Cold Comfort (7 page)

Getting somewhere at last, Gunna thought.

“So you met Svana at Fit Club?”

“That’s right. We’d bump into each other once or twice a week and chat over a coffee.”

“And you continued to ‘bump into each other’ and ‘chat’ even when you’d stopped training at her club?”

Hallur nodded. “Svana had a very wide circle of acquaintances. A very disparate group of people.”

“All men?” Gunna observed.

He nodded again. “I don’t believe she had many close female friends. You understand?”

It was Gunna’s turn to nod. “You still haven’t told me the nature of your relationship, other than that you chatted occasionally over a latte. I have to tell you that you have been identified as a regular visitor to Svana’s apartment.”

Gunna could see that Hallur’s composure was gradually failing.

“This isn’t on record,” she continued, “and you’re not sworn to tell the truth, although I wouldn’t expect anything else of someone in your position.”

“This goes no further?”

“Unless it leads to material evidence that requires further investigation.”

Hallur’s shoulders dropped. “We were occasional lovers. I knew there were others and it didn’t bother her that I’m married. It was just physical … We’d meet up every couple of weeks and … y’know …” His voice tailed off as if he were a schoolboy caught with a pocketful of contraband.

“Always at her apartment?”

“Pretty much. We had a weekend once, in Copenhagen. But it wasn’t comfortable. There are so many Icelanders there that I was terrified of being spotted. This is confidential, isn’t it? It would destroy my marriage if this got out.”

Gunna bit back a caustic reply. “It’s between ourselves, as I said, unless this leads to material evidence that we need to pursue further. However, you mentioned that there were others?”

“Yes. Of course. I couldn’t expect her not to see other men. Svana was … how shall I put it? She liked to experiment.”

“We have people already identified as being Svana’s acquaintances in the same way that you were. But if you could provide names, it would help. As I said, we are making every effort to track down a killer, but it doesn’t help when much of the victim’s life was either right in the public gaze or else hidden completely.”

Hallur’s head bobbed in agreement and his trademark boyish smile began to reappear. “I know that Svana had several friendships. But I don’t have any names and I never asked.”

“In that case, I’ll leave you alone. For the moment, at least,” Gunna said, rising from the chair. Hallur was on his feet instantly and stepped around the desk with his hand held out. “I’d like to thank you for being discreet,” he breathed with a flash of the television smile.

“Anyway, thank you for your time. I’ll be in touch if we need to speak to you again.”

“Of course, please call if you need anything.”

He stood holding Gunna’s hand in his for longer than a usual handshake would warrant. “You know, officer. Would you be free for lunch sometime? I’d like to know more about the way the police work, from the inside, so to speak. Law and order is an issue that I have a deep interest in.”

Gunna extricated her fingers from Hallur’s soft but insistent grip. “Thank you. But that would hardly be appropriate as long as you’re a potential material witness, I’m afraid.”

“Maybe when the case is closed, then?”

“Possibly. Thanks for your time.”

Gunna clattered down the narrow wooden staircase from Hallur’s office. Outside, she breathed a sigh of relief.

“The cheeky randy bastard,” she muttered to herself, striding past Hotel Borg and toying with the thought of going inside to use the bathroom and wash the hand that Hallur had shaken.

T
HE AIR TASTED
slightly stale and the flat no longer felt as if anyone lived there. The kitchen floor where Svana Geirs had twitched as she died in a widening pool of her own blood was scrubbed clean, as if the flat’s occupant had simply moved out. Gunna went from the kitchen to the living room, frowning as she wondered what she was actually looking for. The place was tidy and Svana Geirs’ belongings were all still where they belonged. Eiríkur and the technical team had taken only a few items that they felt needed to be fingerprinted or checked at the laboratory.

In the blue and pink bedroom the huge down quilt had been carefully folded into a square and placed on a corner of the mattress, while the sheets and duvet cover had been taken away to be checked. She slid back the door of the wardrobe that filled an entire wall and ran a hand over the expensive fabrics of the dresses and coats on hangers, wondering how many of these had ever actually been worn.

