Chilled to the Bone (8 page)

When the man she had overheard in Yngvi’s office hadn’t found her half an hour later, Gunna zipped up her coat as high as it would go and strode out of the hotel’s entrance, the door grinding as it closed automatically behind her. Grit in the mechanism, Gunna guessed, screwing up her face in distaste as the wind swept flakes of stinging snow into her face; she could feel that the slush under her feet had begun to harden again in the thickening frost.

There was no post-Christmas rush to the center of Reykjavík. With earnings having remained static for those fortunate enough to still be employed, while prices had risen since the financial crash that now seemed to have receded practically to the Saga Age, shoppers were hardly spending much—at least not until the new credit card month began, Gunna reflected. A few years earlier she had been seriously considering leaving the police to earn more money in a new environment with private security work, but with the upheaval of the crash vivid in her memory, she had resigned herself to holding on to her state pay check, and the transfer to plain clothes in Reykjavík after her rural beat in Hvalvík had made life more stressful but considerably more interesting.

In the lee of a shop, she extracted her phone and punched in a quick SMS.

At the office?

She had hardly put her phone away when it buzzed in reply.

Slaving away

Coffee?

5 mins?

OK. Around the corner

The cafe was almost empty, and as the man behind the counter chewed his lip every time someone walked past, Gunna assumed he must be the proprietor. He brightened as she pushed the door open and stamped snow from her boots.

“I’m sick of winter already,” she said. “Coffee, please, and one of those things.”

“What coffee you like?”

“Just old-fashioned coffee-style coffee. My mate’ll be here in a minute and he’ll want something fancy with asparagus honey and organic goat’s milk, I expect.”

The man took Gunna’s money and she had taken off her coat and was deep in the previous day’s newspaper when Skúli pushed open the door and followed her route to the counter.

“How goes it at the rockface of contemporary journalism?”

“Chipping away,” Skúli admitted, sitting down with a tall glass of coffee. “Still at
Reykjavík Voice
—four days a week now. They advertised for someone, couldn’t get anyone they liked, so they offered me an extra two days.”

“So now you’re working eight days a week?” Gunna asked, biting into the something she’d blithely ordered and discovering it was covered in a sticky coating that clung to her teeth. “Shit, hell and damnation,” she cursed quietly, taking a mouthful of coffee and dropping the remains of the biscuit onto her plate.

“Are you all right, Gunna?” Skúli asked with concern.

“Yeah. Just a bit stressed at the moment. This guy,” she said, placing in front of him the screenshot Helgi had extracted from the hotel’s system. “Any idea who he is?”

Skúli gave it a quick glance. “Is this some kind of test?” he asked as Gunna gave him a long stare. “You don’t know?”

Gunna stifled the urge to snap back at him: No, I don’t know who this is, otherwise I wouldn’t be asking. “He’s a hack, I reckon, and someone I’d like to have a quiet word with, or else a chat with his editor.”

“He’s not a journo.”

“Sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. His name’s Baddó. He was in prison somewhere in Eastern Europe and was only recently released. I did a story about him a while ago because he didn’t want to be repatriated and finish his sentence in Iceland as people normally do. He fought quite hard not to be sent home and he also fought against being deported from wherever it was once he was released. I’m trying to remember what his real name is. I tried to get an interview with him once he was finally sent back to Iceland—before Christmas, I think—but he wouldn’t have it.”

“Hróbjartur,” Gunna supplied, her memory jogged back into gear. “Hróbjartur Bjarnthórsson.”

“Yeah. Isn’t it a terrible name?” Skúli said with a smile. “It doesn’t get much more nineteenth century than Hróbjartur Bjarnthórsson. It’s like something out of Laxness. Now I’m wondering why you’re interested in him and if there’s anything you can tell me?”

“Not right away. He’s been snooping around a case I’m working on and I want to know why.”

“This is about the thing at the Gullfoss? The shipowner who was found strapped to the bed?”

Gunna gave him another hard stare. “You don’t know anything about that, do you, Skúli? I’m not asking, by the way. I’m telling you that you haven’t heard anything, especially from me.”

Skúli shrugged. “Fair enough. It’s not exactly something I can print in
Reykjavík Voice
. But I do shifts at
Dagurinn
, and they were knocking together Jóhannes Karlsson’s obituary last night. Nothing to worry about,” he said hurriedly. “Just the usual crap about which farm his grandparents came from and how many grandchildren he had.”

