Erla took a deep breath, thinking it over. Then she breathed out and nodded. ‘OK.’ Her gaze travelled to Gudlaugur, who was doing his best to avoid her eye. ‘Gudlaugur!’
He was forced to look up. ‘Yes?’
‘How are you getting on with the phone calls?’
‘All right. As far as it goes.’ He picked up a page of notes he’d made. ‘Margeir’s old company sacked him about six months ago. Apparently his temper was always getting him into trouble – he kept being rude to customers. The people who are prepared to admit to employing him on a casual basis after that give him a mixed report. Some say he did the work without any problems, others that he was bad-tempered and offhand for no reason.’
‘Who are these people?’
‘Individuals and small companies. A beauty parlour, a bakery and most recently a garage. He advertised his services online and electricians are in such short supply at the moment that he seems to have had enough to do.’
‘How far down the list are you?’
Gudlaugur seemed to have something in his throat. ‘Um, I’ve finished actually. That was my last call. Unless you want me to try again with the people who won’t admit to having hired him?’
Erla shook her head. ‘Nope. Get your coat. You’re both coming with me.’ Her eye fell on Siggi’s drawing hanging on the wall above Huldar’s desk. ‘And take that crap down. This isn’t a kindergarten.’ Spinning on her heel, she strode off to her office to fetch her coat.
Huldar thought it wiser not to answer back, but defiantly left the picture where it was. Obeying her would come across as too submissive. Instead, he got to his feet and pulled on his outdoor clothes.
As they were on their way out, Jóel came running over to ask where they were off to. Lousy detective though he was, he had a talent for sniffing out breakthroughs in other people’s investigations. When Erla barked at him to get back to his desk and wait for the progress update like everyone else, he shot Huldar a look of pure hatred. Huldar drew his lips back in a grin and winked at the prick, which did nothing to mollify him. On second thoughts it would have been more sensible to ignore him, but Huldar could never resist the chance to wind him up.
‘This has to be it.’ Erla pointed at the only unmarked bell in the lobby. ‘All the rest have names by them.’ She tried ringing the bell and they waited in silence for a while but nothing happened.
‘What now?’ Huldar was itching to get inside the building. From his misspent youth he knew that if they rang all the bells at once, someone was bound to open the door, but these tactics were unlikely to meet with Erla’s approval.
‘We wait.’ She peered in the window to the stairwell, then took out her phone and without a word to them made a call. Huldar and Gudlaugur stood listening impatiently as she talked to the Land Registry in the hope of finding out whether the flat belonged to Helgi.
Erla was still on hold when one of the residents, a middle-aged woman, came up behind them carrying two heavy shopping bags. She looked startled to see them standing in the lobby.
Huldar gave her a friendly smile. ‘Hello. We’re from the police.’
The woman raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh? Has something happened?’
‘No, not as far as we’re aware. But maybe you can help us. We need to speak to the occupant of this flat. You don’t happen to know who lives there, do you?’ He indicated the unmarked bell.
‘Oh, I see.’ The woman relaxed a little. ‘Did Einar ring you?’
‘Einar?’ Huldar thought Erla was going to hang up, now they seemed to be getting somewhere, but she didn’t, so he asked: ‘Who’s Einar?’
‘He lives in the flat next door to the one you’re asking about. He’s a bit peculiar, poor man. Takes up half our residents’ meetings complaining about the noise he claims he hears from that flat. The people living on the other side say they haven’t noticed anything, except on a couple of occasions. They think Einar’s making a fuss about nothing and they’re probably right. It didn’t occur to me he’d go as far as to call the police – let alone that you’d actually turn up.’ Her wondering gaze took them all in. ‘Or that they’d send three of you.’
‘We’re not actually here on a callout.’ Huldar watched as Erla switched her attention back to the phone, then half turned away from them to carry on talking. ‘So you don’t know who lives there?’
