Although he was wearing a dark suit, the Special Prosecutor looked uncomfortable in it. It didn’t fit quite right. Magnus thought of Colby’s investment banking and hot-shot lawyer friends back in Boston. They would run rings around this guy. But he knew better than to underestimate the value of patient, dogged police work. It would be interesting to see what happened. And he admired the Icelanders for going outside the establishment for their prosecutor.
‘We have put together a list of Icelanders who we believe Gunnarsson saw in the last few months in London.’ Piper handed the Prosecutor the list. ‘Do you recognize any of the names?’
The Special Prosecutor peered at the names through his glasses. ‘Yes, I recognize nearly all of them. Businessmen, bankers, lawyers. It’s Iceland’s business elite.’
‘How do they operate, this business elite?’ Piper asked. ‘Do they all gang up together to protect their own, or are there rivalries?’
The Prosecutor laughed. ‘Rivalries would be putting it mildly. Some of these guys bear grudges going back decades. Look, I’m not part of this world, which is why I have this job, but I am beginning to understand it.
‘There are the old establishment families, sometimes known as “The Octopus” for the tentacles they wrapped around Icelandic businesses throughout the twentieth century. They owned the shipping companies and the importers and distributors. They are powerful, but low key. Then there are the new guys, the young Viking Raiders who built up the big network of companies over the last decade. They are the guys who bought all those businesses in your country: Hamleys, House of Fraser, Mothercare, the supermarket chain Iceland, Moss Bros, even West Ham United. There are three groups of them and they ended up owning stakes in three of the big banks. And then there is our former Prime Minister, Ólafur Tómasson. Some of these businessmen were his friends, some his enemies, he held serious grudges against some of them, gave others preferential treatment in privatizations.’
‘And how does Óskar Gunnarsson fit into all of this?’ Magnus asked.
‘He did a good job of being friends with just about everyone. Ódinsbanki wasn’t allied with one group or the other, it did deals with all of them.’
‘So he didn’t have any specific enemies?’
The Prosecutor shook his head. ‘You know, people sometimes talk about the Icelandic mafia. And it’s true that all the big families here in Iceland know each other. But there is absolutely no violence. We are not talking about the Italian mafia here, or the Russian. I suppose it’s always possible that an individual could be violent or a murderer, that’s possible in any society. But as a group, these guys don’t kill people.’
‘And what about the Russians? There are rumours in London that the Icelanders were using Russian money.’
The Prosecutor shook his head. ‘A couple of these Viking Raiders made their money from a bottling plant in St Petersburg in the nineties. That’s perhaps how those rumours started. They probably still have Russian contacts. But the rest, no.’
Piper sighed. ‘Thank you very much. Let us know if you turn up anything on any of those names.’
‘We’ll keep a close eye on Ódinsbanki,’ the Prosecutor said. ‘And if anything like a motive for Óskar’s murder emerges, I’ll let you know. But there is nothing there at the moment.’
‘One last question,’ said Magnus.
The Prosecutor raised his eyebrows.
‘Was Óskar a crook?’
The Prosecutor sighed. ‘He didn’t steal from anyone. He didn’t hurt anyone physically, at least not that I’m aware of. But if he and his friends did set up a web of offshore companies to invest in each other’s companies secretly, he broke the rules. And that is more than just a technicality, it matters. It means the whole edifice of Iceland’s boom was built on deceit.’
He gave a rueful smile. ‘But you can’t just blame the bankers. All of us Icelanders have to ask ourselves what we were doing borrowing money we could never repay. And we’re just going to have to pay it all back.’
Magnus leaned back away from the animated chatter around the table. He felt pleasantly drunk. They had all been drinking for hours. They had started off with a couple of bottles of wine at Ingileif’s place before going out to dinner, and then on to a bar on Laugavegur. The evening would cost him a small fortune, but it seemed like the right thing to take the visiting cop out, especially on a Friday night. In the current atmosphere of cost cutting there was no way he could ask the department to spring for it.
That afternoon, together with Thorkell, Sharon Piper and he had visited Óskar’s parents at their house in Gardabaer. He was struck by how ordinary they were. Whereas Emilía had looked like a wealthy sister of a Viking Raider, their parents were a respectable, unassuming couple. Óskar’s father was still working as a civil engineer for a government department, his mother had retired as an administrator in the tax office. They were both devastated. It was clear that their son had meant everything to them, that they had worshipped him ever since he had been a small boy, given him the self-confidence to succeed.
They were glad of the visit by the police officer from London. Sharon had done a good job of assuring them that the British police were putting everything into the investigation. She also managed to throw in some of her own questions about any personal problems that Óskar might have had, any enemies, but nothing new had emerged. The parents had met both girlfriends: they were overawed by the Russian, and thought the Venezuelan incredibly exotic. They were clearly proud, but a little anxious about their son’s jet-setting lifestyle. The anxiety had turned to guilt: if they had somehow kept their beloved Óskar in Iceland, he would still be alive.
It was frustrating. Magnus could feel himself being drawn into the investigation. He wanted to find Óskar’s killer, the person who had taken their son from them. He’d love to fly back to London with Sharon to see the investigation through at first hand, but he knew that Thorkell and the Commissioner would never authorize it. Why should they?
He wanted there to be an Icelandic link so that he could get properly involved. Perhaps Harpa was that link. His intuition told him that there was more than a common employer and a fouryear-old night of passion connecting Harpa, Gabríel Örn and Óskar. But maybe that was just what he wanted to believe.
It was a shame he couldn’t talk to Sharon about it.
There were five of them at the table in the crowded bar: Magnus, Sharon Piper, Ingileif, Árni and Vigdís. Ingileif had abandoned her party with her fashionable clients to join them, which Magnus appreciated, although he suspected it was curiosity that had drawn her.
As usual, the Icelanders were much better dressed than the foreigners, and when it came to dress sense Magnus was definitely a foreigner. Árni looked cool in a gangly kind of way in a black sweater under a linen jacket. Both Vigdís and Ingileif were wearing jeans, but both looked stunning, with subtle make-up and jewellery, whereas Sharon was wearing the grey pants and pink blouse she had had on all day, and Magnus a checked shirt over a T-shirt and old jeans.
The conversation was animated but slurred. Árni and Magnus had moved on to whisky, but the women had been drinking wine all night. How many bottles, Magnus had long lost count. Vigdís was quizzing Sharon about what it was like to be a woman in the Metropolitan police, with Árni translating frantically and inaccurately.
‘It’s nice to get away for a night or two,’ Sharon said.
‘Have you got kids?’ Ingileif asked.
‘A couple. My daughter’s at uni, and my son has just left school. No job – says he can’t get one with the recession, which might be true. But he’s been getting into all kinds of trouble recently. He expects me to get him out of it, but I’ve had enough. I don’t know what I did wrong. He was a good kid until three years ago.’