Cold Steal (18 page)

‘Anything?’ Gunna asked. ‘Anything at all?’

Ívar Laxdal’s face was set in its usual impassive mask. ‘Nothing at all. Sævaldur has nothing, literally nothing. The slugs are nothing that can be identified and match no firearm on any records. The witness saw nothing that was of any use, and as the girl is from Russia, she doesn’t speak English well enough to be able to tell if the killers spoke with an accent or not. There’s no description beyond two men, one about one metre seventy-five and one about one-eighty-five tall, both heavily built, with dark hair judging by their eyebrows. That’s all.’

‘No vehicle in the area or anything like that? If it wasn’t a hired car, then where did it come from?’

‘Gunnhildur, you think Sævaldur’s incident room hasn’t been through all that?’

‘Sorry. It’s frustrating, though.’ She sensed that he was impatient, unusually for someone who exuded calmness and control while others around him struggled to keep abreast of their workloads. ‘You’re getting shit from above about this?’ she ventured to ask, and saw with a flush of satisfaction that the question had taken him by surprise.

‘No. Not yet,’ he said with a faint smile. ‘But rest assured that I will.’

‘There is something else. The cleaner who found that pool of blood in a cellar yesterday and freaked out?’

‘What about it? No victim, so no case, I’d imagine.’

‘That would be my feeling as well, except that the house is owned by Sunna María Voss and Jóhann Hjálmarsson.’

‘The dentist and his wife? Who have been in business with the victim?’

‘That’s them,’ she said. ‘It seems the wife is the one who has been in business with Vilhelm Thorleifsson. The husband’s lukewarm about him, and also about the missing partner, Elvar Pálsson.’

Ívar Laxdal sat silent for a moment and placed the palms of his hands together in front of him, his fingertips beating a tattoo against each other as he thought.

‘It’s a mess, isn’t it? Have you located this other character?’

‘No. He’s abroad as far as I can make out, but nobody knows where.’

‘Keep an eye on things, would you, Gunnhildur?’ He said slowly. ‘If this man . . .’

‘Elvar.’

‘If he doesn’t show his face soon, then are we looking at a missing person enquiry? Could he have gone the same way?’

‘Who knows? He travels to the Baltic States, and it seems he has business in London as well. So it’s anyone’s guess.’

‘Not in Iceland. Someone will know where he is. Family?’

‘He has an ex-wife who has been an ex-wife for a very long time, no contact there. He’s dissolved most of his business activities here, and the little he does have left in Iceland includes the bankrupt firm that the dentist and his wife were involved with.’

‘And how are they coping with all this?’

‘Living in the lap of luxury in the Harbourside Hotel. But they can afford it.’

‘They’re still asking for protection?’

‘Not at the moment. They have a security consultant looking after them.’

Ívar Laxdal’s eyes rolled and he groaned. ‘Not some hoodlum, I hope?’

‘No, Bára Kristinns who used to be at the Keflavík station.’

‘Ah, then that’s all right,’ he said, brightening. ‘A very sharp young woman. A real shame we couldn’t keep her on the force.’

‘Yeah, and for a hundred thousand a day I’m tempted to go into that line of business myself.’

Gunna scrolled through the report with mounting frustration. The basement of Kópavogsbakki 50 had been examined by the forensic team, who had come up with nothing conclusive. There were no recent fingerprints anywhere in the basement other than those of Valmira and the other cleaners. The dried blood on the floor was real enough and was identifiable as the overwhelmingly common type O, but it was doubtful that a DNA profile could be obtained.

She chewed her lip, knowing that even an urgent DNA analysis request could take weeks and cost money that would come from the department’s already thin budget. Costs had been cut and cut again, to the point that she had started bringing in a few lightbulbs and toilet rolls that filled a drawer of her desk in case the day came when there was an empty store cupboard.

The door had not been forced, although scratches indicated that the lock had been picked, and it was clear enough from the bloodstains on the tape and the splintered remnants of the wooden chair that matched three remaining chairs in the kitchen upstairs that someone had been tied to it.

‘So who the hell are you and why were you there?’ Gunna muttered to herself, rattling her fingernails on the table.

The smashed chair indicated that the victim had broken it to escape, in which case, whoever it was had been left alone long enough to break the chair, bite through the tape and escape. Examination of the grey duct tape used to bind the victim to the chair had yielded some threads of a dark green material, and this had also been found on a corner of the shelves, as if the victim had snagged some clothing on it.

