Ómar swallowed. ‘So what are you going to do?’
An idea came to Dísa. She let her shoulders sag. ‘I’ll give it back. Right at the last minute. You can tell him that. Go and tell him that.’
Her father just sat there.
‘Go!’ she said.
He swallowed. ‘What about my bitcoin? Will you return that to me?’
Dísa stared at him. ‘Look me in the eye and tell me you will kill me if I don’t give it back. And I will. But you have to threaten to kill me first.’
Ómar met her eyes for a couple of seconds. He scrambled to his feet and stumbled out of her flat without a backward glance.
Weak. So weak.
Dísa waited a couple of minutes and followed him out. The brief walk to Matti’s place would be good to clear her head.
Jói sat in his car, watching Dísa’s building. He saw his father go in and then come out again.
Ten minutes later, he saw Dísa emerge.
He was still hopeful that Dísa would do the sensible thing and return his bitcoin. But there was one other way to get his coin back. It was a long shot, but worth a try.
Ideally, he would have liked to pay Tecumseh to do it. But Tecumseh was gone and there was no time to line up a replacement. Jói had transferred the forty thousand dollars in bitcoin he owed him for the hit immediately. He didn’t want Tecumseh as an enemy.
Jói would just have to do his own dirty work from now on.
He waited another ten minutes and then walked around the block to the road behind Dísa’s. He had already checked the street and identified the right house.
He was strangely nervous. He had done a good job for months dealing with the vicissitudes of Thomocoin and had taken life-and-death decisions coolly. But that was from behind a computer. Out in the real world, a bit of breaking and entering in a Reykjavík street in daylight scared him.
He pulled himself together and boldly walked along the side of the house and through a small gate into a back garden. No furtive glances, no hesitation; he wanted to give the impression of a man with a perfect right to go where he was going. He swiftly crossed the small yard and slipped through the bushes at the back.
He had noticed the door with a window at the back of the hallway in Dísa’s building. The building had three floors, presumably all containing students. Dísa’s was the top. There were no lights showing on the ground floor, but he could see a yellow glow behind a curtain in the middle storey. He slipped on some gloves, both to protect his hands and wrists from broken glass and to avoid fingerprints. He smashed the glass and waited a few seconds.
If anyone came to investigate, he would run.
No one came.
He reached in and opened the door from the inside.
Quick. Up the stairs. Dísa’s door wasn’t even locked.
He had listed in his head the most likely places she would hide her pink USB wallet, accepting the possibility that she had kept it with her. It turned out it was still stuck in her laptop, which was lying on the counter in the kitchen.
He yanked the stick out of the machine, slipped out of the apartment, crept down the stairs and left the property by the front door.
In fifteen minutes he was back in his own flat.
He stuck the USB stick into the most powerful of his three computers.
Password protected.
He started with the obvious: ‘1234’; ‘password’ and its Icelandic equivalent ‘lykilord’. Dísa’s date of birth in different formats. ‘Dalvík’. ‘Bonny’. ‘Bonnie’ — Jói didn’t know how to spell Dísa’s horse’s name.
None of them worked, but that was OK. There was no sign that the USB stick had a finite number of tries before it would lock, so he fired up his favourite password cracker and set it to work.
He sat and watched it for a few seconds — it would only take that long to crack a simple password — but the password Dísa had chosen was clearly not a simple one, so Jói just let it run, chugging through the combinations of words and numbers.
The password cracker was top of the range; there was a good chance he wouldn’t have to see his threat through.
Forty-One
Magnus heard the squeak and looked up to see Thelma approaching his desk with her habitual loping gate. Her false leg had started squeaking a few days before. Thelma refused to be embarrassed about it, but it clearly annoyed her. No one dared mention it; presumably, it would take more than a squirt of WD40 to fix.
‘How’s it going?’ she asked.
It was late: everyone else had gone home.
Magnus nodded at his computer screen. ‘Just going through the interviews today.’
‘What’s it look like?’
‘Not sure yet. There are no physical signs of sexual assault or really much of a struggle. The attacker probably grabbed her from behind and strangled her with a cord, dragged her off and stripped her.’
‘Why did he strip her if there wasn’t a sexual motive? Could he have been disturbed?’
‘It’s possible.’ Magnus shrugged. ‘Maybe he was trying to put us off the scent?’
‘Off the scent from what?’
‘I remember a similar case in Boston,’ said Magnus. ‘It looked like a sexual assault. Turned out it was a professional hit.’
‘You think a pro did this?’
‘It’s something to bear in mind.’
‘Why would a professional killer be involved? Was she dealing?’ There were drug gangs in Iceland, and they had the occasional turf war.
‘No. She didn’t even take drugs — her friends are adamant about that.’
‘What about the boyfriend? I understand she had recently dumped him?’
‘That’s right. He was waiting in his flat all evening for her with his two roommates, so unless they are covering for him, he didn’t do it. In theory, he could have hired a professional to do it, but he just doesn’t look the type.’
‘But you’re keeping an open mind?’
‘Always.’ Magnus was thinking. Thelma let him.
‘Yes?’ she said at last.
‘There’s the Dalvík angle.’
Thelma listened. ‘OK.’
‘Kata came from Dalvík. Helga Hafsteinsdóttir was murdered in Dalvík. Helga was Dísa’s mother; Kata was her best friend. There’s a connection.’
‘There could be.’
‘I’ve got Árni checking whether any of Kata’s relatives were involved in Thomocoin.’
‘And were they?’
‘So far, no.’
‘So at least we know there’s no Thomocoin connection.’
‘We don’t know that,’ said Magnus. ‘We need to look further.’
‘I can see how there might be a Dalvík angle or a Dísa angle,’ said Thelma. ‘Look for links between Kata and Gunni, perhaps. Maybe he had an affair with her in Dalvík? But don’t get dragged into Thomocoin unless you are sure that there is a real connection, do you understand me, Magnús?’
‘You know what murder investigations are like. You can’t be sure there’s a real connection until you go looking for it.’
‘The Thomocoin scandal is going to be big; the press is going to be all over it. The last thing we need is for them to find you have been interviewing the scammers about murder. That would create the kind of shitstorm that could bring down governments.’
‘But what if it’s true, Thelma?’ Magnus was doing his best to control his temper.
‘If there is a link and you have proof, fine. But that’s not the case, is it?’
‘No,’ said Magnus. He meant not yet, but he didn’t say it. Thelma was right he was a long way from establishing a link. And the Gunni — Kata angle was worth pursuing. There was some connection between the two murders; he was sure of it.