There had once been a laundry down there, lined with washing machines. But now that people preferred to have a washer and a dryer in their own apartments, the washroom had been stacked with bicycles that had seen better days.
Next to the washroom was a long storeroom of steel cages, one for each of the eight apartments. Orri’s store was the tidiest. There was a bench against the wall lined with boxes and an old chest of drawers next to it, all out of reach behind the padlocked door. Lísa tried every key from the handful she had brought downstairs with her until she had no choice but to give up, glaring at the chest of drawers as if it had personally offended her.
Natalia and Emilija shivered as the wind blew along Kópavogsbakki. Sprawling modern houses squatted heavily on their half-submerged basements and huge blank windows stared blindly at the houses opposite. Valmira fumbled with the bunch of keys for the day and finally found one that opened the door, which swung open into a dark hallway.
Once gratefully inside out of the wind, she dropped the heavy vacuum cleaner and shivered.
‘Empty house this time. The people have just moved out, so it only needs to be made presentable for the next tenants.’
‘Top to bottom, is it?’
‘Every corner,’ Valmira confirmed. ‘And we have all morning to do it. So who feels like doing what?’
‘Same as usual,’ Natalia said. ‘I take kitchen, Emilija does bedrooms, you living room, and we do bathroom last?’
‘Bathrooms,’ Valmira corrected, looking at the list in her hand. ‘There are three.’
‘Three?’ Emilija echoed. ‘Are there ten people living here, or what?’
Valmira shrugged. ‘People with money.’ She shouldered the vacuum cleaner with a wince and set off along the hall, flicking light switches as she went. ‘If you make a start, I’ll check out the rest of the place. All right?’
Natalia made a start on the kitchen, a long room tiled in dark slate that she decided with a frown was perfect for highlighting every spillage and speck of dust, and fitted with discreetly opulent appliances with matching dull steel fronts. She began at the top, walking on the worktops to wipe down the walls from the ceiling down, and as everything was already clean, a rapid wipe-over was all that was needed. She hummed as she worked, occasionally breaking into a few words of a half-remembered song in Spanish, satisfied with the steel extractor hood over the stove when she could see her face in it.
‘Hey, Emilija!’
There was a muffled answer over the whine of the vacuum cleaner in the distance.
‘Hey!’ Natalia called again, wiping the doors of the cupboards after she had checked they were both empty and spotlessly clean.
‘What is it?’ Emilija asked, her face in the kitchen doorway.
Natalia sat down on the worktop, her legs dangling into space, and wiped a bead of sweat from her forehead.
‘I don’t think anyone’s been here. The place is perfectly clean. Weird, isn’t it?’
‘The beds have been slept in, so someone’s been here.’
‘How’s Valmira getting on? It must be time for a smoke break for some of us by now.’
Emilija looked along the hall. ‘I heard her a while ago but I’m not sure where she is now. I’ll go and have a look when I’ve finished in there,’ she said and left, pushing her thick brown plait over her shoulder.
Natalia jumped down lightly. With her soft shoes and slight frame, she landed soundlessly. She decided that a break was needed and stepped outside the front door into the icy wind, lighting up under the shelter of her jacket and sending a plume of smoke to be whipped away by the wind.
‘Talia!’
‘What?’ She called back, holding the cigarette outside while leaning into the hall.
‘Come here, will you?’ Quick.’
Natalia regretfully took a long drag and flicked the rest of the cigarette into a puddle next to the set of steps leading to the house’s front door and stalked along the hall to see Emilija with panic on her face at the door to the basement.
‘Down here, quick. It’s Vala.’
‘She’s hurt?’ Natalia asked, imagining her falling down the stairs.
‘Hell, I don’t know. Come with me, will you?’
Their feet clattered on the steel steps into the wide basement.
‘She’s here . . .’
Emilija crouched down and put an arm around Valmira’s shoulders, where she sat immobile with her back to the wall.
‘Vala, it’s all right. We’re your friends,’ she crooned while Valmira stared into space, her eyes blank and focused on thin air.
