Frozen Out

by Quentin Bates

  ‘Not because of what’s been going on this morning?’

  ‘No …’ Skúli said slowly.

  ‘So you don’t know,’ she said with slow satisfaction and a broad smile that lit up her face. ‘Well, you must be the only reporter in Iceland who hasn’t heard that an unidentified corpse was found just round the corner this morning. You must be the only one, because practically every other hack in the country has either turned up here or else phoned the station to demand a statement. Poor old Haddi’s been going spare.’

  ‘Oh. I see.’

  Skúli dropped his cutlery and dived into his coat pocket to bring out a mobile phone. He switched it on and within seconds it was buzzing angrily with a series of voice and text messages.

  ‘Shit. I forgot to switch it on when I left this morning, and I didn’t even have the radio on in the car,’ he admitted. ‘Sorry, I didn’t know anything.’

  ‘Anyway, now that you’re here, I suppose you’d better have a story to take back with you.’

  ‘That would be … great.’

  ‘You mean it would save your sorry arse from being fried?’

  ‘Er, yes, probably.’

  ‘There’ll be a statement this afternoon, so you can have it half an hour before it comes out officially. I don’t suppose that’ll do any harm.’

  ‘Thank you. That’s brilliant.’

  ‘Right. But you’ll owe me a favour there straight away. How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-five.’

  ‘What are you on this paper, then, a junior reporter, or what?’

  ‘No. I’m the crime editor.’

  ‘What? There’s a whopping story here and you didn’t even know about it, Mr Crime Editor?’ Gunna asked with a second sly smile.

  Skúli shuffled fish about on his plate. ‘Actually I’ve only been the crime editor for a week. And that was because someone put the by-line as a joke on something I wrote about a woman who had been caught shoplifting from the shopping centre at Kringlan. It stayed in by mistake, so I’m the new crime editor.’

  ‘How long have you been working for Dagurinn?’

  Skúli was starting to resent Gunna’s quickfire questions, reminding himself that he should be the one asking. ‘A couple of months. Dagurinn only started up in January.’

  ‘What were you doing before that?’

  ‘I finished my master’s last year and then I was at Jyllands Posten as an intern for a few months until I came home.’

  ‘Denmark. Where?’

  ‘In Århus. How long have you been in the police?’ he asked, trying to wrench the conversation around so that he could ask the questions.

  ‘Far too long. And who are your people?’

  ‘The Snædal family.’

  ‘Oh. Top people, I see.’

  ‘My uncle was in the government years ago.’

  ‘I know. I might even have voted for him.’

  ‘That’s nice to know. I’ll tell him.’

  ‘I’m not quite that old,’ Gunna replied coldly. ‘Now, get that down you and we’ll make a start. I have masses of things to do and if you’re going to tag along you’ll have to keep up and preferably keep quiet. All right?’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Skúli replied, laying down his knife and fork with a premonition of failure. He realized that, for a reporter, he had asked no questions and found out almost nothing about the person he was supposed to be profiling, while she had found out practically everything about him. ‘We can go, if you want. I don’t really like saltfish,’ he admitted.

  ‘Then you won’t grow up to have curly hair. Come on then,’ she said with a grin, rising to her feet and pulling a phone from her jacket pocket as it began to chirrup.

  ‘Hi, sweetheart, just a moment,’ she answered it in a gentle tone.

  ‘You’d better take your tray back to the counter, and you can take mine while you’re at it. I’ll see you outside in a minute,’ she instructed Skúli, marching towards the door with the phone at her ear. Skúli wondered who she could be addressing as sweetheart.

  ‘So, what does a crime editor actually do?’

  The second-best Volvo bumped off the tarmac and rumbled on to the track leading to the pontoon dock. Skúli sat in the passenger seat, laptop on his knees, getting down as much of the story as Gunna was prepared to give him.

  ‘Mostly I just check the police websites every morning. Unidentified, you say? A man or a woman?’

  ‘Male.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Too early to say.’

  ‘What else can you tell me?’

  ‘That’s all for now,’ Gunna replied, bringing the car to a halt with a crunch of gravel behind a white van. Skúli followed her as she picked her way easily between rocks to the foreshore, while he found his feet slipping from under him.

