Frozen Assets

‘We all depend on a certain success rate to see ourselves receiving the promotion we deserve, Gunnhildur,’ he said smoothly.

‘But are you going to back me up? This bloody woman is in it up to her neck and it’s going to look a lot worse for all of us in the long run when it all comes out and it turns out that we didn’t look hard enough.’

Vilhjálmur stood stiffly and his face went entirely blank as he gazed over the long stream of cars snaking along the main street outside.

‘The wife of a minister. .’ he muttered to himself.

‘Villi. .?’

‘All right. Do what you need to do.’

‘And support from my superior officer?’

‘Of course. As long as you have evidence to substantiate everything.’

‘Ah, that means you’ll back me up if I can prove everything and you’ll drop me in the crap if I put a foot wrong?’

‘That’s it, in a nutshell,’ Vilhjálmur snapped.

Erna walked on air and life seemed to be trying to be really good to her for the first time in months. Leaving the house that morning to run a few errands, she had given Hardy a long kiss that fizzed with passion and threatened to drag the pair of them back inside for another half an hour, until he pulled back, tapped the end of her nose with one finger and told her sadly that he couldn’t avoid going to the site.

At the salon, the girls had noticed something about her, giggling and whispering among themselves. It was only Marta, the salon’s manager, she spoke to, but she assumed that by now all the girls would be in on the secret that Erna was taking a week off and taking a new man with her.

Sitting at the traffic lights waiting to turn off into Bústadavegur and into town, Erna squeezed her thighs together and tingled in anticipation of a week in the sun, running her mind over everything already packed and ready.

‘Had a good time in the country, Matti?’ Gunna asked cheerfully.

‘Yeah. S’always good to get away from the tarmac for a while.’

As he wasn’t under arrest, merely helping the police with inquiries, Matti wasn’t being held in a cell. They sat in an interview room at the central police station on Hverfisgata.

‘How’s Lóa?’

‘Ach. She’s fine, the same as usual.’

‘Still got the goats?’

‘Yeah. Same goats.’

‘Why did you walk into the police station in Hólmavík?’

Sitting on his hands and with the hangdog expression Gunna remembered from the teenager who had always been in trouble, Matti looked wretched.

‘Lóa told me I should. She said old Hallgrímur’s missus had noticed me so it was only a matter of a few days till you found me, so I might as well go over to Hólmavík and have done with it.’

Gunna nodded sagely. ‘Lóa is nobody’s fool.’

Matti nodded back, head still hanging.

‘What happened to your girlfriend?’

‘Marika? Still at Álfasteinn, for all I know.’

‘This bloke you’ve been going about with, tell me about him.’

‘Hardy?’

‘If that’s what he calls himself.’

‘What about him?’

‘Everything, and be quick about it.’

‘He’s a right hard bastard.’

Gunna waited until Matti looked up, and she stared him straight in the eye. It’s a shame he grew up to be such a slob, she thought to herself. It’s a shame he went through life constantly on the back foot, considering what a pleasant boy he had been when someone gave him a little attention.

‘Look, I need to find this bloke before he kills someone else and I don’t have a lot of time to do it, so tell me what you know and please get on with it.’

‘So he really has killed people?’

‘Two that we’re sure of, possibly one more.’

Matti went pale. ‘I knew he was a hard fucker, but I didn’t think he was that nasty.’

‘You don’t know the half of it. Where is he, Matti?’

Matti shook his head. ‘No idea.’

‘Come on. You must have some idea. Where did you usually meet him?’

‘He always called and told me where to pick him up. Normally by the side of the road somewhere, or else on the rank somewhere. Grensás or Lækjartorg normally. Down at Grandi sometimes. He liked to eat in Kaffivagninn, said it was a homely sort of place.’

‘Do you think he was living somewhere downtown?’

‘Yeah, probably.’

‘Come on, Matti. Think, will you? He’s bumped off two people already.’

‘All right. It’s in Hverfisgata, the other side of the crossroads. There’s a block of offices with a dodgy photographer on the ground floor. At the top of the place there’s a couple of little one-room flats. He lives in one of them. I followed him one day and saw him go up there,’ Matti announced proudly.

‘You mean he’s been just over the road from here?’

‘Yup.’

‘Stay here.’

Gunna and two burly officers emerged from the tiny flat, leaving a pair of technicians to dust painstakingly for fingerprints.

The place was scrupulously clean, minimally furnished with little more than a narrow bed, a small closet and a threadbare chair in the single room, with a tiny bathroom off to one side. It reminded Gunna of a cell as she looked through everything, the photographer from the ground floor who owned the three flats standing at the door and wringing his hands.

‘So, who lives here?’

‘Just people passing through. A few days now and again. Never very long.’