“Ninety-eight.”
A hard-faced lady in a fur coat stepped quickly past him and a blast of wet air disturbed the bank’s controlled atmosphere before being suddenly cut off as the door eased itself shut again. Diddi gulped.
“Ninety-nine.”
He looked up and saw that the youngest of the three cashiers was waiting for him, a woman with thick brown hair and a toothy smile. Diddi quailed and stood up, stared at the desk in front of him and looked up to focus on the girl’s teeth. He knew she was saying something, but he didn’t hear it for the roaring in his head.
He fumbled with his parka and hauled down the zip to put in a hand and pull out the carpet knife that he had been careful to keep inside, terrified that he would cut his fingers.
“One hundred.”
The cashier at the next desk had seen nothing, but the one facing him was staring in disbelief. Diddi looked straight at her and in a moment of clarity took in the heavy mask of make-up on her face that wrinkled as her mouth opened.
“Quiet,” Diddi ordered. “Please. Give me money. N-n-now,” he instructed, trying to sound as if he meant it, and then remembering what he had been told.
“Don’t make a noise and don’t make any alarms go off,” he ordered, mind on autopilot. He stuffed the crumpled carrier bag that had been in his pocket through the gap. “Put it in there,” he instructed. “If you don’t mind,” he added as an afterthought without having a clear idea why.
The girl recovered her composure and quickly busied herself behind the desk. Diddi realized he had forgotten to tell her to keep her hands where he could see them, and felt suddenly that things were going wrong, telling himself that he shouldn’t panic. The woman at the next desk was staring at him in amazement, and the man in the green jacket she was serving had realized that her attention wasn’t on him any more, but on the young man in a parka with the pudding-basin haircut and bewilderment in his eyes.
“What’s happening?” the man ventured, and Diddi raised the knife, trying to look threatening.
“Please, don’t say anything, and keep calm,” the woman at the desk murmured as the carrier bag appeared in front of Diddi, stuffed with notes. He picked it up with his left hand and backed away from the counter, keeping the two cashiers and the man in front of him.
“One hundred and one.”
The third cashier still had not noticed what had taken only a matter of seconds, but squawked as she looked up and saw Diddi standing in front of them uncertainly, knife held out.
“Look here, young feller,” the man with the green jacket was saying in the same authoritative tone that Diddi had hated hearing at school. “Look, give me the knife and everything will be all right. You understand?”
Diddi backed away as the man advanced, the stern look on his face clashing with his false smile. He proffered a hand for Diddi to put the knife into, when suddenly Diddi remembered what he had been told.
“No, f-f-fuck off! Leave me alone!” he yelled, slashing wildly and turning to run. He registered the door swinging to behind him and the shock of cold air hitting his face outside as a shrill alarm began to ring somewhere in the distance. He raced round the corner and along the street before remembering his instructions. He cut down a footpath and emerged in a street of quiet houses where a battered red car waited.
Panting uncontrollably, he collapsed into the passenger seat. The car was moving before he had even closed the door.
“OK?” asked the denim-clad, thin-faced driver as they stopped politely at the intersection to join the main road towards town. He smiled at Diddi cowering in the seat as they heard the first sirens coming the other way, a police squad car followed closely by an ambulance, and took the car as close as he could to the curb to allow the emergency vehicles a clear path down the middle of the road.
Diddi started to breathe more normally as they approached the main road, and he closed his eyes, trying to overcome the panic he could feel inside and to stop himself sobbing. He still clutched both the bag and the knife.
The mid-morning traffic was fairly sparse, and as the car pulled up at a set of traffic lights ready to turn into another quiet residential area, the driver looked over at him.
“Knife,” he said.
“What?”
“Knife,” he repeated, winding down his window.
Diddi silently handed it over. As the car moved off and around the corner, the thin-faced man sent the carpet knife spinning away into the thick hedge of someone’s front garden.
SIGRÚN RAISEDA questioning eyebrow as the newsreader finished the announcement.
“Robbing a bank? Do people really do that?” she asked. “I knew that kiosks and shops get held up sometimes, but not banks, surely?”
“It happens, though not often,” Gunna said thoughtfully, rummaging through the pockets of her fleece for her phone. “I’m just going to call Helgi …”
Sigrún stood up and refilled the percolator jug absently while Gunna listened to the phone ring.
“Hi, Helgi, busy?”
“No more than usual, chief. Plenty to do and not enough time to do it.”
“You want to take a morning off now and again. Does you good,” she replied. “Here, I just heard the news. Who’s the bank robber?”
“Ah. Actually, I was wondering if I should give you a call, and then I thought better of it.”
“Why? Me being off duty has never stopped you before.”
“No, that’s Eiríkur, not me.”
“Sorry. But OK, is there anything to this?”
She heard Helgi chuckle.
“The world’s stupidest bank robber, it seems. Daft Diddi walked into a branch of Kaupthing with a knife in one hand and got away with about a million in cash.”
“A million? That’s not much of a payday, is it?”
“Wouldn’t even get you a decent second-hand car these days.”
“And where’s Diddi?”
“No idea. The uniform boys are doing the rounds and we’re keeping out of it for the moment. The silly bastard only walked into the branch where he has his own account and the girl behind the counter knew exactly who he was. No attempt to hide his face, nothing, but he managed to disappear, so I doubt he was doing this alone. Poor lad, now he’s going to get into some real hot water.”
“He’ll get a suspended sentence, I suppose, when he shows up.”
“No chance. There was a chap there who tried to be a have-a-go hero and got in the way of Diddi’s knife. Slashed the tendons in one arm, so Diddi’s going to be facing GBH.”
Sigrún put mugs and a plate of biscuits on the table, while Gunna shook her head in despair.
“Unbelievable how stupid these people can be, isn’t it? Let me know what happens, will you? We ought to have a word with Diddi when he’s finally brought in and see if we can get him to admit that it was Ommi who beat him up.”
“Way ahead of you, chief. I’ve already warned the uniform boys that Diddi may have been keeping some bad company. I’ll let you know if anything exciting happens.”
“Fair enough. See you this afternoon,” Gunna said, ending the call.
“What was that?” Sigrún asked.
“Ah, the usual stupid, immoral people we have to deal with. A disabled lad walked into a bank with a knife, demanded money and got away with about a million in cash. But he slashed someone’s arm while he was at it, so it’ll probably be an additional case for us once the boys in uniform have brought him in.”