Cold Comfort (2 page)

T
HE ADDRESS WAS
only a few hundred metres from the police station at Hverfisgata and Gunna decided to go on foot. She strode through the encroaching darkness of the windy afternoon with Helgi loping at her side. There was already a patrol car and an ambulance outside with lights flashing as they arrived at the stairwell of the block of modern flats and found a young officer fending off interested people claiming to live there.

“Crime scene. No admittance,” he announced as they pushed through.

“Serious Crime Unit,” Gunna growled, watching the young man take a step back.

“Straight up. Fourth floor. The lift’s not working,” he said.

Helgi eyed the stairs. “Four flights?”

The young man nodded.

“Oh well.”

Helgi set off up the steps with Gunna taking them two at a time behind him. As they reached the open door of the flat, he was breathing hard.

“This must be it?” he gasped, battling to keep the fight for air under control.

“You want to pack in smoking, Helgi,” Gunna admonished, stepping past him.

Another young officer stood at the door, this time one who recognized Gunna and stood aside to let them in.

“It’s not a pleasant sight,” he said dourly as Gunna snapped on surgical gloves and handed a pair to Helgi. She bent to pull covers over her shoes and again handed a second pair to Helgi as he fiddled with the gloves.

In the corridor, a young woman in police uniform, her face pale as the apartment’s ivory walls, stepped back from the kitchen door to let Gunna and Helgi through to where a paramedic hunched low with his back to them. Gunna went carefully around him and Helgi stayed in the doorway.

“Are you all right, sweetheart?” he muttered to the young policewoman, who merely nodded back, eyes fixed on the paramedic.

“Dead, I suppose?” Gunna asked, crouching next to the man in his green overalls as she surveyed the scene.

“Well there’s not much reason for us to be here, if that’s what you mean,” he replied shortly.

The body of a woman lay on the chequered tiles, arms splayed in front and legs crossed awkwardly. A mass of fair hair spread around her and a pool of dark blood had seeped over the floor.

“Touched anything?” Gunna asked the paramedic.

“Checked for pulse, that’s it. Nothing’s been moved.”

“Good man. Not a chance that she fell and banged her head, I suppose?”

“Not a hope,” the paramedic volunteered cheerfully. “Blunt instrument, this one.”

Gunna looked up at the faces in the doorway. “Helgi, would you get everyone out and bring the technical boys in here right away? This one definitely needs to be sealed up and gone over before we do any snooping ourselves. Do we have any identification?”

Helgi and the paramedic both stared back at her.

“You mean you don’t recognize her?” the paramedic asked.

Gunna took in the woman’s long, ample figure, dressed only in tracksuit bottoms and a white singlet. The taut skin emerging from the sleeveless top was tanned to the point she would have described as being crispy.

“Something about her rings a bell, but I couldn’t say,” she admitted finally.

“That’s Svana Geirs, that is. Was,” the paramedic said with a mournful shake of his head.

“Ah, in that case you’d better make sure we don’t get any intrusion from the gentlemen of the press. And not a word, all right?”

“Of course.”

The paramedic stood up and stretched. Gunna looked at the woman’s face, half obscured by waves of hair. The skin at the corners of the wide-open green eyes looked stretched, parchment-like, in a way Gunna felt would have been more usual in someone past retirement age. The abundant blonde hair was coarse and thick, and she wondered if its natural colour had been seen in the last twenty years. She tried to estimate Svana Geirs’ age and put it at around thirty-five.

“We’d better get ourselves out and leave the place to the technical team. Are you off?” she asked the yawning paramedic.

“As soon as the doc gets here to declare mortality,” he replied, stepping back and carefully not touching walls or worktops. “So, is this your first celebrity?”

“Sort of. I had a city councillor once. Heart attack jogging on the beach at Nautholtsv’k. Stone dead by the time we got there. Shame about Svana, though,” he sighed. “I used to have a poster of her on my wall when I was a student.”

G
UNNA AND HELGI
left the technical team swarming over the flat and met on the first-floor landing to compare notes. As many uniformed officers as could be found had already been dispatched to scour the area for anything that could be a murder weapon, and to start the long process of knocking on doors.

“Tell me about Svana Geirs, then,” she demanded. “The name’s familiar, but that’s it.”

