Thin Ice: An Inspector Gunna Mystery (Gunnhildur Mystery Book 5) (12 page)

Bogi’s face twisted into a scowl of discomfort. ‘It’s sensitive,’ he said, and looked at the floor.

‘Maybe so,’ Gunna said gently, ‘but any piece of background information could lead us to them. And I can assure you that anything you say is confidential.’

‘Erna never told me who Tinna Lind’s real father is,’ he said and sighed, looking at the overstuffed room as if it might give him inspiration. ‘Erna was a pretty wild youngster by all accounts. Look, you’re sure this won’t go any further?’

‘Between you and me. Unless it becomes essential as evidence, in which case it would have to come out.’

‘All right, it’s not going to be relevant to the investigation. When Erna was a teenager she had an affair with her older sister’s husband, who was six or seven years older than she was. I know because Agla, that’s her sister, told me herself; said she’d caught them at it. There was a huge row and the family smoothed it all over so there was no gossip. I’m certain that he’s Tinna Lind’s natural father. You understand that this all happened before I appeared on the scene? Anyway, Tinna Lind was registered at birth as having no known father, and when Erna and I got together and had been married a few years, I adopted her formally, so she’s Tinna Lind Bogadóttir,’ he said in a rush and took a deep breath. ‘And that’s the first time I’ve ever told anyone about that or mentioned it outside Erna’s immediate family. I’m not even sure Tinna Lind knows. It’s not something any of us have ever talked about.’

The clock seemed to tick even more loudly once Bogi stopped speaking.

‘I see,’ Gunna said, impressed by the effort he had made to tell her the family secret. A tiny bead of perspiration had rolled down his forehead and his fingers were again twisted together in a knot. ‘In that case, do Erna and her sister get on today? How about the brother-in-law?’

‘He died two years ago. Erna and Agla had a difficult relationship for a long time, but since Gautur died they have been a lot closer.’

‘Is there any enmity there?’

‘Are you suggesting that Agla might have an axe to grind? Come on, this was all put to bed years ago. In any case, Agla’s not well herself these days.’

‘Friends, acquaintances? Who does Erna associate with?’

‘Women who shop and do lunch, mostly.’

* * *

Magni pushed his trolley to the checkout and stacked everything on the conveyor. A girl who bounced a wad of gum from cheek to cheek scanned everything and the total appeared on the screen as Magni put the goods in two cardboard boxes.

‘Cash or card?’

‘Card.’

He swiped the card through the machine and prayed. The card machine chattered and the girl looked at the strip of paper it ejected.

‘It’s refused.’

‘What? Try it again, can you?’ Magni said, hoping that the girl didn’t take it into her head to look at the name on the card or the photo of Erna on the back of it.

The girl sighed, rubbed the card energetically against her sleeve and ran it through the machine a second time. This time it chattered again but Magni breathed as the girl spun a receipt towards him.

‘Sign here.’

He took the offered ballpoint and scribbled an indecipherable scrawl instead of a signature on the slip, then looked up to see the girl looking at him strangely.

‘Erna Björg Brandsen?’ she said, a plucked eyebrow lifted in question at the beefy ginger-haired man standing in front of boxes stacked with groceries.

‘What?’ Magni asked, trying to be convincing and taking the card. He looked at it and shook his head with what he hoped was an engaging grin. ‘Shit, I picked up my wife’s card by mistake. Ah, what the hell, nobody’ll notice,’ he said lightly, pocketing the card and picking up a freesheet newspaper from the rack and dropping into the box.

The girl opened her mouth to say something.

‘Sorry, sweetheart. It’s my mistake. Happens all the time. She’s probably at the hairdresser’s with my card in her handbag,’ he said and placed his hands on the trolley. The girl looked at the queue snaking back into the shop, shrugged and started scanning the next customer’s items.

Two places along the queue, Svava looked at Magni and caught his eye.

‘Wife?’ she mouthed at him. ‘Really?’

He pushed the Explorer through the darkness, furious at having been recognized in the shop and wondering if Svava having seen him there could prove to be a problem later. Realizing he was driving dangerously fast, he told himself to act rationally and slow down. There was nothing to connect him with anything illegal, he was sure of that, and he brooded all the way along the long straight road. He’d even wiped down the car’s interior as best he could to remove any prints and worn gloves for the journey, but he still had the nagging feeling there could be a print or two that had escaped him, and hoped they would be Össur’s rather than his.

