May 5, 1920. Elizabeth is feeling better and was able to eat. We piled on some warm clothes and are sitting on the upper deck, where there are nice wooden benches. I am teaching Elizabeth Icelandic. She is now able to say hello and good-bye properly…
May 7, 1920. Got up at 10 o’clock a.m. The Westman Islands are rising over the horizon. The glaciers are not very visible, as their tops are draped in fog…
May 8, 1920. Homecoming. My father and Matthías met us on the pier. Little Matthías has turned into a handsome young man. My father has aged. Everything seems so small to me, in spite of all the construction projects that have taken place since I left the country. My father had borrowed an automobile to take us and all our luggage home to Birkihlíd. It annoys me how people here keep staring at Elizabeth and me. They have no manners…
Halldór was reading an article in Morgunbladid about police reinforcement when the phone rang. It was only seven thirty, and it was rare for anyone to call at such an early hour. Halldór looked at Stefanía. “Are you going to answer, dear?”
“It’s bound to be for you. Nobody I know would ring so early in the morning, and on a Saturday at that. It’s not polite,” Stefanía grumbled, going over to the phone.
“Hello,” she said sharply into the receiver. Halldór noticed the scowl quickly disappear from her face.
“Oh no, no need to apologize. Of course we are up,” she said cheerily.
“Yes, yes, he is here. Hold on a moment, please.” She covered the mouthpiece and whispered to her husband, “It’s Jón Björnsson, the bank manager. He wants to talk to you.”
Jón Björnsson was a former government minister and now a bank manager—a résumé his wife would appreciate, Halldór thought to himself.
“Come on then. Don’t keep him waiting,” she said as he put the paper aside.
“Please excuse the intrusion,” the bank manager said when Halldór answered. “I was told that you were in charge of the investigation into the death of Jacob Kieler, one of our staff members.”
“Yes?”
“Well, some rather unpleasant things have come to light here at the bank. Our accountants have been going over this all night.”
“Oh?”
“It seems that Jacob has been embezzling a considerable sum of money from the bank.”
“How so?”
“By using a series of checking accounts. He has taken advantage of the fact that withdrawals take up to twenty-four hours longer to process than deposits. This should of course have come out when we did spot-checks, but he has been able to use his position in the bank to conceal it.”
“Is it a large sum of money?”
“We haven’t got the final figure yet, but he seems to have accumulated several million krónur.”
“I am astonished,” Halldór gasped.
“Yes, but that is not the whole story.”
“Oh?”
“The late Mr. Kieler was treasurer of a society that a few worthy gentlemen here in the city belong to—Gethsemane, a Christian brotherhood. Do you know it?”
“Yes, I have heard of it.”
“When the brotherhood’s board checked their accounts here at the bank yesterday, they discovered they were mostly empty.”
“Good grief! Was it a large sum of money?”
“Yes, quite a bit. The brotherhood has been liquidizing its assets recently, sold an apartment and other things, because they are about to extend their clubhouse. They’ll need to examine their accounts further to get the final figure.”
“Has this been going on for long?”
“He seems to have used money from the brotherhood to disguise the checking fraud when he needed to, but then all the money disappeared from the accounts over a period of a few weeks.”
“I see,” Halldór said. He now understood where Jacob had gotten the money to pay the deposit on Birkihlíd when the contracts were exchanged.
“Can you come to a meeting with us later this morning? Say around ten?” the bank manager asked, adding, “And we would appreciate for this to be kept confidential.”
Halldór agreed to come to the bank, and then hung up the phone.
“What did the minister want?” Stefanía asked.
“He is no longer a minister, only a bank manager.”
“Yes, but what did he want?”
“Nothing special. Just a police matter.”
Stefanía shrugged a little disappointedly and turned back to her tea and magazine. Much to his relief, it looked as though she had accepted this explanation. He sat back down again at the kitchen table and picked up the paper, thinking how good it would be to have Erlendur here to help with the bankers instead of on his way to Austria. Erlendur was a business-school graduate and nearly the only one in the investigation team who knew the difference between a debit and a credit.