Frozen Out

by Quentin Bates

  Gunna parked the jeep outside Dagurinn’s offices. Normally she would never have used a private car for police work, but Skúli had been so insistent they meet that she borrowed the keys to Gísli’s Range Rover and made the hour’s drive to Reykjavík in ten minutes less than usual, even with the detour to drop Laufey off with her friend on the way.

  ‘So what did you want me to see, young man? And why the hell are you still at work at eight thirty on a Sunday evening?’ Gunna asked as they made their way in single file through the maze of workstations. She thought the young man looked tired. There were black bags under his eyes and his hair stood on end where he had repeatedly run his hands through it.

  Although every light was on, Dagurinn’s office was deserted. A pair of tiny Asian women were slowly dusting each desk in the background, clicking off desk lights as they went.

  ‘I’m still at work because I have a ton of stuff to get through and also because I wanted to make sure Reynir Óli wasn’t here when I show you the proofs of Tuesday’s Hot Chat.’

  ‘Hot Chat? What’s that?’

  ‘God, Gunna, where have you been? Hot Chat’s Dagurinn’s answer to Seen & Heard,’ Skúli said. ‘It’s pretty shit, actually. It’s just the same as Seen & Heard, but it’s got a bit more raunchy as the competition got tougher.’

  ‘Which did?’ Gunna asked, confused already.

  ‘Well, both of them did. They’re both garbage. Lots of gossip and celebrity scandal.’

  ‘And that’s what you want to show me?’

  ‘Yup. Come on.’

  Skúli threaded through the quiet desks and the two cleaners soundlessly stepped aside to let him pass, looking at Gunna, still in uniform, with fearful eyes. She tried to smile at them, as if to send a message that she wasn’t remotely interested in their immigration status, but their expressions remained impassive as she followed Skúli.

  At the far end of the row of desks, he sat down and started up one of the computers. He tapped at the keyboard and paused. A page of newsprint and pictures appeared gradually, scored with red guidelines, and Skúli scrolled downwards.

  ‘The guy you’re looking for, the foreign tough guy. You know, the one who was at the march in the spring. Is that him?’

  He pointed at the screen and Gunna fumbled for her glasses. She peered at the image of four people sitting round a table with a cluster of wine bottles in the middle. Hårde had a smile on his face and his left arm round the back of a statuesque blonde woman. On Hårde’s right side sat the pink-faced young man Gunna had seen at the bathroom door in the Gullfoss Hotel suite and next to him sat a regal Sigurjóna in a low-cut black dress, all of them with their attention on something out of camera shot.

  ‘Bloody hell. What’s all this?’ Gunna asked.

  ‘I’ll print it out for you.’

  Skúli’s fingers flickered and a printer hummed somewhere behind them.

  ‘It’s the PR Association Awards, held the other night. The design guy did these pages today and I saw the proofs this afternoon.’

  ‘But it’s Sunday. Don’t you people ever take a day off?’

  ‘The guy who did the story is a freelance, and freelancers never stop working. The page make-up guys are on flexi-time, so if they want to, they can work twenty hours straight and take two days off. I guess the one who did these pages was in today because it’s the last page of the mag and I don’t expect he’ll be in again until the middle of the week.’

  Skúli swung his chair round and picked a crisp set of proofs from the printer under the bench behind him. He smoothed the sheets and spread them on the desk.

  ‘That’s Sigurjóna Huldudóttir.’ His finger paused at Jón Oddur. ‘Don’t know who that guy is. That’s the foreign guy.’

  ‘Hårde, his name is, but you don’t know that.’

  ‘OK, that’s Hårde.’ His finger moved on. ‘And that’s Erna Daníelsdóttir.’

  ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘Celebrity hairdresser, Sigurjóna’s little sister.’

  ‘Good grief. You can see the resemblance.’

  She inspected the double page spread with its ‘PR Practitioners Pull Out the Stops!’ headline. Another picture showed Sigurjóna with a blissful smile on her face accepting an award. Gunna skimmed over further photographs of grinning people in formal finery sitting at tables or standing on a platform accepting their own awards.

  ‘Looks like quite a party. Who took these pictures?’

  Skúli pointed to the by-line at the top of the page. ‘There.’

