“Who was it?”

  “Eiríkur. If it’s important, he’ll call back,” she said just as the phone began to buzz again.

  “Must be important,” Steini said.

  “Eiríkur. What’s up?” Gunna asked crisply. “I’m off duty, and you should be as well—”

  “It’s Bjartmar, chief,” Eiríkur interrupted. “Dead. He’s been shot.” Steini sat up, registering the expression on Gunna’s face as she listened.

  “Bloody hell. Where?”

  “At his house. It seems he opened the front door and bang, bang.”

  “Where are you?”

  “On the way there now.”

  “All right. I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she said, closing her phone and rummaging in the pile of clean laundry for fresh socks.

  “Anything serious?” Steini asked.

  “A villain we’ve been investigating with all sorts of nastiness in his past. It seems someone knocked on his front door and gave him both barrels.”

  She scooped up her phone and pulled on a thick fleece, stuffing the phone into one pocket and casting around for her shoes.

  “I’ve no idea how long I’ll be,” she said, lacing up one shoe and reaching for the other. She stood up. “Damn and blast it. Firearms. It was always going to be a case of when and not if,” she said furiously to herself.

  By the door she picked up a thick green parka and turned to Steini. She took a couple of steps across the floor and planted a kiss on his forehead.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can. Keep the bed warm for me, will you?”

  JÓN RANG THE bell and waited. Rain pelted down in the darkness and he huddled under the shelter outside the house in the western end of town. The concrete of the shelter was crumbling and the rusted iron rods that reinforced it were poking out. He could see there was a light on upstairs, otherwise he wouldn’t have rung the bell. It was past midnight and he couldn’t face going back to his brother’s flat.

  “Hello?”

  The door opened a crack and the woman’s face appeared in the narrow opening.

  “Hi. I, er, I’m really sorry to be calling so late. You remember me? Jón the plumber?”

  The door opened a little wider as she stared out at him.

  “What do you want this late?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Look, I’m really, really sorry. I’m in a bit of trouble and was wondering if I could come in for a minute?”

  She stared back with her lips pursed, then closed the door. Jón heard a chain rattle and a second later it opened again. This time he could see that she was wrapped in a dressing gown that had once been white, with shapeless slippers on her feet and a quizzical look on her narrow face.

  Wordlessly she stood aside to let him in. Another door behind her squealed as it opened and an elderly man looked out at them, a grey-faced woman peering over his shoulder.

  “Another new boyfriend, Elín?” the man asked salaciously, while the woman scowled behind him.

  “Oh go back to sleep, you nosy old bastard,” Elín Harpa snarled, slamming the front door and turning to climb the stairs behind Jón.

  Jón stood in the middle of the kitchen and dripped water from his jacket.

  “I’m really so sorry to barge in on you,” he stammered. “It’s late and I don’t have anywhere to go. Lost my house and everything. Been sleeping at my brother’s place, but he doesn’t really want me there and I thought … maybe …?”

  “You can sleep here if you want,” Elín Harpa told him in a flat voice. She went towards the flat’s tiny living room, where a TV screen was the only illumination. More than half of the room was taken up by a double bed. She sat on the edge of it and looked up at him calmly.

  “Is that your bed? I didn’t mean …” Jón faltered. “I meant, don’t you have a spare room or a sofa or something?”

  Elín Harpa shrugged. Jón saw that the lifeless shoulderlength brown hair had gone, replaced by a short crop that nestled over the tops of her ears, making her look younger and more fragile.

  “There’s only one other room and that’s where the kids sleep. So it’s here with me or on the floor. Up to you.”

  She prodded a remote control bound up with sticky tape several times until the TV screen went black, leaving the room in gloom, while Jón continued to drip on the kitchen floor.

  Monday 22nd

  MORNING WAS NOT far off when Gunna parked Gísli’s Range Rover outside and quietly opened the front door to the silent house. The only sound to be heard was the muted ticking of the kitchen clock. Her hands and feet, chilled in the hours spent searching Bjartmar’s garden under the glare of floodlights, had thawed on the drive home, but the fatigue of the long day and the shock of seeing Bjartmar’s mangled corpse, eyes wide open and staring into the distance, had left her drained.

