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Voss?’
    ‘That’s her. They were at university together, all three of them. Elvar has been Villi’s partner in a lot of shady ventures. Sunna María married a dentist. We went to their wedding in Antigua. It was lovely,’ she reminisced and her face softened for the first time.
    ‘They are both here in Iceland?’
    ‘Sunna María and her dentist live here. Kópavogur somewhere. Elvar? Yeah. He’s around somewhere. He seems to pop up. Villi always knew where he was.’
    *   *   *
    Winter was best, dark all the time and no problem getting about without being noticed. When it was cold and dark, people also hurried more and didn’t hang around watching to see who that was across the street bundled up in a padded coat and hat. Summer could be good as well, but different. That was when people were away and left their stuff there for the taking, Orri thought, wishing it could be summer again and knowing that it wasn’t far away.
    The street he was interested in was a new one, a row of low-slung houses with flat roofs, the street deserted and silent as only a cold morning could make it. He could see that each one had its lower storey dug deep into the ground as a basement while the long tinted windows above showed that these were houses for people with money, or access to it. The concrete of the walls was still a shiny grey, with a sheen that a year or two of weathering would dull if it were not painted, and the gardens were wide open. The straggling twigs at the edges would one day be hedges and trees, but for the moment they were little more than sticks scratching for a foothold and waiting for winter to end.
    Deliveries in this exclusive half-built suburb had sparked his interest in the area. This part of Kópavogur on the older western side of the main road was fertile hunting ground for a man of his talents, he felt. As the area was hardly a fashionable one, it was populated by mostly prosperous middle-aged people, his preferred type of homeowner.
    The waterside houses of this new street had all been finished, but on the landward side was a row of plots in various states of completion; one that was clearly weathertight and ready for work inside, while another was still a concrete foundation and another was not even that far advanced, still a series of trenches with the steel mesh in place, ready for the foundations to be poured.
    He rubbed warmth into his hands, the rubber of the thin latex inside sticking to the wool of the gloves he wore over them. He had been discreetly walking around this quiet end of Kópavogur for a few days, paying particular attention to the street of new houses and making a habit of going purposefully the same way, so the neighbours would assume he lived there, or at least somewhere close by. Orri reckoned that being part of the scenery helped as he checked out the houses on the city side of the street. These were the smartest houses, the ones with nothing but rocks and water behind them.
    Less chance of being noticed, he mused. Once behind one of the houses, there would be nobody to see him taking his time finding a way in around the back. The downside was that a rapid retreat by taking a short-cut over someone’s garden was out of the question. The slope down to the sea, not a problem in summer, was slick with melting ice and would take him only to the sea-smoothed rocks of the shoreline.
    On a day like today, with a hint of spring in the air and the days finally getting longer he reflected that it was between two seasons. Maybe it would be better to cash in a few of his investments or raid his own bank account and spend a week or two in the sun, even though he had been determined not to take a holiday quite yet, telling himself that a few more jobs were needed to lift his finances first. He worried about the amount of gear he had managed to collect recently, all of which needed to be turned into cash. That was where he felt his business plan had failed him.
    Looking quickly along the