Frozen Assets

‘Not until next week. There’s no hurry since they cut the bloody quotas again.’

‘Fine. Are you staying here? It’s up to you. I’ve no idea when I’ll be back.’

‘We’ll stay here for a while, I think,’ Soffía said carefully. ‘If that’s all right with you?’

‘No problem. I’ll be back sometime. Just make sure my lad washes up after himself, won’t you?’ she said, standing up and making for the door, by which time the young couple were already wrapped precariously around each other.

In the lobby, she half closed the door and bent to pull her boots on again, looking out through the narrow window by the door to see that the rain was beating down outside harder than ever.

***

He drove slowly through Hafnarfjördur, down the hill from the town’s southern entrance and stopped at the lower quayside, thought about going into the café on the dock where he had eaten several times with Matti, but decided against it.

With the wipers struggling to clear water from the windscreen, Hårde drove slowly up the slope and along the southern edge of the harbour area, through a small industrial estate crowded with fork-lift trucks, badly parked vans and large plastic tubs of fish waste along the sides of the road. Looking for a suitable opportunity, he carried on past the industrial zone, before taking a U-turn to double back, this time passing the bay towards the town itself.

Confidence, that’s the key, he reminded himself. A man with a smile and a purpose doesn’t normally get asked what he’s doing.

He parked neatly in a bay in the town centre and got out of the car to reconnoitre on foot, the collar of his jacket turned up, hands deep in his pockets. The small precinct of shops where he bought a couple of pastries had a few people walking around, but both the post office and the bank in particular were busy with longish queues. Chewing a sweet roll, he timed a middle-aged lady as she entered the bank — it took her an encouraging eleven minutes to get her business concluded and leave. He went back to the car, where he sat watching the passers-by while he ate a second roll and drank the carton of fruit juice he had bought.

He unfolded the free newspaper he had picked up without looking at it carefully and was jolted awake at the sight of a photo of himself at the bottom of the front page, one that he recognized as the Swedish police’s mug shot of him.

He swore, anger rising inside him until he carefully stifled it. Only the woman serving at the shop counter had seen him clearly, and she had been a foreigner as well, not likely to read an Icelandic newspaper. Nobody else would need to see him anyway, so the photo in the paper needn’t be an issue.

What had caught him off guard was that the fat policewoman was obviously further ahead of him than he had imagined. Maybe that stupid taxi driver had told them something? Or Sigurjóna, a person he would never be able to trust.

He looked back at the paper and saw to his surprise that Sigurjóna was there on the cover too, one scarlet-taloned hand shielding a sour pout from a photographer’s flash, and he chuckled grimly to himself, well able to imagine what would be going on now that InterAlu had dropped its Icelandic partners.

Ágúst Vilmundsson wasn’t having a good day. He had been late for work that morning, one of his men hadn’t turned up and he had had to reorganize the whole schedule for the day to fit in the six jobs that seven men would have to do between them, knowing full well that finishing four jobs of out of six would be good going.

After the coffee break, he left the first job with two of the lads getting on well with the old lady’s new floor and decided that he would have to go and give a bit of moral support to the two finishing off fitting a kitchen in Kópavogur, but on the way he remembered that the sheaf of bills on the passenger seat would have to be paid and now was as good a time as any to stop off at the bank.

Ágúst Vilmundsson cursed the rain as he drove into Hafnarfjördur, cursed it as he tried to find a spot to park and cursed yet more as he hurried across the car park to the bank with the rain fogging his glasses.

Ten minutes later, he stepped back out into the rain, reminding himself for the hundredth time to get internet banking set up so he could pay bills in the evenings instead of having to do it when it didn’t suit him.

At first he thought the drops of rain on his glasses were playing tricks on him, so he took them off and peered myopically about the car park. There was no doubt about it. He perched his glasses back on his nose and peered about him, spying a police car in the distance making sedate progress along the road between the bay and the rows of shops. He ran as fast as he could towards the road, crashing through sparse hedging plants along the road and waving.

The police car drew to a gentle halt beside him and a window hissed down.

‘Got a problem?’ the young officer inside asked, looking over at him.