Chilled to the Bone

by Quentin Bates

  With Jóel Ingi’s trail gone cold, she told herself that she could pick it up later, either from his home or the ministry, and the tracker she’d discreetly stuck inside a wheel arch meant that his trail could be picked up whenever she felt like it. The instinct developed during years spent in uniform told her the Hyundai would be worth tailing in the meantime. This time she was ready. The brown car toiled up the slope and the venerable Renault, sharp and well looked after in spite of its age, was quick enough to keep up at a respectable distance.

  She followed it through the thickening afternoon traffic as it seemed to go aimlessly through the city and out the far side towards Kópavogur before joining the main road to Hafnarfjördur. She watched the Hyundai make a slow circuit of the harbour area, encountering locked dock gates several times before it occurred to her that the driver was lost.

  Finally it stopped at the side of the road in an industrial area, parking between a couple of trucks outside a row of small fish-processing plants. The little factories were deserted, the day’s work over by mid-afternoon and the staff long gone, but leaving tubs of waste outside for the gulls to peck and gnaw at. She wrinkled her nose at the aroma of stale fish that the breeze brought and closed the car window as she parked a hundred metres behind the Hyundai and waited.

  After a while it occurred to her that she might be in for a long wait, telling herself it could be uncomfortable sooner rather than later. There were no lights to be seen in the Hyundai and she wondered what the driver was doing. She slipped out of the car, zipped her parka up to the neck and pulled on a baseball cap that she hoped would hide her face, walking away from the Hyundai and taking a short cut between two buildings into the street higher up, conscious that this could be a mistake. The man could decide to move off at any moment, leaving her unable to follow quickly enough.

  Walking briskly around the corner, she completed a circuit by striding back towards her car, taking care to stay on the opposite side of the road, thereby giving her the opportunity for only a very quick view of the Hyundai, where she was relieved to see its occupant with closed eyes, the seat laid back as far as it would go.

  Satisfied for the moment, she walked smartly back to the Renault, looking about her rapidly to see if she’d been observed, and side-stepped between two shipping containers. Dubious about the cold, but left with no choice, out of the wind and out of sight, she unzipped, squatted quickly and emerged relieved a moment later to take her place in the Renault, where she switched on the radio, told herself that she was now good for the rest of the day, and waited for the Hyundai’s occupant to wake up and move off.

  Ægir Lárusson was unamused and Már Einarsson was visibly agitated at his side.

  ‘Jóel Ingi Bragason is on sick leave. He was taken ill last night.’

  ‘So he’s in hospital, is he?’ Gunna asked. ‘Which one?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Már said stiffly. ‘As far as I’m aware, he’s at home.’

  ‘What’s his address?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that. It’s confidential.’

  ‘Oh, come on. It’s not going to be that hard to find out where the man lives. You may as well tell me and save me going through the national register.’

  Már looked at Ægir, who gave the tiniest nod of assent. Már wrote a few lines on a notepad and tore the top sheet off, handing it to her.

  ‘Classy address,’ Gunna said. Standing behind her, Helgi heard his phone chime and she registered him raising an eyebrow as he read the text message. ‘I’m wondering what does Jóel Ingi’s sudden illness have to do with this mysterious laptop that you were so anxious about a few days ago?’

  Már looked anxious and flashed a glance at Ægir, who forced a smile. ‘Officer, I don’t know exactly why you are suddenly so interested in a matter you were asked to investigate some time ago. It’s not as if the police were particularly enthusiastic then.’

  Gunna held his gaze as he tried to stare her down. ‘I don’t know either. But I’m not a great believer in coincidences. I get the impression that Jóel Ingi is out of his depth and that neither of us has the full story. I certainly don’t believe the ministry has been entirely open on this. Far from it, in fact. I’d say that we’ve been asked to clear up your mess, but without being given the correct information.’

  Ægir frowned. ‘There are things I’m not at liberty to divulge.’

  ‘That’s up to you. But without the facts, there’s not a lot we can do. On the other hand, it may well be that the ministry’s security is compromised. Tell me, what does Jóel Ingi do here, exactly?’

