Cold Comfort (26 page)

“Hell is packed with shitbags like you,” he said quietly, and wondered why he had said it as he pulled the trigger and sent the load of pellets into Bjartmar’s chest.

With the numb feeling of a job well done, he stowed the shotgun under his coat and stepped back into the garden. The man was clearly dead, his feet mangled by the first shot and his chest a mess of blood and torn flesh surrounded by ribbons of charred white shirt.

He took care to walk over the damp grass this time. As he crossed the street, he heard doors bang and saw lights appearing in the doorways of neighbouring houses. He walked up the slope, keeping to the gutter, where rainwater flowed steadily downhill, washing his shoes clean of blood. A few hundred metres ahead he ducked along a footpath between the houses that took him back downhill, emerging into another quiet street. A second footpath took him further down the slope to where the van was parked.

The engine grumbled into life and he drove slowly along the residential street to turn into the main road towards town, pulling over on the way to let two police cars with wailing sirens and flashing lights overtake and hurtle past.

Instead of going back to Sammi’s flat, Jón stopped off at the workshop, where he lit the stove with some scraps of paper and threw on handfuls of sawdust and woodchips. When the fire was burning merrily, he took off his trainers and added them to it, wrinkling his nose at the smell of melting rubber. It was only then that the pent-up tension reached him and his hands began to shake uncontrollably. He drew his legs under him in the workshop’s ragged armchair and hugged his arms around them, letting the heat of the stove bring some warmth back to his chilled bones.

G
UNNA LAY BACK
and wiggled her toes, her feet perched on the edge of the table. Her head was against Steini’s chest, the two of them lying against each other on the sofa, and she could hear his heartbeat. She could tell by his breathing that he was almost asleep. The TV burbled beyond her feet; she had stopped paying attention to it as her eyelids began to droop. If she hadn’t been so comfortable, she would have suggested turning it off and going to bed.

“It’s been a long day,” she said lazily.

“Nothing but excitement for the guardians of law and order,” Steini agreed, opening one eye and shifting slightly to settle himself even deeper into the sofa.

“Sarcasm is a an offence you can be arrested for, you know.”

“Ah, but you don’t have any proof. No jury would convict me.”

“That’s what you think, mate.”

“Early night, maybe, after all that excitement?”

“I’ll take it into consideration.”

Her phone began to buzz and flash on the table in front of them, and Gunna hauled herself upright.

“Æi, don’t answer it,” Steini mumbled, opening the other eye.

“It might be Laufey,” Gunna said.

“Isn’t she at Sigrún’s?”

“Yeah. I’ll just check,” she said, and was surprised to see Eiríkur’s number on the display. Before she could answer it, the buzzing stopped and the “missed call” message was displayed. Gunna lay back.

“Who was it?”

“Eiríkur. If it’s important, he’ll call back,” she said just as the phone began to buzz again.

“Must be important,” Steini said.

“Eiríkur. What’s up?” Gunna asked crisply. “I’m off duty, and you should be as well—”

“It’s Bjartmar, chief,” Eiríkur interrupted. “Dead. He’s been shot.” Steini sat up, registering the expression on Gunna’s face as she listened.

“Bloody hell. Where?”

“At his house. It seems he opened the front door and bang, bang.”

“Where are you?”

“On the way there now.”

“All right. I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she said, closing her phone and rummaging in the pile of clean laundry for fresh socks.

“Anything serious?” Steini asked.

“A villain we’ve been investigating with all sorts of nastiness in his past. It seems someone knocked on his front door and gave him both barrels.”

She scooped up her phone and pulled on a thick fleece, stuffing the phone into one pocket and casting around for her shoes.

“I’ve no idea how long I’ll be,” she said, lacing up one shoe and reaching for the other. She stood up. “Damn and blast it. Firearms. It was always going to be a case of when and not if,” she said furiously to herself.

By the door she picked up a thick green parka and turned to Steini. She took a couple of steps across the floor and planted a kiss on his forehead.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can. Keep the bed warm for me, will you?”

