Chilled to the Bone

by Quentin Bates

  ‘Hey, Jóel Ingi,’ Katrín grinned as the waiter placed tiny cups of Icelandic coffee in front of them to smother the subtle sushi flavours. ‘Chelsea v Spurs on Saturday. I’m sure you’ll be glued to that, won’t you?’ she joked. ‘Spurs to win, you think?’

  Jóel Ingi lifted his eyes to smile back at her and shook his head, about to speak. But as he looked at her laughing eyes and past her through the restaurant windows, a familiar parka and baseball cap combination strolled along the opposite side of the street, stopped to look into a shop window and carried on.

  ‘Shit! I was joking about the football,’ Katrín said in alarm as the colour drained from Jóel Ingi’s face and the coffee cup stopped an inch from his lips.

  Seconds after leaving Skúli so he could return to editing the next week’s TV listings, Gunna had her phone to her ear. She was relieved that the continuing snow promised by the deep grey clouds brooding a scant few feet above the rooftops of downtown Reykjavík was holding off releasing its payload.

  ‘Eiríkur? Hi, Gunna,’ she said needlessly, as if Eiríkur had not already seen her number appear on his phone. She was cursing herself for not having spent the previous evening looking through Hróbjartur Bjarnthórsson’s file, but Gísli’s bombshell had pushed everything else out of her mind, and she reminded herself that first Laufey would have to be told of her big brother’s predicament, and then the rest of the family. She wondered if her elder brother Svanur had yet been told of his stepdaughter’s pregnancy, and the circumstances.

  ‘Chief? You there?’ Eiríkur asked, concerned. Gunna realized that her phone was at her ear while her mind was elsewhere.

  ‘Sorry, Eiríkur. Brain’s gone to mashed potato today,’ she said, smothering her growing irritation at herself and trying to concentrate. ‘Look, priority. No messing about. Jóhannes Karlsson’s wife must have been told by now. I want access to his bank details as soon as possible, preferably within an hour. Any unauthorized transactions and all that. You know the score.’

  ‘Anything suspicious?’

  ‘Anything out of the ordinary, especially anything yesterday, considering he was probably dead around lunchtime. Understand?’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘But quick, Eiríkur. There are more people than just us sniffing around. OK?’ Gunna instructed, putting her phone away and approaching the hotel, where a bulky man with a black frown on his face was huddled in a padded coat, smoking a cigarette under the ‘No Smoking’ sign.

  ‘This is a non-smoking zone,’ she snapped and the man glared back at her, took a final pull and flicked the butt into the slush in the gutter.

  ‘How would you like to mind your own business?’ he invited and quailed as Gunna opened her wallet in front of him.

  ‘City police,’ she said in the same sharp tone as before. ‘I believe you wanted a word with me. You are?’

  ‘Hákon Hákonarson,’ he said once they were inside the hotel’s lobby. ‘My wife works here and she was questioned twice yesterday. I just wanted to make it plain that this is unjustified and it’s not right for you people to harass her like this.’

  Gunna nodded in agreement, suppressing the dislike that she’d instinctively developed for this corpulent man and his pompous manner. ‘If she had been interviewed twice, then I might agree with you, but there was one short interview and that was all. Where’s your wife right now?’

  ‘At home with a headache,’ Hákon retorted in a sullen voice, like a child scolded for someone else’s misdemeanour.

  ‘And where do you live?’

  ‘Vallarholt. Number 87.’

  ‘And you drove here, did you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Gunna felt in her pocket for her keys. ‘Well, if you go now, you’ll be there before me.’

  Hákon looked stunned. ‘You think you’re going to interview her again?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘She’s had two interviews already,’ he protested.

  ‘That’s as maybe. But she’s only spoken to a police officer once and I’d very much like to know who she spoke to after she left this place yesterday.’ She made to go. ‘So I’ll see you in about half an hour, Hákon. All right?’

  Valeria looked ill while Hákon fumed in a corner. The flat was spotless, with not a single one of the many china statues of ballerinas and puppies out of place. Gunna felt nervous about sitting down and ruining the careful arrangement of cushions on the sofa, so she perched on the edge instead.