She went through the hangers one by one, checking the pockets of all the jackets and coats for anything that might have been left, but finding nothing. At the far end, behind a couple of colourful summer dresses that she doubted would see much use in a short Icelandic summer, and some revealing nightdresses, she found herself looking at two hangers that had been carefully pushed out of sight.

“Good grief,” she muttered, lifting up a hanger that held a skimpy French maid’s outfit consisting of more lace than material. Behind it was a bizarre version of a nurse’s outfit that she realized with distaste was made of some kind of plastic.

She debated with herself whether these ought to be taken for testing as well, but decided that if anything were to be found, the bedclothes or the contents of the washing basket would probably be likelier sources.

She hung the items back in their places respectfully, painfully aware that their owner had only been dead a few days. She wondered who had been the beneficiary of Svana Geirs’ magnificent figure in these bizarre, titillating outfits. She looked at the vast array of shoes at the wardrobe’s floor level, shook her head and shut the double doors.

The place was unnervingly silent. Any traffic noise was shut out entirely by the triple-glazed windows, excluding any sense of the outside world. The flat resembled a cocoon cut off from reality. She sat at the head of the bed and felt herself sink in the dense mattress, resisting the temptation to bounce on it. The two drawers of the bedside table on one side were empty, but the side nearer the window revealed the TV remote, sprays and jars of creams and a party box of condoms in a variety of colours and, as far as Gunna could make out, flavours—she decided that banana probably didn’t refer to size. The lower drawer contained handcuffs, a small vibrator that emitted a rattlesnake buzz at the flick of a switch, and packets of pills from paracetamol to heavyduty prescription painkillers. But no phone or little black book were to be seen. In fact, Gunna reflected, as she paced to the window to look out at the quiet street four floors below, nowhere was there a scrap of paper, a magazine or a book.

Suddenly all her senses sharpened in a single flash of alarm as a groan, muffled but unmistakable, came from the corridor. She turned slowly and listened for it to be repeated, stepping as gently as she could towards the bedroom door. She was wondering if she had definitely closed the flat’s door when the groan came again, longer this time and ending on a higher note that was almost a squeal.

In the passage she stood and listened. She could hear someone’s breath coming in short bursts, and this time she swept towards the kitchen, certain that the sound was coming from there. In the kitchen doorway, she scanned the room. The breaths panted and morphed into a low moan that rose and suddenly stopped, cut off as if by the flick of a switch. The flat was silent again.

Gunna stood in the middle of the kitchen floor and turned in a slow circle, looking in every direction. She smiled to herself, reached into her jacket pocket, took out her phone and thumbed the green button twice.

“Helgi? In the office, are you? You have Svana’s phone number? I’d like you to call it right now from your desk phone, OK? And stay on the line.”

The silence in the kitchen was broken only by the faintest hum from the fridge. Gunna was uncomfortably conscious of her own breathing, and even of the rustle of her still unfamiliar non-uniform trousers. When it began, she thought at first that the innocuous buzz was from the fridge itself, a low but insistent pulse. As she squatted down on her haunches, aware that the sound was coming from near the floor, the groan echoed through the kitchen a second time, tinny against the room’s hard surfaces. She listened, eyes half closed, and the second groan began, rising to a squeal of what Gunna could now make out was supposed to be ecstasy.

She cast about as the voice began to pant. She lay flat on the floor and peered under the fridge and then under the dishwasher, where a mobile phone sat in the only patch of dust she had seen in the whole flat, flashing and vibrating to itself as the voice rose from a moan to burst into a climax.

“Ah. There you are,” Gunna said as a grin spread across her face, reaching with a wooden spoon under the machine to retrieve the phone. It was still vibrating and howling in pleasure as she sat up with it in her hand in triumph. Suddenly it stopped flashing and the screen went dark as the phone switched itself off.

“Damn, battery must be flat,” she muttered, fumbling for her own phone. “Helgi? What happened there?” she asked, Svana’s lifeless mobile in her hand.

“I let it ring and ring and then it went dead,” Helgi said. “What was all that shouting?”

“That was Svana’s ringtone, and she was faking it. I’ll be back in a minute.”

