Chilled to the Bone (3 page)

“This was the four who …?”

“So it would seem.”

“Shit. What do you know? What do they know?”

Már slowed his pace; he obviously had no intention of reaching their destination too soon. “I’m not sure. But they decided to tell us this, which is what makes me wonder. You realize the implications, don’t you? There could be heads on blocks all over, starting with yours and mine, and all the way up from there.”

“But we did what—”

“What we were told? Come on. We can’t use that excuse.”

Chastened, Jóel Ingi nodded. “Does our guy know about this?”

“I doubt it. He’d have blown his stack by now if he did. Or he’d have blogged about it,” Már said with a snigger. “But Ægir wants to be briefed.”

“Give me an hour,” he said as the back door of the ministry building loomed. Jóel Ingi turned to face Már. “I’ll do a few discreet checks,” he said, keeping his nerves under control, his hand on the door and his mind already focused uncomfortably on what had happened to his computer.

T
HE EXPRESSION ON
the minister’s political adviser’s face showed that the meeting was not going to be a happy one.

“Is there any link to these men?” Ægir Lárusson demanded in a tone caustic enough to strip paint from the wall.

“Not as such,” Már Einarsson replied.

“And what does that mean, or is it just bullshit?”

Már winced. People with political rather than ministry backgrounds could be tiresomely rude. “It means that as far as we know, there are no links.”

“As far as you know? So you mean there could be? What am I going to tell my boy in there when he’s up on his hind legs and one of those hairy-legged lesbians asks him straight out if those four terrorists came to Iceland?”

“There was no evidence that they were terrorists,” Már protested. The man was simply too crude.

“Or if the press get hold of even a whisper of this?” Ægir’s voice was rough, with a scratched quality that reminded Már of fingernails scraping down a wall. His face was redder than Már had ever seen in a man who was seldom far from an angry outburst.

“Listen. There’s one of those lesbians with hairy armpits in the office next to mine. She’s the human rights and gender equality officer, and if she gets a sniff of this, even a hint, she’ll raise the roof, and I personally will ensure that your pickled testicles are lovingly put in a jar for your wife to keep by her bed as a shriveled memento of what could have been. Understand? Now, will you tell me just what ‘as far as we know’ means in plain language?”

Már took a deep breath. “There’s nothing on paper. Not a scrap. I’ve checked records and been through the archives. There were phone conversations at the time. There are no notes and no memos here. I can’t speak for the minister,” he said in an attempt to hold his own.

“I’ll speak for my boy. But?”

“But what?”

“I can see it in your face. You were about to say ‘but …’ weren’t you? So, but what?”

Már took a deeper breath. “There were emails. I’ve already
done some housekeeping on that score. There’s nothing here. But …”

“You’re doing it again,” Ægir snapped.

“There’s a laptop. It went missing.”

“When?”

“Not long ago. A few days before Christmas.”

The expected outburst didn’t materialize. Instead, there was an even more disturbing silence while Ægir sat down and placed his hands together on the deck, intertwining his fingers. “Then I would suggest, Már, that you and your people set about finding that laptop with all due speed. That is, providing your wife doesn’t want to abandon every ambition she has of arranging the seating plans at ambassadorial dinners in Paris or Washington one day in the distant future. Because the alternative is that she might end up as a fishery officer’s wife in Bolungarvík, possibly in the not-too-distant future.”

“I have already …”

“Don’t tell me what you’ve done,” Ægir cut in. “Just let me know when it’s fixed.”

T
HE GIRL LOOKED
uncomfortable in the shabby magnolia-painted canteen that contrasted with the understated opulence of the hotel’s lobby and sumptuous rooms. Gunna smiled and wished that Yngvi would stop fidgeting.

“
Hæ
, my name’s Gunnhildur Gísladóttir, and I’m a detective sergeant in the city police. What’s your name?”

“Valeria Hákonarson,” the girl replied uncertainly through dark eyes that flickered toward Yngvi in his suit, which was beginning to look a lot less smart than it had a few hours earlier.

“Where are you from, Valeria?” Gunna asked. “You speak Icelandic well enough, don’t you?”

