“Not going to drip everywhere, are you?” she asked as Skúli sat in the passenger seat trying not to shake excess water from his head. “Can’t help it. I’m soaked.”
“You could have waited a couple of minutes. But it’s all right, this is a rental car,” Gunna told him as the rain stopped beating on the roof and sunlight began to glimmer again on the puddles.
“You rent cars?” Skúli asked.
She hauled the Golf out into the stream of traffic and kept pace behind a lorry as it trundled towards the harbour. “When there aren’t enough in the pool, they rent a few for us to use.”
“A fine use of taxpayers’ cash,” Skúli observed, and lapsed into silence as Gunna drove the short distance to pull up outside Kaffivagninn. They sat in the café as a second wave of rain hammered on the iron roof over their heads.
“What’s happening at Dagurinn, then?” Gunna asked when Skúli had made short work of a sandwich. He shrugged.
“No idea. I’m on compulsory unpaid holiday. Got to keep the wage bill down, or so they say.”
“Oh, right. I thought you were still at work.”
“I am. I’m doing some freelance stuff for Reykjavík Voice.
And Dagurinn doesn’t mind?”
“Dagurinn can go to hell,” Skúli said with a sudden flash of anger. A new side to him, Gunna thought. “It wouldn’t be a surprise if there’s no job to go back to when my two months off are up, so what the hell?”
“And this other one you’re working on, what’s that?”
“It’s a freesheet with daily news on the web, half in English, half in Icelandic. It’s not bad, but the money’s lousy.”
Gunna nodded and wondered at the change that had come over Skúli since the previous summer, when he had been finding his feet in his first real job since leaving university. Iceland’s financial crash had taken him by surprise, and Gunna had followed his growing disillusionment.
“But at least Reykjavík Voice is more or less independent and we’re not just plugging Rich Golli’s business interests and political chums, which is more or less what Dagurinn is there for,” Skúli grumbled.
“Will you go back to Dagurinn if you can?” Gunna asked.
“I’ll have to. Jobs aren’t easy to find, and even though it’s shit, if there is a job once my mandatory unpaid holiday is over, I’ll still have to stick with it. Unless Rich Golli’s closed it down by then.”
“Ach, you’ll be all right,” Gunna tried to reassure him. “Things’ll pick up soon enough.”
“Yeah. That’s the Icelandic way, isn’t it? ‘It’ll work out’ is what everyone always says. But I don’t know …”
“When the force finally decides to employ a press spokesman, I’ll put in a word for you,” Gunna said with a thin smile.
“Would you?” Skúli asked, the serious tone of his reply taking her by surprise.
“Of course. I don’t know if they’d even look at it, what with the state of the finances. There’s nothing spare anywhere. I’m even bringing in light bulbs and toilet paper myself now and again.”
“For Christ’s sake,” Skúli muttered. “You realize the amount of money the taxpayer will eventually have to fork out for the Icesave thing would be enough to run the Greater Reykjavík police force for more than a hundred years?”
“No, I didn’t,” Gunna admitted. “I’m afraid that with those sorts of figures it just becomes telephone numbers, completely unreal. Anyway, do you have anything you can tell me?”
“About Svana Geirs?”
“Anything from a new angle would be useful.”
Skúli sipped his coffee and grimaced.
“Strong.”
“Good grief. What do you expect in a dockers’ café? And people wonder why the descendants of the Vikings have become a bunch of weaklings,” Gunna observed seriously. “Now, Svana?”
“Prostitution,” Skúli said quietly, wiping his mouth and looking around him.
“You’re joking.”
“Nope. From what I can gather, and absolutely nobody wants to be quoted or interviewed on this, you understand, Svana Geirs had turned herself into a top-class hooker.”
“Bloody hell. That explains a few things,” Gunna said as Skúli put down his mug, fumbled in his coat pocket for a notebook and flipped through it.
“Here we are,” he said, reading with his finger on the page. “‘A skilled and enthusiastic purveyor of some highly specialized services who really enjoyed her work’ is what one bloke I spoke to said with a huge grin on his face, so I got the impression he was speaking from personal experience.”
“And who’s this guy?”
“Can’t say. He said it was a while ago, though, a good few years.”
“Fair enough. What I could really do with knowing is if she worked alone, or if there’s someone fronting for her. This is something that’s becoming a real problem these days.”
“Since the law was changed, it’s certainly been driven even further underground,” Skúli agreed.
“Didn’t you interview some Eastern European woman last year about this?”
“Yup. Could have been a fantastic front page, but it was the same week that the banks went belly-up and I suppose there was bigger news and my story got buried near the back.”
“All right. Tell me what you can, then. D’you want a refill?”
“Yes please.”
“Get one for me at the same time, will you? I’m going to nip to the loo.”
Gunna returned to find Skúli sitting in front of two mugs and reading through his notes.
“That’s better. Now, where were we?”
“Svana Geirs,” Skúli replied, and sipped. “As far as I can see, there wasn’t anyone fronting for her business, if that’s what you can call it. The whisper is that there’s a little club who quietly shared her services. I don’t know how many there are, but she didn’t do what you might call freelance work, and I gather she was well paid enough by her group of ‘friends’ not to need to.”
“Hell, so this was an organized operation, then?”
“Absolutely. Very small and discreet, the most exclusive club in town.”
“And some exclusive members, I suppose?”
“Very much so. Not men who would welcome publicity.”
Giving in to temptation, Gunna put a lump of hard sugar between her teeth and filtered a mouthful of coffee through it.
“Don’t stare, Skúli,” she admonished.
“Sorry. I thought it was only old men who did that.”
“YOU’RE SURE?” THE National Commissioner’s deputy asked. For a second Gunna looked at Ívar Laxdal’s knitted brows and wondered how this thickset barrel of a man managed to wear a hat as ridiculous as a beret and still radiate authority.
“I’m sure enough. Sure enough to warrant leaning hard on some of these people.”
“What sort of people?”
Gunna ticked them off on her fingers. “The regulars are two businessmen, one accountant and one MP.”
“Which party?” Ívar Laxdal demanded.
“Social Democrat.”
He snorted. “Wishy-washy liberal types. But they’re part of the government right now and therefore able to kick us where it hurts. And they’ll close ranks to protect their own,” he rumbled. “These politicians worry about their own skins first and the rest of us afterwards.”
“It’s probably best I didn’t hear you say that,” Gunna said quietly to remind him that politics and policing should stay separate.
“No coppers on that list?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“That’s something to be grateful for. But I suppose even a chief superintendent wouldn’t be taking home enough to get him into that sort of club,” he said, almost as if to himself. Gunna reflected that she hadn’t given him names and he hadn’t asked for them.