Cold Comfort

“So how about she had the phone in her hand when she was actually attacked?” Helgi said slowly. “Surely if the attacker wanted to get rid of it, he’d have taken it with him and dropped it off a bridge. I reckon we can be sure that Svana didn’t deliberately put her own phone under the dishwasher. What d’you think?”

“It sounds more likely. You’d have thought an attacker would have taken it and disposed of it rather than stash it under the dishwasher,” Gunna agreed, staring at the heaped printout. “Where’s Eiríkur? I need some help going through all this stuff.”

“He’s off today.”

“OK. You know, Helgi, I have a strong feeling that you’re absolutely right. Svana gets a bang on the head, hits the ground like a sack of potatoes and anything in her hand’s going to go flying. Which means that there’s a real possibility that she was taking this call when she was attacked-which could give us a very precise time of death.”

“What’s next, then?” Helgi asked dubiously.

Gunna felt her stomach growl. “It’s all boring detective work, starting with going through the names and numbers in Svana’s call log. Are you still looking for Long Ommi?”

Helgi rolled his eyes and Gunna saw his shoulders droop. “God, yes. The bastard’s about somewhere, but I’m damned if I can find out where he’s holed himself up. Normally there’s someone who’s only too ready to pipe up and it takes about two days to track these deadbeats down, but I don’t know what Ommi’s doing right this time.”

“I’d better leave you to it. Can you put Eiríkur on to this tomorrow?”

Helgi’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not here tomorrow?”

“Yeah, afternoon shift. See you at lunchtime,” Gunna said, pulling on her anorak.

“Hæ! Anybody live here?” Gunna called out, kicking off her shoes in the back kitchen of Sigrún’s house among all the boots scattered in front of the wire-mesh cage that occupied the corner. She swung open the kitchen door to be greeted by steam and the aroma of fish soup from the pot on the stove. Baleful eyes glared from the cage.

Sigrún looked up and gently closed the laptop on the kitchen table in front of her. “All right? Good day?”

“Not bad, apart from a smarmy git trying to smooch his way into my knickers.”

“But you say it like it’s a bad thing?” Sigrún grinned.

“Hallur Hallbjörnsson.”

“The handsome-and-knows-it MP?”

“Yup.”

“Yuck. You can lock people up for trying it on with a police officer, can’t you?”

“If only.”

Gunna fumbled in her pocket for the packet that wasn’t there any more while lifting a mug from the tree on the worktop behind her without having to look. She placed it in front of her and Sigrún poured.

“Is Laufey here?”

“I sent her to the Co-op with Jens.”

“Ah, peace and quiet for five minutes.”

“Not for long.” Sigrún looked preoccupied and frowned.

“What’s up?” Gunna asked, recognizing the signs. “Jörundur behaving himself?”

“Well …” Sigrún began.

Gunna sipped her scalding coffee and waited.

“I don’t know what you think… and I really hope it’s not going to be a problem for you, what with Laufey and everything. But Jörundur and I have been, well, you know, talking about everything. And he’s been offered a job.”

“That’s great,” Gunna said warmly. Sigrún’s surly bear of a husband had been one of the first victims of Iceland’s financial turmoil, as the construction business had ground to a halt even before the banks had admitted that their coffers were empty. “But it means moving, right?”

Sigrún nodded. “Norway.”

“Norway? Good grief.”

Gunna wondered, as so many times before, how she would ever have managed to juggle work and family without Sigrún down the street to feed the children when police business called. With Gísli now away at sea much of the time and Laufey turning into an independent young woman in her next to last year of secondary school, Sigrún’s help was less frequently needed, but still invaluable.

“He’s been unemployed for the best part of a year, and things don’t look like getting any better. It seems that one of the guys he used to work with up at the Kárahnjúkar dam got a job there on some tunnel-building project and they need people with experience, so he called Jörundur up and told him to apply. Jörundur’s good at what he does, you know. They told him to come over as soon as he can and the job’s his.”

Sigrún looked suddenly tearful before taking a deep breath.

“We’ve been over it again and again, but he’s set on it,” she continued. “I’ve told him often enough that if we’re careful we can live on what I bring in. There wouldn’t be any holidays in the sun, but I can live with that.”

“But not Jörundur?”

“Ach. You know what blokes are like, and my Jörundur’s not what you’d call a new man. As far as he’s concerned, a man provides, and if he can’t, he’s a waste of space. I suggested he could go back to college for a year and retrain, but that was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard.”

“So when are you leaving?” Gunna asked softly.

“Next month, probably.”

“You’ll be fine,” she forced herself to say. “Something new.”