Blackout

by Ragnar Jónasson

  Helga answered after a couple of rings and Ísrún breathlessly gave her name.

  ‘How did you get this number? I’m in a meeting and I can’t answer questions now,’ Helga said quietly, the sharpness of her tone conveying her irritation at being disturbed.

  ‘This is an emergency, life or death,’ Ísrún said, making every effort to keep her satisfaction to herself.

  ‘What? Wait a moment, I’ll go outside.’

  ‘You’ll have to let my cameraman be there. Us and nobody else,’ Ísrún said, ashamed of herself for wasting precious seconds.

  ‘No promises,’ Helga said. ‘But I’ll do my best.’

  ‘I have a reliable source…’ Ísrún said, wondering how to word what she wanted to say. ‘This is someone who tells me that Elías was involved in people trafficking, and…’ she began and then paused.

  ‘Trafficking? Well, dammit. I was hoping we’d never see that here…’ Helga said.

  This is going to be a hell of a story, Ísrún thought to herself, her commentary already half written in her mind.

  ‘It seems he brought a young woman to Iceland. Did you know?’

  ‘Yes, there was a passenger who came to Iceland on the same flight as Elías from Denmark,’ Helga said guardedly. ‘The same person had accompanied him from Nepal to Denmark. A girl. They didn’t have adjacent seats, so there was no direct connection, but we noticed it when we checked the flight lists. We haven’t been able to trace her so far. We’re only a small team who’ve been working on this, I’m afraid, but you keep that to yourself.’

  ‘My source is convinced that Elías has locked her away somewhere. She was supposed to be held until some contact of his collected her – and paid for her,’ Ísrún said.

  ‘Locked away? Where?’ Helga asked. ‘And who’s your source?’ she demanded.

  ‘You know I’m not going to give away a source. This person said that he didn’t know where she is. But I suspect that she’s in an apartment that Elías owned in Akureyri,’ Ísrún continued carefully.

  ‘He didn’t have a place here. We’d have known about it,’ Helga replied shortly.

  ‘He didn’t register the place in his own name. It’s registered to a company owned by his former wife,’ Ísrún said, and quickly spelled out the address.

  ‘Thanks. We’ll be right there. Anything else?’

  ‘No, but let me know what happens. I’m on my way,’ Ísrún said, but Helga had already ended the call.

  Ísrún got into her car, and pulled away at speed, taking the road to Akureyri.

  Ignoring any concerns for her own safety or rules about using phones while driving, she made a call to María.

  ‘Yes. Hello, Ísrún,’ María said. ‘I was trying to get hold of you earlier.’

  ‘I need a cameraman in Akureyri right now,’ Ísrún told her, speaking fast and hoping that nothing would be lost. ‘The police are on their way to rescue a girl Elías locked up in his apartment there. He brought her from Nepal a few days ago and was going to sell her on to a prostitution ring – here or somewhere in Europe.’

  ‘What?’ María yelped. ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I’ve informed the police and the source is reliable. We don’t know exactly where she is, but they’ll be starting the search at Elías’s place in Akureyri any minute. We need to get our stringer there right away,’ she said, her voice strained. ‘OK to call him out?’

  ‘Do it.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Ísrún said. ‘Why were you trying to reach me?’

  ‘Nothing special,’ María assured her. ‘Just get yourself there.’

  Ísrún didn’t need to be told twice and ignored every speed limit as she pushed the car as hard as she could.

  Her next call was to Móna. Before she had left her they had exchanged numbers. Ísrún had told her to call whenever she needed any kind of support.

  ‘I had a thought,’ she said as soon as Móna picked up. ‘There might be a way for Logi and Jökull to admit to the murder, if that’s what it comes to, without bringing you or the baby into it. Elías was involved in people trafficking and he had brought a girl from Nepal to Iceland to sell her on. This is information that won’t be made public right away. If Logi and Jökull talk to the cops tonight and say that this was the reason behind the murder – that they were trying to save the girl – then I reckon it would sound credible.’

  Móna listened in silence.

  ‘Thanks. That’s interesting,’ she said after a moment. ‘I’ll talk to the boys and see what they say. But you’re right. It’s probably the only way out.’

