Winterlude (8 page)

‘I guess you’re right.’

Henning looked quickly behind him. ‘But have you found his secret cubbyhole?’ he asked, with a conspiratorial gleam in his eye.

Gunna tracked Bjarni Björgvinsson down to the smart newish house his parents owned and she waited while the young man’s mother went to wake her youngest son several hours before the usual time he was on his feet. She came downstairs with suppressed frustration in her eyes.

‘He’s still in bed. I don’t know what the matter is with him these days. He’s surly, he’s rude and he has mood swings. It’s driving his father and me nuts,’ she admitted.

Gunna smiled inwardly. ‘Tell me about it,’ she said, trying to look sympathetic.

‘You have the same problem, maybe?’ Bjarni’s mother asked, clearly anxious for Gunna to have exactly the same headaches to deal with.

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Gunna said guardedly, wondering whether or not to tell this worried woman that her son’s behaviour clearly spelled out either alcohol or dope, or both.

‘You have children as well?’ Bjarni’s mother asked.

‘A boy and a girl.’

‘They say girls are less bother. Is that true?’

Gunna wanted to laugh. ‘I couldn’t say. But my mother certainly wouldn’t agree with that.’ She looked at her watch and listened for any movement. ‘Is he going to be long, do you think?’

The woman shook her head and Gunna could see the grey in her fair hair. ‘I’ll go and call him again.’

‘How about I go and wake him up?’

Her eyes bulged for a moment and she hesitated. ‘It’s a bit of a mess,’ she said defensively.

‘If a bit of a mess was the worst I had to be worried about in this job, believe me, it would all be so much easier. Where’s the boy’s room?’

‘At the top of the stairs, on the right,’ she said in a faint voice as Gunna took the stairs two at a time. At the top, the not unfamiliar smell of boy’s bedroom guided her and she rapped smartly on the door, didn’t bother waiting for a reply and clicked on the light as she stepped inside.

‘Go away, will you? I said I’m not well,’ a voice whined from beneath the duvet. ‘And turn the light off.’

Gunna strode to the window, swept the curtains aside and aimed a kick at the end of the bed. ‘I don’t care if you’ve got the plague and you’re missing an arm and a leg, you can wake up,’ she snapped, leaning down and roughly hauling the duvet back a foot to expose Bjarni’s head sunk in a deep depression in the pillow. He stared back at her dumbfounded through eyes heavy-lidded with too much sleep. ‘My name’s Gunnhildur. I’m an investigating officer at the city police force’s serious crime unit and I have some questions for you to wake up and answer.’

‘What . . . ? Now?’

‘Now. Right now. Either you wake up and pay attention, or I’ll call up a squad car and you can sit in an interview room at Hverfisgata wrapped in your smelly duvet and answer questions there,’ Gunna said, lifting a mess of magazines and CD cases from the room’s only chair and dumping it all on the desk under the window so she could sit down. ‘Your call. Make your mind up.’

‘This is police brutality,’ Bjarni said in a tone that carried little conviction. ‘And you need a warrant.’

‘You’ve probably been watching too many American cop shows. Sorry to destroy your misconceptions, Bjarni, but I don’t need a warrant. And if you think this is brutality, I’ll call up a squad car right now to collect you,’ she said, looking meaningfully at the ashtray on the windowsill overflowing with roaches. ‘And we’ll have a good look through this room in the process. I don’t suppose you’ve bothered to hide your stash all that carefully, have you?’

Bjarni quailed and hauled the duvet up to his chin.

‘Where were you on Sunday?’

‘Er . . . out.’

‘I can figure that out for myself. Where were you and who were you with? What time did you leave here and when did you return?’

‘I went out about two with Elmar and we just mooched around a bit downtown, went to a mate’s place and then came back here and did some PlayStation.’

‘Until when?’

‘I don’t know. Some time in the night.’

‘Who’s this mate and where’s his place?’

‘Jóhann Eggertsson, his name is, lives in Lyngrími. I don’t know what number.’

‘In Grafarvogur, yes? Did you go anywhere near Hafnarfjördur on Sunday?’

‘No, not on Sunday.’

‘You were out with Elmar Kjartansson in that blue van he drives, were you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘When you said you weren’t anywhere near Hafnarfjördur on Sunday, what does that mean? That you had been there with him some other time?’ Gunna asked, extracting a picture from her folder.