At least the Explorer was behaving better now that the tank was full of fresh petrol, and as he barrelled along he almost missed the junction by the filling station onto the unmade road northwards, and had to stop and reverse to make the turning, scolding himself for not paying attention.

Hotel Hraun was in darkness. He parked at the front and took the boxes in one by one, stacking them on the kitchen table. All but one of the loaves of bread and cartons of milk went into the freezer, as did the bags of chicken and pork, along with a bag of still-frozen fish fillets, although he pulled out a couple to defrost for the next day.

‘Hello! Where is everyone?’ he called out. He put water on to boil and ripped open a bag of coffee.

‘How did it go?’

‘Ah, not bad. The tank’s full and there’s food in the fridge. How’s your mum?’

Tinna Lind grinned. ‘Going stir crazy, I think. She hasn’t been shopping for two whole days. She’s watching TV upstairs and fretting that you might be living the high life on her Visa card.’

‘In Selfoss? Yeah, sure.’

‘You could have gone to the booze shop, couldn’t you?’

‘Yeah, I could have. But I wanted to keep it discreet, so I got fuel and food, and that’s it. Don’t want to take too many risks with someone else’s card. In fact, the girl in the shop in Selfoss looked at it strangely and I said I’d picked up my wife’s card by mistake.’

‘And you got away with it?’

‘Yeah, of course,’ Magni said, and thought back to Svava mouthing ‘wife?’ at him as he left the shop.

Össur appeared in the doorway.

‘It went all right?’

‘It did. Food and fuel.’

‘You got smokes?’

Magni tossed a carton of Camels to him and Össur caught it with the first smile that any of them had seen on his face.

‘Food as well?’

‘Yep, stocked up with stores.’

‘What are we eating tonight?’

Magni delved into the last box and took out three paper bags.

‘As it’s Saturday night, grilled chicken and salad,’ he said, adding a couple of cartons to the pile on the table. ‘Help yourselves. The chef gets a night off tonight.’

‘Fucking hell . . .’

Magni turned to see Össur with the newspaper spread out on the table in front of him, an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

‘What?’ he asked, making his way to the other side of the table to see what had taken him by surprise.

O
NE
D
EAD IN
H
AFNARFJÖRDUR
H
OUSE
F
IRE
read the headline, over a picture of an old-fashioned house with smoke billowing from an upstairs window while a fire engine filled the foreground of the picture.

‘Shit. That’s Árni’s place,’ Össur said in a dead voice.

‘Fuck. You’re sure?’

‘Of course I’m fucking sure.’

Magni picked the paper up, checked the date, saw it was the previous day’s paper and went to an inside page for the full story.

‘“A man was pronounced dead at the scene after fire crews attended an incident in the upstairs apartment of a house in Hafnarfjördur early this morning,”’ he read out. ‘“The deceased is believed to be a man in his forties and his name has not yet been released as relatives are still being informed. A police and fireservice investigation is in progress to find the cause of the fire. Police have not ruled out that the blaze could have been started deliberately and are seeking witnesses who may have been aware of movements in and around Vitastígur between five and seven this morning.”’

‘That’s Árni,’ Össur said, lighting his cigarette with trembling fingers. ‘It has to be Árni. That’s his place. Fuck, that evil bastard Alli must have got to him.’

‘You think so? It might have been an accident.’

‘Sure. “Police have not ruled out that the blaze could have been started deliberately,”’ he said, finger on the page. ‘That means they definitely think someone set fire to the place. Christ, I could do with a drink. You didn’t go to the booze shop, did you?’

‘OK, thanks. That’s great,’ Gunna said. ‘I’ll speak to you again in the morning.’ She put the phone down and turned to face Ívar Laxdal as he appeared silently in the detectives’ office.

‘Busy weekend, Gunnhildur?’

Ívar Laxdal was finding it harder to take Gunna by surprise and he decided that she must have developed an instinctive sense of when he was approaching.

‘Weekends are always busy, aren’t they? Eiríkur’s liaising with the fire investigators on the house fire in Hafnarfjördur. He says the dead man’s a taxi driver and some kind of petty criminal, so he’s really waiting to find out for definite if the fire was deliberate or not.’

‘Was it?’