• • •

R
AGNA GÚSTA HAD
been named after two old ladies. Linda had wanted to christen the little girl with her mother’s name, and Jón realized that his own mother would consider it a lifelong slight if the child didn’t carry her name as well. Now he thought it vaguely amusing that his daughter would go through life carrying in close company the names of Ragnhildur and Ágústa, two elderly ladies who couldn’t stand each other.

Jón could see the serious expression she had inherited from her maternal grandmother on his daughter’s face as Ragna Gústa painstakingly nibbled the nuggets of chocolate from her ice cream before devouring it.

“Daddy?”

He wondered if the bloody man had the faintest idea what turmoil had been wreaked on the lives of ordinary hardworking people. He had fought for months to keep everything together, but finally he’d had to admit to himself that he couldn’t keep the pretence up any longer. The jeep had been the first thing to go. Linda hadn’t minded, as she hadn’t liked it anyway. What had been painful was having to pay more than a million in cash on top just for the privilege of being rid of the loans secured on it.

“Daddy? What’s that?”

If only he’d had the sense to take out a loan in krónur instead of letting himself be persuaded to borrow in yen and Swiss francs, then he wouldn’t have been hit by the spiralling exchange rate that had doubled his repayments. The boy who bought the Land Cruiser was only a youngster, but a youngster with a berth on a trawler and a pocketful of cash. Jón reckoned he’d actually got the lad to agree to a good deal, once he’d seen the young man’s eyes lingering over the massive tyres.

It hadn’t been painless, but at least he was shot of the mushrooming repayments that had been crippling him.

“Yeah, sweetheart? What’s up?”

“Daddy, are we going to see Grandma today?”

“No, sweetheart, not today. Shall we go to the pictures instead?”

A
LBERT STOOD FOR
a moment in thought, Svana Geirs’ phone in his hand. “Quite a new model, this one is,” he said, as if to himself. “Now, over here …”

Gunna watched as he dived into a box and rummaged, emerging with a black box bound round with a lead.

“This one might do it. We’ll see,” he muttered, plugging the charger into the wall and then into Svana’s lifeless phone. “We’ll give it a minute to build up some juice and then we can give it a try. So, how are you getting on with being out of uniform?” he asked with a lopsided smile.

“To tell you the truth, Albert, it’s bloody weird,” Gunna replied as he tapped a computer’s keyboard to bring it to life. “I feel like an old frump most of the time, all dressed up and nowhere to go.”

She eyed Albert, who was now watching the screen of the laptop perched on a pile of phone books on the workbench in front of him. One of the force’s forensics officers, a fascination with anything to do with communications and computers, as the amassed collection of chargers, battery packs, spare parts and other paraphernalia stacked under the workbench demonstrated. Gunna was certain he was absorbed in establishing a link between Svana’s phone and the laptop and was no longer hearing a word she said.

“So some mornings I wonder whether to go for the leather miniskirt and the slashed tights, or just put on the little black cocktail dress,” she continued.

“Ah! Got it,” Albert said in triumph. “The phone’s charging and I can open a link to download the call log data, but I’ll need a code to get into it.”

He ran a hand over the top of his bald head and tapped at the keyboard with the other. The computer beeped back and Albert’s mouth turned into the downward bow of a petulant frown. He rapidly tried another combination, with the same result, and reached for the desk phone, cradling the receiver on his shoulder as he jabbed at the keypad, hardly taking his eyes off the laptop screen.

Gunna felt entirely excluded from Albert’s world as he grunted into the phone still jammed between a shoulder and the side of his head.

“Hey, mate. Yeah. Got a D700i. Yup,” he mumbled as Gunna tried to make sense of the one-sided conversation. “Two of them, yeah. No, can’t see it. It’s the new one with the expanded memory. Got an unlock?”

He grunted monosyllabic responses into the phone and tapped at the keyboard, which refused to accept the code with an imperious alert tone.

“No, didn’t do it.”

He tapped again, and this time there was no answering beep from the laptop.

“Gotcha. Yup, thanks,” Albert grunted into the phone. “We’re in,” he announced, looking up at Gunna as if returning to the real world and flourishing an outstretched palm to show the data marching across the screen.

Gunna shifted her stool closer to the high workbench and peered at the laptop.