Iceland didn’t have serial killers. Or, at least, not up till now. Magnus profoundly hoped that wasn’t about to change.
‘I said, let’s not jump to any conclusions. We’ll see what Edda comes up with. Get in touch with the university. And Missing Persons. We need an ID.’
‘Magnús!’
It was the constable.
Magnus and Vigdís joined her outside the crime-scene perimeter.
‘Got a missing person’s report. From an address just around the corner.’
‘Yes?’
‘Katrín Ingvarsdóttir. Nineteen years old. Dark hair, blue eyes, about one-sixty tall.’
Magnus glanced at the body. It matched the description: a bit over five feet long, blue eyes staring in glassy shock, black hair matted with dirt. ‘Come on,’ he said to Vigdís.
They drove, but it was only a couple of hundred metres to the address, a grey concrete house broken up into apartments, a pile of bikes leaning against the wall indicating its student inhabitants. Magnus rang the bell, his warrant card at the ready, steeling himself to deliver the bad news. A female voice answered, barely comprehensible over the screech of static from the intercom.
A moment later a young woman appeared, her eyes wide with fear, fear for bad news she had already imagined.
But it was Magnus who was surprised.
‘Dísa?’
Thirty-Six
Dísa wiped the tears from her eyes as Vigdís handed her a mug of instant coffee. They were in Dísa and Kata’s tiny student flat.
‘Was she... raped?’ Dísa asked.
‘We think so,’ said Vigdís. ‘We won’t know for sure until she has been examined. She was found naked.’
‘Actually, we don’t know yet,’ said Magnus.
Vigdís glanced at him sharply. It was bad form to contradict a colleague. But Magnus wanted to stop the rape assumption taking hold.
Dísa noticed the look between the two detectives. ‘How was she killed?’
‘She was strangled,’ said Magnus. ‘With a cord or rope of some kind, probably. We think last night.’
‘Oh, God.’ Dísa stared miserably down at her mug.
‘You reported Katrín missing at twelve-forty a.m.?’ Magnus asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she hadn’t come home.’
‘Lots of students don’t come home every night.’
Dísa nodded. ‘That’s true. She was going to see her boyfriend Matti — her ex-boyfriend. She told me she was going to explain why she split up with him. So I didn’t expect her to stay the night.’
‘They could have made up?’ said Magnus.
‘I know. That’s why I called him. He said she had never shown up. So I called the police. They didn’t seem very interested. I knew something had happened to her! I had to beg them to take her details.’
‘It’s not odd that the police weren’t concerned about a student staying out all night,’ said Magnus gently. ‘What’s odd is that you were.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why were you so scared something would happen to Kata?’
‘Something did happen, didn’t it?’ she said defiantly.
‘Something you were expecting?’
‘No! Why would I be expecting something to happen to her?’
‘That’s a good question.’
‘Well, I wasn’t.’
Magnus paused. ‘Do you think this attack may have something to do with Thomocoin? Or your mother’s murder?’
‘Of course not,’ said Dísa. ‘Why should it? You said it was rape, didn’t you?’
‘No,’ Magnus corrected. ‘We said it looked like rape.’
‘I don’t know why she was killed,’ Dísa protested, another tear running down her cheek.
‘There have been only two murders in the whole of Iceland this month,’ said Magnus. ‘Both involving victims you knew very well. That can’t be a coincidence.’
‘Can’t it?’ Dísa scrambled to collect her thoughts. ‘Kata had nothing to do with Thomocoin. She wasn’t interested in it at all whenever I talked about it.’ Then a thought seemed to strike her. ‘But that might be why I assumed the worst when she didn’t come home. Because of what happened to Mum.’
That was possible. But it looked to Magnus like Dísa had stumbled on a plausible explanation for her fear for her friend’s life.
‘Have you done anything about Thomocoin?’ Dísa asked.
‘I made some inquiries,’ Magnus said. ‘It does sound dodgy. But I couldn’t find any direct link between Thomocoin and your mother’s murder, or even much of a link between Gunni and Thomocoin apart from some email correspondence with Fjóla.’
‘What about Sharp?’ Dísa asked. ‘Did you talk to him? Is he still in Iceland?’
‘I did. But he went back to London at the end of last week. The British police tried to arrest him, but he had already fled. As had Jérôme Carmin in Paris. Interpol thinks they both flew to Panama via Madrid.’
‘So is that it for Thomocoin?’ said Dísa.
‘It looks like it,’ said Magnus.
Dísa nodded.
Magnus wasn’t sure how she was taking that news. ‘Are you happy? That Thomocoin has blown up?’
Dísa sighed. ‘They deserve it. But it means that all those investors have definitely lost their money, doesn’t it? That my grandparents will lose their farm?’
Magnus nodded. His own father’s death had blown up his family, although that had taken years. His grandparents, his uncle, his little brother: all had been damaged. Or caused the damage. Murders were messy and catastrophically destructive to the survivors.
Magnus was on the side of the survivors. He was on Dísa’s side. But he needed her help.
‘And now Kata’s dead,’ she said.
‘Are you quite sure Thomocoin has nothing to do with that?’ Magnus asked.
‘Not that I know of,’ said Dísa firmly.
Magnus let the silence hang.
But then he moved on. They needed information from Dísa: timings of Kata’s movements the day before, details about her boyfriend Matti, her address in Dalvík, her closest friends at university, her professors.
And, lastly, they needed Dísa to identify the body in situ. The sooner they had a definite ID the better; if it turned out the victim wasn’t Kata after all, they would avoid wasting a lot of time.
It was Kata.
Magnus’s heart went out to Dísa as he saw her glance quickly at the body, still uncovered under the bush, and recoil. She had lost her mother. She had lost her best friend.
And, unless Magnus was very mistaken, she was scared.
‘Sorry I contradicted you back there,’ Magnus murmured to Vigdís. ‘About the rape.’
‘I see why now,’ said Vigdís.
‘Do you think she’s hiding something about Thomocoin?’
‘I’m damned sure she is.’
A major murder investigation swung into action. Magnus called Thelma to warn her to play down the rape angle with the press until it had been confirmed by a physical examination. He didn’t mention Thomocoin to her. But he did when he called Árni in Dalvík and asked him to check whether Kata or any of her relatives were involved in the cryptocurrency.
Matti the ex-boyfriend was interviewed, as were his friends, as were Kata’s friends. The international airport at Keflavík confirmed that Sharp hadn’t slipped back into the country. The police search soon discovered a spot of blood on the pavement thirty metres away from where the body had been found, which indicated where Kata had been murdered. CCTV was examined, neighbours questioned. Although Kata’s phone wasn’t found, her computer and a tablet were, and by lunchtime keyword algorithms were swarming all over her online life.