  ‘You need to act quickly, though,’ Ísrún said, thinking of the desperately sad woman with the baby growing inside her. ‘I know it’s hard, but you have to do it right away if it’s going to work.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know…’

  Móna sounded hesitant, so Ísrún decided to press her.

  ‘You can tell them I told you. But, please, please my name can’t be brought into this. And no one must know what Elías did to me.’

  ‘Of course. I’ll make sure they know. Thank you, Ísrún. I really mean it.’

  Sometimes Ísrún’s own flexible attitude to the truth was something that took her by surprise, but she decided that this time the end justified the means.

  20

  ‘I’m expecting a friend,’ Kristín had said in her email. A friend? The message didn’t say a male friend, but Ari Thór had a good idea what she meant.

  He and Tómas were at the case review meeting in Akureyri. Helga from CID was taking charge in her usual efficient manner, but now she had gone out to answer a phone call.

  Not much had come out of the meeting that was new. The police had interviewed Ríkhardur Lindgren, and the thinking was that, directly or indirectly, the case was unlikely to have anything to do with him.

  Ari Thór’s thoughts were entirely on Kristín, however. Knowing that she was so close by, in the same town, meeting some other man, was an agony for him.

  Did this simply confirm that everything between them was over? Was this the painful reality he was going to have to face? Or was she just playing some kind of game with him – trying to make him jealous? Or perhaps she was waiting for him to take the initiative?

  He didn’t feel that was likely. What he really wanted to do was bang on her door, right now, this evening, interrupt whatever was going on and tell her that he wanted her back. He would apologise in person, face to face.

  That way she’d have to choose one of them or the other.

  He pushed his thoughts aside. Of course he would never do anything like that.

  Helga came back into the meeting room. Her face was taut and serious. Something had clearly happened.

  ‘There’s an aspect to the case we have been exploring that I need to explain,’ she said with an awkward expression on her face. ‘We’ve been trying to track down a girl who travelled from Nepal to Iceland on the same flights as Elías. We haven’t been able to trace her, but I’ve just had confirmation that she did accompany him to Iceland, in connection with a people-trafficking ring.’

  She paused to let her words sink in.

  ‘Elías was holding her when he died, probably in an apartment in Akureyri. She has more than likely been locked in there for forty-eight hours, if not longer.’

  It would have been possible to hear a pin drop in the room.

  Helga broke the silence. ‘I’ve already dispatched an ambulance and a squad car in the area to the location. Now we need to be there right away.’

  Ari Thór was on his feet in an instant. For now Kristín was forgotten.

  For once, Ari Thór was in the driving seat before Tómas got to the car. He had no intention of being the last one on the scene, which would be a definite possibility if Tómas was behind the wheel.

  ‘I doubt we’ll be able to do much for the poor girl, my boy,’ Tómas said as Ari Thór put his foot down. ‘We don’t need to rush.’

  The house stood on its own on the edge of town
. It was a gloomy, neglected building. The ground-floor windows had been boarded over and upstairs the curtains were drawn.

  Ari Thór drew up outside and was out of the car in a flash. There was already an ambulance in front of the house, as well as several police cars and an old station wagon with a TV station’s logo on the side. The flashing blue lights underscored the urgency of the situation. He noticed a cameraman filming without interference.

  Helga was standing to one side, waiting.

  ‘Do we have a warrant for this?’ Ari Thór heard a police officer from Sauðárkrókur asking Helga.

  ‘There’s no time,’ she said, her voice hard. ‘I’ll take responsibility.’

  21

  The little apartment Kristín had rented in Akureyri was on the ground f loor of a charming old house in a quiet neighbourhood, not far from the college, the same college where her mother had studied many years before.

  Kristín’s mother had become an architect and her father had worked for a bank. Now her parents had moved to Norway, both having lost their jobs in the wake of the financial crash.

