“Sweetheart, I want you to call 112. Tell them who you are, who I am, and that there’s a road traffic accident on Reykjanesbraut, eastbound, four kilometres past the Vogar turnoff. OK?”
“OK, Mum,” Laufey replied, eyes wide as Gunna assumed a different, unfamiliar, businesslike persona.
“I’d best go and see if anyone’s hurt. I’ll be right back, OK?” Gunna recognized one of the paramedics who arrived a few minutes later to casually ease a shocked young man from the wreck of the red car and a whiplashed elderly couple from their dented Volvo as the same young man who had attended Svana Geirs’ flat.
“H? again, how are you?” he enquired with a cheery smile as the shaken old couple were taken away in one ambulance and the young man sat, grey-faced and wrapped in a blanket, on the step of the other one. “Not as bad as the last one, eh?”
“Could have been so much worse,” Gunna agreed. “Silly bastard shouldn’t have been driving that fast in this weather.”
“Nope, hopefully these three will all be right as rain soon enough. Shame about their cars, though. You don’t see so many of those old Volvos these days,” he observed as a burly pair in orange all-weather overalls that made them look like cuddly toys winched the Volvo on to a truck while a uniformed officer from the Keflavik station watched.
“H?, Gunna. How goes it?” the officer greeted her with a smile.
“Snorri! Good to see you. It goes well enough, I suppose. Shame I have to stop and help you lot out on the way to work.”
“You saw it happen, did you?”
“No. Just saw the red car go belting past and then saw them by the side of the road a minute later.”
“Fair enough. I’ll have to get a statement from you later.”
Gusts of wind whipped rain across the road and into their faces.
“Right, that’s us done,” the paramedic announced. “We’ll take matey here away and I’ll leave the clearing-up to you guys,” he said happily, and ushered the young man to a seat in the back of the ambulance, still wearing his grey blanket like a refuge.
“Thanks, mate,” Snorri said to the paramedic and turned to Gunna. “When can I catch up with you, chief?”
“I’ll drop in at your station tomorrow, if you like. Or you can stop by at home this evening. Up to you.”
“OK. I’ll see you tomorrow. I guess you need your peace and quiet of an evening these days,” he said with a wink that bordered on a leer, waving as he got into his own car.
“The jungle drums are working overtime now,” Gunna grumbled, getting back into the Range Rover where Laufey was busily texting.
“All right, sweetheart? You’d have been quicker on the bus today,” she apologized.
“That’s all right, Mum.”
“Who are you texting?”
“Just letting them know I’m a bit late. Mum?”
“Yes, sweetheart?”
“Mum, why don’t you see Snorri any more?”
“Because we’re not working together now I’m back on the city force.”
“Shame.”
“Why’s that?”
“Snorri’s lush. He’s loads lusher than Steini.”
Gunna sighed.
“He’d be much better for you,” Laufey continued slyly.
“Good grief, young lady,” Gunna exploded. “It’s enough that the whole bloody force seems to be clued up on my private life without you chipping in as well.”
“But why not?”
Gunna shook her head in despair. “One, Snorri is a dozen years younger than I am. Two, he has a girlfriend. Three, I don’t fancy him, even if he is lush. How’s that?”
“I suppose …” Laufey conceded, lapsing into a silence that she did not break until the red-and-white checks of the aluminium factory appeared ahead.
“Mum?”
“Yes, sweetheart?”
“How do you get to be a paramedic?”
“I THOUGHT WE needed to have another chat, Selma,” Gunna said cheerily.
Selma slouched in the chair and glared back truculently at Gunna, who had become certain that this young woman could be the key to unlocking a few mysteries.
“Had some breakfast, have you?” Gunna asked.
“I don’t do breakfast. It’s bad for you.”
“All right, that’s up to you. Now, can you account for your movements on the eighteenth of last month?”
“Duh. What day was that?”
“The day that you drove up to Rif and collected Ommi.”
“Oh, that day,” Selma said and lapsed back into silence.
“And?” Gunna prompted.
“I went up there to visit him, like I normally do, and …”
“And?”
“Well, he had a day pass so we could go out for a few hours. So we did.”
Selma sat in thought for a moment and Gunna began to wonder if she had fallen asleep.
“Then he just said, ‘I’m not going back inside. You’re taking me south’ So that’s what we did.”
Gunna consulted a page of her notebook. “If you say so. Now, I’ve spoken to the prison authorities, and normally you visit on the second and fourth weekends of each month. So why was this visit in the middle of the week? You’d only been there a few days before, hadn’t you?”
“Yeah, well, Ommi asked me to, didn’t he?” Selma shifted uncomfortably in her chair, lifting herself from a slouch to sit up and perch forward, hands in front of her.
“I don’t know. I’m asking you.”
“Yeah. That’s it. He asked me to come and see him. Said he’d got a day pass and we could go out for a few hours,” she repeated.
“Do you normally do that?”
“Yeah.”
“So where do you go?”
“Just for a drive, look around a bit.”
“Do you have a job, Selma?”
“Not any more. I’m disabled. Nerves.”
“Yet someone with your poor disposition can drive up to the far end of Sn?fellsnes, pick up an absconding prisoner, drive him back to Reykjavik and then help him evade the police?”
“Yeah, well. It’s Ommi, isn’t it?”
“What does that mean?” Gunna enquired.
“Ommi’s, well …” She shrugged, as if that were answer enough.
“I’m just wondering if it really was Ommi who asked you to drive up there and collect him.”
Selma looked thunderstruck. “Course it was. Who else?”
“Plenty of people have an interest in him. Could be any one of them. I gather Ommi had some unfinished business to attend to. Tell me about it.”
Selma yawned in spite of herself, puncturing the tough image she had been trying to project. “Y’know, Ommi came back with me, like he asked. I dropped him off near the bus station and he went to do his stuff. I don’t know what.”
“Tell me about Diddi.”
“Who?”
“Don’t play the fool, Selma. You know who Daft Diddi is. Why did Ommi want to see him?”
“Did he?”