  She hung her coat and fleece on the back of a kitchen chair, stretched her arms high above her head and breathed in deeply. She closed her eyes and lifted her chin, squaring her shoulders and trying not to visualize the man’s last terrified moments.

  She had finally been ordered home, along with Eiríkur and Helgi. Nothing but faint footprints had been found in the grass, so, leaving the technical team engrossed in the scene of crime, she and Eiríkur had joined the group of uniformed officers conducting house-to-house enquiries, trying to locate anyone who might have been aware of anything.

  An elderly gentleman walking a small dog recalled seeing a man striding uphill from the crime scene, but could give no description beyond the fact that he was tall and dressed in dark clothing. The enquiries stretched into the neighbouring streets and revealed only that a shabby white van had been parked there for a while, but nobody recalled the number, or even when it had arrived or departed.

  Gunna pulled off her T-shirt and unbuttoned her jeans, then stood in front of the open fridge to take a long pull at a carton of the orange juice that she always tried to remember to buy for Laufey.

  She wriggled out of her jeans, sodden past the knees, and rolled them into a ball with the T-shirt. Feeling sweaty and dirty after hours in the drizzling rain, on an impulse she clicked off the main light, leaving only the light over the stove on, stripped off the rest of her clothes and stuffed everything into the washing machine. She squatted and poured powder into the drawer, set the machine to run, and padded to the shower, where the sulphurous hot water soothed the knotted muscles of her shoulders.

  It was much later when she crawled into bed, draping one arm over Steini’s sleeping form.

  “Y’all right?” he enquired drowsily. “Tough job?”

  “Yup. Exhausted.”

  She squeezed him gently and Steini snaked an arm behind him to rest a hand on her thigh as he began to snore musically again.

  THE NEWLY PROMOTED chief inspector Sævaldur Bogason took charge of the briefing. Gunna yawned as he preened at the front of the room, and noticed with interest that Ívar Laxdal stood at the back.

  “Right, people,” Sævaldur said loudly, calling the room to order, even though everyone there was already sitting in silence and waiting for him to start. “The deceased, Bjartmar Arnarson, killed at twenty-one forty last night, two rounds from a shotgun at extremely close range. No witnesses. What do we have?”

  Albert from the technical team stood up and cleared his throat. “Like you said, Sævaldur. Two shots. The first probably downwards and into the victim’s feet. This wasn’t a fatal injury, but would have been completely debilitating. No way he could have escaped or resisted. The second shot to the chest was the fatal wound. Death would have been instantaneous.”

  “Where’s Miss Cruz?” Sævaldur demanded. “Why isn’t she here?”

  “She’s still at the crime scene,” Albert apologized. “She’ll be carrying out the autopsy this afternoon, but in broad terms I don’t think it will tell us much more than we know already.”

  “OK. Is there anything else to go on?”

  “The place is like a slaughterhouse,” Albert continued. “Blood everywhere. The splash patterns tie in with what I’ve already described. There are a couple of footprints. The victim was barefoot, so we assume the tracks are the killer’s; look like very ordinary training shoes. We’re going through the data to try and get a match, but it’s a long shot.”

  “Any dabs?”

  “Not that we’ve found so far. We’re still checking the house.”

  “Ballistics?”

  “Working on it. But without a cartridge case, there’s not a lot to go on.”

  Gunna could see that Sævaldur was enjoying his role at the front. He looked at the assembled faces and singled her out.

  “Gunnhildur. You’ve been investigating this man already. Can you give us a rundown?”

  Unlike Albert, Gunna decided to stay seated, and saw Sævaldur frown.

  “He had a complex set of businesses that are, as far as we can see, all legal, based on the cash he made in property. Before that he was involved in narcotics, but didn’t get his own fingers dirty and nothing was ever pinned on him. He ran a club called Blacklights that many of us will remember fondly, which is now a smart restaurant, but he still owns the building,” Gunna explained, habit making her refer to Bjartmar in the present tense.

