Part 12 (1/2)

At the eight-kilometre mark, he realized that if he had cycled to the gym he would have covered the same distance but through the early evening traffic instead of under pounding heavy metal. He decided to do at least another two kilometres before he stopped, not least because a slender young woman had just mounted the machine in front of him and the view of her muscular b.u.t.tocks immediately inspired him to complete the extra distance.

Mar appeared as he approached eleven kilometres, a towel round his neck to soak up some of the sweat a session on the rowing machine had produced. He nodded at the girl on the exercise bike in front and winked. Joel Ingi grinned back. Mar made a drinking motion and he nodded back, holding up two fingers to signify two more minutes.

'Didn't expect to see you here,' Mar said, handing him a bottle of chilled water.

'Ach. I had to get out of the house, y'know. Agnes is . . .' he shook his head.

'Agnes is what? She's OK, isn't she?'

'Yeah, she's fine. She's just being a bit hard work at the moment.'

'As long as she's OK,' Mar said doubtfully.

'I said, she's fine, all right?' Joel Ingi snapped, and immediately regretted the sharp tone. Mar had known Agnes since childhood and had introduced them. But still Joel Ingi sometimes resented her affection for Mar and that the friends.h.i.+p pre-dated his and Agnes's relations.h.i.+p, as well as the nagging curiosity that sometimes irked him. He wanted to know if Mar's and Agnes's friends.h.i.+p had been anything more than that, but had never dared ask.

'Does she know?'

'About what?'

'About the computer you mislaid?'

As far as Mar knew, the missing laptop in its bag had been lifted from Joel Ingi's shoulder by a pair of teenagers, one on a mountain bike, who pedalled along Posthussstraeti into the evening darkness, while his friend had been the distraction. Only Hinrik knew what had really happened, and he knew only a fraction of the truth, just enough to allow him to get CCTV stills from the hotel. Joel Ingi didn't even want to ask how he had obtained the pictures so rapidly, guessing that someone on the hotel staff had either been bribed or intimidated into extracting them from the surveillance system.

His mind elsewhere, Joel Ingi realized that Mar was speaking.

'Look, can't you take some time off? You're wandering around in a daze. AEgir's noticed you've gone off the boil and he'll rip you up if you put a foot wrong.'

'I'm all right. I can hold my own against that overblown windbag.'

'You think so? The minister hangs on his every word. He can blight your career like that,' he said, snapping his fingers to ill.u.s.trate the point. 'You're like me. No friends or relatives upstairs to fight our corner. Be careful.'

Joel Ingi scowled and said nothing, sipping from his bottle of water and watching as a gaggle of toned teenagers strolled through the chairs scattered around the gym's health bar.

'So what are you doing about this?'

'Don't worry. I have someone looking after it.'

'Police?'

'h.e.l.l, no! A friend. Well, a friend of a friend.'

Mar's eyes narrowed. 'Explain, will you?'

'Look, it's all in hand,' Joel Ingi told him, breathing deeply to keep his temper intact. 'It's a friend of someone my brother knows.'

'Your brother's not the most reliable character, is he?'

'Junkies aren't normally the most reliable people.'

'So is his friend trustworthy?'

'I don't suppose so. But there's money involved and he's being paid to do a job.'

'I'm not going to ask who this person is, but wouldn't you be safer going to the police?'

'Yeah. The police already know, and I'll bet you anything they've filed it away and forgotten about it. If I thought they'd actually do something, I wouldn't have had to find someone else to do the job. Anyway, I don't know the guy who's doing this, and it's better if I don't.'

He almost wanted to cry when he saw how much his stash of foreign currency had been depleted. Everyone had thought he was mad at the time, selling his shareholdings just as everything had been going up, and leaving the financial sector for a boring job with a bunch of grey-faced old men at the ministry. But as the currency tumbled and the banks tottered, Joel Ingi quietly congratulated himself on his astuteness. Another six months and things would have been very different, painfully different, he reflected.

But the stacks of euro notes that he'd originally stored in a bank deposit box, having decided that a foreign exchange account wasn't the safest option, were now looking decidedly thinner, and the equivalent of another million kronur in Hinrik's pocket was painful.

