“Good grief,” she muttered, lifting up a hanger that held a skimpy French maid’s outfit consisting of more lace than material. Behind it was a bizarre version of a nurse’s outfit that she realized with distaste was made of some kind of plastic.
She debated with herself whether these ought to be taken for testing as well, but decided that if anything were to be found, the bedclothes or the contents of the washing basket would probably be likelier sources.
She hung the items back in their places respectfully, painfully aware that their owner had only been dead a few days. She wondered who had been the beneficiary of Svana Geirs’ magnificent figure in these bizarre, titillating outfits. She looked at the vast array of shoes at the wardrobe’s floor level, shook her head and shut the double doors.
The place was unnervingly silent. Any traffic noise was shut out entirely by the triple-glazed windows, excluding any sense of the outside world. The flat resembled a cocoon cut off from reality. She sat at the head of the bed and felt herself sink in the dense mattress, resisting the temptation to bounce on it. The two drawers of the bedside table on one side were empty, but the side nearer the window revealed the TV remote, sprays and jars of creams and a party box of condoms in a variety of colours and, as far as Gunna could make out, flavours—she decided that banana probably didn’t refer to size. The lower drawer contained handcuffs, a small vibrator that emitted a rattlesnake buzz at the flick of a switch, and packets of pills from paracetamol to heavyduty prescription painkillers. But no phone or little black book were to be seen. In fact, Gunna reflected, as she paced to the window to look out at the quiet street four floors below, nowhere was there a scrap of paper, a magazine or a book.
Suddenly all her senses sharpened in a single flash of alarm as a groan, muffled but unmistakable, came from the corridor. She turned slowly and listened for it to be repeated, stepping as gently as she could towards the bedroom door. She was wondering if she had definitely closed the flat’s door when the groan came again, longer this time and ending on a higher note that was almost a squeal.
In the passage she stood and listened. She could hear someone’s breath coming in short bursts, and this time she swept towards the kitchen, certain that the sound was coming from there. In the kitchen doorway, she scanned the room. The breaths panted and morphed into a low moan that rose and suddenly stopped, cut off as if by the flick of a switch. The flat was silent again.
Gunna stood in the middle of the kitchen floor and turned in a slow circle, looking in every direction. She smiled to herself, reached into her jacket pocket, took out her phone and thumbed the green button twice.
“Helgi? In the office, are you? You have Svana’s phone number? I’d like you to call it right now from your desk phone, OK? And stay on the line.”
The silence in the kitchen was broken only by the faintest hum from the fridge. Gunna was uncomfortably conscious of her own breathing, and even of the rustle of her still unfamiliar non-uniform trousers. When it began, she thought at first that the innocuous buzz was from the fridge itself, a low but insistent pulse. As she squatted down on her haunches, aware that the sound was coming from near the floor, the groan echoed through the kitchen a second time, tinny against the room’s hard surfaces. She listened, eyes half closed, and the second groan began, rising to a squeal of what Gunna could now make out was supposed to be ecstasy.
She cast about as the voice began to pant. She lay flat on the floor and peered under the fridge and then under the dishwasher, where a mobile phone sat in the only patch of dust she had seen in the whole flat, flashing and vibrating to itself as the voice rose from a moan to burst into a climax.
“Ah. There you are,” Gunna said as a grin spread across her face, reaching with a wooden spoon under the machine to retrieve the phone. It was still vibrating and howling in pleasure as she sat up with it in her hand in triumph. Suddenly it stopped flashing and the screen went dark as the phone switched itself off.
“Damn, battery must be flat,” she muttered, fumbling for her own phone. “Helgi? What happened there?” she asked, Svana’s lifeless mobile in her hand.
“I let it ring and ring and then it went dead,” Helgi said. “What was all that shouting?”
“That was Svana’s ringtone, and she was faking it. I’ll be back in a minute.”
• • •
RAGNA GÚSTA HAD been named after two old ladies. Linda had wanted to christen the little girl with her mother’s name, and Jón realized that his own mother would consider it a lifelong slight if the child didn’t carry her name as well. Now he thought it vaguely amusing that his daughter would go through life carrying in close company the names of Ragnhildur and Ágústa, two elderly ladies who couldn’t stand each other.
Jón could see the serious expression she had inherited from her maternal grandmother on his daughter’s face as Ragna Gústa painstakingly nibbled the nuggets of chocolate from her ice cream before devouring it.
“Daddy?”
He wondered if the bloody man had the faintest idea what turmoil had been wreaked on the lives of ordinary hardworking people. He had fought for months to keep everything together, but finally he’d had to admit to himself that he couldn’t keep the pretence up any longer. The jeep had been the first thing to go. Linda hadn’t minded, as she hadn’t liked it anyway. What had been painful was having to pay more than a million in cash on top just for the privilege of being rid of the loans secured on it.
“Daddy? What’s that?”
If only he’d had the sense to take out a loan in krónur instead of letting himself be persuaded to borrow in yen and Swiss francs, then he wouldn’t have been hit by the spiralling exchange rate that had doubled his repayments. The boy who bought the Land Cruiser was only a youngster, but a youngster with a berth on a trawler and a pocketful of cash. Jón reckoned he’d actually got the lad to agree to a good deal, once he’d seen the young man’s eyes lingering over the massive tyres.
It hadn’t been painless, but at least he was shot of the mushrooming repayments that had been crippling him.
“Yeah, sweetheart? What’s up?”
“Daddy, are we going to see Grandma today?”
“No, sweetheart, not today. Shall we go to the pictures instead?”
ALBERT STOOD FOR a moment in thought, Svana Geirs’ phone in his hand. “Quite a new model, this one is,” he said, as if to himself. “Now, over here …”
Gunna watched as he dived into a box and rummaged, emerging with a black box bound round with a lead.
“This one might do it. We’ll see,” he muttered, plugging the charger into the wall and then into Svana’s lifeless phone. “We’ll give it a minute to build up some juice and then we can give it a try. So, how are you getting on with being out of uniform?” he asked with a lopsided smile.
“To tell you the truth, Albert, it’s bloody weird,” Gunna replied as he tapped a computer’s keyboard to bring it to life. “I feel like an old frump most of the time, all dressed up and nowhere to go.”
She eyed Albert, who was now watching the screen of the laptop perched on a pile of phone books on the workbench in front of him. One of the force’s forensics officers, a fascination with anything to do with communications and computers, as the amassed collection of chargers, battery packs, spare parts and other paraphernalia stacked under the workbench demonstrated. Gunna was certain he was absorbed in establishing a link between Svana’s phone and the laptop and was no longer hearing a word she said.
“So some mornings I wonder whether to go for the leather miniskirt and the slashed tights, or just put on the little black cocktail dress,” she continued.