On A Small Island

by Grant Nicol

  ‘You yourself have seen clear evidence that she intended to blackmail a prominent member of Icelandic society and it is entirely possible that this is not the only stupid idea that she has come up with lately. For an intelligent young woman she appears, to the untrained eye at least, to be extraordinarily stupid.

  ‘What we don’t want is you following in her footsteps. Standing on someone’s driveway accusing them of being complicit in a major crime is not the path you want to be taking, Ylfa. You’ve got to use your common sense.’

  I fidgeted in my seat as I forced myself to keep quiet and let him finish talking. I wanted to scream at him too but that would only reinforce his idea that Elín and I were cut from the same cloth. I didn’t want to give him any reason to feel satisfied with himself. If he thought he had me or my sister all figured out then he was in for a shock.

  ‘I know it was him who broke into my flat. If not him, then his hairy biker friend. He took my laptop so that I wouldn’t be able to send that email to anyone else but I can do that using any computer I want. I could do it with my phone. Maybe he just wanted to see it so he could calculate the risk that Elín represents to him for himself.

  ‘Either way you don’t seem to care about anything except the consequences for yourself of ruffling the feathers of one of the city’s biggest birds. Until now I had never thought of the Reykjavík Police as spineless but that is obviously the case. It’s sad to know that you’re more concerned with your reputation among rich businessmen than you are with solving crimes. My sister could well wind up dead before I can get anyone to take me seriously. Hopefully, though, that’s something that you’ll be able to live with.’

  I took a deep breath and tried pretty unsuccessfully to calm myself down.

  ‘I think you’re overreacting, Ylfa. We don’t know that anything untoward has happened to your sister, we just suspect that this is the case. We do know that Aron Steingrímsson has a very good reason to be angry with her but that is not the same thing as him bearing any responsibility for her disappearance. We know from her laptop that she demanded money from him but there is no indication that any money changed hands; in fact Aron has denied that any exchange took place. He says that a demand was made but that he steadfastly refused to bow to her threats.

  ‘We know she was planning to fly to London but never boarded the plane. Apart from that we have no idea where she has got to or what has happened to her. So far, the only crime that has been committed has been by her and as soon as we find her she will be charged with the attempted extortion of ten million krónur from Aron Steingrímsson.

  ‘You are not very far behind her there, either. If you insist on continuing with your campaign against Aron Steingrímsson and his family you will find yourself being arrested also. You cannot attempt to do the work of the police yourself, Ylfa. If you continue to do so, you will find yourself in all sorts of trouble. Do you understand me?’

  ‘I do. I can see now that I was wasting my time hoping we would get any help from the police. You’re only seeing what you want to see here and nothing else.

  ‘Anything more would be too uncomfortable for all concerned, wouldn’t it? If anything happens to her I will never be able to forgive you. Not ever, do you understand? I made a mistake expecting you to help. It won’t happen again.’

  I stood up and walked out of the interview room and out of the station. The wind was biting cold outside so I walked to the taxi rank next to the Hlemmur Bus Station and took a taxi back to Túngata to fetch my car. I wasn’t in the mood for rearranging my flat yet so I chose to visit Dad instead. I was desperately in need of talking to someone who might just take me seriously.

  When I walked into the living room in Hafnarfjörður, Dad was sitting in his favourite chair as he always did. He looked tired around the eyes like he hadn’t been sleeping well. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he hadn’t been sleeping at all since Jóhannes was killed. I know I wouldn’t have been. On the table in front of him was a small pile of legal documents. He motioned towards it with his eyes and told me to sign them once I’d read them. It was the deed to the property. He had told the lawyers to send them out to him since I hadn’t made any attempt to visit them. He said he wanted me to take legal ownership of the place sooner rather than later. I no longer felt even the slightest bit like arguing with him about why he wanted me to do so, he would tell me in his own good time, but I told him that there was something I needed to tell him first. He nodded and got up to make us some coffee. He was moving gingerly as though really feeling his age.

  ‘Your story can wait five minutes while you read the papers and sign them, my girl. I didn’t get them sent over to lie about on the table.’

  He busied himself in the kitchen preparing the coffee but what he was really doing was waiting for me to look at the documents. He looked pleased with himself when he came back with the cups and saw that I had done as he’d wanted. I guess I wanted to please him more than I wanted an explanation as to why this was happening now. He passed me a coffee and put the papers away after checking that I hadn’t missed anything out.

  ‘Now what was it you wanted to tell me?’

  ‘It’s Elín, Dad.’

  ‘Why do you start spending time with her again after all these months? She doesn’t change, you know. What’s she done now? ‘

  ‘She’s gone.’

  ‘Gone where?’

  ‘I think she’s been kidnapped; in fact I’m positive.’

  He looked at me as though he expected me to start laughing and he would suddenly get the joke. When I didn’t, he realised that I was serious and that we might just have a problem.

  ‘Start from when you saw her last, and take it slowly.’