  Two people in white overalls crouched on the sand where the falling tide had left the man’s body, while a tall uniformed officer stood and watched as a photographer systematically took pictures of the area. Gunna lifted the Do Not Cross tape and ducked under it.

  ‘Hi, Snorri, what’s new?’ Gunna asked the man in uniform.

  ‘Nothing yet. They’ve not long been here.’

  ‘And Bjössi?’

  ‘Been and gone for a snoop around. Said he’d see you at the station in a while.’

  ‘Fair enough. Oh, by the way, that’s Snorri,’ she announced, looking at Skúli and jerking a thumb at the uniformed officer. She used the same thumb to point at Skúli. ‘This is Skúli. He’s my shadow. From the newspapers, so be careful what you tell him.’

  Skúli saw her smile again while Snorri looked doubtful.

  ‘Camera?’ she asked Skúli.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you have a camera?’

  ‘No – well, only the one in my phone.’

  ‘All right. Take any pictures and I’ll lock you up.’

  Gunna moved closer to the white-overalled pair crouched around the body and hunched down next to them. Skúli caught a glimpse of a young face, lifeless eyes half-open, and he felt himself engulfed in a sudden deep sadness at the sight.

  ‘Gunnhildur,’ Gunna introduced herself brusquely.

  ‘Sigmar. That’s Selma,’ the man replied absently, while the woman did not look up.

  ‘Anything useful?’

  ‘Not really. He’s not been here long, I’d say. Nothing to indicate any injuries. More than likely a case of falling in the water followed by hypothermia or drowning.’

  ‘Any identification?’

  ‘Nothing so far. Nothing in his pockets. No rings, no jewellery. We’ll know more when we’ve had a proper look at him on the slab. If he’s Icelandic, then we’ll probably have an identity in a day or two, sooner if he has a record of any kind. If he’s a foreigner …’

  He shrugged, scratched at the stubble on his chin and yawned.

  ‘Makes a change to get out into the country once in a while,’ he observed with a thin smile.

  ‘Taking him away, are you?’

  ‘Yup. Almost finished, actually. We’ll probably be off in an hour and we should have a report for you in a day or two. There’s no sign of any violence, so how urgent do you want this to be?’

  ‘Sooner the better, as far as I’m concerned. This kind of thing doesn’t happen every day round here.’

  ‘All right. We’ll do what we can,’ Sigmar said, pulling a mask back up over his mouth and nose.

  ‘Are you all right, lad?’ Gunna asked Skúli kindly. ‘Not seen a dead person before?’

  Skúli’s face had gone from pale to white. He shook his head.

  ‘It’s all right. You’ll get used to it. But if you’re going to puke up, please don’t do it over anything that might be used as evidence.’

  The young man had departed in an ambulance to the National Hospital’s mortuary in Reykjavík before the inshore boats began to appear in the afternoon and the pontoon dock became a hive of activity. Gunna could see plenty of curious faces and knew that Albert Jónasson
must have been chatting over the VHF while he steamed out that morning.

  ‘Nothing to see, people,’ she muttered to herself as she and Skúli were the last to drive away, leaving the beach to be reclaimed by the rising tide.

  ‘I’d best be getting back to town,’ Skúli said as Gunna parked in the mayor’s space outside the police station.

  ‘All right. I hope today was useful, but it’s quite unusual to have a body. In fact, it hasn’t happened for years. So that’s a bit of excitement for you.’

  ‘Do you know who it is?’

  ‘No idea. Might be a seaman, could be a foreigner. But whoever he was, my guess is he had a bit too much to drink and fell into the water trying to get on board a boat.’

  ‘When do you think you’ll know?’

  Gunna shrugged. ‘Anybody’s guess, I’m afraid. Now, you’re not going to write any of this, are you? There’ll be a statement this afternoon with everything in it that we can say before he’s been identified. Things get a bit delicate with relatives and whatnot. You understand?’

  ‘No, of course not. I mean, yes. I’ll be back later in the week if that’s all right.’

