The house was an old one. It looked forlorn and abandoned from her position on the bank above it. The door hung half open and broken, the interior of the old place in deep darkness. Sharp grains of snow carried by the wind stung Gunna’s face as she watched intently, her attention fixed on the door. The snow around it had been churned up, streaked with black and red, raked with prints.
Gradually her attention on the door relaxed as she felt she herself was being watched. There was no sound other than the whisper of wind that tugged at the ripped curtain hanging on the smashed door. She looked around and then quickly back at the door, waiting for movement, not knowing if it would come from inside or out.
When it came, it took her by surprise, and from behind. A rushing sound and a sharp animal smell made her look over her shoulder in alarm and she rolled over to aim the rifle, hoping to be fast enough. The animal seemed on top of her, a vast dirty-white presence that appeared in front of her face, and she knew already that she was too late to bring the rifle to bear. She could see the calmness in its eyes as it grunted and felt the animal’s raw power as a paw as big as her head and set with claws swung towards her.
Gunna sat bolt upright, her eyes wide open with the vision of the bear in front of her until it faded. The room was dark, with only a narrow strip of weak light coming under the door. She breathed deeply, the dream still vivid, and pushed hair damp with sweat from her face.
‘What’s the matter?’ Steini mumbled, stretching out a hand from under the duvet to rest it on her thigh. ‘You all right?’
‘Yeah. Bad dream, that’s all.’
‘Reckon you can get back to sleep?’
‘Hope so,’ Gunna said, lying back on the pillow as she tried to convince herself that the dream, in utterly convincing technicolour, even down to the animal’s piercing reek, had been nothing but her imagination playing tricks. She knew it would be hopeless trying to get back to sleep and she could feel her heart still racing while Steini’s steady breathing told her that he was having no such problems.
Gunna swung her legs out of bed, eased open the door and slipped into the kitchen.
Orri had left Lísa in bed. Their relationship was an odd one, dominated by them both working shifts, Lísa managing a canteen at a factory where production was only ever halted for a day at Christmas, and him at a freight company’s depot on an industrial estate on the city outskirts. His other activities also ate into his time and he had never got round to telling Lísa that he had volunteered to work reduced hours when the company had been forced to make cuts. In fact, all but a few of the mostly middle-aged staff had taken a cut in hours, and it didn’t seem to have mattered. The old boys just worked harder to make up for it, which was something Orri failed to understand.
He yawned as he clocked in, already wearing his overalls and steel toecap boots, his helmet under his arm. He looked into the coffee room where two of the old boys were leafing through newspapers a week old and grumbling about the state of the country.
‘Good morning.’
‘Good morning, Orri,’ the one facing him replied while the other one, a corpulent man with a roll of fat at the back of his neck, the sight of which made Orri feel queasy, continued to look through last week’s small ads. ‘And how might you be this fine day?’
‘Not so bad.’
‘You’re early today. Your Lísa must have been at work last night?’
‘Nope. She’s still asleep.’
‘The lazy bitch. I’d have kicked her out of bed, demanded eggs, bacon and coffee be brought to me, and an early morning roll in the hay to kick off with.’
Orri snorted with laughter. ‘Yeah, right,’ he retorted. ‘I’ve seen your old woman and it’d be a brave man who told her to do anything.’
At the next table, Dóri the foreman closed his newspaper and stood up with a slow smile. ‘That’s what you youngsters can’t get into your heads. Gentle touches. That’s all it needs. That’s what has them eating out of your hand and running to get your breakfast when you whistle for it.’
‘If you say so,’ Orri said, already bored with the non-stop talk of women and their bizarre habits that seemed to obsess his older colleagues. ‘What are we starting with today?’
‘Six pallets to go to Akureyri. Two for Raufarhöfn on the same truck, so those need to go to Reykjavík today. There’s a couple of crates to go to Djúpivogur and another shipment for the Westmann Islands, but that’s not on pallets yet. Eight collections to make in Reykjavík, two in Keflavík and there’s a delivery from Akranes due at eleven that’s being forwarded to somewhere or other. It has to go to the airport, anyway,’ Dóri reeled off in a flat monotone as he read the list from a clipboard.
Orri yawned. ‘What am I doing then, boss?’
‘I’m not the boss, young man, but I’d suggest Alex does the Keflavík run from Hafnarfisk in the fridge truck as usual and you do the Reykjavík collections in the Trafic. Does that meet with your agreement?’
‘Alex is in today?’
‘He’d better be if he wants to keep his job, that’s all I can say,’ Dóri said, taking off his glasses and folding them away in the breast pocket of his overall. ‘Late yesterday. Late today and late twice last week. Not good enough and I wouldn’t put up with it, but I’m not the boss, as you know.’
‘I’ll have a word.’
Dóri looked at him with his face screwed into a frown. ‘Up to you. But the old man doesn’t need to put up with Alex being a dick. There are a dozen immigrants a week knocking on the door asking for work.’
As the old man left him to it, Orri tapped at his phone, put it to his ear and listened to Alex’s voicemail kick in with a few sentences of rapid Latvian that he ignored.
‘Hi. It’s Orri. Where are you, man? You’re going to get sacked if you keep coming in late,’ he said in bland English as he walked through the door and saw Alex swagger towards him with a smile. He paused and dug in his pocket, raising a finger at Orri as he did so.
‘Don’t bother. It’s a message from me,’ Orri called out. ‘Telling you not to turn up late again if you want to keep your job.’
‘Hey, don’t worry. He can’t fire me,’ Alex said with a grin. ‘I didn’t mean to be late.’ He whistled. ‘That girl. Man. She just wouldn’t let me go. Know what I mean?’
‘Yeah, yeah. I know. But she won’t like you so much if you’re under her feet at home all day, will she?’ Orri said.
‘You have some stuff for me? I have space next week if you have some goods to deliver.’
She was early for her midday shift, arriving at the Hverfisgata station with an hour to spare, certain that Ívar Laxdal would be looking for her. In two years with what had been formed as the Serious Crime Unit, she had found that serious crime seemed to occur in fits and starts, and Gunna and her colleagues had found themselves investigating anything from car theft to a cartel of youthful but computer-savvy mobile phone thieves, as well as the occasional crime so brutal that she asked herself repeatedly if this was something new. She wondered if people were reporting things that had previously been sorted out behind closed doors, often with more discreet violence.
Ívar Laxdal found her in the detectives’ office as her computer was powering up.
‘Gunnhildur,’ she heard behind her as she typed in her password. ‘I hope you feel better for the break?’
She swung her chair around and saw the granite face of the National Commissioner’s deputy, his blue eyes sparkling with an intelligence and humour his deadpan expression rarely betrayed.