Thin Ice: An Inspector Gunna Mystery (Gunnhildur Mystery Book 5)

by Quentin Bates

  The kitchen and lobby were in silent darkness. Össur was asleep on the sofa, his hand in the pocket of his jacket, and Magni wondered if now might be the moment to try and take the Baikal off him, but he decided against it, reasoning that the pistol’s safety could be off and it would be too dangerous. Besides, he was tired. The nervous trip to the city and the constant fear of being noticed had exhausted him.

  ‘Össi,’ he said gently, a hand on his shoulder. ‘Hey, man. I’m back. Where are the girls?’

  ‘What? Asleep, I think.’

  ‘I hope they’re asleep and not halfway to Reykjavík by now.’

  ‘Nah. It’s snowing outside, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yeah, it is. But you might have stayed awake all the same.’

  ‘You get a car?’

  ‘Yep, a Skoda, four-wheel drive. Decent car. And tomorrow we get out of here. I’m going to get my head down, Össi. You should do the same,’ he said, and saw Össur’s head already beginning to nod while his right stayed firmly clasped around the pistol in his pocket.

  Magni went upstairs in the dark. He listened at the door of the room Erna slept in and was satisfied to hear her snoring gently inside. In the room he had taken for himself, the one nearest the top of the stairs, he stripped off his clothes and reminded himself that he would need to wash some things in the morning. He crawled under the duvet and felt the fatigue in his aching legs. He had underestimated how stressful the trip would turn out to be, especially the last twenty kilometres over roads that were on the brink of being blocked by the deepening drifts.

  He stretched his hands behind his head and felt the muscles in his back begin to relax. His neck cracked and he twisted his head as far as it would go each way to relieve the tension. His eyes closed as he was close to sleep, but he jerked awake when a cool draught caught at his feet.

  ‘Shhh,’ Tinna Lind whispered. He could hear the rustle of her clothes being pulled off and she crept under the duvet to lie on top of him, resting her head on his chest. He lifted a hand and placed it on her back, pressing her against him.

  ‘Did it go all right?’

  ‘Yeah. It was OK. Parked the Explorer where someone will find it and left the key in it. Came back with a Skoda instead.’

  They lay still for a long time before she parted her legs to straddle him, lifting herself up to gaze into the glint of his eyes in the not quite complete darkness.

  ‘Shall we?’ she murmured. ‘How would you like it?’

  5

  Monday

  Magni emerged from the shower refreshed and clean, his socks and underwear clean but also wet.

  ‘Smart,’ Tinna Lind said as he came back into the bedroom. ‘Taking a shower and washing your undies at the same time.’

  She sat cross-legged on the bed, cornrows loose around her shoulders.

  ‘Seaman’s trick,’ he said, arranging them on the radiator to dry.

  ‘So, going commando or coming back to bed?’

  ‘Any preference?’

  ‘Commando is always good.’

  Magni dropped the towel and climbed back on the bed, lying down and putting out an arm to caress the back of Tinna Lind’s head and pull her down towards him.

  ‘After something, are you?’

  ‘Could be,’ he said, nuzzling her neck. ‘Why d’you ask?’

  ‘Just wondering.’

  Her hands strayed across his back and down towards his thighs.

  ‘It always pays to look after the cook, you know.’

  ‘That’s just what I thought I was doing,’ she said, her voice dropping to a husky whisper.

  ‘Oh, yes. That’s good. The cook likes that. Don’t stop.’

  Afterwards they lay still and entwined as weak daylight began to filter through the curtains.

  ‘Magni? You asleep?

  ‘Me? No. Just savouring the moment.’

  ‘Magni?’

  ‘Hmmm?’

  ‘Is this a bit serious, or what?’

  Magni snapped awake. ‘What did you say?’

  Tinna Lind rolled over onto her front and rested her chin on his chest.

  ‘I said, is there any danger of this getting serious? And before you start to get worried, I’m not being needy or clingy.’

  ‘I . . . I don’t know. Hadn’t thought about it,’ he lied.

