The ski couple’s eyes widened, as if they were witnessing a major event being played out in real time on television.
Elín sat still, looked firmly at Ari Thór, refusing to be intimidated.
‘I’m in a meeting. Can this wait?’
‘No,’ Ari Thór replied sharply, immediately irritated by her attitude.
She stood up quickly. ‘We can talk outside.’
He would have preferred to have remained inside the ski lodge to talk to her. It was cosy inside and Ari Thór’s thoughts had again moved to the impending winter. This warm mountain hut would be a welcome refuge when the snow began to fall in earnest. And it was already growing increasingly cold outside, the temperatures definitely descending below zero.
They went outside and Elín followed. It was early afternoon and dusk was approaching; the cold was piercing. It was a beautiful day, but one best enjoyed from behind a window. A brooding silence settled over the valley. It seemed so empty, the ski lift motionless, nobody skiing, no activity anywhere.
‘Shall we sit in the car?’ Tómas asked.
‘Not unless I’m being arrested,’ Elín replied, appearing to be fully in control. ‘I’m fine out here. Are you gentlemen feeling the cold?’ she added, looking first at Ari Thór and then at Tómas.
‘Elín Reyndal,’ Tómas said. ‘Or Elín Einarsdóttir?’
‘Either will work,’ she said, drawing her lips together in a tight line.
‘Is there a particular reason why you’re not using your given name? And why your legal residence is registered down south?’
‘Reyndal is an old and perfectly good family name. I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t use it if I feel like it.’
‘Nobody’s implying that you shouldn’t,’ Tómas said. ‘It’s just curious.’
‘Whatever you say.’
‘And the legal residence, I’d have thought you would be registered here in Siglufjördur. You live here permanently, don’t you?’
‘That’s not certain yet. I haven’t been here long,’ she said coolly. ‘But since you ask, I plan to change it. I don’t suppose two police officers came up here to ask about an incorrectly registered address?’ she asked, a cold look on her face.
‘What kind of relationship do you have with the mayor, Gunnar Gunnarsson?’ Tómas asked.
‘I work for him.’
‘Have you known him long?’ Ari Thór broke in.
‘We were at school together,’ she said. It seemed she was going to offer little beyond the bare facts.
‘Close friends?’
She hesitated at last. ‘Friends, yes. Nothing more.’
‘And is that how you got the job?’
‘Just what are you insinuating?’
Now it was Ari Thór’s turn to hesitate, concerned that he might be on thin ice. ‘Well, it seems like he wanted to employ someone he knew.’
‘He knows me well enough to realise that I’m trustworthy. That’s all there is to it.’
She glanced at her watch and then at her car. ‘I have to go. And I still don’t see why you had to drag me away from a meeting.’
‘You have plenty to say to each other, you and Gunnar,’ Tómas said calmly, ignoring her growing agitation.
‘Of course we talk to each other.’
‘On the phone? Every morning and evening?’ he asked, his statement becoming a question.
Elín hesitated again. The hint of red that flushed her cheeks could have been the cold.
‘We sometimes talk,’ she said.
‘More than sometimes, I’d say, not that I have a precise figure for all the phone calls yet.’
‘What the hell do you mean? Have you been tapping my phone?’
Tómas grinned. ‘Nothing as serious as that, and if we were, I’d hardly tell you. We don’t make that kind of information public. All I can tell you is that we have a record of calls to and from Gunnar’s phone. Your name comes up frequently.’
She seemed taken aback and Ari Thór started to suspect that her tough exterior might not be so impenetrable after all.
She gave herself a moment to think. ‘I don’t see quite where this is going. I have no obligation to explain myself and my conversations with Gunnar. And before you ask, I’m not sleeping with him.’
‘I wasn’t going to ask,’ Tómas said. ‘The other day we paid Gunnar a visit and hauled him gently over the coals…’
Ari Thór instinctively looked sideways, as if he wanted to say ‘your words, not mine’.
Elín waited in silence.
