Cold Comfort (42 page)
“Æi, why did I say anything?” Gunna groaned. “I should know better by now.”
“She’s getting to be a big girl now, quite a grown-up young lady.”
“I know, that’s what worries me,” Gunna said, stretching to reach her mobile as it trilled. “Gunnhildur.”
“Hæ, chief. Högni’s dabs are all over Jónas Valur’s car. How’s your head?” Eiríkur asked.
G
UNNA STUBBORNLY REFUSED
to use the lift and tackled the stairs in two stages, taking a breather halfway up to ease the pounding in her temples. Sigvaldi on the desk had asked tenderly, albeit gruffly, after her health.
At her own desk she waited while Eiríkur and Helgi marshalled chairs. Several other people looked curiously at her as they passed, and even Sævaldur Bogason offered a few mumbled kind words.
“All right, boys. Tell me the worst,” Gunna instructed, looking up to see Ívar Laxdal appear in the doorway, his eyebrows knitted in disapproval.
“Come in, please. Just a quick chat and then I’m going back home,” she assured him.
“As long as that’s all,” Ívar Laxdal growled.
Gunna turned to Helgi. “Any sign of Högni Sigurgeirsson?”
“Nothing, chief. No sign of his car anywhere yet, but Jónas Valur’s Merc was abandoned at the BSÍ bus station,” Helgi said, flipping through a sheet of notes. “You’ll be interested to know that during the house-to-house questions around Hallur Hallbjörnsson’s place, there was a mention of a grey Opel, same model as Högni’s, in the next street, and the timing fits.”
“Interesting. If it was Högni, he must have gone pretty much straight from being questioned here to Hallur,” Gunna agreed. “No doubt on the vehicle identification?”
“None at all. The woman in question has the same model of car, so she was certain. No registration number, though.”
“Shame,” Gunna said.
“If this man is a suspect for the killing of Jónas Valur, you think he may have attempted to murder Hallur Hallbjörnsson as well?” Ívar Laxdal asked.
“Certainly,” Helgi replied.
“So what next?” Gunna asked, wondering if the investigation was out of her hands and in Helgi’s charge.
“We’re looking for the weapon used to assault you and Jónas Valur. The door-to-door stuff is still going on and there’s a search in progress through all the bins and nooks and crannies for anything that might fit the bill. It could be a long process,” Helgi replied sadly.
“A
LL RIGHT, ARE
you?” Sigrún asked with concern.
“Ah, not so bad,” Gunna admitted. “And you? Heard anything from … ?”
Sigrún’s face brightened. “A little bird whispered to me that Jörundur’s all alone now.”
“Really?” Gunna said. “What happened?”
Sigrún sat down and opened a bag of home-made biscuits straight from the deep freeze. She dipped one in her coffee and skilfully lifted it out and into her mouth a moment before it was ready to disintegrate.
“Left over from Christmas,” she said, munching. “I baked too many and froze what was left over.”
“Never happens at my place. I swear my Gísli can sniff out cakes and biscuits a mile away. Come on, what’s happened with Jörundur? He’s not on the way home, is he?”
“No, it’s his lady friend, this Gígja who went out there with him. They’d been carrying on a good while. I can see it now, all the signs were there, but I refused to acknowledge it,” Sigrún said with a shake of her head. “I should have known better. Well, I was talking to Mæja Dís the other day.”
“The girl who works in the office at Hvalvíkingur?”
“That’s her, the personnel manager I think she is. Well, Mæja Dís knows this Gígja a bit, because Gígja’s ex used to be a cook on one of the boats; Einar, his name is. So Mæja Dís ran into Einar at the petrol station in Keflavík and he said that she was back.”
“Already? That was quick!”
“Apparently Einar said that Gígja had given up her job and let her flat to go to Norway with Jörundur, but once he’d been on the drink once or twice, she packed her stuff and got a flight back. Now she’s living with her daughter, because she can’t have her flat back until the end of the year.”
“Amazing, isn’t it, how some people fall out of lust the moment they see the other half’s true colours?”
“That’s not all,” Sigrún added gleefully. “I don’t want to crow, but she had sold or given away almost all her furniture and everything. So when she does get her flat back, she’ll have to start by buying a new fridge and a washing machine. I don’t want to crow,” she repeated, “but it’s karma. She’s gone from having a nice flat and a reasonable job to stealing someone else’s deadbeat husband, and now she’s got no job, no flat and no bloke either. Great, isn’t it?” Sigrún smiled radiantly while Gunna shifted uncomfortably in her seat.