‘What’s all that stuff there?’ Natalia asked, bewildered.
‘I don’t know. But don’t touch it. Something’s happened here.’
‘What do we do? Call Viggó?’
‘Call the police. Then you can call Viggó.’
Natalia’s mouth set in a thin, hard line. ‘The police . . . ? You’re sure we need them?
‘Jesus, Talia. Look at all that blood, will you?’
‘But the police. Police is bad news. We take Vala home, tell Viggó she’s sick. Clean it all up. Nobody needs to know.’
‘You’re joking, aren’t you? Look at all that stuff. Someone’s been hurt here, or killed. We don’t tell the police and they find out afterwards, we’ll be in prison ourselves.’
Natalia pouted. ‘In Chile . . .’
‘We’re not in Chile, Talia. This is Iceland. The police aren’t going to throw you in jail for reporting something. Jesus, call an ambulance, will you? Vala’s in a bad way.’
Emilija brushed a lock of Valmira’s dark hair away from her eyes and saw a tear on her cheek.
‘It’s all right, Vala. Natalia’s getting help. You’re going to be just fine. You hear me?’
Gunna saw that the ambulance and a squad car were there before her as she strode up the path to the gaping door where a small figure with a look of outright distrust on her pinched face glared at her.
‘Good morning,’ Gunna offered, stepping past her and looking about.
‘You police?’ asked the small woman in the jacket wrapped tightly about, her fists thrust deep in her pockets.
‘That’s right. I’m a detective. And you are?’
‘Natalia.’
‘You called us, did you?’
‘Yeah. Emilija, she said call you,’ Natalia said and Gunna could hardly make out her words through the thick accent.
‘All right, where’s this Emilija, and the officers who are already here?’
Natalia jerked her head towards the recesses of the house, every sound inside echoing of the bare walls and uncarpeted floors. ‘In there. Downstairs. I stay here.’
Gunna’s footsteps sounded loud on the smooth wood floor and she heard voices as a figure in paramedic’s overalls appeared from a doorway, a thickset woman on his arm and leaning heavily on him as another paramedic followed them.
‘Hæ, I’m Gunnhildur from CID, what’s the situation?’
The woman with the dark fringe over her blank eyes and clutching the paramedic’s arm did not appear to be injured and Gunna wondered what the problem was.
‘Your guys are downstairs and I guess they’ll tell you the story,’ the paramedic said in a patient bedside-manner voice. ‘This lady’s had a shock and we won’t be leaving quite yet. We’ll be in the ambulance if you want to catch up with us in a little while.’
‘Thanks, will do,’ Gunna said, and made her way down the stairs.
At the bottom two officers in uniform surveyed a broken chair in the middle of the floor.
‘Ah, the cavalry’s here.’
‘Hæ, Geiri. What’s the story, then? Who did what and who got hurt?’
The heavily built officer stepped back while his colleague, a young woman with a sharp face, frowned at the debris on the floor.
‘Three cleaners arrived to give this place a scrub. They’re all foreigners; they work for some outfit called Reindeer Cleaners. The house is rented and the t
enants left a couple of days ago, so it’s being cleaned for the next tenants. Anyhow, it looks like one of the cleaners came down here, and I can’t really make out what happened. Whatever, one of the others came down here and found her sitting on the floor as if she’d been knocked on the head.’
‘Had she?’
‘Apparently not.’
‘Fallen over, maybe?’
‘No injuries as far as the paramedics can tell.’
‘There’s blood here,’ the male officer said, leaning forward and picking up a leg of the smashed chair.
‘Hold on,’ Gunna ordered, hurriedly snapping on a pair of surgical gloves to take it. ‘Best if you get back and don’t touch anything,’ she added, holding the chair leg under the light to inspect it. Ragged lengths of ripped duct tape stuck to the wood and the dark stains looked suspiciously like dried blood. She stepped back, surveying the floor where the remnants of the wooden chair were scattered, and quickly made out the other leg, also bound with ripped tape, and patches of blood that had stuck to the polished cement floor.