  I told him about the concert the evening before and how she was meant to have met me at Harpa, but didn’t. I told him about finding her office empty and the strange note on the wall. I told him all about her stupid plan to blackmail Aron Steingrímsson with a naughty recording on her laptop and the tickets to London and northern Spain that she never used. He listened carefully as I told him about the money changing hands and Aron telling me to stay the hell away from him or else he’d make me disappear too.

  He didn’t ask any questions; he just sat there and listened to me describe the map that his eldest daughter had used to get herself so very, very lost. He looked as though something inside was breaking slowly, the way that things do when you shake them too hard.

  She had never been his favourite child; I sometimes suspected that he didn’t really like her at all. She represented everything that he thought had gone wrong with the country and in many ways it was hard to argue with the man on that count. A lot of people had sold their souls for money while many others had merely traded them in for shiny new ones.

  It was hard to tell what he thought of it all. I wasn’t sure what sort of response I had anticipated but I barely got one at all.

  Elín had finally been listed as a missing person on the evening news and people were being asked to look out for her and contact the police if they saw her. There was no mention of the fact that she was wanted for questioning regarding her extortion attempt, which I was pleasantly surprised at. Whether that was to protect her or Aron I wasn’t at all sure. The photo they used was from her driver’s licence but she still looked great. If she was around she would be spotted soon enough – no one misses a pretty girl like that.

  Jóhannes was still in the news as the police admitted that they were no closer to finding his killer. Suspicions that it had been gang related were rife. No one really had any idea why he had been murdered but everyone seemed to agree that the country was a more dangerous place than it ever had been before.

  This seemed to be an opinion shared by my father. He had taken to keeping a loaded shotgun in his room. The one he had used to shoot ptarmigan up until about five years ago. In years gone by I would have been dismayed by such irresponsible behaviour but now the weapon didn’t seem so out of place in the house. Even so, it
made me more than a little nervous.

  I went to bed praying that he wouldn’t shoot his foot or anything else off in the middle of the night by mistake. The last thing I wanted was him hunting imaginary prey around the house in the dark. He would be just as likely to blow my head off as I got myself a glass of water as catch an intruder.

  Dad had always risen early so I wasn’t overly surprised to see him missing from his room by the time I got up the next morning. I did wonder why he’d taken the gun with him, though. That was until I heard the shouting.

  I hurried outside in nothing more than a t-shirt and knickers to find my father standing in the near darkness pointing the shotgun at head height, straight at a man standing at the top of our driveway. He had either been instructed to hold his hands well above his head or he had simply chosen to do so himself when confronted by an angry old man in the mid-morning gloom with a loaded gun in his hands.

  I called out to Dad to lower the weapon but he wasn’t in the mood for listening; he was in the mood for shouting, which he seemed to be doing plenty of. I looked at the terrified man and asked him what he thought he was doing on our property unannounced at such an hour. He really did look terrified so I yelled at Dad to point the gun somewhere else. When he didn’t comply, I walked over and shoved the end of the barrel towards the ground and finally he stopped yelling. I looked at the stranger again and told him that he could put his hands down. He lowered them slowly, thanking me for my intervention as he did so. After taking a deep breath he said, ‘My name is Stefán Jón Tryggvason, please don’t shoot me.’

  CHAPTER 14

  I told Stefán Jón that he could put his hands down and that we weren’t going to shoot him. Probably. I asked him again what he thought he was doing on our property. He told us that he was worked for Fréttablaðið and that he just wanted to talk. When Dad heard that he worked for a newspaper I actually had to pull the gun from his hands and take it away from him. I told Dad to make himself scarce and that if he did then Stefán Jón and I would get out of his hair. He begrudgingly agreed and stomped off to the stables doing his best to keep an eye on Stefán Jón.

  ‘I’m sorry about all that. We’ve been a bit on edge of late,’ I apologised. From the look on his face he was trying really hard to understand but not quite getting there.

  ‘That’s what I came here to talk to you about. I’ve seen the email you sent to the paper and I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions for an article I’m going to write.’

  ‘Wait here.’

  I took the shotgun inside and put it back next to the bed in Dad’s room. I was starting to have my doubts about the wisdom of keeping it in the house. The way we were going, we would all be in jail by the end of the week. I quickly threw some more clothes on and headed back outside.

  I guided Stefán Jón away from the house and back down the drive to where he had his car waiting. As we walked side by side I noticed that his hands were still shaking a little.

  By the time we were nearing the Fréttablaðið offices on Skaftahlið I was starving so I suggested we stop off at the Kringlan Mall for coffee and pastries first.

  We had already covered a lot of what Stefán Jón wanted to know on the drive into town so he decided to give the office a miss and take breakfast somewhere a little more comfortable. He lived on Skipholt near the Hlemmur Bus Station, which was much closer than my place so we decided to head there with breakfast.

  His apartment was small but clean, well, in that bachelor kind of a way. He apologised quietly as he slid about the place tidying up papers and takeaway food containers but he soon had the place looking fairly shipshape. His actions were those of a man with some considerable practice at the last minute neaten. The amount of mess in the room was still exactly the same, he had just organised it so it looked a whole lot better. I was already thinking that there might be things I could learn from this man. I also saw him as someone I could bounce a few ideas off so once we’d polished off the pastries and coffee we decided to get down to business.

