‘Eiríkur is on paternity leave and won’t be back for a couple of weeks,’ she explained, as Sævaldur snorted derision. ‘And Helgi is up north. I’m hoping he’ll be back tonight or tomorrow morning.’
‘Up north? What’s he doing there? You mean Akureyri?’
‘Nope. He’s checking out Kjartan’s brothers, who it seems have something of a track record of sorting out each other’s problems.’
‘You reckon? That sounds far-fetched to me. I’d pin my efforts on Kjartan.’
‘Maybe. But I can’t not check.’ She fluttered the sheaf of printed-out photographs in her hand. ‘And Kjartan has the most solid alibi you can find, in that he was still at sea somewhere north of Grímsey when Borgar Jónsson was killed.’
Sævaldur looked sour for a moment. ‘You be careful of Kjartan, though,’ he warned.
‘I most certainly will. The man’s a bruiser and he has bully written all over him in big letters. But he didn’t murder Borgar Jónsson. Now if you don’t mind, I have to ask our friends in traffic for a favour or two.’
Stefán was pleased with himself that the old Bronco that had been in his workshop the day before was now well enough to be outside, while something more modern and sleek was plugged into a computer on wheels parked next to it.
‘That’s the one, I reckon,’ he said, looking through narrowed eyes at the pictures Gunna showed him of Elmar’s wrecked van. ‘I thought it was one of those four-wheel-drive Nissans. A lot of people use them for work; plumbers, carpenters, mechanics — that sort of business.’
‘You’re sure this is the vehicle?’
‘Well, not a hundred and one per cent, but as sure as I can be. That dirty patch on the side gives it away.’
‘And you got a look at the driver?’
Stefán shrugged. ‘Young fella. Bad haircut,’ he said. ‘I didn’t look twice. Now, if it had been a young lady, I might have taken more notice.’
‘You’d recognize him?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe.’
Gunna dug into her folder and pulled out Elmar’s driving licence photograph, blown up to a washed-out A4 size, his pale eyes staring somewhere beyond the camera.
‘How about that?’
Stefán stared at it and shook his head. ‘I don’t know. It looks like him, but I couldn’t swear to it. I only gave him a quick glance.’
As satisfied as she was likely to get, Gunna nodded and made a few notes. ‘OK, thanks. That’ll do nicely.’
‘Happy to help. If I’d have known, I’d have looked a bit more carefully. You reckon this is the guy who, you know. .’ He paused. ‘Borgar?’
‘I can’t comment on that.’
‘You want me to let you know if I see him again?’
‘I’d be surprised if you do,’ Gunna said, tapping the pictures of the wrecked van. ‘This happened last night and he’s in hospital now with a lot of broken bones.’
She let herself into the NesPlast unit and allowed her eyes to adjust to the gloom before she went upstairs and switched on one light over the canteen table. The place was clean, much cleaner than it should have been after being empty for several years.
She started in the kitchen area and went through all of the drawers, from cutlery at the top to one at the bottom containing old invoices, all dated a decade or more before. Moving on to the cupboards, she found only newly washed and dried glasses and cups, neatly stacked. She sat back down and shook her head in puzzlement. The place had been cleaned thoroughly. There was none of the dust and grime of downstairs. The office, little more than an alcove off the canteen, had also been swept clean, but there was no furniture. Desks and chairs had gone, and only the planner charts on the walls and faded outlines where pictures had been pinned indicated what the place had once been. Only a threadbare sofa occupied one end below the window.
Gunna sat on it and bounced gently, feeling the springs squeal. She stood up and felt under the seat, lifting when she felt it move. Underneath was a duvet and a couple of pillows, still fairly fresh rather than having lain there all the years that Borgar had been in prison. She stared at them and wondered what it all meant. Had Borgar used this place, the last remaining part of his former sprawling businesses, as some kind of bolt-hole, a place to escape to when the gloomy hostel became too much for him?
She lifted the duvet up, shook it and folded it in half, placing it on the floor with the two pillows on top. She searched the box under the sofa, fingers feeling for anything that might give her an idea of what Borgar had been doing there, but eventually stood up, admitting defeat, convinced that Borgar had spent an hour or two every day before his hostel evening curfew clearing up his one-time business.
Straightening up, she saw a couple of books on the windowsill above the sofa, half hidden behind its back. She riffled through the pages of the two cheap thrillers and put them down again, turning back to the office where she scanned the walls, remembering Henning’s question about Borgar’s cubbyhole. There was nothing to be seen. The floor was an unbroken set of boards without a join anywhere, while the walls were blank and provided no clue. The only break in them anywhere was the electrical box, and staring at it she remembered that the team arriving on Monday had found the circuit breakers tripped, but that Sigmar had reset them downstairs.
Gunna snapped her fingers. The circuits for the building were on the floor below. She clattered down the stairs, found the circuit box and took the metal key for opening the latch from its string. Upstairs it fitted the identical door and it swung open to show a single pair of circuit breakers, which she assumed had to be for the lights and power in the kitchen. She stretched and peered into the box, her head almost inside it.
‘Ah, there you are, my little beauty,’ she breathed, sliding her hand sideways behind the cabinet’s framework into a compartment that lay behind the panelling of the wall, and extracted an old Bible that she stared at in surprise, wondering if Borgar had found God during his time at Litla-Hraun.
The Bible felt odd in her hands, as if its covers did not meet properly, and opening it she saw why, as a couple of small, hardback books fell out and landed at her feet. Picking them up, Gunna saw there was a passport with a star and crescent on the cover, and bearing the legend ‘Republic of Turkey’. The picture inside was undoubtedly a younger and plumper Borgar Jónsson than the one whose picture she had seen on the police files, but with a very unfamiliar name, while the two books were clearly savings accounts from banks she had never heard of, containing figures dating back more than six years and running into many thousands.
‘Turkey. Someone planning a new life,’ she said to herself, straightening up and looking out of the window at the gathering gloom outside. ‘So I don’t suppose our Borgar had found God after all,’ she decided, and the sudden harsh ringing of her phone brought her back to reality.
The unmistakeable smell hit Helgi in the face. Somewhere a generator chattered discreetly and a few lights glowed in the gloomy barn where the carcasses of abandoned farm machinery crouched along one side. His shoes crunched on the gravel underfoot and he saw that a strip of light glimmered under a door at the far end.
He knew that this was not a good idea. It went against all the rules of good policing, but that would mean going back to Blönduós and calling in Anna Björg or another of the local station’s few officers to come with him. He glanced at his phone and saw that with no signal, there was no chance of calling anyone to join him.
Taking a deep breath to summon his courage, he listened at the door to the silence on the other side, wrinkling his nose at the smell before pushing the door open. Inside was a single light that illuminated the workshop where a still hissed on top of a gas ring. On the far side of the long room a dozen plastic bins were the source of the smell and Helgi knew exactly what he had stumbled across as he backed away as silently as he was able before turning and making for the door.