Gunna started uncomfortably at the mention of grandchildren.

“Nothing about him paying a hooker to tie him to a bed in a smart hotel,” Skúli added.

“There’d be hell to pay if you did.”

“But there are rumors.”

“Like what?”

Skúli scratched his nose and looked about him theatrically, reassuring himself that apart from the two of them, the only other person in the café was the proprietor, yawning behind his counter.

“There’s nothing concrete, but you know what
Reykjavík Voice
is like. It’s seething with gossip. It seems that it’s the latest scam. Man books a kinky escort, she ties him up and disappears with his wallet after taking a couple of compromising photos,
presumably as insurance. Simple as that. It seems one guy wanted his fun in the wardrobe, but she locked him inside it and stole his wallet. It’s been going on for a while and it’s all ‘somebody knows someone who heard something from …’ You know?”

“Yeah. I know, Chinese whispers that don’t stand up in court.”

“I thought it was just an urban myth until this thing at Hotel Gullfoss happened yesterday. Not that we journos know any more than the police,” he said with a sly smile. “Although now some of us know that Bigfoot Baddó is involved. Not that we’d say a word out of place.”

A
T LUNCHTIME
J
ÓEL
Ingi went for sushi. It wasn’t something he did often, nor did he like it particularly, but the others enthused about the delights of raw fish and he joined the group of four at a small, smart place on Laugarvegur that had yet to become popular. Once it did, they would probably abandon it and find somewhere else, Jóel Ingi thought, enjoying the unaccustomed slow pace of the meal, made slower by his lack of skill with chopsticks, which he did his best to disguise.

The two women in the group departed together for the restaurant’s bathroom, leaving Jóel Ingi and Már with Sævar, a translator from the next floor. Jóel Ingi daydreamed as the other two talked British football, something he had never been able to muster interest in. Coffee arrived as the two women returned, and Katrín from the press office sat down opposite him and smiled. Jóel Ingi liked her. Katrín had a sense of humor that seemed irrepressible. A short, round woman who he decided had never seen the inside of a gym in her life, she didn’t attract him in the same way that his wife’s spare, bony frame drove him wild, but there was no denying that Katrín was fun in a way that Agnes could never be.

Jóel Ingi remained distant, answering the questions Katrín laughingly set him. Her friend, a wiry girl called Ursula, was
definitely more his type, he felt. The only one of the group not from the ministry, she seemed reluctant to engage in conversation with him, apparently preferring to talk to Már. Although he noticed her stealing the occasional glance his way.

“Hey, Jóel Ingi,” Katrín grinned as the waiter placed tiny cups of Icelandic coffee in front of them to smother the subtle sushi flavours. “Chelsea v Spurs on Saturday. I’m sure you’ll be glued to that, won’t you?” she joked. “Spurs to win, you think?”

Jóel Ingi lifted his eyes to smile back at her and shook his head, about to speak. But as he looked at her laughing eyes and past her through the restaurant windows, a familiar parka and baseball cap combination strolled along the opposite side of the street, stopped to look into a shop window and carried on.

“Shit! I was joking about the football,” Katrín said in alarm as the color drained from Jóel Ingi’s face and the coffee cup stopped an inch from his lips.

S
ECONDS AFTER LEAVING
Skúli to return to editing the next week’s TV listings, Gunna had her phone to her ear. She was relieved that the continuing snow promised by the deep grey clouds brooding a scant few feet above the rooftops of downtown Reykjavík was holding off releasing its payload.

“Eiríkur? Hi, Gunna,” she said needlessly, as if Eiríkur had not already seen her number appear on his phone. She was cursing herself for not having spent the previous evening looking through Hróbjartur Bjarnthórsson’s file, but Gísli’s bombshell had pushed everything else out of her mind, and she reminded herself that first Laufey would have to be told of her big brother’s predicament, and then the rest of the family. She wondered if her elder brother Svanur had yet been told of his stepdaughter’s pregnancy, and the circumstances.

“Chief? You there?” Eiríkur asked, concerned. Gunna realized that her phone was at her ear while her mind was elsewhere.

