The garage was practically empty. The steel rack of shelves was clear of the usual paraphernalia that families collected and stored out of the way. He peered into the basement and saw it was empty, too, and with disgust, Orri realized that he might have spent time and effort breaking into an unoccupied house. There were the usual white goods in a row, but there were no power tools of the kind that he guessed Alex had a ready export market for.
He ascended the stairs and eased open the door at the top into the house itself. His soles whispered on the pale wood floor as his torch threw a narrow beam of light ahead of him. Like the basement, the kitchen was vacant apart from a few empty pizza boxes and cartons that had once contained noodles, stacked neatly on the worktop.
So there had to be someone here, he decided, wondering if they were preparing to move. There were cases in the living room, all locked, and he did not feel inclined to try picking the locks, at least not until he had checked the rest of the house. A tablet or even a decent smart phone would do the trick, he thought, that would be enough to have made the trip pay for itself.
In the bedroom there was a vast double bed, bigger even than the one he had seen at Sunna María Voss’s house the night before. This one was bare of any bedclothes but had a couple of cases stacked on it. It was one of the smaller bedrooms that was in use, with the bed meticulously made and only a very few personal items to be seen.
Back in the main bedroom, Orri clicked open the first case and immediately shut it again. A ThinkPad laptop, more than few years old and therefore worth next to nothing. Another case revealed another laptop, sleeker and newer, but still not modern enough to be worth taking, although it might do as a last resort, Orri decided.
The contents of a heavier case were what made him catch his breath as he snapped the clasps and lifted the lid. The metal parts of the pistol were nestled snugly in foam cutouts, waiting to be plucked and assembled. The case had a faint, sharp smell of oil and he wondered if the weapon had been used. Orri felt a sudden fear as he knew this was far beyond anything he could have expected. Even with his limited knowledge of firearms he could tell it was a specialist tool that gleamed malevolently in its padded case in front of him, a murder weapon designed for one purpose only.
He closed the lid and fastened the clasps again. The sweat broke out along his back as he felt an anxious hot flush of fear. In a rush of realization, he knew that the people who owned a weapon like that were not ones he would want to meet, and he wouldn’t even want them to know they’d been visited. He backed away, nervously keeping his movements as deft as they had been on the way in, terrified that he would knock over some pretentious ornament and set alarms ringing along the street. His feet made no more sound than they had when he’d entered the house. The torch was switched off and he made his way along the hall and back to the door leading to the basement and way out, reasoning that the clear route through the front door was too obvious.
At the top of the steps, Orri felt his breath coming in gasps and consciously made himself breathe more slowly, at a measured rate that also settled his mind and helped him think logically. There was no hurry. If there were anyone here, they would have raised the alarm. The place was silent. There was nobody here. Although there was no reason to hang about, he told himself there was no need to move as silently as a cautious mouse.
He crossed the basement in almost complete darkness and gulped in relief at the sight of the door, but relief morphed slowly into panic as the door refused to open. In desperation he rattled the immobile handle and turned to go back into the house and seek out another door, upstairs and out through the front door. He’d be in full view of the street, but what the hell?
At the bottom of the steps he paused at a sound a few inches behind his head. It was a full-bodied click, the snick of engineered metal that he’d heard often enough in movies but never expected to hear in real life.
‘Stand still,’ a voice behind him instructed. ‘Lift your hands up.’
Just like he had seen in the movies, Orri lifted his hands above his head and panted with fear. ‘I don’t mean any trouble. I’m leaving. I haven’t taken anything and I haven’t seen anything,’ Orri forced himself to say as clearly as he could.
‘Name?’ the voice continued in its accented English.
‘Orri Björnsson.’
‘And what are you doing in here, Orri Björnsson?’
‘I’m a burglar,’ he admitted; it was the first time he had said the word out loud, and it felt distinctly odd to be saying it in English.
‘You steal from people’s houses?’
‘Well. .’ Orri began, twitching as swift hands began to delve in his pockets. A light flickered into life behind him.
‘A professional, I see,’ the voice said as the phone jammer was lifted from Orri’s pocket. ‘Not a particularly good model, but it’ll do the job well enough at short range.’
‘Look, I. .’ Orri said, turning his head to look behind him.
‘Don’t turn round,’ the voice said softly, administering a sharp kick to Orri’s calf muscle that made him gasp in pain and force himself not to cry out. ‘So who are you working for?’ The voice immediately demanded.
Orri sniffed and blinked back tears that appeared unbidden. ‘I work for myself,’ he said finally.
‘You work alone?’
‘Look, who are you?’ Orri said, trying to think fast. ‘You’re not a cop, are you?’
‘Who do you work with?’
‘A friend.’
‘And your friend, he knows where you are and he’ll come and look for you if you’re not back at the right time?’
‘Or he’ll go to the police.’
This time there was a snort of laughter behind him. ‘That does not sound likely, Orri Björnsson. A thief going to the police because another thief is late getting home. I don’t think so.’
‘Who are you?’ Orri asked again. ‘Listen, I can help you. I can hear you’re not from here and I could. .’ he said, but his voice faded away lamely.
‘I think we need to go for a walk, Orri,’ the voice said softly and his hands were swiftly hauled downwards and taped together behind his back. A second later a bag descended over his head and the faint light of the torch behind him was blotted out. Then he was spun round in a circle several times in each direction and roughly dragged, before his knees were kicked from under him and he collapsed in a heap. He could hear the voice making a joke in a language he didn’t understand and the sound of something scraping on the concrete floor before everything went quiet, even though he hadn’t heard anyone leave.
Gunna could see that Jóhann was tired. He looked younger than his fifty years, she thought, although he had clearly put effort into keeping himself trim. He was a slim, spare man with a mop of curly hair that had turned an incongruous pale silver grey. It made him look oddly youthful, Gunna thought, deciding that he must have been a striking man in his younger days. He fiddled with his glasses, turning them over in his fingers and putting them on to check the laptop in front of him that chimed at intervals.
‘Vilhelm Thorleifsson,’ Gunna said. ‘You knew him well?’
She saw the corners of his mouth droop in disapproval and he glanced at Sunna María, who sat impassively. They made an odd couple, Gunna decided, the prosperous dentist older than his wife by ten or fifteen years, she guessed, wondering what had brought them together.
‘I didn’t know Vilhelm well, I have to admit,’ he said in a dry voice. ‘I wouldn’t call him a friend as such.’
‘But I gather you were more involved in your business dealings with him?’