“Well we’ll have to do a bit of digging. I suppose she was one of those people who are famous for being famous, if you know what I mean.”

“You mean she didn’t actually do anything?”

“She was on telly for a while with a fitness show on Channel 2. My first missus used to watch it, so that has to be five years ago at least, doing these daft exercises in front of the box. Never did her any good. The show was less about keeping fit than Svana’s tits bouncing up and down in a tight top. That’s about it. She sort of disappeared from view after that, but she still pops up in the gossip mags.”

“All right. So who wants to knock off a failed TV presenter? There was some real force behind it, and that was a single blow as far as I could see,” Gunna said. She would dearly have liked a cigarette, but a promise is a promise, and Laufey would know the second she walked in that Mum had been cheating.

“Time of death?” Helgi asked.

“Don’t know. Miss Cruz will give us an accurate idea later. It’s getting on for six now, so I reckon this afternoon sometime. She was still warm when we got here.”

The police’s only forensic pathologist was on long-term leave and the post had been covered by a series of replacements recruited from overseas. The latest was a woman from Spain with a double-barrelled surname who had replaced a tall Irishman and had instantly been christened Miss Cruz by her new colleagues.

“Who raised the alarm?” Gunna continued.

“The cleaner. Found the lift wasn’t working, climbed the stairs and saw the front door was open.”

“Open? So whoever did this was out pretty quick without waiting to cover their tracks,” Gunna said. “Did you check the lift?”

“Jammed between the third and fourth floors. Been like that for a week, the maintenance man says.”

“Top flat. Nobody comes up here without a reason. What about next door?”

“Nobody home. No sign of life.” Helgi frowned and rolled his shoulders as if they ached. “Well, whoever lives there is going to get a bit of a shock when he comes home from work. How do you want to organize this, Gunna?”

For a moment she wondered why he was asking her. Being in charge of a new investigation unit was a change that would take some getting used to after the years running the police station in rural Hvalvík, where weeks could pass with nothing more serious than a stolen bicycle. The offer of promotion and the shift to the Reykjavík city force had come as a surprise, and working as part of a larger set-up was already taking some getting used to. Although she had lived there in the past and knew the city intimately, Gunna felt vaguely uncomfortable in Reykjavík. Much had changed during the years she had taken it easy in her coastal backwater. The city’s pace of life had accelerated steadily for years until the crisis that saw the banks nationalized and the country plunged into a recession stopped progress dead in its tracks.

She had moved into the Serious Crime Unit’s new office as the protests outside Parliament were becoming steadily angrier, watching her uniformed colleagues disconcerted at the public fury they were on the receiving end of at demonstrations every weekend, while many of them felt a secret sympathy with the protesters and their impotent rage.

Gunna had flatly refused to move house from Hvalvík, and the forty-minute drive was proving a challenge in the mornings, but the journey home had become an oasis of valuable thinking time.

“Gunna?” Helgi asked again.

“Æi, sorry. Thinking hard for a moment. If you try and figure out what the lady’s movements were over the last couple of days, I’ll tackle the next of kin.”

“Fine by me. I’m still looking for Long Ommi as a priority as well, you know?”

“Fair enough. Eiríkur should be here in half an hour and you’d better fill him in on all this so he can collect everything that comes in from the knocking on doors. I’m sure the lad will have some kind of theory he read in a book that’ll boil down to ordinary common sense. Pathology will tell us what they can, but I reckon we’ve seen it already. Blunt instrument to the head, single blow aimed to kill.”

“Any ideas?” Helgi asked hopefully.

“I was about to ask you that,” Gunna sighed. “On the surface, it looks straightforward enough. When someone’s killed like this, it’s either a junkie who doesn’t know what he’s doing, or it’s money or anger. Svana Geirs must have pissed someone off, or else she’d ripped someone off.”

“Jealousy?”

“Certainly a possibility. You’d better find out who she was shagging, in that case. I can’t imagine she lived like a nun. It’d be handy to know what she did for a living. I doubt somehow that a flat like this comes cheap.”

“I’ll see what I can dig out by the morning. Be in early, will you?” Helgi asked.

“Nope. Bjössi in Keflavík asked me to stop by the hospital there and look in on someone in the morning, a friend of your chum Long Ommi, as it happens.”

