“Good morning,” Gunna greeted her. “My name’s Gunnhildur Gísladóttir and I’m from the CID Serious Crime Unit. I take it you’re Helena Rós? I’d like to speak to your husband.”

  “We’re about to have lunch. We have guests,” she replied with a blend of frustration and irritation in her piping voice.

  “Who is it, Helena?” a familiar voice asked as its owner approached. When Hallur appeared behind his wife, his face fell. He recovered quickly.

  “Ah, good morning, officer. I have to say, this isn’t a convenient time,” he said, doing his best to mask his discomfort.

  “I realize that fully, but I assure you this isn’t trivial,” Gunna said.

  “In that case you had better come in,” he said resignedly. “Helena, would you look after our guests?” He looked helplessly at Gunna and pursed his lips into a thin line in irritation. “Come with me, please. We’ll go to my study.”

  The book-lined den in the basement was reminiscent of his parliamentary office, but considerably larger. Hallur sat at a small desk and gestured for Gunna to take a seat on the other side.

  “Last night a man was shot at his home in the Setberg. You’ve heard about this?” Gunna said without preamble.

  “I heard something on the radio this morning, but I had a late night last night and haven’t listened too carefully to the news yet.”

  “The victim’s identity hasn’t been released yet. But I can tell you that it was Bjartmar Arnarson.”

  “What?” The colour vanished from Hallur’s face. “Do you know who … I mean, who did this? Who’d want to kill Bjartmar?” he asked helplessly as Gunna scrutinized him for reactions.

  “Someone who knew just what he was doing, apparently.”

  “How? I mean, how did it happen?”

  “He was shot by the front door of his house, twice, at close range with a shotgun,” Gunna said grimly. “This wasn’t an accident. Half the force is working on this one case now. What I’m after is a motive that could lead me to the killer. But what interests me right now is that Bjartmar not only had no shortage of people with not much love for him; he also had a good few partners in his various businesses. I’m concerned that there might be a list here, and someone out to settle grudges.”

  If Hallur’s face had not already been white, it would undoubtedly have gone paler.

  “How far back does your acquaintance with Bjartmar go?” she continued.

  “A few years.”

  “All right. Let”s not play games. Your acquaintance with Bjartmar goes back to the years when you were a city councillor closely involved with the departments and committees overseeing land procurement and sales.”

  “I don’t know how you—”

  “It’s all in the records. All you have to do is dig deep enough,” Gunna said quietly, opening her briefcase and taking out some photocopied sheets. “It’s all here, minutes of the procurement committees, reports, financial forecasts, et cetera. The city quietly sold off land in Grafarvogur and plots in and around the city centre without any kind of consultation or bidding process on a number of occasions. Every time, these plots were sold to companies that were run by Bjartmar Arnarson and Sindri Valsson. There’s a word for this, you know.”

  “What?” Hallur asked dazedly.

  “I’d say it’s corruption, but that’s not my concern right now. I’m more interested in knowing who else the bloke with the shotgun might want to settle up with. Where’s Sindri now?”

  “Er … Portugal, I think. That’s where he normally is.”

  “How far did all this go? And for how long?” Gunna demanded.

  “Look, I don’t think I ought to be speaking to you about this without a lawyer. I don’t want to be in a position of incriminating myself.”

  “Don’t be stupid. I’m wondering how many people you lot upset over the years, you and Bjartmar and Sindri between you. Just how many people are there who might hold a grudge against you?”

  Hallur sank down in his chair and looked blank.

  “There are so many,” he said morosely. “I sort of kept in the background and did what I could to push business their way. Jónas Valur, you know, is an influential man, and quite a few of us owe him favours. Bjartmar and Sindri did the business side of things until they went their separate ways.”

  “And when was this?” Gunna asked.

  “A few years ago, I suppose. We were at one of the informal gatherings we have occasionally.”

  “Who’s that? The Svana Syndicate?”