  ‘Look, Magni. We might not have much time together so it’s not as if we’ll have an opportunity to go through the boyfriend/girlfriend shit and all that picking out favourite movies and choosing curtains stuff. And I don’t go in for keeping what I think to myself.’

  ‘OK,’ Magni said. ‘I’m sort of wondering where this is going.’

  ‘Straight out. I like you a lot and I have an idea the feeling’s mutual. Would I be right?’

  ‘You’d be right.’

  Tinna Lind lifted herself up and crossed her legs again, letting her hair fall about her shoulders before roughly bunching it into a bun behind her head.

  ‘I have a proposition for you.’

  ‘You want to have my babies and live happily ever after?’

  ‘That might come later, who knows?’ she said, and her voice dropped. She reached out and walked her fingers up Magni’s chest, ending up with one finger on his chin. ‘How much money does your friend in the bridal suite have?’

  ‘Something around two hundred thousand euros, I think,’ he answered and found himself becoming slightly breathless at the thought.

  She leaned forward and looked into his eyes.

  ‘So how about you and me? We ease your friend out of the partnership, drop him somewhere with a long walk to civilization, then we drop my mother next at a bus stop somewhere.’

  ‘And?’ Magni’s mouth was dry.

  ‘And we disappear. Just like you and Össur were going to do. Think about it. We could live well with that much money if we could get to somewhere warm.’

  ‘Like where?’

  ‘Anywhere that life’s cheap and people don’t ask too many questions. Sicily. Morocco. A Greek island. Bulgaria.’

  ‘That’s a thought,’ Magni admitted.

  Tinna Lind winked, got off the bed and headed for the bathroom. Magni heard her pee and then the shower began to run.

  ‘Think about it for a while,’ she said with a sly look around the door, and Magni lay back and did just that.

  The habit of being up and about before the rest of the world was an old one and she enjoyed the tranquillity of the early part of the day. But today the morning’s tranquillity had already been shattered by an argument with Laufey before she even reached the detectives’ office at Hverfisgata.

  ‘Late, Gunnhildur?’ Ívar Laxdal asked in surprise. ‘I don’t think you’ve been late for anything since about 1996, have you?’

  ‘The last time I was late I’d found out I was pregnant with Laufey,’ she snapped back and instantly regretted it, but Ívar Laxdal’s face creased into a grin in a way that wouldn’t have happened had anyone else been present. ‘I’m sorry,’ she apologized. ‘I had a call when I was on the way this morning to tell me that Erna Brandsen’s card was flagged up last night at the filling station on Fellsmúli, so that’s where I’ve been.’

  She dropped a memory key on her desk and waited for her computer to start.

  ‘CCTV?’

  ‘Yep, and if it’s as much use as last time, then it’ll be about as useful as a wet fart.’

  The video sequence showed a car pull up at the pump and the driver using a credit card to pre-pay before filling the tank to the brim and driving away into the night.

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Just before eleven last night. This place is manned until ten and it’s card-only after that.’

  ‘Numbers obscured,’ Ívar Laxdal mused. ‘A grey Skoda. It’s not as if there’s a shortage of those about.’

  Gunna put on the glasses she hated using and sat with her nose a hand’s breadth from the screen, intent on not missing any detail.

  ‘It’s the same man,�
�� she said finally. ‘I’m certain of it. That’s the same coat the man buying petrol for Erna Brandsen’s Explorer wore at the first filling station. That’s the same hat pulled down past his ears.’

  ‘You have that footage as well?’

  ‘On the hard drive.’

  ‘Let’s see it,’ Ívar Laxdal said, and sat back as Gunna ran the earlier recording.

  ‘See? Gunna said when the sequence had finished. ‘The shoulders are the same, the way he stands is the same. It’s the same guy.’

  ‘I agree. It’s not necessarily courtroom evidence, but as far as I’m concerned it confirms it’s the same character. But why change to another car?’

  ‘He’s better off now as before we knew he was driving a fairly distinctive white Explorer with a known registration. Now he’s driving an anonymous grey Skoda and we can’t see the number.’

  ‘Send the footage to Albert upstairs. He might be able to make out some of the registration plate.’