  ‘Not feeling well, Valeria?’

  ‘It’s OK. I don’t have a shift today, so I’m not missing work.’

  ‘Let’s track back, shall we? You found Jóhannes Karlsson’s body in his room at the hotel, right? I understand that you shouldn’t have done. According to the rules, your supervisor should have gone into the room first.’

  ‘That’s right. Ástrós is worried about it. There will be an . . .’ She floundered, searching for the right word.

  ‘Investigation?’ Gunna offered.

  ‘Yes. Investigate. Soon.’

  ‘I’ve a good mind to take the damned hotel to court and demand damages,’ Hákon rumbled, unable to contain his indignation any longer. ‘It’s a damned disgrace that their staff should have to put up with this kind of thing.’

  ‘Quite,’ Gunna said shortly, pointedly ignoring Hákon and concentrating on Valeria, who was sitting on a hard-backed chair.

  ‘I’m not having it, you know,’ he continued, failing to take the hint. ‘The last time this happened—’ he stopped suddenly. Gunna looked at Valeria, who was staring at her husband in horror.

  ‘The last time this happened?’ Gunna asked, breaking the long silence that followed his furious outburst. ‘Just what do you mean by that? Explain, will you?’

  Valeria sighed. ‘At Gullfoss Hotel once. I only work there two months, the week I start there. Before that I was working at Harbourside Hotel. Two times at Harbourside.’

  ‘Owned by the same company,’ Hákon put in. ‘They asked her to switch because Gullfoss needed more reliable staff when they took it over.’

  ‘Ástrós also. She work for these hotels for twenty years. First Arctic Hotel, then Harbourside. Then to Gullfoss. Same company for a long time. Now there are mistakes, problems, and she is worried. Not easy to find work for fifty-year-old lady.’

  ‘What happened at the Harbourside Hotel? And how long ago?’

  Magnús yawned. The doorbell chimed insistently for the third time and he hauled himself out of bed and shuffled towards the front door of the flat. He had only lived there for a few weeks and there were still boxes in the hall that needed to be unpacked.

  He ran a hand through his hair, scowled at the boxes and reflected that if Sara had moved in with him instead of going back to her parents, all the crockery and ornaments would have been put in cupboards and on shelves weeks ago.

  Peering through the spy hole, he could see a middle-aged man in blue overalls with his finger on the doorbell button again, as he yawned and scratched his beard with the other hand.

  ‘Who is it?’ he called through the door.

  ‘Maintenance. There’s a water leak somewhere in the building and we’re checking all the bathrooms.’

  ‘There’s no leak here,’ Magnús called irritably.

  ‘What? I can’t hear you?’

  He could see the man on the other side cupping one ear and Magnús cursed at having had to move to a cheaper apartment with no intercom.

  ‘Plumbing,’ the man called out again. ‘Got to check the valves. It’ll take two minutes.’

  Magnús groaned and considered going right back to bed, but in the end he gave way and opened the door to let the man and his toolbox inside.

  ‘Where’s your bathroom, pal? Sorry to disturb you. It won’t take long.’

  Magnús scratched under the baggy T-shirt he slept in and walked ahead of him along the passage. ‘In here. But there’s nothing wrong here,’ he began, and yelped in surprise as the man pushed him forward in
to the bathroom, looked around quickly and put a hand firmly onto Magnús’s shoulder. A second later he was lying in the bath, dazed and with blood running down his face, wondering how the rim of the bathtub had flown up and hit his nose. The man’s hand felt huge as it descended on his face, stifling the howl of alarm that welled up inside him as his mouth was filled with a foul-tasting ball of cloth.

  With a knee planted firmly in the small of Magnús’s back, the man bound his hands together with swift movements and a roll of tape, completing the task before his victim had even realized what was happening. Magnús kicked out as the man grasped his feet to bind those as well, and was instantly rewarded with a merciless jab in the ribs that left him gasping and cross-eyed with a pain he could hardly have imagined.

