“It’s a step up from speeding tickets,” Gunna admitted. “Everything is linked somehow. Wherever you look, someone else had an interest as well.”
Eirikur put a hand up. “Er, chief. Actually there’s more. While you were out this morning, I did a bit of digging and spoke to Bjorgvin over the road. Bjartmar was a director of Kleifaberg as well. Don’t know if you were aware of that,” he said, as if this was something that he should have found out long before.
Gunna circled the company on the whiteboard, which was now covered in arrows, and added another between Bjartmar and Kleifaberg. “Good grief, anything else?”
“Well, yes, there is,” Eirikur said nervously. “There were a few more shareholders in Kleifaberg, including Bjarki Steinsson and a woman called Helena Ros Palsdottir—Hallur Hallbjornsson’s wife.”
“Ah, so the plot continues to thicken, Gunnhildur,” Ivar Laxdal said approvingly. “But I need to see results for the murder of Svana Geirs. Do you have anyone in the frame?”
“As it is, I don’t believe we are close to an arrest. We have Omar Magnusson in the picture, with evidence that puts him there during the week leading up to her death, but the same is true of half a dozen other people. Bjartmar has a rock-solid alibi, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t get someone else to carry it out on his behalf. We can place Jonas Valur, Bjarki Steinsson and Hallur in her flat during that same week, Bjarki on the same day, but we still have no evidence that any of them may have committed the crime.”
“Motives?”
“Ah, Omar is the obvious one, as she had been a witness over the Steindor Hjalmarsson murder in 2000, and this is what I feel we need to crack more than anything. Who was paying Omar to do the time? What went wrong and why did Omar abscond? If we can find that out, then I’m certain everything else will fall into place. I’m sure Oskar knows, but he’s terrified. I’m sure Jonas Valur knows, but he’s saying nothing, possibly to protect his son.”
“Next step?”
“Oskar. I’ve already pushed him harder than I should have, considering he’s a sick man. But I reckon he’s our way in.”
JON ADMIRED THE clean lines of the shotgun, the deep patina that much polishing had given the stock and the gunmetal menace of the twin barrels. He and the old man had shot geese and ptarmigan every winter while his father had lived, first using the old man’s shotgun that Jon had left under the bench at his mother’s house. A year before he died, Jon’s father had bought him a shotgun of his own, and the two of them doubled their haul of geese that winter, to the consternation of his mother, expected to pluck, clean and roast them.
With the old man gone, Jon had little heart for spending time on the hills and fields they had walked together, and the shotguns languished in the cellar, occasionally taken out to be cleaned, polished, oiled and put away.
Jon winced to himself as he put the barrels between the jaws of the vice and gently closed them. What he was about to do didn’t feel right, but he picked up a hacksaw from the bench and laid the blade against the barrels, shutting his eyes as he pushed the saw forward for the first rasping cut.
GUNNA LISTENED TO the hired car’s suspension complain every time it hit a bump in the road. Helgi himself seemed blissfully unaware of the bumps and Gunna decided that he must have become so used to the noise that if it were to disappear he would start to be worried about it.
“Run out of cars again, have we, Helgi?”
“Yeah. Sometimes. Here, I’ve been thinking,” he said and lapsed back into silence.
“About what?”
“Long Ommi. Svana Geirs was murdered between twelve and three in the afternoon, right?”
“As far as we’re aware. That fits in with the last call on her phone, and Miss Cruz said that body temperature indicated she’d been dead between six and three hours.”
“All right. So if she was killed at two, give or take an hour or so each way, twelve-ish at the earliest, then it would have been a bit of a rush for Ommi to get to Keflavik to give Oskar Oskarsson a hiding, wouldn’t it?”
“You’re saying he couldn’t have done both?” Gunna hazarded.
“That’s it. Oskar turned up at Casualty at six that evening, by which time it was already a couple of hours since he’d been beaten. So what do you think? Is Oskar Ommi’s alibi?”
Gunna gnawed a lip in discomfort. The idea had been at the back of her mind, but for some reason she had deliberately not thought it through.
‘I don’t know, Helgi. I really don’t know. It strikes me that he could have done both if he’d been quick off the mark, but it doesn’t look good, does it? It’s an hour’s drive, give or take ten minutes or so. Ommi could have bashed Svana’s head, run for it and been in Keflavik an hour later to administer some punishment to Oskar. It could just fit.”
“All right. So Ommi knew exactly where to find Oskar, did he? He didn’t have to search around for him?”
“It’s impossible to say until one or the other of them throws us a rope. We’d better have another go at Ommi tomorrow. Fancy a little drive in the country?”
The route to Oskar’s room at the hospital was becoming familiar. Gunna pushed open the door to see an orderly stripping the bed.
“Where’s Oskar? The man who was in this room?”
“I not know. Ask sister,” the orderly replied with a heavy accent.
In the corridor, Gunna cornered a tired-looking nurse who could only say that her shift had just started and went off to find someone more senior. Finally Gunna recognized the nurse she had spoken to the first time she had been there to interview Oskar.
“I can guess who you’re looking for, and he’s gone,” Sjofn Stefansdottir said. “He discharged himself very much against doctor’s orders and left about half an hour ago.”
“Dammit, couldn’t you have told us?” Gunna exploded. “Can’t you keep people in here?”
“Actually, I left a message on your voicemail as soon as I knew what was happening,” Sjofn replied sharply. “And no, we can’t keep people against their will unless they’re sectioned. That’s a major step and it’s not something we can do lightly; even then it’s almost exclusively done when there are mental health problems, not when someone is fed up with being harassed,” she added.
“I’m sorry. Really, I shouldn’t have gone off the deep end like that. Do you know where he’s gone?”
“No idea. But he left with his wife half an hour ago, so I don’t suppose they’ve got far yet.”
“Helgi, will you get on to the local coppers and see if they can have a look for Skari and Erla’s car? They may well be on the way out to Hvalvik,” Gunna instructed, then turned back to Sjofn. ‘I’d like to speak to the doctor who treated Oskar when he was brought in. Is that possible?”
’I think he’s here at the moment. Come with me and I’ll see if he’s in the common room.”
They padded along corridors with Helgi behind them, muttering into his communicator. In the common room, Sjofn gently tapped the shoulder of a tall man dozing in an armchair with his feet crossed at the ankles and resting on a low table covered with notes.
“Jonmundur,’ she said, looking down at him as he adjusted his glasses. “This lady is from the police and would like a word with you about Oskar Oskarsson.”
The doctor removed his feet from the table and put them on the floor, coughing as he did so.
“The guy who discharged himself?” he asked.
“That’s him,” Gunna said. “You treated him when he was admitted? What were his injuries?”
“Bruises to the face and upper body, certainly received during a fight of some kind. There was concussion, a broken clavicle, broken ribs and broken fingers, as well as a broken jaw and half a dozen teeth knocked out. Not something we see every day, quite a thorough beating.”
“All right, he arrived here around six in the evening, right? What I’m keen to establish is how long after the event that was? I need to establish the time the beating took place.”
“That’s not easy to say. The bruises were well developed, and he was black and blue all over, though that doesn”t take long to happen. But he was suffering from borderline hypothermia. He was quite badly chilled and it seems he”d been unconscious or asleep outside for some time, quite possibly a couple of hours.”
“Two, maybe?”
The doctor thought carefully.
“You understand I’m not a specialist in this,” he warned. “He was quite well dressed, that is in terms of protection from cold, in a thick fleece, a shirt and a singlet. I doubt that his core temperature was near a danger level, but his extremities were badly chilled.”