  Kristín missed them, and she intended to visit them if she could get enough time off work. She had protested unconvincingly when they had told her of their plans, but she could hardly complain. She had moved out of Reykjavík herself and visited them all too rarely. There was no work for her mother in the capital, or for any other architect for that matter, and she had been offered a well-paid position in Oslo. Most jobs overseas now seemed to be well paid in comparison to the weak state of Iceland’s currency.

  Her father had found a position with another bank in Reykjavík, one that had risen from the ashes of the crash, but that was only a temporary post. And anyway, he was keen to make a change following the financial crisis. So now he was working for a small company in Norway that provided financial consultancy to the maritime sector, a field he had specialised in at the bank.

  They had visited Kristín at Easter, bedding down on mattresses on the floor of her little living room.

  ‘You’ll have to find somewhere bigger,’ her mother had said with her habitual forthrightness, which often bordered on the hurtful. ‘This place is too small for a doctor and it’s terribly bare.’

  The last thing Kristín wanted was to fill the place with junk. She liked the place as it was. There was a single picture on the living room wall, a poster for Casablanca, her all-time favourite film, with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. The sofa and chairs set around a modest wooden table had come from a second-hand shop. She hadn’t put up bookshelves and her books were stacked on the living room floor, her library consisting almost entirely of medical textbooks.

  The kitchen table had come with the flat and, like the rest of the fixtures and fittings, it was showing its age. The kitchen was Spartan, demonstrating how little time the flat’s occupant spent there. Kristín preferred to eat at work, where the canteen always offered decent midday and evening meals. Her shift rota meant that she could normally eat both lunch and dinner there. Apart from that, she relied on fast food, taking care to keep to the more healthy varieties.

  Now Kristín sat at the kitchen table opposite the widower. They were perched on worn green stools and sipped red wine while the roast cooked itself to tenderness in the oven.

  ‘I didn’t time it right,’ Kristín said in a voice that was both warm and apologetic. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve had time to cook like this. It’s going to need another half an hour.’

  The man smiled. His face was sharply chiselled and his hair shaded with a touch of grey.

  In the short time she had known him, they had hardly mentioned previous relationships. It seemed to be a topic they were both anxious to avoid. She certainly had no wish to talk about Ari Thór, and he seemed reluctant to say anything about his late wife.

  They clinked glasses for the third time that evening over the guttering tea lights on the table.

  22

  Helga was holding an impromptu conference outside Elías’s apartment. Ari Thór and Tómas stood among the other police officers and listened.

  The cameraman kept his camera running until Helga asked him to switch it off while she talked to her colleagues. He was reluctant to do so, but agreed to step back when she promised him that he would be the first to get an update on the situation.

  ‘I’d have arrested that guy with the camera,’ Ari Thór whispered to Tómas, who grinned in reply. It wasn’t often that he saw a smile on Tómas’s face these days.

  The cameraman stopped recording and walked away, although Ari Thór was certain he was still close enough to hear most of the conversation.

  ‘The girl isn’t here,’ Helga said, even though this hadn’t escaped any of them. ‘It could be that the reporter’s source was leading us up the garden path, or maybe the unfortunate woman is locked away somewhere else. If that’s the case, then we’re on borrowed time, as you can well appreciate. We need to go over everything right away, and work out what other potential locations there might be. This means interrogating Elías’s friends and colleagues again – by phone if there’s no other option,’ she said. ‘Although we didn’t find the girl,’ she went on, ‘we did find what look to be stolen goods in there.’

  Helga began to assign specific tasks to the Akureyri officers. When she reached Ari Thór and Tómas, she said,

  ‘You need to talk to your people – Elías’s colleagues in Siglufjörður: Páll and Logi, and the foreman at the tunnel.’

  ‘That’s Hákon,’ Tómas said. ‘Hákon the Herring Lad.’

  Helga stared at him, baffled.

  ‘I’ll call Hlynur,’ Ari Thór said. ‘He’s on duty. He’s not up to speed on this case, but we need to work fast.’

  He dialled Hlynur’s mobile and listened to the phone ring, doubting, however, that a contribution from Hlynur would be any kind of help. When Hlynur failed to answer, he called the police station’s direct number. But there was no answer there either.

  ‘That’s weird,’ Ari Thór muttered. ‘I can’t reach him.’