  “Well, yes,” Hallur admitted. “Bjartmar and Sindri were in the process of winding Kleifaberg up. Bjartmar had already set up Landex and Sandex, so he was doing all right. But Sindri took us all by surprise. He said he was getting out. Of course we all thought he was completely mad. The economy was booming at the time. But he said he’d consulted analysts and gave it two years. In the event, he was entirely right.”

  “You mean he predicted the crash, sold his assets and emigrated?”

  “He still comes back here sometimes. But, yes, he saw something the rest of us missed and put all his cash into property in Portugal. Hotels, golf courses, that sort of thing.”

  “And Bjartmar?”

  “God, I’ll never forget the two of them arguing that night. They’re both pretty fiery and it practically came to blows. I’m sure Sindri would have hit Bjartmar if his father hadn’t been there,” he reminisced, staring over Gunna’s head at the wall behind her. “Bjartmar hasn’t done quite so well. His Spanish portfolio has been stable, as far as I know, but he’s had problems here. He stretched himself a long way and some of his companies are struggling. Rigel’s just about getting by but Arcturus Holdings is well over its limits. Both of those companies built property that back in 2007 would have sold as soon as it hit the market. But then everything was turned upside down. Rigel Investment built those luxury flats on Lindargata. Some of them sold and some are rented, but there are still too many empty. Arcturus built all those terraces in Gardabær, about a hundred houses altogether, and they’re practically all empty.”

  “Bjartmar Arnarson was in financial difficulties?” Gunna asked, reminding herself that this was the district where Long Ommi had been hiding in a brand-new empty house.

  Hallur nodded glumly. “I’d say he was in serious danger of losing control of Rigel, possibly in the near future. It’s quite possible that he only held on to ownership because the bank had enough on its plate already and the last thing they wanted was to suddenly own a hundred empty houses all at the same time.”

  “Are there creditors over these houses, then?”

  “God, yes. Some of the contractors went bankrupt. But Bjartmar was pretty smart in a lot of ways. He owned the company that handled the project under a different tax number, so that operation went bust without directly affecting Rigel, which actually owns the properties.”

  “Wheels within wheels? The usual dodges? Doing favours for your cronies?” Gunna said with disdain.

  “Business.” Hallur shrugged. “Just business. That’s how it works.”

  “Steindór Hjálmarsson. Does that name mean anything to you?” Hallur looked blank. “Don’t think so. Should it?”

  “Not necessarily. Tell me what your movements were on the day Svana Geirs died.”

  “Are you still on that? God, I’d have thought you’d have caught the bastard by now,” Hallur said.

  “A little more co-operation and we might have,” Gunna retorted.

  “Is this anything to do with Bjartmar?” he asked warily. “Are these murders linked?”

  “That’s what I need to find out. Now, details. Tell me what happened that day, without leaving anything out this time.”

  Hallur groaned. “I left here around six thirty, as usual, and went to my parliamentary office. There I went through paperwork, answered emails, all that kind of crap, had a meeting with a couple of colleagues—”

  “About what?”

  “The oil refinery proposal in the Westfjords. Basically it’s an environment-versus-employment question. So whatever stand we take on it, we’re going to be wrong,” he said bitterly. “Personally I’d like to see the effort going into aquaculture, but I’m only a junior MP and so nobody pays much attention.”

  “You can give me the names of these parliamentary colleagues?”

  “Certainly. Eyrún Valgeirsdóttir, Pálmi Marteinsson, Fannar Jónsson. There were others, but those are the ones that spring to mind. They’ll vouch for me.”

  “And then?”

  “The meeting came to an end at around ten thirty and I went out.”

  “To meet Svana?”

  “I went to Fit Club and was expecting to meet her. She wasn’t there so I did an hour of running and weights, showered and went back to work. Simple as that. I was due to speak at two, as you know.”

  “You say you were expecting to see her? Had you arranged to meet?”

  “Not specially. But she was normally there at that sort of time.”

  “You had something particular to discuss?”

  “No.” He shrugged. “I enjoyed her company. Svana was a fun person to be around. Even though she was shallow in many ways, she was a lively personality and an antidote to dry meetings that go on too long.”