  Már coughed. ‘He works with me. We’re part of a team that carries out analysis and prepares digests for policy development.’

  ‘Tell me that’s more than watching foreign TV news reports?’

  ‘Of course it is,’ Már snapped.

  ‘So he, and you, are dealing with sensitive or confidential data?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘Like what?’

  Már looked at Ægir, who pursed his lips and shook his head. ‘Where is this going, officer?’ he asked wearily.

  ‘What I’m after is some kind of background information that could tell me if Jóel Ingi is being pressured or even blackmailed. What kind of information is he working with?’

  ‘Trade figures, mainly. Analysis of exports from countries that compete with our industries. That’s his main role at present.’

  ‘What about his personal life? He’s married? Children?’

  ‘He’s married, no children.’

  ‘Hobbies? Activities? Clubs? Politics? Friends?’

  Ægir sat back and his eyebrows twitched. Már looked blank. ‘He works out a lot. Fitness is important to him. When I go to the gym, he’s normally either there already or on the way. Politics? I don’t think he takes an interest. At least, not an active one. He doesn’t have many friends, as far as I know, not after he left the bank.’

  ‘What? Explain, will you?’

  ‘He used to be a legal adviser at one of the main banks before the crash. He left the bank about six months before everything went wrong, so I don’t know if he’d seen it coming or what, but he got out and applied for a post here instead. I gather most of his friends were in the banking sector and pretty much cut him off after the crash.’

  Gunna looked squarely at him without saying anything until Már’s hands fluttered. ‘I really don’t know why. I suppose they resented the fact that he’d managed to get out with clean hands and a few million stashed away. There were never any questions about his role at the bank. He wasn’t called in by the winding-up committee. As far as I’m aware, he came away from it with his hands clean.’

  ‘And his personal life?’

  Már shrugged. ‘I really don’t know. He doesn’t have close friends. I suppose I’m the closest thing he has to one,’ he said haltingly. ‘Although . . .’ he tailed off and paused.

  ‘Although what?’ Gunna prompted.

  ‘I’m not sure his marriage is all that stable. He’s devoted to Agnes, but it’s quite a stormy relationship. They can both be pretty volatile and I’ve seen them practically fighting one minute and in each others’ arms the next.’

  ‘Understood,’ Gunna said, making notes before turning to Ægir Lárusson. ‘This laptop you’re so keen to retrieve. What’s on it that’s so important?’

  ‘You’re not security cleared. All I can say is that it contains sensitive data.’

  ‘Just who is going to be inconvenienced if this sensitive stuff leaks out? Jóel Ingi? You? Someone higher up?’

  Ægir scowled and his face flushed. ‘I’m not at liberty to say. All I can say is that we consider it important that this information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.’

  ‘And whose hands would those be? The press? Another ministry? The opposition?’

  Ægir shoved his chair back. ‘That’s all I have to say,’ he said abruptly.

  As he put the phone down and the panic started to rise again, Jóel Ingi saw his
phone flash a second time. While he hoped that it was Agnes calling to heal the rift between them, he knew deep inside that an apology would have to come from him first.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, answering the call even though his instinct had been to ignore it.

  ‘Hæ, my name’s Skúli Snædal and I’m a journalist at the Reykjavík Voice,’ he heard and froze. ‘Hello?’ the voice continued. ‘Hello, is that Jóel Ingi Bragason? Are you there?’

  ‘I’m here,’ he said after a long pause. Fatigue seemed to have eaten its way deep into his bones as he closed the car door. ‘I’m sorry. This isn’t a good moment. Can it wait until tomorrow?’

  ‘I have an allegation from a foreign human rights group that four asylum seekers arrived in Iceland in 2009, but that they weren’t processed in the usual way and were instead immediately put on a flight leaving the country. Can you confirm that this was the case?’

  Jóel Ingi heard a buzzing in his ears that almost drowned out the sound of the man’s voice. He felt a sense of removal, as if he were looking down on himself from above.