‘And you know what the first thing he did was once the interrog– meeting … was finished?’ Tómas asked.
Elín shook her head.
‘He called you.’ There was a short silence before Tómas continued. ‘Why was that? What did he need to tell you?’
‘Tell me?’ she demanded, buying herself a moment. ‘We were discussing planning issues.’
The defiant front was starting to crumble and Ari Thór’s first thought was that this was bad lying; she was probably saying the first thing that entered her mind.
‘Planning for the ski area?’ he asked with pointed courtesy.
‘What? I don’t remember. It could well have been.’
She looked at her watch again.
‘Were you in contact with Herjólfur?’ Tómas asked, apparently in no hurry to bring the conversation to an end, despite the bitter cold. This was a wonderful area to visit in summertime, a place where temperatures could reach very high figures on a sunny day, but on a day like this, it made no sense to stand still and be tortured by the chill.
Ari Thór slipped away, as inconspicuously as he could. Once he was sitting in the patrol car, he called the mayor’s mobile number and Gunnar answered after a couple of rings.
‘Yes? Hello?’
It was clear he hadn’t realised who was calling.
‘Hello, this is Ari Thór from the police. Am I interrupting anything?’
‘No, not at all. I’ve just got home.’
A little early in the day for the mayor to be going home, Ari Thór thought.
‘After we came to see you the other day, Tómas and I…’
‘Yes … of course, yes,’ Gunnar broke in.
‘You called your colleague, Elín.’ There was a silence on the other end of the line, and Ari Thór decided to let it become a long one, striking while the iron was at its hottest. After a few more moments of silence, he added, ‘Why did you do that?’
‘Why did I do that?’
‘Was there something you wanted to warn her about?’ Ari Thór asked, taking care to keep the same measured tone.
‘No, of course not. No. I, er … I just wanted just let her know that the police had been to see me about the investigation, just in case anyone might be asking. So we could respond correctly.’
Ari Thór could hear Gunnar’s short, sharp breathing down the line. He or Elín was lying, or maybe they both were. It had been a smart move on Tómas’s part to apply for the phone records, even though there had not been strong grounds to back up the request.
‘I’m sorry, but I’m not entirely sure I understand you,’ Ari Thór said courteously. ‘Would you have had to respond? Is she also the mayor’s press officer?’
‘Well, no. Not at all. But we work closely together. I took her on because I’ve known her for a long time and I was confident that I could trust her. I could say that she’s my right hand,’ Gunnar said, his voice taking a sharper edge. ‘How on earth did you know about that call? Not that I have anything to hide…’
‘We have a list of the calls made to and from your phone.’
‘What? Is that something you have access to?’
‘No, we applied for a warrant.’
‘A warrant?’
‘That’s right. So we would have all the facts, because you and Herjólfur had spoken so shortly before he was shot.’
‘Were you looking into just my calls or others as well?’ he asked and Ari Thór could de
tect a combination of anger and fear in his voice.
‘I’m afraid I can’t answer that. I’m sure you understand.’
Ari Thór saw that Tómas was making his way back to the car, his conversation with Elín over.
‘I have to go, Gunnar. Thanks for your time,’ Ari Thór said, and hung up.
‘A chat with the mayor?’ Tómas asked, the moment he was behind the wheel. It was an old habit for Tómas to do all the driving.
Ari Thór nodded.
‘Excellent, my boy. Excellent. And what did he say?’
‘Not the same as Elín.’
‘It gets better and better. In fact, this is going to be very interesting.’ Tómas started the car, a smile behind the thoughtful look on his face. They were on to something, and Ari Thór was quite sure that things were not going to end well for the mayor of Siglufjördur.
I wrote nothing yesterday.
The whole day was spent lying in bed.
It’ll make you feel better, Dr Helgi had said. That was one of the few things he had to say before he dismissed me from his office.
What a load of shit! I’ve never felt worse. These pills aren’t doing me any good. Quite the opposite. I’m nothing like my normal self. I sleep worse than before and my mouth is dry all the time. You’re supposed to be patient with these drugs and ‘work with your medication’, or so the staff keeps reminding me.