  The man smiled and nodded, as if satisfied with his own handiwork. He leaned over him and spun the taps; ice-cold water poured into the tub, blending with scalding water that reeked of sulphur. The bulky man sat on the edge of the tub and lit a cigarette, gazing down sadly like a father contemplating a naughty child. Magnús wondered what he had done and spluttered to mumble past the ball of cloth in his mouth.

  ‘Not a word. Understood?’ The man reached forward and gripped his shirt to spin him onto his back. He then delicately pulled from his mouth what Magnús recognized as a pair of his own underpants, taken from the washing basket by the door. He felt instantly sick and sour vomit cascaded down his chest as he retched while trying desperately to protest his innocence.

  ‘Shhhh,’ the big man said. ‘Magnús. You’re not going to cause any fuss, are you? Of course not. Because if you do . . .’ A hand swept forward, gripped the hair of his fringe, shoved his head beneath the surface and held it there until bubbles began to appear, before hauling him back up. Magnús gasped and barely managed a lungful of air before he was back below the surface. He writhed and a maelstrom of bubbles broke the surface. The big man counted to three and hauled his head back up while Magnús gasped and retched, shuddering as he gulped down precious air.

  ‘As you can see, Magnús, I’m not playing any games. You can see that, can’t you?’ The man asked in a warm, avuncular tone, as if regretting that things had come to this.

  ‘I haven’t done anything . . .’ Magnús groaned, too drained of energy to offer resistance.

  ‘Let’s just say that you haven’t done anything that you’re aware of, shall we?’ The man smiled. ‘A woman showed up at your hotel yesterday morning. Tall, blonde, grey dress. What’s the scam and who’s in on it? Talk.’

  Magnús hesitated. The man grasped a handful of hair and again propelled Magnús below the surface, to reappear what seemed like half a lifetime later with a gasp and the words tumbling out of his mouth.

  ‘I don’t know, I swear. It’s nothing to do with me and I just saw her come in and go up to the room,’ he gabbled, the words tripping over each other in his desperate haste to explain before his head was thrust below the surface again.

  ‘All right, Magnús. Now, you tell me when she left. How long did she stay in the hotel. Whose room did she go to?’

  ‘It was 406. There was a businessman in there. There was a phone call at reception at about twelve o’clock to say that there was someone in 406 who was in trouble and would we send one of the staff to check, and that it was urgent. I went up there myself and there was a guy who had been tied to the bed. That’s the truth, and I didn’t see the girl again. She went in but I didn’t see her leave.’

  ‘And the guy who was in the room?’

  ‘He was packed and gone about ten minutes later.’

  ‘You checked CCTV to see if she had left, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, of course. But I didn’t see her anywhere. She disappeared.’

  The man stood up and Magnús could see him thinking. ‘The victim. Name?’

  ‘Haraldur, I think.’

  ‘Whose -son?’

  ‘I . . . I’m not sure.’

  Again his head disappeared below the surface of the water.

  ‘Any ideas?’ The man asked.

  ‘Samúelsson, I think. From out of town somewhere.’

  ‘He settled his bill and left?’

  ‘He’d paid for the room in advance.’

  The man nodded slowly. ‘You know, Magnús? You’re working this afternoon, aren’t you?’ he asked and continued without waiting for a reply. ‘You’re going to go to work as usual and you’ll get a phone call a few minutes after four, which is when you’re going to give me this guy’s name, address, phone number and his credit card number as well. You can get all those off the computer system, can’t you?’

  Magnús nodded, prepared to agree to anything that involved not being drowned in the bathtub of a cheap rented flat.

  ‘You’ll also go into the phone records and get me the number of the phone that called to tell you this guy needed some help upstairs. Understood?’

  ‘I’m not sure I can—’

  ‘Do it,’ the man said in a cold, hard voice. ‘I’m not going to play games. I know where you work. I know where you live. I know where your girlfriend lives. You get my drift? And if anyone else asks you about this shit, you don’t know anything.’

  He stood up and picked up his toolbox. Magnús strained against the tape holding his wrists as the man made for the door. ‘Can you . . . ?’ he pleaded.

