96

‘Here it is,’ Úrsúla said, passing to Gunnar the laptop that rested on her knees, still logged in to the ministry intranet. ‘There’s the 217article about Óðinn’s appointment eight years ago as permanent secretary. And look, underneath it details his whole career.’

Úrsúla leaned back in her seat and breathed a couple of heavy sighs.

The tension had left Gunnar sweating, so his fingers slipped on the screen of his phone as he had searched for information about Óðinn. But now Úrsúla had found what they were looking for.

‘Óðinn was on the Reykjavík police force from 1979 to 1989, and was an inspector from 1986 onward.’ Gunnar leaned back in his seat, and his heavy sigh echoed Úrsúla’s. ‘That means he was a serving police officer at the time your father died.’

‘Fuck,’ she spat, punching the plastic dashboard in front of her. ‘I don’t know what to make of this.’ She shook the scrap of paper that had been in her pocket. ‘I don’t know what the hell to think.’

‘Do you have any of the court documents from Pétur’s trial?’ he asked.

Úrsúla sighed again. ‘I know them practically off by heart,’ she said. ‘But the names of the officers on duty that night aren’t mentioned. They’re just Police Officer A and Police Officer B. I’ve never even wondered about their names. It never occurred to me that there was any kind of doubt about the events of that night. I was a child at the time, and everyone accepted it as fact that Pétur had beaten Dad to death.’

‘I know who could help us,’ Gunnar said, and tapped a message to Boris into his phone:

Who were the cops on duty the night Pétur P was supposed to have murdered Úrsúla’s dad?

He knew the wording would spark Boris’s curiosity. He had deliberately said ‘supposed to have murdered’ instead of ‘murdered’. Boris would be intrigued and he’d definitely check it out. His phone pinged an alert almost immediately. He opened Boris’s reply:

Is Monday OK? We’re having a weekend out of town.

Gunnar swallowed his disappointment. Pétur’s scrawled note 218wasn’t grounds for wrecking Boris’s cosy weekend in his summer cottage. Maybe it was just something the old man had dreamed up.

‘There’s only one way to find out what he means,’ Gunnar said, starting the engine. Úrsúla seem to understand instantly what he had in mind.

‘We’ll have to find a way to keep him calm so we can talk to him,’ she said, staring straight ahead.

The engine had been switched off, and in their excitement, their breath had clouded the car’s windscreen, and even with the heater turned up to maximum, it still hadn’t cleared by the time Gunnar brought the car to a stop outside the police station at Hlemmur. Úrsúla opened her door, but Gunnar placed a hand on her arm.

‘I’ll go inside,’ he said. She nodded as she clicked her door closed again. It wasn’t ideal for the minister of the interior to march into the police station, asking about a particular prisoner.