‘Would he recognize either of you anyway?’
‘I doubt it. We only spoke for a few minutes.’
‘Good. Right. I have to run, as you can imagine, Skúli. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for the information, and if this comes off, I owe you an enormous favour.’
Skúli grinned broadly. ‘No problem.’
‘By the way,’ she murmured in a voice that wouldn’t carry, ‘maybe you ought to know that a certain prominent political figure’s wife is in a cell at Hverfisgata, not that you heard that from me.’
Skúli grinned. ‘Great. Thanks, chief.’
‘Call me tomorrow. OK?’ Gunna shot at him, departing at a trot.
‘Vilhjálmur!’ Gunna bellowed, bursting back into the incident room. ‘Where the hell is the bloody man when you need him?’
‘Here, Gunnhildur. If you’d slow down for a second, you’d find me right behind you,’ he said tartly.
‘Right. No time to fart about,’ she said briskly as the rest of them appeared, having heard Gunna’s bellow echo through the building. ‘Our man’s at Keflavík airport right now.’
‘And you thought he wouldn’t be?’ Snorri mumbled through a mouthful of sandwich.
‘I may be wrong. So fire me. I’m told he was at check-in twenty minutes ago, so he’s probably checked in by now and waiting for his flight. Vilhjálmur, I want the airport force alerted straight away.’
‘They’re already on standby for this person, but it hasn’t helped with the Minister going through and all the press they expected.’
‘I don’t give a stuff about the Minister. He’s long gone by now. Get them back on the ball and tell them that our man is probably in the building. Remind them he’s dangerous. Now, please, Vilhjálmur.’
Vilhjálmur Traustason left the room at the closest to a run anyone had seen since he had been in the police handball team twenty years before.
‘Snorri, Bjössi, you’re with me. Bára, I want you to stay here and hold the fort. Get on to the airport and explain what the hell’s going on.’
‘Isn’t Vilhjálmur doing that?’
‘Vilhjálmur is safely out of the way talking to his opposite number at the airport. I want you to communicate with us and with the guys on the ground. Make sure they know what’s happening before we get there.’
‘OK. Will do,’ Bára said, parking himself at a computer screen and placing a headset over one ear.
‘Come on. Snorri, you’re driving,’ Gunna said, tossing the keys to the second-best Volvo high in the air.
Hårde didn’t believe in disguise. A confident approach, preferably with a discreet smile, was his preferred way of staying inconspicuous, although it wasn’t always easy for a man of above average height.
He was unhappy with the airport while being unable to put his finger on precisely what was wrong, apart from Sigurjóna’s having told him that the fat policewoman was looking for him. The check-in queue moved quickly enough and the concourse area was crowded enough for him to meld into the throng. He looked carefully at the queue ahead of him and singled out a couple of possible targets, men of roughly his own age and build, travelling alone.
He knew he would be ahead of Erna and had to admit to himself that he was looking forward to seeing her again, even though they had only parted that morning. He forced himself to think objectively and not to let the thought of her writhing beneath him cloud his judgement. Women come and women go, he reminded himself.
He watched the girl at the check-in desk for reactions that would betray that his name had been flagged up by the computer system, but she was mercifully bland.
‘Have a nice flight, Mr Ström,’ she smiled, passing him his boarding pass.
He passed security painlessly as a bored guard waved him through to pick up his X-rayed hand baggage. Inside the departure lounge, he drank a coffee at the bar and made his decision.
Ib Torbensen was bored and tired. His business trip to Iceland had been successful enough, but the small company representing his employers’ products had exhausted him. The evening before they had taken him to dinner and a few drinks that had become a crawl through some of the noisier parts of downtown Reykjavík, ending in a raucous bar only a few hours before he needed to be awake at a meeting that he had not been able to stop yawning through.
He drank coffee, but didn’t feel well enough to eat. His coat was making him too hot and he regretted not having packed it in his luggage. After three cups of coffee, he stood up, dropped some notes on the bar and wandered idly among the shops until the need to pee became too strong to fight.
He found a toilet on the far side of the concourse. Standing at the urinal and watching the yellow stream hit the bowl, he vaguely registered the door open and someone else enter the toilets.
