“Oh, Mum, don’t be so old-fashioned,” Laufey scolded, nose in the air as she marched to her room and shut the door firmly behind her.
“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.
Gunna 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.
“All 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.”