the back of his head, appeared from the kitchen with a pizza box in his hands.
“Hogni. This look for you,” the man behind the counter announced as Hogni’s face fell.
“The man I’ve been looking for,” Gunna said cheerfully.
“Look, yeah. Er, I’m working right now, see. I can’t talk to you.”
“You work here?”
“Yeah. I deliver pizzas sometimes,” he said sulkily.
“Well you’d better get someone else to deliver that one, because you and I need to have words.”
Hogni made for the open door at a trot and Gunna stepped in front of him. His bulk would have been enough to bowl her over, but he stopped short.
“Now.”
Hogni looked bewildered.
“Hey, Ahmed,” he called to the man behind the counter. “Can you get someone else to take this one?”
“Yeah. Z’OK. Andrzej back soon. You go. Take with you police,” he said shortly, almost spitting out the last word.
Hogni followed Gunna outside and she opened the door of the Audi for him to sit in the passenger seat. Infuriatingly, the craving for a cigarette came over her as she got into the driver’s side, but she ruthlessly banished it and took a square of gum from the pack in the door pocket.
She chewed slowly and looked at Hogni as he sat rigidly.
“Why did you do it, Hogni?” she asked softly, and watched as he crumpled in the seat. Tears started to roll down his red cheeks and he wiped his nose with the Pizza-K baseball cap.
Gunna handed him a tissue. The overbearing bluster that had been the main feature of any conversation so far with Hogni had disappeared. He sniffed and his face relaxed with what she guessed was a release of tension now that he was no longer guarding a secret.
“I’d like you to tell me exactly what happened, Hogni, OK? No pressure, and this is between us. We’ll have to do it formally later, but tell me the story first. Did you find Svana?”
Hogni hiccoughed and nodded. “She said I could come round and see her around half one, two. We were going to go to the gym and work on some fitness regimes for me.”
“So you were training together?”
“Yeah. She said I needed to lose ten kilos at least. She was going to try and get me fixed up as a personal trainer. But she said I couldn’t be an unfit personal trainer.”
Gunna appraised the young man’s baggy form and compared it to his late sister’s toned figure. She could only agree with Svana’s diagnosis that losing the double chin and some of the belly would probably make him a happier individual.
“So you went to her flat? You have a key?”
“Yeah,” he said, sniffing hard and pulling a ring of keys from his pocket. He picked one out and held the bunch by it. “And I knew the alarm code.”
“So you let yourself in. What then?”
“I never hurt her,” he said plaintively. “I would never have done that.”
“I can see that, Hogni. But you have to tell me everything you can. Even a tiny detail could take us to the person who really did it.”
“I knocked, opened the door and went in. The alarm wasn’t on.” He gulped. “So I called out and went into the kitchen and saw her there on the floor.”
“Did you move her at all?”
Hogni shook his head.
“So when we arrived at the scene she was lying just as she fell? Is that right?”
Hogni nodded vigorously and his chin quivered. “I touched her cheek. And her hand.”
“But you knew she was dead?”
“Her eyes were open but she couldn’t see anything.”
“And you answered the phone, didn’t you?” Gunna asked.
“How do you know? Yeah. The phone was there on the side. It started to ring and so I picked it up.”
“Do you know who was calling?”
“Dunno. Didn’t look at the screen. It was some guy and he wanted to know where Svana was so I just said she was busy right now and couldn’t talk to him,” Hogni blurted out before drawing a breath. “He got a bit angry. Asked who the hell I was and why I was answering Svana’s phone, so I told him I was her brother and he just laughed. Then he said he needed to talk to her and I should give her the phone. I said no, I couldn’t and he wanted to know why.”
“You told him?”
“It’s all fuzzy now. I think so. I think I said she won’t wake up, or something like that.”
Hogni was starting to collect himself. The gasps for breath had calmed and the hiccoughs had disappeared.
“What was his reaction to that?”
“I don’t know. He must have hung up.”
“All right. So what did you do then?”
“I don’t really know.”
“You mean you panicked?”
“Ummm.”
Hogni nodded a second time and Gunna sat in thought. She had suspected that Hogni could have been responsible for his sister’s death in a furious outburst, but the man’s obvious distress now was going a long way towards convincing her otherwise. But knowing that Svana was already dead by the time the last conversation on her phone took place was enough to open up other possibilities.
Hogni saw the look of determination on Gunna’s face and immediately quailed.
“What’s going to happen now?” he asked.
Gunna looked up and shook herself back to the here and now. She started the engine.
“You have a lot of questions to answer. Put your seat belt on, please. We’ve going to Hverfisgata to finish this. It’s going to take a while, I’m afraid.”
“But I’m supposed to be at work. I’ll lose my job,” Hogni protested. “And what about my car?”
“Sorry, work’s going to have to wait,” she said sternly, and clicked her communicator. “Zero-five-sixty-one, ninety-fivefifty. Busy?”
“Not right now. What can we do for you?”
“Can you meet me by the Arnarbakki shops, outside Pizza-K?”
“Will do.”
“Give me your car keys, please, Hogni,” Gunna instructed, and he meekly handed them over. “We’re going to Hverfisgata and I’ll have to ask you to make a statement and account for every single thing you remember from the second you walked in the door of Svana’s flat. Understand?”
Hogni nodded as a squad car appeared at the far side of the car park and nosed through the traffic towards them to pull up next to the Audi. Gunna wound down the window to greet the two officers sitting in it.
“All right?” the one nearest to her said with a dazzling smile.
Gunna leaned out of her window and passed Hogni’s keys across.
“Grey Opel over there, guys. I need one of you to bring it down to the station for me. But first, will one of you go into Pizza-K and tell the snotty bastard behind the counter that this young man’s not been arrested, but he’ll be helping us with an enquiry for the rest of the day and it’s not his fault?”
HOGNI SLUMPED IN the chair. The release of tension in the young man had already exhausted him. Although Gunna would have preferred to treat him gently, a gut feeling told her that this also needed some quick and determined handling.
Eirikur handed her a photocopy of Hogni’s newspaper interview and sat back to listen, while Gunna pushed it across the table towards him.
“This is what made me think,” she told him, tapping it with one finger. “It was the worst feeling of my life seeing my big sister, who we all loved and admired so much, lying dead in front of me,” she read out, and waited for a reaction.