‘Officially, we don’t know yet.’

‘Unofficially?’

‘According to Rúnar, who was the fire officer at the scene, it looks like a bunch of petrol-soaked rags through the letterbox and the victim died of smoke poisoning, probably without even waking up.’

‘So it’s a murder investigation?’

‘It is, or will be as soon as the fire investigator confirms their findings. But Eiríkur’s on it and he’ll have Helgi with him tomorrow.’

‘Suspects?’

‘Hard to say. Working on it.’

Ívar Laxdal sat down in Helgi’s chair and leaned back, his hands clasped over his chest, fingers entwined in a way that reminded her of Bogi Sveinsson.

‘And this missing persons inquiry? Something of a mystery?’

‘Very much so, but a bit of information just turned up a few minutes ago.’

‘Explain.’

‘The bank where Erna Brandsen has her account. Her credit card was used a couple of hours ago to buy petrol at a filling station not far from Selfoss.’

‘Interesting. So the husband is no longer a suspect?’

Gunna rattled her fingernails on the desk. ‘To start with, I thought he could be.’

‘And now?’

‘Now I’m not so sure. I was sitting in his living room talking to him when the card was used, so that certainly wasn’t him.’

‘That’s as good an alibi as a man could hope for.’

‘The woman and her daughter, who is the husband’s stepdaughter, seem to have disappeared together. Their mobile phone records show they both dropped off the network at roughly the same time and place, somewhere near Thingvellir. So they’re most likely together, or their phones are. The husband has a solid alibi. He was in Akureyri and didn’t get home until Friday afternoon, and that’s been confirmed, so he’s out of the picture. Plus he’s devastated, doesn’t know what to do with himself. Strangely, he seems more upset about the girl than about his wife, who seems to me to be one of those women who landed herself a wealthy husband and then set about spending it all as fast as he can earn it.’

‘And the domestic violence angle you mentioned yesterday? Anything?’

‘Nothing at all. Nothing to indicate abuse. A fairly happy and well-balanced family, by all accounts. So I’m back to square one and a wider search.’

Ívar Laxdal straightened his back, clapped his hands together and nodded once.

‘Good. I’ll leave things in your capable hands. What’s next?’

‘On the missing women? I have alerts out all over the place for Erna Brandsen’s white Ford Explorer, their phones are being tracked and I’ll get an alert as soon as one of them pops up. I’m getting some poor droid at their bank out of bed on a Sunday morning to go through any more traffic on her debit and credit cards, and if nothing’s happened by midday it could be time to mobilize rescue squads for a search, although we really need a better defined area to search than just somewhere around Thingvellir. If that confirmation hadn’t come through that Erna Brandsen’s card had been used today, I’d be looking at organizing the rescue squads to start a search right now.’

‘You think they’re dead? An accident of some kind? A robbery or a kidnapping? Or some kind of personal crisis?’

Gunna spread her hands wide. ‘Who knows?’

‘A nervous breakdown? It has been known.’

‘Maybe. But it seems totally out of character for Erna Brandsen, who it seems didn’t like going further out of town than the outlet stores in Mosfellsbær.’

‘And the fire?’

‘I’m leaving that to Eiríkur and Helgi. They’ll shout if they need help from me.’

‘Do you need anything? Resources, bodies?’

‘A search flight if you can get the Coast Guard to organize it and the Dash isn’t in use elsewhere. It’s the car we need to find, if the cloud lifts enough for a flight.’

‘A white car on a snow-covered landscape,’ Ívar Laxdal smiled. ‘That’s not a problem, is it? So what now?’

‘It’s five o’clock on Saturday afternoon and I’m going home. ‘D’you know what date it is?’

Ívar Laxdal closed his eyes and thought for a moment.

‘Of course,’ he said softly. ‘It was today. Fifteen years ago. How could I forget?’

* * *

The booming of the television from the room at the end where Össur had once again locked himself in could be heard as a dull bass beat. Magni reached behind the sofa in the hotel’s lounge and lifted the whisky bottle out.

‘It’s Saturday night. Drink?’

Tinna Lind grinned. ‘Hell, yeah.’

He handed her two fingers. They clinked glasses and sipped. Magni rolled it over his tongue and leaned his head back to savour it.

‘We’d better not stay here too long or we’ll be out of whisky in a few days.’