  ‘It’s not something I can comment on,’ he said.

  ‘That’s a shame, as we have been given copies of emails that appear to have been sent from your ministry email address, implicating several officials and confirming that a transfer could take place at Keflavík airport, where these four people were placed on a military flight leaving that same evening. Are you telling me this didn’t happen?’

  He sighed. ‘I’m sorry. I really can’t comment.’

  ‘Was the minister aware of this?’

  ‘I told you, I can’t comment. Listen, I’m not well. I’m on sick leave right now. You need to contact the ministry about this, not me.’

  ‘I’ll have to say that you declined to comment, and that you’re implicated personally.’

  ‘You need to speak to Ægir Lárusson. Do you want his personal numbers?’

  She almost missed the Hyundai move off and had to accelerate hard to keep it in sight as it rounded the corner. She bullied her way into the road, ahead of a pickup truck whose driver flashed his lights angrily at her, and put her foot down in spite of the icy road, praying that the nails in the tyres would keep her from sliding. As darkness fell, the frost accompanied it. The air was so cold that her first breaths almost hurt and the road under the Renault’s wheels crackled as the water on it became glassy ice.

  Her eyes were glued to the Hyundai’s lights as she watched it drive along the Hafnarfjördur seafront before taking the road back towards Reykjavík. With two cars between them, she waited at the lights, pulling away fast and taking note as the mud-coloured car swung sharply right and drove through yet another industrial area, this one a series of workshops and offices. As the car stopped on the forecourt of an empty workshop, she cruised past to the end of the road, did a quick U-turn and came slowly back, stopping outside a pizza place in the middle of an untidy knot of badly parked cars.

  She reached down and picked up a small pair of binoculars from the pocket in the door, confident that she couldn’t be made out by the Hyundai’s driver as she focused them on the brown car and its occupant, his elbow resting on the wide-open driver’s window as he scanned the road. Her heart beat faster as a second car pulled up alongside it, and she recognized the black Audi, and Jóel Ingi getting out of it to walk towards the Hyundai.

  She desperately wanted to know what words passed between them, as well as what was in the package that went from Jóel Ingi’s hand and disappeared inside the brown car. A moment later Jóel Ingi was gone. The Audi was speeding away, too fast for her to follow, but his trail could be picked up later.

  She wondered what was going on as the Hyundai headed out of town in the steady stream of rush-hour traffic, northwards past Mosfellsbær, and she decided that anything north of the tunnel under Hvalfjördur would be far enough.

  Staying just far enough behind to keep the mud-brown car in sight and trying to keep at least one car between the two of them, she saw it overtaken by a grey van as it slowed and pulled off the road into a lay-by occupied only by a dormant roads-department bulldozer. She slowed down as well, dropping her speed low enough to see the driver hunched over the wheel, his phone to his ear.

  She kept her speed as low as she could, watching the mirror for the brown car’s reappearance, but she saw nothing. She decided to give up, and at the Kjalarnes turnoff she slowed down and pulled into the middle lane, disappointed that she’d wasted the best part of an hour on a futile trip out of town and determined to get back to the job of tailing Jóel Ingi, which had now been made more difficult by the fact that she would have to remain out of sight.

  She stopped at the Kjalarnes petrol station, pulling up by the pump and taking the opportunity to fill the car’s tank. Inside the shop she bought a newspaper, a sandwich and a bottle of water as a belated lunch, deciding to take a break, but was surprised to see the mud-brown Hyundai appear on the forecourt. Instead of coming into the shop, the car nosed up to the drive-by service window, where the driver, his face partly hidden by a hood, ordered a hot dog and a bottle of fizz, which were handed to him by the bored boy behind the counter.

  As the car pulled away, she dropped her sandwich onto the seat beside her and followed, trying to keep the same discreet distance as before. This time the man with the scarred face took a detour around Kjalarnes, stopping for a few minutes at the far end of the village with the engine running as the driver stared at an old house a little way outside the settlement. After a few minutes, he turned back the way he had come to the main road and, worryingly, again headed north. With the tunnel entrance approaching, she decided the chase had to be cut short, and slowed down in order to use the turnoff for the old Hvalfjördur road the tunnel had replaced for a U-turn. The Hyundai did the same. Keeping it as far ahead as she could without losing sight, she watched it slow down and turn off.

