Chilled to the Bone

by Quentin Bates

  ‘Good. Excellent. I have a candidate in mind.’

  ‘You do?’ Eiríkur asked, startled.

  ‘I do. I have a few things to do for ten minutes, so I’d like you to check with forensics and see if there’s anything on that car. If it’s Magnús Sigmarsson’s car, I want to know, and preferably yesterday. Think you can manage that?’

  ‘Yeah, of course.’

  Gunna rummaged through a tray of papers on her desk and handed Eiríkur a file.

  ‘Once you’ve done that, get yourself back down to Grandi, find Egill Skafta, and show him that picture.’

  Eiríkur looked at the photo of Hróbjartur Bjarnthórsson, looking into the lens as if the man behind the camera were beneath contempt. ‘You reckon this is him?’

  ‘As usual, Eiríkur, I have no idea. But if it’s not him, then we need to start looking for someone else.’

  ‘An old friend of the police?’

  ‘You can read it later. But he’s more than an old friend of ours. He’s one of us, sort of.’

  ‘How come?’ Eiríkur asked, perplexed.

  ‘He was almost a police officer once, back in the nineties. What went wrong, I don’t know, but he completed police college and then decided he didn’t want to join the force after all.’

  ‘The phone’s registered to Pétur Steinar Albertsson,’ Gunna told Ívar Laxdal without any explanation.

  ‘Something to do with Magnús Sigmarsson, is it?’ he asked in a grumpier tone than usual. ‘I have a press conference in half an hour and by rights you should be there as well, Gunnhildur. I’ve already had calls from two newspapers and TV today asking if there’s any progress, and I’m going to have to give them something.’

  ‘I’m concerned about this character who’s been shadowing everything we do.’

  ‘You have a stalker?’

  ‘Someone who has an interest in Jóhannes Karlsson’s death pumped some of the Gullfoss Hotel staff for information.’

  Ívar Laxdal’s single thick eyebrow that stretched across his face thickened as he frowned. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’

  ‘I wasn’t sure. I’m still not sure, but it’s becoming clearer.’

  ‘Jóhannes Karlsson and Magnús Sigmarsson’s deaths are linked, you reckon?’

  ‘There are too many links for comfort,’ Gunna said thoughtfully. ‘I didn’t think so at first, and I was sure that his girlfriend’s father had a hand in it. But now I’m confident we can rule him out. He didn’t like the lad, but not enough to want to kill him.’

  ‘So what the hell’s going on?’

  ‘My guess is that someone else has an interest in Jóhannes Karlsson’s death, and in finding the woman who was with him, which is exactly what we’ve been trying to do. I have a suspicion who this person might be, and it’s the first link to someone else who might be involved.’

  ‘What do you want to do?’ Ívar Laxdal asked, looking at his watch.

  ‘Ten minutes ago I was tempted to go charging in and haul this Pétur Steinar Albertsson into the station. But now I’m more inclined to sit back and watch.’

  Ívar Laxdal nodded. ‘Do that. Find out every last bit of information you can about the man first. But don’t hang around. There’s pressure from all sides to get this wrapped up.’

  ‘Where from, exactly?’

  ‘The ministry; the commissioner; the press; Jóhannes Karlsson’s family, who are discreetly pressuring the minister through their MP. You name it,’ he grumbled. ‘I’ll see you in the morning, but you can see me on TV this evening. It’ll probably be the fourth or fifth item, right after the city not being able to afford any more snow clearance until the year after next.’

  There was a spring in Baddó’s step. He parked María’s car carefully, as it would never do to have to admit that he’d scratched his sister’s Ford’s paintwork, even if it was an old wreck. He had celebrated his conversation with Hekla, or Sonja as he still thought of her, even though she was now a flesh-and-blood person, with a visit to Krónan on the way back to town, where he’d bought some pork that he was already looking forward to hearing sizzle under the grill. A bottle of wine would complete the evening, but he’d keep that for Ebba later.

