“Helgi, why the hell do people never answer their mobile phones?” she demanded as he backed into the room and sat down at his desk with a mug of coffee, which he wiped the base of carefully on his trousers before putting on the desk.
“Beats me. My kids tried that for a while, not answering when I called.”
“Do they still do it?”
“Nope. I told them that as I was paying for their phones, if they didn’t answer when I called they could pay for their own airtime. Why? Laufey being awkward?”
“Not at all. It’s Hekla Elín that I’m trying to get hold of. No reply, blast her. Are you off?”
“I am, and so should you be, chief. It’s getting late.”
“I’ve a good mind to drive out to Kjalarnes and sit by her front door until she turns up.”
“You should be going home.” Helgi said firmly, snapping his glasses into their case. “It’s late and we’ve been here since we were called to the hospital at some ungodly hour of the morning. Remember?”
“Was that really today? It feels like it was weeks ago.”
“It feels like I’ve spent a week on that idiot Hólmgeir Sigurjónsson’s paperwork, and I have to say I feel I’ve done the community a service having locked that waste of skin up.”
“Yeah. Until a magistrate pats him on the back and tells him not to do it again.”
“Well, there is that, I grant you. But if you’re going out to Kjalarnes, then I’ll go with you.”
Gunna shook her head. “Go home, Helgi. Let’s pack it in for the day. I’ve asked for a uniformed patrol to run out to Kjalarnes a couple of times tonight to check there’s nothing untoward going on there.”
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been trying to track the bloody woman down all day and haven’t been able to get hold of her, and I can’t help feeling there’s some part of all this that we haven’t figured out yet.”
Helgi pulled on his coat. “Come on then,” he prompted.
“Come on, what?”
“I’m not going home until you’re out of the building, so will you get a move on, please?”
Gunna stood up and stretched, knotting her fingers and cracking her knuckles. “All right. You sound like my dad,” she said. “In at seven?”
“Yeah. That’ll do me.”
“You can be early and go with Eiríkur if you want.”
“Why?”
“He’s tagging along with the drug squad tomorrow for an early start. Rather him than me.”
Jóel Ingi parked the Audi behind Katrín’s Saab and looked across the snow-filled garden at the basement flat’s windows. A dim light was shining from one window and he could see the flickering of a television behind the curtains. Still nervous about being followed, he locked the car and looked about him before making his way past the garden gate, which was permanently open in a drift of snow, and knocking at the door.
He had left his coat in the car and it was cold. He shivered, rubbing his hands to warm them, and was about to go back to the car when the door opened a crack. An indistinct face and some dark hair that didn’t belong to Katrín could be seen in the narrow opening.
“Hello?”
“Hæ. I’m looking for Katrín. This is her place, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, but she’s not here at the moment. I’m not sure when she’ll be back.”
“Her car’s there.”
“She can’t have gone far if she’s not driving. D’you want to give her a call?”
“I don’t have a number. I work with her, I was just wondering if she was going to be long?”
The door opened a little wider. “You’re Jóel Ingi, aren’t you?”
“I am.”
This time the door opened fully and a petite girl with a sharp nose and inquisitive eyes looked him up and down.
“You must be Ursula. I saw you at the sushi place we went to the other day.”
“You’d best come in. It’s freezing out. You want a coffee? Or a beer? You know Katrín talks about you all the time?”
He sat down in the flat’s tiny living room and stretched out his legs while Ursula clattered in the kitchen.
“Lived here long?” he asked.
“No. Katrín split up with her guy about the same time as I did with mine, so we’re renting this place together for the time being. How long have you known Katrín?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been at the ministry since two thousand and eight and she’s been there at least as long. But she’s on another floor so it’s only recently that I’ve got to know her.”
“At the lunch club?”
Jóel Ingi grinned. “Yeah. Már Einarsson’s famous lunch club.”
Ursula looked at her watch. “I called her but she’s not answering. She’ll ring me back when she sees there’s been a missed call. She’s organized, our Katrín.”
The coffee was thick and fragrant, giving him a new rush of alertness.
“Where do you work?”
Ursula looked sour. “I was the accounts manager for a building company until last week.”
“New job?”
“I’ve been made redundant.”
“That’s a shame.”
Ursula shrugged. “That’s the way it goes. Last in, first out. Business hasn’t been great and they were optimistic when they took me on.”
“No other job to go to?”
“Some freelance work, doing people’s tax returns and stuff, but not a lot.”
“That’s a shame,” Jóel Ingi repeated, at a loss for anything else to say.
In spite of the coffee having given him a momentary rush, he felt inexplicably drowsy, blaming the heat of the little flat.
“I’d like to go away for a while. I’ve been in boring jobs for years now and I want to see a little color, so I might go traveling for a few months, and maybe go back to university in the autumn. That’d be nice.” She glanced down to check her phone. “Katrín normally calls back right away.”
“Maybe she’s busy?”
“Could be …”
“Where would you go if you wanted to do some traveling?”
“I don’t know. Spain, maybe. Or France.”
Jóel Ingi smiled broadly. He liked her already, solid arms and legs in spite of her petite figure, nothing like Agnes’s willowy frame.
“Then this could be your lucky day.”
Ursula looked at him sharply. “How so?”
“I’m flying to Paris tonight.” Jóel Ingi pulled a package out of his coat pocket, put it on the table and spread the notes in a fan. “If we don’t go too wild, I reckon that should keep us for at least a year.”
She had picked up his trail easily enough, and now she watched Jóel Ingi disappear up the stairs and into departures with the woman on his arm. They were traveling light, hand baggage only. She shrugged. There was nothing more that she could do other than report back. Under the street lamps that lit the car park outside with their harsh glare, she keyed a message into her phone, looking pensively out of the window as the Renault’s heater whined and fought to disperse the thin film of frost on the windscreen.
She pulled off her ski hat, massaging her scalp, then prodded gently at the tender part of her face, relieved that it was no more painful than it was. It was close to midnight on a dark, cold night, and she asked herself yet again why she had given up a stable but frustrating job for this life of anti-social hours, awkward clients and unreliable payments. She wasn’t expecting a reply until the morning, but the phone on the seat flashed once and hummed briefly.
She read the message, nodded briefly and punched in a one-word reply before putting the car into gear. It was rolling forward when the phone flashed a second time and she stopped to look at the message. Her eyebrows rose as she read it, before heading for the main road back to Reykjavík.
Wednesday
Gunna slept badly and was on her feet long before the alarm started to buzz to the muffled sound of Drífa retching in the bathroom, the faint but unmistakable sound carrying along the corridor of the silent house. Her thoughts immediately went back to Gísli as she looked at the ceiling in the darkness, and how-or if-he would resolve things with his two expectant mothers when he came home in a few weeks’ time.