Reykjavík by Ragnar Jónasson

Author:Ragnar Jónasson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

* * *

Margrét answered the door of her parents’ house, a handsome detached villa in the upmarket suburb of Gardabær. Her eyes were red and puffy from weeping.

‘Thanks for coming round,’ she said to Sunna. ‘Do come in. My parents are out. I made them go to work as I couldn’t cope with them hanging over me all the time.’ Margrét forced a watery smile. ‘Can I offer you anything?’

‘No, thanks.’

Inside, the house couldn’t have been more different from Sunna’s family home in Húsavík. All the furnishings, including the paintings on the walls, made it clear to visitors that the owners were not exactly short of money. Margrét’s parents were both lawyers and ran their own legal practice these days, though her father was best known for having done a term in office as the Minister of Justice.

‘How are you doing?’ Margrét asked, once they were sitting down.

Sunna shrugged. What was she supposed to say? Margrét could multiply her own suffering by ten, or a hundred, if she wanted the answer.

‘I just can’t believe he’s gone,’ she replied eventually, to say something. She hadn’t met Margrét that often; in fact, she’d never really understood what Valur had seen in her. Perhaps in a sense they’d both been rebelling against their backgrounds, Margrét by hooking up with a penniless journalist on a weekly paper, Valur with a girl who had everything and would never vote for anyone but the Conservatives, like her mummy and daddy. Still, what did Sunna know? Maybe opposites getting together was the key to happiness. But the answer was probably more straightforward. Margrét was quite simply Valur’s type: dark-haired, with a mysterious look in her eyes; the kind of girl Cary Grant would have ended up with in one of those classic newsroom movies that Baldur had talked about.

‘Have the police been round to see you too?’ Sunna asked.

‘Only to break the news. Not since then. Why do you ask?’

Sunna came straight to the point. ‘The thing is,’ she said, breaking her promise to Bjarni, the officer in charge of the case, ‘we believe someone pushed Valur in front of that bus.’

She had rarely seen anyone look so blindsided.

‘What?’ Margrét asked, aghast. ‘What are you saying?’

‘You weren’t with him at the time, were you?’ Sunna asked with studied casualness.

‘With him?’

‘When it happened.’

‘No, of course not. He was alone. On his way to meet me, I think, or maybe he was going home first, because we’d arranged to meet by the lake at eight, and the buses were driving round and round the area, so he must just have decided to …’ Margrét faltered.

‘I see.’

‘Did you really say he was pushed?’

Margrét didn’t seem offended by Sunna’s question about her whereabouts, or to have taken it as an indirect accusation that she might have something to hide – or might not have been telling the whole truth.

‘Yes, according to the police.’

‘But that’s unbelievable.’

Sunna was silent.

‘It’s unbelievable,’ Margrét repeated. ‘Who would have done it? And why?’

‘We don’t know, but it goes without saying that it must be linked to Lára somehow.

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