Four officers in heavy overalls stood around a fifth, a burly man who handled the jackhammer as if it were no heavier than a wooden spoon in his huge hands. Lumps of broken day-old concrete had been piled on a sheet high above the trench as the newly laid foundations were broken up piecemeal. The metal frames had already been sliced off with an angle grinder and heaped by the road.
‘Break off,’ Ívar Laxdal called. ‘Give them half an hour and we can get a cover rigged up while they eat their pizzas,’ he ordered. ‘I still want to know if you seriously expect to find anything here, Gunnhildur?’
‘You know, I’m not certain,’ she said. ‘But the pressure’s working over there,’ she added, jerking her head towards Sunna María, swathed in an ankle-length coat by the perimeter.
‘It’s a damned expensive way of applying pressure, if you ask me. Have you any idea how much all this is costing?’
‘We can’t not look,’ Gunna replied, turning to follow him back to the road, where neighbours had lined up in spite of the rain to watch the fun. ‘Her husband vanishes and a few days later there’s a trench next door being filled with concrete.’
‘Hey!’ One of the officers in the trench called.
‘What?’ Gunna yelled back over the roar of the generator.
‘There’s something here.’
Water had collected in black pools at the bottom of the trench between jagged edges of concrete.
Gunna squatted down at the top of the trench and peered into the darkness ‘Where?’
One of the officers adjusted a floodlight and illuminated a training shoe emerging from the broken concrete.
‘A shoe?’ Ívar Laxdal frowned.
‘Yeah. And there’s a foot in it,’ the officer at the bottom of the trench called back.
* * *
This was a very simple job, Orri decided. He had taken extra precautions, parking off the road and walking across the rocks in the dark. The place seemed to be deserted, with a ghostly feeling that he was being watched, which he immediately told himself was just superstitious claptrap.
His mother had believed in aliens and vampires, and that was all rubbish, he reminded himself. But his grandmother had held a belief in the people who lived in the rocks to the end of her long life. Orri reminded himself that the old lady, who’d been one of the few people who’d had time for him as a youngster, had never lied to him or made anything up, so maybe there could be something in it after all?
He walked around the low building. There were no obvious security cameras and no alarms, not that anyone was likely to hear an alarm with the nearest house a kilometre or more away. His picks made short work of the elderly locks on both outer and office doors, which were so worn he could almost have opened them with his own house keys.
Somewhere in the distance water dripped intermittently. The place was cool, but not cold, and the radiator had a little warmth in it, so he guessed that someone had been there that day. He made quick work of the job in hand, pulling plastic bags over his shoes to stand on the desk and replace the smoke alarm in the corner with the new one from the knapsack worn over his chest, guessing that these contained some kind of recording devices but not bothering to check, and using a chair to reach the second alarm in the lobby outside.
He had finished when the roar of an engine outside shook him and he froze. The engine died and he heard the rattle of a key in the lock. Orri looked around quickly. The door on the far side of the office was the only available escape route and he closed it gently behind him as the outer door opened, banging against the wall as a blast of cold air came in with it.
In the long room that Orri found himself in, he hurried along the rows of racks in the near darkness without wondering what they might be, searching for a door that would take him back outside before stepping smartly sideways into a smaller room. Behind him he heard someone whistle in time with heavy footsteps. Orri stood with his back to the wall, his ski hat rolled over his face and ready to take to his heels if he were seen, but the footsteps passed by and the whistled tune became faint in the distance.
Orri peered with caution around the door and saw that the long room was empty. Whoever it was had taken themselves out of sight, and he wasted no time in going back the way he had come, through the office and out into the yard. The quad bike parked by the door still had the keys in the ignition and for a second he considered taking it before dismissing the idea as a stupid one. If he were to disappear into the darkness, then nobody would be any the wiser, he reasoned as he rounded the end of the building and set off back across the rocks towards his car with the familiar triumph at a job well done returning.
‘You were right, Gunnhildur,’ Ívar Laxdal admitted.
The operation at Kópavogsbakki had suddenly acquired a new urgency. Every available officer had been drafted in to help. A tent had been erected over the site and more lights added. Two officers guarded the perimeter to keep the growing crowd of curious bystanders at bay and the road had been blocked off to stop any traffic, apart from the one neighbour who had started ferrying mugs of coffee to the police team.
‘Who do you think it is?’
‘I’d be surprised if it wasn’t our mysterious dentist, Jóhann Hjálmarsson, Sunna María Voss’s husband. He’s been missing since Friday,’ Gunna explained grimly. ‘I managed to trace him to a last sighting by an office block on Ármúli around four o’clock on Friday and a hired van that was returned on Sunday morning. Apart from that, nothing.’
‘What’s your best guess?’
‘That someone gave him a Mickey Finn, trussed him up and dropped in in the trench there just in time for the concrete to start flowing yesterday. It’s just as well it’s fresh concrete, otherwise it would have been like breaking through iron in a few days.’
‘And the wife? A suspect?’
‘Who knows? Maybe not in person, but certainly someone close to her, I’d say. Too early to tell if it’s with or without her knowledge.’
‘You’re going to question her this evening?’
‘Not sure. I’m inclined to let the pressure continue to build for the moment.’
Ívar Laxdal’s famous frown returned. ‘I’d have a word. It’s her property and she ought to be kept informed, suspect or not.’
‘You go, then. You’re the senior man.’
Ívar Laxdal preened for a moment. ‘You’re right. Why not? I’ll just assure her that everything’s under control and she’ll be kept informed.’
‘Perfect. Now I’m going over to that nice lady over the road who’s been dishing out coffee for a quick chat.’
‘What for? Is she involved? Or maybe she’s seen something?’
‘More than likely, but that can wait until we start knocking on doors. Right now there’s a more pressing issue. I could pee behind a bush like the rest of you, but I prefer not to cause a scandal.’
The truck had given him an extra day of life. He had seen the wreck squatting a little way downhill from the road and wondered what it might be. With dusk not far away and no other option, Jóhann stumbled across the tussocks to where the shape stood out against the darkening landscape.
It had been a lorry once, one of the kind that had been common in Iceland in years gone by but which had now long disappeared. The wheels had been taken off and there was only one door, but it provided shelter from the wind. Mercifully, the windscreen was still in place and unbroken.
He curled up where the driver’s seat had once been before everything had been stripped out. He guessed that the old Bedford had long since broken down up here and had been rolled off the road before someone had stripped it of the spare parts that were any use.
It wasn’t warm in there and Jóhann wondered bitterly how long it was since he had last felt comfortable. At least the rusting remains of the lorry’s cab kept the wind and rain at bay. As he pulled the overcoat tight up to his neck and wrapped his arms about him, Jóhann watched the sun set through the grimy windscreen, thankful that it had given him another day, although he was sure that now he was on borrowed time and that the day to come would be his last chance.