showered and went back to work. Simple as that. I was due to speak at two, as you know.”
“You say you were expecting to see her? Had you arranged to meet?”
“Not specially. But she was normally there at that sort of time.”
“You had something particular to discuss?”
“No.” He shrugged. “I enjoyed her company. Svana was a fun person to be around. Even though she was shallow in many ways, she was a lively personality and an antidote to dry meetings that go on too long.”
“It seems she had an appointment. Any idea who with? Another of the syndicate?”
There was a sour look on his face.
“I have no idea. I hoped to see her. She wasn’t there,” he said with rising impatience.
“You’ve no idea who she was expecting to meet?”
“Not the faintest, officer, and if you don’t mind, we have guests for lunch.”
“I’m sure they’ll leave some for you. When did you last see Bjartmar?”
“Before his trip to the US,” Hallur said with a sour expression on his handsome face.
“And the rest of the syndicate?”
“I’ve seen Bjarki once or twice in the last few weeks. His firm looks after the books for my wife’s media business and we’re old friends.”
“He doesn’t have an alibi.”
“Bjarki? Good grief, he’d never hurt a fly, let alone a person. Svana was so fit and healthy, she could have made mincemeat of him.”
“Bjartmar was abroad. You were in Parliament. Jonas Valur doesn’t have much of an alibi and Bjarki doesn’t have one at all. I’m not assuming that one of the syndicate killed Svana Geirs, but you have to admit that you all make a good starting point. You had a motive in that if she were to reveal the arrangement, your political career would be in trouble.”
“You think so?” Hallur asked with a grim laugh. “If the truth were known about the goings-on between political bedrooms in this country, more than half of us would be out of office tomorrow.”
“Did you meet any of Svana’s other acquaintances?”
“What? Her friends? No. I don’t think she had friends like normal people do. She just had people who were useful to her. I’d sometimes run into her with people at Fit Club, normally the sort of fashionable women she used to associate with, sometimes men, but not often. Once I saw her laughing and joking with a troll of a man at Fit Club, who turned out to be her brother. That was a bit strange, because Svana never seemed to have anything like a family, ever.”
“How so?”
“She never mentioned family at all. I knew she was from out of town somewhere, but didn’t know where. I know it sounds funny, but it didn’t fit somehow.”
“How so?” Gunna asked again.
“I don’t know,” Hallur answered. “She’d never had any relations like the rest of us do, never mentioned parents. Finding out there was a family behind her was a bit like discovering a shameful secret that she’d have preferred to keep quiet about.”
GUNNA LEFT HALLUR’S smart house with his wife’s farewell scowl vivid in her mind and drove back to Hverfisgata thinking over the conversation. She made a mental note to find Bjorgvin in the financial crime department and ask if he had any knowledge of Bjarki Steinsson’s activities. As an accountant, Bjarki undoubtedly handled affairs for his friends’ companies, and although she knew little would be divulged beyond generalities, she felt that the man’s demeanour would tell her enough.
Some of what Hallur had said triggered a mental note she had made to herself a few days earlier that had become submerged beneath a tide of other matters. She hurried through the rain, grumbling to herself that rain shouldn’t fall from a virtually clear sky. Instead of going to the detectives’ office, she climbed an extra flight of stairs to the cells and could hear someone snoring sonorously inside one of them.
An elderly man padded uncertainly from the toilet back to a cell, followed by a woman prison officer. Hearing her approach, both of them turned.
“H?, Gunna, sweet thing,” the grey-haired man croaked.
“Had a night on the tiles, did you, Maggi?”
“?i, Gunna. You know how it is sometimes. A little drink doesn’t go far these days,” he said, and yawned.
“Come on, Maggi,” the prison officer encouraged. “You can have a few more hours’ sleep and that’s your lot.”
The old man tottered forward, one hand on the wall, and the prison officer locked his door behind him, watching through the peephole as he settled himself back on the mattress inside.
“Gunnhildur, isn’t it?” she asked. “I thought I recognized you.”
“That’s right,” Gunna said, surprised. “You’re Kaya?”
“Saw you in the paper last year.”
“Ah, so you must be one of the half-dozen people who actually read Dagurinn instead of using it to line the litter tray.”
“Sort of.” Kaya grinned. “We don’t have any pets, so I suppose we have to read it. What can I do for you?”
“Chap brought in last week. Thickset, pissed. Tinna Sigvalds and Big Geiri brought him in but they’re both off duty today, otherwise I’d have asked them. Who was he?”
Gunna followed Kaya to the office, where she scrolled through the log on the computer.
“Last Friday? He was brought in about six thirty?”
“That fits.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Not much. Just who he was. The face looked familiar and I wanted to be sure.”
Kaya scrolled through the notes. “Nothing special. His name’s Elvar Marinosson, legal residence at Holabraut 60, Djupivogur, date of birth twentieth of March 1986.”
Gunna nodded, writing the man’s name and date of birth down on the last page of her notepad. “What was he brought in for?”
“Being an idiot, basically. Pissed, had an argument with a cashier in a shop on Posthusstr?ti. He lit a cigarette in the shop, refused to put it out and they called the police. He slept it off, the shop decided not to press charges and so we let him out the next morning with a thick head and told him not to do it again.”
“OK, thanks. That tells me what I needed to know.”
“Any time,” Kaya said with a saw-toothed smile.
Gunna clattered down the stairs to her own office and waited impatiently for her computer to start up.
When it had stopped whirring and had settled down to its usual irritating hum, she went to the traffic database and typed in Elvar Marinosson’s name and date of birth. A second later the man’s driving licence details appeared, confirming his full name, legal residence and date of birth, just as Kaya had said. But the picture alongside it, although not a recent one, showed a pale-faced, fair-haired man with deepset blue eyes, not the beefy red-faced man who had appropriated his identity.
“Ah, Hogni Sigurgeirsson. What game are you playing at?” Gunna asked herself quietly.
“CAUGHT HIM YET?” Gunna asked as Helgi appeared with Eirikur behind him.
“Caught who?” Eirikur said with a dazed look in his eyes.
“I don’t know. Anyone, plenty out there to choose from. What have you been up to, then?”
Helgi shook his head in despair. “Have you any idea? Any idea at all how many vans there are in this country that are either white or light grey? I’ve just spent an hour with the old feller who thinks he saw our mysterious white van down the hill from Bjartmar’s house, showing him pictures of vans in all shapes and sizes, every model under the sun. Guess what? It’s a white van. That’s the nearest he can get. Oh, but there might have been some lettering on the side. Or there might not.”
He dropped the folder of photographs and brochures on his desk and sat down.
“How far did the Special Unit go with their hot search?” Gunna said, standing up and going over to a much- annotated map of Reykjavik on the wall. “They don’t mess about, those guys. If it was there when they did their search, they’d have logged it. If it wasn’t, then it must have disappeared at the critical moment,” she decided. “If it