‘No. I live on the ground floor and I’ve never seen the owner. He doesn’t come to residents’ meetings and I gather he’s very rarely here. According to Einar, he rents it out through Airbnb, but I don’t know if that’s true. It would be against the building rules, if it is. But that’s hardly a police matter, is it?’
Before the woman could advise them any further on their duties, Huldar thanked her and made it clear that the conversation was over. Realising she’d been dismissed, she squeezed past and went inside. There was no point grabbing this opportunity to follow her through the door as they still wouldn’t be able to enter the flat. Huldar and Gudlaugur waited instead for Erla to finish her conversation.
‘It’s definitely the right flat,’ she told them. ‘It’s been registered to an American company for the last nine years. Something tells me that Helgi either has a share in that company or owns it outright. Anything else would be too much of a coincidence.’ She shoved the phone back in her pocket. ‘What was that bloke called? Einar?’ Huldar nodded and Erla turned to the panel, found his name and pressed the bell. After a brief interval a man’s voice crackled over the intercom. Erla introduced herself and he eagerly invited them to come up. They waited for the lock to buzz, then hurried in and climbed up to the third floor. The flats turned out to be accessed from an outdoor walkway, and they waited there, shivering in the icy wind, for Einar to open up. Beside them was the door to what must be Helgi’s flat. While they were waiting, Gudlaugur pressed his ear to it. When Einar opened his door, the young man moved away, reporting that the flat must be empty as all was quiet inside.
‘Are you Einar?’ The man, who must have been about seventy, looked rather frail. He’d lost most of his hair and his face was set in deep lines of discontent that appeared to be habitual.
Erla came straight to the point as it was freezing hanging around on the concrete walkway. ‘Is it possible that the flat next door to you belongs to a man called Helgi Fridriksson?’
The man’s scowl deepened. He tightened his grip on the door as a gust threatened to tear it out of his hands, but didn’t invite them in. ‘It depends how you look at it. Officially, the flat belongs to a foreign company, but he owns it through the company. I heard on the news that he’s dead – murdered. Are you investigating?’
Erla said they were. ‘Did you send him a letter recently, complaining about the noise from this flat?’
‘Yes. I’ve sent him several. The man’s hardly ever here, so I had to do something. The racket they make is totally unacceptable. I can’t be expected to put up with it.’
Erla ignored this: disputes between neighbours weren’t her department. ‘How would you describe the disturbance?’
The man snorted. ‘I don’t know. All kinds of things. Booming music, people having noisy sex and just general loud voices and crashing about. If you ask me, the flat’s rented out for parties. At least, you never hear anything midweek. It’s not only the city that’s plagued with this bloody Airbnb menace.’
‘Did you have a word with Helgi about it?’
‘No. I never saw him. The people responsible sneak out at night after everything’s gone quiet. When I knock during the worst of it, no one answers the door. Maybe he left instructions to ignore the neighbours’ complaints.’
‘Has anyone else complained?’ Huldar asked, although he already knew the answer after talking to the woman in the lobby. It could be useful to put interviewees on the spot when they were exaggerating.
The man looked annoyed. ‘I wouldn’t know. But I assume they must have done. The noise was so bad that I can’t have been the only one who got woken up at weekends.�
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‘Every weekend?’ Erla took over the questioning again.
‘No. Not every one. But it’s still been intolerable. I’d never have moved in if I’d known. I’ve only lived here for two years and I can’t believe the problem only started then.’
Erla huddled into her anorak. ‘How did you find out that the flat belonged to Helgi?’
‘I lay in wait for one of his tenants or whatever I should call him. He was a bit of a wimp. Stammered out all Helgi’s details when I cornered him.’
‘Did you get his name?’
‘Tómas. I can’t remember his patronymic. But I’ve got it written down somewhere, if you want it.’
‘Was this recently?’
‘No. About a year ago. I tried ringing Helgi, but he slammed the phone down on me and wouldn’t answer my calls after that. So I resorted to writing him letters. Not that that worked either. I heard a scream from the flat earlier.’
‘A scream?’ Erla snapped to attention. ‘What kind of scream?’