  “It seems she had an appointment. Any idea who with? Another of the syndicate?”

  There was a sour look on his face.

  “I have no idea. I hoped to see her. She wasn’t there,” he said with rising impatience.

  “You’ve no idea who she was expecting to meet?”

  “Not the faintest, officer, and if you don’t mind, we have guests for lunch.”

  “I’m sure they’ll leave some for you. When did you last see Bjartmar?”

  “Before his trip to the US,” Hallur said with a sour expression on his handsome face.

  “And the rest of the syndicate?”

  “I’ve seen Bjarki once or twice in the last few weeks. His firm looks after the books for my wife’s media business and we’re old friends.”

  “He doesn’t have an alibi.”

  “Bjarki? Good grief, he’d never hurt a fly, let alone a person. Svana was so fit and healthy, she could have made mincemeat of him.”

  “Bjartmar was abroad. You were in Parliament. Jónas Valur doesn’t have much of an alibi and Bjarki doesn’t have one at all. I’m not assuming that one of the syndicate killed Svana Geirs, but you have to admit that you all make a good starting point. You had a motive in that if she were to reveal the arrangement, your political career would be in trouble.”

  “You think so?” Hallur asked with a grim laugh. “If the truth were known about the goings-on between political bedrooms in this country, more than half of us would be out of office tomorrow.”

  “Did you meet any of Svana’s other acquaintances?”

  “What? Her friends? No. I don’t think she had friends like normal people do. She just had people who were useful to her. I’d sometimes run into her with people at Fit Club, normally the sort of fashionable women she used to associate with, sometimes men, but not often. Once I saw her laughing and joking with a troll of a man at Fit Club, who turned out to be her brother. That was a bit strange, because Svana never seemed to have anything like a family, ever.”

  “How so?”

  “She never mentioned family at all. I knew she was from out of town somewhere, but didn’t know where. I know it sounds funny, but it didn’t fit somehow.”

  “How so?” Gunna asked again.

  “I don’t know,” Hallur answered. “She’d never had any relations like the rest of us do, never mentioned parents. Finding out there was a family behind her was a bit like discovering a shameful secret that she’d have preferred to keep quiet about.”

  GUNNA LEFT HALLUR’S smart house with his wife’s farewell scowl vivid in her mind and drove back to Hverfisgata thinking over the conversation. She made a mental note to find Björgvin in the financial crime department and ask if he had any knowledge of Bjarki Steinsson’s activities. As an accountant, Bjarki undoubtedly handled affairs for his friends’ companies, and although she knew little would be divulged beyond generalities, she felt that the man’s demeanour would tell her enough.

  Some of what Hallur had said triggered a mental note she had made to herself a few days earlier that had become submerged beneath a tide of other matters. She hurried through the rain, grumbling to herself that rain shouldn’t fall from a virtually clear sky. Instead of going to the detectives’ office, she climbed an extra flight of stairs to the cells and could hear someone snoring sonorously inside one of them.

  An elderly man padded uncertainly from the toilet back to a cell, followed by a woman prison officer. Hearing her approach, both of them turned.

  “Hæ, Gunna, sweet thing,” the grey-haired man croaked.

  “Had a night on the tiles, did you, Maggi?”

  “Æi, Gunna. You know how it is sometimes. A little drink doesn’t go far these days,” he said, and yawned.

  “Come on, Maggi,” the prison officer encouraged. “You can have a few more hours’ sleep and that’s your lot.”

  The old man tottered forward, one hand on the wall, and the prison officer locked his door behind him, watching through the peephole as he settled himself back on the mattress inside.

  “Gunnhildur, isn’t it?” she asked. “I thought I recognized you.”

  “That’s right,” Gunna said, surprised. “You’re Kaya?”

  “Saw you in the paper last year.”

  “Ah, so you must be one of the half-dozen people who actually read Dagurinn instead of using it to line the litter tray.”