  Under the headline she read ‘Words and pictures: Ármann J.’

  ‘Right. Where can I find this Ármann character?’

  Skúli shut down the computer. ‘I’ll find his number for you.’

  Back at his own desk, Skúli skimmed through the post-it notes adorning the monitor and copied the number on to a scrap of paper.

  ‘Thanks, Skúli. I take it I can hold on to this?’ She brandished the pages he had printed out.

  ‘Yeah. But I’d appreciate it if you didn’t let on where they came from.’

  He yawned and closed the laptop on his desk.

  Gunna pressed her phone to her ear and listened to it ring.

  ‘Snorri? Hi, Gunna. Yup. No, it’s OK, nothing wrong. Something’s come up, so we’d better be early tomorrow. Pick me up at six outside my place and can you call Bára and the others, and ask them to be there for a meeting at seven?’

  Skúli pulled on the jacket that was draped over the back of his chair and looked expectantly at Gunna as she spoke.

  ‘That’s all right. Yeah, sorry to disturb you,’ Gunna continued. ‘No, I’ll call Bjössi and let him know as well. Thanks, Snorri. Goodnight.’

  She snapped the phone shut and dropped it back in her pocket.

  ‘Thank you, Skúli. I think I can forgive you for dragging an old lady out on a Sunday evening.’

  ‘I hope it’s some use to you. But you’d have seen it anyway on Tuesday.’

  ‘I doubt it. Hot Chat isn’t exactly at the top of my reading list. But thanks again, young man.’

  ‘No problem. Er, Gunna?’ he asked diffidently. ‘Any chance you could give me a lift home?’

  Gunna parked Gísli’s Range Rover and sat in the driving seat, listening to the engine tick, continuing to run things through in her mind.

  She was still muttering to herself as she opened the front door and kicked off her boots, flexing stiff toes that had been cooped up far too long. She noticed instinctively that Laufey’s trainers were in their place.

  She peered past Laufey’s bedroom door and heard her breathing softly. In the kitchen she poured coffee and water into the percolator, and hung her cap on the door before hauling off her uniform jacket and slinging it over the back of the sofa. In the shower she let the scalding sulphur-smelling water run until the knotted muscles across her shoulders gradually untied themselves and she could hardly see for steam, and wondered what linked Arngrímur Örn Arnarson’s killing to those of Egill Grímsson and Einar Eyjólfur Einarsson.

  The bloody man hadn’t been involved with Clean Iceland for years. So why knock him off? she asked herself.

  Gunna wrapped herself in a dressing gown that had seen better days, but since she had stolen it herself from a hotel in Copenhagen on the honeymoon with Raggi all those years ago, it had enough sentimental value to be kept. She retrieved her glasses from her jacket pocket and perched them on her nose to flip through the Sunday newspaper that had been lying on the doormat since early that morning. Although she had called Snorri to bring the morning meeting forward, she deliberately hadn’t asked what progress he and Bára had made in chasing Ósk Líndal for information.

  ‘Bloody shame, really,’ she muttered to herself. ‘Bloody good coppers those two. But I’d bet any money they’re both out of the force in two years.’

  She reached for her mug on the table and realized that she had leafed through the paper automatically without taking a single thing in, so she sipped coffee and le
aned back in the flat’s only comfortable chair to run the faces through her mind again.

  ‘Mum?’ Laufey inquired drowsily, padding softly into the room and dropping on to the sofa to wriggle under Gunna’s arm.

  ‘Hi, sweetheart. All right?’ Gunna asked tenderly, suppressing a pang of guilt at having been out for so long.

  ‘Yeah. I went to Sigrún’s and had dinner there and then I came home and did my homework,’ she said carefully.

  ‘All your homework?’

  ‘All of it.’

  ‘I’m sorry, my love, things are really busy at work at the moment.’

  ‘I know, Mum. You are going to catch this murderer, aren’t you?’

  ‘How do you know?’ Gunna asked in surprise.

  ‘Mum,’ Laufey explained patiently, ‘I do watch the news and I hear it when you’re on the phone. And Finnur said that when you catch him, he’ll get life. Is that right?’

