‘Alex.’
‘Alex? The guy who ate everything and then disappeared?’
‘That’s the one.’
Valmira’s mouth set in a hard line. ‘He’s a bastard, Emilija. You know that. Did you. .?’
Emilija sighed and nodded.
‘Get rid of him, Emilija. You know he’s going to let you down.’
‘I know,’ Emilija said, eyes on the road, fumbling for the wiper switch to clear spots of cold rain from the windscreen. ‘Alex is a shit. But he’s such a charming shit when he wants to be.’
‘Did you do this place yesterday?’
‘I did it with Natalia. It only took an hour.’
‘So why are we doing it again today?’
Emilija grinned. ‘Because Viggó made a mistake. He wrote three hours every day on the work sheet. So we do three hours every day.’
‘But the place was cleaned yesterday. There should be nothing to do.’
‘Exactly. There’s a nice bakery across the road where we have a coffee and some breakfast, and get paid three hours overtime for it.’
An eye appeared at the window and again as the door opened a crack.
‘G’day. Is Oggi home?’
The woman with the washed-out face kept the door open only as far as the security chain would allow. She looked Gunna up and down and then her eyes quickly scanned the windows of the terrace of houses across the street, checking for her neighbours peering out from behind their curtains.
‘He’s not here. He hasn’t been here for weeks.’
‘So you don’t know where your little lad is, do you? Not hiding upstairs?’
‘Go away. He’s not here and if he was I wouldn’t tell the law.’
The howl of a motorcycle being revved mercilessly ripped through the air. Gunna glared at the woman and hurried around the side of the house, throwing herself flat against a wall as a trail bike screeched past, its rider yelling from behind a black full face helmet that contrasted incongruously with the battered bike.
Gunna ran after the bike as its back wheel spun in a muddy puddle in what had once been a garden, losing traction and almost stalling as Eiríkur and Gunna hurried towards it. The rider revved the engine furiously.
‘You bitch! You fucking bitch! Don’t let me down now!’ The rider yelled, muffled under his helmet as the engine refused to give him full power, revving and dropping away. With Eiríkur only a couple of steps from grabbing the rider and pushing the bike off balance, its engine burst back into life and the bike gave a full-throated roar as it spun its way out of the mud and gripped the road surface.
Gunna stopped, panting with exertion, and clicked for her communicator. ‘Control, ninety-five-fifty.’
‘Wankers! Fuck you!’ Gunna heard the motorcycle’s rider scream at them, turning and cruising past them out of reach.
‘Ninety-five-fifty, control.’
‘A red trail bike. Rider wearing a full-face black helmet, grey sweatshirt, black jeans, can’t see the number. Heading towards Réttarholtsvegur. Any chance of some support?’
The bike revved again through its cracked exhaust as it picked up speed and the rider twisted round in his seat to give the hopelessly pursuing Eiríkur a single finger held upright as a token of his opinion.
‘Ninety-five-fifty, control,’ the calm voice responded in her ear. ‘On the way. Is he heading north or south?’
Eiríkur stopped to catch his breath after sprinting in the bike’s wake.
‘Losers!’ the rider shouted, but his yell became a howl of frustration as the bike’s front wheel hit a broken skateboard that had been left lying by the kerb. The bike slewed to one side as the rider’s single hand on the handlebars was not enough to keep them steady. Eiríkur jogged triumphantly towards the tangled heap that had been bike and rider a second before. The rider rolled from the mess, his helmet bouncing across the road. This time he howled in pain, clutching at his ankle with both hands, and Gunna saw his mother approaching as well, her front door gaping wide open as she splashed through the puddles towards him.
‘Oggi!’
‘Control, ninety-five-fifty,’ Gunna said into her communicator. ‘Cancel the intercept, will you? But we could do with a patrol and an ambulance. Our idiot’s just fallen off his moped.’
* * *
Ingi Antonsson sat in the back office of the 10–11 shop he managed and his hands shook. Gunna stood by the door with her arms folded, as if to ensure that this innocuous man didn’t try to make a run for it between the aisles of soft drinks and sweets.
‘You’ve been keeping tabs on your ex-wife for a long time, have you?’
‘Since we split up. Three years.’
‘Any particular reason?’
‘It’s the children. I thought she’d leave the country and take them back to Latvia, and then they’d never see me again.’
Gunna watched Ingi tremble.
‘You’ve never been in trouble with the law before, have you?’ she asked and Ingi shook his head.
‘It was a guy who comes in here who said he’d scare Alex off for me. I knew Emilija had been seeing this gangster for a while and I hated my children being near that bastard. It was driving me crazy. I was losing weight, couldn’t sleep.’
‘This guy’s name?’
‘I don’t know his real name, but he’s called Oggi.’
‘A little chap with a sharp nose?’ Gunna asked and Ingi nodded. ‘Óli Grétar, otherwise known as Oggi. We know him well. He offered to frighten Alex off for you? How much did you pay him?’
‘A hundred thousand.’
Gunna sighed. ‘You idiot,’ she snarled. ‘I’d like to throw the book at you. Your pair of thugs found the right place but got to the wrong guy. So there’s a man in hospital with a hand that your friends smashed with a lump hammer who has never even seen your ex-wife. So you’ve screwed up his health for life and Alex gets away scot-free. Well done. That’s a fine job.’
The blood drained from Ingi’s face and he gulped air, reminding Gunna of a fish on dry land.
‘What? I had no idea. .’
‘What did you expect?’
‘I thought they’d just push him around a little, maybe a black eye. I never thought. . Shit, what have I done?’
Tears cascaded down Ingi’s hollow cheeks.
‘Come on. Back to the station and we can get this dealt with there,’ Gunna said, reaching for her phone as it rang in her pocket. ‘Gunnhildur.’
‘Laxdal. Where are you? We have a problem.’
The white van was still parked outside, rain pattering on its roof as Eiríkur shrugged himself deeper into his coat.
‘I’ve been here before somehow,’ he complained.
‘How so?’ Geiri asked, hunched forward over the wheel to look through the drops of rain on the windscreen at the block of flats.
‘Knocking on doors to find out which apartment some deadbeat lives in,’ he said glumly and passed a print of the CCTV image of the man in the green fleece to Geiri in the front seat. ‘That’s what he looks like. We don’t have a name, but we know where his van’s registered and presumably that’s where he lives.’
‘Pick him up at his work?’ Tinna suggested.
‘As the van’s here and it’s a Sunday afternoon, I think we can be sure he’s not at work,’ Geiri said, trying not to sound acid. ‘Come on. Let’s make a start, shall we? There are eight flats in the block, so we start at the ground floor and work upwards.’
Eiríkur checked the lobby first, noting down the names on the mailboxes and hoping to see Elísabet Sólborg Höskuldsdóttir’s name there, though he wasn’t surprised when it didn’t appear anywhere, before walking around the building outside to check for the fire escape that a building of this age didn’t have.
Eiríkur was already in conversation with a sharp-faced elderly woman on the block’s first floor as Geiri and Tinna came up the couple of steps leading to the landing.
‘Keeps himself to himself, that’s all I know,’ the sharpfaced woman said. ‘I like to mind my own business and not interfere with other people, but he’s an odd one, that Orri.’