  She wondered why he was going along a road that was only occasionally cleared of snow and which would lead to nowhere but a few isolated farms and summer cottages. Deciding that the Hvalfjördur road would be too much for the Renault, she watched the Hyundai’s lights disappear into the distance, before turning back to town, and the job in hand, wondering about the significance of the old house at Kjalarnes.

  Gunna rubbed her eyes with the heel of each hand. She shook herself and went through a list of numbers. Frustrated, she called a number and was rewarded with a ‘this number is not available’ message, with no invitation to leave a message of her own. She drummed the desktop with her fingertips and instead dialled Pétur Steinar Albertsson’s home number, listening to it ring a dozen times. She was about to put the phone down when there was a click.

  ‘Er . . . hello?’

  ‘Hello, my name’s Gunnhildur and I’m with the city police force. I’d like to speak to either Pétur or Hekla, if either of them are home.’

  ‘There’s nobody here. Just me.’

  ‘That’s a shame. Are they going to be long, do you know?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘Is that Sif I’m speaking to?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s me,’ was the surprised response. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I’m Gunnhildur. I really need to speak to your dad or to Hekla. It’s important.’

  ‘I don’t know where they are. Why don’t you call the mobile?’

  ‘I would if I had the number.’

  ‘Wait . . .’

  Gunna drummed the desk with growing impatience as a muffled conversation could be heard in the distance before Sif returned.

  ‘You there?’

  ‘I’m here.’

  Sif reeled off seven digits and Gunna wrote them down and repeated them.

  ‘Is that your dad’s phone or Hekla’s number?’

  ‘It’s hers. Dad never goes anywhere, so he says he doesn’t need one.’

  ‘Who’s there with you, Sif? You said you were alone.’

  ‘My friend,’ she retorted. ‘What’s it to do with you, anyway?’


  ‘No reason. Just wondering. Thanks, bye.’

  She quickly dialled the number Sif had given her, comparing it to the communications division’s list as it rang, nodding as she recognized it as one of the numbers Baddó had called that afternoon.

  ‘Hæ. This is Hekla. I can’t take your call right now, so leave a message. Thanks.’

  Gunna put the phone down in disgust.

  ‘Helgi, why the hell do people never answer their mobile phones?’ she demanded.

  ‘Beats me. My kids tried that for a while, not answering when I called.’

  ‘Do they still do it?’

  ‘Nope. I told them that as I was paying for their phones, if they didn’t answer when I called they could pay for their own airtime. Why? Laufey being awkward?’

  ‘Not at all. It’s Hekla Elín that I’m trying to get hold of. No reply, blast her. Are you off?’

  ‘I am, and so should you be, chief. It’s getting late.’

  ‘I’ve a good mind to drive out to Kjalarnes and sit by her front door until she turns up.’

  ‘You should be going home.’ Helgi said firmly, snapping his glasses into their case. ‘It’s late and we’ve been here since we were called to the hospital at some ungodly hour of the morning. Remember?’

  ‘Was that really today? It feels like it was weeks ago.’

  ‘It feels like I’ve spent a week on that idiot Hólmgeir Sigurjónsson’s paperwork, and I have to say I feel I’ve done the community a service having locked that waste of skin up.’

  ‘Yeah. Until a magistrate pats him on the back and tells him not to do it again.’

  ‘Well, there is that, I grant you. But if you’re going out to Kjalarnes, then I’ll go with you.’

  Gunna shook her head. ‘Go home, Helgi. Let’s pack it in for the day. I’ve asked for a uniformed patrol to run out to Kjalarnes a couple of times tonight to check there’s nothing untoward going on there.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve been trying to track the bloody woman down all day and haven’t been able to get hold of her, and I can’t help feeling there’s some part of all this that we haven’t figured out yet.’