Jón rang the bell and waited. Rain pelted down in the darkness and he huddled under the shelter outside the house in the western end of town. The concrete of the shelter was crumbling and the rusted iron rods that reinforced it were poking out. He could see there was a light on upstairs, otherwise he wouldn’t have rung the bell. It was past midnight and he couldn’t face going back to his brother’s flat.
“Hello?”
The door opened a crack and the woman’s face appeared in the narrow opening.
“Hi. I, er, I’m really sorry to be calling so late. You remember me? Jón the plumber?”
The door opened a little wider as she stared out at him.
“What do you want this late?” she asked suspiciously.
“Look, I’m really, really sorry. I’m in a bit of trouble and was wondering if I could come in for a minute?”
She stared back with her lips pursed, then closed the door. Jón heard a chain rattle and a second later it opened again. This time he could see that she was wrapped in a dressing gown that had once been white, with shapeless slippers on her feet and a quizzical look on her narrow face.
Wordlessly she stood aside to let him in. Another door behind her squealed as it opened and an elderly man looked out at them, a grey-faced woman peering over his shoulder.
“Another new boyfriend, Elín?” the man asked salaciously, while the woman scowled behind him.
“Oh go back to sleep, you nosy old bastard,” Elín Harpa snarled, slamming the front door and turning to climb the stairs behind Jón.
Jón stood in the middle of the kitchen and dripped water from his jacket.
“I’m really so sorry to barge in on you,” he stammered. “It’s late and I don’t have anywhere to go. Lost my house and everything. Been sleeping at my brother’s place, but he doesn’t really want me there and I thought … maybe …?”
“You can sleep here if you want,” Elín Harpa told him in a flat voice. She went towards the flat’s tiny living room, where a TV screen was the only illumination. More than half of the room was taken up by a double bed. She sat on the edge of it and looked up at him calmly.
“Is that your bed? I didn’t mean …” Jón faltered. “I meant, don’t you have a spare room or a sofa or something?”
Elín Harpa shrugged. Jón saw that the lifeless shoulderlength brown hair had gone, replaced by a short crop that nestled over the tops of her ears, making her look younger and more fragile.
“There’s only one other room and that’s where the kids sleep. So it’s here with me or on the floor. Up to you.”
She prodded a remote control bound up with sticky tape several times until the TV screen went black, leaving the room in gloom, while Jón continued to drip on the kitchen floor.
Morning was not far off when Gunna parked Gísli’s Range Rover outside and quietly opened the front door to the silent house. The only sound to be heard was the muted ticking of the kitchen clock. Her hands and feet, chilled in the hours spent searching Bjartmar’s garden under the glare of floodlights, had thawed on the drive home, but the fatigue of the long day and the shock of seeing Bjartmar’s mangled corpse, eyes wide open and staring into the distance, had left her drained.
She hung her coat and fleece on the back of a kitchen chair, stretched her arms high above her head and breathed in deeply. She closed her eyes and lifted her chin, squaring her shoulders and trying not to visualize the man’s last terrified moments.
She had finally been ordered home, along with Eiríkur and Helgi. Nothing but faint footprints had been found in the grass, so, leaving the technical team engrossed in the scene of crime, she and Eiríkur had joined the group of uniformed officers conducting house-to-house enquiries, trying to locate anyone who might have been aware of anything.
An elderly gentleman walking a small dog recalled seeing a man striding uphill from the crime scene, but could give no description beyond the fact that he was tall and dressed in dark clothing. The enquiries stretched into the neighbouring streets and revealed only that a shabby white van had been parked there for a while, but nobody recalled the number, or even when it had arrived or departed.
Gunna pulled off her T-shirt and unbuttoned her jeans, then stood in front of the open fridge to take a long pull at a carton of the orange juice that she always tried to remember to buy for Laufey.
She wriggled out of her jeans, sodden past the knees, and rolled them into a ball with the T-shirt. Feeling sweaty and dirty after hours in the drizzling rain, on an impulse she clicked off the main light, leaving only the light over the stove on, stripped off the rest of her clothes and stuffed everything into the washing machine. She squatted and poured powder into the drawer, set the machine to run, and padded to the shower, where the sulphurous hot water soothed the knotted muscles of her shoulders.
It was much later when she crawled into bed, draping one arm over Steini’s sleeping form.
“Y’all right?” he enquired drowsily. “Tough job?”
“Yup. Exhausted.”