It’s midday. Actually I don’t have a watch so I don’t know exactly what the time is, but we’ve just been called to lunch. That means it’s midday in this little community. I’m not going, I don’t feel up to it.
It’ll pass, or so I’m told, all these side-effects and teething problems that are part of my new relationship with medication.
Nobody needs a watch here. Time passes in a rhythm dictated by an organised timetable; breakfast, morning meeting, lunch, afternoon coffee, dinner. Then it all starts again the next day. The fucking monotony of it would drive a sane man crazy, although I have to concede that there is something soothing about it all. Before, I used to dread each new day, not knowing what it might bring, but that feeling is starting to fade away now. Just like I am.
19
Kristín was nowhere to be seen when Ari Thór arrived home at dinner time, and he assumed she must be upstairs putting Stefnir to bed. He had brought a pizza home with him, but saw as soon he went into the kitchen that Kristín and Stefnir had already had fish. There were no leftovers for him in the fridge, which was possibly a silent rebuke for having been away from his family so often since the investigation had begun. Or maybe Kristín had simply not expected him to be home for dinner.
He would have liked to have crept up the stairs to take a peek at them, but knew that Kristín would take a dim view of an interruption while she was getting the boy off to sleep. He was probably better off in the kitchen with the pizza while it was still warm. Siglufjördur’s police force didn’t live on doughnuts. The mainstay of their diet was pizza, as well as those cinnamon buns that the local bakery did so well.
Ari Thór had missed the evening news on television and he wasn’t sorry. He had already seen and heard enough news reports speculating the specifics of the attack. An armed assault on a police officer was a major story, unprecedented in the history of the small island, so there wasn’t much else in the news, even though the investigation had made little appreciable progress. He had no need to listen to journalists telling him what he already knew, that the case was still unresolved. They had probably found the owner of the shotgun, Ingólfur the teacher – or he’d found them. The forensic team had searched Ingólfur’s garage without discovering anything that might be relevant to the case. Ari Thór found Ingólfur’s story plausible and the gun had presumably been stolen. It seemed that the assault weapon was the same type of gun, but a match would not be possible until the shotgun itself was found.
His neighbours had been interviewed to find out if anyone had seen anything, but nothing had emerged. The case remained shrouded in darkness. Ingólfur would have to be considered a suspect, but Ari Thór found it difficult to imagine that he could be guilty of anything other than carelessness.
The police had not yet made this new angle of the investigation public, and deep inside he hoped that Ingólfur could be shielded from the spotlight, although that was probably unlikely. The forensic team’s investigation of his garage in broad daylight would certainly not have escaped notice, and that kind of gossip would spread like wildfire in the small community. It wouldn’t be long before hungry journalists would be sniffing at the trail.
Seeking some company to go with his pizza, he finally switched on the television only to find a studio debate on gun ownership taking place, a subject that rarely attracted any attention in Iceland. It wasn’t difficult to work out what had prompted the discussion.
‘There are sixty thousand registered firearms in Iceland,’ said one of the panel members. ‘Sixty thousand! That means every fifth Icelander has a weapon, and if we only take into consideration the adult population, gun ownership is much higher. A few years ago a survey showed that Iceland has the fifteenth-highest level of gun ownership worldwide per capita. Fifteenth! Chances are these figures are much lower than the reality, too.’
A society of hunters, Ari Thór thought to himself.
‘Per capita,’ someone else said, interrupting the debate on the screen. ‘You can get all kinds of weird and wonderful numbers per capita…’
‘Excuse me?’ The first one squawked. ‘In fifteenth place. Going by those figures, we must have ninety thousand firearms. What on earth do we need all those guns for? Isn’t it about time the rules were tightened up? And what comes next? Arming the police? It seems that everyone except the police has access to firearms.’
Ari Thór was quietly enjoying the argument, when a loud knock at the door shattered his peaceful meal. He was startled. Putting down his half-eaten slice of pizza, he stood up, gripped by a feeling of unease that he did his best to ignore. He wasn’t expecting anyone and it was most unlike Tómas to call unannounced.
