“You’re looking for me?” he asked doubtfully.
“Yup, Gunnhildur Gísladóttir. Serious Crime Unit. A quiet word would be useful.”
“I recognize you,” Gulli Olafs said, eyes narrowed. “There was a feature about you in a newspaper last year, wasn’t there?”
“There was,” Gunna said gravely. “I can see that my notoriety goes before me.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“Can we go somewhere quiet?”
Gulli Olafs held his hands up and looked around the cramped office with its desks and a few booths. “There’s nowhere right now. The meeting room’s in use and I don’t know how long they’ll be. Is it something particular you want to ask me about?”
“Yes. Steindór Hjálmarsson.”
Startled, Gulli Olafs took a step back and then looked around him. “I think we’d better go outside,” he said heavily, nodding his head almost imperceptibly at the young man at the front desk.
They walked the few hundred metres to Grandakaffi, one of the workmen’s cafés. It looked to be thirty years behind the times in the increasingly smart dock area, but still saw a thriving trade for its traditionally down-to-earth food.
“Been here before?” Gulli Olafs asked as they went into the quiet café with the lunchtime rush over.
“Many times,” Gunna assured him, taking coffee and a roll, and fumbling for coins.
“No, on me,” Gulli Olafs said, handing over a note and asking for a receipt, which he folded carefully away.
They sat in the far corner of the glass-fronted extension and Gunna noticed that deep stress lines ran across Gulli Olafs forehead, making him look older than he was.
“Steindór Hjálmarsson. You knew him well, or so Hulda Björk tells me?”
“Yes. I was one of his closest friends, one of his few close friends. You’ve spoken to Hulda?”
“I have. Steindór’s death is linked indirectly to an investigation that we have in progress at the moment, not something I can say too much about. But I’m trying to get a picture of what happened, and why.”
“Omar Magnússon, I suppose?” Gulli Olafs asked with a sideways look.
“Well, yes. It’s not hard to put two and two together.”
“Not when you’re dealing with gossip all day long it isn’t. I knew he had escaped from prison and wondered why. His sentence must be almost up by now.”
“Well, no. There’s about a third of it left to go, but he would have been up for parole at the end of this year and would probably have been out if he’d kept quiet and behaved himself. He’s not someone you ever had any dealings with?”
“God, no,” he said with a shudder. “I saw him at the trial and I have to say that he was one of the most evil people I have ever set eyes on. He just radiated arrogance and … How should I put it? There was a ruthlessness about him that was quite unnerving. Absolutely no shred of remorse to be seen.”
“That about sums up Long Ommi,” Gunna agreed. “I’m particularly interested in Steindór in the weeks before his death. Was there anything about him that was odd, different, maybe?”
Gulli Ólafs stared out of the window across the wasteland between the café and the empty dock and to the shell of the unfinished opera house on the far side of the harbour.
“Steindór had graduated the year before and had fallen into a fairly decent job at that import-export company. He wasn’t happy there. He was being given more work than he was able to do comfortably and he was also doing work for other companies within the group, which had a very wide portfolio of business. There was fish, there were cars, scrap metal, electrical goods, all sorts,” he said finally, speaking slowly as if trying to recall every detail.
“Kleifar? Or Kleifaberg, maybe?”
“That’s it. But they were getting into property as well. This was before the banks were privatized and property prices hadn’t started to shoot up. If I’d known, I’d have bought a house then,” he added ruefully. “But about a fortnight before the, um, incident, Steindór came to see me. I was in my first real job as well, as a reporter on a daily back then. Steindór said that he was sure there was something going on that he wasn’t comfortable with. Kleifaberg and a couple of others were buying up property at an unprecedented rate, a lot of it owned by the city, at some surprisingly low prices. It was being practically given away. This was land that has housing estates and hypermarkets on it today.”
“A bit of insider trading going on?”
“Exactly. Some highly placed people within the city council were allowing potentially very valuable properties to be sold quietly to their friends.”
“So what did you do? What did Steindór want you to do?”
“He was giving me a fantastic story, but unfortunately it was a bit too dynamite. It reflected badly on his employers and several municipal authorities. He promised me more information and some documents to back him up.”
“But then he was killed in a fight?”
“Precisely.”
Gulli Ólafs stared out of the window, where a fat black fly buzzed in the corner. He sighed deeply. “I had nothing to go on. No evidence, no documents. I asked some uncomfortable questions but got only fudged answers in response. The guy who was my editor at the time didn’t want me to pursue it and discouraged me from digging into it.”
“So what did you do?”
“There wasn’t anything I could do. There were no real avenues open to investigate. Look, I was the new boy in the office. I’d been told in no uncertain terms that if I were to continue digging into this, my career would finish before it had begun. Then I had a warning.”
Gunna frowned. “What sort of warning?”
“I remember it like it was yesterday. I left the office late one evening and was surprised when I got to the car and found it wasn’t locked, but just thought I must have forgotten. So I got in and was about to turn the key when there was a hand around my neck.”
“What? Someone was in the back seat?”
“Yeah, and a rope. Whoever it was pulled a rope round my throat and round the back of the seat until I was practically choking. He said, very clearly, “Back off. Leave it. You know what.” That was it. A deep voice. That’s all I can say. Didn’t see anything.”
“You didn’t go to the police?”
“God, no. I was terrified. Went home, threw up, bolted the door and stayed in for a week. It’s a long time ago now, but I still wake up in the night sometimes. That’s the first time I’ve told anyone about this, ever.”
“I see. It may be a stupid question, but do you have any idea who it might have been, or who was sending you a message?” Gulli Ólafs shrugged. “I’m as sure as it’s possible to be that it was something to do with Kleifaberg or the people who owned it, and still do.”
“And that is … ?”
“He doesn’t do quite so much these days, but I guess Jónas Valur has made his pile and prefers to spend most of his time on a golf course in Portugal, especially now that he’s a highly respectable figure and a well-known party stalwart.”
JÓNAS VALUR HaJALTASON glowered. The urbane businessman with the convincingly sincere smile Gunna had spoken to before was gone, replaced by a snarling man who radiated suspicion.
“Where’s your son?” she asked without any kind of preamble, after she had brought him unwillingly to his front door. “He’s overseas.
He doesn’t live in Iceland these days.”
“Where?”
“You’ll have to ask him that yourself.”
“You’re aware that obstructing an investigation is an offence?” Gunna snapped.