As Magnus drove into Hverfisgata, Ingileif’s words swirled around his head. They stirred up his thoughts into a mixture of excitement, nervousness and confusion.
He could feel Ingileif pulling him towards her. He had no idea whether he should let himself go, or fight it. Ingileif was dangerous, at least for him. She always had been. He knew he had an important decision to make, something that would alter the course of his life — and that of other people — but he didn’t know how he was going to make it.
And what about Eygló? Eygló who trusted him. Eygló who wanted to build a family with him. Eygló on whom he could always rely. Eygló whom he loved.
Didn’t he?
As he entered the conference room full of police officers, he firmly pushed Ingileif to one side. He had a murder to solve. Probably two murders.
He stood in front of the crowd and kicked off the briefing. The volume of information had built up in the previous twenty-four hours, but precious little useful had come out of it.
The autopsy showed no sign of semen or injury that could have resulted from rape. Death was by asphyxiation from strangling by a nylon cord. No signs of a struggle apart from the blood on the nose. No DNA from the attacker; nothing under the victim’s fingernails. Some fibre that may have come from gloves; Edda’s forensics team were working on pinning down the brand.
There were no CCTV cameras at the scene or even on the short route from Kata’s apartment to where she was killed. But a camera situated a couple of hundred metres towards the centre of town from the apartment showed several single men walking that way, three of whom returned later in the evening. The police would try to identify these men; officers would be standing by the camera that evening in case it was a regular route for one or two of the three.
The jilted boyfriend was an obvious line of inquiry: Vigdís would interview him again that morning, as well as his two flatmates who claimed to be with him all evening.
Magnus mentioned that Árni in Akureyri was checking the Dalvík angle and any possible connection with Helga’s murder. He didn’t mention Thomocoin, or the call from the DA’s office in North Carolina. Not yet.
Nor did he mention Thomocoin at the quick press conference he held after the briefing. But he did everything he could to scotch rumours that there was a rapist on the streets of Reykjavík.
‘Are you sure you don’t want to talk to Matti with me?’ said Vigdís afterwards.
‘No. I’m off to Hólmsheidi.’
‘To see Gunni?’ said Vigdís. Magnus had filled Vigdís in privately on his conversation with Árni.
‘That’s right.’
‘Does Thelma know?’
‘No. But if she asks, tell her I’m following up on her suggestion that there may be something between Gunni and Kata.’
‘I don’t think that’s what she meant you to do,’ said Vigdís.
Magnus grinned. ‘Probably not.’
‘What about Ólafur? He won’t be happy. He’s leaving Gunni to stew. He won’t like someone else interviewing him first.’
‘He may not,’ said Magnus. ‘So let’s not worry the poor guy, eh?’
Vigdís rolled her eyes. ‘Árni had better be right, or you are in big trouble.’
‘Árni is sometimes right,’ said Magnus.
‘Oh yeah?’
Dísa got up early, made herself a cup of coffee and set to work on her computer. The flat was quiet and empty without Kata there.
For a moment that stretched to several, Dísa stared ahead, focusing on a scratch on the cupboard above the sink, and thought of her friend. How she would never see her again. How she always seemed to know what Dísa was thinking and how Dísa knew what she was thinking. How there would be no future boyfriends to dissect and analyse.
How Dísa would never now be able to persuade her that Taylor Swift was a good singer and not a commercial sell-out.
That last got to her. Yet another tear leaked from her raw eyes.
She was glad she had seen Matti the evening before. The break-up with Kata had clearly hurt him badly, but obviously not as badly as her death. He was a wreck.
He had repeated that he had no idea why Kata had dumped him. Dísa tried to explain as gently as possible that it all had to do with Kata and her desire to reinvent herself, and not with Matti.
Matti didn’t seem to understand. He also didn’t understand why the police seemed to be treating him as a suspect when it should be obvious how much he loved her.
In the end, Dísa had said that Kata was an idiot to dump Matti, and in Dísa’s opinion Kata would have realized that eventually. Dísa wasn’t sure that was true, but it might have been, and it seemed to give Matti some comfort. The poor guy needed comfort.
She shook herself. She had a lot to do before five o’clock that afternoon. She still had some more email and Facebook addresses to compile, and she needed to draft messages to persuade the Thomocoin investors to set up their own bitcoin wallets together with instructions how.
She would send those at four that afternoon. And by that time she would be well out of Reykjavík. Where should she go? Not Akureyri or Dalvík. The Westfjords maybe? Or east to Höfn or Seydisfjördur, or somewhere even smaller. She should put some thought into that.
She went to check her bitcoin. The pink USB stick wasn’t in the desk drawer where she usually kept it. A surge of panic leaped in her chest. Had she taken it with her the previous evening when she had visited Matti? She didn’t think so. If she had left it stuck in her computer, it definitely wasn’t there now.
She checked the pockets of her jeans. No.
She looked around the kitchen, the living area, her bed.
No.
Could someone have taken it?
Krakatoa? Or Krakatoa’s people?
She checked the flat for a sign of a break-in. She hadn’t locked the door. No one locked their doors in Dalvík, and she didn’t like doing it in Reykjavík unless she really had to. As it was, the door to the building itself was always locked, and she had nothing worth stealing.
Usually.
Now she had twenty million dollars of bitcoin.
She opened the door to her flat and stuck her head out into the narrow landing. A cold draught touched her face. She padded down the stairs in her socks.
The window of the back door was broken and had been roughly covered with a plastic bag.
She knocked on the door of the ground-floor flat. A bleary-eyed student, Nína, answered the door.
‘What happened?’ Dísa asked, pointing to the door.
‘Someone broke in yesterday evening. We don’t think they took anything. And we didn’t want to disturb you because... well, you know. Did you hear them?’
‘No, I didn’t,’ said Dísa. ‘I was out.’
‘Oh. Have you lost anything?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Should we report it to the police? Maybe you could tell them next time you see them?’
‘Yeah, I’ll do that.’ Dísa was surprised at how casually Nína had taken the break-in.
She hurried back upstairs and fought the surge of panic that washed over her. She had lost the cold wallet. Krakatoa had stolen it, or arranged for someone to steal it.
The question was, could he get access to the private key?
The USB stick was password protected. Dísa had done some research back in 2017 and had learned that the best passwords were four individual unrelated words strung together. These created a password of many letters that was nonetheless possible to remember.
Dísa had chosen horse, dessert, philosopher and calm. Except she had chosen the Icelandic equivalents: hestur, eftiréttur, heimspekingur and logn: hestureftiretturheimspekingurlogn. She knew that there were ever more sophisticated password-breaking programs around, but she doubted it would be worth anyone’s while to program the Icelandic language into them.