It was late and most of the bystanders had drifted off when the call came. Gunna and Ívar Laxdal stood side by side with Sævaldur hovering behind them. A forensics team was ready to start work, dressed in their white suits, although the team leader had already expressed his doubts that there would be much that could be done after the work of breaking up several tons of concrete had taken place.
Gunna clambered down a ladder into the trench where it was suddenly quiet. The jackhammer had stopped and the sound of the chattering compressor in the street was muffled. The body had been freed from the concrete, wrapped in a carpet and black plastic bags, and transferred as gently as could be managed to a stretcher to be lifted clear.
She made her way carefully over the sharp ridges of concrete and the officer who had wielded the jackhammer parted the carpet at the head end and exposed a shock of sodden dark hair.
Gunna looked in surprise at an unfamiliar face.
‘It isn’t Jóhann,’ she called up to Ívar Laxdal.
‘What? Who the hell is it then?’
‘Alex,’ Sævaldur said with distaste, the brim of his hat pulled down over his face. ‘His name’s Alex.’
‘So that’s why he hasn’t been at work,’ Gunna said, shivering.
Chapter Twelve
‘Good morning, Maris,’ Gunna said in a cheerful voice that contrasted sharply with the expression on her face which instantly made Maris quail.
‘Hello,’ he said slowly and Gunna swung a chair across the floor, planted it backwards next to the bed and herself firmly on it, arms folded on the chair’s back.
‘The good news is, we’ve found your friend Alex. The bad news is, Alex is dead,’ she said and watched the blood drain from his face. ‘He was murdered, probably two days ago, and now you’re going to tell me every single thing you know about Alex Snetzler. Who were his friends? Who did he hang around with? But we can start with who was providing you two with stolen goods and who was your buyer?’
‘I don’t know,’ Maris said, still half asleep and running a hand through his tousled hair. ‘That was Alex’s business. I didn’t have anything to do with it.’
‘You expect me to believe that?’
‘It’s the truth. I’ve been here for a few months. Alex has been here for a couple of years. The flat was already full of stuff when I got here, and stuff would go and more junk would arrive. I didn’t pay it much attention.’
‘You knew Alex before you came to Iceland?’
‘No I didn’t.’
‘So how come you were living with him?’
‘It came with the job. I came here to work for Mr Vadluga and I guess it’s his place.’
‘Where are you working?’
‘It’s a place called Vison, just outside the city.’
‘Vison? Doing what?’
‘It’s a mink farm that’s just starting up.’
‘Tell me about Mr Vadluga.’
‘Boris Vadluga. He’s a businessman in Latvia, all kinds of businesses. He owns the company where Alex was working as well.’
‘Green Bay? The transport company?’ Gunna asked, reaching for her phone and standing up.
‘That’s the place.’
‘I’ll be back in a moment,’ she said, her phone to her ear and closing the door behind her. ‘Don’t go away.’
‘Eiríkur?’
‘Yep.’
Gunna could hear him trying not to yawn. ‘Listen. I need you to check out a company called Vison. Maris Leinasars works there. The missing dentist and his wife are involved with it, plus the same Boris Vadluga who owns Green Bay Dispatch.’
She could hear Eiríkur come to life. ‘Where Alex Snetzler worked?’
‘Precisely, and Orri Björnsson. I’m at the hospital with Maris. You check on Vison, I’ll go to Green Bay.’
‘Will do,’ Eiríkur said smartly. ‘Oh, and a bit of extra information for you. Guess who’s the owner of the flat where those two jokers were living?’
Maris looked at her with wide brown eyes as Gunna shut the door behind her again.
‘When did you last see Alex?’
‘The night this happened,’ he said bitterly, lifting up his splinted and bandaged hand.
‘How was he? Did he seem worried before this happened?’
‘No, not at all. He was going out for a beer somewhere. He seemed happy enough.’
‘Who was he meeting?’
‘I don’t know. His girlfriend, maybe.’
‘Alex had a girlfriend?’
Maris looked uncertain. ‘Well, maybe not a girlfriend exactly. He was seeing a girl. Emilija, her name is. She’s from Latvia as well. He liked her, but he told me he didn’t like her kids. They got in the way, he said.’
‘There are traces of amphetamines in the apartment you and Alex were living in, found in the living room and some of the clothes showed distinct traces. Where did that come from?’
Maris looked too innocent for Gunna’s liking. ‘I don’t know. Alex, maybe?’
‘Look, you’ve gone from being a victim to a suspect, so let’s do without the bullshit, shall we? These were in the bag of clothes in the living room. Your clothes. Alex had the bedroom. This tells me that someone had been handling respectable amounts of the stuff, not for personal consumption.’
Maris started to shake. ‘I don’t know,’ he whispered, cradling his smashed hand.
‘We also found some traces of precisely the same stuff in a house in Kópavogur.’
‘Not me. It’s nothing to do with me.’
‘Look, Maris. Have you been inside a prison? Icelandic prisons are great, very comfortable. Central heating and three meals a day. But if you don’t start to co-operate then I’ll make sure that one day you get sent home to sit out all of your sentence in a Latvian prison. How does that appeal to you? You’re not a criminal, are you? No friends there to make life easier? I’m telling you, you won’t enjoy it.’
There was a roof in the distance. Jóhann was certain of it. He had become more familiar with Iceland’s landscape than he had ever expected to be and he knew that there are no straight lines in nature. Everything natural is made up of elegant and subtle curves that turn and sway with the wind and rain.
But far ahead there was a straight line that jarred with the view he had become used to over the last few days. It was too far away to be distinct yet, but he was sure that it had to be a roof of some kind and hoped that it was a farmhouse with a plump farmer’s wife inside a centrally heated, well-stocked kitchen with a hissing percolator in one corner and the promise of a hot shower and an even hotter breakfast.
The thought helped him overcome the pain in his ankle as his pace increased. The track twisted over the base of a hill that spread out in front of him and the uphill gradient was hard work. He stopped to catch his breath a couple of times, leaning on a stick he had pulled from the fence by the cattle grid. Jóhann told himself repeatedly not to be too hopeful and that the dream of the plump lady farmer who bore startlingly little resemblance to Sunna María was a vision he could not afford to allow himself.
He was right. It took more than an hour before the straight line of the roof hove close enough into view for him to make it out. His pace slackened as he finally made out the lowslung farmhouse’s blank windows, like empty eye sockets in a dead face. The place had been abandoned years ago, just like the ruin he had already left behind him. This time there was at least a sign by the road; its paint was long gone but the raised metal letters announced that the place it pointed to had been known as Brekka.
He felt crushed by disappointment. Jóhann wanted to howl at the injustice of it. He had walked for two days, slept in a steel hut and wrecked truck, yet the sanctuary he had hoped for had been swept away. The plump farmer’s wife and her kitchen had been snuffed out in a second as soon as he saw the farmhouse’s blind windows.