J
ÓN RANG THE
bell and waited. Rain pelted down in the darkness and he huddled under the shelter outside the house in the western end of town. The concrete of the shelter was crumbling and the rusted iron rods that reinforced it were poking out. He could see there was a light on upstairs, otherwise he wouldn’t have rung the bell. It was past midnight and he couldn’t face going back to his brother’s flat.

“Hello?”

The door opened a crack and the woman’s face appeared in the narrow opening.

“Hi. I, er, I’m really sorry to be calling so late. You remember me? Jón the plumber?”

The door opened a little wider as she stared out at him.

“What do you want this late?” she asked suspiciously.

“Look, I’m really, really sorry. I’m in a bit of trouble and was wondering if I could come in for a minute?”

She stared back with her lips pursed, then closed the door. Jón heard a chain rattle and a second later it opened again. This time he could see that she was wrapped in a dressing gown that had once been white, with shapeless slippers on her feet and a quizzical look on her narrow face.

Wordlessly she stood aside to let him in. Another door behind her squealed as it opened and an elderly man looked out at them, a grey-faced woman peering over his shoulder.

“Another new boyfriend, Elín?” the man asked salaciously, while the woman scowled behind him.

“Oh go back to sleep, you nosy old bastard,” Elín Harpa snarled, slamming the front door and turning to climb the stairs behind Jón.

Jón stood in the middle of the kitchen and dripped water from his jacket.

“I’m really so sorry to barge in on you,” he stammered. “It’s late and I don’t have anywhere to go. Lost my house and everything. Been sleeping at my brother’s place, but he doesn’t really want me there and I thought … maybe …?”

“You can sleep here if you want,” Elín Harpa told him in a flat voice. She went towards the flat’s tiny living room, where a TV screen was the only illumination. More than half of the room was taken up by a double bed. She sat on the edge of it and looked up at him calmly.

“Is that your bed? I didn’t mean …” Jón faltered. “I meant, don’t you have a spare room or a sofa or something?”

Elín Harpa shrugged. Jón saw that the lifeless shoulderlength brown hair had gone, replaced by a short crop that nestled over the tops of her ears, making her look younger and more fragile.

“There’s only one other room and that’s where the kids sleep. So it’s here with me or on the floor. Up to you.”

She prodded a remote control bound up with sticky tape several times until the TV screen went black, leaving the room in gloom, while Jón continued to drip on the kitchen floor.

Monday 22nd

M
ORNING WAS NOT
far off when Gunna parked Gísli’s Range Rover outside and quietly opened the front door to the silent house. The only sound to be heard was the muted ticking of the kitchen clock. Her hands and feet, chilled in the hours spent searching Bjartmar’s garden under the glare of floodlights, had thawed on the drive home, but the fatigue of the long day and the shock of seeing Bjartmar’s mangled corpse, eyes wide open and staring into the distance, had left her drained.

She hung her coat and fleece on the back of a kitchen chair, stretched her arms high above her head and breathed in deeply. She closed her eyes and lifted her chin, squaring her shoulders and trying not to visualize the man’s last terrified moments.

She had finally been ordered home, along with Eiríkur and Helgi. Nothing but faint footprints had been found in the grass, so, leaving the technical team engrossed in the scene of crime, she and Eiríkur had joined the group of uniformed officers conducting house-to-house enquiries, trying to locate anyone who might have been aware of anything.

An elderly gentleman walking a small dog recalled seeing a man striding uphill from the crime scene, but could give no description beyond the fact that he was tall and dressed in dark clothing. The enquiries stretched into the neighbouring streets and revealed only that a shabby white van had been parked there for a while, but nobody recalled the number, or even when it had arrived or departed.

Gunna pulled off her T-shirt and unbuttoned her jeans, then stood in front of the open fridge to take a long pull at a carton of the orange juice that she always tried to remember to buy for Laufey.

She wriggled out of her jeans, sodden past the knees, and rolled them into a ball with the T-shirt. Feeling sweaty and dirty after hours in the drizzling rain, on an impulse she clicked off the main light, leaving only the light over the stove on, stripped off the rest of her clothes and stuffed everything into the washing machine. She squatted and poured powder into the drawer, set the machine to run, and padded to the shower, where the sulphurous hot water soothed the knotted muscles of her shoulders.

It was much later when she crawled into bed, draping one arm over Steini’s sleeping form.

