Winterlude (12 page)

Gunna looked around. ‘So where’s the water cooler?’

Clearly impatient to be working, the girl disappeared behind the bar and began sweeping. ‘I don’t know. In the office, I expect.’

‘Which is where?’

The girl stopped sweeping for a second and pointed. ‘That way,’ she said, indicating some double doors. ‘And I haven’t seen anything,’ she called as Gunna pushed them open.

Gunna saw stairs and climbed them in the dark, feeling for a switch that she didn’t find until the top step. As the light flickered on, she saw another door on the far side of an open area with a large table in the middle, its surface scarred and stained underneath a scattered covering of playing cards, empty glasses and overflowing ashtrays. The water cooler stood by what was certainly the office door that refused to budge as Gunna tried the handle. The cooler itself was switched off and empty, its plastic bottle upended in position, and looked to have been that way for a long time, with old newspapers and an empty pizza box balanced on top of it.

Wondering whether or not to give the office door a kick, Gunna saw that next to a leather sofa long past its sell-by date against the other wall was another door, and with a little effort this one swung open to reveal a much-used and long uncleaned toilet, as well as a shower cubicle. Sweeping aside the curtain, Gunna saw that the shower had also clearly not been used for a long time, as it was stacked high with boxes of the kind that Elmar and the Land Cruiser driver had delivered.

She opened the flaps of the box at the top and found herself looking at an empty plastic drum. Prising off the cap, she sniffed, closed the bottle and its box and made her way back downstairs, waving to the girl wiping tables who nodded in curt acknowledgement.

A message was stuck to Gunna’s computer monitor when she arrived back at her desk at the Hverfisgata station.

Check your email
, it read.

Gunna scrunched it into a ball, threw it into the bin and prodded her computer into life. She read the message, rattled her fingernails in a tattoo on the desk as she did so and reached for the phone.

Helgi’s phone diverted straight to voicemail. She cursed, flipped through a chart on the wall, found the number she was looking for and dialled again.

‘
Hæ
, Anna Björg? Gunnhildur. Is Helgi behaving himself?’

‘He’s being a good boy, most of the time anyway,’ Anna Björg said with what Gunna felt was a catch in her voice. ‘He’s in the interview room with Reynir Aronsson now. We’ll probably have to let him go this afternoon if there’s no progress.’

‘Ah, that’s what I wanted to talk to him about. Could you get him to call a halt and give me a buzz back?’

‘Yep. No problem. Give me five minutes and he’ll call you back.’

Gunna tapped the desk with her index fingernail, the one that seemed to grow irritatingly faster than the others, scrolling through her other messages and deleting as many as could safely be ignored while she waited for Helgi to call. She was deep in a report when her desk phone finally buzzed.

‘Gunnhildur.’

‘
Hæ
, Chief,’ Helgi said. ‘What news?’

‘How are you getting on?’

Helgi sounded tired, as if two days in his sparsely populated home territory had exhausted him.

‘We called in some reinforcements last night and cleared out Össur’s and Reynir’s distillery at Tunga, except that Össur and Ingi obviously did some very sharp work and managed to get the still and some of the production equipment hidden away somewhere,’ Helgi chuckled. ‘I can hazard a guess as to where it is, but that’s for Anna Björg to follow up if she feels inclined.’

‘And Reynir Aronsson?’

‘He’s bloody hard work, that’s all I can say. He won’t admit to anything. He reckons the CCTV footage of his vehicle is falsified and swears blind he wasn’t in Reykjavík on Sunday even though Anna Björg has been working on his girlfriend and demolished his alibi.’

‘Some good news for you, in that case. According to forensic, we have a positive identification of a set of Reynir Aronsson’s fingerprints at the murder scene. Sigmar found a couple of handprints on a section of galvanized pipe that had been thrown in with a lot of other old tools under a workbench. So I guess you can have a quiet word with the sheriff, formally arrest Reynir for the murder of Borgar Jónsson, and we can ship him south.’

Gunna could hear the sigh of relief. ‘Perfect, Chief. Just what we needed. I was dreading having to let him go this afternoon. So that’s cut and dried, is it?’

‘Well, I’m not so sure,’ Gunna said, re-reading the email from Sigmar. ‘The fingerprints are definitely there, but they’re not as clear as we would like them to be. There’s no doubt that Reynir handled this piece of pipe and I’ll email you the photos so you can show them to him. But Sigmar said that it looks as if the prints aren’t fresh, as if they were made quite some time ago.’