“All right, are you?”
“Ach. Stiff after my little adventure, that’s all.”
“D’you think you should still be doing this sort of stuff?” Sigrún asked seriously.
“Absolutely. Can you see me managing for long with a desk job?”
“You did it here for long enough.”
“Yeah, but that was different. There was only me and old Haddi at the station here, so we both had to do a bit of everything, and Haddi was quite happy to sit in peace and quiet and look after the paperwork.”
Gunna hauled herself to her feet. “Well, Laufey’s disappointed you’re not going.”
“Why’s that?”
“Krummi. She was really looking forward to having a rabbit living in our bathroom.”
“W
HERE ARE WE
going now?” Helgi asked. “You know, we hard-working public servants have enough to be getting on with. Especially when some of those public servants ought to be at home nursing a sore head.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know.”
“Why so secretive?” Helgi asked, looking sideways at the determined side of Gunna that he had heard of but never seen close at hand.
Gunna sighed and brought the car almost to a halt so she could check the café’s interior.
“Here?”
“Yup.”
“Why?” Helgi asked, baffled.
Gunna screwed up her eyes against the bright midday sun that she felt was trying to drill holes in her head and strolled across the road. She pushed open the door, nodded to someone Helgi could hardly see in a corner and poured coffee for both Helgi and herself at the counter, offering a note to the darkeyed girl behind the till. She handed Helgi his mug and nodded towards another table in the far corner, where Helena Rós’ gaze followed Gulli Olafs’ as he looked in horror at Gunna and Helgi bearing down on them.
Gunna smiled broadly, taking a seat at the end of the table. “How sweet. The wronged wife and the investigative journalist meeting for lattes in a bookshop café.”
Both looked embarrassed as Gunna sat back and surveyed them, while Helgi pulled up a chair next to her.
“We’re … er …” Gulli Olafs floundered.
“Gunnlaugur is writing an article about this whole affair,” Helena Rós said sharply. “He wanted to interview me about Hallur’s part in it. Haven’t I helped you enough with all this already?” she asked, her voice petulant.
“Certainly,” Gunna said. “My officers have spent a lot of time trawling through your husband’s effects. How is he, by the way?”
“As close to being brain-dead as before,” Helena Rós snapped back.
“Now I’m wondering if we were looking in the right places.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I mean is that I’d like you to accompany my colleague here. He’s going to go to your house once again for another look around, while Gulli has a chat with me.”
Helena Rós’ face was set as firm as rock. “Am I under arrest for something?”
“Not so far,” Gunna said coolly, opening her briefcase to pull out a file. “But that’s an option if you decline to cooperate.”
Helgi looked puzzled. Gunna opened the file and extracted some sheets of paper that she placed on the table. “Of course, these are just copies, as the originals are still at the lab.”
Gunna watched the blood drain from Gulli Ólafs’ face as he saw what had been put in front of them.
“Can we, er … can we take this somewhere else?” he said in a strained voice.
“We’re just about to do that, don’t you worry,” Gunna told him, and turned to Helgi. “See if you can rustle up a patrol car to take this lady home, would you? When you get there, you’ll need to impound all the computers and printers in the house.”
“How dare you!” Helena Rós spluttered, her cheeks acquiring pink spots of fury beneath the make-up.
“And you,” Gunna continued, transferring her attention to Gulli Ólafs, “I’m asking you to come with me to your office and we’ll go through the same procedure there.”
The tension that had been gnawing at her all morning had disappeared, replaced by a serene calmness that she knew would be followed later by a draining exhaustion.
“I want to make a statement,” Gulli Ólafs said abruptly while Helgi muttered into his communicator.
“And so do I,” Helena Rós spat.
“All in good time,” Gunna assured her, as a patrol car appeared outside and two officers emerged from it.
“Magic, chief. Eiríkur should be here in a few minutes as well,” Helgi assured her. “Shall we go?” he asked Helena Rós in a voice that left her in no doubt that she had no option.
“What about my car?”
“One of these gentlemen will bring it, if you’ll give him the keys, and we’ll go in the patrol car.”
Helena Rós numbly handed over a bunch of keys hung with a fluffy effigy of a white dog, and Helgi took her elbow in his hand as they made their way over the road, leaving Gunna facing Gulli Ólafs.