  ‘What the hell?’ Tómas’s scowl showed both his anger and embarrassment.

  Helga looked over. ‘Did I just hear that you can’t you reach anyone at Siglufjörður station?’ Her tone made her disapproval clear. ‘What kind of shambles is it over there? You two had better go straight back,’ she said, without waiting for a reply. ‘And when all this is over, I want a full explanation of exactly why there’s no one on duty. This is not acceptable.’

  ‘We’re on our way,’ Tómas said shamefacedly, walking hurriedly towards the car.

  But Ari Thór stayed where he was. A sudden idea had rooted him to the spot.

  Helga had left two key people out of the list of contacts she thought they should talk to in Siglufjörður: Jói the artist and Jónatan. Ari Thór hadn’t yet told Tómas about his conversation with the strange, prematurely aged Jónatan, with his painfully bent back. Thinking about him now, in front of Elías’s empty house, Ari Thór felt certain his instinct was right.

  ‘I think I know where the girl is,’ he said out loud.

  ‘What? What do you mean?’ Tómas boomed, almost running back from the car. ‘Out with it,’ he ordered, making Helga spin around.

  ‘Elías spent his summers in the country when he was a boy, on a farm not far from here – in Skagafjörður. It’s abandoned now. He must have known his way around there. Where better to hide someone than an abandoned farm nobody ever goes near?’

  ‘Hell and damnation, why didn’t you say so before?’ Helga snapped, her eyes flaring with anger.

  This wasn’t quite the positive response Ari Thór had expected; no thanks or a pat on the back.

  ‘You know where the farm is?’ Tómas asked.

  ‘No. But I know who does,’ Ari Thór said, already looking up Jónatan’s number.

  Ísrún was speeding towards Akureyri, doing her best to keep the car on the right side of the road. She had no intention of slowing down, though; this kind of sco
op didn’t turn up every day, and she was determined not to miss it. She drove the same route that had brought her to Siglufjörður, the Low Heath road. The stretch she was on now was an unmade dirt road and more than once she was sure that she was about to lose control of the car.

  Her phoned buzzed. She picked it up with one hand, struggling to keep hold of the wheel and control her spinning tyres with the other.

  ‘Where are you?’ the cameraman from Akureyri asked urgently.

  ‘On the Low Heath road.’

  ‘Then turn round,’ he told her. ‘The girl wasn’t in the place in Akureyri. They reckon she’s in some abandoned farmhouse in Skagafjörður. We’re on our way there.’

  She slammed the brakes on and was thrown forward in her seat. The cameraman was reading out instructions for where she needed to go. She repeated them back, using all her journalist’s skill to quickly memorise the location.

  ‘OK. I’m on my way,’ she said, trying with difficulty to turn the car around one-handed in the middle of the narrow dirt road. ‘Don’t lose sight of them! This is going to be a hell of a story!’ She was almost yelling into the phone.

  She finally managed to complete her manoeuvre with a bad skid, and headed back the way she had come, putting her foot down so that a trail of dust rose up behind the car in the still summer air.

  ‘You should have mentioned that before,’ Tómas said in quiet voice, as Ari Thór took his place in the driving seat.

  Ari Thór didn’t reply. Why was he being criticised? Hadn’t he just sorted the case out for them?

  They were on the way out of town when he stamped hard on the brakes. As they always did when he was in Akureyri, his thoughts went to Kristín and a terrible thought occurred to him as he recalled what Natan had told him.

  She met him playing golf. He’s older and his wife died.

  The thought came to him with sudden, sickening realisation. A year and a half earlier, he had been caught up in a serious dispute in Siglufjörður with a man who had been cleared of one murder but who had undoubtedly committed another one, although that could never be proved. The description matched perfectly. He was somewhat older than Kristín. His wife had died and he had moved to Akureyri, as far as Ari Thór knew. This was a man who had never had a problem with women, a character who blended charm with a lack of scruples – a dangerous mix. He certainly bore Ari Thór a grudge and had been forced to leave Siglufjörður after rumours about him appeared in the press – rumours that could be traced to Ari Thór.