  ‘Fine by me. It won’t be so interesting, though. Most of what we do here is traffic. There’s bugger all happens in Hvalvík, so I really don’t know why they wanted to send you here.’

  Gunna opened the car door and swung her legs out. ‘Give me a call when you want to come over. Shouldn’t be a problem.’

  ‘Haddi!’

  ‘In here.’

  Gunna put her head round her own office door to see Haddi in one chair and the morose figure of Bjössi from CID sitting behind her desk with his feet perched on the window sill.

  ‘Ah, Bjössi. So that’s where you’ve got to. Make yourself comfortable, will you?’

  Bjössi languidly put his hands behind his head. ‘Will do, Gunna. Two sugars for me, if you don’t mind, and a few doughnuts wouldn’t do any harm.’

  ‘Bugger off. I don’t want your clogged-up arteries on my conscience. But I’m sure Haddi has some coffee on the go somewhere?’

  ‘All right,’ Haddi grumbled, standing up. Gunna waved Bjössi to Haddi’s vacated seat and planted herself behind her desk.

  ‘Right then. What have we got?’

  Bjössi sighed. ‘Dead bloke. Late twenties to mid-thirties by the look of him. Been in the water a few hours, but not long. Not a thing in his pockets. No rings, no watch, nothing round his neck, no piercings that we could see. No visible injuries.’

  He took a deep breath and carried on. ‘Clean-shaven probably yesterday, I’d say. Ginger hair, nails clipped, no shoes, black jeans and a black shirt with long sleeves. That’s it, in a nutshell. He’s probably on the slab at the morgue right now being looked at carefully. With any luck we might get something more tomorrow.’

  ‘He’s not a local, but he must have gone into the water here. The tide wouldn’t have washed him into the harbour from anywhere else, surely?’

  ‘Nope. Hasn’t been in the drink long enough for that. If he’d been rolling around in the water for long enough to drift along the coast, he wouldn’t be in such good condition.’

  Haddi returned with a thermos and mugs.

  ‘I suppose you want milk, Bjössi?’ he grumbled.

  ‘Black’s fine with me.’

  ‘That’s just as well, because we don’t have any milk anyway. Need me, do you?’

  ‘No, you’d best knock off now, Haddi,’ Gunna replied. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’

  Haddi waved as he let the door swing shut behind him and Gunna heard him greet the woman reading the morning’s paper at the post office counter next door as he left the building.

  ‘Bjössi, how much help with this can I get from CID?’

  ‘Not a lot, I’m afraid. Looks pretty clear to me. Once he’s identified, inform the relatives and get on with the rest of it. There’ll have to be an inquiry, but I’d be surprised if it came up with anything other than death by misadventure, either drowning or hypothermia.’

  ‘Seems reasonable enough to me,’ Gunna agreed. ‘No sign of foul play, not yet at any rate. I’ll check the missing persons list before I finish today and get on to pathology in the morning and see what they can tell us.’

  She yawned.

  ‘Been a long day?’ Bjössi asked.

  ‘It has. And I’d better be off in a minute. How’s Dóra, anyway?’

  ‘Ach, she’s fine. Moaning, but nothing unusual about that. How about your kids?’

  ‘Laufey should be back from school soon, so I’d better be there when she gets home. Gísli’s at sea, been on Snæfugl since January and says he likes it, or he likes the money anyway.’

  ‘He’s got his head screwed on, your boy has.’ Bjössi grinned. ‘Don’t know where he gets that from.’

  ‘From his mother, of course,’ Gunna said stoutly. ‘There’s no bloody sense in his father’s family.’

  ‘Ah, I wouldn’t know about that. But I reckon if things keep going the way they are, fishing’s about the best place your lad could be. Interest rates and prices going up all the time. You know, it doesn’t seem right.’ The furrows across Bjössi’s brow deepened.

  ‘Yup, it stinks. But fishermen and coppers will be fine, just you see,’ Gunna assured him.

  Bjössi refilled his mug from the thermos. He wedged a hard lump of sugar between his teeth and sipped his fresh coffee through it.