‘You know, the kind someone makes when they get a shock.’
‘What time was this?’
The man grimaced as he looked at his watch. ‘A bit over an hour ago. Something like that.’
‘Could it have been someone in distress?’
The man shrugged, and shrugged again when Erla asked about the sex of the person who’d screamed.
‘All right, thanks.’ Erla turned to Huldar and Gudlaugur, but when she didn’t hear the door shutting behind her, she turned back to Einar, thanked him again and asked him to go inside and close his door: they had nothing more to discuss with him for the moment. He obeyed and went back inside, looking even more disgruntled.
‘Call a locksmith.’ Erla nodded at Gudlaugur who immediately whipped out his phone. After that, she sent him downstairs to let the man in while she and Huldar kept watch outside the flat. Although there was no sound from inside, it was possible that someone was waiting for the chance to sneak out unobserved. If so, it was almost certainly Margeir, Huldar thought.
But when the locksmith opened the door for them, Huldar’s guess turned out to have been wide of the mark. Inside they found two men, the dentist Thormar and another man who identified himself in a shaky voice as Tómas, Helgi’s friend. They were both in a state of shock, having been interrupted in the middle of a job that they seemed to be struggling with. Both wore yellow rubber gloves and they were holding open a large black bin bag. When the door opened, they made frantic attempts to kick it under the sofa.
But it wasn’t until Huldar, Gudlaugur and Erla looked out onto the balcony that they realised what the bag was for.
There was a chair just outside the window, propped against the concrete partition that separated the balcony from the neighbour’s. In it sat a dead man with a nail gun on his lap. They recognised him at once: it was Siggi’s father, Margeir Arnarson.
Chapter 30
Thursday
Helgi’s friend Tómas, an economist at the Central Bank, took the tissue from Erla and blew his nose. He probably hadn’t cried this much since the banking system collapsed. Erla and Huldar watched impassively as he wiped his nose and tear-streaked face. The man’s blubbering was getting on their nerves so much that Huldar longed to pick him up and shake some backbone into him. His sobbing and hiccupping were interrupting the flow of information that up to now had been pouring out of him. He’d struck them as a pathetic specimen when they arrested him yesterday, and, as often happened, a night in the cells had stripped him of any last vestige of courage. According to the officers guarding the cells, Thormar had shown more guts, though perhaps his toughness was only a veneer. They’d soon find out as he was next on the list to be interviewed.
Erla’s decision to lock the men in the cells and let them stew until morning seemed to have paid off, in Tómas’s case, at least. But she hadn’t only done it to get them shaking in their shoes. The discovery of the body had had to take precedence and the crime-scene investigation hadn’t been completed until nearly midnight. By then it had been too late to question the men. The interviews were too important to be entrusted to exhausted officers, and besides the team didn’t yet have a clear picture of the events that had led up to the killing. There was still no sign of a murder weapon and the two men’s cleaning frenzy hadn’t exactly made life easy for Forensics. It was the most pristine crime scene they’d ever had the misfortune to examine; almost every single fingerprint had been erased.
Huldar had tossed and turned for much of the night, trying in vain to figure out the sequence of events following this latest bombshell. If anything, he was even more perplexed by the time he finally fell asleep than he had been before their visit to the flat on Sudurhlíd.
The preliminary report on the cause of death had forced them to revise their initial theories. When Huldar, Erla and Gudlaugur spotted Margeir sitting out there on the balcony, they had naturally concluded that he had murdered Helgi and probably his wife as well, before taking his own life. But the moment they walked round behind the chair, it became evident that they were not looking at a suicide. Nor had the coatless man frozen to death out there. The big, ugly wound on the back of his head couldn’t possibly have been self-inflicted. Between the clumps of dried blood in his hair Huldar had glimpsed splinters of bone and what appeared to be brains, before beating a hasty retreat inside the flat.
