Chilled to the Bone (18 page)

H
ARALDUR
S
AMÚELSSON WAS
already sweating when Gunna rapped on the door and went in without waiting for an answer. He reminded her of the frightened reception she’d got at Hermann Finnsson’s flat the day before; she hoped that Haraldur could be persuaded to be more forthcoming.

“G’day,” she offered, extending a hand that Haraldur took and shook firmly. She could see instantly that he was nervous as he sat at his desk and began fiddling with the cable that connected his iPhone to the socket. “I appreciate your finding time on a Sunday.”

“Not a problem. The managing director seems to work seven days a week anyway. What can I do for you? I’m afraid I really don’t have anything to tell you.”

Gunna sat opposite Haraldur and wondered how far she could push this man before he either cracked and told her everything he had ever done or else closed up and refused to say a word.

“Look, Haraldur. I know you stayed at the Harbourside Hotel and had an unfortunate experience there. I can understand that it’s embarrassing and that you don’t want anyone to know, but I’ll be entirely straight with you. This is a delicate and increasingly serious investigation in which your part is probably very small. I’m not even slightly interested in prosecuting you for whatever minor indiscretions you may have committed. Is that clear?”

Haraldur stared back at her in virtual disbelief. “You mean …?” He began, fumbling for the right words. “Not a word to anyone?”

“More or less. Tell me the whole story.”

“And you really are from the police?”

“I am,” Gunna confirmed, laying her warrant card on the desk, with the two screen-grab printouts from Hotel Gullfoss next to them. “Do either of these look familiar?”

She saw a tremor pass through Haraldur as his eyes opened
wide at the sight of the pictures, and she knew immediately that she was on the right track. He slumped into his chair once the initial shock had passed.

“That’s her.”

“Sonja?”

“That’s what she calls herself.”

“I’ve a fairly good idea what happened. You were tied up and then she disappeared with your wallet?” Gunna asked and Haraldur nodded.

“How come you were tied up?”

“Because I asked her to,” he said in a small voice that sounded incongruous coming from a man in a suit; his face was bright red.

“And was there a payment involved?”

“No. No money. I paid for the room, that’s all.”

“So she ties you up, which I suppose had been arranged, and once you’re unable to move, she takes your money and runs? Why didn’t you shout?”

“Oh, God,” Haraldur moaned. “There was gag as well. It’s a domination thing. There’s a scene …” he said and his voice tailed off for a moment while he took a breath. “A few of us like to experiment sometimes.”

“Pardon my asking, but your wife …?”

His expression stiffened. “A few years ago she liked to, er, experiment as well. After a while she stopped enjoying it, I suppose. I don’t know. It’s not something we talk about now.” He sighed and caught his breath. “She’s a teacher. It wouldn’t do if … if someone were to recognize her, and Akureyri is a small town.”

“Does she know that you still take part in this kind of activity?”

“She suspects.”

“You make a habit of this?”

“It’s rare. Once in a while if I have to go to Reykjavík. Not here. Like I said, it’s a small town.”

“There’s no ‘scene’ here?” Gunna asked.

Haraldur squirmed in his seat and Gunna reminded herself that humiliating the man, however easy that might be, was something to be avoided.

“There are people in Akureyri who are part of the scene, some of them much more extreme than the stuff Svava and I used to dabble in,” he finally admitted after an internal struggle. “But it’s difficult.”

“So this stuff gets taken out of town?”

“Exactly.”

“And how much did Sonja sting you for?”

“Just over a million.”

“A million? Good grief. How did she manage that?”

Haraldur sighed at the painful memory. “Two debit cards and a credit card. She must have milked the cards as hard as she could until they wouldn’t dispense any more cash, and then she did some shopping as well, using the credit card. Jewelery, judging by what I could see when I checked my account online.”

“I need to see that. But how did she get the PINs for your cards?”

“Simple, I guess. She wanted the PINs and said that if the cards worked, then she’d call the hotel after an hour and tell them that someone in such-and-such a room was in trouble. If the PINs didn’t work, she wouldn’t bother and probably nobody would go into the room until the next morning,” he explained in a hollow voice. “And then there were the photos.”

“Photos?”

“Yes. She took a couple of pictures.”

