“Magic, chief. Eiríkur should be here in a few minutes as well,” Helgi assured her. “Shall we go?” he asked Helena Rós in a voice that left her in no doubt that she had no option.
“What about my car?”
“One of these gentlemen will bring it, if you’ll give him the keys, and we’ll go in the patrol car.”
Helena Rós numbly handed over a bunch of keys hung with a fluffy effigy of a white dog, and Helgi took her elbow in his hand as they made their way over the road, leaving Gunna facing Gulli Ólafs.
Her face hardened and she glowered as Gulli Ólafs began to shrink into his chair. “Do you want to make a statement at the station, or do you want to tell me the story?”
“Jesus… I, er … I don’t think I should … I mean …”
“Make sense, will you?” Gunna’s finger stabbed at the transparent folder on the table. “You wrote these, right? I don’t doubt that we’ll be able to trace these documents to a computer you have access to, and we’ll match the inks to your office printer without too much trouble.”
“God… Yes, I wrote a couple of notes and posted them to that evil old bastard Jónas Valur. But I didn’t do anything more than that.”
“Where’s the money?”
“Money?”
“Don’t play games.”
“It’s at home. It was all Helena Rós’ idea. She knew her husband had been seeing Svana, and she knew he was terrified of the publicity after he got into Parliament. She wanted to give him a hard time.”
“And the cash you got out of Hallur Hallbjörnsson and I suppose Bjarki Steinsson? At your home as well?”
Gulli Ólafs nodded miserably as Gunna looked out of the window to see a second patrol car draw up across the road, this time with Eiríkur in the passenger seat.
“Come on. We’re going to have a little trip to Hverfisgata,” Gunna said, getting to her feet. She took his arm and steered him discreetly out of the door.
Outside, Gulli Ólafs blinked owlishly in the bright sunshine. Gunna felt him tense, and took a firmer grip on his elbow just as he ripped his arm free and sprinted across the road. A bus coming towards him screeched to an undignified halt. Gulli Ólafs dodged around it and splashed frantically through the puddles until Eiríkur, the length of his spindly legs giving him a clear advantage, caught up with him in a tackle that laid both of them full length in the street.
Trying to free her mind of the image of Eiríkur as a galloping giraffe, Gunna walked towards where Gulli Ólafs had been brought down in a patch of gravel with his face in a puddle. Eiríkur was panting and holding the man’s right wrist in a lock behind his back. Gunna kneeled down and snapped handcuffs around his wrists.
“Thanks, Gulli. That makes things so much easier,” she said with satisfaction.
• • •
“TALK,” GUNNA INSTRUCTED. “Everything, please. We have all day ahead of us and as much of tomorrow as we need.”
“Where shall I start?” Gulli Ólafs asked plaintively, as if to himself. He was hunched in the chair, while Gunna sat back with her hands on the desk in front of her.
“You and Helena Rós. How long’s this been going on?”
“Almost a year.”
“Before or after she found out about her husband seeing Svana Geirs?”
“After. She was going to divorce him and come and live with me.”
“Who had the idea of these threats and demands?”
“What?”
“Come on. The demands that Jónas Valur, Bjarki Steinsson and Hallur have been getting. The inks on some of these letters match the printer in your office.”
“There are hundreds of printers like that about,” he said dismissively.
“Actually, no.” Gunna smiled. “It seems it’s a fairly unusual type, and there aren’t more than a handful in various offices. My colleague spoke to the dealer and found out that these were introduced right after the crash when nobody had any money, so they only sold half a dozen.”
“So? How does that implicate me?”
“Because other ones were printed on a cheap inkjet printer that matches the one in Helena Rós’ study. So who had the bright idea?”
“Well I did, sort of. I said something about it one day as a kind of joke.” He twisted his fingers in his hands.
“A joke?”
“Yeah. I said something about it to Helena Rós, just in passing. Then she came back with it a few days afterwards and she was serious.”
“So how did she find out about Hallur’s relationship with Svana Geirs?”
“I told her,” Gulli Ólafs whispered miserably. “I truly wish I’d kept quiet.”
“And how did you know about the Svana Syndicate?”
“Newsroom gossip. This kind of thing leaks out and it’s impossible to keep anything completely secret, but these rumours stay that way, just rumours. There are dozens of things going on all the time that we could never, ever use.”
“Like a story about property fraud involving some prominent people?” Gunna asked.
“Exactly. This stuff gets talked about but that’s as far as it can go. Nobody dares to go out on a limb with it and nobody will be quoted. So I followed Svana discreetly, watched her flat, saw who came and went.” He shrugged. “Easy enough. I was interested because of the connection with Jónas Valur and Bjartmar Arnarson. They screwed me over before and I’ve been looking for an opportunity to return the favour ever since.” His voice oozed bitterness as he spat out the names of the two men.
“And now they’re both dead.”
“Nothing to do with me! You have to believe that, surely!”
“You heard about this group who were sharing Svana Geirs between them, and knowing that Hallur was one of them, you told his wife, right? Why?”
“I, well … I’ve known her for years. Good friends, but never … you know …”
“You thought it might bag you a good story, return the favour to the people who screwed you over before and help you into her knickers, all at the same time?”
“That’s …” he began, and sank down and nodded.
“And it worked?”
He nodded again. “I was going to leak it to a gossip magazine or a website. That would get it out into the open so I could follow it up. That was the idea, expose Hallur as a man who was cheating on his wife. That would have made it a lot easier for Helena Rós to end the marriage. She’s a prominent figure in her own right and doesn’t need any mud thrown at her.”
“So you were going to engineer a scandal with Hallur as the bad guy?”
“I’m not proud of it. Not now.”
“I’m not here to pass any judgement on you. That’s for the jury.”
“Jury?”
“Undoubtedly. This will go to court.”
“Jesus … Look, it was Helena Rós who wanted to put pressure on her husband, not me.”
“Right, let’s backtrack. You say she wanted to apply pressure to her husband. When was this?”
“About three weeks before Svana Geirs died. Hallur was a bag of nerves after he got the first demand. Helena Rós is vicious. She wanted to pressure him and screw as much money out of him as she could. It wasn’t because she needed it; just to make him squirm. She knew he had money hidden away that she didn’t have access to, but didn’t know how much.”
“So she wrote the letters?”
“I did that, some of them anyway. Then Helena wrote more.”
“You sent them to his office or his home?”
“Both.”
Gunna felt her head throbbing but forced herself to concentrate. “You also sent letters to Bjarki Steinsson, Bjartmar Arnarson and Jónas Valur Hjaltason?”
“A few text messages as well,” he sighed. “They all responded, except Bjartmar. Maybe he just didn’t care. I don’t know.”
“Why?”