“You know who Gunnlaugur Ólafsson is?”
“Who?” Skari asked, mystified.
“Bjarki Steinsson?”
“Look, I don’t know who you’re on about,” Skari replied angrily. “Who the hell are these people?”
“Högni Sigurgeirsson?”
“I said, I don’t know who these bloody people are. All right?”
“Who was it who beat you up and put you in hospital?”
“Told you,” he said, dropping his eyes to the floor. “Polish bloke.”
“No, Skari,” Gunna corrected him. “I’m sick of listening to this particular broken record. Most of the Poles have already gone home and there isn’t a single Pole, Latvian, Lithuanian or even Mongolian who answers your description. So how about you come clean and admit it was Ommi?”
“What?” he asked, eyes wide. “Because …”
“Because what? I know you and Ommi go way back, but that’s not going to make a bit of difference.”
Skari hung his head and at last his fists unclenched.
“It was Ommi,” he muttered angrily. “Ommi and some little pipsqueak mate of his. I’d have had Ommi on his own, but his mate batted me round the head with a plank and I couldn’t think straight after that.”
Gunna turned to Bjössi in the doorway. “Got that?”
Bjössi nodded back at her and she looked down at Skari, sitting on the bed clenching and unclenching his big fists.
“And you’re going to give my colleague a statement to that effect, aren’t you?”
“Can I go home after that?” he asked hopefully.
“Make a statement and you can go home to Erla and the kids.”
“Everything?”
“Everything,” Gunna said firmly. “All right, Bjössi, we’ll leave this chap to your tender care. Can you sort him out a lift home when he’s made a suitable statement?”
“Statement, yes. Don’t know about a lift, though. We’re a bit short-handed today and a car down as well.”
“Then put him in a taxi and tell the driver to take him to Hvalvík without going past the booze shop,” Gunna instructed. “And Skari?”
“Yeah?”
“Give your mum my regards when you get home, would you?”
Helgi drove, keeping steadily to the speed limit as cars and trucks whistled past them in the outside lane of Reykjanesbraut. As they passed the spot where she and Laufey had come across the accident a few days before, Gunna could see nothing to indicate that anything had ever happened there. “Hæ, Eiríkur. Can you hear me?” She called into her mobile. Suddenly the car emerged from the black spot and she could hear him perfectly.
“Anything on that note?”
“Nothing much. No dabs. It’s printed on an ordinary laser printer of some kind, but there are thousands of those in use, so that’s no help. Nothing special about the paper, either. There are a few prints on the envelope, but nothing that we’ve been able to identify so far. We’re working on it, but I reckon they’re more than likely Hallur’s own.”
“But we fingerprinted him to eliminate him from Svana’s flat, didn’t we? So we’ll have those prints on file. Check the dabs, would you, and let me know as soon as you have anything?”
She ended the call and sat brooding in the front seat, hands in her coat pockets, watching the lampposts flash past.
“Was Svana being blackmailed, or was she doing the blackmailing? If so, is that why someone broke her head open, possibly with her own baseball bat?”
“Where to, chief?” Helgi asked as they approached the Hafnarfjördur outskirts.
“Skari had nothing to do with anything recent. All this stuff going on around Svana Geirs and her syndicate, it’s nothing to do with him. The same goes for Ommi. So who stands to gain on all this? Who’s doing the blackmailing? Is it someone who knows which of these bastards killed Svana, or is the person who killed Svana trying to cash in on the others? Someone within the syndicate? Högni, maybe?”
“You know, I don’t bloody know. It gets more complex by the minute,” Helgi grumbled. “A few straightforward break-ins would be nice for a change.”
“If that’s the case,” Gunna went on, as if Helgi had said
nothing, “why so little? Twenty-five thousand euros is a stack of money for you or me, but for any of these high-flyers like Jónas Valur or Hallur, it’s small change.”
“Unless it’s not about the money.”
“It’s always about the money.”
“I mean, if it’s a smokescreen of some kind.”
“Could be, I suppose,” Gunna conceded, unconvinced. “I’d like you to dig into Hallur’s basement again today.”
“Where to, chief?” Helgi asked again. “Back to the station first?”
“Ach. Let’s take a little ride around Kópavogur on the way, shall we? There’s nothing like staying away from the shop for five minutes to stimulate the grey matter. There’s a bakery at Hamraborg, so we can stop for an early lunch break.”
Later that afternoon, Gunna bustled past Sigvaldi at the desk with her phone at her ear, but was rewarded with only Eiríkur’s voicemail. On the way up the stairs, she met Sævaldur on the way down for the second time that day.
“We’re going to have to stop meeting like this, Gunnhildur,” he warned her.
“Nothing to worry about, Sævaldur,” she shot back. “Nobody would ever believe it.”