When Hårde’s right arm snaked around his neck, Ib Torbensen tried to shout. But Hårde’s left arm quickly connected with his right hand, trapping the arm around Ib Torbensen’s neck in the crook of the elbow, while the flat of Hårde’s free hand forced his victim’s head forward. As Ib Torbensen collapsed into unconsciousness, Hårde caught him and hauled the body to a cubicle, shutting the door behind them both.
Five minutes later, Hårde emerged, leaving an unconscious Ib Torbensen on the cubicle floor, having divested him of all his travel documents, passport, money and every piece of identification.
He walked smartly back across the concourse to the bar and saw Erna perched on a barstool. He hesitated for a moment, and made a second decision.
He dropped a hand gently on her shoulder. ‘Don’t say anything, Erna.’
She turned to him in surprise, but kept quiet.
‘You said you thought I was a dangerous man?’
Erna nodded, eyes wide.
‘I’m not coming with you.’
‘What? Why?’ she couldn’t help demanding, eyes wide.
‘Listen. I have to fix something and you haven’t seen me.’
He squeezed her shoulder gently with the hand that had nearly killed lb Torbensen. ‘You haven’t seen me since yesterday. Go to M’diq as planned. I’ll see you in a few days.’
‘How many days?’
‘A few. That’s all I can say.’
He squeezed her shoulder once more as Erna looked at him with a mixture of sorrow and fury. ‘OK, Mr Dangerous. Make it soon.’
‘Soon,’ Hårde said, his eyes wrinkling at the corners with a suppressed smile, and in seconds he had melted back into the crowd around the bar.
He walked purposefully but not too fast towards the long walkway leading to the departure gates and passport control. Halfway along, he spied a noisy group of people coming towards him from an arriving flight, laughing and joking among themselves. Hårde took a step to one side to make way for them and turned to double back, following until they reached the top of the steps for arriving passengers to go down to the baggage reclaim.
He stood behind an elderly couple on the escalator. At the bottom, he took a deep breath and walked past the carousels to the Nothing to Declare channel, where he was waved straight past and out, back on to Icelandic soil.
At the car hire desk, he thought the girl might recognize him, but with a queue to deal with, she simply asked him to sign in the right boxes, photocopied Ib Torbensen’s passport and swiped his credit card before handing over the keys.
In the rental car lot, Hårde smiled grimly to himself as he heard the distant wail of sirens and prepared to drive on to the road, pausing at the exit to allow an ambulance followed by two squad cars to hurtle past and halt to disgorge a group of uniformed police officers led by a broad-shouldered woman.
There were uniforms everywhere, customs officers, airport officials, two paramedics and police officers from both the town and the airport.
One of the customs officers explained to Gunna and Snorri, while a groggy Ib Torbensen was revived by the paramedics and Bára went with one of the security staff to examine CCTV data.
‘Who are you?’ Gunna asked as soon
as Ib Torbensen appeared to be awake enough to answer a question, but he shook his head in reply.
‘Icelandic? English?’ Gunna barked.
‘I’m from Denmark. It’s OK to speak English,’ Ib Torbensen said slowly.
‘What happened to you?’
Ib Torbensen thought as he raised his hands to his throat and massaged his neck.
‘I do not know,’ he said drowsily. ‘I went to piss, and woke up in the lavatory when someone was shaking me.’
‘When did this happen?’ Gunna demanded, reverting to Icelandic.
‘He was located at 16.35 in the departure lounge toilets,’ one of the security men replied.
‘And when’s he supposed to be flying, and where to?’
‘Billund, he says, and he’s missed his flight. It’s closed.’
‘What’s your name? Can I see your tickets and passport?’ Gunna asked, switching to unwilling English, attention back on the forlorn Ib Torbensen, now massaging the sides of his head with the palms of his fat hands.
‘My name is Torbensen. Everything has been taken from me, everything.’
He rooted in the pockets of his coat and jacket, and hauled himself upright to check the pockets of his trousers.
‘Nothing. Everything gone,’ he announced.