  “What’s your angle on him? Why have you been chasing this character?”

  Gunna hesitated, remembering Ívar Laxdal’s instructions to keep the investigation into the Svana Syndicate as low-key as possible.

  “Bjartmar had a number of companies, including one called Rigel Investment. The ownership is complex, to say the least. But Rigel Investment owns the building that Svana Geirs lived in, also the car that she had the use of.”

  “D’you think there’s a link?”

  Gunna threw her hands up. “Undoubtedly. Bjartmar had upset a great many people over the years with all kinds of business deals that were, strictly speaking, legal, but far from honest. He didn’t have many friends and seemed to have a talent for making enemies as well as money.”

  Sævaldur grunted in acknowledgement. “Motives?”

  “This wasn’t a robbery. Nothing appears to have been stolen and the killer didn’t go further into the house than the lobby,” Eiríkur ventured. “It was quick as well. The 112 call was made at twenty-one forty-one by one of the neighbours who had heard the shots. The first car was on the scene at within three minutes and the Special Unit was right behind them, by which time the killer was gone. He probably walked up the hill and away. None of the neighbours recalled any kind of traffic along the street until we got there.”

  “Motive, if this wasn’t a robbery?” Sævaldur asked, throwing the question to the whole room.

  “Revenge,” Gunna said firmly. “Bjartmar’s wife is still in hospital after what looks to have been an arson attack. I don’t know if that was an attack that was intended for Bjartmar himself, but it seems possible. Bjartmar and his wife weren’t on good terms and he resented propping up her business, while I understand that she was pretty much a trophy wife. He had another woman on the side, who runs a seafood bar called the Fish Lover a few doors from his wife’s restaurant. Bjartmar seems to have taken a perverse delight in setting this woman up in a business in direct competition with his wife’s.”

  “That sounds bloody mad,” Helgi observed, speaking for the first time.

  “It does,” Gunna agreed. “But we have no shortage of people only too happy to do the man a bad turn.”

  Sævaldur looked at his watch. There was no need to, as there was a clock on the wall, but the gesture was theatrical.

  “We’ll adjourn until seventeen hundred. Albert, could you report then with Miss Cruz on developments, and Gunnhildur, will you draw up a file of the man’s particular enemies and coordinate interviews?”

  He clapped his hands to dismiss the group, clearly enjoying the moment, while Ívar Laxdal caught Gunna’s eye: the barely perceptible lifting of one eyebrow indicated that he wanted a quiet word.

  JÓN OPENED HIS eyes with difficulty and wondered where the strange low ceiling had come from. Then the previous night came flooding back and he shut his eyes and began to shake.

  “You’re awake, then?”

  Elín Harpa sat on the edge of the bed and looked at him questioningly.

  “You’ve had a bad time,” she observed.

  “Yeah,” Jón grunted, his throat dry, struggling to sit up. “Look, I’m really sorry about yesterday. I was desperate and didn’t know where to go.”

  “S’all right. There’s plenty of desperate people about these days.”

  “I’m really grateful you let me stay here. I’ll be out of your way now.”

  “S’all right,” Elín Harpa repeated, shrugging off the long-since-white dressing gown and wriggling back under the duvet. “Stay if you want. You’ll have to buy some food, though. There’s none here and I don’t get any money until tomorrow”.

  GUNNA DEEPLY FELT the need for a cigarette, something she was sure she had conquered over the last few weeks and months of withdrawal. Sævaldur’s briefing had triggered a craving inside that she tried to cure with a brisk walk around the car park in Ívar Laxdal’s company.

  In spite of his shorter legs, Ívar Laxdal walked at a pace slightly faster than Gunna’s and she matched it by keeping to the inside track.

  “Bjartmar Arnarson. Is this linked to the case you were already investigating?” he asked bluntly.

  “Probably, yes. I’d be amazed if there wasn’t some kind of link, even if not directly. The number of people the bloody man had upset over the years, we’re spoil for choice for suspects until Technical come up with something to work on or we can find a witness to give us a lead. The best we have so far is a tall man in dark clothes and a van parked two streets away. That’s it. No fingerprints, no witnesses, bugger all, in fact.”