“I’m from Romania, but I’ve been here for a few years,” she replied in passable Icelandic, but with a distinct accent. “My husband’s Icelandic.”

“Been working here long?”

“Two years,” she said, her eyes flickering toward Yngvi again.

“All right, I’d like you simply to take me through what happened today. No pressure, I just want you to describe what you did and what you saw, that’s all.”

Valeria took a deep breath and collected her thoughts. “I knocked and there was no answer. So I knocked again. Still no answer, so I call out, ‘Chambermaid,’ and open the door. I go into the corridor and the light is off, so I go into the room and the man is there on the bed,” she explained with a curl of her lip.

“Did you touch anything?”

“Just the light switch in the hall, I think.”

“The lights were on in the room itself, but not in the hallway, you mean?”

Valeria nodded.

“You touched the body?”

“I touch here,” Valeria said with a shudder and put a hand to her neck. “Check for heart. Nothing, then call for help.”

“Who did you call?”

“Ástrós, the supervisor. She was in the linen cupboard down the hall and came straight away. She saw the guy on the bed and called Yngvi,” she said, nodding at Yngvi as he sat gloomily twisting his fingers in knots.

Gunna nodded. “Apart from the man on the bed, was there anything that you noticed was out of place?”

“No, I don’t think so,” she said with a shrug. “I was only in there a few moments.”

“All right, then. Thank you, Valeria, that’ll do. My colleague will scan your fingerprints before you leave so that we can identify which are your prints in the room.”

“Then I can go now?” Valeria asked, relieved.

“Yes, thank you. Just speak to my colleague, the tall youngish guy, and he’ll do the fingerprint scan for you.” Gunna turned to Yngvi as Valeria left the room. “Is Ástrós about anywhere?”

“I’ll get her,” Yngvi said, half-standing until Gunna waved him to sit down.

“No big hurry; I need a statement from you as well. I take it Ástrós alerted you?”

“She did. We have these bleep machines so the managers and supervisors can be located. Ástrós bleeped me and I was there a minute later.”

“And you saw …?”

He shrugged. “Just the same as Valeria described. The man was lying on the bed. I didn’t really take much notice other than to do the same as she did and check for a pulse. I couldn’t find one, so I made the one-one-two call from the front desk and noticed that Sveinn Ófeigsson was in the restaurant. So I asked him to come with me.”

“Why didn’t you call one-one-two from the room itself?”

“I, er,” Yngvi floundered. “I, er, just didn’t think of it. The man was dead, no doubt. I didn’t think a few seconds would make a difference.”

Alerted by Yngvi’s obvious nervousness, Gunna instinctively pushed him harder. “This was at what time?”

“I don’t remember. Around one, I think.”

“The one-one-two call was made at 13:12,” Gunna said, consulting her notes. “How long was it after finding the body before you called one-one-two? Was it before or after Sveinn Ófeigsson went up to the room with you?”

“Er, before.”

“I take it Jóhannes Karlsson was overdue checking out of his room?”

“He was. I had expected him to leave by twelve, as usual. He’s a regular guest so it wasn’t a problem that he was a little late. We try to be helpful here, you know,” he said, bridling in defense.

“It’s all right, I’m just trying to build up a picture of what went on here. He was supposed to check out around twelve. He didn’t show up, so what’s the normal procedure?”

“Reception would call the room’s phone and ask if the guest has been delayed. If there’s no reply, they call again ten minutes later—in case the guest is, er, indisposed.”

“Yup, in the shower or taking a dump, you mean? Then what?”

“Then someone will knock and, if there’s no reply, they’ll enter the room. You understand, there have been cases of people sneaking out without paying, so it’s general policy to keep an eye on these things.”

“Understood. But surely Jóhannes Karlsson wouldn’t do that?” Gunna said, tapping her teeth with her pen. “Who would normally enter a guest’s room, in that case?”

Yngvi shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Normally it would be the duty manager or a supervisor.”

“And in this case it was a chambermaid?”

“I don’t know what went wrong. I asked Ástrós to check the room at around one as Jóhannes Karlsson was due to check out and, as we’re busy at the moment, the room was needed tonight. Maybe she asked Valeria to knock and check. She’s been here for some time and is very competent and trustworthy. I haven’t yet had a chance to check with Ástrós, but I imagine the management will expect an enquiry into this.”