‘You’d better see if you can stop that flight from leaving and be quick about it,’ Gunna told the airport security officers. ‘There might well be someone on that plane masquerading as this gentleman. Snorri, you go with them and have a look. Be careful. This guy’s nasty.’
Snorri and the security men loped away, muttering into microphones on their lapels.
‘What worries me is if he isn’t on that flight,’ she muttered to herself. ‘Otherwise the bloody man could be anywhere by now.’
In the airport’s operations room, Gunna growled every time unwelcome news came in. Nobody had used Ib Torbensen’s seat on the flight to Billund. In fact, there were two empty seats, Ib Torbensen’s and another in the name of Gunnvald Ström.
The flight to Madrid had already departed on time, with Erna Daníelsdóttir on board. But nobody by the name of Hadre, Hårde, Hardy or Ström had boarded and the Hadre Erna appeared to have booked a seat for failed to check in for his flight.
Gunna was even more gloomy when she realized that in the furore around Ib Torbensen, she had overlooked searching Erna out and preferably questioning her for long enough for her to miss her flight.
Ib Torbensen was taken off to hospital in Keflavík for questioning and to be met by hastily summoned staff from the Danish Embassy in Reykjavík, while Snorri accompanied the groaning man, his neck in a brace, to get a statement. Gradually the crowd thinned.
‘Where did the bastard get to?’ Gunna fumed. ‘The bastard,’ she emphasized. ‘The bastard outflanked us. Never, never, never underestimate these people.’ She glared balefully at Bára.
‘He checked in as Ström,’ Bára announced.
‘What?’
‘He checked in,’ Bára repeated. ‘We’ve worked it all out. It’s all on CCTV. Come on, I’ll show you.’
At a computer terminal in the operations room, she showed Gunna what they had been able to piece together from the CCTV data.
‘He checks in here, hand baggage only. OK?’
‘Yeah, got that.’
‘So, next we see him, he’s here. That’s Hårde, isn’t it?’
Gunna peered at the screen and nodded. ‘That’s him.’
‘Right. Next we see him, he’s here, near the bar in the departure lounge, and it seems he sits there for a while. Now, this is the interesting part,’ Bára said, fingers flickering over the keyboard as she scrolled forward and called up material from other cameras. ‘He’s here in the walkway that leads to passport control, but he never gets there.’
‘How does that work?’
‘Who knows? You can’t get to the departure gates and the flights without going through passport control, and he doesn’t. The security chief spoke to all the duty officers and our man didn’t go through.’
‘So if he’s not on a flight, he’s either hiding somewhere in the airport, or else he’s sneaked out and is still in Iceland,’ Gunna said, thumping the table with her fist. ‘The sly bastard. Knocking that poor Danish guy out cold and letting him be found was just a diversion to take the attention off him while he did a runner.’
Hårde felt numb. He had not been happy about using the international airport, the only route off this weird island, he reflected. Creating a diversion may have been what was needed to get him away from the airport, but it would undoubtedly have spurred the amateurish Icelandic police into even more efforts to locate him. Hårde took a deep breath and reminded himself that no adversary should ever be underestimated — that way lay complacency and errors of judgement.
At a petrol station in Reykjavík he bought sandwiches and calmly ate one over a plastic beaker of gritty coffee while he looked through the phone book. Matti had shown him how to find virtually anyone in the country — and there she was: ‘Gunnhildur Gísladóttir, police officer, Hafnargata 38, Hvalvík.’ Sigurjóna had described her as the fat policewoman. Even though he knew the woman’s name and had seen at the airport as she disappeared inside the building that Sigurjóna’s description had been less than kind, he still thought of her as the fat policewoman.
The anonymous Toyota sprang eagerly into life and he sat in thought with his hands on the wheel. Horst had done his best, but even a man with influence can hardly work miracles, so this gave him a couple of days to lie low before he could make an exit. He wondered if it would be better to hide away, if somewhere suitable could be found, or if it would be worthwhile trying to derail the search for him.
Without having consciously made a decision, he swung the little car on to the main road and followed it for a short distance before slowing to take the exit road that would take him through the lava fields towards the coast.
