After half an hour of producing a chart of ownership and cross-ownership on a whiteboard, Gunna stood back and admired her handiwork, shaking her head at the criss-crossed red, green and blue lines. With Vilhelm Thorleifsson’s name in the centre of the board, it was clear that there was a network of people with reasons to wish him harm as well as those he had collaborated with. But as well as Elvar Pálsson’s name, the multi-coloured strands pointed repeatedly at two more names and Gunna went back to the national register and the phone book to track down Sunna María Voss and Jóhann Hjálmarsson.
Orri had done his homework. The house he had visited belonged to Sólfell Property ehf, a limited company owned by Sunna María Voss and her dentist husband, which was no surprise. There was nothing unusual in rich people putting their property into the names of relatives or companies. What was a surprise was that several more of the bunker-like houses in the street were owned by the same company, along with two more at different stages of construction, one of them weathertight and the other still a set of half-dug foundations. He found that Sólfell Property even had a website of its own that listed several exclusive properties available for short- or long-term lease via a letting agency.
A few canny investments there, Orri decided as he spent an afternoon researching the street’s residents still further. He reckoned that around half of the twenty houses in the street were owned by their occupants, the rest could be owned or rented and therefore less easy to find out much about the occupants.
‘The dentist is dabbling in property.’ Orri laughed to himself as his fingers skimmed the trackpad of the laptop he had bought legally. He knew better than to have stolen goods lying around the flat. Merchandise was best disposed of quickly, he felt. Comparing the photos on Sólfell Property’s website with satellite images, he was able to work out which houses were theirs and wondered if these would be worthwhile targets. It would be worth scouting around, at least. Anyone in the market to rent a house like that would be no pauper, although the research might be a little more involved than with someone who had lived in the same house for years.
Orri snapped shut the laptop and stood up, tossing his keys from hand to hand. A little drive out to the wealthier end of Kópavogur would not be a bad idea. Lísa wouldn’t be back for a few hours yet and maybe he’d be nice to her for once and take her out for a meal. Nothing too fancy, mind, no waiters with waistcoats or any of that stuff. A pizza, or a fish meal at one of the trendy places near the harbour that were half-empty outside the tourist season.
Heading for the door with his fleece over his arm, he thought again about the dentist’s wife and the vision of her, eyes closed with water coursing over her face and jutting breasts, past the taut belly to the dark triangle below. The thought added a spring to his step as he promised himself he was only going to observe.
The elderly lady was agitated and her husband fumed, standing up to take a few angry paces before sitting down again.
‘You’ve no idea when this happened?’ Eiríkur repeated wearily.
‘Of course not,’ Matthildur Sveinsdóttir squawked, fingers busy with the frayed tassels of a shawl draped over her shoulders. ‘It wasn’t until I saw my clasp in Aunt Bertha’s window that I realized.’
‘Aunt Bertha?’ Eiríkur asked.
‘It’s a shop.’
‘It’s in Reykjavík,’ her husband explained, filling in the gaps. ‘They sell all kinds of old junk there.’
‘Antiques, he means,’ Matthildur corrected. ‘Ævar, why don’t you go and look in the garage and see if anything’s missing there?’
‘Don’t be stupid, woman. I always lock the garage. Unlike you, who’s always leaving the back door unlocked.’
‘I do not!’
‘Excuse me, can we get back to the matter in hand?’ Eiríkur demanded, trying to sound as stern as he could. The old man stamped from the room, banging the door behind him. ‘Could we start again?’
Matthildur Sveinsdóttir took a deep breath. ‘Yes. Well, Ævar and I went downtown to do some shopping, like we usually do once a week or so because we like to have a walk around the centre and have a coffee in Hotel Borg or somewhere. Ævar misses town so much since he retired, you know,’ she prattled and Eiríkur groaned inwardly.
‘I appreciate that, but what did you see in this shop?’
‘That? I told you, didn’t I? I saw a gold clasp just like mine, the one that came off my mother’s best dress that she had from her mother. I’d been meaning to sew a new bodice for it for years and never got round to it, and now that the arthritis is playing merry hell with my fingers I probably never will, but I was going to pass it on to my daughter one day, you see, that’s why I kept it in the drawer upstairs.’
‘So you are sure it’s the same one as yours? How do you know?’
‘Well, I said to Ævar straight away that it looked just like mine, and so we came straight home and I looked in the drawer upstairs and it was gone,’ Matthildur said with aggrieved triumph.
‘You didn’t go into the shop and look at the. . what was it? A clasp? What is it exactly?’
The old lady pursed her lips in impatience. ‘A clasp. A set of gold decorations for national dress. Surely you know what I mean?’
‘Gold? Was it worth much?’
‘I don’t know, young man, but Aunt Bertha had a damned respectable price tag on it. Surely you’ll go and look? It was in the window an hour ago.’
Eiríkur nodded, pretending to understand. ‘Is anything else missing from the house?’
‘Ævar’s watch, the smart one that he hardly ever wears, and I think Ævar said there was some money in the drawer as well.’
‘And you have no idea when these items disappeared?’
‘They didn’t disappear. They were stolen,’ Ævar’s voice boomed furiously from the door. ‘There’s nothing missing from the garage.’
‘You checked all the cupboards, did you?’ Matthildur asked.
‘Of course I did. You don’t think I went out there and didn’t have a proper look, do you?’
‘Do you have a list of what’s missing?’ Eiríkur asked quickly, hoping to nip another squabble in the bud.
‘Well, not really,’ Matthildur said after a moment’s thought.
Eiríkur closed his notebook. ‘In that case, I’m going to go down to this Auntie Bertha place now. I need you two to go through the house, put together a list of what you think is missing — as detailed as you can make it — and to think hard about when you last saw these items so we can have an idea of how long they have been missing.’
‘Why do you need to know that?’
‘Because that will give us an idea of when the break-in might have taken place,’ Eiríkur said, calling on reserves of patience. ‘And that means I can try and tie it in with other similar incidents, and hopefully get an idea of who might have been responsible.’
‘All right,’ Ævar growled. ‘You do that, young man, and when you find out who it is, I want to break his fingers one by one.’
He drove past a couple of times and was pleased there wasn’t a soul to be seen; not that the streets being deserted said all that much. In this kind of neighbourhood people walked from the door to the car and no further. The exclusive cul-de-sac where he could see the dentist’s house at the end was quiet. There was no car to be seen and no lights on inside. It was the same further along the street at most of the houses on the seaward side, the ones he was most interested in, and at this time of the afternoon, experience told him that people could be unpredictable in their movements, though middle-aged people generally kept office hours.