  He toyed with the idea of having a word with Hinrik to try and find out a little more about why someone found Sonja so interesting, and what it was that was so valuable, but he decided that a night owl like Hinrik needed to be approached first thing in the morning when his senses were dulled with vodka and homegrown grass, not with evening drawing on and his mind still relatively fresh.

  Baddó locked the car, put the key in his pocket, zipped it up and hefted a carrier bag in each hand as he pushed open the door of the apartment block. Once he’d made a bit of money, he’d get María somewhere better, he thought, hearing the outside door click shut. He stiffened as a second click immediately alerted his senses.

  ‘Hæ, Baddó. Long time since you’ve been seen around here.’

  He spun round to confront the soft voice, and as he looked into the shadow of the stairwell, a stocky figure emerged and a hand grabbed his collar from behind just as a swinging kick swept his feet from under him, sending him sprawled face down. The wine bottle smashed on the concrete floor and its aroma flooded the lobby as it soaked into the dust.

  Baddó thrashed furiously as a knee was planted securely on his neck and one arm was wrenched high up his back.

  ‘Stay still, Baddó. No point in arguing, is there?’

  He thought fast. These weren’t cops. The police would have cuffed him by now. He lay still for a second and could hear someone leaning over him. There had to be two of them. Or maybe three? With his cheek crushed to the floor in a rivulet of wasted Chilean merlot, it was hard to tell.

  With a feeling of dread, he recognized again the metallic click that had alerted him to start with. It took him by surprise that the cut as it sliced into his cheek wasn’t painful. It was only once the carpet knife’s blade was clicked home again that he felt it begin to sting as drops of blood dribbled onto his lips and the floor, mingling with the rich red wine. He blinked sweat out of his eyes and screwed his head round as far as he could to get a sight of his attackers, but he saw only faded combats and black boots.

  ‘This is payback from an old friend, Baddó,’ the soft voice hissed in his ear, cut short as a burst of cold air told him the outside door had opened. He could feel the pressure of the knee in his back relax as its owner was distracted. Baddó twisted with all his strength, taking the man by surprise as he rolled and kicked out. He took in the shocked face of the elderly woman from the flat below María’s in the doorway, staring at the tableau in front of her.

  ‘Shit—’ the soft voice snarled, momentarily distracted and giving Baddó an opportunity to scrabble for the remains of the wine bottle, pulling himself onto all fours and catching hold of it by the neck just as the smaller of the two men barged the woman to one side and was gone. Baddó was fast enough to swipe with the smashed bottle at the heavier, slower man as he followed his friend out and was rewarded with a howl of pain and surprise as the glass slashed deep into fabric, skin and muscle.

  Baddó leaned on the door frame and watched as a blue 4 × 4 that had seen better days skidded to a halt and the two men tumbled into it, one trailing drops of blood into the snow behind him, the leg of his trousers already soaked with blood, his face alight with agony and alarm.

  The elderly woman picked up her shopping bags.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked once he’d managed to steady his breathing as his legs turned to jelly beneath him.

  ‘I’ll be all right, young man,’ she replied in a voice of schoolteacher severity, ‘but you aren’t.’

  Gunna yawned and looked at her watch, startled to find that it was long past the end of her shift. Eiríkur and Helgi were already long gone, both of them only too happy to escape the office. Gunna cursed herself for being tempted to do just a few things that had since eaten up almost two hours of her own time.
/>   Nevertheless, a stack of routine paperwork had been dealt with, either signed and sent on or returned, or else consigned ruthlessly to the bin overflowing behind her. On top of that, she had already identified the occupant of the house at Kjalarnes that the phone number belonged to. A quick call to the communications division confirmed that the mobile phone belonging to the man she knew of only as Jón had remained stubbornly silent. It had been switched off following that single call earlier in the day and it had stayed that way.

  Gunna tapped her teeth with a pencil and wondered how Haraldur Samúelsson and the mysterious Jón were connected to Pétur Steinar Albertsson. A search through police records showed that Pétur Steinar had a criminal record with convictions for vehicle theft, drunkenness in a public place and a little housebreaking. Gunna looked at the dates and frowned to herself. His record had been clean for more than twenty years, which meant that she was most likely looking at a series of youthful indiscretions.

