“The cleaner. Found the lift wasn’t working, climbed the stairs and saw the front door was open.”
“Open? So whoever did this was out pretty quick without waiting to cover their tracks,” Gunna said. “Did you check the lift?”
“Jammed between the third and fourth floors. Been like that for a week, the maintenance man says.”
“Top flat. Nobody comes up here without a reason. What about next door?”
“Nobody home. No sign of life.” Helgi frowned and rolled his shoulders as if they ached. “Well, whoever lives there is going to get a bit of a shock when he comes home from work. How do you want to organize this, Gunna?”
For a moment she wondered why he was asking her. Being in charge of a new investigation unit was a change that would take some getting used to after the years running the police station in rural Hvalvik, where weeks could pass with nothing more serious than a stolen bicycle. The offer of promotion and the shift to the Reykjavik city force had come as a surprise, and working as part of a larger set-up was already taking some getting used to. Although she had lived there in the past and knew the city intimately, Gunna felt vaguely uncomfortable in Reykjavik. Much had changed during the years she had taken it easy in her coastal backwater. The city’s pace of life had accelerated steadily for years until the crisis that saw the banks nationalized and the country plunged into a recession stopped progress dead in its tracks.
She had moved into the Serious Crime Unit’s new office as the protests outside Parliament were becoming steadily angrier, watching her uniformed colleagues disconcerted at the public fury they were on the receiving end of at demonstrations every weekend, while many of them felt a secret sympathy with the protesters and their impotent rage.
Gunna had flatly refused to move house from Hvalvik, and the forty-minute drive was proving a challenge in the mornings, but the journey home had become an oasis of valuable thinking time.
“Gunna?” Helgi asked again.
“?i, sorry. Thinking hard for a moment. If you try and figure out what the lady’s movements were over the last couple of days, I’ll tackle the next of kin.”
“Fine by me. I’m still looking for Long Ommi as a priority as well, you know?”
“Fair enough. Eirikur should be here in half an hour and you’d better fill him in on all this so he can collect everything that comes in from the knocking on doors. I’m sure the lad will have some kind of theory he read in a book that’ll boil down to ordinary common sense. Pathology will tell us what they can, but I reckon we’ve seen it already. Blunt instrument to the head, single blow aimed to kill.”
“Any ideas?” Helgi asked hopefully.
“I was about to ask you that,” Gunna sighed. “On the surface, it looks straightforward enough. When someone’s killed like this, it’s either a junkie who doesn’t know what he’s doing, or it’s money or anger. Svana Geirs must have pissed someone off, or else she’d ripped someone off.”
“Jealousy?”
“Certainly a possibility. You’d better find out who she was shagging, in that case. I can’t imagine she lived like a nun. It’d be handy to know what she did for a living. I doubt somehow that a flat like this comes cheap.”
“I’ll see what I can dig out by the morning. Be in early, will you?” Helgi asked.
“Nope. Bjossi in Keflavik asked me to stop by the hospital there and look in on someone in the morning, a friend of your chum Long Ommi, as it happens.”
“All right. Give him my regards, will you? Bjossi, that is, not anyone who might be a friend of Long Ommi’s.”
A NETWORK OF lines fanned out from the corners of the nurse’s eyes. Working too hard, Gunna thought.
“This way, please,” the nurse said quietly, her gaze flickering back and forth.
“How is he?”
“Not great. But he’ll live.”
“Can he speak?”
“Not easily.”
She thrust open heavy double doors, strode along an echoing corridor and gently pushed aside a door that was already ajar. “Oskar? There’s someone to see you.”
The man lay back in bed, a wild tangle of black hair against the white pillow and fury in his eyes.
“Good morning, Oskar,” Gunna said with as much warmth as she could muster at the sight of the man’s lower jaw swathed in bandages. She tried not to imagine the splintered bones underneath, in addition to the split lip, puffed black eyes and the livid bruise colouring one cheekbone.
“Can I leave you to it?” the nurse asked. “We’re shortstaffed today.”
“Of course. Thanks. I’ll come and find you when I’m finished,” Gunna said, looking sideways at the patient as if he were a naughty schoolboy.
The nurse nodded and padded silently away. Gunna sat at the bedside and opened her folder. She took her time to read the notes, while the bed’s occupant looked at her stonily through his bruises.
“Right, then. Oskar Oskarsson, isn’t it? Your mates call you Skari?” she asked without waiting for a reply. “You know who I am?”
“A cop,” he mumbled with difficulty, his voice a hoarse baritone.
“Ah, so you can talk. That’s good. Just so you know, I’m Gunnhildur Gisladottir. Until a few weeks ago I was the station sergeant at Hvalvik, and now I’m with the Serious Crime Unit. Your file has stopped with us. So, now then. What can you tell me?”
Gunna scanned the notes as Oskar glared truculently at her. “Your legal address is Sundstr?ti 29, Hvalvik. Full name, Oskar Petur Oskarsson, married to Erla Smaradottir. Three children.”
“Five.”
“Five?”
“Erla got two already.”
“From what I’ve been told, you turned up at Casualty in a right old state and declined to explain how you managed to get in this condition. So you’d better tell me what happened, and don’t say you fell down the stairs.”
“Pissed. Argument,” Oskar muttered sourly.
“Argument? Who with?”
“Bloke.”
“Who? Where?”
“Keflavik.”
“Who was this person?”
“Dunno,” Oskar replied slowly. “Big bloke. Polish.”
“Ah, so what were you arguing about?”
“Can’t remember. Pissed.”
Gunna scanned the notes in her file. “It doesn’t mention intoxication when you arrived at Casualty, only hypothermia.”
“Pissed,” Oskar replied firmly.
“No. You weren’t pissed. What was this about? If we’ve got someone on the loose beating people up with this kind of savagery, then we need to find them as soon as possible. Skari, you’re lucky to be alive. You could have been dead of exposure.”
Oskar’s eyes focused on the wall behind her, and Gunna recognized the determination in them. This would be a battle, and the whole story would probably never come out.
“Heard from Long Ommi recently, have you?” she asked, throwing out the question without expecting a reply as there was a tap at the door.
“Are you finished yet?” asked the nurse. “I can’t leave you too long. He’ll tire quickly.”
“It’s all right. I’m finished,” Gunna said, looking at Oskar and noticing the sudden panic in his bruised face.