‘Interesting,’ Gunna decided. ‘But when? ‘When did this happen? How long ago?’ She picked up the phone and started dialling when the door swung open and a paper cup of coffee appeared, followed by Eiríkur, a folder of notes under one arm.

‘Hæ,’
Eiríkur said, dropping into his chair. ‘I had no idea that we lead such exciting lives.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Gunna agreed, her eyes skimming the rest of the report. ‘Non-stop thrills and spills at CID. That’s why you wanted to be a policeman, isn’t it?’

Eiríkur stretched and yawned. ‘Well, I certainly didn’t join up to be lectured on police procedure by an old boy who seems to have spent his retirement reading thrillers and knows more about police work than I do.’

‘No joy here, I’m afraid. Whoever was tied up in that basement appears to have been born without fingers as there isn’t a print to be found anywhere. No luck with your elderly crime fan, then?’

‘Maybe.’ Eiríkur grinned. ‘You know the Aunt Bertha guy, described as medium height and otherwise completely unremarkable, but wearing a green fleece with a yellow logo on it?’

‘Go on.’

‘Old Geir Einarsson has logged the appearance of a man in his late twenties or early thirties on ten occasions walking along Kópavogsbakki wearing a green fleece with a yellow logo on the front and two yellow stripes down one arm.’

‘That means there’s a possibility our mysterious victim could be whoever robbed the old lady’s house. Sævaldur’s phantom housebreaker, maybe?’

‘How do you figure that out?’

Gunna tapped the side of her nose and scrolled back through the report. ‘Traces of Polyethylene tera . . .’ She stumbled. ‘Polyethylene teraphthalate found on the gaffer tape in the basement of Kópavogsbakki fifty, and also on a sharp edge of the shelves. That’s the stuff that fleece jackets and whatnot are made from. Colour: dark green.’

‘Wonderful. Will you tell Sævaldur or shall I?’

‘You know he’ll be furious if he doesn’t figure this one out for himself.’

‘I know. I can’t wait.’

‘I don’t suppose your elderly armchair sleuth saw what the logo was?’

‘Nope, sadly not. Too far away,’ Eiríkur said. ‘But he seems to have walked the same route, mostly in the afternoons, and he was seen at various times from soon after midday to just before dark.’

‘There you go, then. You’d better get back to Aunt Bertha and see if you can jog that woman’s memory, or find out what CCTV there is around there that he might have walked past. If you can figure out the logo, you might have him.’

‘She did give me the time, so I’ll see what I can find.’

‘Good man. Now get on with it before Sævaldur comes back and you have to tell him what you’ve found out,’ she said, reaching for her desk phone as it rang.

Orri saw Lísa’s car parked outside and muttered a curse that she had managed to park it across two spaces. He switched off the engine and sat in silence for a while, listening to the car ticking as he gathered his thoughts. He had been surprised at how nervous he had been sticking whatever it was to that car downtown that morning, scared of being noticed and questioned. Orri felt that under normal circumstances his nerves were strong, but being unable to choose the time and place was uncomfortable, and not being able do his usual research troubled him, removing the illusion of control.

Eventually he sighed, pulled the keys from the ignition with a click and made his way inside, his heavy work boots in one hand and his high-viz vest over his arm.

In the lobby he rattled his postbox and was surprised to see there was a bulky padded envelope there with no stamp, just his name on it in typed capitals. Puzzled, he ripped it open and found inside a folded wad of notes circled with a rubber band. Looking around quickly to see if he was being watched, Orri counted the notes and decided as he did so that the hour’s detour that morning had maybe been worthwhile after all. The wad of 5,000 krónur notes was equivalent to a good week’s wages.

He was on his way up the stairs with a spring in his step that had been lacking all day when his phone buzzed and he read the message as he pushed open the door of his flat and walked into the smell of something heavy on the spices.

Orri stopped dead, leaving the door half open.

Good evening, Orri Björnsson. You did well today. We have another task for you. Instructions for the job and on where to collect the equipment will be in your mailbox before morning. Reply with a blank message to acknowledge.

In a daze, and with the feeling deep inside that he was doing the wrong thing, Orri thumbed the reply button and sent a blank message back with the door of his apartment still open.