“And that’s why you’re so nervous? Because the right procedures weren’t followed?” Gunna asked and was rewarded with a tight-lipped frown.

“You can draw your own conclusions,” he snapped back and immediately apologized. “Sorry. It’s been a difficult day. Is there anything more I can help you with?”

H
EKLA WALKED SMARTLY
past the trendy end of downtown Reykjavík and through the streets of the old western end of town. She had a spring in her step and cash in her pocket, her holdall slung over one shoulder as she enjoyed the crunch of the snow beneath her trainers.

Her Toyota was parked discreetly in a residential street in front of a rambling old house that had been converted into a warren of tiny apartments. She had reckoned that with so many people living in the house, residents would assume the car belonged to a visitor in one of the other flats. She put a huge carrier bag from one Reykjavík’s more expensive shops in the car’s boot and dropped her holdall next to it; a couple of small gift-wrapped packets nestled reassuringly in her jacket pocket.

The car started with an effort. Giving it a minute for the engine to warm up and the fan to start circulating some warm air, she hunched low in the seat and looked around quickly. The street was deserted and as far as she could make out, nobody was looking out of the windows of the apartments she had parked outside. The Toyota bumped along the street as Hekla headed through town, taking care not to drive too fast or too slowly but to look as if she were simply going home from the gym. In the queue of waiting traffic at the lights by Lækjargata, she turned the radio on, drumming the steering wheel with her thumbs in time to the music and trying not to peer toward the town center.

It was with relief that she saw the lights change to green and the traffic begin to move. She decided to go with the flow of traffic and let it take her through the city and out the other side, with a stop at one of the big supermarkets at the busiest time of the day to shop for the week’s groceries.

She wondered if the two men had been set free yet, and how long it would be before their cards stopped working. The first one would have been found by now, she thought. The older guy would be furious; there had been no mistaking the virulence of the hatred in his stare, which was only magnified by his naked helplessness. But he would just have to lick his wounds and get over it, she decided, certain that the man could easily afford the relatively modest shopping spree he’d unwillingly funded.

Fortunately she had already been to several cashpoints and
had milked the cards of everything the machines would dispense after she had bought herself some expensive shoes and what she liked to think of as investments against a rainy day. The second guy’s cards had resulted in a good deal of cash and some more of the same expensive, understated gold and silver, which would keep its value in a safe deposit box.

As the city center disappeared behind her, Hekla relaxed at the wheel, feeling safer inside the cocoon of late afternoon traffic heading for the suburbs and listening to the wheels judder on the uneven road surface with its coat of gravel, thankful for the thick weather, which she wore like a disguise.

She shopped in Krónan, filling her trolley with as much as she could, including two heavy pork joints that the family wouldn’t normally be able to afford, one for the weekend and one for the freezer for Pétur’s birthday. She chose the checkout with the youngest cashier, a gawky youth who looked as if he should still be in school, with glasses and a fuzz of soft teenage beard on his cheeks. He looked stressed and tired, and seemed unlikely to look too closely at a credit card, Hekla decided.

He sneezed as she approached with the laden trolley.

“Bless you,” she said cheerfully.

The young man blinked behind his thick glasses. “Thanks,” he said, sniffing and swiping Hekla’s purchases rapidly past the till as she tried to keep up, stowing things into bags.

“That’s seventy-one-thousand-six-hundred-and-eighty,” the young man said as if the number were a single word, sniffing again and kneading the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb as Hekla handed a card across as if it were her own while she continued stowing tins and boxes into bags.

“Sorry, it’s been rejected,” the young man said. There was an almost audible sigh of irritation from the queue for the till.

“What? It should be fine. I was paid yesterday and there’s plenty in there. Can you try it again?”

He swiped it again and the queue, muffled in coats and hats
against the New Year chill outdoors and steaming gently in the supermarket’s heat, shuffled its feet with palpable impatience until the young man shook his head.

“Sorry.”

“What?” Hekla said in anguish. “Hell, that useless bank must have been messing me about again. I promise there’s more than enough in there to cover it. Could you try again, or charge it manually? Please?”