  ‘The question is,’ Gunna said as if she hadn’t heard Ívar Laxdal’s words. ‘Where’s Erna Brandsen’s Explorer? And where are these people? Are Erna and Tinna Lind and this mystery man all together, or what? Are they still alive?’

  ‘That’s the problem,’ Ívar Laxdal said with an uncomfortable shift in his chair. ‘We need something concrete on this, preferably today, and ideally some indication that Erna Brandsen is alive. Otherwise there’ll be no choice but to call out a full-scale search.’

  ‘Yes, but where? The region they would need to search is huge. We need a starting point. What about a search flight? Did you request the Dash from the Coast Guard?’

  ‘I did, but in case you hadn’t noticed, there’s been virtually rooftop-level cloud cover for the last week. They’ll be ready to go as soon as there’s a break in visibility.’

  ‘In that case you’d better let them know we’re looking for a grey Skoda as well as a white Explorer.’

  ‘I’ll do that. Gunnhildur, do you need help on this?’

  ‘I need a break on this,’ she said and pointed to the screen. ‘I need this guy to make a mistake. Until then, we’ll see if anything comes in. Their pictures were in the papers again this morning.’

  ‘And the fire in Hafnarfjördur? Árni Sigurvinsson?’

  ‘Helgi’s attending the post-mortem this morning. Eiríkur’s report is on the system and I need to have a look at it. I haven’t seen him since Saturday.’

  ‘D’you want to shift Helgi to the Erna Brandsen inquiry? I can put Sævaldur and his team onto the Hafnarfjördur investigation with Eiríkur?’

  Össur’s head jerked up and he looked at Magni with his eyes full of panic.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘That was the door.’

  ‘What do we do?’

  ‘We see who it is,’ Magni said. ‘What else can we do?’

  He stood up and went to the hotel’s big front door, which had already swung open before he could touch the handle. Mentally he tried to prepare himself for the sight of a black-clad police team tumbling through the door with automatic weapons at the ready, or worse, Alli the Cornershop smiling at him from behind a squad of hired heavies.

  Behind him he heard the click of the Baikal’s safety catch and offered a fervent prayer that if there was any shooting, then at least Össur wouldn’t be the one to start it.

  A thickset man in a blue overalls with a toolbox in one hand stood there and stared at them from under a baseball cap.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ he demanded. ‘I thought the place was supposed to be empty?’

  ‘Oh, Ársæll said we could stay here for a couple of days,’ Magni said smoothly, sensing the tension in Össur behind him.

  The visitor put his toolbox down and kicked snow from his boots, pulled off his gloves and rubbed warmth back into his hands.

  ‘So who are you guys, then?’ he asked. The suspicion in his voice was clear. ‘I spoke to Ársæll a couple of days ago and he said nothing about there being anyone up here. The place is supposed to be closed down for the winter.’

  ‘My mate spoke to him a couple of weeks ago and he said it was OK to come up here when we could get away, as we weren’t sure when we could all get a few days off work to get out of Reykjavík. So what brings you up here? Routine visit?’

  ‘Nah. Had an alert to say one of the alarms had gone off and then reset itself, so it’s probably a fault, but I thought I’d take a look anyway. How long have you been up here?’

  ‘We . . . we got here on Saturday afternoon.’

  ‘Must have been you setting it off, then.’

  ‘Yeah, one of the girls burned some toast. I reset the alarm and didn’t realize you’d get a notification as the phone’s dead.’

  ‘The phone’s diverted. That’s why it’s not working, but the line stays live for the alarm system. I got the alert right away, but didn’t worry about it immediately as it was cancelled,’ the man said, marching through the lobby, past the reception desk and straight to the office, as if he were at home there. Magni watched him go to the fire alarm control box and go through the menus, muttering under his breath.

  ‘That looks about right,’ he mumbled to himself, and his thumb moved to the test button.

  ‘There are people asleep—’ Magni said, but his words were cut off as the alarm began to shriek.

  ‘What d’you say?’ the man yelled.

  Magni shook his head and the alarm shrieked for twenty seconds before the man pressed the test button a second time and it lapsed into silence.

  ‘I was just saying there are people asleep upstairs,’ Magni said, hoping to sound offended and frosty.