‘Right, back upstairs, both of you,’ Gunna said decisively. ‘Geiri, will you seal this off and I’ll have forensics look the place over before this goes any further. No point muddying the waters before they get here. Tinna?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ll talk to forensics to start with. While Geiri gets his rolls of smart blue tape from the car, will you have a word with the two cleaners upstairs? Leave the casualty with the medics, but get names, addresses, phone numbers, who they work for, and get all the keys to this place that you can lay your hands on. All right?’
‘Yep.’
‘Good. Go on then,’ Gunna said, pulling her phone from her pocket and selecting a number.
Outside Gunna found the ambulance’s back door open. The dark-haired woman with the broad shoulders sat hunched inside with a blanket over her shoulders, shaken by sobs as she stuttered words in short bursts between bouts of hyperventilation, one of the two medics holding her hands as she reassured her.
‘What’s the score?’ Gunna asked the second paramedic, a young man with cheeks reddened by the cold wind.
‘Hysterical. Something’s given her a colossal shock, and my colleague’s in there trying to calm her down a little before we take her to hospital.’
‘Any idea what?’
‘Nope,’ the man shook his head. ‘Couldn’t say. But she shied away as soon as she saw me in that house. She only wanted to see my colleague.’
‘You have a name?’
‘Valmira. That’s all I have so far. We’ll get her name and identity number when she gets to the hospital. I reckon she’ll need to be sedated, but we’d need a doctor here for that.’
‘So she’s not a local?’
The man shook his head. ‘Not sure. Her Icelandic is very good, but she was babbling in some other language to start with. She switched to Icelandic once she calmed down,’ he said, and looked past Gunna to the ambulance’s open door.
‘Ready?’
The female paramedic looked down and nodded. ‘She’s not good. I can’t remember seeing anyone with no physical injuries quite so distressed. I’ll stay in the back with her, but we had better be quick.’ She raised an eyebrow at Gunna. ‘Police?’
‘Yep. You’re going to the National Hospital?’
She looked dubious. ‘You want to interview her?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘You’ll have to check with the doctor. I’m not sure she’ll be in any fit state for a while.’
The forensics team did its work behind closed doors while Gunna sat in the scrubbed kitchen and made notes. Emilija and Natalia sat opposite her like naughty schoolgirls, one wide-eyed and fearful, the other wearing a truculent scowl.
‘How long have you worked with Valmira?’ Gunna asked,
‘Four–five year,’ Natalia said.
‘A couple of years.’
‘So you both know her quite well? You socialize outside work, or are you strictly colleagues?’
‘I see her sometimes,’ Emilija said. ‘We started this job around the same time because we both lost our jobs in the crash.’
‘What were you doing?’
‘I was a chef at Bryggjubar. Then it closed down when the banks . . .’
‘I get the picture. And Valmira?’
‘She worked for an export company, worked there a long time. It went bankrupt a few months after the crash. But there’s always shit work to be had and we’ve both been here since,’ Emilija said without any bitterness.
‘How about you, Natalia? You know Valmira well?’
Natalia put out a hand, palm down and shook it from side to side. ‘A little.’
‘You understand what I’m saying, don’t you? Where are you from?’
‘From Chile,’ Natalia said with a thick accent as Emilija shook her head and looked away.
Gunna looked into Natalia’s defiant black eyes and put her pen down on the notebook in front of her, waiting for Natalia to look away. Eventually her stare dropped guiltily to the table.
‘Listen,’ Gunna said softly. ‘I can see you understand every word I’ve said to you and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t play the stupid foreigner with me. Understood?’
Natalia’s jaw squared in defiant dislike, but she nodded.
‘Fine,’ Gunna said. ‘Just so you know, this isn’t a formal interview. I’m only making a few notes for background, nobody’s been arrested and I’m not even sure if a crime has taken place, although I will probably have to take formal statements from you at some point. All right? So, Natalia, how long have you lived in Iceland?’
‘Eleven years.’
Gunna was gratified that even in those two words the fake accent had disappeared immediately.
‘And you, Emilija?’
‘About eight years.’