“All right. Give him my regards, will you? Bjössi, that is, not anyone who might be a friend of Long Ommi’s.”

Friday 12th

A
NETWORK OF
lines fanned out from the corners of the nurse’s eyes. Working too hard, Gunna thought.

“This way, please,” the nurse said quietly, her gaze flickering back and forth.

“How is he?”

“Not great. But he’ll live.”

“Can he speak?”

“Not easily.”

She thrust open heavy double doors, strode along an echoing corridor and gently pushed aside a door that was already ajar. “Óskar? There’s someone to see you.”

The man lay back in bed, a wild tangle of black hair against the white pillow and fury in his eyes.

“Good morning, Óskar,” Gunna said with as much warmth as she could muster at the sight of the man’s lower jaw swathed in bandages. She tried not to imagine the splintered bones underneath, in addition to the split lip, puffed black eyes and the livid bruise colouring one cheekbone.

“Can I leave you to it?” the nurse asked. “We’re shortstaffed today.”

“Of course. Thanks. I’ll come and find you when I’m finished,” Gunna said, looking sideways at the patient as if he were a naughty schoolboy.

The nurse nodded and padded silently away. Gunna sat at the bedside and opened her folder. She took her time to read the notes, while the bed’s occupant looked at her stonily through his bruises.

“Right, then. Óskar Óskarsson, isn’t it? Your mates call you Skari?” she asked without waiting for a reply. “You know who I am?”

“A cop,” he mumbled with difficulty, his voice a hoarse baritone.

“Ah, so you can talk. That’s good. Just so you know, I’m Gunnhildur Gísladóttir. Until a few weeks ago I was the station sergeant at Hvalvík, and now I’m with the Serious Crime Unit. Your file has stopped with us. So, now then. What can you tell me?”

Gunna scanned the notes as Óskar glared truculently at her. “Your legal address is Sundstræti 29, Hvalvík. Full name, Óskar Pétur Óskarsson, married to Erla Smáradóttir. Three children.”

“Five.”

“Five?”

“Erla got two already.”

“From what I’ve been told, you turned up at Casualty in a right old state and declined to explain how you managed to get in this condition. So you’d better tell me what happened, and don’t say you fell down the stairs.”

“Pissed. Argument,” Óskar muttered sourly.

“Argument? Who with?”

“Bloke.”

“Who? Where?”

“Keflavík.”

“Who was this person?”

“Dunno,” Óskar replied slowly. “Big bloke. Polish.”

“Ah, so what were you arguing about?”

“Can’t remember. Pissed.”

Gunna scanned the notes in her file. “It doesn’t mention intoxication when you arrived at Casualty, only hypothermia.”

“Pissed,” Óskar replied firmly.

“No. You weren’t pissed. What was this about? If we’ve got someone on the loose beating people up with this kind of savagery, then we need to find them as soon as possible. Skari, you’re lucky to be alive. You could have been dead of exposure.”

Óskar’s eyes focused on the wall behind her, and Gunna recognized the determination in them. This would be a battle, and the whole story would probably never come out.

“Heard from Long Ommi recently, have you?” she asked, throwing out the question without expecting a reply as there was a tap at the door.

“Are you finished yet?” asked the nurse. “I can’t leave you too long. He’ll tire quickly.”

“It’s all right. I’m finished,” Gunna said, looking at Oskar and noticing the sudden panic in his bruised face. “But I’ll be back. If you’ve a minute, I could do with a word.”

The nurse nodded. “I’ll be at reception.”

“I might as well come with you,” Gunna said, rising to her feet and slotting her notes under one arm. “See you soon, Skari. Look after yourself.”

The injured man looked balefully back but said nothing. He fumbled with his uninjured hand for the remote control and his eyes glazed as the TV blared into life.

By the reception desk, Gunna and the nurse sat on a sofa for waiting relatives behind a coffee table stacked with thumbed gossip magazines in a variety of languages.

“So, what can you tell me about this guy?”

The nurse shrugged. “His jaw’s broken in a couple of places and I don’t suppose he’ll ever be able to eat or speak easily again. The other injuries are broken ribs, broken fingers on one hand, plus some cuts and bruises across his face and shoulders that’ll heal quickly enough. He’s been given a beating, as far as I can see, and a very heavy one. Somebody really wanted to hurt him.”