  Ívar Laxdal’s pace picked up and Gunna wondered how soon she would find herself jogging to keep up.

  “Actually, we have a problem there,” she said.

  “The Svana Geirs case? What’s that?”

  “Our star suspect has an alibi.”

  “Solid?”

  “He was beating somebody up a hundred kilometres away. It’s possible at a stretch, but I don’t think it was him.”

  “Long Ommi, you mean?”

  “That’s him. Even he can’t be in two places at once. If he was handing out a beating that means he couldn’t have been anywhere near Svana Geirs’ flat when she was killed.”

  Ívar Laxdal nodded as he walked. “Bjartmar is the priority now. Was this a vendetta of some kind? A professional killing?”

  “God, I hope not,” Gunna said with feeling. “There are enough firearms floating around the country but they’ve never been used. But I suppose it was always going to be a matter of time before we were to see gun crime. If this was a contract killing, it could open the floodgates for all the scumbags who have weapons to start using them.”

  “My feeling precisely. This has to be sorted out quickly, very quickly. Svana Geirs being bumped off is one thing; that could be what the French call a crime passionnel. Temporary insanity, the Americans call the same thing. But this is something we can’t afford to get wrong.”

  “Are we getting the killer profiled?”

  Ívar Laxdal snorted. “We are. But that’s just to keep them happy upstairs. It’ll be legwork that sorts this one out, just you see.”

  “And Sævaldur’s going to do that?”

  Another snort. “Sævaldur’s going through the motions. I want you on the Svana case, ostensibly. I want every possible angle examined that could have any bearing on Bjartmar. Everything, understand? You can have all the overtime you want, but I don’t have any bodies for you. There’s no spare manpower for an emergency these days, I’m afraid.”

  “WHY DID YOU cut all your hair off?” Jón asked.

  “Felt like it. This is easier. Not so much to wash.”

  “It makes you look younger. It looks good.”

  “How young do you think it makes me look?” Elín Harpa asked with secretive smile.

  “I don’t know,” Jón said, taken by surprise. “Twenty-six, twenty-seven?”

  “Close. Twenty-four. And you? You’re quite old, aren’t you?” she said blandly.

  “Thirty-eight,” Jón answered, subtracting three years from his age and wondering why.

  Jón had bought pizzas. He and Elín Harpa perched on the edge of the bed, while two of the children sat on plastic chairs and the smallest lay happily in the crook of his mother’s arm, sucking on a bottle.

  The little boy and his younger sister chewed the spicy slices and guzzled cola greedily, apparently unconcerned by Jón’s presence. They watched the television constantly, engrossed in cartoons in English, until only one slice of pizza remained and both decided that they wanted it.

  “Stop it!” Elín Harpa commanded as the two of them began to squabble noisily. “Stop! Now! Or I’ll change the channel,” she threatened as they ignored her.

  She stabbed at the taped-up remote control until the channel changed and the two children howled at the injustice.

  “Turn it up, will you?” Jón said suddenly, and the children fell silent, turning to the television, where a row of police cars was parked in a suburban street that Jón recognized instantly.

  “Mummy, what’s—?” the little boy began.

  “Shhhh!” Jón admonished. “Turn the sound up, will you?” The television image cut away to a grim newsreader.

  “A man was found dead at his home in Hafnarfjördur late last night. A police statement is expected later today but the man’s identity is not being released until relatives have been informed,” he announced in sonorous tones. “In Akureyri yesterday …”

  “You can change it again now. That’s all I wanted to see.”

  “Someone you know?” Elín Harpa asked.

  “Sort of,” Jón said. “Someone I used to work for.”

  • • •

  THIS TIME GUNNA tracked Hallur Hallbjörnsson down to his home, a smart house on the periphery of the Vogar district in a shady, tree-lined street only a few hundred metres from the busy traffic of Sudurlandsbraut but shielded from the constant whine of traffic by a thick hedge.