This time they met at a bookshop; they were practically the only people there who weren't sitting behind laptops and tablets over their designer coffees. Hinrik sipped his coffee with distaste. A proper drink would have been preferable at this late hour of the afternoon. Joel Ingi had a tall gla.s.s in front of him that Hinrik eyed with suspicion.

'What's that, then?'

'Latte. Try one.'

Hinrik wrinkled his nose. 'Nah. Not for me. Got it?'

'Half,' he said and watched Hinrik's eyes narrow in suspicion. 'No results yet. Half now, and half when there's a name and address.' Joel Ingi pushed a padded envelope across the table between the cups. 'Cash. In euros,' he added.

The sour expression across Hinrik's face lingered and then dissolved into a smile devoid of any warmth. 'In that case, as you're a valued customer, leave it with me.' The smile vanished as if it had been turned off at the mains. 'But we're a little light on information and you haven't given us a lot to go on. What's going on here? You're complaining that this isn't moving fast enough, but you won't tell me what I need to get the job done fast.'

Joel Ingi stared back at him.

'I mean,' Hinrik continued, almost disconcerted by Joel Ingi's dispa.s.sionate look, which told him nothing about what was happening behind those grey eyes. 'You want this done quick, so give me an idea what it's all about,' he said, lowering his voice. 'You know I offer a comprehensive service, don't you? No need to get your own hands dirty.'

'I'll think about it.'

Hekla was exhausted. The day since she had returned from the pool so abruptly had dragged by and she had been unable to settle into doing anything. She sat at the kitchen table, Alda happily colouring in a picture and Alli spellbound by the TV as Hekla flipped through the newspapers she had picked up at the garage that morning. Without reading anything much, she took in the headlines and checked that her own advertis.e.m.e.nt was still among the cla.s.sifieds, not that she'd be renewing it. The morning's scare had told her that line of business had to come to an end, and immediately.

She listened to the radio, punctuated by the whine of Petur's lathe in the garage, where he sat propped on a stool as he carefully turned out dishes, cups and ornaments from the lengths of wood stacked on the bench next to him. The whine stopped but she only noticed as the click of Petur's crutch told her he was on the way along the short corridor; she wondered how long he would be able to get in and out without help.

'There's coffee in the machine,' she said without turning round as she heard the clicks that accompanied the shuffle of every step Petur took. He stooped to kiss the back of her neck, wincing as he straightened up again and smiling as he watched Alda concentrating on the colouring book.

Hekla turned a page in the paper and felt a chill run through her as coffee gurgled into Petur's mug. He turned to her. 'D'you want some as well?'

She felt unable to speak, transfixed by the picture in front of her.

'Are you all right, love?' Petur asked, bemused. 'Something interesting?'

Hekla shook herself back to reality. 'No, fine. Just someone I thought I knew, but it's not. Yes, please,' she added, pus.h.i.+ng a mug to the edge of the table.

Mug in hand, Petur looked at her fondly and made for the door again. 'I'll do another hour and then call it a day,' he said.

'I'll come and get you. Don't overdo it. You know what the doc said.'

Petur snorted. 'The doc. What the h.e.l.l does he know?' he demanded and was gone, with his step-shuffle-click signalling his progress down the hall and back out to the garage, leaving Hekla to stare aghast at the photograph of a young and dynamic Johannes Karlsson staring back at her from the midst of his full-page obituary.

With Helgi dispatched to Kopavogur to speak to the tearful girlfriend who had reported Magnus Johann Sigmarsson's disappearance, Gunna parked outside the Harbourside Hotel for the second time that day. The building was an imposing one, giving the upper floors some fine views over the bay, and Esja beyond it, with the stiff wind whipping up white horses on Faxa Bay in what remained of the daylight. Not that Reykjavik's favourite mountain could be seen in the gloom, Gunna reflected as she slammed the leased car's door and made for the entrance. Darkness fell early at this time of year and January was a bleak month, with New Year over and people nervously awaiting the first post-Christmas credit card bill of the year.