He toyed with the idea of having a word with Hinrik to try and find out a little more about why someone found Sonja so interesting, and what it was that was so valuable, but he decided that a night owl like Hinrik needed to be approached first thing in the morning when his senses were dulled with vodka and homegrown grass, not with evening drawing on and his mind still relatively fresh.
Baddó locked the car, put the key in his pocket, zipped it up and hefted a carrier bag in each hand as he pushed open the door of the apartment block. Once he’d made a bit of money, he’d get María somewhere better, he thought, hearing the outside door click shut. He stiffened as a second click immediately alerted his senses.
“Hæ, Baddó. Long time since you’ve been seen around here.”
He spun around to confront the soft voice, and as he looked into the shadow of the stairwell, a stocky figure emerged and a hand grabbed his collar from behind just as a swinging kick swept his feet from under him, sending him sprawled face down. The wine bottle smashed on the concrete floor and its aroma flooded the lobby as it soaked into the dust.
Baddó thrashed furiously as a knee was planted securely on his neck and one arm was wrenched high up his back.
“Stay still, Baddó. No point in arguing, is there?”
He thought fast. These weren’t cops. The police would have cuffed him by now. He lay still for a second and could hear someone leaning over him. There had to be two of them. Or maybe three? With his cheek crushed to the floor in a rivulet of wasted Chilean merlot, it was hard to tell.
With a feeling of dread, he recognized again the metallic click that had alerted him to start with. It took him by surprise that the cut as it sliced into his cheek wasn’t painful. It was only once the carpet knife’s blade was clicked home again that he felt it begin to sting as drops of blood dribbled onto his lips and the floor, mingling with the rich red wine. He blinked sweat out of his eyes and screwed his head around as far as he could to get a sight of his attackers, but he saw only faded combats and black boots.
“This is payback from an old friend, Baddó,” the soft voice hissed in his ear, cut short as a burst of cold air told him the outside door had opened. He could feel the pressure of the knee in his back relax as its owner was distracted. Baddó twisted with all his strength, taking the man by surprise as he rolled and kicked out. He took in the shocked face of the elderly woman from the flat below María’s in the doorway, staring at the tableau in front of her.
“Shit-” the soft voice snarled, momentarily distracted and giving Baddó an opportunity to scrabble for the remains of the wine bottle, pulling himself onto all fours and catching hold of it by the neck just as the smaller of the two men barged the woman to one side and was gone. Baddó was fast enough to swipe with the smashed bottle at the heavier, slower man as he followed his friend out and was rewarded with a howl of pain and surprise as the glass slashed deep into fabric, skin and muscle.
Baddó leaned on the door frame and watched as a blue 4×4 that had seen better days skidded to a halt and the two men tumbled into it, one trailing drops of blood into the snow behind him, the leg of his trousers already soaked, his face alight with agony and alarm.
The elderly woman picked up her shopping bags.
“Are you all right?” he asked once he’d managed to steady his breathing as his legs turned to jelly beneath him.
“I’ll be all right, young man,” she replied in a voice of schoolteacher severity, “but you aren’t.”
Gunna yawned and looked at her watch, startled to find that it was long past the end of her shift. Eiríkur and Helgi were already long gone, both of them only too happy to escape the office. Gunna cursed herself for being tempted to do just a few things that had since eaten up almost two hours of her own time.
Nevertheless, a stack of routine paperwork had been dealt with, either signed and sent on or returned, or else consigned ruthlessly to the bin overflowing behind her. On top of that, she had identified the occupant of the house at Kjalarnes that the phone number belonged to. A quick call to the communications division confirmed that the mobile phone belonging to the man she knew of only as Jón had remained stubbornly silent. It had been switched off following that single call earlier in the day and it had stayed that way.
Gunna tapped her teeth with a pencil and wondered how Haraldur Samúelsson and the mysterious Jón were connected to Pétur Steinar Albertsson. A search through police records showed that Pétur Steinar had a criminal record with convictions for vehicle theft, drunkenness in a public place and a little housebreaking. Gunna looked at the dates and frowned to herself. His record had been clean for more than twenty years, which meant that she was most likely looking at a series of youthful indiscretions.
Moving to the vehicle register, she flashed up Pétur Steinar Albertsson’s driving licence and saw a picture taken ten years earlier of a thickset man with heavy five o’clock shadow and laughing eyes. Gunna moved to the national registry and found Pétur Steinar Albertsson, Hekla Elín Hauksdóttir, a teenage girl and two toddlers with identical dates of birth. She compared dates of birth and decided that the teenager could, at a stretch, be Hekla Elín’s child, but that it was more likely that Sif Pétursdóttir was the result of an earlier relationship on Pétur’s part.
Looking back at the police records, she saw that Hekla Elín had a drugs conviction for a minimal amount of cannabis more than a dozen years ago; Gunna calculated that the woman would have been nineteen at the time. There was nothing since, other than a solitary speeding ticket and a fine paid promptly. Neither he nor his wife had fallen foul of the law for a long time and there was no reason to expect that either of them had done anything wrong. Smiling humorlessly to herself, Gunna reflected that one of her colleagues in particular would have observed in his usual foghorn voice that once a criminal, always a criminal, and would advise her to drop down on the family in Kjalarnes from a great height and with maximum manpower.
Not that I’m inclined to take Sævaldur Bogason’s advice on anything, she said to herself softly. Out of curiosity she went to the vehicle register and typed in Hekla Elín’s name. The computer hesitated and a photograph of Hekla Elín finally appeared. Gunna frowned at the sight of the young woman, whose picture had presumably been taken when she was around twenty. A distinctive long face and toothy smile looked back at her; Gunna quickly rooted among the papers on her desk, lifting up the CCTV photo of blonde Sonja next to her monitor.
The face had filled out in Hekla’s thirties, with cheekbones that gave it character, and the dark brown hair and fringe that framed her youthful face had to be taken out of the equation and replaced by the blonde version, but the line of the jaw and that distinctive nose with its slight kink were convincingly similar.
So there you are, Sonja, Gunna breathed to herself, sorry that she was alone in the office, with neither Eiríkur nor Helgi there to share her discovery. She wrote down the phone numbers that she’d extracted easily enough from the online phone book, and made notes of the registration numbers of the red Toyota and the antique Land Rover, both of which were registered to the address, before shutting down her computer.
It can wait until tomorrow, she decided, wondering whether or not it would be worth a quick drive out to Kjalarnes to check out the neighborhood, but immediately telling herself not to be stupid. Half an hour or more to Kjalarnes, the same back, plus the hour’s drive home to Hvalvík would see her arriving home close to ten o’clock, and as Steini had promised to be back from wherever he was working at a reasonable hour, it would be worth being home on time at least once in a week.