Gunna looked at him and frowned. “Bjössi, dear and trusted comrade-in-arms. Of course I was deadly serious. You don’t think I’d push him that far if there wasn’t something behind it? The more I find out, the more convinced I am. I want to be sure who did kill that poor bloke. There must be a bloody good reason for it, and anyone who can afford to give Long Ommi a payday for doing a long stretch must have seriously deep pockets.”
“IT’S A RIGHT pig’s breakfast,” Gunna announced.
Ívar Laxdal’s brooding presence dominated the room. Eiríkur and Helgi sat in silence, ready to be called on.
“Go on,” he said. “Just the outline, not too many details.”
Gunna took a deep breath and picked up a marker pen. The others sat in silence while she drew a circle on the board and wrote a series of names around it.
“Steindór Hjálmarsson was killed ten years ago in a fight. Ómar Magnússon was convicted of the murder, which is all on record. Our information tells me that Ómar wasn’t responsible for the killing. It seems to me that someone was concerned that Steindór was going to blow the whistle on some very dodgy dealing with several municipal authorities in property that subsequently became extremely valuable. I’m convinced that Ómar was doing time for someone else.”
She drew arrows across the circle on the board to indicate the relationships.
“Now, Óskar Óskarsson and Svanhildur Mjöll Sigurgeirsdóttir were both among the people who gave statements to the effect that Ómar had argued with Steindór on the night he died. Ómar absconds from prison a few months before he would have been up for parole. While he’s on the loose, Óskar is badly beaten and Svana Geirs is murdered. Also Daft Diddi is beaten and then intimidated into committing a violent robbery. With me so far, everyone?”
The three men nodded.
“We have all sorts going on here. Svana Geirs had turned herself into some kind of high-class hooker with an exclusive clientele. We’ve spoken to all of her regular clients, as far as we know, and some of them have sticky fingers. Bjartmar Arnarson and Jónas Valur Hjaltason didn’t seem too concerned that we knew what was going on. In fact, Bjartmar appears to have dropped out of the Svana club. The other two, Hallur Hallbjörnsson and Bjarki Steinsson, are extremely jumpy. Hallur for understandable political reasons, and Bjarki because his wife will rip his balls off when she finds out.”
Gunna paused for breath. “Questions?”
“Get on with it,” Ívar Laxdal growled.
“We also have the problem of Bjartmar’s wife, still in hospital after what looks like an arson attack. Bjartmar himself has a very unsavoury past. He owned the club where the altercation between Steindór and Ómar took place. Ómar and Óskar were both working for Bjartmar, ostensibly as bouncers, but both were certainly involved in Bjartmar’s other illegal business interests.”
“Such as?” Ívar Laxdal asked.
“Dope. Blacklights was a clearing house for all kinds of narcotics, but Bjartmar was very careful never to get his own hands dirty. The man came into some money in the late nineties, and within a year he’d gone legit and was probably making more money legally than he had done illegally.”
“How?”
“Property investments, for the most part. He bought houses and sold them as soon as the value rose by twenty per cent. Prices shot up between 2000 and 2007, so he made a fortune and put a lot of it into a similar business in Spain selling property to elderly people looking to retire somewhere warm. But he was still heavily into property and development here at the same time. One of his companies, Rigel Investment, owns the building just round the corner on Lindargata where Svana Geirs lived.”
“It’s convoluted, isn’t it?” Ívar Laxdal observed with a rare shadow of a smile.
“It’s a step up from speeding tickets,” Gunna admitted. “Everything is linked somehow. Wherever you look, someone else had an interest as well.”
Eiríkur put a hand up. “Er, chief. Actually there’s more. While you were out this morning, I did a bit of digging and spoke to Björgvin over the road. Bjartmar was a director of Kleifaberg as well. Don’t know if you were aware of that,” he said, as if this was something that he should have found out long before.
Gunna circled the company on the whiteboard, which was now covered in arrows, and added another between Bjartmar and Kleifaberg. “Good grief, anything else?”
“Well, yes, there is,” Eiríkur said nervously. “There were a few more shareholders in Kleifaberg, including Bjarki Steinsson and a woman called Helena Rós Pálsdóttir—Hallur Hallbjörnsson’s wife.”
“Ah, so the plot continues to thicken, Gunnhildur,” Ívar Laxdal said approvingly. “But I need to see results for the murder of Svana Geirs. Do you have anyone in the frame?”
“As it is, I don’t believe we are close to an arrest. We have Omar Magnússon in the picture, with evidence that puts him there during the week leading up to her death, but the same is true of half a dozen other people. Bjartmar has a rock-solid alibi, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t get someone else to carry it out on his behalf. We can place Jónas Valur, Bjarki Steinsson and Hallur in her flat during that same week, Bjarki on the same day, but we still have no evidence that any of them may have committed the crime.”
“Motives?”
“Ah, Omar is the obvious one, as she had been a witness over the Steindór Hjálmarsson murder in 2000, and this is what I feel we need to crack more than anything. Who was paying Omar to do the time? What went wrong and why did Omar abscond? If we can find that out, then I’m certain everything else will fall into place. I’m sure Oskar knows, but he’s terrified. I’m sure Jónas Valur knows, but he’s saying nothing, possibly to protect his son.”
“Next step?”
“Oskar. I’ve already pushed him harder than I should have, considering he’s a sick man. But I reckon he’s our way in.”
JÓN ADMIRED THE clean lines of the shotgun, the deep patina that much polishing had given the stock and the gunmetal menace of the twin barrels. He and the old man had shot geese and ptarmigan every winter while his father had lived, first using the old man’s shotgun that Jón had left under the bench at his mother’s house. A year before he died, Jón’s father had bought him a shotgun of his own, and the two of them doubled their haul of geese that winter, to the consternation of his mother, expected to pluck, clean and roast them.
With the old man gone, Jón had little heart for spending time on the hills and fields they had walked together, and the shotguns languished in the cellar, occasionally taken out to be cleaned, polished, oiled and put away.
Jón winced to himself as he put the barrels between the jaws of the vice and gently closed them. What he was about to do didn’t feel right, but he picked up a hacksaw from the bench and laid the blade against the barrels, shutting his eyes as he pushed the saw forward for the first rasping cut.
GUNNA LISTENED TO the hired car’s suspension complain every time it hit a bump in the road. Helgi himself seemed blissfully unaware of the bumps and Gunna decided that he must have become so used to the noise that if it were to disappear he would start to be worried about it.
“Run out of cars again, have we, Helgi?”
“Yeah. Sometimes. Here, I’ve been thinking,” he said and lapsed back into silence.
“About what?”
“Long Ommi. Svana Geirs was murdered between twelve and three in the afternoon, right?”
“As far as we’re aware. That fits in with the last call on her phone, and Miss Cruz said that body temperature indicated she’d been dead between six and three hours.”
“All right. So if she was killed at two, give or take an hour or so each way, twelve-ish at the earliest, then it would have been a bit of a rush for Ommi to get to Keflavík to give Óskar Óskarsson a hiding, wouldn’t it?”