“Who was this?”
“I don’t know.” He waved a hand towards the jacket hanging on the back of a chair. “Look in the pocket. You’ll see.”
Gunna gestured for Bjössi to look as Bjarki continued, speaking faster, his voice rising from a whisper to a more normal tone.
“Yesterday there was a text as well. So I thought, why bother? I’d just go. I have enough to live on. I was just going to walk away and leave whoever it is to tell Kristrún whatever he wants. I don’t care any more. The house and the business are all in her and the children’s names. She can keep the lot, all those stupid crystal knick-knacks and pictures that give you a headache. I’ve had enough.”
Behind her, Bjössi carefully unfolded a sheet of paper, typed with a dozen lines. Gunna saw with relief that he had put on gloves to read it. “Have you any idea where these demands were coming from?”
“Some man. I have no idea who. Just a phone number, nothing else.”
“And the note? How did that get to you? Post?”
“It was pushed under the windshield wiper of my car yesterday morning. I heard about Hallur and then Jónas Valur, and I decided that was all the warning I needed after I went to see Hallur in hospital yesterday.”
“What do you know about what happened to him?”
“Only that he would never have taken his own life, never,” he said with conviction. “Hallur always comes out smiling. He’s one of nature’s survivors.”
Gunna turned to Bjössi. “What is it?”
“Demand for cash. Twenty thousand euros. ‘Have it ready. You will be told when and where to hand it over,’ it says here.”
“A classy sort of blackmailer, then, wanting foreign currency.”
“Understandable, I’d have thought, considering how valuable Icelandic cash is these days.”
“All right. We’d best get that to Technical as soon as we can and see what they make of it,” Gunna said, and turned back to Bjarki. “I’m sorry. I can’t allow you to leave the country.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“Not yet. But you tried to leave the country with a large amount of foreign currency, which I’m sure a man in your position is aware is illegal. Plus you’re a key witness in a serious case. If you attempt to leave the country, I’ll make sure you’re stopped and I’ll get an injunction to prevent you from travelling.”
“I can’t go back to Kristrún,” he said with certainty.
“In that case we’ll get you a hotel room for the night. I’ll be along to see you again in the morning, and then you can make other arrangements.”
Tuesday 30th
GUNNA BANGED WITH a fist on the door of Bjarki Steinsson’s room, with Eiríkur behind her.
“Don’t tell me the bloody man’s not here. Eiríkur, run down to reception again, will you, and find out if anyone’s seen him. Failing that, get somebody up here with a pass key,” she instructed. Eiríkur left at a jog along the corridor, his footfalls soundless in the deep beige carpet.
Beige and boring, Gunna thought. Just like Bjarki bloody Steinsson.
“Bjarki! Open the bloody door, will you! It’s the police!” She yelled, hammering on the door again.
She paced the corridor back and forth, banging the wall with her fist and feeling her knuckles sting. Eventually Eiríkur appeared at the far end of the corridor with the portly figure of the hotel’s manager puffing at his side.
“Open that, will you?” she instructed the manager.
“It’s extremely irregular,” the manager grumbled. “I can’t open a guest’s room just like that.”
“Yes you damn well can, and quickly. We’ve had enough bodies as it is,” Gunna told him grimly.
At the mention of bodies, the manager’s eyes bulged in immediate alarm and he swiped a card through a slot. The door swung open and he stood back to let Gunna and Eiríkur enter the room first. The clatter of running water was the first thing Gunna noticed, followed by the steam coming past the slightly ajar bathroom door, and the reek of sulphur.
“Bjarki!” Gunna called out. “Are you there?”
The bedroom was empty, the duvet on the bed thrown back. Gunna took a deep breath and pushed open the bathroom door. A cloud of steam billowed past her. She peered into the gloom, the room’s light hardly piercing the steam and reduced to a white orb in the middle of the ceiling. She could see the water running at full power in the shower cubicle, and a dark shape against the cubicle wall showed her where Bjarki Steinsson was.
Here we go again, she thought, turning to Eiríkur. “We’re going to need an ambulance, I reckon. Get one called, will you?” she told him and gingerly opened the cubicle door.
Gunna looked down at the body curled against the wall and breathed a sigh of relief as Bjarki Steinsson gazed up at her with water cascading through his thin hair and down his face. There was misery in his eyes—but at least he was alive.
She gestured to Eiríkur to take a step back before she squatted down on her haunches and looked into Bjarki Steinsson’s blank brown eyes rimmed with red.
“Bjarki?” she said gently. “What happened?”
“It’s just too much,” he said hollowly.
“Look, come on out of the shower, will you? You’ve been in there for a long time.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said finally, after a long moment’s thought. “None of it matters now.”
Gunna stood up. She leaned over him to turn off the flow of scalding water and there was a sudden silence. She pulled a thick towel from the rail, opened it and held it out to him.
“It’s going to be all right,” she said softly. “Come on, we’ll get you dried off and sorted out. All right?”
He nodded dumbly and dragged himself unsteadily to his feet, every movement seeming to cost him pain. Gunna was surprised at just how thin his limbs were as he stepped, shivering already, from the shower cubicle. He immediately sat on the closed toilet seat and his shoulders hunched forward, emphasizing the pale paunch that contrasted with the thinness of the rest of his body. She wrapped the towel around his shoulders and pulled another from the rack.
“Get the manager out of here, and make sure he keeps quiet,” she said to Eiríkur in a matter-of-fact voice so as not to alarm the forlorn man sitting in front of her. “And look out for that ambulance, will you?”
Eiríkur disappeared, taking the manager with him.
“All right, Bjarki. They’ve all gone. Stand up again, please.”
He obeyed as if in a trance, and she reached around him to wrap the second towel about his waist before taking his hand to lead him to the bedroom. She sat him down on the end of the bed and crouched down in front of him.
“Bjarki, tell me what happened. Have you taken any pills or anything like that?”
The question seemed to spark him into consciousness.
“God, no.”
“What then?”
“I was just going to go away. Away from everything. I’ve wanted to do it for years, just walk away.”
“Where to?”
“To the house in Spain.”
“You have a house there?”
Bjarki nodded. “Nobody knows about it, not even the witch,” he whispered. “Bjartmar fixed it up for me at a good price. I was going to go there and not bother coming back.”
“So what went wrong?”
“You did,” he said with a first flash of animation. “Stopped me at the airport yesterday.”
“Customs stopped you leaving the country with an illegal amount of foreign currency,” Gunna reminded him.
“Illegal, crap. All the top dogs can do it. If you know the right people, you can do what you want.”
“But why yesterday? What brought this on if you’ve been planning it for so long?”
Bjarki shook his head. “We went there a couple of times, Svana and I. Nobody knew us. It was perfect. Then she died.”