Outside the station, Gunna puffed a hurried Prince cadged from Bjössi with her phone at her ear.
‘Sigrún? Hi, Gunna.’
She waved Bjössi away as he appeared through the fire door, mugs in one hand, a cigarette packet in the other.
‘Sure. Yup. Thank you, Sigrún, that’s very kind of you. Yup, something of a panic right now and I can’t begin to tell you anything about it. Top secret.’
Bjössi held out a mug and Gunna took it in her free hand.
‘OK. Thanks. No problem, I’ll see you in the morning. I’ll speak to Laufey and let her know. Great, bye.’ She thumbed the red button and finished the call with relief.
‘All right, sweetheart?’ Bjössi asked with concern.
‘Yeah. Nothing that can’t be sorted out. Just fixing up childcare.’
‘Laufey? How old is she now?’
‘Thirteen.’
‘Teenager yet?’
‘Getting there, but I’m sure there’s worse to come.’
‘You could send her to us if you need to. Dóra wouldn’t mind at all.’
‘Thanks, Bjössi. I might well take you up on that.’
She took a gulp of coffee. ‘But Gísli came home yesterday and he’s got ten days off, so Laufey thinks that big brother is all the supervision she needs and the two of them will rub along just fine without Mum.’
‘And can’t they?’
‘Bjössi, my old and dear friend. Gísli is nineteen and he’s been at sea for weeks. I’m sure you can imagine that babysitting his little sister is not his top priority right now.’
‘Sorry. Should have known. The boy probably has beer and girls on his mind.’
‘Exactly. Now, if you’ll excuse me I’ll call Laufey and try to explain that to her and why she’s staying with Sigrún down the street until Mum’s little panic at work is sorted out.’
Darkness was starting to fall as Hårde parked the Toyota outside the deserted school and waited without being sure what he was waiting for. There was no car parked outside the terraced house, although there were
tyre tracks in the mud. No lights could be seen at Hafnargata 38 and Hårde decided to leave it until it was fully dark before making a move.
He huddled low in the seat and was sure he was unlikely to be observed as a woman in a heavy coat and rubber boots splashed up the street and went direct to number 38, opening the door and stepping inside without having to unlock it. Hårde waited and wondered if this were the right house, or if the new arrival were a friend or a relative, or even the fat policewoman’s girlfriend? It wouldn’t surprise him, he thought with a dark smile.
The door swung open again and this time the woman walked back down the street, accompanied by a gangly teenage girl with a schoolbag under one arm. This time Hårde stepped from the car and followed at a discreet distance, observing as the pair walked downhill, clearly enjoying a lively conversation, before disappearing into a low-slung house set back from the road behind an untidy garden of stunted trees.
Hårde smiled to himself and walked back in the growing gloom of the evening. Warm lights appeared at most of the windows in the street and he could make out television screens behind most of them. This was reassuring, as people who are busy watching a soap opera don’t tend to look out of their own windows.
He opened the door of Hafnargata 38 with a single swift movement of a strip of flexible plastic and stepped inside, clicking the door to behind him.
***
It was close to midnight when the whole team assembled again in the incident room. Bára, Snorri and Gunna were haggard after the long day.
Bjössi was his usual self. He always looked as if he had just woken up, regardless of whether he had been on his feet all day or had just started his shift.
Gunna was surprised to see Vilhjálmur Traustason still on his feet. His face was paler than usual and Gunna guessed that he hadn’t closed his eyes either.
‘So,’ Gunna began, flexing her fingers in front of her and yawning. ‘He’s given us the slip. He was undoubtedly at Keflavík airport this afternoon and either we didn’t get there in time, or else he saw us coming and slipped away. We’re pretty sure we know how and I’m positive that half-strangling that poor Danish bloke was a red herring. With Vilhjálmur’s agreement —’ she gestured towards Vilhjálmur Traustason standing by the back wall near the door with the brooding presence of Ívar Laxdal at his side — ‘we have informed the media and a report was carried on every TV news report this evening, with a photo of Hårde, and an announcement that members of the public should not approach him. It’ll be in every newspaper in the morning as well,’ she added. ‘Anything else?’
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