‘But if it places Reynir in the NesPlast unit, that’s good enough grounds for arrest, isn’t it?’

‘It’s grounds to haul him south and take our time getting the story out of him,’ Gunna decided. ‘So go for it.’

Helgi wanted to punch the air, but maintained a sober expression as he and the lawyer who had gone outside for a quiet smoke made their way back to the interview room.

‘Can’t have been good news if you don’t have a smile on your face,’ Reynir said as Helgi sat down opposite him.

He fanned out the photographs he had printed out and laid them on the table so that Reynir and the lawyer could see them.

‘You and your Land Cruiser at four locations in Reykjavík. Tryggvagata and Bankastræti, and two in Hafnarstræti, all within forty minutes of each other on Sunday morning,’ he said in a flat voice as Reynir stared. ‘Then there’s this one of your vehicle driving past an incident in Hafnarfjördur that same afternoon that I showed you yesterday. I take it you did your deliveries and then went off to find Borgar Jónsson in Hafnarfjördur? How come Elmar wasn’t doing the deliveries as usual? Because you wanted to find Borgar and did the run south with the week’s production at the same time? Is that how it worked? Killing two birds with one stone, if you’ll pardon the expression?’

Reynir lifted his shoulders in a careless shrug. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Nothing to do with me.’

‘In that case, how about this?’ Helgi asked softly, placing two more pictures on the table. ‘Recognize this?’

‘No. Why? Should I?’

‘I’d say so. It’s more than likely the metal bar used to beat Borgar Jónsson to death, and it has your fingerprints all over it as well as blood traces from the victim.’

Reynir stared at the picture and a vein began to throb in his temple. Helgi braced himself for an explosion and the lawyer gently shifted his chair sideways, as if sensing the tension in the air. Reynir picked up the printout and looked at it at arm’s length for a long time while Helgi and the lawyer sat in tense silence.

Helgi opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it as Reynir sat back and squared his shoulders.

‘I admit it,’ he said finally. ‘I killed the bastard.’

‘In that case, I arrest you, Reynir Aronsson, on suspicion of the murder of Borgar Jónsson. You do not have to say anything, but you are required to answer truthfully any questions put to you,’ Helgi intoned as Reynir bowed his head. ‘Just so you know, we’ll be travelling south later today.’

Mæja’s eyes flashed from side to side. With the only interview room already occupied by Helgi and Reynir, Anna Björg made space in her office for Mæja to perch nervously on the edge of a chair.

She glanced at the door.

‘Is that closed? Can anyone hear us?’

‘Nobody’s listening, Mæja. Don’t worry.’

‘That’s easy for you to say,’ she shot back.

Anna Björg squared away her notebook and watched Mæja fidget nervously. ‘Is Hjörtur back at Blanda today?’

‘He left this morning.’

‘Four days?’

‘Yep. Back on Sunday night.’

Anna Björg pursed her lips, wondering how to start. ‘Look, Mæja. You’ve had a long-running affair with Reynir Aronsson for . . . what? Five years at least. I’m not out to judge. Your private life’s your private life. Understand?’

‘Yeah, I know,’ Mæja said hesitantly. ‘So what’s this about? I’ve already told you Reynir was with me on Sunday.’

‘Are you afraid of Reynir?’

Mæja’s gaze dropped to the desk between them. ‘Not afraid of him, but I take care not to upset him, if that’s what you mean. You know what Reynir’s like. He has a temper.’

‘But you still see him?’

‘Nobody’s perfect. He’s a good man. It’s just deep inside.’

‘You’re not being coerced at all?’

Mæja’s brows knitted in concentration. ‘You mean saying he was with me when he wasn’t?’

‘Exactly.’

‘No! I haven’t even seen him since he left on Sunday night. It’s not as if we’re teenagers texting each other all the time,’ she said angrily, her face reddening.

‘So give me the times,’ Anna Björg said sharply. ‘When did Reynir arrive and when did he leave?’

‘He turned up on Friday night about nine and left early in the morning. Then he was back Saturday evening some time. I can’t remember what time and he stayed until about four.’

‘Four in the morning?’

‘Yeah.’

‘All right. So you say he was with you on Sunday as well. When did he show up?’