‘Tell me about Valmira. Where is she from? Married? Children? Does she has any family here?’
Emilija shook her head. ‘There are some cousins who live somewhere outside Reykjavík, Ólafsvík somewhere, I think. Her name’s Valmira Vukoja, and she’s from Bosnia originally, although I know she has lived in Iceland for a long time, much longer than Talia or me.’
‘She’s not married, no boyfriend or next of kin?’
‘No. As long as I’ve known Vala she has kept to herself. Not many friends, definitely no guys. She has relatives here but she doesn’t talk about them much.’
‘And you all work for what? Reindeer Cleaners? I’d best have a word with them as well. Where’s the office?’
Emilija and Natalia exchanged a thin smile as Gunna wrote down the address.
‘What’s the manager’s name?’
‘Viggó. Viggó Jakobsson. He runs it, sort of. But his father owns the company, I think.’
Picking on the smile that flashed between them, Gunna’s antenna twitched. ‘This Viggó. How do he and Valmira get on?’
‘Why do you want to know?’ Natalia asked, breaking into the conversation for the first time.
‘I don’t need to know, but it could be useful. I’d like to find out what’s happened to your friend, and anything you can tell me helps build up a picture. You all spend a good few hours every week at work, so someone’s working environment is an important part of it. So do Valmira and Viggó get on well or badly?’
‘Well . . .’ Natalia said, and paused.
‘She gets on well with old Jakob,’ Emilija said. ‘He employed her to start with after the company she worked for collapsed.’
‘But now his son runs it?’
‘Yeah. And he’s stupid,’ Natalia said with emphasis.
‘She’s right. Viggó knows that Valmira could run everything better than he does,’ Emilija added. ‘But he’s the boss’s son, so . . .’
Gunna made quick notes. ‘Understood. There’s some friction there?’
Emilija nodded. ‘But only on Viggó’s side. Valmira doesn’t want his job, but Viggó thinks she does.’
‘You work as a team all the time?’
‘Yes. There are three teams,’ Emilija said.
‘All foreigners,’ Natalia added.
‘All? Nine people?’
‘That’s right. All foreign women, plus Viggó.’
‘I’ll go and have a chat with him,’ Gunna promised. ‘When you got here this morning, was there anything unusual?’
‘Well,’ Natalia began, and looked doubtful. ‘Not really. It’s just that . . .’
‘Just what?’
‘It looked like the place had already been cleaned. It was too clean. There was hardly anything for us to do.’
‘The whole house?’
‘I did the bedrooms and they were spotless,’ Emilija said. ‘Talia did the kitchen; was it the same?’
‘Yes. All I needed to do was polish the surfaces. It was like the place had already been cleaned before we got here.’
‘Is there anywhere you didn’t clean?’
‘The bathroom was all that was left. Otherwise we were almost finished. I heard Valmira vacuuming the front room and then she went down to the basement. I’m not sure if we were supposed to clean down there or not and I haven’t seen the list.’
‘What list?’
‘We get a log sheet from Viggó for each day with the jobs on it and instructions, quick clean, deep clean, which rooms, that sort of thing. Valmira ticks everything off as we go. I don’t know what was on the log sheet for today, but there’s another job this afternoon, somewhere in this street.’
‘Any idea where the log sheet is?’
Natalia shrugged and Emilija looked blank. ‘Probably in the basement,’ she decided. ‘Valmira must have had it with her.’
‘Anything interesting?’
‘Well . . .’ Gunna paused, wondering whether or not to involve Eiríkur, knowing that he had enough work to do already. Although they worked well together, she hadn’t built up the same close relationship with him as she had with Helgi. Eiríkur was a city boy and of a different generation; it was less easy to bond with him than with someone who shared a similar background. Gunna had come to Reykjavík from a small town in the far west of Iceland and Helgi from a farming district in the north, and while Eiríkur’s parents had come from the countryside, he had grown up in the city and had little feeling for what went on outside its limits. She couldn’t help wishing that it was Eiríkur who was still on leave and not the solidly dependable Helgi, who had chosen precisely this week to be away.
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