‘I’m sorry, young man,’ the old man wheezed. ‘I’m not sure I can help you any further.’
Eiríkur thanked the old man and made his way down the stairs as two officers in uniform stepped into the building.
‘G’day, Eiríkur, you called?’
‘Yeah, that was me. Just follow the racket, would you, and maybe have a quiet word with the occupant about antisocial behaviour?’
The taller of the two officers tilted his head to one side and listened for a moment. ‘Cradle of Filth,’ he decided. ‘That definitely constitutes anti-social behaviour.’
Gunna looked up as Eiríkur arrived, breathless and excited at the hospital.
‘Found it,’ he announced.
‘What have you found?’
He grinned in triumph. ‘Our friend’s girlfriend. I know where she lives, and with a bit of luck she should lead us to him. That’s her,’ he said, placing a sheet of paper in front of Gunna.
‘Our mystery man’s girlfriend?’
‘Elísabet Sólborg Höskuldsdóttir. I found the riding club the logo belongs to and someone there confirmed that she had seen the guy in the picture with this Elísabet. So, find her and we find him,’ he said. ‘I hope.’
‘And have you found her?’
‘Not so far. I know where she lives and I have her driving licence photo. There’s a grey Ford Ka registered to her, so at least I have a little more to go on.’
‘You’ve put an alert out for the car?’
‘Already done it.’
Gunna looked closely at the picture and saw a young woman looking blankly past the camera. Unruly hair had been pushed back behind her ears and she saw thick lips and a stubby nose that gave the strong face a determined look, offset by the steel ring looped through the lower lip.
‘Distinctive,’ Gunna said. ‘But that photo’s almost ten years old, so she might well look very different now.’
‘Could be,’ Eiríkur said. ‘But at least I have some idea what she looks like, and if she can lead me to her boyfriend, so much the better.’
‘That’s brilliant,’ Gunna said and nodded at the computer monitor showing the shattered hand. ‘But she’ll have to wait. Take a look at that.’
‘Hell, that must be painful. Deliberate?’ Eiríkur asked, staring at the X-ray image of Maris’s smashed hand. ‘That’s no accident, surely?’
‘That’s my feeling,’ the doctor said, looking up from his desk at the other side of the room. ‘But you’d better get a specialist opinion on that.’
‘Listen,’ Gunna said, flipping through her notes. ‘Eiríkur, listen. The victim lives at Lyngvangur in Hafnarfjördur. Number 45, top flat on the right. I want you to get over there right away and have a good look at the place before we do much else. Take pictures and dust for prints. But I really want you to see if you can figure out how this happened. According to this gentleman,’ Gunna said, gesturing to the doctor who was again engrossed in his computer. ‘The victim had some kind of domestic accident.’
‘You think he’s lying?’
‘I don’t think he’s lying. I know so. So go and check it out while I have another word with him.’
Orri would have given almost anything to be somewhere else. Houses were much more familiar and easier to deal with. Offices had never been his style, and daylight even less so, but after the gut-wrenching experience of the motorcycle clubhouse, this had turned out to be easy, far easier that he had expected.
His experience that a man carrying a toolbox and wearing overalls and a yellow waistcoat attracts no attention was again proved right.
Not that this office had been a difficult one to get into, he reflected as he padded between the desks. He might as well have been invisible. The fire escape at the top of the external steel staircase was clearly this office’s smoking spot and it had been easy enough to open the door with a screwdriver jammed into the worn mechanism.
He froze as the front door of the office downstairs at street level rattled and he peered cautiously out of the window of what he assumed was the director’s office to see a security guard with a dog on a lead walk away, satisfied that the place was locked up, and not expecting anyone to break into an office on a Saturday afternoon.
The dog whined and pulled at its lead, aware of something that the man in the official cap and jacket with a logo on the back was clearly not worried about. The dog came to a stop, looking longingly at the upper floor windows and Orri jerked his head back, certain that it had seen him.
‘Pack it in, will you?’ He heard the security guard irritably scolding the dog as he made for the comfort of his van and Orri briefly felt sorry for the animal that was being prevented from doing its job, but relieved that the guard was too lazy to do his own job properly.
He quickly did as he had been told. Standing on the desk, he lifted the ceiling panel, put the little control box next to the light fitting and opened the aerial. He clipped the two tiny crocodile clips to the wires leading to the light and saw an indicator on the control box begin to glow. Using a ballpoint pen, he pushed a hole through the ceiling panel, relieved that the old-fashioned fibreboard was soft and there was no need to use the drill he had brought with him, and pushed the barrel of the camera into the gap. With droplets of sweat breaking out on his back in spite of the chill, he replaced the panel and hoped that he had fitted everything correctly. He swept off the desk, even though he had left no footprints, and made for the other office, where he went through the same procedure before heading for the back door.
He was down the fire escape and back in his car within a minute, the high-viz tabard identifying him as a contractor rolled up under the seat, and a few seconds later he was speeding through Kópavogur towards the main road and home. Orri smiled to himself. The sight of the covert camera in its package in his postbox had given him an idea and it had taken only an hour or two to find just what he was looking for. There had been no call from the Voice and Orri decided to see if he could turn the tables.
An hour’s shopping later, he pulled up outside the block of flats. In the lobby he made sure there was nobody about before he used his picks to tease open the lock of the postbox above his own, which he knew belonged to a flat that had been empty for months and was likely to stay that way. Using lumps of modelling clay, he fixed a small camera of his own in the postbox to stare out through the gaps in the grille, shut the box and checked it to be sure it wasn’t visible except to someone taking an exceptionally close look. He jogged up the stairs feeling like a man with a good day’s work behind him and knowing that he would be able to download the footage from the camera direct to his phone.
A nurse had come to attend to Maris and change the dressing on his hand, giving Gunna the opportunity to make a few phone calls from the corridor.
‘Hæ, Eiríkur, anything interesting?’
She could hear his phone crackle and his voice echoed in the bare flat.
‘Nothing much. I’m dusting for prints and there’s a full palm print on the living-room table, with a lot of dents around it. Looks to me like someone has been busy with a hammer.’
‘That would account for the broken fingers?’
‘It could,’ Eiríkur said. ‘I’ll have to check against our victim’s prints, but it looks like everything has been swept right off the table and onto the floor. It’s a real bloody mess in here. Has our boy said anything?’
Gunna looked around and wondered how long it would take to change Maris’s dressings.
‘Not a single truthful word. He claims he was moving a wardrobe and it fell on his hand.’
‘Bullshit. There isn’t even a wardrobe in here.’ She could hear a door creak open. ‘There’s one in the bedroom, but you can see it hasn’t been moved for years. For fuck’s sake. .’