  “Sort of.” Kaya grinned. “We don’t have any pets, so I suppose we have to read it. What can I do for you?”

  “Chap brought in last week. Thickset, pissed. Tinna Sigvalds and Big Geiri brought him in but they’re both off duty today, otherwise I’d have asked them. Who was he?”

  Gunna followed Kaya to the office, where she scrolled through the log on the computer.

  “Last Friday? He was brought in about six thirty?”

  “That fits.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Not much. Just who he was. The face looked familiar and I wanted to be sure.”

  Kaya scrolled through the notes. “Nothing special. His name’s Elvar Marínósson, legal residence at Hólabraut 60, Djúpivogur, date of birth twentieth of March 1986.”

  Gunna nodded, writing the man’s name and date of birth down on the last page of her notepad. “What was he brought in for?”

  “Being an idiot, basically. Pissed, had an argument with a cashier in a shop on Posthússtræti. He lit a cigarette in the shop, refused to put it out and they called the police. He slept it off, the shop decided not to press charges and so we let him out the next morning with a thick head and told him not to do it again.”

  “OK, thanks. That tells me what I needed to know.”

  “Any time,” Kaya said with a saw-toothed smile.

  Gunna clattered down the stairs to her own office and waited impatiently for her computer to start up.

  When it had stopped whirring and had settled down to its usual irritating hum, she went to the traffic database and typed in Elvar Marínósson’s name and date of birth. A second later the man’s driving licence details appeared, confirming his full name, legal residence and date of birth, just as Kaya had said. But the picture alongside it, although not a recent one, showed a pale-faced, fair-haired man with deepset blue eyes, not the beefy red-faced man who had appropriated his identity.

  “Ah, Högni Sigurgeirsson. What game are you playing at?” Gunna asked herself quietly.

  “CAUGHT HIM YET?” Gunna asked as Helgi appeared with Eiríkur behind him.

  “Caught who?” Eiríkur said with a dazed look in his eyes.

  “I don’t know. Anyone, plenty out there to choose from. What have you been up to, then?”

  Helgi shook his head in despair. “Have you any idea? Any idea at all how many vans there are in this country that are either white or light grey? I’ve just spent an hour with the old feller who thinks he saw our mysterious white van down the hill from Bjartmar’s house, showing him pictures of vans in all shapes and sizes, every model under the sun. Guess what? It’s a white van. That’s the nearest he can get. Oh, but there might have been some lettering on the side. Or there might not.”

  He dropped the folder of photographs and brochures on his desk and sat down.

  “How far did the Special Unit go with their hot search?” Gunna said, standing up and going over to a much-annotated map of Reykjavík on the wall. “They don’t mess about, those guys. If it was there when they did their search, they’d have logged it. If it wasn’t, then it must have disappeared at the critical moment,” she decided. “If it was ever there at all.”

  She traced the road in which Bjartmar’s house stood with one finger, before skipping across the next road to the one beyond it.

  “Bjartmar’s house is in the furthest street but one in that district,” Eiríkur observed. “So if our man escaped on foot, he must have gone downhill, because there’s only one street of these yuppie mansions, and then lava fields behind it.”

  “Until some bright spark like the late lamented Bjartmar feels a need to build on it,” Gunna added.

  “Yeah, chief. Look, though. Our friend does a runner. No point going uphill, there’s nothing there and no way out. Downhill, back towards Hafnarfjördur. So even if the van was nothing to do with him, he would have gone down there anyway,” Eiríkur continued.

  “Yes, and look here,” Gunna pointed out. “In case neither of you had noticed, there are only two ways out of that district. So if you can find some CCTV footage from a minute or two after the shooting that shows a white van, then we might be on to something.”

  “You should apply for promotion, Gunna. With brains like that, you’re wasted on us,” Helgi assured her, while Gunna took a moment to decide that the comment didn’t warrant a sharp reply. “As it happens, my young colleague has already been busily searching out CCTV footage. But what have you been doing, chief?”

  “I’ve been annoying our elected representatives once again.”