Jón admired the clean lines of the shotgun, the deep patina that much polishing had given the stock and the gunmetal menace of the twin barrels. He and the old man had shot geese and ptarmigan every winter while his father had lived, first using the old man’s shotgun that Jón had left under the bench at his mother’s house. A year before he died, Jón’s father had bought him a shotgun of his own, and the two of them doubled their haul of geese that winter, to the consternation of his mother, expected to pluck, clean and roast them.
With the old man gone, Jón had little heart for spending time on the hills and fields they had walked together, and the shotguns languished in the cellar, occasionally taken out to be cleaned, polished, oiled and put away.
Jón winced to himself as he put the barrels between the jaws of the vice and gently closed them. What he was about to do didn’t feel right, but he picked up a hacksaw from the bench and laid the blade against the barrels, shutting his eyes as he pushed the saw forward for the first rasping cut.
Gunna listened to the hired car’s suspension complain every time it hit a bump in the road. Helgi himself seemed blissfully unaware of the bumps and Gunna decided that he must have become so used to the noise that if it were to disappear he would start to be worried about it.
“Run out of cars again, have we, Helgi?”
“Yeah. Sometimes. Here, I’ve been thinking,” he said and lapsed back into silence.
“About what?”
“Long Ommi. Svana Geirs was murdered between twelve and three in the afternoon, right?”
“As far as we’re aware. That fits in with the last call on her phone, and Miss Cruz said that body temperature indicated she’d been dead between six and three hours.”
“All right. So if she was killed at two, give or take an hour or so each way, twelve-ish at the earliest, then it would have been a bit of a rush for Ommi to get to Keflavík to give Óskar Óskarsson a hiding, wouldn’t it?”
“You’re saying he couldn’t have done both?” Gunna hazarded.
“That’s it. Óskar turned up at Casualty at six that evening, by which time it was already a couple of hours since he’d been beaten. So what do you think? Is Óskar Ommi’s alibi?”
Gunna gnawed a lip in discomfort. The idea had been at the back of her mind, but for some reason she had deliberately not thought it through.
‘I don’t know, Helgi. I really don’t know. It strikes me that he could have done both if he’d been quick off the mark, but it doesn’t look good, does it? It’s an hour’s drive, give or take ten minutes or so. Ommi could have bashed Svana’s head, run for it and been in Keflavík an hour later to administer some punishment to Óskar. It could just fit.”
“All right. So Ommi knew exactly where to find Óskar, did he? He didn’t have to search around for him?”
“It’s impossible to say until one or the other of them throws us a rope. We’d better have another go at Ommi tomorrow. Fancy a little drive in the country?”
The route to Óskar’s room at the hospital was becoming familiar. Gunna pushed open the door to see an orderly stripping the bed.
“Where’s Óskar? The man who was in this room?”
“I not know. Ask sister,” the orderly replied with a heavy accent.
In the corridor, Gunna cornered a tired-looking nurse who could only say that her shift had just started and went off to find someone more senior. Finally Gunna recognized the nurse she had spoken to the first time she had been there to interview Óskar.
“I can guess who you’re looking for, and he’s gone,” Sjöfn Stefánsdóttir said. “He discharged himself very much against doctor’s orders and left about half an hour ago.”
“Dammit, couldn’t you have told us?” Gunna exploded. “Can’t you keep people in here?”
“Actually, I left a message on your voicemail as soon as I knew what was happening,” Sjöfn replied sharply. “And no, we can’t keep people against their will unless they’re sectioned. That’s a major step and it’s not something we can do lightly; even then it’s almost exclusively done when there are mental health problems, not when someone is fed up with being harassed,” she added.
“I’m sorry. Really, I shouldn’t have gone off the deep end like that. Do you know where he’s gone?”
“No idea. But he left with his wife half an hour ago, so I don’t suppose they’ve got far yet.”
“Helgi, will you get on to the local coppers and see if they can have a look for Skari and Erla’s car? They may well be on the way out to Hvalvík,” Gunna instructed, then turned back to Sjöfn. ‘I’d like to speak to the doctor who treated Oskar when he was brought in. Is that possible?”
’I think he’s here at the moment. Come with me and I’ll see if he’s in the common room.”
They padded along corridors with Helgi behind them, muttering into his communicator. In the common room, Sjöfn gently tapped the shoulder of a tall man dozing in an armchair with his feet crossed at the ankles and resting on a low table covered with notes.