Although Margeir’s post-mortem was not yet complete, the preliminary examination at the scene indicated that he had died on Sunday. A more precise time frame was not yet available. They’d been working on the assumption that he was Helgi’s killer, regardless of who had subsequently murdered him. They still had a long way to go in clarifying Tómas’s role in events too. He flatly denied having had anything to do with Margeir’s death, and the name of the dead man had apparently come as a complete surprise to him. If his story was to be believed, he and Thormar hadn’t had a clue who the man in the chair was. They claimed not to know anything about him apart from what they’d heard on the news. The dead man had looked very different from the picture the police had used in their appeal for information. Tómas was adamant that he didn’t know Sigurlaug Lára or their son Sigurdur either, and stuck to his statement, despite repeated questioning. He was equally insistent with regard to Helgi’s death. He hadn’t killed him – it would never have crossed his mind to murder one of his closest friends. What possible motive could he have had for wanting Helgi dead, let alone a complete stranger? According to Tómas, he and Thormar had stumbled on Margeir’s body by chance. They had come to the flat to clean it from top to bottom in order to remove all the evidence of their own presence there. It was only after they’d finished that they’d spotted the corpse on the balcony and completely lost their heads.
When they realised the man hadn’t died of natural causes, they’d panicked about whether they’d scoured the place thoroughly enough. Deciding to go over it again, they had dashed out to the shops to buy some more heavy-duty cleaning products. Tómas admitted that they’d discussed removing the body, but swore they’d immediately abandoned the idea. Instead, they’d rolled up their sleeves but had only just got started again when they heard a commotion outside the flat and froze. They had been discussing in whispers whether they should let themselves down from the balcony on sheets or climb over onto the neighbouring one, when the door suddenly opened.
The veil of secrecy surrounding the ownership of the flat had mostly been lifted, assuming that Tómas was telling the truth. According to him, Helgi owned it through a Luxembourg-based shell company. He had acquired it more than eight years ago when it was repossessed. At first he had rented it out, but when the tenant left, Helgi had used it himself on his short visits to Iceland, before deciding it was too small for his needs and buying another, larger place that was more to his taste. He’d been intending to sell it but this had turned out to be disadvantageous for tax reasons, so in the end he had held on to it. Because he’d never got round to finding a new tenant, the flat had en
ded up as a party pad for him and his friends. Each of them had a key and could use it as a bolthole to throw parties and mess around without the risk of causing friction with their own neighbours. By the time Helgi moved back to Iceland and bought the luxury apartment he’d been living in at the time of his death, he was so satisfied with the arrangement that he had decided to keep on the weekend flat. As soon as the interview was over, Erla was going to get the man who was trying to unravel Helgi’s financial affairs to verify this story. Huldar thought it would probably prove accurate. It was hard to see what Tómas had to gain from making it up. Suspects usually saved their lies for the things that really mattered.
‘You’ve got to let me call my wife.’ Tómas put down the tissue on top of a heap of used ones on the table in front of him. ‘Please.’
‘No.’ Erla pushed a keyboard towards him. ‘Concentrate on what we’re doing. Show us your website.’
Tómas turned pleading red eyes on her. ‘Why won’t you believe me? You won’t learn anything of interest from the website. I don’t think it’s even legal for you to see it. There’s a lot of stuff on there that’s not intended for public consumption.’
‘We’re not the public. We’re the police. Type in the address, your username and the password. Now.’ Erla folded her arms uncompromisingly across her chest. Huldar suspected she did this to prevent herself from reaching across the table and wringing the man’s neck. He was on the verge of doing it himself. They were both dying of curiosity to see the site.
From what they had managed to extract from the snivelling wreck in front of them, the case hinged on an internet forum that the four friends had been maintaining for the last ten years. But Tómas obstinately refused to explain what it contained that was so private. With any luck, they were about to find out. Huldar suspected the content would include Helgi’s sex videos. That would explain the man’s scarlet cheeks and flustered reaction every time the subject of the forum came up. In the end Erla had paused the interview and dispatched Huldar to fetch a projector and a computer with a Tor browser.
Gallows Rock - Freyja and Huldar Series 04 (2020) Page 26