Frozen Assets

‘Maybe I’ll ask Mr Hardy to keep his eyes open for me.’

Bjarni Jón caught his breath. ‘Jóna, I’m warning you. These aren’t nice people and they aren’t the sort you want to owe too many favours.’

‘I don’t care. I have to stop this. I can’t stand it any more. And if you don’t do something, I’ll find someone who will.’

4

Friday, 29 August

Haddi and Snorri were already at the station when Gunna arrived, out of breath, irritable and late.

‘Afternoon,’ Haddi said.

‘Hell. Sorry, Haddi. Laufey desperately needed a lift to the stables this morning and she didn’t bother to tell me until two minutes before I was ready to leave. Children, nothing but trouble from day one,’ she grumbled.

‘Never had a moment’s trouble with mine,’ Haddi said with the satisfied look of a proud parent on his face.

‘Haddi, my dear friend. That’s entirely due to the fact that you had the sense to stay at sea until your lads had grown up a bit.’

‘Well, there is that,’ he agreed and bustled to the spitting percolator. ‘Not putting you off, are we, Snorri?’

Haddi put three steaming mugs on the table and sat back down again. ‘So, what’s on the agenda for Hvalvík’s guardians of law and order, chief?’

Gunna came back to the front office from her own room holding a batch of papers which she slapped on the table.

‘Simple. Haddi, I need you to mind the shop. Snorri, you can take the smart Volvo and go up to the InterAlu compound. Introduce yourself to the manager there. He’s called Sveinn, nice enough bloke, but don’t make any promises. Most of what we have to deal with here at the moment is traffic to and from the InterAlu site, which is the smelter they’re building on the far side of the harbour. There are dozens of trucks every day and every now and again there are low-loaders with the heavy equipment.’

‘They go right through the town?’

‘Not now. The back road was built up in the spring, so most of it can bypass the town itself, and sometime in the autumn they’re due to start dredging the harbour to deepen it, after which they’ll start bringing in the very heavy stuff by sea. All right?’

‘Yup. I’ll go and see Sveinn. What’s happening with the other construction — the hydroelectric one?’

Gunna sighed. ‘That’s going to be a nightmare when it really gets into gear. There’s going to be a huge volume of traffic going both ways when they start clearing the site. Haven’t you been up there?’

‘Not since the project started,’ Snorri said.

‘It’s a bloody awful road up there past Stjáni at Læk’s place. But it’s their problem, so they can sort it out when the time comes. All right? You’d better be back from the InterAlu place before eleven so Haddi can do his usual tour of the docks.’

Haddi smiled to himself.

‘Don’t get the car dirty, or Haddi’ll be furious.’

‘And what might you be up to today, Gunna?’ Haddi asked.

‘I have a meeting with Vilhjálmur Traustason to brief him on our dead guy’s case in half an hour. And considering it’s a good forty minutes’ drive to Keflavík from here, I reckon I’m going to find the old fool in a bad mood when I get there.’

She planted her cap squarely on her head and made for the door.

‘So I’ll see you boys later. Look after the place for me.’

Gunna didn’t break any speed limits getting to Keflavík, although by the time the Hvalvík station’s second-best Volvo pulled up outside the Keflavík police station she was running almost an hour late.

‘What brings you over here, darling?’

Bjössi’s question was her first greeting inside the door, where Bjössi was standing with a mug in one hand and a pack of filterless Camels in the other on his way to the back door for a quiet smoke in the bright morning sunshine.

‘Can’t keep away. Nothing like a visit to the big city to remind a girl of what she’s missing out in the country.’

‘That’s what I keep telling you,’ Bjössi agreed, pushing backwards through the doors with his hands full. ‘See you in a minute. .’

‘Ah, Gunnhildur, I’m terribly sorry to have to keep you waiting,’ a breathless Vilhjálmur Traustason apologized, bustling past in the opposite direction. ‘A meeting with the Sheriff took a little longer than anticipated,’ he explained as if to a wayward child, while Gunna strode along in his wake.

In his small office Vilhjálmur waved Gunna to a chair and carefully placed his cap on the top of his filing cabinet on his way to his own chair. He leaned on his desk and placed his palms together in a steeple in front of his face.

‘Now,’ he said, as if preparing himself for action. ‘The drowned man, Einar Eyjólfur Einarsson.’

‘You have my interim report already, so you know everything I do for the moment.’

‘I want to know what you think.’

‘I think he was murdered.’

‘Really?’ There was a brief note of fright in his voice. ‘Why? The man had a very high blood alcohol content and Sigmar at pathology says drowning was the cause of death.’

‘That’s right. But we don’t understand how a man on a night out in Reykjavík managed to drown in an obscure backwater a hundred kilometres away.’