‘He has the temper, and as far as I’m concerned, he’s done it before,’ Helgi said. ‘Not that I can put that in writing anywhere.’
‘But he has an alibi.’
‘He has an alibi that doesn’t ring true and I don’t imagine Mæja would be prepared to stand up in court and give evidence on his behalf.’
Helgi yawned and rolled his aching shoulders. ‘Enough for tonight. We’ll pick this up in the morning, shall we?’
‘I’ll speak to Mæja again in the morning. It might be worth bringing her in for a formal interview. What do you think?’
Helgi stood up and pulled on his coat, thrusting his hands deep into his pockets. ‘You’re quite right,’ he decided. ‘This has to be clarified so there’s no doubt there. How long has this been going on between Mæja and Reynir?’
‘For the last five years, to my knowledge — every time Hjörtur goes off on shift for four days, Reynir comes in the back door.’
‘Five years? And it still hasn’t dawned on him?’
Anna Björg kneaded her eyes with the heels of her hands. ‘You know, Helgi, some men are the weirdest creatures. Sometimes they see dragons where there are none, but fail to see what’s right under their noses.’
‘Present company excepted, I take it?’
‘Hmm. Possibly. But don’t bank on it. Anyway, while you’ve been talking, I’ve sent Arnar out to Tunga where he’ll meet three of the guys from the station at the Hook. They should be closing down the brothers’ amateur distillery so that will all be done by the time we have to release Reynir tomorrow. I’ve sent his fingerprints to Gunna as well and she can get them checked against those from the murder scene.’
Helgi sat back, his mind numb as he fought back a yawn. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m shattered.’
Thursday
Gunna studied the CCTV footage carefully. With hours of screen time to go through, she had begged, wheedled and promised favours to get more pairs of eyes and fortunately the bad weather meant that Reykjavík had seen a fairly quiet night. Two officers on the night shift had pored over the digital recordings and flagged up where the black Land Cruiser from Tunga had crawled around the centre of Reykjavík on a quiet Sunday morning. Four stops had been recorded only a few hundred metres apart, all of them outside bars and nightclubs.
She slowed the replay down and magnified the images as best she could, but even the high-gain cameras that could normally pick up a number on a credit card struggled to produce clear images in the heavy rain. At each stop the Land Cruiser’s broad-shouldered driver carried a couple of boxes inside, stayed for a few minutes and emerged to put boxes back in the car and drive away, but at no point did he pull back the hood of his sweatshirt or lift the brim of the baseball cap pulled low over his face.
Gunna wondered if the man was aware of the cameras, considering how skilfully he avoided looking directly at any of them.
Leaving Sunday’s recordings, Gunna selected the previous week’s footage and quickly scrolled through the view from the same camera a week before. That Sunday had also been wet but marginally less dark, so the quality of the pictures was sharper. She was almost ready to give up when what she was looking for appeared. Instead of the Land Cruiser, Elmar’s blue van came to a halt at precisely the same spot and Gunna could clearly make out the young man slamming the door behind him before he carried a box inside, while Bjarni Björgvinsson’s unkempt blond head could be seen on the passenger side, his head nodding in time to the beat of whatever the two iPod wires were delivering to his ears.
Satisfied, she collected the relevant screengrabs of the Land Cruiser and attached them to an email to Helgi with a feeling of satisfaction at some progress being made.
The bar was in the centre of the city behind an inconspicuous set of doors. A girl in a pale blue tunic answered when Gunna hammered on them, and looked through the narrow opening with suspicion.
‘There’s nobody here,’ she said as Gunna flashed her identification and stepped inside without waiting for an invitation. ‘Honest.’
‘Where’s the manager?’
The girl shrugged her shoulders. ‘He won’t be here for hours yet. He only left at six this morning.’
‘You’re here every morning, are you?’
‘There’s a team of us. We rotate. I do four mornings a week.’
Gunna looked around curiously. The bar had a dead feel to it with normal lights on, which illuminated the shabby paint and scratched furnishings that night-time punters would never see under the dim lights of business hours.
‘So where are the rest of you?’
‘They’ll be here any minute. I though that was them banging on the door.’
‘You’re employed by the club, or is this a cash-in-hand arrangement?’
‘It’s an agency, Reindeer Cleaning. I think the guy who runs this place owns Reindeer as well. Listen, I’m not going to get into trouble telling you all this, am I?’ she asked and frowned suspiciously. ‘I mean, I need this job,’ she added.
‘Not if you don’t tell him, I suppose,’ Gunna said, taking a series of printed-out screengrabs from her folder. ‘Look at this. Tell me if you recognize this guy.’
The girl glanced at the picture. ‘That’s the water cooler guy.’
‘Water cooler?’
‘Yeah. I don’t know his name. He turns up once or twice a week, always mornings when it’s quiet. He says it’s easier to park if he does his round early. He delivers the refills for the water coolers. You know, those plastic drum things,’ she said. ‘With water in,’ she added, as if speaking to a child.
Gunna looked around. ‘So where’s the water cooler?’
Clearly impatient to be working, the girl disappeared behind the bar and began sweeping. ‘I don’t know. In the office, I expect.’
‘Which is where?’
The girl stopped sweeping for a second and pointed. ‘That way,’ she said, indicating some double doors. ‘And I haven’t seen anything,’ she called as Gunna pushed them open.
Gunna saw stairs and climbed them in the dark, feeling for a switch that she didn’t find until the top step. As the light flickered on, she saw another door on the far side of an open area with a large table in the middle, its surface scarred and stained underneath a scattered covering of playing cards, empty glasses and overflowing ashtrays. The water cooler stood by what was certainly the office door that refused to budge as Gunna tried the handle. The cooler itself was switched off and empty, its plastic bottle upended in position, and looked to have been that way for a long time, with old newspapers and an empty pizza box balanced on top of it.
Wondering whether or not to give the office door a kick, Gunna saw that next to a leather sofa long past its sell-by date against the other wall was another door, and with a little effort this one swung open to reveal a much-used and long uncleaned toilet, as well as a shower cubicle. Sweeping aside the curtain, Gunna saw that the shower had also clearly not been used for a long time, as it was stacked high with boxes of the kind that Elmar and the Land Cruiser driver had delivered.
She opened the flaps of the box at the top and found herself looking at an empty plastic drum. Prising off the cap, she sniffed, closed the bottle and its box and made her way back downstairs, waving to the girl wiping tables who nodded in curt acknowledgement.
A message was stuck to Gunna’s computer monitor when she arrived back at her desk at the Hverfisgata station.
Check your email, it read.
Gunna scrunched it into a ball, threw it into the bin and prodded her computer into life. She read the message, rattled her fingernails in a tattoo on the desk as she did so and reached for the phone.
Helgi’s phone diverted straight to voicemail. She cursed, flipped through a chart on the wall, found the number she was looking for and dialled again.
‘Hæ, Anna Björg? Gunnhildur. Is Helgi behaving himself?’