‘Nope.’ Snorri shook his head, scrolling through Matti’s record. ‘In the last two years there’s speeding, max points on his licence, public drunkenness, some minor violence and a few other odds and sods.’
‘Not to mention what’s not on record,’ Gunna added. ‘There was a narcotics case a few years ago, but he wriggled out of it and someone else did the time for it.’
She hung her head and sighed even more deeply, then swore quietly under her breath. ‘The upside of it is that as Fat Matti’s a relative of mine, I’d prefer not to have to arrest him. So if he shows up anywhere around Hvalvík, you or Haddi can do the honours.’
‘I’ll look forward to it,’ Snorri said with a smile.
‘You do that. If you see him, bang him up and call for me.’
Matti was worried. He was more than worried, he was scared. The sight of the tall man with the wispy hair and the glasses whimpering in agony over his smashed arm stayed with him in the days following the terrifying drive back to Reykjavík. Hardy had sat in the passenger seat enjoying the sunshine, humming to himself and cracking the occasional joke that Matti couldn’t appreciate. The man seemed more relaxed than Matti had seen him before, as if his swift act of controlled violence had released a tension in him.
The big taxi’s wipers swept drizzle from the windscreen as Matti dropped a customer off outside one of the big office blocks on Borgartún. It was mid-afternoon and he decided to head back to Reykjavík airport to see if a fare could be picked up from one of the domestic flights. Pushing through the mid-town traffic he almost crashed into the rear end of a bus halfway through Channel 2’s three o’clock news bulletin.
A man had been found dead at his home just outside Borgarnes, where Mýrar County police were treating the death as suspicious and appealing for witnesses.
‘Shit. Shit. Shit,’ he swore to himself.
He was due to collect Hardy at four thirty from a meeting in Kópavogur. Matti wondered whether or not he would have heard about the man’s death.
Sitting outside the airport he watched a couple of Fokker Friendships land and the passengers start to trickle out of the terminal, suitcases and small children at their feet. Country people, he thought, not used to a big city like Reykjavík and looking forward to seeing the place for a few days before going back to Akureyri or Húsavík.
He looked at his watch as a hard-faced woman with two shell-suited children and a clutch of suitcases in tow tapped on the window.
‘Can you take us to Kópavogur?’ she rasped.
‘Yeah, I’ll open the boot,’ Matti agreed unwillingly. It was too short a fare, leaving him too much time to wait for Hardy to come out of his meeting and not enough time for another fare in between. But he lifted the woman’s cases into the boot and ushered the children to the back seats and ordered them to put the seat belts on.
‘Don’t I know you?’ she demanded suddenly as Matti swung the car out on to Hringbraut.
‘Don’t think so,’ Matti grunted.
‘I do. You’re Matti Kristjáns, used to live in the flat over the bakery. You must remember me, surely? Kaja Jóakims?’
Matti’s heart sank. He put his foot to the floor and breezed through a set of lights a fraction of a second after they switched to red.
‘Nah. Not me,’ he said unconvincingly as the woman looked sideways at him through narrowed eyes.
They finished the trip in record time and an uncomfortable silence as Matti resolved never to wait outside the airport when flights from Vestureyri were landing. There was too much chance of running into someone from home, an unwelcome face from the old days. Admittedly he did now recognize the red-faced woman as the modern personification of the pudgy girl with pigtails and a shrill voice from over the road, but the last thing he wanted to do was to start comparing notes on who was living where these days.
Outside the large detached house that was Kaja Jóakims’s destination, he mumbled as he fiddled with the meter.
‘Four thousand,’ he said.
‘Discount for old times’ sake?’ Kaja Jóakims asked shyly.
‘Already included,’ Matti muttered.
With notes in his hand, he lumbered from the car and opened the boot to retrieve their cases, while a young woman emerged from the house and embraced his passengers in turn. He was quickly back at the wheel and ready to go when he noticed that the young woman and Kaja Jóakims bore an uncanny resemblance.
‘See you later, Matti,’ she cooed and waved as he drove away, swearing out loud now that he had an empty cab and more than half an hour to kill.
‘Kaja Jóakims a grandmother,’ he grumbled to himself. ‘Who’d have thought it?’