“Of you tied up?”

“Yes. So you can understand why I wasn’t keen to talk to you …” he said, his voice fading away again.

Gunna’s phone buzzed and she looked at the screen, noticing to her surprise that she had spent almost half an hour in Haraldur’s company.

“Excuse me, I have to take this,” she apologized, stabbing the green button. “Helgi, a bit busy at the moment. Call you back?” She could hear the wind whipping Helgi’s voice away as it roared and faded in her ear. “Where are you?”

“Near the quarter-mile race track. Give me a buzz back when you’re free. It looks like we’ve got Magnús Sigmarsson.”

Gunna sensed the tension from Helgi’s end, and looked over at Haraldur, who had taken the opportunity to check his own phone.

“But not in a good way, I take it?”

“Nope. Stone dead. Broken neck’s my guess.”

“Hell and damnation. All right. I’ll call you when I’m finished here. I’ll be back this afternoon at any rate.”

“Right-o, chief,” Helgi said, and Gunna could hear that his attention was elsewhere with another voice calling his name as the connection closed.

“Sorry about that,” Gunna said, frowning, as Haraldur put his phone down on the desk. “Now, tell me how you made the connection with Sonja. I don’t imagine that’s her real name.”

“I have no idea. That’s definitely her, though,” Haraldur said, tapping the pictures Gunna had left on his desk. “Where were those taken? At the Harbourside?”

“I can’t tell you where they were taken, but they were taken the same day.”

“She’s an attractive woman,” Haraldur said with a wistful look on his face.

“So how did you arrange to meet? Why the Harbourside?”

“There’s an internet site, personal.is. That’s where a lot of people on the scene make contact. She was on there. I sent her a message, got a reply and we arranged everything that way without having to speak. She decided when and where, told me to book a room at the Harbourside Hotel and instructions on where to be.” He shrugged. “So that’s what I did, and look where it’s got me,” he added with the first note of bitterness in
his voice. “My wife doesn’t need to know about this, does she? I mean, after the phone calls and everything …”

“What do you mean, calls?” Gunna asked sharply. “I called you once yesterday. Has anyone else been in touch you about this? Sonja, maybe?”

“Er … no,” Haraldur said, flustered. “No, it’s just that …”

“Just what?”

“The Harbourside guy who called, he said I shouldn’t speak to anyone else about this.”

“Who was that? Símon?”

“He said his name was Jón, that’s all, and that I shouldn’t speak to anyone else about all this. But considering you’re from the police, I thought I’d best not hide anything,” he said, the confusion apparent on his broad face. “I hope I haven’t done the wrong thing.”

I
T WAS STILL
a pleasant surprise not to wake up in a metal cot on a mattress that was too thin. Baddó stretched and yawned. María had already gone, leaving him with the flat to himself. He swung his legs out of bed, furrowed his eyebrows as he saw that there were two missed calls on his phone from a withheld number and wondered who it could be. Probably Hinrik, he reasoned, knowing that the man changed his business number every few weeks to another anonymous pay-as-you-go number.

Yawning, with the percolator spitting in the background and the radio on, he sat at María’s computer and waited for it to start up. It hadn’t taken him long to learn how to use it and he was already wondering about getting a faster model of his own. There was one message waiting in his inbox.

Sorry. I’m retired. Good luck elsewhere. Sonja x

He quickly typed a reply, his jaw set as he tapped with two fingers.

Hæ again. Could you call me, please? I’ll make it worth your
while
, he wrote, adding his phone number, and hit the send button. As he cupped his chin in his hands and thought what to do next, the radio newsreader burst into his thoughts.

“Police have not yet commented on the person believed to have been found on waste land south of Hafnarfjördur this morning. There is a strong police presence in the area following the discovery early this morning of a body, but no details are yet available,” he heard, immediately furious. “The national women’s handball squad returned today from …” the newsreader continued until Baddó snapped the radio off. Shit, damn and blast, he thought, hardly believing that Magnús Sigmarsson’s body could have been discovered quite so soon and realizing that the car now parked outside, which had been so useful yesterday, had become a liability that would have to be smartly disposed of.

