Far North - Michael Ridpath [40]
And all this had been caused by a bunch of speculators sitting on their fat arses in overheated offices borrowing money they didn’t have to buy stuff they didn’t understand.
Bastards.
Björn’s father, a postman and a lifelong communist, was right after all. They were all bastards.
The wind was picking up. Small clouds skipped across the blue sky above, and even in the sheltered harbour the little fishing boats bobbed, creaked and rattled. Björn walked back down the quay to Kaffivagninn, the café used by the fisherman. It was almost empty. He glanced around, looking for Einar who often hung around there, eager to share a yarn with anyone who would listen, but he couldn’t see him. He bought himself a coffee and kleina, sat at a table by the window and thought of Harpa.
He was glad he had come down the night before. There was no doubt she needed him. He treated her well. Unlike Gabríel Örn. Harpa spoke about him sometimes in the middle of the night. That man was scum. He had taken her for granted, mistreated her, in a way that Björn would never have done.
Björn was worried about how Harpa would handle further police questions. It would put a lot of pressure on her, especially since they both had thought that they had got away with it in January. They had made some mistakes when they had covered up Gabríel Örn’s death. Sending the suicide text message from Gabríel Örn’s phone was one: Björn had regretted it as soon as he had pressed send. It drew unnecessary attention to Harpa.
He had done all he could to bolster her courage, make her believe in herself. He blamed the others: Sindri, the student, the kid. They were the ones who wanted to attack Gabríel Örn. They had used her, manipulated her to reel in a banker for them to abuse. It wasn’t her fault.
Their stories had hung together under the initial police investigation: there was no reason why they shouldn’t now. All they needed was their luck to hold and Harpa’s courage not to fail her.
Magnus, Vigdís and Árni were in the small conference room in the Violent Crimes Unit, the papers from the Gabríel Örn Bergsson file spread out on the table in front of them. Árni had been involved in the initial investigation, but Vigdís hadn’t, and Magnus appreciated her independent point of view.
‘So, what do you think?’ Magnus asked her.
‘I don’t like the bed,’ Vigdís said. ‘It was unmade when we checked Gabríel Örn’s flat the next day. He had already been sleeping in it when Harpa called. She woke him up, he got dressed, and went out to meet her.’
‘Except he didn’t go to meet her,’ Magnus said. ‘He went off to the sea two kilometres away and drowned himself.’
‘And why would he do that?’ Vigdís asked. ‘It seems to me one of two things happened. Either Harpa told him something on the phone that so upset him that he felt an immediate desire to drown himself, or he didn’t kill himself at all. Someone else put him in the water.’
‘The pathologist’s report is inconclusive,’ Magnus said. ‘He wasn’t shot and he wasn’t stabbed and it didn’t look like he was strangled. But he could have been struck somewhere – the body was so battered by its time in the sea that the pathologist couldn’t tell.’
‘The report doesn’t say whether Gabríel Örn was breathing when he went in the water,’ Vigdís said.
‘To be fair, that’s a hard one to figure out,’ Magnus said. ‘You get water in the lungs either way.’
‘What if Harpa had told Gabríel Örn something about Ódinsbanki?’ Árni said. ‘Maybe she was going to cooperate with the authorities. Put him in jail. Maybe he couldn’t face that?’
Magnus glanced at Vigdís. She was frowning. So was he.
‘There’s nothing from his parents or his new girlfriend that suggests that he was any more worried about what was going on at Ódinsbanki than anyone else. He hasn’t been implicated in anything apart from a few bad loans. No fraud. No gambling debts. Some drugs