Gunna clapped her hands once and found herself in an empty room. Outside, she ran into Bjössi sheltering from the stiff breeze in the lee of the building and grinding the butt of a cigarette under his heel.
‘Hi, Gunna. What d’you reckon on all this, then?’
‘That’s better.’
‘What is?’
‘Less of the sweetheart for the moment.’
Bjössi laughed and coughed. ‘Ach, you know I don’t say it to wind you up. Hey, what about Vilhjálmur, then?’
‘Got his bollocks in a vice.’
‘Well, let’s hope they don’t stay there. Because when the people at the top are suffering, they tend to squeeze the bollocks of the people underneath them. Not that you have bollocks, sweetheart, but you do, if you know what I mean.’
‘Point taken, and coming from you, I’ll treat that as a compliment. But all the same, this wasn’t investigated properly and that was Vilhjálmur’s decision.’
‘Under pressure.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What I mean is that Vilhjálmur was being pressured from higher up not to make it a priority. He’s been expected to put as much effort as possible on narcotics, and that’s what he’s done.’
‘All right, so he’s not such a bad guy, just misguided.’
‘He’s always done everything by the book. Just following orders, is what he’d say, and rightly so. Hey, where are you off to?’
‘I feel like a day off,’ Gunna shot back as she started the second-best Volvo.
Matti was worried, more worried than he had been the time he’d been stranded in Grimsby after failing to reach his ship just as the last Cod War broke out, more worried than the time his first — or second? — wife’s brothers had threatened to pay him a visit when he’d staked and lost her parents’ house on what should have been a cast-iron winning hand.
This could be serious. Although Matti had watched Hardy carefully on their various journeys together over the summer around the south-west, acting as a combination of guide, driver and interpreter when necessary, he was still wondering just what Hardy’s business was about. He speculated that Hardy was American, disguised with a neutral enough accent to pass as a European. He felt sure that Hardy’s business was something to do with the spate of heavy industry projects springing up around the country, but this hardly concerned him. He knew that while Hardy paid on the nail and treated him with the respect due to an equal, his passenger in the understatedly expensive clothes was not someone to tangle with lightly. The air of authority and the hidden menace were unmistakable to someone with a professional interest in gauging the desires or the gullibility of the person in the passenger seat.
At the time he had thought nothing of the trip to pick Hardy up on the dockside at Sandeyri in March. The man had wanted to go to many unlikely places at odd times and had been dropped off and collected from several unfamiliar places that Matti had been forced to search for when the time came.
But he had to admit to himself that he was intrigued when the TV news had shown a short item about a car being recovered from the dock at Sandeyri. He wondered idly about it and put it from his mind. But now he had something to be concerned about — the possible loss of a valued client and an excellent source of tax-free, back pocket earnings.
Sitting in the morning rush hour traffic waiting for the lights to change at the Miklabraut junction, Matti turned down the radio, abruptly silencing yet another round of Channel 2’s celebrity gossip, and drummed the wheel with his thumbs. After weeks of driving Hardy back and forth across the south of Iceland, he still had only a hazy idea of what the man’s business was. The only point of contact was an anonymous mobile number, and Hardy rarely asked to be collected or dropped off at the same place more than once. This time their meeting place was on the Grensás taxi rank where Matti bullied the big car into a space on the end. He was starting to feel uncomfortable in the Mercedes since Gunna had questioned him. Normally he wasn’t inclined to worry too much about the law, but this time he felt as if everything on the road was watching him.
As usual, Hardy appeared within a few seconds, dropping into the passenger seat with the nearest he came to a smile.
‘Where to, boss?’ Matti asked.
‘Out of town today.’
‘OK. East? South? Which way?’
‘Hvalvík.’
Matti’s heart almost missed a beat and he was sure that Hardy immediately sensed it.
‘Hvalvík it is, then,’ he grunted, coaxing the car out into the road and scraping the bumper of the car double-parked in front.
They sailed through Reykjavík’s sunshine. It was a warm day and the dust rose thickly in the heat. Hardy was dressed as usual in spite of the temperature, the pale leather jacket making him look slimmer across the shoulders than he really was.
‘Everything all right, big man? You’re quiet today,’ Hardy said pleasantly as they left the city behind and began to climb the heath.
‘That guy. The one you went to talk to near Borgarnes. He’s dead.’
Hardy lifted an eyebrow. ‘How do you know?’