  ‘What I really want to ask you is this: do you think there’s a connection between what happened at your father’s place and your sister’s disappearance?’

  ‘I’m not too sure,’ I replied.

  I had assumed that he was going to start off by asking me about the email that I had sent to the paper but obviously he wanted to approach it from another direction. I wanted to hear his opinions first. Was he planning to expose Aron or was that something that the paper wouldn’t want to do quite yet?

  I also needed to know how much he knew about the circumstances surrounding Jóhannes’s death and just what, if anything, he might have managed to find out about that. I assumed he got a lot of his leads from sources within the police force and wasn’t too sure what they may or may not have told him.

  ‘You want to hear what I know first, right? Or at least what I think might have happened?’

  He got the idea much quicker than I thought he would. Smart boy.

  ‘Of course. You don’t think I agreed to come here to just help you out, do you?’

  ‘Of course not. I assumed it was because you were struggling to resist my undeniable charms,’ he teased. ‘And losing.’

  ‘Oh, is that how most people usually wind up here? Maybe I should have shot you while I still had the chance.’

  There was something about this man that was hard to resist. He was very comfortable in his own skin, I think is the saying. Either that or he was ever so slightly full of himself. Whichever it was, it worked.

  ‘I’ve been told that despite the police not mentioning anything yet there was a link of some sort between the two crime scenes. They won’t tell me what, though. At this time they’re not prepared to describe your sister’s disappearance as a crime. As far as they’re concerned she is a missing person. Is that right?’

  ‘I’m not sure what she is. All I know is she’s gone.’

  ‘She was planning to leave, though, wasn’t she? They found plane tickets amongst her belongings?’

  ‘Yes, but she never used them. They even waited for her at the airport. Their main concern seems to be that she might have done something wrong rather than the fact that she’s missing.’

  ‘Okay, okay, go on. I haven’t heard anything about this. What is it that they think she’s done?’

  I told him that the email I had sent to the paper was part of her failed attempt to finance her escape from the country and that she had tried to get Aron to pay for it. I said that I was convinced that because of the threat their affair now presented him with that Aron was responsible for whatever fate had befallen her. Even if he didn’t have anything to do with her disappearing, he had broken the trust between himself and his wife and could suffer the consequences of his actions when the truth came out. He was no different from the rest of us.

  Everything in this world comes at a price and he would just have to pay up like everybody else. He had been involved in some sort of pay-off with my sister and then his muscle for hire had somehow got the cash back for him. In the meantime my sister had vanished. I struggled to believe that he was innocent of any wrongdoing.

  When I told him about Aron ringing me and denying any knowledge of Elín’s whereabouts he looked a little incredulous but he did suggest that he might have actually been telling the truth. It could be possible, he mooted, that the hired goon had been given some kind of no-questions-asked assignment to get the cash back and then after that, the less anyone knew the better. I shuddered to think of her at the mercy of the drunken, leather-clad biker. I had to admit that I hadn’t thought of that and wondered if the argument I’d witnessed between the two of them might have been about the finer points of just such a deal.

  Maybe I had been focusing on the wrong man after all and it was the biker who I should have confronted. I had no idea how I would go about tracking him down but it looked as though it would have to be the next job on my list.

  Stefán Jón had been scribbling down notes as I tal
ked but hadn’t taken his eyes off me for more than a few seconds at a time. He was listening intently but it seemed to be leading to something that we weren’t talking about yet.

  Eventually, I stopped thinking aloud and waited for him to make the next move. Although I felt completely comfortable in his presence I wasn’t too sure why I should trust him apart from the fact that I didn’t really have anyone else to talk to and without someone’s help I didn’t stand any chance of finding my sister.

  ‘There’s one other thing I had hoped you would be able to help me out with. I’ve been told about some notes that have been found in some odd places. The rumours have been quite unspecific. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?’

  I nodded slowly, I had been wondering when he would get around to those. For me they were the most troubling ingredient of all my woes. Simply because they were the most difficult to explain.

  ‘Why don’t you tell me what you’ve heard first. I’ve been doing far too much talking as it is,’ I said.

  Stefán Jón put down his pen and pad and arranged his thoughts. At least that was what he looked like he was doing. He definitely seemed to be concentrating rather intently on something.

  ‘I’ve heard from some unsupported sources that there have been notes found by the police, although they still deny this. Messages of some sort from the criminals. At the scene of Jóhannes’s murder, on his body, even, and at your sister’s office. I’ve been told that there was one found before the young man was even killed; in Mosfellsbær.

  ‘If any of this is true then it would suggest to me that there’s something else at play here, not just a case of extortion gone wrong. To be perfectly honest with you, I think your theory about Aron Steingrímsson is just a little bit too simple to be right. It would seem to me that there is something much more sinister at play here.’