‘He wanted to go there a few times last week. I don’t know why. He’d go round town, see a few people and then he’d go round this industrial place, round and round these garages and stuff. I don’t know why.’

‘Anything in particular he was looking out for?’

‘He said he was looking for someone for his brother, but him and Einar don’t get on,’ Bjarni said in a petulant tone. ‘Look, can you leave the room so I can get up?’

‘I’m not finished with you yet,’ Gunna snapped, holding up the picture printed onto an A4 sheet showing a grainy version of what Borgar Jónsson had looked like a decade previously. ‘Seen this man?’

Bjarni peered briefly. ‘Never seen the guy.’

‘Look again, Bjarni, and don’t play games. Reykjavík’s full of CCTV cameras and whatever Elmar’s been up to, you can bet your life you can be implicated.’

The boy flinched at the thought, swept a lock of greasy hair out of his eyes and looked again. ‘Yeah,’ he said sulkily. ‘I think that’s the guy he was looking for. We saw him in town one time.’

‘Where?’

‘Outside some Bónus shop. Don’t know which one.’

‘Where else?’

‘Near that industrial place near Hafnarfjördur.’

‘Both times you were out in that blue van Elmar drives?’

‘Yeah. The blue van he got from someone he works for.’

‘Elmar doesn’t work, though, does he? Yet he always has plenty of cash. How come? What’s he doing – dealing? Are you involved in this as well?’ Gunna said, rattling out questions faster than the bewildered young man could cope with them. ‘You know how many years you’d be looking at for possession with intent to supply?’

‘No! It’s not me! I just hang around with Elmar.’

‘So where’s his money coming from?’

‘Ask him, why don’t you?’

‘Because,’ Gunna said, relishing the boy’s befuddled expression, ‘your mate Elmar is in the National Hospital with his arms and legs in plaster and morphined to the eyeballs. That’s why.’

She watched his eyes widen in fright.

‘What happened?’

‘You can ask him yourself when he’s out of hospital. Now, where’s all that cash coming from? Don’t try and tell me he’s running a car and having a good time on dole money that wouldn’t cover petrol to get to town and back every day of the week.’

Bjarni’s eyes glazed over as he shifted in bed and pulled the duvet tight to his chin where it met the fringe of hair that was plastered over the side of his head he had lain on.

‘He delivers stuff. Those big bottles they put onto water coolers in offices. That’s what he does.’

Sunshine broke through a ragged gap in the clouds and gleamed on the white hillside behind Tunga. The farm was far from being isolated, only twenty kilometres from the hotel where Helgi had spent an eventful night, but it lay at the end of a dog-leg track and in the lee of a hillside topped by a rocky escarpment that sheltered it from the worst of the weather. While there was a dusting of powdery snow on the lower slopes and the rocks at the top showed their teeth through the deeper snow around them, the pastures flanking the track to the farm were merely lightly frosted with a white morning crust that was already melting in the watered-down sunshine.

A dog barked briefly from the safety of a barn as Helgi parked the Daihatsu outside the farmhouse, in between an ancient Ferguson tractor with a wheel missing and the axle propped up on blocks, and a black Land Cruiser that dwarfed the police Daihatsu.

Helgi sniffed and frowned to himself at the vaguely sour smell the breeze brought to him as he walked towards the farmhouse and tapped at the door. The distant dog barked a second time, then was silent. The farmhouse door swung open as he tried the handle and he stepped inside to the familiar aromas that brought home to him how much he missed the countryside.

‘Hello! Anyone home?’

Only the clock over the kitchen doorway ticked in response. He closed the door and walked around to the back, to the warmth of the byre and a row of cows contentedly chewing, but there was nobody to be seen and Helgi’s back prickled with the feeling that he was not alone.

The tracks of a set of tyres could be seen leading out of the yard and along the trail that passed below the farm and its barn towards the shore some distance away, and Helgi tried to remember the outline of the Tunga lands, more than fifteen years after his last visit to the farm.

The gap in the clouds closed slowly and the glitter on the hillside faded to dull white as Helgi cast about, puzzled that there was nobody to be seen anywhere. He knew that Ingi lived in Blönduós these days, but Össur had stayed at the farm and either he or Reynir should be here somewhere, while the presence of the very new Land Cruiser in the yard indicated that someone was not far away.

Helgi pulled his phone from his pocket and was relieved to see that a few bars of signal strength remained. He scrolled down to Gunna’s name and listened as it rang.