‘About four, five, something like that. It was after the football was on TV and he was happy that his team had won. I made some dinner, Reynir washed up. We watched TV, had an hour in bed and he left just after midnight. OK? Are there any other details you’d like?’ Mæja asked in a snide tone. ‘Curious about what other people get up to, are you? No secrets in this town – and there are all kinds of things going on that people think nobody knows about. Like at the hotel on a weeknight when it’s quiet.’

‘I’m not being curious by choice,’ Anna Björg retorted, stung by Mæja’s jibe. ‘But there’s a man here who may well be facing a murder charge and years in prison, so maybe you can see why I have to be sure.’

‘Well, yes, I suppose there is that,’ Mæja mumbled.

‘I saw your husband here in Blönduós on Sunday morning. He wasn’t on shift on Sunday night. So how come Reynir was able to be with you on Sunday evening? That’s what I want to know.’

Gunna arrived back at her desk with a mug of coffee in one hand to find Ívar Laxdal sitting in Helgi’s chair and looking through the pile of books under the table.

‘I never thought of Helgi as an admirer of Laxness,’ Ívar Laxdal said, flicking through a much-thumbed hardback and placing it reverently back where it had come from. ‘
Independent People
. Marvellous stuff, I always thought.’

‘Why, did you think he was more of a one for Westerns and whodunnits? He’s a dark horse, is our Helgi. You know what these country boys are like. Speaking of which, he’s up in Húnavatnssysla and he’s made an arrest.’

‘This is the killing in Hafnarfjördur?’

‘It is,’ Gunna confirmed and sipped her coffee. ‘Actually, Helgi has done all the important work on this one.’

‘You mean you feel he deserves an afternoon off?’ Ívar Laxdal asked with a trace of a smile.

‘Steady on. I wouldn’t go that far, but a bag of sweets, maybe.’

‘So who’s the killer?’

‘Reynir Aronsson. The brother of the man whose son was run over by Borgar Jónsson. But there’s a hell of a lot of ground to go over here. There are four brothers and they have a long history of sorting out each other’s grudges – going back decades, or so Helgi says.’

‘You think you can tie this in with any cold cases?’

Gunna shook her head. ‘I doubt it. It’s more a case of figuring out if any of the other brothers were party to this and how much of it was arranged in advance.’

‘So this was premeditated murder?’

‘Without a doubt, I’d say.’

‘And the young man who had an accident? Was he part of this too?’

‘I’d say so. There’s been a little business going on here as well. Two of the brothers were brewing moonshine on a practically industrial scale up north, and the man, Elmar, was delivering it to bars and people who were selling it by the half-bottle to the city drunks. He was close to his father’s brothers and they supplied him with a van so he could deliver for them, or that’s the way it looks. That lad has a lot of questions to answer once that morphine feed is turned off. But my guess is that he was the one who had tracked down Borgar Jónsson and shadowed him. Maybe he found out about Borgar’s plans to skip the country and they decided between them on some rough justice. Who knows? He’s still in hospital and too doped up to answer questions – not that he’s going far, so it can wait a day or two.’

‘We might have to open a whole new wing at Litla-Hraun just for them. Anyhow, an announcement needs to be made. A man is helping police with enquiries, etc, do you think?’

‘A man has been arrested, kind of thing, I’d say. But no names, obviously. Not that the press won’t work out who he is soon enough.’

‘Excellent. The commissioner will be relieved. I’ll tell him.’

‘If you don’t mind, don’t forget to mention Helgi as well. It’s his work that’s done this.’

‘Of course,’ Ívar Laxdal said, levering himself from Helgi’s chair. ‘Credit where it’s due. Just so you know, the gentlemen of National Security were very interested in what I had to show them yesterday. The passport is, however, a fake.’

‘So Borgar must have bought it for some reason. In case he needed to make a quiet exit, maybe?’

‘Who knows? Anyhow, it’s a fake, but a very good one of the kind that when it was made eight or nine years ago would have cost a lot of money. They doubt it would pass inspection now. Airport checks are so much more rigorous and he probably wouldn’t have got far with it, although it’s not easy to say if it would be a problem somewhere further south in Europe with a fifty-euro note tucked between the pages. There’s no Turkish embassy here, so the unit is in touch with their Oslo embassy. If anything more surfaces, I’m sure they’ll let us know.’

‘So Borgar could have left the country as himself, gone to Rome or somewhere, and travelled on from there under another identity?’ Gunna speculated.