A sudden rattle in the kitchen made her nerves scream in alarm, until the black and white cat jumped from window sill to kitchen table with an inquiring look on its face.
‘Hi, Kisi. What happened here, then?’ she asked it, but the cat only stared back at her.
Hunched under the sink, she fumbled for the panel under the sagging kitchen unit and triumphantly brought out a handful of disks that she knew contained most of her recent work.
Relieved, she unclipped the phone from the ragged patch of denim on the waistband of her jeans and dialled 112.
18
Tuesday, 16 September
Gunna felt self-conscious in Reykjavík. The city had changed so much since she had been on the Reykjavík force that she even found herself taking wrong turnings along the new roads that seemed to sprout up every time she ventured into town.
Radio Taxis had a yard at the back of an industrial area not far from the main road. On an overcast morning Gunna nosed the police Volvo through grey puddles between drab workshops until she found Radio Taxis’ offices, a shed that looked slightly better on the inside than the ramshackle exterior.
A couple of bare bulbs lit up the yellowing walls. A woman glanced up briefly from her desk as Gunna entered and then looked up a second time with a flash of panic as she noticed the uniform.
‘Good morning,’ Gunna offered cheerfully, recognizing the woman’s discomfort.
‘Hi. Nonni’s not here at the moment,’ she replied.
‘That’s a shame. Know where he is?’
‘Playing golf, I expect,’ the woman sniffed. ‘He seems to have better things to do than spend time here these days.’
‘Not to worry. It’s just a routine call. I’m Gunnhildur Gísladóttir from Hvalvík police. And you are?’
‘I’m Eyrún Jónína. Routine? What about?’ the woman demanded suspiciously.
‘Mercedes taxi,’ Gunna said, placing a slip of paper with the registration number on the counter between them.
‘Yeah. That’s one of ours. Is there a problem?’
‘Nothing special. Our computer flagged up this vehicle’s registration and this is just to tidy up our records,’ Gunna lied. ‘I see this car had a collision on Snorrabraut a few months ago. Has that all been settled with the insurance company now?’
Eyrún Jónína sat at her desk and leafed through a bulging folder. ‘Yeah. That’s all settled. Some yuppie’s caravan fishtailed across two lanes and bumped the wing. His insurance paid up, no questions.’
Gunna pretended to make notes. ‘That’s fine. The reason the computer flagged the vehicle up is that there was a road traffic accident in my area last week.’
‘That idiot’s not had another dent, has he?’
‘No, nothing like that. A witness mentioned that a Mercedes taxi had been in the vicinity at the time and there are only a few cars like this in the country registered as taxis. I’d like to identify the driver as a potential witness.’
‘That’s all right. Just as long as he hasn’t screwed up one more time.’ Eyrún hauled another binder from the shelf above her desk. She leafed through it and pulled a sheet of paper from a plastic sleeve in the middle, placing it on the counter.
Gunna frowned in irritation and surprise as she looked down at a photocopy of the driver’s licence.
‘Know him, do you?’ Eyrún Jónína asked with a short laugh. ‘Matti drives that taxi all the time.’
‘I know most of the taxi drivers,’ Gunna muttered, scanning through the details even though there was no need to. She wrote down the licence number and shook her head sadly as she peered again at a youthful version of Marteinn Georg Kristjánsson glaring truculently back at her.
19
Wednesday, 17 September
17-09-2008, 0119
Skandalblogger writes:
So everyone knows, a memorial service for Einar Eyjólfur Einarsson will be held at the church in Mosfell at 4 on Saturday 27th, so don’t be late. It’s now three weeks Einar disappeared and there’s three weeks’ silence on what happened to him.
All right, so we know he died incapable, cold and alone. But how come he drowned a hundred kilometres from where he was last seen? It’s not so much a case of did he fall or was he pushed, rather, did he walk, or was he driven? And as it would have taken him a week to walk there, who the hell was driving? Whatever the police may think, this was no accident, so just who did this terrible thing?
Come on, Keflavík police Führer Vilhjálmur Traustason! This is on your patch! When are you going to get to the bottom of this one and let us know what did happen to this young man, who Skandalblogger can now reveal was very much one of us?
See you all on the day . . .
‘The taxi is used on a permanent basis by a driver called Marteinn Georg Kristjánsson, born in Vestureyri on the eighteenth of September nineteen sixty-seven,’ Gunna announced when Snorri asked if she had found out anything useful.
‘He’s from Vestureyri? You know this guy, then?’
Gunna nodded. ‘Fat Matti, he’s called. He has a record of petty thievery, mostly cars, numerous instances of public drunkenness and the odd punch-up,’ she told Snorri, wondering at the same time whether or not to tell him quite how long she had known Matti. ‘He spent a long time in Canada until they picked him up a few years ago and sent him home by parcel post with a stamp on his arse. Oh, shit.’ Gunna sighed and Snorri looked up from the computer at her in surprise.
‘He’s something of a troublemaker?’ he asked, pointing at the screen. ‘I’ve got his record here and it looks that way.’
‘Snorri, my boy, you don’t know the half of it. Matti’s one of my many cousins from the west and he’s never forgiven me for joining the force. He’s always made a point of being as awkward as he possibly can without actually being arrested, and I reckon I spent my first few years in uniform hauling the silly bastard out of trouble here and there.’
She hunched her shoulders wearily. ‘Damn and blast. That’s all we bloody needed, Fat Matti having something to do with all this.’
‘Right,’ Snorri said, at a loss for what to say next.
‘It’s OK. It might be fun to catch up with the old fool again. He might have found God or something in the meantime.’
‘Nope.’ Snorri shook his head, scrolling through Matti’s record. ‘In the last two years there’s speeding, max points on his licence, public drunkenness, some minor violence and a few other odds and sods.’
‘Not to mention what’s not on record,’ Gunna added. ‘There was a narcotics case a few years ago, but he wriggled out of it and someone else did the time for it.’
She hung her head and sighed even more deeply, then swore quietly under her breath. ‘The upside of it is that as Fat Matti’s a relative of mine, I’d prefer not to have to arrest him. So if he shows up anywhere around Hvalvík, you or Haddi can do the honours.’
‘I’ll look forward to it,’ Snorri said with a smile.
‘You do that. If you see him, bang him up and call for me.’
Matti was worried. He was more than worried, he was scared. The sight of the tall man with the wispy hair and the glasses whimpering in agony over his smashed arm stayed with him in the days following the terrifying drive back to Reykjavík. Hardy had sat in the passenger seat enjoying the sunshine, humming to himself and cracking the occasional joke that Matti couldn’t appreciate. The man seemed more relaxed than Matti had seen him before, as if his swift act of controlled violence had released a tension in him.
The big taxi’s wipers swept drizzle from the windscreen as Matti dropped a customer off outside one of the big office blocks on Borgartún. It was mid-afternoon and he decided to head back to Reykjavík airport to see if a fare could be picked up from one of the domestic flights. Pushing through the mid-town traffic he almost crashed into the rear end of a bus halfway through Channel 2’s three o’clock news bulletin.