He glanced at his phone to see if anyone had tried to contact him, and to make sure he hadn’t accidentally turned it off or silenced it, but that was not the case. There was not really any reason to be concerned by an unannounced caller, not in Siglufjördur. A more peaceful spot could hardly be imagined. This was a place where, on occasions, the forces of nature were to be feared, but not the neighbours. But now someone had shot one of the town’s two police officers at close range. The remaining police officer was Ari Thór. Was there someone with a grudge against the police? Was Herjólfur just the first victim?
The knock was repeated, loud and determined.
A moment later there was a bang on the ceiling above. The old house was built of wood and sound carried well throughout it. Kristín had undoubtedly heard Ari Thór come home and then the knocking on the front door. Her bang on the floor was a clear instruction for him to answer the door promptly while she was getting Stefnir to sleep.
Ari Thór hurried to the hallway.
The lightbulb by the front door needed replacing so he peered into the darkness to see the face of someone he recognised but had never spoken to. Ottó N. Níelsson stood there, Siglufjördur’s newly elected town councillor, born and raised in the town, and recently returned to his home turf after many years in Reykjavík.
‘Good evening, Ari Thór,’ he said in a deep bass voice, before Ari Thór could open his mouth. ‘I hope I’m not intruding? I’d appreciate a word with you.’
As he had taken the trouble to visit after dark, the errand had to be something urgent.
‘Yes, won’t you come in?’
‘That would be appreciated. Much appreciated,’ Ottó said, carefully wiping non-existent mud from his shoes onto the mat before coming inside and following Ari Thór into the living room. Ottó made himself comfortable in the middle of the sofa. Ari Thór found it awkward having this stranger call on him so late in the day and was relieved that Kristín wa
s busy upstairs.
Ari Thór knew a little of Ottó’s background. He was a high-profile member of Reykjavík’s business community and had done very well for himself with the acquisition of the remnants of a debt-laden car dealership just when demand for new vehicles had dropped to virtually zero. According to rumour, he had been able to sell the company at a considerable profit a few years later once the economy had begun to recover from the financial crash. He had moved back to Siglufjördur, stood in the municipal elections and had been elected. He was also believed to have applied pressure for Gunnar Gunnarsson to be appointed mayor; Gunnar being a close friend of his, but an outsider with little experience.
Ari Thór sat and waited for his visitor to get to the point.
‘How’s the investigation going?’ Ottó asked, his deep voice appearing to well up from the depths of his torso. His gaze didn’t waver from Ari Thór’s face and it was obvious that something more than simple curiosity had brought him.
‘Reasonably well,’ Ari Thór answered, keeping his answer short. Ottó sat silently. ‘Of course, I’m not at liberty to discuss details,’ he said to break the silence.
‘Exactly. Of course,’ Ottó said.
‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ Ari Thór asked, hoping that he would say no.
‘Not for me, but thanks all the same. I’m not stopping.’ He leaned forward. ‘You’ve been speaking to Gunnar, and more than once, or so I understand. Or interrogating him, if that’s the word…’
‘I can’t confirm…’ Ari Thór began, before Ottó interrupted.
‘Gunnar told me himself, so there’s no need for you to confirm anything. And earlier today you were pestering the deputy mayor, Elín Reyndal,’ he said before Ari Thór could reply. Ottó laid particular emphasis on the word ‘pestering’.
‘As I told you, I’m not in a position to discuss details of the case…’
‘Fine, fine. You and Tómas have spoken to both Gunnar and Elín, and I can’t for the life of me understand why. I know, or at least I’m sure enough, that this was Tómas’s doing. I remember him from the old days. He’s pushy, in his own way. He moves south, gets a smart promotion and then there’s this opportunity to run the investigation here. Of course the old boy’s going to want to make his presence felt. That’s what I’m saying, Ari Thór … I mean that I’m not blaming you for any of this.’
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