‘Good morning,’ Gunna offered, stepping past her and looking about.
‘You police?’ asked the small woman in the jacket wrapped tightly about, her fists thrust deep in her pockets.
‘That’s right. I’m a detective. And you are?’
‘Natalia.’
‘You called us, did you?’
‘Yeah. Emilija, she said call you,’ Natalia said and Gunna could hardly make out her words through the thick accent.
‘All right, where’s this Emilija, and the officers who are already here?’
Natalia jerked her head towards the recesses of the house, every sound inside echoing of the bare walls and uncarpeted floors. ‘In there. Downstairs. I stay here.’
Gunna’s footsteps sounded loud on the smooth wood floor and she heard voices as a figure in paramedic’s overalls appeared from a doorway, a thickset woman on his arm and leaning heavily on him as another paramedic followed them.
‘Hæ, I’m Gunnhildur from CID, what’s the situation?’
The woman with the dark fringe over her blank eyes and clutching the paramedic’s arm did not appear to be injured and Gunna wondered what the problem was.
‘Your guys are downstairs and I guess they’ll tell you the story,’ the paramedic said in a patient bedside-manner voice. ‘This lady’s had a shock and we won’t be leaving quite yet. We’ll be in the ambulance if you want to catch up with us in a little while.’
‘Thanks, will do,’ Gunna said, and made her way down the stairs.
At the bottom two officers in uniform surveyed a broken chair in the middle of the floor.
‘Ah, the cavalry’s here.’
‘Hæ, Geiri. What’s the story, then? Who did what and who got hurt?’
The heavily built officer stepped back while his colleague, a young woman with a sharp face, frowned at the debris on the floor.
‘Three cleaners arrived to give this place a scrub. They’re all foreigners; they work for some outfit called Reindeer Cleaners. The house is rented and the tenants left a couple of days ago, so it’s being cleaned for the next tenants. Anyhow, it looks like one of the cleaners came down here, and I can’t really make out what happened. Whatever, one of the others came down here and found her sitting on the floor as if she’d been knocked on the head.’
‘Had she?’
‘Apparently not.’
‘Fallen over, maybe?’
‘No injuries as far as the paramedics can tell.’
‘There’s blood here,’ the male officer said, leaning forward and picking up a leg of the smashed chair.
‘Hold on,’ Gunna ordered, hurriedly snapping on a pair of surgical gloves to take it. ‘Best if you get back and don’t touch anything,’ she added, holding the chair leg under the light to inspect it. Ragged lengths of ripped duct tape stuck to the wood and the dark stains looked suspiciously like dried blood. She stepped back, surveying the floor where the remnants of the wooden chair were scattered, and quickly made out the other leg, also bound with ripped tape, and patches of blood that had stuck to the polished cement floor.
‘Right, back upstairs, both of you,’ Gunna said decisively. ‘Geiri, will you seal this off and I’ll have forensics look the place over before this goes any further. No point muddying the waters before they get here. Tinna?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ll talk to forensics to start with. While Geiri gets his rolls of smart blue tape from the car, will you have a word with the two cleaners upstairs? Leave the casualty with the medics, but get names, addresses, phone numbers, who they work for, and get all the keys to this place that you can lay your hands on. All right?’
‘Yep.’
‘Good. Go on then,’ Gunna said, pulling her phone from her pocket and selecting a number.
Outside Gunna found the ambulance’s back door open. The dark-haired woman with the broad shoulders sat hunched inside with a blanket over her shoulders, shaken by sobs as she stuttered words in short bursts between bouts of hyperventilation, one of the two medics holding her hands as she reassured her.
‘What’s the score?’ Gunna asked the second paramedic, a young man with cheeks reddened by the cold wind.
‘Hysterical. Something’s given her a colossal shock, and my colleague’s in there trying to calm her down a little before we take her to hospital.’
‘Any idea what?’
‘Nope,’ the man shook his head. ‘Couldn’t say. But she shied away as soon as she saw me in that house. She only wanted to see my colleague.’
‘You have a name?’
‘Valmira. That’s all I have so far. We’ll get her name and identity number when she gets to the hospital. I reckon she’ll need to be sedated, but we’d need a doctor here for that.’
‘So she’s not a local?’
The man shook his head. ‘Not sure. Her Icelandic is very good, but she was babbling in some other language to start with. She switched to Icelandic once she calmed down,’ he said, and looked past Gunna to the ambulance’s open door.
‘Ready?’
The female paramedic looked down and nodded. ‘She’s not good. I can’t remember seeing anyone with no physical injuries quite so distressed. I’ll stay in the back with her, but we had better be quick.’ She raised an eyebrow at Gunna. ‘Police?’
‘Yep. You’re going to the National Hospital?’
She looked dubious. ‘You want to interview her?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘You’ll have to check with the doctor. I’m not sure she’ll be in any fit state for a while.’
The forensics team did its work behind closed doors while Gunna sat in the scrubbed kitchen and made notes. Emilija and Natalia sat opposite her like naughty schoolgirls, one wide-eyed and fearful, the other wearing a truculent scowl.
‘How long have you worked with Valmira?’ Gunna asked,
‘Four-five year,’ Natalia said.
‘A couple of years.’
‘So you both know her quite well? You socialize outside work, or are you strictly colleagues?’
‘I see her sometimes,’ Emilija said. ‘We started this job around the same time because we both lost our jobs in the crash.’
‘What were you doing?’
‘I was a chef at Bryggjubar. Then it closed down when the banks. .’
‘I get the picture. And Valmira?’
‘She worked for an export company, worked there a long time. It went bankrupt a few months after the crash. But there’s always shit work to be had and we’ve both been here since,’ Emilija said without any bitterness.
‘How about you, Natalia? You know Valmira well?’
Natalia put out a hand, palm down and shook it from side to side. ‘A little.’
‘You understand what I’m saying, don’t you? Where are you from?’
‘From Chile,’ Natalia said with a thick accent as Emilija shook her head and looked away.
Gunna looked into Natalia’s defiant black eyes and put her pen down on the notebook in front of her, waiting for Natalia to look away. Eventually her stare dropped guiltily to the table.
‘Listen,’ Gunna said softly. ‘I can see you understand every word I’ve said to you and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t play the stupid foreigner with me. Understood?’
Natalia’s jaw squared in defiant dislike, but she nodded.
‘Fine,’ Gunna said. ‘Just so you know, this isn’t a formal interview. I’m only making a few notes for background, nobody’s been arrested and I’m not even sure if a crime has taken place, although I will probably have to take formal statements from you at some point. All right? So, Natalia, how long have you lived in Iceland?’
‘Eleven years.’
Gunna was gratified that even in those two words the fake accent had disappeared immediately.
‘And you, Emilija?’
‘About eight years.’
‘Tell me about Valmira. Where is she from? Married? Children? Does she has any family here?’
Emilija shook her head. ‘There are some cousins who live somewhere outside Reykjavík, Ólafsvík somewhere, I think. Her name’s Valmira Vukoja, and she’s from Bosnia originally, although I know she has lived in Iceland for a long time, much longer than Talia or me.’