“Sorry, Eiríkur. Brain’s gone to mashed potato today,” she said, smothering her growing irritation at herself and trying to concentrate. “Look, priority. No messing about. Jóhannes Karlsson’s wife must have been told by now. I want access to his bank details as soon as possible, preferably within an hour. Any unauthorized transactions and all that. You know the score.”

“Anything suspicious?”

“Anything out of the ordinary, especially anything yesterday, considering he was probably dead around lunchtime. Understand?”

“Understood.”

“But quick, Eiríkur. There are more people than just us sniffing around. Okay?” Gunna instructed, putting her phone away and approaching the hotel, where a bulky man with a black frown on his face was huddled in a padded coat, smoking a cigarette under the
NO SMOKING
sign.

“This is a non-smoking zone,” she snapped and the man glared back at her, took a final pull and flicked the butt into the slush in the gutter.

“How would you like to mind your own business?” he invited and quailed as Gunna opened her wallet in front of him.

“City police,” he said in the same sharp tone as before. “I believe you wanted a word with me. You are?”

“Hákon Hákonarson,” he said once they were inside the hotel’s lobby. “My wife works here and she was questioned twice yesterday. I just wanted to make it plain that this is unjustified and it’s not right for you people to harass her like this.”

Gunna nodded in agreement, suppressing the dislike that she’d instinctively developed for this corpulent man and his pompous manner. “If she had been interviewed twice, then I might agree with you, but there was one short interview and that was all. Where’s your wife right now?”

“At home with a headache,” Hákon retorted in a sullen voice, like a child scolded for someone else’s misdemeanor.

“And where do you live?”

“Vallarholt. Number Eighty-seven.”

“And you drove here, did you?”

“Of course.”

Gunna felt in her pocket for her keys. “Well, if you go now, you’ll be there before me.”

Hákon looked stunned. “You think you’re going to interview her again?”

“Yup.”

“She’s had two interviews already,” he protested.

“That’s as maybe. But she’s only spoken to a police officer once and I’d very much like to know who she spoke to after she left this place yesterday.” She made to go. “So I’ll see you in about half an hour, Hákon. All right?”

V
ALERIA LOOKED ILL
while Hákon fumed in a corner. The flat was spotless, with not a single one of the many china statues of ballerinas and puppies out of place. Gunna felt nervous about sitting down and ruining the careful arrangement of cushions on the sofa, so she perched on the edge instead.

“Not feeling well, Valeria?”

“It’s okay. I don’t have a shift today, so I’m not missing work.”

“Let’s track back, shall we? You found Jóhannes Karlsson’s body in his room at the hotel, right? I understand that you shouldn’t have done. According to the rules, your supervisor should have gone into the room first.”

“That’s right. Ástrós is worried about it. There will be an …” She floundered, searching for the right word.

“Investigation?” Gunna offered.

“Yes. Investigate. Soon.”

“I’ve a good mind to take the damned hotel to court and demand damages,” Hákon rumbled, unable to contain his
indignation any longer. “It’s a damned disgrace that their staff should have to put up with this kind of thing.”

“Quite,” Gunna said shortly, pointedly ignoring Hákon and concentrating on Valeria, who was sitting on a hard-backed chair.

“I’m not having it, you know,” he continued, failing to take the hint. “The last time this happened—” he stopped suddenly. Gunna looked at Valeria, who was staring at her husband in horror.

“The last time this happened?” Gunna asked, breaking the long silence that followed his furious outburst. “Just what do you mean by that? Explain, will you?”

Valeria sighed. “At Gullfoss Hotel once. I only work there two months, the week I start there. Before that I was working at Harbourside Hotel. Two times at Harbourside.”

“Owned by the same company,” Hákon put in. “They asked her to switch because Gullfoss needed more reliable staff when they took it over.”

“Ástrós also. She work for these hotels for twenty years. First Arctic Hotel, then Harbourside. Then to Gullfoss. Same company for a long time. Now there are mistakes, problems, and she is worried. Not easy to find work for fifty-year-old lady.”

“What happened at the Harbourside Hotel? And how long ago?”

M
AGNÚS YAWNED
. T
HE
doorbell chimed insistently for the third time and he hauled himself out of bed and shuffled toward the front door of the flat. He had only lived there for a few weeks and there were still boxes in the hall that needed to be unpacked.