  ‘We’ll see. I hope so,’ Gunna said as her mind flashed back to Einar Eyjólfur. ‘Come on, you’d best be off to bed again. I have an early start tomorrow, so you’ll have to sort yourself out in the morning. Did Sigrún say you could go to her for lunch again tomorrow?’

  ‘Hm. Yup,’ Laufey mumbled.

  ‘Go on, sweetheart. Off to bed. I’m going to sleep soon as well.’

  Laufey dragged herself to her feet and shambled back to her room. Gunna heard the creak as she lay down and within a minute her thoughts were back to the case.

  She was delighted to know that Matti Kristjáns had run for shelter and had a good idea of where he had run to. The thought of her cousin being another victim would have been hard to bear. In spite of the rancour between them, she felt genuinely fond of Matti as one of those people who had always been part of the family scenery for as long as she could remember.

  Gunna glanced at her watch on the table in front of her and saw to her surprise that it was almost eleven. She lifted her feet on to the coffee table and laid her head back in the chair on the headrest, intending to close her eyes for a minute.

  Three hours later the front door clicked and she snapped awake. She realized that she had fallen asleep in the chair and her legs were aching. She lifted them stiffly to the floor as the living-room door swung silently open and the shadow of a tall figure appeared in the doorway.

  She felt entirely helpless, wearing only a dressing gown and her mind fogged with sleep. The figure dropped a bag on the floor and stooped slightly to avoid cracking his head on the lintel as he stepped into the room.

  Gunna sighed silently with relief and delight.

  ‘Hi, Mum. Thought you’d be asleep.’

  ‘Gísli! When did you get in?’

  ‘Docked an hour ago. Is there anything to eat?’

  31

  Monday, 29 September

  Gunna’s head was aching. She should have gone back to sleep, not let herself be tempted to spend an hour in the middle of the night talking with Gísli as he devoured sandwich after sandwich and a jug of coffee. She was overjoyed to see him home after a month at sea and had a good idea he would spend much of his ten days ashore in Reykjavík, only returning to the house in Hvalvík for sleep and laundry.

  ‘What do we know that we didn’t know yesterday?’ Gunna asked to set the ball rolling once Ívar Laxdal and Vilhjálmur Traustason had taken their seats at the back of the room.

  Bára, wide awake, answered first. ‘Marteinn Georg Kristjánsson walked into Hólmavík police station last night.’

  ‘Excellent. I thought he might do something like that,’ Gunna said with satisfaction. ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘Hverfisgata. Hólmavík police drove him as far as Brú and Reykjavík sent a car to pick him up from there.’

  ‘Right. I’ll go and talk to Matti as soon as we’ve finished. What else?’

  ‘Arngrímur Örn Arnarson. Death certainly not accidental, but no indication of how or who as yet. The man was a computer whizz of some kind, ran his own company called Tenging. Snorri knows more about this kind of stuff.’ Bára looked sideways at Snorri.

  ‘He specialized in security, firewalls and things like that, stopping hackers and prying eyes from looking too closely into systems,’ Snorri offered. ‘I reckon he was setting up systems for people who are doing things that aren’t entirely legal and placing them overseas somewhere in countries where things aren’t looked at too closely.’

  ‘Porn, scams, that sort of thing?’ Bjössi asked.

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Skandalblogger, maybe?’

  ‘Who knows? Maybe we’ll find out when our own über-nerds get in there.’

  Gunna looked around the table. ‘Right then. Ósk Líndal. Any joy?’

  Snorri grinned. ‘There’s someone who isn’t a happy bunny on a Sunday afternoon.’

  ‘Explain,’ Gunna instructed sharply.

  ‘She didn’t answer the phone, so we paid her a visit. She lives in one of those terraces at the top of Mossfellsbœr, so it was easy enough to drop in on the way back from Borgarnes,’ Bára explained.

  ‘And?’

  ‘She was as unhelpful as she could be without slamming the door in our faces.’

  ‘Well, I reckon we interrupted some kind of party,’ Snorri grinned.

  ‘She was even less pleased when we got her to go and open up the Spearpoint offices so she could look up what we wanted.’

  ‘She was in some kind of kimono thing and had to get changed so she could go out,’ Snorri added. ‘She’s a biiig lady. A seriously strange woman.’