‘Gunnhildur.’

‘
Hæ
, it’s Helgi. How goes it?’

‘Ach. You know. Just been doing what I do best and practising a little police brutality on the blameless public.’

‘Business as usual, then?’

‘Yep. Chasing up Elmar Kjartansson’s alibi for Sunday, and he was nowhere near Hafnarfjördur, so he didn’t beat Borgar to death,’ she said. ‘Not that I expected it of him, somehow. And you? What news of the countryside?’

‘Nothing yet. I’m at Tunga and the place is deserted. Can you check out a vehicle for me?’

‘Sure. Give me the registration.’

Helgi read the number off the Land Cruiser’s hulking rear end and Gunna repeated it as she wrote it down.

‘Got that. Is that a vehicle at this godforsaken farm?’

‘It is. It’s a swanky black Land Cruiser and not the kind of thing a poor sheep farmer can afford, so you might want to dig a little deeper than just who it’s registered to. I’d say that if anyone from here was in Reykjavík on Sunday, this is what they would have been driving.’

Gunna nodded in agreement as she looked up at Bjarni Björgvinsson’s bedroom window where the curtains were still drawn, and imagined the young man having to answer some searching questions after having been visited unexpectedly by a detective. She was fairly sure from the determined expression on the boy’s mother’s face as she left that she had been lurking on the stairs to listen to the exchange going on in her son’s bedroom, and that the end of a long tether had been reached.

‘OK, thanks, Helgi. I’ll give you a buzz back as soon as I know something. Good luck with them there yokels,’ she said as she ended the call.

Helgi started the Daihatsu up again and bumped out of the yard, following the fresh tyre tracks leading seawards, thankful that it was still early and there would be daylight for a few more hours. The car bumped in second gear along a rutted track, and around the shoulder of ground that Tunga occupied the land dropped away into a long slope between the farm and the sea, with a square barn in the distance that even a kilometre away he could see had smoke coming from a chimney and a newer tractor than the ancient Ferguson parked outside it.

Gunna downloaded the photos sent by Herbert’s colleague in Selfoss and set the printer running. It whispered to itself as it spat out sheets of paper.

‘Any luck with Borgar Jónsson?’

Sævaldur Bogason’s head appeared around the door, grinning.

‘It’s not about luck, Sæsi,’ she replied. ‘It’s about asking the right questions of the right people, or so I was told at police college all those years ago.’

‘You know what I mean, Gunna. Any progress? Spoken to that headcase Kjartan?’

‘Actually, I have,’ she said, retrieving a dozen sheets of paper from the printer and examining the top one. ‘Why do you say he’s a headcase? He seemed remarkably well balanced to me, all things considered.’

Sævaldur shook his head pityingly. ‘Shit. I remember the trial. He was practically crawling up the walls. I was sure he was going to beat some poor sap half to death just to take it out on someone. And what have you done with the rest of your team? It seems pretty empty around here.’

‘Eiríkur is on paternity leave and won’t be back for a couple of weeks,’ she explained, as Sævaldur snorted derision. ‘And Helgi is up north. I’m hoping he’ll be back tonight or tomorrow morning.’

‘Up north? What’s he doing there? You mean Akureyri?’

‘Nope. He’s checking out Kjartan’s brothers, who it seems have something of a track record of sorting out each other’s problems.’

‘You reckon? That sounds far-fetched to me. I’d pin my efforts on Kjartan.’

‘Maybe. But I can’t not check.’ She fluttered the sheaf of printed-out photographs in her hand. ‘And Kjartan has the most solid alibi you can find, in that he was still at sea somewhere north of Grímsey when Borgar Jónsson was killed.’

Sævaldur looked sour for a moment. ‘You be careful of Kjartan, though,’ he warned.

‘I most certainly will. The man’s a bruiser and he has bully written all over him in big letters. But he didn’t murder Borgar Jónsson. Now if you don’t mind, I have to ask our friends in traffic for a favour or two.’

Stefán was pleased with himself that the old Bronco that had been in his workshop the day before was now well enough to be outside, while something more modern and sleek was plugged into a computer on wheels parked next to it.

‘That’s the one, I reckon,’ he said, looking through narrowed eyes at the pictures Gunna showed him of Elmar’s wrecked van. ‘I thought it was one of those four-wheel-drive Nissans. A lot of people use them for work; plumbers, carpenters, mechanics – that sort of business.’