This time he was lucky. There was gold and silver to be had, a dozen krugerrands, a heavy necklace and a couple of bracelets and chunky pendants that he quickly stowed in his bag without looking too carefully. Metal was good and the Baltic boys would give him a price for it. Melted down, it became untraceable, and there was always a market for it.
A leather wallet made of some soft skin yielded a handful of cash in a variety of currencies, which he stuffed into a trouser pocket before he decided that enough was enough for a few quick minutes of easy work. It might take weeks for the couple whose bedroom he had invaded to notice that the cash and jewellery had vanished, and he made a swift exit. He clicked the back door locked. He dropped the torch into his jacket pocket and froze, standing with his back to the wall between the house and the garage.
He heard car doors slam twice in quick succession and a bang as the house’s front door shut, and he hurried on silent feet to the corner and saw a BMW parked squarely in the drive. Lights were being switched on inside as he looked around and made a dash for the street. It took a matter of only a few seconds before he was off the drive and walking along the road towards where he had parked the van around the corner, still loaded with boxes to be delivered.
His heart still in his mouth, he got in the van and was gone in a few seconds, still waiting to hear cries of anger and the slap of flat feet on the wet pavement. At the traffic lights at the end of the road he watched the mirrors carefully, but there was nothing to be seen, no cars behind him, nobody on foot. He peeled off his latex gloves and dropped them into the passenger side footwell as he congratulated himself on a job well done, laughing out loud as he left the quiet street behind him.
It was Eiríkur’s first day back and he looked tired, with bags under his eyes and a hangdog look about him.
‘Welcome back,’ Gunna greeted him. ‘And congratulations. How’s the little one doing?’
Eiríkur’s smile lit up his wan face. ‘He’s the most beautiful baby in the world, of course. But he’s been keeping us up, and so has his sister.’
‘Jealous, is she?’
‘A little. But we’ve been trying to give her as much attention as we can, but it’s not easy.’
‘Tell me about it,’ Gunna said. ‘I’m afraid you have to be firm as well as loving, unfortunately, and it can’t always be painless.’
‘I know. I’m not really sorry to be back at work, to be honest,’ he said, dropping his voice as if he were confessing a sin.
‘Don’t worry about it. I could never have stopped working. I’d have happily sold both mine if I’d had to spend all day every day with them.’
‘Where’s Helgi?’ Eiríkur asked, looking at Helgi’s unusually tidy and clearly empty desk.
‘On holiday. He’s driving to Blönduós today and he’ll spend the next two weeks in some remote valley helping sweet baby lambs into the world, and I imagine in the autumn he’ll want another week’s holiday to go and help his brother round up those same lambs and send them off to be slaughtered.’
‘Oh,’ Eiríkur said, and sat down at his own desk and watched his computer start up. ‘I didn’t realize he was on holiday. Are we busy? You want me to take over any of Helgi’s caseload?’
‘There’s an assault case that Helgi’s working on which I need you to do some work on. It’s a hit-and-run thing, but it seems that it might have been deliberate. You’ll find the notes on the system, so you’d best have a read through it and I’ll fill you in on the details afterwards. Then there’s a couple of muggings that seem to have got out of hand, with a little more violence than usual. That’s a lowlife by the name of Thór Hersteinnsson. We know it’s him, but there’s precious little hard evidence and nobody he knows wants to give a statement.’
Eiríkur’s face fell. ‘I’ve encountered this Thór before. Not the pleasantest of people, I have to say.’
‘He has an alibi for both muggings, provided by various of his friends and therefore dubious, so if you could crack one or both of those, we’ll be doing nicely.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Oh, no. We have a dead businessman to deal with. Don’t you watch the news?’
‘I thought Sævaldur would have been looking after that as we were both off?’
‘He is, but so are we. All of us under the Laxdal’s eagle eye. Briefing at two, so I’d better find something out about this man. You’ll be on this as well.’
Eiríkur sat back in his chair and gazed at the computer screen in front of him and the piles of paper between it and him, all of which demanded attention. Gunna could see his eyes starting to glaze over at the prospect.
‘Small, Medium and Large,’ Viggó announced from behind the desk in the corner of the garage. ‘Bang on time, my darlings.’
‘You go fuck yourself, fat boy,’ Natalia grunted with Viggó out of earshot, but only just; he cupped an ear.
‘Hey, what d’you say?’
‘I say, nice to see you, boss,’ she replied with a broad smile and exaggerating her accent almost to a parody of herself.
Viggó’s eyes narrowed as she bustled past with her box of cloths, brushes and sprays, and Valmira handed mops, buckets and the two heavy-duty vacuum cleaners out of the van to Emilija.
‘Hey, Small, Medium and Large!’
This time Natalia’s eyes narrowed while Emilija and Valmira pointedly ignored the names he had given them.
‘What is it?’ Valmira finally asked.
‘Which of you three has the first aid certificate?’
‘We all have first aid training. It’s in the contract, and you made us pay for it as well. Remember?’
Viggó spread his hands wide in innocence. ‘I don’t make the rules, girls. It’s not up to me.’
‘You not the boss then?’ Emilija asked, stacking the equipment on racks against the wall.
‘Yeah, I’m the boss.’
Emilija shrugged. ‘You don’t make rules. You not boss. Simple,’ she said, without stopping what she was doing. Both she and Natalia kept their conversations to the simplest Icelandic they could while Viggó was anywhere near, leaving Valmira to speak for them. None of them found it odd that they all used Icelandic every day between themselves as the only language they all had in common, but were careful not to let Viggó find out they could understand everything he said.
Valmira was different, they felt. She had come to Iceland with what remained of her family as a hollow-eyed child refugee from a war-torn part of the Balkans that she never spoke about. Only the limp that stiffened in cold weather and the occasional suppressed hiss of pain as she bent to pick something up gave away the old injuries they had never dared ask about. Valmira, or Large, as Viggó preferred to call her, had been in a proper office job before the financial crash had bankrupted the import company she had worked for practically overnight, and she spoke a dozen languages, including Icelandic as well as any local, apart from an accent that only tiredness brought out.
‘I’m the man in charge here and don’t you forget it,’ Viggó warned, his face reddening.
‘You daddy. He boss. Not you,’ Natalia said with venom behind her sweet smile.
‘You be careful, Small. Mind your manners or you’ll be sacked.’
Natalia smiled again, just as sweetly, her tiny teeth bared. ‘You daddy, he love me. He don’t sack people who work hard.’