  Moving to the vehicle register, she flashed up Pétur Steinar Albertsson’s driving licence and saw a picture taken ten years earlier of a thickset man with heavy five o’clock shadow and laughing eyes. Gunna moved to the national registry and found Pétur Steinar Albertsson, Hekla Elín Hauksdóttir, a teenage girl and two toddlers with identical dates of birth. She compared dates of birth and decided that the teenager could, at a stretch, be Hekla Elín’s child, but that it was more likely that Sif Pétursdóttir was the result of an earlier relationship on Pétur’s part.

  Looking back at the police records, she saw that Hekla Elín had a drugs conviction for a minimal amount of cannabis more than a dozen years ago; Gunna calculated that the woman would have been nineteen at the time. There was nothing since, other than a solitary speeding ticket and a fine paid promptly. Neither he nor his wife had fallen foul of the law for a long time and there was no reason to expect that either of them had done anything wrong. Smiling humourlessly to herself, Gunna reflected that one of her colleagues in particular would have observed in his usual foghorn voice that once a criminal, always a criminal, and would advise her to drop down on the family in Kjalarnes from a great height and with maximum manpower.

  Not that I’m inclined to take Sævaldur Bogason’s advice on anything, she said to herself softly. Out of curiosity she went to the vehicle register and typed in Hekla Elín’s name. The computer hesitated and a photograph of Hekla Elín finally appeared. Gunna frowned at the sight of the young woman, whose picture had presumably been taken when she was around twenty. A distinctive long face and toothy smile looked back at her; Gunna quickly rooted among the papers on her desk, lifting up the CCTV photo of blonde Sonja next to her monitor.

  The face had filled out in Hekla’s thirties, with cheekbones that gave it character, and the dark brown hair and fringe that framed her youthful face had to be taken out of the equation and replaced by the blonde version, but the line of the jaw and that distinctive nose with its slight kink were convincingly similar.

  So there you are, Sonja, Gunna breathed to herself, sorry that she was alone in the office, with neither Eiríkur nor Helgi there to share her discovery. She wrote down the phone numbers that she’d extracted easily enough from the online phone book, and made notes of the registration numbers of the red Toyota and the antique Land Rover, both of which were registered to the address, before shutting down her computer.

  It can wait until tomorrow, she decided, wondering whether or not it would be worth a quick drive out to Kjalarnes to check out the neighbourhood, but immediately telling herself not to be stupid. Half an hour or more to Kjalarnes, the same back, plus the hour’s drive home to Hvalvík would see her arriving home close to ten o’clock, and as Steini had promised to be back from wherever he was working at a reasonable hour, it would be worth being home on time at least once in a week.

  She pulled on her coat and zipped it up in the lift, preparing herself for the cold shock of the car park after the warmth of the office, and wondering if she would find time to read the records she had printed out.

  Shoving open the door, she scrolled through the numbers on her mobile and dialled, listening to the phone on the other end buzz once.

  ‘Comms.’

  ‘Hæ, Siggi. Gunnhildur.’

  ‘I know. I recognized the number. We are supposed to be the communications wizards, after all.’

  ‘Apologies for underestimating you, in that case. Listen, do me a favour, would you?’

  ‘I never say yes without knowing what it is first,’ Siggi laughed.

  ‘It’s all right. It’s not your body I’m after.’

  ‘That’s a relief.’

  ‘You cheeky young pup. Just keep an eye out for that number, would you?’

  ‘Yeah. Will do. I’ve been monitoring it, but it still hasn’t been switched on.’

  ‘OK, thanks. Just send me a text it if it pops up, can you? All quiet, otherwise?’

  She heard Siggi yawn on the other end of the phone as she opened the car door.

  ‘Yeah. Not a lot happening on a night like this. There was a fight of some kind an hour ago and the victim’s in casualty having his face sewn up. Quite nasty, I’m told.’

  ‘Not something for me to deal with? Not tonight, anyway?’

  ‘Nope. Uniform are dealing with it. The guy’ll be in hospital until tomorrow at least. Something for you to look forward to.’