S
TANDING OUTSIDE
H
ARALDUR
Samúelsson’s office, Gunna punched in the number that he had extracted from his phone and listened to it ring until finally the “number not available” tone began, by which time Andrés had bumped his squad car across the car park.

“How’d it go?” He asked as she gave up calling the number and dropped her phone into her lap. “Where to now?”

“Straight back to the airport, if you would be so kind. Something’s come up and I need to get back quickly.”

“Weren’t you going to see someone else?”

“I was, but that’ll have to wait until later,” she said grimly. “We have a body out by the quarter-mile track, and it’s to do with this case I came up here for; suddenly it’s looking rather more serious than it was an hour or two ago.”

M
ERCIFULLY, THE RAIN
had held off. Under a plastic tent erected over a deep fissure in the lava rocks, Gunna looked at the remains of Magnús Sigmarsson lying twisted into
an impossible position half out of sight, the visible part of him illuminated by harsh lights fed by a chattering generator.

“Who found him?”

“Someone out walking his dog this morning. The dog found him.” Helgi sniffed, the beginnings of a cold thickening his voice. He shivered inside his thick coat, a woollen hat pulled down close to his bushy eyebrows, which dripped with moisture. “I sent the dog owner and his dog home,” he added.

“What do the forensic gurus say?”

“Apart from moaning about being asked to come out here in this weather on a Sunday? Too early to say, but I’d bet anything you like his neck’s broken. You just have to look at the way his head’s twisted around.”

Gunna shuffled her feet, aware that water was seeping into her shoes.

“What we need to know is if it was broken before he landed down there, or was it the fall that did it, and when?”

“Yup,” Helgi agreed. “That’ll do it. How was your morning in Akureyri?”

Gunna shook her head. “The poor guy was scared shitless, didn’t know what was happening to him. I just had to write it all down and now I need a few hours of peace and quiet to sort this out.”

“Does any of it make sense yet?” Helgi asked.

“You know,” Gunna said, wondering what to say, “so far, no. Jóhannes Karlsson had a heart attack and died. That’s simple enough to work out and there’s no foul play involved as far as I can see. There’s no evidence of any kind of violence, and the post-mortem confirmed it was a genuine heart attack, which wasn’t exactly a surprise in an elderly man with a history of heart problems.”

“And this guy?”

“I know. It’s weird, isn’t it? There’s nothing to link the two. Elderly man croaks from natural causes under odd circumstances,
while a young man looks like he’s been murdered, and if he wasn’t, how the hell did he get out here?”

“Not related?”

Gunna shrugged her collar higher. “They shouldn’t be related. There’s nothing to link the two, but there’s so much else happening around these hotels that the whole thing stinks,” she said as Helgi nodded gloomy agreement. “Now there’s a body I reckon we’ll be giving this priority and overtime shouldn’t be a problem.”

Gunna looked around, as if expecting to see the stocky form of Ívar Laxdal looking over her shoulder; she was almost surprised to see he wasn’t there.

T
HE PROBLEM WAS
transport. Baddó decided that getting rid of the car somewhere out of the way would be no great problem, but there was no way he was going to ask for help from anyone, least of all from that thieving shyster Hinrik. He would have taken the chance of using Magnús’s car for a few more days with its carefully switched number plates, but now the police would be looking at murder, driving the Golf was a risk he didn’t want to take. Besides, he could hear that a wheel bearing was about to wear itself out, and being stranded somewhere in the broken-down car of a murder victim would be unfortunate, to say the least.

Already nervous about what he had in mind for it, he walked downtown, past the bars and eateries that had sprung up in the city center during his years away. The Gullfoss Hotel looked inviting and the warmth of the lobby hit him like a fist planted in his chest.

“Good evening,” the odd-looking man behind the desk greeted him.

“Hi,” Baddó responded. “The bar’s open, is it?”

“It is. But it’s quiet tonight. It’s still early.”

“Quiet will do nicely,” He grinned. “For the moment.”

The man smiled and gestured with a hand to the hotel’s bar with its long window looking out onto city life outside, not that there was much life so early on a weekday evening.

The odd-looking man with the heavy tortoiseshell glasses appeared behind the bar just as Baddó placed a hand on it, looking around at the small number of drinkers already sat at tables here and there.