the stairs behind Jon.
Jon stood in the middle of the kitchen and dripped water from his jacket.
“I’m really so sorry to barge in on you,” he stammered. “It’s late and I don’t have anywhere to go. Lost my house and everything. Been sleeping at my brother’s place, but he doesn’t really want me there and I thought … maybe …?”
“You can sleep here if you want,” Elin Harpa told him in a flat voice. She went towards the flat’s tiny living room, where a TV screen was the only illumination. More than half of the room was taken up by a double bed. She sat on the edge of it and looked up at him calmly.
“Is that your bed? I didn’t mean …” Jon faltered. “I meant, don’t you have a spare room or a sofa or something?”
Elin Harpa shrugged. Jon saw that the lifeless shoulderlength brown hair had gone, replaced by a short crop that nestled over the tops of her ears, making her look younger and more fragile.
“There’s only one other room and that’s where the kids sleep. So it’s here with me or on the floor. Up to you.”
She prodded a remote control bound up with sticky tape several times until the TV screen went black, leaving the room in gloom, while Jon continued to drip on the kitchen floor.
MORNING WAS NOT far off when Gunna parked Gisli’s Range Rover outside and quietly opened the front door to the silent house. The only sound to be heard was the muted ticking of the kitchen clock. Her hands and feet, chilled in the hours spent searching Bjartmar’s garden under the glare of floodlights, had thawed on the drive home, but the fatigue of the long day and the shock of seeing Bjartmar’s mangled corpse, eyes wide open and staring into the distance, had left her drained.
She hung her coat and fleece on the back of a kitchen chair, stretched her arms high above her head and breathed in deeply. She closed her eyes and lifted her chin, squaring her shoulders and trying not to visualize the man’s last terrified moments.
She had finally been ordered home, along with Eirikur and Helgi. Nothing but faint footprints had been found in the grass, so, leaving the technical team engrossed in the scene of crime, she and Eirikur had joined the group of uniformed officers conducting house-to-house enquiries, trying to locate anyone who might have been aware of anything.
An elderly gentleman walking a small dog recalled seeing a man striding uphill from the crime scene, but could give no description beyond the fact that he was tall and dressed in dark clothing. The enquiries stretched into the neighbouring streets and revealed only that a shabby white van had been parked there for a while, but nobody recalled the number, or even when it had arrived or departed.
Gunna pulled off her T-shirt and unbuttoned her jeans, then stood in front of the open fridge to take a long pull at a carton of the orange juice that she always tried to remember to buy for Laufey.
She wriggled out of her jeans, sodden past the knees, and rolled them into a ball with the T-shirt. Feeling sweaty and dirty after hours in the drizzling rain, on an impulse she clicked off the main light, leaving only the light over the stove on, stripped off the rest of her clothes and stuffed everything into the washing machine. She squatted and poured powder into the drawer, set the machine to run, and padded to the shower, where the sulphurous hot water soothed the knotted muscles of her shoulders.
It was much later when she crawled into bed, draping one arm over Steini’s sleeping form.
“Y’all right?” he enquired drowsily. “Tough job?”
“Yup. Exhausted.”
She squeezed him gently and Steini snaked an arm behind him to rest a hand on her thigh as he began to snore musically again.
THE NEWLY PROMOTED chief inspector S?valdur Bogason took charge of the briefing. Gunna yawned as he preened at the front of the room, and noticed with interest that Ivar Laxdal stood at the back.
“Right, people,” S?valdur said loudly, calling the room to order, even though everyone there was already sitting in silence and waiting for him to start. “The deceased, Bjartmar Arnarson, killed at twenty-one forty last night, two rounds from a shotgun at extremely close range. No witnesses. What do we have?”
Albert from the technical team stood up and cleared his throat. “Like you said, S?valdur. Two shots. The first probably downwards and into the victim’s feet. This wasn’t a fatal injury, but would have been completely debilitating. No way he could have escaped or resisted. The second shot to the chest was the fatal wound. Death would have been instantaneous.”
“Where’s Miss Cruz?” S?valdur demanded. “Why isn’t she here?”
“She’s still at the crime scene,” Albert apologized. “She’ll be carrying out the autopsy this afternoon, but in broad terms I don’t think it will tell us much more than we know already.”
“OK. Is there anything else to go on?”
“The place is like a slaughterhouse,” Albert continued. “Blood everywhere. The splash patterns tie in with what I’ve already described. There are a couple of footprints. The victim was barefoot, so we assume the tracks are the killer’s; look like very ordinary training shoes. We’re going through the data to try and get a match, but it’s a long shot.”
“Any dabs?”
“Not that we’ve found so far. We’re still checking the house.”
“Ballistics?”
“Working on it. But without a cartridge case, there’s not a lot to go on.”
Gunna could see that S?valdur was enjoying his role at the front. He looked at the assembled faces and singled her out.
“Gunnhildur. You’ve been investigating this man already. Can you give us a rundown?”
Unlike Albert, Gunna decided to stay seated, and saw S?valdur frown.
“He had a complex set of businesses that are, as far as we can see, all legal, based on the cash he made in property. Before that he was involved in narcotics, but didn’t get his own fingers dirty and nothing was ever pinned on him. He ran a club called Blacklights that many of us will remember fondly, which is now a smart restaurant, but he still owns the building,” Gunna explained, habit making her refer to Bjartmar in the present tense.
“What’s your angle on him? Why have you been chasing this character?”
Gunna hesitated, remembering Ivar Laxdal’s instructions to keep the investigation into the Svana Syndicate as low-key as possible.
“Bjartmar had a number of companies, including one called Rigel Investment. The ownership is complex, to say the least. But Rigel Investment owns the building that Svana Geirs lived in, also the car that she had the use of.”
“D’you think there’s a link?”
Gunna threw her hands up. “Undoubtedly. Bjartmar had upset a great many people over the years with all kinds of business deals that were, strictly speaking, legal, but far from honest. He didn’t have many friends and seemed to have a talent for making enemies as well as money.”
S?valdur grunted in acknowledgement. “Motives?”
“This wasn’t a robbery. Nothing appears to have been stolen and the killer didn’t go further into the house than the lobby,” Eirikur ventured. “It was quick as well. The 112 call was made at twenty-one forty-one by one of the neighbours who had heard the shots. The first car was on the scene at within three minutes and the Special Unit was right behind them, by which time the killer was gone. He probably walked up the hill and away. None of the neighbours recalled any kind of traffic along the street until we got there.”
“Motive, if this wasn’t a robbery?” S?valdur asked, throwing the question to the whole room.
“Revenge,” Gunna said firmly. “Bjartmar’s wife is still in hospital after what looks to have been an arson attack. I don’t know if that was an attack that was intended for Bjartmar himself, but it seems possible. Bjartmar and his wife weren’t on good terms and he resented propping up her business, while I understand that she was pretty much a trophy wife. He had another woman on the side, who runs a seafood bar called the Fish Lover a few doors from his wife’s restaurant. Bjartmar seems to have taken a perverse delight in setting this woman up in a
