‘Gunnhildur Gísladóttir.’
‘Henning Simonsen,’ he replied, his eyes on the Polish girl as she threaded her way back across the room. ‘Good grief,’ he said. ‘That bottom. Once upon a time. . She’s a good girl, that one. A real worker.’
He grimaced and jerked a thumb behind him.
‘What do you mean?’ Gunna asked.
‘If you push, we can go to the dining room and get a bit of peace and quiet away from all these old women listening to the wireless.’
The dining room was quieter. The Polish girl brought them coffee and left, Henning once again admiring her rear as she departed. ‘I tell you. .’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Now, what can I do for you? About that Borgar, I’ll wager? God rest his soul. But he was a thieving bastard. I used to tell people to count their fingers once they’d shaken his hand.’
‘Exactly. It’s Borgar’s death I’m investigating. I take it you were here on Sunday afternoon?’
The old man grinned and sucked coffee through a lump of rock-hard sugar. ‘If I’d killed Borgar, I’d admit it straight out,’ he said. ‘I’ll bet prison’s more comfortable than this place.’
‘But there’s no Wioletta in Litla-Hraun,’ Gunna pointed out.
‘Ah, but maybe they’d allow her to visit an old man.’
‘You worked for Borgar for a long time?’
‘I did. I started NesPlast back in the eighties and we built a lot of boats but never made much money.’
‘But Borgar owned NesPlast. You sold it to him?’
‘I owned 60 per cent of NesPlast and Borgar owned the rest, so that’s why he wasn’t able to screw it up like every other business he touched. But he owned the building and rented it to NesPlast.’
‘Paying himself rent?’
Henning shrugged. ‘It was a tax dodge of some kind. A way of making sure NesPlast never made enough of a profit on paper to have to pay tax.’
‘And it closed down after he went to prison?’
‘Well, the crash was around that time as well. There was no money about and nobody wanted boats. We were stuck with two expensive boats that customers defaulted on and there was no choice but to wind it up. My health wasn’t what it had been, and there was nobody to take over.’ He smiled to himself. ‘I was able to sell the two boats to a cousin of mine in the Faroes who came and sailed them home. Cash,’ he said, rubbing his hands at the memory. ‘Borgar wasn’t happy. Not happy at all. But by then he had other things to worry about.’
‘He had enemies, though, surely?’
Henning reached for the thermos on the table. ‘Would you?’
Gunna poured him another cup and he sipped it gratefully.
‘There were always problems. People were happy enough with the boats, but when it came to money Borgar would always screw customers somehow.’ He sighed and looked at Gunna steadily. ‘But to answer the question you haven’t asked, as far as I know there were dozens of people who would have been happy to break Borgar’s nose, although I don’t believe any one of them would have gone so far as to kill him. These people aren’t crazies, and for most of them I reckon this was so long ago now that it’s in the past. Fishermen are used to setbacks. They move on.’
‘I guess you’re right.’
Henning looked quickly behind him. ‘But have you found his secret cubbyhole?’ he asked, with a conspiratorial gleam in his eye.
Gunna tracked Bjarni Björgvinsson down to the smart newish house his parents owned and she waited while the young man’s mother went to wake her youngest son several hours before the usual time he was on his feet. She came downstairs with suppressed frustration in her eyes.
‘He’s still in bed. I don’t know what the matter is with him these days. He’s surly, he’s rude and he has mood swings. It’s driving his father and me nuts,’ she admitted.
Gunna smiled inwardly. ‘Tell me about it,’ she said, trying to look sympathetic.
‘You have the same problem, maybe?’ Bjarni’s mother asked, clearly anxious for Gunna to have exactly the same headaches to deal with.
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Gunna said guardedly, wondering whether or not to tell this worried woman that her son’s behaviour clearly spelled out either alcohol or dope, or both.
‘You have children as well?’ Bjarni’s mother asked.
‘A boy and a girl.’
‘They say girls are less bother. Is that true?’
Gunna wanted to laugh. ‘I couldn’t say. But my mother certainly wouldn’t agree with that.’ She looked at her watch and listened for any movement. ‘Is he going to be long, do you think?’
The woman shook her head and Gunna could see the grey in her fair hair. ‘I’ll go and call him again.’
‘How about I go and wake him up?’
Her eyes bulged for a moment and she hesitated. ‘It’s a bit of a mess,’ she said defensively.
‘If a bit of a mess was the worst I had to be worried about in this job, believe me, it would all be so much easier. Where’s the boy’s room?’
‘At the top of the stairs, on the right,’ she said in a faint voice as Gunna took the stairs two at a time. At the top, the not unfamiliar smell of boy’s bedroom guided her and she rapped smartly on the door, didn’t bother waiting for a reply and clicked on the light as she stepped inside.
‘Go away, will you? I said I’m not well,’ a voice whined from beneath the duvet. ‘And turn the light off.’
Gunna strode to the window, swept the curtains aside and aimed a kick at the end of the bed. ‘I don’t care if you’ve got the plague and you’re missing an arm and a leg, you can wake up,’ she snapped, leaning down and roughly hauling the duvet back a foot to expose Bjarni’s head sunk in a deep depression in the pillow. He stared back at her dumbfounded through eyes heavy-lidded with too much sleep. ‘My name’s Gunnhildur. I’m an investigating officer at the city police force’s serious crime unit and I have some questions for you to wake up and answer.’
‘What. .? Now?’
‘Now. Right now. Either you wake up and pay attention, or I’ll call up a squad car and you can sit in an interview room at Hverfisgata wrapped in your smelly duvet and answer questions there,’ Gunna said, lifting a mess of magazines and CD cases from the room’s only chair and dumping it all on the desk under the window so she could sit down. ‘Your call. Make your mind up.’
‘This is police brutality,’ Bjarni said in a tone that carried little conviction. ‘And you need a warrant.’
‘You’ve probably been watching too many American cop shows. Sorry to destroy your misconceptions, Bjarni, but I don’t need a warrant. And if you think this is brutality, I’ll call up a squad car right now to collect you,’ she said, looking meaningfully at the ashtray on the windowsill overflowing with roaches. ‘And we’ll have a good look through this room in the process. I don’t suppose you’ve bothered to hide your stash all that carefully, have you?’
Bjarni quailed and hauled the duvet up to his chin.
‘Where were you on Sunday?’
‘Er. . out.’
‘I can figure that out for myself. Where were you and who were you with? What time did you leave here and when did you return?’
‘I went out about two with Elmar and we just mooched around a bit downtown, went to a mate’s place and then came back here and did some PlayStation.’
‘Until when?’
‘I don’t know. Some time in the night.’
‘Who’s this mate and where’s his place?’
‘Jóhann Eggertsson, his name is, lives in Lyngrími. I don’t know what number.’
‘In Grafarvogur, yes? Did you go anywhere near Hafnarfjördur on Sunday?’
‘No, not on Sunday.’
‘You were out with Elmar Kjartansson in that blue van he drives, were you?’
‘Yeah.’
‘When you said you weren’t anywhere near Hafnarfjördur on Sunday, what does that mean? That you had been there with him some other time?’ Gunna asked, extracting a picture from her folder.
‘He wanted to go there a few times last week. I don’t know why. He’d go round town, see a few people and then he’d go round this industrial place, round and round these garages and stuff. I don’t know why.’