One hour. Be here. Ægir L
A minute later the house phone began to chirp. Surprised that anyone would call his landline, Jóel Ingi hunted for the handset and found it behind a pile of magazines just as Agnes padded in from the bathroom in a cloud of steam, toweling her hair and giving him a dazzling smile that confused him even more.
“Jóel Ingi?” An unfamiliar, brisk voice asked.
“I’m not buying anything-”
“That’s a shame, because I have something you need.”
“Who is this?”
“My name’s Jón. Our mutual friend Hinrik mentioned that we ought to talk, so answer your mobile in half an hour.”
Agnes listened to Jóel Ingi’s side of the conversation, her head cocked to one side, watching as the conversation was abruptly terminated and Jóel Ingi was left holding a buzzing phone. “You’re going out,” she said, sitting down in an armchair and opening a drawer in a table next to it to bring out the makings of a joint.
“Do you have to smoke that fucking stuff in the house?” Jóel Ingi snapped, his irritation boiling over.
Agnes shrugged. “It’s my house as well.”
“I’m a public official. If you get caught-”
Agnes’s laughter tinkled. “Who’s going to catch me? Anyway, I like it. It helps me think,” she said. “It helps me relax and it makes me horny. Not that you complain about that.”
“I have to go.”
“Shame,” Agnes said coolly, rolling with practiced ease. “Going to be long? My flight’s at six.”
“Hello! Pétur Steinar Albertsson?” Gunna asked, recognizing from his driving licence photo the tall man with a lined but fresh face who looked around from his workbench. “I knocked on the front door, but nobody answered.”
“Yeah, I’m Pétur. What are you selling?”
“I’m not selling anything,” Gunna said and held open her police ID as the man stood up and a cloud of concern descended on what looked like a normally cheerful face.
“Anything wrong? The children …?”
“Nothing like that,” she assured him. “But I need a few questions answered.”
Pétur wiped his hands on a rag and limped toward her. “That sounds ominous, and we have enough problems as it is. But what can I do for you?”
Wondering how far she should go, Gunna looked around the workshop with interest. “What do you make here?”
“These,” Pétur said, tossing up and catching a wooden bowl from the top of a stack. “I’m disabled and can’t work a full day any more, so I make these for a tourist shop. They sell pretty well once they’ve been polished up.”
“Who lives here?”
“Me. My wife. Three children.”
“I know your name already. What’s your wife’s name?”
“Hekla. Hekla Elín Hauksdóttir. Why?”
“Just wondering who lives here.”
Pétur shifted his weight uncomfortably, leaning on a stick. “We’re renting this place month by month. We thought we were only going to be here for a few months, but now it looks like we might all be here for a while.”
“All?”
“There’s me and Hekla. My daughter Sif, and mine and Hekla’s children, Albert and Alda. You still haven’t told me what this is about.”
“To be straight with you, I’m not entirely sure myself,” Gunna told him. “In any case, there’s only so much I can tell you. But this address has come up in connection with an investigation and I need to decide whether or not it has anything to do with you, or maybe whoever lived here before you. How long have you been here?”
“About a year. Just over. We moved in a few days before Christmas last year.”
“And who lived here before you?”
Pétur smiled grimly. “Hard to tell. The place had been empty for about two years. It was owned by a big shot at one of the banks, who was going to tear the place down and have a summer house built on the site. But he didn’t get planning permission and by the time it looked like he might, the bank had gone tits-up and the gentleman in question left the country in a hurry.”
“So who’s the owner now?”
“It went to one of the pension funds in the fallout. One of Hekla’s uncles is involved with the bank’s winding-up committee and he put in a word. We can stay until it sells, however long that takes.”
“So there’s been nobody here but you?”
“I don’t really know. There’s a scout troop that camps on the meadow in the summer, and there were some squatters here for a while when the big shot owned the place, but that was before our time. I gather he got them out pretty quick. It was something of a pigsty when we moved in. Part of our agreement with the winding-up committee is that we fix the place up and make it habitable, not that there was much that needed doing. The house itself was fine. It just needed a massive amount of cleaning.”
“So you fell on your feet. Your wife at home, is she?”
“She has a day’s work today.”
“What does she do?”
Pétur smiled fondly. “She trained as an actress, but times are tight these days. Mostly she does voice-overs and things like that. She’s reading something for a radio ad today, as far as I know.”
Gunna nodded. “Mind if I take a look around?”
Pétur looked surprised. “Sure. Anything in particular you’re looking for?” he asked, suspicion etched across his face.
“I don’t know, to be quite honest. But as this address has come up as part of the investigation, I’d like to get a feel for the place and an idea of the layout in case things go any further.”
“And you can’t tell me what all this is about?”
“I’m afraid not,” Gunna smiled, seeing the disappointment on his face as Pétur made for the workshop door, swinging his stiff right leg with each step.
The house was small but warm, she thought, imagining what it had been like after a few empty years. Pétur had sanded and varnished the floor of the living room and a large window provided a view over the sea, with Reykjavík in the distance across the bay. Unconsciously, Gunna compared the warmth of what was clearly an old building against her own modern concrete terraced house. Somehow wood gave a house a friendly feeling, she thought, scanning a line of pictures on the living room wall and stopping herself from doing a double take.
“Is that your daughter?” Gunna asked, pointing to a teenage girl in a low-key monochrome print, who looked to be hiding behind long brown hair that covered half of her face as she sat cross-legged, flanked by a gap-toothed, flaxen-haired boy and girl.
“That’s my Sif with the twins,” Pétur told her, pride unmistakeable in his gruff voice.
“And you and your wife behind them?” Gunna asked, leaning forward to peer at the print and the slightly out-of-focus background figures. “Any idea when she’ll be back?”
“This evening sometime, I expect.”
“Do you know where she’s doing this reading?”
“Nope. There are a couple of studios where they do that kind of thing. I don’t bother asking which one any more.”
Baddó swore and dropped the phone on the car seat. Fatigue was starting to catch up with him and the painkillers were making him drowsy. It was taking every ounce of his mental energy to concentrate on the road and he desperately wanted to close his eyes and rest for a few hours. He felt exhausted, staring at the road in front of him without knowing quite where he was going, but certain that if he were to relax for a second, the car would be off the road. He was also sure that the police would be looking for the mud-colored Hyundai by now, so it would have to be either dumped or disguised somehow.
He stopped just as it was becoming fully dark. The wind had dropped and it looked like it would be a cold night with no low cloud to help keep the day’s warmth close to the ground. An endless stream of cars and trucks swished past in the growing darkness and Baddó squinted at his phone to punch in the numbers.
It rang only once before it was answered, and there was a moment’s silence before anyone spoke.