Frozen Assets

‘The guy you’re looking for, the foreign tough guy. You know, the one who was at the march in the spring. Is that him?’

He pointed at the screen and Gunna fumbled for her glasses. She peered at the image of four people sitting round a table with a cluster of wine bottles in the middle. Hårde had a smile on his face and his left arm round the back of a statuesque blonde woman. On Hårde’s right side sat the pink-faced young man Gunna had seen at the bathroom door in the Gullfoss Hotel suite and next to him sat a regal Sigurjóna in a low-cut black dress, all of them with their attention on something out of camera shot.

‘Bloody hell. What’s all this?’ Gunna asked.

‘I’ll print it out for you.’

Skúli’s fingers flickered and a printer hummed somewhere behind them.

‘It’s the PR Association Awards, held the other night. The design guy did these pages today and I saw the proofs this afternoon.’

‘But it’s Sunday. Don’t you people ever take a day off?’

‘The guy who did the story is a freelance, and freelancers never stop working. The page make-up guys are on flexi-time, so if they want to, they can work twenty hours straight and take two days off. I guess the one who did these pages was in today because it’s the last page of the mag and I don’t expect he’ll be in again until the middle of the week.’

Skúli swung his chair round and picked a crisp set of proofs from the printer under the bench behind him. He smoothed the sheets and spread them on the desk.

‘That’s Sigurjóna Huldudóttir.’ His finger paused at Jón Oddur. ‘Don’t know who that guy is. That’s the foreign guy.’

‘Hårde, his name is, but you don’t know that.’

‘OK, that’s Hårde.’ His finger moved on. ‘And that’s Erna Daníelsdóttir.’

‘Who’s she?’

‘Celebrity hairdresser, Sigurjóna’s little sister.’

‘Good grief. You can see the resemblance.’

She inspected the double page spread with its ‘PR Practitioners Pull Out the Stops!’ headline. Another picture showed Sigurjóna with a blissful smile on her face accepting an award. Gunna skimmed over further photographs of grinning people in formal finery sitting at tables or standing on a platform accepting their own awards.

‘Looks like quite a party. Who took these pictures?’

Skúli pointed to the by-line at the top of the page. ‘There.’

Under the headline she read ‘Words and pictures: Ármann J.’

‘Right. Where can I find this Ármann character?’

Skúli shut down the computer. ‘I’ll find his number for you.’

Back at his own desk, Skúli skimmed through the post-it notes adorning the monitor and copied the number on to a scrap of paper.

‘Thanks, Skúli. I take it I can hold on to this?’ She brandished the pages he had printed out.

‘Yeah. But I’d appreciate it if you didn’t let on where they came from.’

He yawned and closed the laptop on his desk.

Gunna pressed her phone to her ear and listened to it ring.

‘Snorri? Hi, Gunna. Yup. No, it’s OK, nothing wrong. Something’s come up, so we’d better be early tomorrow. Pick me up at six outside my place and can you call Bára and the others, and ask them to be there for a meeting at seven?’

Skúli pulled on the jacket that was draped over the back of his chair and looked expectantly at Gunna as she spoke.

‘That’s all right. Yeah, sorry to disturb you,’ Gunna continued. ‘No, I’ll call Bjössi and let him know as well. Thanks, Snorri. Goodnight.’

She snapped the phone shut and dropped it back in her pocket.

‘Thank you, Skúli. I think I can forgive you for dragging an old lady out on a Sunday evening.’

‘I hope it’s some use to you. But you’d have seen it anyway on Tuesday.’

‘I doubt it. Hot Chat isn’t exactly at the top of my reading list. But thanks again, young man.’

‘No problem. Er, Gunna?’ he asked diffidently. ‘Any chance you could give me a lift home?’

Gunna parked Gísli’s Range Rover and sat in the driving seat, listening to the engine tick, continuing to run things through in her mind.

She was still muttering to herself as she opened the front door and kicked off her boots, flexing stiff toes that had been cooped up far too long. She noticed instinctively that Laufey’s trainers were in their place.

She peered past Laufey’s bedroom door and heard her breathing softly. In the kitchen she poured coffee and water into the percolator, and hung her cap on the door before hauling off her uniform jacket and slinging it over the back of the sofa. In the shower she let the scalding sulphur-smelling water run until the knotted muscles across her shoulders gradually untied themselves and she could hardly see for steam, and wondered what linked Arngrímur Örn Arnarson’s killing to those of Egill Grímsson and Einar Eyjólfur Einarsson.

The bloody man hadn’t been involved with Clean Iceland for years. So why knock him off? she asked herself.