Read Online Blackout by Ragnar Jónasson - Free Book Online Page B

his answer deliberately short.
    ‘Dreadful to hear about that fellow who was … murdered ,’ Ómar said with a dramatic emphasis on the last word.
    ‘Yes. You knew him?’
    ‘No. Good Lord, no. He was just a contractor here, wasn’t he? Making some money out of the tunnel? Everyone seems hell-bent on making something out of it. I hear he lived at Nóra’s place.’
    ‘That’s right, he rented it from her,’ Tómas confirmed, taking care not to give the old man too much information. The investigation was being handled by CID in Akureyri, assisted by the local force in Sauðárkrókur, and, in a more minor way, the Siglufjörður police.
    Ari Thór had already been busy working on the case, and had interviewed Hákon, or ‘Hákon the Herring Lad’, as Tómas habitually referred to him. Hákon had given him the names and contact details of Elías’s three closest colleagues. One of them, Páll Reynisson, had been a police officer in Siglufjörður at one point. Then there was Svavar Sindrason, resident in Dalvík, and a third man, Logi Jökulsson.
    Tómas and Ari Thór had then taken part in a conference call and had been told that Svavar Sindrason had already been interviewed. He had known Elías for a long time but had not been able to provide much information. He had been aware that Elías had a job on the side, working on the house in Skagafjörður; Elías certainly hadn’t kept it a secret.
    The likelihood was that the murder had taken place at night, but with little traffic surveillance in the district at that time and no traffic cameras, it would be close to impossible to work out who had been travelling through the area.
    As for Svavar himself, he said that he had been asleep all night. As he lived alone, that would be difficult to confirm.
    It hadn’t been ruled out that the killer could have been a woman. Comparatively little force had been behind the blow, and the length of timber hadn’t been particularly large. The real damage had been caused by the nail that had protruded from it.

    Nóra Pálsdóttir’s life could be divided into three distinct sections: a disastrous marriage; foreign travel, and peering into other people’s mouths. She had studied dentistry because her father had been a dentist and no other career path had even been mooted in the household in which she had grown up. In reality she had no interest in her work and organised things so that she could spend as much time as possible travelling. After ten years of marriage, her husband had realised that she loved her travels more than she loved him, promptly divorced her and took an unnecessarily generous proportion of her wealth with him in the process. The divorce was perhaps due, not so much to her love of holidays, as to her habit of being not entirely faithful to her husband.
    She downsized, selling the detached house in downtown Reykjavík and moving away from the city centre, buying instead an apartment in the suburbs and channelling the resulting cash into her travel fund.
    The journeys had begun during her university years, globe-trotting with a minimum of luggage, and preferring to be alone.
    Living on a remote island in the north Atlantic was never going to satisfy her and she had always had a deep inner urge to explore the world, to experience distant and unfamiliar cultures and the natural world. So she took every opportunity to visit somewhere new, to leave Iceland far behind.
    First it had been Europe, but as her earnings increased, more exciting destinations were added, in Asia, Africa and South America. Shefound her own favourite places in each hemisphere and made sure to visit them more than once. Her itinerary was relentless. With every new paradise she discovered, a return journey was planned, until it became clear, as the years passed, that time was a finite resource, and so were her funds. By the time she reached the age of sixty, she decided that enough was enough. One by one, her friends and acquaintances were