  ‘Well, if they sleep through that, they’re doing well,’ the man retorted, snapped shut the control box and stepped down from the stool he had needed to reach it.

  ‘Is that all?’ Magni asked, conscious that Össur was still hovering behind him and that he hadn’t heard the Baikal’s safety catch click for a while.

  The man glared suspiciously. ‘Yeah. That’ll do for today,’ he said. ‘I’ll give Ársæll a call when I get back in phone range. It still seems odd that he didn’t say anything to me,’ he grumbled, and as he looked over Magni’s shoulder his voice faded away.

  Magni turned and followed his gaze to see Erna with an expression somewhere between confusion and irritation standing in the doorway, while the man in the blue overall stared at her.

  ‘There’s something a bit damn spooky about all this,’ he said with a sudden burst of anger and pointed at Erna. ‘I know who you are. Your picture’s been in the papers and on the TV; they said you’d gone missing somewhere. So what’s all this about?’

  He made for the door and Magni tried to head him off. ‘Hey, listen, man. It’s not what it looks like, all right?’

  The man shook Magni’s hand from his shoulder. ‘I don’t care what it looks like. There’s something proper fishy happening here and the sooner I’m out of this place, the better.’

  Fat flakes of snow drifted lazily down through still air as the man set off across the yard.

  ‘You fucking stop.’ This time it was Össur who was yelling. ‘I’m warning you.’

  ‘Össi, no . . .’ Magni said.

  The man in the blue overalls stopped and turned, staring at Össur who strode towards him, hands in his pockets, snowflakes collecting on his thin grey hair.

  ‘And what?’ the man said with a truculent look at Össur, who was shorter than him by half a head and certainly seemed less of a threat than the beefy Magni might have been. ‘What you going to do? You can fuck off, pal. I’m out of here.’

  ‘You stay right where you are,’ Össur snarled, his voice hoarse.

  ‘And if I don’t?’ the big man demanded, squaring up to Össur. ‘I’m out of here and you’re not stopping me.’

  ‘Össi, no . . .’ Magni called, hurrying across the yard to where the two of them were almost nose to nose.

  ‘If you know what’s good for you, shitbag,’ Össur drawled.<
br />
  ‘Well, fuck you!’ The man in the blue overalls yelled in his face and placed both hands on Össur’s chest, sending him staggering backwards.

  ‘Össi, don’t . . .’

  The pistol appeared from Össur’s pocket and Magni could see the blood drain from the man’s face.

  ‘Hey, this ain’t right . . .’ the man said in disbelief, the words barely out of his mouth before Össur’s first slug caught him in the chest. Magni had expected the man to be thrown backwards, like he’d seen in the movies, but instead he stopped still for a moment and a second shot hit him only an inch or so away from the first. The two shots were rapid, dry cracks that echoed off the surrounding hills, dulled by the damp in the air; and before the second shot’s echo had faded it was joined by Erna’s piercing scream bouncing off the rocks as the man sagged gradually to his knees before falling forward into the snow.

  Helgi was tight-lipped and pale when he made his appearance. He went to the coffee room, poured himself a mugful and sat staring into space.

  ‘All right?’ Gunna asked. The faint smell of the autopsy room lingered around him.

  ‘Yeah. I’ll be all right in a minute.’

  ‘So? Árni Sigurvinsson?’

  Helgi sipped his coffee, grimaced, squirted some long-life milk into it from a carton on the table and sipped again.

  ‘Smoke inhalation, as we expected. Absolutely no doubt that was the cause of death, according to Miss Cruz. But there’s more.’

  ‘Explain, young man.’

  ‘It’ll all be in Miss Cruz’s report. He’d been beaten up quite efficiently probably only a couple of hours at most before he died. There’s a good bit of internal bruising, but not many outward signs of it. There’s a decent amount of alcohol in his blood, and Miss Cruz reckons they’ll probably identify a few other goodies as well once the tests have been done. Plus he’s missing a toe on his left foot.’

  ‘Eiríkur said. A recent injury?’

  ‘His toe was chopped off with something sharp, a chisel maybe, and very recently.’