
Bjorgvin filled a plastic cup from the water cooler and sipped. “What do you need to know?”
“I need to know who might want to try to kill his wife, and why.”
“That fire in the Setberg?”
“That’s the one. Apart from a few parking tickets, the man has a squeaky-clean record.”
Bjorgvin grimaced. “He’s as sharp as a knife, I’ll give him that. He’s been up to his eyeballs in all kinds of dirty tricks but has always kept himself at enough of a distance to avoid too much investigation, let alone any kind of a case to be built against him.”
“All right. Background?”
“Unusually for the crimes we investigate here, he’s not a lawyer or a banker. He was a wheeler-dealer of some kind for a few years and the drug squad took an occasional interest in him, but nothing concrete. He owned part of a place called Blacklights at the end of the nineties.”
“I remember it well,” Gunna said grimly.
“Bjartmar was doing all right for himself, but things really took off when his dad died. Our boy inherited a boat in the Westmann Islands with a few hundred tonnes of cod quota. He promptly sold the lot and became straight virtually overnight. You remember when the banks were privatized?”
“Around 2000?”
