“Who was driving? You?”
“Yeah.”
“In your mother’s car?”
“No! In Ommi’s car that he bought the other week. The red one.”
“He bought it? Who from?”
“I don’t know. Some guy.”
“Some guy who stole it,” Gunna said.
“Oh.”
“When Diddi was in the car, what did they talk about?”
“Money and stuff. I didn’t listen much.”
“And what was your impression of Diddi? How did he come across? Frightened?”
“Er, maybe. A bit,” Selma said after a long moment’s thought.
“Come on, Selma. Don’t play games with me. I think Ommi and his mate threatened Diddi and forced him to go into a bank with a knife. In fact I know so, and unless I’m convinced otherwise, I won’t have much of an option but to see you as an accessory.”
“Please, officer,” the lawyer at Selma’s side said without looking up from his notes.
“What’s an access … sery?” Selma asked.
“It means that you would be seen as having taken part in the alleged crime,” the lawyer said in a dry voice.
“But I didn’t! It was them!” Selma squawked.
“Ah. So now we’re getting somewhere. You’re saying that Ommi and Addi forced Diddi to commit a crime?”
“Yeah,” Selma said sulkily.
“What did they tell him to do?”
“They said that he owed them money from sometime years ago before your lot put my Ommi in prison. Diddi said he didn’t have it. Ommi said he could help him find it and all he had to do was go into the bank and get it. Look, I was just driving them around, OK?”
“Which one of them gave Diddi a lift on the day?”
“When?”
“Don’t act stupid, Selma. Which one of them drove Diddi to the bank, parked in the next street and drove him away afterwards?”
“I don’t know. Not me.”
“Selma, why did Ommi abscond from Kvíabryggja?”
“Ab-what?”
“Do a runner.”
Selma’s shoulders rose and fell in a shrug. “Dunno.”
“There has to be a good reason for it. He had less than a year to go and then he would have been out on parole. Why jeopardize that? Something to do with this Addi? Did they have some business together?”
“Dunno,” Selma said quietly, the sour looked fixed to her features.
“Come on, Selma. I know you’re not as thick as you make out. Ommi’s going away again for a good long time and if you’re not careful, so will you. What was Addi there for? Why did Ommi do a bunk? Something to do with Addi’s business, or was it something else?”
“Dunno,” Selma repeated stonily. “Look, I want a cigarette. I’ve been here for hours.”
“Sorry,” Gunna said. “It’s a government building, so it’s a smokeless zone.”
IT WAS PAST six o’clock when Gunna, Eiríkur and Helgi gathered to compare notes. All of them were tired after spending a full day in the interview rooms with Ommi, Selma and the taciturn Addi the Pill when he was brought back, one wrist in plaster and prepared only to comment bitterly on his ill-treatment. Gunna felt her uniform shirt sticking to her back and longed for a shower.
“I’m leaving in …” She looked at her watch, “five minutes and not a second longer. What have we found out?”
Helgi yawned and his phone yodelled to him as he switched it on. “Daft Diddi’s escapade was orchestrated by Ommi and Addi. No doubt. Even if Ommi didn’t have a good few years of his sentence ahead of him, we’d have grounds for keeping him. We have custody for Addi and it won’t be a problem to keep him in. What about Selma?”
“We’re letting her out tomorrow morning. Evil Eygló has been shouting about her daughter being banged up without good cause all day, so no harm in giving her a bit more to yell about.”
“Did you get anything out of Selma?” Helgi asked, scrolling through a day’s worth of accumulated text messages. “Shit. Halla wanted me home at four. Oh well. It’s the doghouse for me tonight,” he said, almost cheerfully.
“Selma knows a lot of it, certainly more than she’s letting on. What I really want to know is the Ommi-Bjartmar-Svana triangle. How do these three tie up? What are the links? Who owes who a favour? Who did Ommi do time for, and in return for what? If there was some kind of a deal, why abscond? Is Ommi acting on his own initiative or what? Did he do a runner because of something happening outside? If so, what? Was it Bjartmar he was doing the time for?”
Eiríkur looked blank. “I’ve no idea, chief. Really no idea. It’s like talking to a wall in there. I don’t know how long Addi the Pill has been sampling his own merchandise, but the guy is completely spaced out.”
Gunna shuffled through papers on her desk and screwed up tired eyes to look at the screen of her computer, scrolling through new emails and deleting as she went until only a few remained. She clicked Shut Down and stood up.
“All right, gents. We’ve done a long day’s crimebusting and I’ve had enough. Time to go home.”
THEY ALL THREE took gulps of fresh, cold air in the car park after a day inside. Helgi was fumbling for his keys as a patrol car entered the car park and drove straight to the admittance bay.
“Eight tomorrow, Helgi? I have a feeling that overtime isn’t going to be a problem for the next week or two, or at least until we have Svana Geirs sorted out.”
“Suits me,” Helgi said. “My exhaust’s on its last legs and a bit of overtime wouldn’t do any harm.”
Gunna squinted into the gloom and could make out Tinna Sigvaldsdóttir, the slightly built officer who had been first on the scene of Svana Geirs’ murder, getting out of the driver’s seat of the patrol car while her beefy male colleague emerged from the rear seat and a heavily built man in a leather jacket was unceremoniously hauled out with his hands cuffed behind him. Gunna caught a glimpse of a florid face, and even in the half-light and at a distance, she sensed that the man was drunk. The face was vaguely familiar and she wondered where from.
“Another pisshead, I expect,” Eiríkur said without a second glance.
“Ach, you don’t remember what it was like when we had real drunks in this country. Hard men who’d be on the piss for a week or more and travelled round in taxis with the clock ticking and a crate of vodka in the boot,” Helgi said. “Now we just get these doped-up fuckwits instead.”
“So that feller should get an award, should he, for keeping alive a grand old Icelandic tradition?” Gunna suggested.
“Bugger that, he should practically be in a museum,” Helgi snorted. “I have to say I regret the passing of the traditional old-school Icelandic pisshead,” he added sadly, while Eiríkur stared at him and Gunna burst out laughing.
“You sound like old Haddi when you say stuff like that. Sounds like you almost mean it.”
“Well, given a choice of dealing with drunks or dopeheads, I know which I’d choose,” Helgi said with finality, swinging his keys on his little finger. “Need a lift, Eiríkur?”
Eiríkur hesitated, seeing Helgi’s Skoda lurking in a corner of the car park.
“Go on,” Gunna urged him. “I had a ride in it once, and it’s not that scary.”
Saturday 20th
STEINI SNORED TUNEFULLY. It wasn’t an all-out rumble, or even the occasional thunderous snort. It was more a musical tenor hum, Gunna reflected, lying awake. It felt odd, even uncomfortable, to have a man in her bed regularly after so long. In the little house with its thin walls they had done their best to be quiet, not knowing if Laufey in the next room was asleep, awake, or blissfully unaware of anything other than what Steini playfully referred to as the stream of “Beatlemusic” coming through her headphones.