  ‘I hope somebody’s going to be fine,’ Bjössi mumbled with the sugar lump still between his teeth. ‘The exchange rate’s up and down. I don’t care what the government tries to tell us, I can see prices of everything going up and Dóra says it’s dearer just to live now. Half of the Poles and whatnot have already left, except the ones running lucrative dope businesses.’

  ‘You’re probably right, but what’s going to change? Nothing. Anyway, what’s keeping you so busy over at Keflavík that you can’t help an old colleague out for a few hours?’

  ‘Dope, dope and more dope.’ Bjössi sighed. ‘It’s just never-ending and I’m sick of it. It’s dealing with these bloody low-lifes that I’m fed up with, day in, day out.’

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t have joined the police in that case.’

  ‘Probably right,’ Bjössi said, standing up. ‘But I reckon we’re both stuck with it now, Gunna. Come and find me if you’re in Keflavík tomorrow. By the way, who’s the toyboy?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your young man.’

  ‘Oh, him. He’s a journalist on Dagurinn, says he’s here to write a profile of a country police station.’

  ‘Fun for you.’ Bjössi sniggered while Gunna glowered.

  ‘It was wished on me,’ she said. ‘Shit, that reminds me.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘I’ve just remembered I had a meeting with Vilhjálmur Traustason this morning.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, sweetheart. I told our glorious leader that you were a bit busy today.’

  2

  Wednesday, 27 August

  Gunna’s flat soles slapped on the polished floor of the hospital corridor. Sigmar’s office was at the far end of the passage, marked only with a handwritten sign that indicated the occupant’s name and not his position.

  Hearing voices within, she knocked and pushed the door open without waiting for a response. Sigmar swivelled round, the phone at his ear.

  ‘I’ll have to call you back. Sorry, I have a visitor. Yes, an hour at least.’

  He dropped the phone on to its handset and smiled. ‘Good morning, sergeant. You’ve come to my rescue.’

  ‘Morning. In what way?’

  ‘One of the administrators,’ he said with distaste, glaring at the phone. ‘More cash-saving incentives needed, although obviously that wouldn’t extend to bureaucrats. But hopefully in an hour when the lady calls back, I’ll be on my way home for lunch,’ he added with satisfaction.

  ‘A result, then?’

  ‘Indeed. Now, our young man.’ He shuffled thr
ough papers and came up with a handwritten sheet. ‘Of course you’d have the full report tomorrow, but I understand that you’ll need to know as much as possible straight away.’

  ‘It helps.’

  Sigmar consulted the sheet. ‘Actually I can’t tell you much more than I did yesterday at the scene, except to confirm he hadn’t been in the water for more than a few hours. Six, at most.’

  ‘The body was located at six thirty.’

  ‘Around midnight, not before. He was also extremely drunk, almost double the drink-driving limit. At any rate it’s not surprising that he may have missed his footing. He’d certainly have had trouble walking in a straight line at that level of intoxication. The cause of death was drowning.’

  Gunna scribbled notes in a pad as Sigmar spoke. ‘So he was alive when he hit the water?’

  ‘Oh, yes. But apart from that, there’s not much to tell. He was in good health, didn’t smoke, or at least not often, wasn’t overweight. He clearly didn’t do any kind of manual work as his hands are as soft as a baby’s bottom.’

  ‘Any distinguishing marks?’ Gunna asked.

  ‘Ah, yes. We have a tattoo. On the left upper arm.’

  Sigmar tapped at his computer keyboard and swivelled the monitor round so they could both see it.

  ‘There you are. Wonderful things, computers,’ he said appreciatively as Gunna looked at the magnified image of the young man’s pale skin and the stylized motif of a book with E3 on one open page and V2 on the page opposite.

  ‘Will you email me these pictures? E-three?’

  ‘E cubed, EEE. Someone’s initials, maybe?’ Sigmar mused. ‘Who knows? It could be anything. But that’s your job, sergeant.’

  ‘Of course.’ She made a note and moved on. ‘Any DNA evidence?’

  Sigmar frowned. ‘This isn’t CSI, you know. If he has a criminal record, we’ll know in a couple of days. But if he’s an honest man, then the answer’s no.’