Gunna distinctly heard a crash through the phone.
‘Eiríkur, are you all right?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ he answered after a pause. ‘I opened the wardrobe door and a load of stuff came crashing out onto the floor. All electrical stuff, drills, that kind of thing. There must be a dozen of these things. Why would anyone need a wardrobe full of power tools?’
‘Stolen goods?’
‘Looks like it to me. Listen, I’ll have a proper look through all this stuff and get back to you.’
‘Fine. You do that while I have another chat with our friend. You’d better see if you can rustle up a squad car from the Hafnarfjördur station to help you if there’s a lot of stuff there.’
‘Wow, a DeWalt cordless, I always wanted one of those.’
‘Eiríkur, keep your mind on the job, will you?’
‘Hell, there’s a few laptops here as well, all sorts, and a couple of those computer games consoles. It’s like a treasure trove.’
‘Write it all down, there’s a good boy, and call me back when you’re done.’
There was no water anywhere, but a stream that chattered and bubbled past the ruined farmhouse was good enough. With no cup to drink from, Jóhann had no choice but to kneel on a flat rock and lower his face to the water that startled him with its chill.
The building itself was a wreck, abandoned more years ago than he could imagine, its gaunt concrete walls pitted by sun and frost and with deep cracks running from the ground like the branches of a tree to fade out higher up. The roof seemed intact and Jóhann looked with disquiet at the grey clouds that had replaced the bright dawn sunshine, threatening rain. The stillness of the dawn that had woken him had also been replaced by a cool wind that cut like a knife.
At the back of the building what he guessed had once been pasture had been filled with a framework of rough wooden poles, nailed and lashed in place, with hundreds of cross bars running from side to side. Each of these was hung with fish drying in the wind. He stood helplessly underneath, staring at the headless fish hung tail up on the bars and it was a long time before the thought struck him that this was food.
He scrambled as best he could up a triangular trestle at the corner of the structure. Halfway up he realized that he was faint with hunger and wondered just how long he had been there. He had long since given up wearing a wristwatch, relying instead on the phone that had become his constant source of data from messages to traffic updates to the simple concept of tracking the time. But now the phone was lifeless in his pocket. Had he been there a day or two days? He had no idea; he was only able to judge that he would collapse soon if he wasn’t able to eat. The thought spurred him to climb a little further and he reached out to snatch at one of the closer fish drying on a beam. A pair of them came away in his hands, one in his grasp and the other falling to the ground below as the twine holding them together parted. He was surprised at how light the fish in his hand was.
On the ground he tore at it with his fingers, ripping it apart and retching. The strips of white meat were hard, far tougher than the dried fish in chunks that he occasionally bought in plastic bags to offer at conferences to foreign colleagues as a typical Icelandic delicacy for them to chew their way through.
He chewed manfully and the fish gradually became a pile of desiccated skin and bone on the ground. Still hungry but no longer starving, Jóhann trudged back to the house, carrying the other fish that had fallen to the ground in his hands like a prize and wrapping his jacket around him like a shroud.
Orri was relieved to have the place to himself for a change. He yawned and lifted his feet onto the table as he clicked the TV into life and scrolled through the channels. He had checked the camera he had fitted in the unused postbox opposite his own, bluetoothing the files in its memory to his phone and he checked the short video files one by one. The camera was motion-activated and he could see from the clips that it started to record its sequences as the outside door swung open or when someone came down the stairs.
Mostly they showed people walking rapidly straight past, while some stopped to check their own mailboxes. One showed the rather superior elderly lady from the ground floor standing in the lobby where she daintily picked her nose with a crooked little finger as she waited for a taxi. The clip that showed the capricious teenage daughter of the couple on the top floor checking her lipstick and adjusting her ample chest to display maximum cleavage before going out was the one he watched several times with a grin on his face, but there was nothing to show anyone putting anything through the slot in his mailbox, apart from the postman with the handful of envelopes he’d already collected.
They were all bills, none of them big ones but they were still outgoings, and his night-time activities that would normally have brought in extra cash had been curtailed, in spite of the windfall of cash the Voice had put his way and which he felt could not be relied on to continue for long. He might have to dig into his savings, he thought with misgivings, standing up to make his way to the kitchen and see if there were the makings of a meal in the fridge.
He found himself wondering where Lísa was, almost admitting to himself that he preferred it when she was there even though she talked too much. She liked to cook and that was what gave her food a spark of energy that the stuff he made lacked. Orri liked to eat and it was only after Lísa had elbowed her way into his life that new things had appeared in his diet, a variety of new flavours he had been suspicious of at first but soon found himself missing when he had to cook for himself.
He was bent over the contents of the fridge when the door rattled and slammed.
‘Hungry, are you?’
‘Starving,’ he admitted, hauling himself upright to give her a kiss. ‘Are you cooking anything?’
‘Men.’ Lísa snorted. ‘They’re only interested in two things, and food is the other one.’
‘Beer, you mean?’
‘Yeah. Right.’
‘Well, we can discuss the other one after dinner, if you like?’
Lísa shook her head and rummaged in her bag. ‘This is for you,’ she said, handing him an envelope.
‘What is it?’
‘How should I know? Your name’s on it.’
He read ‘Orri Björnsson, c/o Elísabet S. Höskuldsdóttir’ typed on the envelope.
‘Where did this come from?’
‘It was under the wiper on my car. Don’t ask me who’s sending you letters through me. Seems stupid, considering they could have just posted it to you.’
She banged a pot onto the stove and poured water into it. Orri saw that she was annoyed and pretending not to be curious, although she looked sideways to see what was in the envelope as he ripped it open.
‘What’s so special about that?’ She asked, mystified, looking at the grainy print of Orri’s back, his hands in the unused mailbox. Orri stuttered in incomprehension. They knew he had tried to catch them out but had beaten him to it. There was nothing else in the envelope, no note, nothing that might indicate where it had come from.
In the lobby, with the print in his hand, Orri looked around frantically, trying to figure out where the picture had been taken from and finally noticed a glint behind one of the mailbox grilles on the opposite side of the entrance hall, where a tiny electronic eye was watching him. He hammered at the steel front of the mailbox and pushed his fingers as far into the slot as they would go, but with no chance of reaching the contents inside. He raced up the flights of stairs and clattered back down with his lock picks, telling himself to be calm and take it easy.
The fine pick refused to slide into the lock as it should have done, and squinting into the barrel, Orri saw the lock had been filled, he guessed with fast-setting glue. His shoulders sagged in defeat. The lock would have to be drilled out and he could hardly get the surly old man who looked after the block’s maintenance to force open a mailbox that wasn’t his.