  ‘Use your teeth, can’t you?’ the man replied with a smile that was even more unnerving than his scowl. ‘It’s only sticky tape. It’ll give you something to do while you think through what we’ve been talking about.’

  It took Gunna an hour to tease just part of the story out of Valeria in a session that came to a halt halfway through when she ordered Hákon out of the room. Without her overbearing husband present, Valeria had spoken more freely, but Gunna could see that much of what she said was hearsay and gossip. A hard worker, she had only been at the Gullfoss for a few months after its new owners, who owned several hotels in and around Reykjavík, had acquired it and set about modernizing its systems and standards. One of the city’s older and more respected hotels, the new owners wanted to smarten it up discreetly and make it more efficient, but without losing the patina of age and respectability that their more trendy hotels lacked. Staff from the other hotels had been brought in to start making those changes. Ástrós had been promoted to a supervisor’s job when she was transferred from the Harbourside Hotel and chose Valeria as the hardest worker to go with her.

  Gunna wanted to track down Ástrós and push her harder than she had the previous day now that it had virtually been confirmed that Jóhannes Karlsson’s experience had not been a one-off – apart from its abrupt ending.

  She stalked back into the lobby of Hotel Gullfoss at three, hoping that Ástrós would still be around. There she found her and two men struggling to remove the bed from the room that Jóhannes Karlsson had died in the previous morning.

  ‘It has to go,’ she panted as she hauled the mattress out of the door. ‘Policy. Someone kicks the bucket in the hotel, everything in that room has to go. Just as well it doesn’t happen too often. I’ll be right back.’

  ‘It’s just as well the forensic team had finished in there,’ Gunna said, half to herself, as Ástrós shuffled along the corridor with the mattress behind the two men carrying the bed’s frame. There were a dozen black bin bags that Gunna presumed contained the curtains, bedding and anything else from the room, which now looked stripped. A shadow of clean red carpet marked out where the bed had been, and showed just how old the carpet was.

  Gunna peered at her phone, found Albert’s phone number and listened to it ring. To her surprise, it was answered after only a few buzzes.

  ‘Albert.’

  ‘Hæ. Gunna. Any news? Sorry. I know it was only yesterday.’

  ‘I thought you’d seen the directive,’ Albert said caustically.

  Suspicious, Gunna was immediately on her guard. ‘Directive? Who from?’

  ‘Upstairs. Due to budgetary restrictions forensics are now only able
to attempt to perform miracles on even dates between one and five, weather permitting.’

  ‘Sorry, Albert. Of course I saw that, but I didn’t think it applied to you. Look, I’m in this room that you went over yesterday. It’s been stripped so I hope you got everything you needed.’

  ‘Yup, and I can tell you the name of the person who left that hair in the wash basin.’

  Gunna was silent for a moment. ‘Already? I thought getting DNA analysis results took weeks? Go on, then. Make my day.’

  ‘Barbie.’

  ‘Barbie?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Albert laughed. ‘Barbie. It’s not real hair. It’s fake, from a wig. Plastic hair.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘So we reckon it’s either Barbie or Elton John. Take your pick,’ he said and paused. ‘Are you a bit slow today, Gunna? A blonde moment or a senior moment?’

  ‘Ach. Sorry, Albert. No, just a bit preoccupied. There’s a lot going on at the moment.’

  ‘I know. Knitting booties . . .’

  ‘Get away with you,’ Gunna retorted, and found that the reminder was not a welcome one. She stifled the urge to yell at Albert. ‘Do you reckon you can get any more information from that hair, whatever it is?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I’ll have a stab at figuring out what the material is and you might be able to track down the supplier, that’s assuming it was bought in Iceland and not abroad.’

  ‘Yeah, or through eBay or something. It could have come from anywhere.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Albert said and she could hear the sound of voices behind him as his attention was no longer on what she was saying. ‘There can’t be that many wig suppliers in Iceland, surely? But that’s your department, something for the detectives to detect.’

  ‘That’s as maybe. But we only perform miracles on special occasions these days, unlike you guys, who have to come up with them every other day.’