  ‘OK, what did you get?’

  ‘She had all the info there that we wanted. All the dates that Hårde has been here from the middle of last year onwards,’ Bára said, handing over a computer printout. ‘As you can see, he was in Iceland when Einar Eyjólfur disappeared and also in March when Egill Grímsson was killed. And apart from a couple of breaks, he’s been here almost all summer.’

  ‘That figures,’ Snorri added, speaking for the first time. ‘The site manager at the Hvalvík compound confirmed that Hårde had only been there once or twice a week, but after the fire on the night after that march, he’s been around pretty much all the time.’

  ‘Did you make any progress on finding whoever started that fire, Bjössi?’ Gunna inquired.

  ‘Nah. No fingerprints. No identifiable footprints. No witnesses. Nothing to go on at all. They’ll show up sooner or later, but how much evidence there might be towards a conviction when that happens is anybody’s guess.’

  ‘Airlines, anyone? Any progress there?’

  ‘Sorry, chief. Only got one pair,’ Snorri said sadly, with both of his large hands on the table in front of him.

  ‘Not to worry. That’s next, please, ladies and gentlemen. Anything from the nerds in Reykjavík?’

  ‘Yes. Er, there’s a new entry on Skandalblogger’s page, posted on Saturday. Has anyone seen it?’ Bára asked.

  Heads were shaken around the table.

  ‘It’s about the awards thing that Sigurjóna Huldudóttir attended, alleging large amounts of cocaine being present.’

  ‘Nothing new there, then,’ Snorri said. ‘Is that something worth chasing, d’you think?’

  ‘Don’t know. We have enough to be getting on with as it is,’ Gunna mused. ‘I’ll let the Reykjavík drug squad know and they should be able to investigate.’

  ‘But that’s not all,’ Bára added. ‘There was a strange comment to say that Bjarni Jón Bjarnason should have good reason to be on his way back to Iceland early from this conference he’s at in Berlin. No more details. Maybe Skandalblogger knows something we don’t?’

  ‘I’m wondering if maybe we ought to be having a quiet word with the Minister for Environmental Affairs,’ Gunna said quietly, as if to herself, placing Skúli’s printout on the table and spreading it out. At the back of the room, Vilhjálmur Traustason’s eyes widened in horror. ‘And we need to find out about this, immediately.’

  ‘What’s this?’ Snorri asked, looking at Gunna w
ith surprise. ‘I didn’t think you read this sort of thing.’

  ‘I don’t. It was passed to me last night. This is what Tuesday’s Hot Chat is going to look like. But you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to buy your own copies of Hot Chat.’

  Gunna said Hot Chat as if the very words themselves smelled like a public toilet on a hot day.

  ‘Is this from your toyboy?’ Bjössi smirked.

  ‘That would be telling. If you look, you’ll see that these pictures were taken by a freelance hack called Ármann J, real name Ármann Jens Helgason. His phone number’s there. One of you can chase this guy up today and squeeze what you can out of him. Snorri, I’ll leave that to you. Now, if we look at these photos, incidentally taken at the Gullfoss on Friday evening during that bullshitmongers’ jamboree, we will see the lovely Sigurjóna, her PA or whatever he is, Sigurjóna’s sister Erna the hairdresser, and a certain Mr Hårde.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Bjössi said and whistled.

  ‘The cheeky cow.’ Bára seethed. ‘She knew exactly where he had been the night before and certainly didn’t bother to tell us that.’

  ‘Ah, but we didn’t ask where he had been, only if she knew where he was when we spoke to her. So another visit to the delightful Sigurjóna might be in order. OK, boys and girls. Grab yourselves a coffee, then get to it, please,’ Gunna said, noticing with discomfort as he stood up the new lines that had appeared on Vilhjálmur Traustason’s long face, making him look a few years older than he had at the end of the previous week.

  ‘Ah, Gunnhildur. A word, if you would be so kind.’

  Hårde drove faster than usual out to Hvalvík, talking for most of the way to the voices that came through his mobile headset. His room at the guesthouse he had been staying at was tidy, and still occupied for a few more days as far as the owners would be concerned. The bed was made and there was still a toothbrush in the bathroom, but the locked suitcase on the bed was empty.