“Y’all right?” he enquired drowsily. “Tough job?”

“Yup. Exhausted.”

She squeezed him gently and Steini snaked an arm behind him to rest a hand on her thigh as he began to snore musically again.

T
HE NEWLY PROMOTED
chief inspector Sævaldur Bogason took charge of the briefing. Gunna yawned as he preened at the front of the room, and noticed with interest that Ívar Laxdal stood at the back.

“Right, people,” Sævaldur said loudly, calling the room to order, even though everyone there was already sitting in silence and waiting for him to start. “The deceased, Bjartmar Arnarson, killed at twenty-one forty last night, two rounds from a shotgun at extremely close range. No witnesses. What do we have?”

Albert from the technical team stood up and cleared his throat. “Like you said, Sævaldur. Two shots. The first probably downwards and into the victim’s feet. This wasn’t a fatal injury, but would have been completely debilitating. No way he could have escaped or resisted. The second shot to the chest was the fatal wound. Death would have been instantaneous.”

“Where’s Miss Cruz?” Sævaldur demanded. “Why isn’t she here?”

“She’s still at the crime scene,” Albert apologized. “She’ll be carrying out the autopsy this afternoon, but in broad terms I don’t think it will tell us much more than we know already.”

“OK. Is there anything else to go on?”

“The place is like a slaughterhouse,” Albert continued. “Blood everywhere. The splash patterns tie in with what I’ve already described. There are a couple of footprints. The victim was barefoot, so we assume the tracks are the killer’s; look like very ordinary training shoes. We’re going through the data to try and get a match, but it’s a long shot.”

“Any dabs?”

“Not that we’ve found so far. We’re still checking the house.”

“Ballistics?”

“Working on it. But without a cartridge case, there’s not a lot to go on.”

Gunna could see that Sævaldur was enjoying his role at the front. He looked at the assembled faces and singled her out.

“Gunnhildur. You’ve been investigating this man already. Can you give us a rundown?”

Unlike Albert, Gunna decided to stay seated, and saw Sævaldur frown.

“He had a complex set of businesses that are, as far as we can see, all legal, based on the cash he made in property. Before that he was involved in narcotics, but didn’t get his own fingers dirty and nothing was ever pinned on him. He ran a club called Blacklights that many of us will remember fondly, which is now a smart restaurant, but he still owns the building,” Gunna explained, habit making her refer to Bjartmar in the present tense.

“What’s your angle on him? Why have you been chasing this character?”

Gunna hesitated, remembering Ívar Laxdal’s instructions to keep the investigation into the Svana Syndicate as low-key as possible.

“Bjartmar had a number of companies, including one called Rigel Investment. The ownership is complex, to say the least. But Rigel Investment owns the building that Svana Geirs lived in, also the car that she had the use of.”

“D’you think there’s a link?”

Gunna threw her hands up. “Undoubtedly. Bjartmar had upset a great many people over the years with all kinds of business deals that were, strictly speaking, legal, but far from honest. He didn’t have many friends and seemed to have a talent for making enemies as well as money.”

Sævaldur grunted in acknowledgement. “Motives?”

“This wasn’t a robbery. Nothing appears to have been stolen and the killer didn’t go further into the house than the lobby,” Eiríkur ventured. “It was quick as well. The 112 call was made at twenty-one forty-one by one of the neighbours who had heard the shots. The first car was on the scene at within three minutes and the Special Unit was right behind them, by which time the killer was gone. He probably walked up the hill and away. None of the neighbours recalled any kind of traffic along the street until we got there.”

“Motive, if this wasn’t a robbery?” Sævaldur asked, throwing the question to the whole room.

“Revenge,” Gunna said firmly. “Bjartmar’s wife is still in hospital after what looks to have been an arson attack. I don’t know if that was an attack that was intended for Bjartmar himself, but it seems possible. Bjartmar and his wife weren’t on good terms and he resented propping up her business, while I understand that she was pretty much a trophy wife. He had another woman on the side, who runs a seafood bar called the Fish Lover a few doors from his wife’s restaurant. Bjartmar seems to have taken a perverse delight in setting this woman up in a business in direct competition with his wife’s.”