‘Soffía?’
‘That’s her. A sweet girl. Soffía got pregnant and the little boy, Ari, was born in April.’
‘Congratulations!’ Bára beamed. ‘Wow, Gunna a grandmother! That’s wonderful, surely?’
‘That’s the good part. Not long after Soffía got pregnant, Gísli, Laufey and I all went up to Vestureyri for my grandmother’s funeral. I stayed there with Laufey for a few days, but Gísli drove south the day after the funeral as he was going back to sea that night. He took a passenger south with him and the passenger got pregnant on the way.’
Bára sat in silence. ‘Shit,’ she said finally. ‘That’s terrible. When. .?’
‘Did baby number two appear? Kjartan made his appearance about two months after Ari.’
‘Shit,’ Bára repeated. ‘So who’s the girl?’
‘That’s what makes it all even better. She’s my brother Svanur’s stepdaughter, and at the beginning of last year Drífa showed up on my doorstep in floods of tears, and she’s still there.’
‘She’s living with you?’
‘She was until last summer when we managed to get her a social housing flat in the village, so she and the baby are living around the corner and my Laufey seems to spend as much time there as she does at home.’
‘Life’s never quiet or easy around you, is it?’ Bára said with a wan smile. ‘And there’s me moaning about having to shepherd these two snobs all day. Speaking of which,’ she said, looking at her watch. ‘I need to be there in a few minutes.’
Outside the café Bára turned up the collar of her coat against the sharp wind.
‘You want a lift?’
‘No, it’s all right. The Harbourside is right there and I need to have a walk around the back as well anyway.’
‘Fair enough. I’ll need to come and grill them again later today.’
‘Gunna,’ Bára said and hesitated. ‘Client confidentiality aside — you know how old habits die hard — and between ourselves.’
‘Yes?’
‘Jóhann’s as worried as hell, like I said. He tries to hide it, but it shows. She’s up to something as well, with all the calls and texts she leaves the room to take, but I haven’t figured out what it is yet.’
Orri’s back ached as he got slowly out of the truck, his high-vis jacket draped over one arm. In the canteen he listlessly changed out of his boots while his cup of coffee cooled on the table next to him.
‘All right, are you?’ Dóri asked, pushing his glasses up onto his bald head and putting down the crossword. ‘You look like shit, Orri.’
‘Slept badly.’
‘Never mind. Can you do a couple of hours tomorrow? Overtime?’
‘Yeah. Should be OK. Eight?’
‘Eight would be fine. Go on, go home and get your head down.’
Orri nodded. His head was heavy and the few hours of sleep had been no rest at all. On top of that, he found himself concerned at Lísa being so suspicious of him, not that he could blame her, he told himself ruefully. He extracted his phone from his jacket pocket and keyed in a text message to her, ending it with a smiley face that he would never normally have used, hoping it would get him out of cooking that night.
Alex stood in the corridor and smiled as Orri made to go back outside.
‘Hæ,’ Orri said.
‘Hey. Bruno ask about you,’ he said quietly.
‘Why? Is Bruno worried about my health?’
‘No. But maybe you should be, if you don’t get Bruno some goods.’
‘You tell Bruno he can go screw himself,’ Orri snarled in an angry retort. ‘I’m not at his beck and call, and you can tell him so. If there’s some gear, then I might let him have it, if he’s lucky. Or I might not.’
He stalked out without waiting for a response from Alex, who was startled by Orri’s unexpectedly angry outburst. In the year they had worked together, Alex hadn’t even heard Orri raise his voice, let alone snap back in fury, and he wondered what was wrong. Girlfriend trouble probably, he decided as he walked after him.
‘Orri, man. What’s the problem?’ He asked, hoping to sound friendly. ‘I said, Bruno asks about you, nothing else.’
‘You know, Alex,’ Orri said. ‘Sometimes I wonder if this mysterious Bruno really exists or not.’
Eiríkur felt his eyelids droop. He had watched half a day’s footage spanning the downtown streets of central Reykjavík from four of the series of cameras with not a sign of anyone in a green fleece dark enough and with distinctive stripes to match the fibres found in the basement of Kópavogsbakki fifty.
The cameras closest to Aunt Bertha were the ones he began with, and while the shop’s owner was far from sure what time of day it had been when the man came in, he started each recording a few minutes before Aunt Bertha opened its doors at ten. Two hours later he had fastforwarded through two hours of footage from the four closest cameras and was starting to wonder if the woman had the right date.
He took a break for half an hour, chatted with the communications centre’s staff and went outside for a few minutes’ fresh air to clear his head before starting again. He decided to stick with the same four cameras as before and told himself to keep to the area around the shop before going to the cameras further away.
By now the streets were busier, with a thicker mass of pedestrians. Eiríkur paid attention to those walking with purpose rather than the ones who ambled the streets looking in windows here and there. After midday the streets began to fill with people in hiking boots and padded anoraks and he cursed the fact that a cruise ship must have been at the quay and disgorged a few hundred tourists to spend a couple of hours looking at the sights.
The ticker in the corner of the screen said 15.32 when a nondescript figure in a yellow waistcoat walked past, and Eiríkur hardly noticed the dark green fleece with two narrow yellow stripes down the sleeve until the man had passed the camera and was out of sight. Suddenly he was wide awake and rewound the figure’s progress, this time with his eyes intently on the screen. He replayed the sequence as the man walked under the camera and away from it, slipping off the waistcoat as he walked and stuffing it into a pocket.
He stopped the replay and called out to one of the others. ‘Hey, how do I follow this guy?’
‘Found a villain, have you?’
One of the communications staff, a headset on one ear with its lead trailing at his side, leaned over the monitors.
‘This guy,’ Eiríkur said, pointing at the round-shouldered figure stopped in mid-stride.
‘All right. That’s Austurstræti. You know where this guy is going?’
‘A shop called Aunt Bertha.’
‘The shop full of old crap on Ingólfsstræti?’
‘I think they like to think of it as an antiques shop, rather than a place full of old junk. But yeah, that’s the one.’
‘In that case, we should be able to follow him over the street into Bankastræti.’
His fingers flickered over the keyboard and a click of the mouse later they saw the dark green fleece appear, walking towards them, and this time Eiríkur could see the man’s face.
‘Stop it there for a second, can you?’
The communications officer clicked. The picture froze and he zoomed in. Eiríkur found himself looking at eyes that glanced sideways out of the picture, shoulders hunched and a deeply ordinary face. Short brown hair and a few days’ worth of stubble surrounded a squat nose. There was a determined look on the face, its lips pressed together as if the man was concentrating and defensive, keeping the rest of the world at bay.
‘Can I save that as a still image?’ Eiríkur asked.
The mouse clicked a couple of times. ‘Done. You want to see where he’s going?’
As the image unfroze, the man continued, looking to left and right, until he disappeared around a corner. The communications officer looked expectantly at Eiríkur. ‘That’s Ingólfsstræti, and the shop he’s going to is a hundred metres away.’