  ‘Oh, joy. Hoodlums fighting over a bit of dope, I expect. I’ll see about it tomorrow. G’night.’

  ‘Sleep well, Gunna,’ Siggi replied, yawning again. ‘Another four hours and I can go as well.’

  Steini put down his book and clicked off the television. Gunna lay on the sofa, her eyes closed and with the reports she had promised herself she’d read in disarray on her chest. The place was blissfully quiet for once after an awkward few days with Drífa among them.

  Gunna knew that the girl felt uncomfortable there, but guessed that the flat she was sharing in Reykjavík with a gaggle of first-year university students had also become less comfortable as her pregnancy progressed. Gunna had tried to probe gently and find out if Drífa intended to return to her parents in the Westfjords town of Vestureyri, but understandably the fear of small-town gossip and notoriety meant she had no desire to go home to her mother and stepfather. She wondered if the girl were waiting for Gísli to come home, but there were still more than three weeks left before he returned from sea – the second to last trip he had planned before Soffía was due to give birth in April. Even more worryingly, Gunna wondered if Soffía would let Gísli back into the little flat they had rented in Kópavogur, raising the spectre that the lad might have to come home to his mother as an emergency measure.

  Steini knelt next to her and lifted the papers, squaring them neatly and laying them on the table. Concern registered on his face as he saw Gunna frowning to herself in her sleep.

  ‘Hey, sleepyhead.’

  When there was no response, he stroked the tip of one finger down her cheek and was rewarded with a bleary eye opening.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘It’s tomorrow, and some of us have to get up in the morning.’

  ‘Tomorrow, as in after midnight?’

  ‘Yup, coming to bed?’

  Gunna yawned and lifted herself up on one elbow. ‘Can’t you just bring me a duvet and I’ll go back to sleep here?’

  ‘You’re telling me to sleep alone?’

  ‘You should be so lucky,’ she said, swinging her feet to the ground. ‘It’s a cold night and I don’t want to freeze to death before morning.’ She yawned. ‘Where are the girls?’

  ‘Laufey’s babysitting for Sigrún while she has a date with some new man, and Drífa went with her.’

  ‘Steini, are you all right?’ Gunna asked, noticing the more than usually serious expression on his face.

  ‘Yeah, fine.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound convincing to me. What’s the problem?’

  Steini shifted from squatting uncomfortably to sitting on the flo
or. ‘Well,’ he said in an awkward tone.

  ‘Well, what?’

  ‘I was just wondering if I’m, y’know, up to the mark?’

  Gunna wrinkled her forehead in incomprehension. ‘What are you driving at?’

  He cleared his throat awkwardly. ‘You see, it’s like this,’ he said and paused, while Gunna looked expectant.

  ‘For a man who normally gets straight to the point, you’re not doing a great job.’

  ‘All right, then. I was using your computer yesterday and I saw your browser history.’

  ‘And what about it?’

  ‘I couldn’t help but see that you’d been looking through personal.is a lot. I’m just wondering if there’s something going on that I should know about?’

  Perplexed and still half asleep, Gunna realized Steini’s predicament. ‘Ah, you mean you’re wondering if I’m up for a threesome or looking for a like-minded, discreet couple, or if I fancy trying out riding crops and leather underwear with studs on the inside?’

  Steini coughed, embarrassed for the first time since she’d known him. ‘Well. Yes, I suppose that’s what I’m asking.’

  ‘In a good way or what?’

  ‘You mean would I be interested in all that stuff? A threesome with a nineteen-year-old who waxes his chest or a horny housewife from down the street? Actually, no. I was just wondering if there might be something I wasn’t doing right.’

  Gunna yawned, stretched and sat upright on the sofa. ‘That’s good, because if you were expecting an interest in fluffy pink handcuffs, then I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed. My trawl through personal.is is purely work-related as that’s where it seems a now-dead punter made his arrangements to meet a potential witness we’re trying to track down. That’s about it,’ Gunna said, yawning. ‘And that’s about all I can tell you as well.’

  She studied his reaction and was relieved that he didn’t seem visibly disappointed.