“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.”

  Monday 29th

  “WHERE 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.

  • • •

  “TALK,” 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.

  “And now they’re both dead.”

  “Nothing to do with me! You have to believe that, surely!”

  “You heard about this group who were sharing Svana Geirs between them, and knowing that Hallur was one of them, you told his wife, right? Why?”

  “I, well … I’ve known her for years. Good friends, but never … you know …”

  “You thought it might bag you a good story, return the favour to the people who screwed you over before and help you into her knickers, all at the same time?”

  “That’s …” he began, and sank down and nodded.

  “And it worked?”

  He nodded again. “I was going to leak it to a gossip magazine or a website. That would get it out into the open so I could follow it up. That was the idea, expose Hallur as a man who was cheating on his wife. That would have made it a lot easier for Helena Rós to end the marriage. She’s a prominent figure in her own right and doesn’t need any mud thrown at her.”

  “So you were going to engineer a scandal with Hallur as the bad guy?”

  “I’m not proud of it. Not now.”

  “I’m not here to pass any judgement on you. That’s for the jury.”

  “Jury?”

  “Undoubtedly. This will go to court.”

  “Jesus … Look, it was Helena Rós who wanted to put pressure on her husband, not me.”

  “Right, let’s backtrack. You say she wanted to apply pressure to her husband. When was this?”

  “About three weeks before Svana Geirs died. Hallur was a bag of nerves after he got the first demand. Helena Rós is vicious. She wanted to pressure him and screw as much money out of him as she could. It wasn’t because she needed it; just to make him squirm. She knew he had money hidden away that she didn’t have access to, but didn’t know how much.”

  “So she wrote the letters?”

  “I did that, some of them anyway. Then Helena wrote more.”

  “You sent them to his office or his home?”

  “Both.”

  Gunna felt her head throbbing but forced herself to concentrate. “You also sent letters to Bjarki Steinsson, Bjartmar Arnarson and Jónas Valur Hjaltason?”

  “A few text messages as well,” he sighed. “They all responded, except Bjartmar. Maybe he just didn’t care. I don’t know.”

  “Why?”

  “I wanted to make them suffer too. I’m damn sure that bloke who threatened to strangle me was sent by Bjartmar or Jónas Valur, or that bastard of a son of his.”

  “And you needed the cash, I suppose?”

  “Shit, yes, all right. I bought a flat two years ago, not long before the crash. The payments on it have gone through the roof and I thought I’d be out on the street otherwise. The place has been for sale for the best part of a year and it’s only even been viewed twice.”

  “So your flat is safe now?”

  “For the moment.”

  “Good. Interview suspended, fourteen twenty-five,” Gunna intoned, stopping the recording. “Maybe you’ll be able to rent it out while you’re in prison. We’ll take a break now.”

  At the mention of prison, Gulli Ólafs’ eyes glazed over.

  “I HEAR HÖGNI’S been picked up,” Eiríkur said, sitting down at his desk and running his hands through his hair to dislodge some more of the gravel collected during his tussle with Gulli Ólafs.

  “Do we have room for him?” Gunna asked, shaking painkillers from a jar and washing them down with lukewarm coffee.

  “Yup. There’s a cell upstairs reserved for him. Helgi’s back,” he added. “Has Helena Rós been arrested?”

  “Not yet. But she has plenty of questions to answer.”

  The door swung silently open and Ívar Laxdal stepped inside. “Progress, Gunnhildur?” The trace of a smile on his normally deadpan face told them both that he was already aware of what had happened.

  “Oh yes. Högni Sigurgeirsson is on his way and Helena Rós is sitting in an interview room waiting for us.”

  “Hallur Hallbjörnsson’s wife?”

  “That’s her.”

  “Her father’s a well-known figure, you know.”

  “And he’s a lawyer.”

  “What progress with the hack?”

  “Singing like a bird. Can we get some extra bodies to search his flat and his car? I could do with someone to go to his office as well and bring his computer back here for Albert to have a look through.”

  “I can get that done,” Ívar Laxdal said.

  “What we have at the moment is Helena Rós and Gulli Ólafs helping us with enquiries. It’s crystal clear that between them they were blackmailing three of the four members of Svana’s Syndicate, but I have no idea yet how they’re linked to the deaths of Svana or Jónas Valur, or the attacks on me or Hallur,” Gunna said, pausing for breath as Ívar Laxdal’s eyes widened. “On the other hand, we have Högni Sigurgeirsson, who is a seriously fucked-up young man and has plenty of questions to answer about Hallur’s injuries. It seems that Gulli and Helena Rós had already started their little campaign some time before Svana’s murder, and it was aimed mainly at wrecking Hallur’s marriage, as well as digging Gulli Ólafs out of his financial difficulties, after which he was going to play house with the man’s wife. It’s something I should have twigged earlier and followed up.”

  “Don’t blame yourself, Gunnhildur. You’ve been busy.”

  “Albert’s work has been outstanding,” she continued. “There was a dog hair in one envelope at Hallur’s parliamentary office that matches Helena Rós’ poodle. Now Gulli Ólafs and Helena Rós Pálsdóttir are in separate interview rooms desperately blaming each other. But Gulli Ólafs wasn’t the one who smacked Hallur and tried to poison him, or the one who bashed Jónas Valur’s head in, although he was probably the person Jónas Valur was expecting to see. Both Gulli Ólafs and Helena Rós were elsewhere at the time, and that’s already been confirmed. The house-to-house enquiries and CCTV have turned up sightings of a grey Opel that fits, so I have our pizza delivery boy pegged for that one. But we’ll see.”

  “If you think Högni may be responsible for the attack on you and Jónas Valur, then that interrogation ought to be handled by someone else,” Ívar Laxdal decided.

  “Not Sævaldur, surely? Not after all the work we’ve done.”

  “Sævaldur’s busy elsewhere. Helgi can do it.”

  GUNNA SAT QUIETLY next to Eiríkur in the interview room.

  “Interview with Helena Rós Pálsdóttir, officers Eiríkur Thór Jónsson and Gunnhildur Gísladóttir present,” Eiríkur recited for the benefit of the recording. “Helena Rós, can you tell us where you were on the day your husband was attacked at your home?”

  “At a fundraising event.”

  “Fundraising for what?”

  “For the National Theatre, at Hotel Borg.”

  “And there were people there who will confirm your attendance?”

  “Of course.”

  “Have you any idea who might be responsible for the attack on your husband?”

  Helena Rós folded her arms and glared, head back. “You’ve already asked me all these questions.”

  “How long have you been in a relationship with Gunnlaugur Ólafsson?”

  “Who says we’re in a relationship?”

  “I’m asking,” Eiríkur said. “Are you saying there isn’t a relationship between you?”

  “All right. About a year.”

  “How long have you known Gunnlaugur?”

  “Since we were at college. Twenty years, something like that.”

  “And how did you become aware of your husband’s arrangement with Svana Geirs?”

  “Do I really have to answer these questions? This is very personal.”

  “But it’s also a murder inquiry.”

  “Surely you don’t suspect me of murdering that woman?”

  “Would you please answer the question?”

  Helena Rós fidgeted with the ends of her scarf. “I knew there was something going on. Hallur has always been easily led astray, especially by pretty women, but since the children were born he’s kept his dick in his trousers, or so I thought. This was different. To answer your question, it was simple. I checked the SMS messages on his phone while he was in the bath. He must have realized, because after a while he started taking his phone with him to the bathroom.”