He went up the stairs slowly and while Lísa looked on with concern, he filled a litre bottle with water and took it downstairs with him. Looking outside to see if anyone might see him, he poured the water into the mailbox slot, hoping it would short-circuit something in the tiny camera and stop it spying on him.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ The querulous voice behind him was filled with fury. ‘Are you mad?’
‘Someone’s put glue in the lock,’ he explained plaintively to the elderly woman who had appeared from her flat, recognizing her as the one who had stood by the door exploring the inside of her beaky nose with a little finger.
‘What? Then get the maintenance man to come and look at it.’
‘I’m trying to wash the glue out,’ Orri said frantically as the last drops of water dribbled from the bottle into the mailbox. A puddle of water had already formed at his feet as it leaked down the front of the steel door.
‘I’m going to report you,’ the old woman hissed. ‘You’re a vandal, that’s what you are.’
She slammed the door behind her and it suddenly occurred to Orri that the whole exchange had probably been recorded, along with his frantic attempts to get at the spying eye behind the grille. He trudged back upstairs to where Lísa was waiting in the doorway, arms folded.
‘Orri Björnsson, will you tell me just what the fuck is going on?’
The car was deliberately inconspicuous. It had been drilled into Alex that gangsters could treat themselves to gold trinkets and eye-catching sets of wheels, but a man with something to hide was better off being inconspicuous, and Alex had a sinking feeling inside that he had attracted more attention than was healthy.
He brooded, leaning on the wheel with the engine running, looking up at the dark windows of the flat. There was no doubt the heavies who had come calling the day before weren’t the brightest pair, and the message was intended for him. But what was the message, and who the hell were they?
He closed the car door and walked silently around the building in the twilight. With a stiff wind blowing salt off the sea, there was nobody about. He almost tripped over the twisted frame of an abandoned bicycle, cursed and pushed open the door. The block of flats was an old one, with external walkways along the front leading to the individual flats. He hated these as they had filled up with snow last winter, and it was too easy to see who was going to which flat.
With yet another sinking feeling, he saw that his flat was sealed. The lock had been changed and a police seal fitted to the door. That idiot Maris must have blabbed, instead of sticking to the story Alex had told him to tell before he put him in a taxi. Not that Maris had been in much of a condition to make sense the night before, Alex reflected, his face grey with shock and his teeth chattering.
He tried his key, even though he knew it wouldn’t fit. The lock was too new. He already knew that a credit card would not slip past the door’s deep frame, and he smiled grimly at the idea of getting Orri to come and open it for him. But now it was important to know what the police had seen, or even if they had seen anything at all, so he stepped back as far as the balustrade would let him go and kicked, aiming, as he had been taught to do, as close to the lock as he could. The door creaked and buckled.
Alex stepped back again. This time he took his time, aimed more carefully and let fly with a kick that saw the door crack open. Pushing at it with one shoulder, he saw that the lock was intact, but he had managed to splinter the tired frame. Not that it mattered, he decided.
He left the lights off and went through the place rapidly. He was sure he had left nothing that would identify him when he’d gone out the night before, but Maris had probably spilled his guts, as expected. The place had been cleared out. There was nothing in his bedroom wardrobe and all the stuff he had been getting from Orri and which he knew he should have passed on was gone. It wasn’t a huge problem, just a minor irritation, but he knew that Bruno would not be pleased.
He pulled the door closed behind him and tiptoed down the stairs. Outside he again walked round the building to approach his own car from an unexpected angle. With the engine running and the heater on at full blast, he opened his phone and dialled a number from memory.
‘It’s Alex,’ he said when the voicemail kicked in. ‘Call me. We might have a problem.’
Maris looked less happy as Gunna knocked and entered without waiting to be asked. The smile had gone from his face and he looked drawn with pain as she sat down and made herself comfortable.
‘So, Maris, how are things since we spoke this morning? Feeling better?’
‘It hurts a lot. But it’ll be all right in a few weeks.’
‘You really think so?’
‘Yes. Going home soon. The consul was here, they’re going to get me a flight home.’
‘You want to go home, do you?’
Maris nodded. Gunna decided this was a young man who had taken his misfortune badly. She had to steel herself to deliver bad news.
‘That might not be possible.’
‘What? But the consul said. .’ he floundered.
‘This is the way it is, Maris,’ Gunna explained in a patient voice, looking into the young man’s anxious brown eyes which reminded her of the sheep being herded into the slaughterhouse at Vestureyri when she was a girl, convinced that behind the sad eyes was the knowledge that they would not be coming out again. ‘The health system in Iceland is hugely overburdened and you’ve managed to get yourself a very nasty injury that’s going to take up a huge amount of resources to put right, not to mention all the treatment you’re going to need afterwards to get your hand back to being of some kind of use one day. I don’t know what the doctor has told you, but your hand has been smashed and it’s going to be months or years before it’s any use to you,’ she said and paused to let her words sink in as tears began to well up in his eyes.
‘You’re going to need a huge amount of therapy,’ she continued. ‘And it’s going to take months. So you can understand that the health service would really prefer you to go home and get treated there. You see what I mean?’
‘Yes, I know all that. I pay for my flight home. My family know I’m coming.’
Gunna jerked a thumb at the door. ‘They want you off their hands. You can understand why, can’t you?’
Maris nodded and Gunna pointed a finger at her own chest. ‘On the other hand, I have a problem with that.’
‘How?’ he asked with a blank look. ‘Why is that?’
‘Because I know that a crime has been committed; not a trivial one, but a brutal attack. You get my meaning? I have a pair of thugs running around my city who are probably going to do this again to someone else before too long, and I’d like to catch them before that happens. So I’d like you to tell me who attacked you and why.’
This time he looked bewildered and Gunna wondered if he was going to cry.
‘I can’t tell you.’
‘In that case, you’ll be staying in Iceland a long time. I can withhold your passport, don’t forget. I’m not letting my key witness leave the country,’ she said as the first tear made its way through the brown stubble on Maris’s cheek. ‘And on top of that we have the little matter of why your flat was crammed with stolen goods — that also requires a little explanation.’
Chapter Ten
Orri stayed curled in a ball under the duvet as Lísa left for work at five for an early shift. He wanted to go downstairs but didn’t dare, certain that he was being watched. His phone buzzed and he left it where it was. When he finally uncurled himself from his bed, he pointedly didn’t even look at the phone on the floor with ‘new message’ on its screen, and kicked it under the bed on his way to the bathroom, where he stayed for a long time under the scalding shower.