Her face hardened and she glowered as Gulli Ólafs began to shrink into his chair. “Do you want to make a statement at the station, or do you want to tell me the story?”
“Jesus… I, er … I don’t think I should … I mean …”
“Make sense, will you?” Gunna’s finger stabbed at the transparent folder on the table. “You wrote these, right? I don’t doubt that we’ll be able to trace these documents to a computer you have access to, and we’ll match the inks to your office printer without too much trouble.”
“God… Yes, I wrote a couple of notes and posted them to that evil old bastard Jónas Valur. But I didn’t do anything more than that.”
“Where’s the money?”
“Money?”
“Don’t play games.”
“It’s at home. It was all Helena Rós’ idea. She knew her husband had been seeing Svana, and she knew he was terrified of the publicity after he got into Parliament. She wanted to give him a hard time.”
“And the cash you got out of Hallur Hallbjörnsson and I suppose Bjarki Steinsson? At your home as well?”
Gulli Ólafs nodded miserably as Gunna looked out of the window to see a second patrol car draw up across the road, this time with Eiríkur in the passenger seat.
“Come on. We’re going to have a little trip to Hverfisgata,” Gunna said, getting to her feet. She took his arm and steered him discreetly out of the door.
Outside, Gulli Ólafs blinked owlishly in the bright sunshine. Gunna felt him tense, and took a firmer grip on his elbow just as he ripped his arm free and sprinted across the road. A bus coming towards him screeched to an undignified halt. Gulli Ólafs dodged around it and splashed frantically through the puddles until Eiríkur, the length of his spindly legs giving him a clear advantage, caught up with him in a tackle that laid both of them full length in the street.
Trying to free her mind of the image of Eiríkur as a galloping giraffe, Gunna walked towards where Gulli Ólafs had been brought down in a patch of gravel with his face in a puddle. Eiríkur was panting and holding the man’s right wrist in a lock behind his back. Gunna kneeled down and snapped handcuffs around his wrists.
“Thanks, Gulli. That makes things so much easier,” she said with satisfaction.
• • •
“T
ALK,” GUNNA INSTRUCTED.
“Everything, please. We have all day ahead of us and as much of tomorrow as we need.”
“Where shall I start?” Gulli Ólafs asked plaintively, as if to himself. He was hunched in the chair, while Gunna sat back with her hands on the desk in front of her.
“You and Helena Rós. How long’s this been going on?”
“Almost a year.”
“Before or after she found out about her husband seeing Svana Geirs?”
“After. She was going to divorce him and come and live with me.”
“Who had the idea of these threats and demands?”
“What?”
“Come on. The demands that Jónas Valur, Bjarki Steinsson and Hallur have been getting. The inks on some of these letters match the printer in your office.”
“There are hundreds of printers like that about,” he said dismissively.
“Actually, no.” Gunna smiled. “It seems it’s a fairly unusual type, and there aren’t more than a handful in various offices. My colleague spoke to the dealer and found out that these were introduced right after the crash when nobody had any money, so they only sold half a dozen.”
“So? How does that implicate me?”
“Because other ones were printed on a cheap inkjet printer that matches the one in Helena Rós’ study. So who had the bright idea?”
“Well I did, sort of. I said something about it one day as a kind of joke.” He twisted his fingers in his hands.
“A joke?”
“Yeah. I said something about it to Helena Rós, just in passing. Then she came back with it a few days afterwards and she was serious.”
“So how did she find out about Hallur’s relationship with Svana Geirs?”
“I told her,” Gulli Ólafs whispered miserably. “I truly wish I’d kept quiet.”
“And how did you know about the Svana Syndicate?”
“Newsroom gossip. This kind of thing leaks out and it’s impossible to keep anything completely secret, but these rumours stay that way, just rumours. There are dozens of things going on all the time that we could never, ever use.”
“Like a story about property fraud involving some prominent people?” Gunna asked.
“Exactly. This stuff gets talked about but that’s as far as it can go. Nobody dares to go out on a limb with it and nobody will be quoted. So I followed Svana discreetly, watched her flat, saw who came and went.” He shrugged. “Easy enough. I was interested because of the connection with Jónas Valur and Bjartmar Arnarson. They screwed me over before and I’ve been looking for an opportunity to return the favour ever since.” His voice oozed bitterness as he spat out the names of the two men.