‘Hæ.
Who was that?’ Lísa asked. ‘Anything important?’

Orri dropped his boots and his fluorescent jacket by the door, and shook his fleece from his shoulders.

‘Nah. Work stuff. What’s cooking?’

Bára sat in a café a few minutes’ walk from the Harbourside Hotel and waited for Gunna.

‘Working you hard are they?’

Bára’s smile was thin. ‘I’ll have them house-trained in a few days, I hope.’

‘So what are you doing here?’

‘Checking security. Back entrances and fire doors, that sort of thing,’ she said. ‘And getting a break from madam upstairs.’

‘How are they getting on?’

‘He’s all right. He’s in bed by eleven and working at his laptop by seven in the morning. She sleeps to midday and is up until three. He’s worried, Gunna,’ Bára said, looking around her. ‘It’s easy enough to tell. There are phone calls that are clearly not friendly ones and I’d love to have a really good look inside his laptop, but there’s no chance of that happening. He never leaves it open and I suspect there are a dozen passwords to go through to get to anything.’

Gunna looked over Bára’s shoulder at the morning activity unfolding. A ship was manoeuvring slowly in the still water of the harbour, assisted by a tug snapping at its heels to shove it into a berth. She shook her head irritably.

‘All right, are you?’ Bára asked with concern.

‘Yeah. I’m OK. Haven’t been sleeping well recently. Things have been awkward at home for a while.’

‘Are you and Steini not getting on?’

‘Steini’s lovely, as always,’ Gunna sighed. ‘He’s patient, always in a good mood and he cooks. So there’s nothing whatever to complain about. It’s my boy that’s causing me grief. You’re out of the loop if you haven’t heard.’

Bára looked blank. ‘In that case I’m out of the loop.’

Gunna took a deep breath. ‘Last year Gísli and his girlfriend—’

‘Soffía?’

‘That’s her. A sweet girl. Soffía got pregnant and the little boy, Ari, was born in April.’

‘Congratulations!’ Bára beamed. ‘Wow, Gunna a grandmother! That’s wonderful, surely?’

‘That’s the good part. Not long after Soffía got pregnant, Gísli, Laufey and I all went up to Vestureyri for my grandmother’s funeral. I stayed there with Laufey for a few days, but Gísli drove south the day after the funeral as he was going back to sea that night. He took a passenger south with him and the passenger got pregnant on the way.’

Bára sat in silence. ‘Shit,’ she said finally. ‘That’s terrible. When . . . ?’

‘Did baby number two appear? Kjartan made his appearance about two months after Ari.’

‘Shit,’ Bára repeated. ‘So who’s the girl?’

‘That’s what makes it all even better. She’s my brother Svanur’s stepdaughter, and at the beginning of last year Drífa showed up on my doorstep in floods of tears, and she’s still there.’

‘She’s living with you?’

‘She was until last summer when we managed to get her a social housing flat in the village, so she and the baby are living around the corner and my Laufey seems to spend as much time there as she does at home.’

‘Life’s never quiet or easy around you, is it?’ Bára said with a wan smile. ‘And there’s me moaning about having to shepherd these two snobs all day. Speaking of which,’ she said, looking at her watch. ‘I need to be there in a few minutes.’

Outside the café Bára turned up the collar of her coat against the sharp wind.

‘You want a lift?’

‘No, it’s all right. The Harbourside is right there and I need to have a walk around the back as well anyway.’

‘Fair enough. I’ll need to come and grill them again later today.’

‘Gunna,’ Bára said and hesitated. ‘Client confidentiality aside – you know how old habits die hard – and between ourselves.’

‘Yes?’

‘Jóhann’s as worried as hell, like I said. He tries to hide it, but it shows. She’s up to something as well, with all the calls and texts she leaves the room to take, but I haven’t figured out what it is yet.’

Orri’s back ached as he got slowly out of the truck, his high-vis jacket draped over one arm. In the canteen he listlessly changed out of his boots while his cup of coffee cooled on the table next to him.

‘All right, are you?’ Dóri asked, pushing his glasses up onto his bald head and putting down the crossword. ‘You look like shit, Orri.’

‘Slept badly.’

‘Never mind. Can you do a couple of hours tomorrow? Overtime?’

‘Yeah. Should be OK. Eight?’