Cold Comfort (9 page)

A hard-faced lady in a fur coat stepped quickly past him and a blast of wet air disturbed the bank’s controlled atmosphere before being suddenly cut off as the door eased itself shut again. Diddi gulped.

“Ninety-nine.”

He looked up and saw that the youngest of the three cashiers was waiting for him, a woman with thick brown hair and a toothy smile. Diddi quailed and stood up, stared at the desk in front of him and looked up to focus on the girl’s teeth. He knew she was saying something, but he didn’t hear it for the roaring in his head.

He fumbled with his parka and hauled down the zip to put in a hand and pull out the carpet knife that he had been careful to keep inside, terrified that he would cut his fingers.

“One hundred.”

The cashier at the next desk had seen nothing, but the one facing him was staring in disbelief. Diddi looked straight at her and in a moment of clarity took in the heavy mask of make-up on her face that wrinkled as her mouth opened.

“Quiet,” Diddi ordered. “Please. Give me money. N-n-now,” he instructed, trying to sound as if he meant it, and then remembering what he had been told.

“Don’t make a noise and don’t make any alarms go off,” he ordered, mind on autopilot. He stuffed the crumpled carrier bag that had been in his pocket through the gap. “Put it in there,” he instructed. “If you don’t mind,” he added as an afterthought without having a clear idea why.

The girl recovered her composure and quickly busied herself behind the desk. Diddi realized he had forgotten to tell her to keep her hands where he could see them, and felt suddenly that things were going wrong, telling himself that he shouldn’t panic. The woman at the next desk was staring at him in amazement, and the man in the green jacket she was serving had realized that her attention wasn’t on him any more, but on the young man in a parka with the pudding-basin haircut and bewilderment in his eyes.

“What’s happening?” the man ventured, and Diddi raised the knife, trying to look threatening.

“Please, don’t say anything, and keep calm,” the woman at the desk murmured as the carrier bag appeared in front of Diddi, stuffed with notes. He picked it up with his left hand and backed away from the counter, keeping the two cashiers and the man in front of him.

“One hundred and one.”

The third cashier still had not noticed what had taken only a matter of seconds, but squawked as she looked up and saw Diddi standing in front of them uncertainly, knife held out.

“Look here, young feller,” the man with the green jacket was saying in the same authoritative tone that Diddi had hated hearing at school. “Look, give me the knife and everything will be all right. You understand?”

Diddi backed away as the man advanced, the stern look on his face clashing with his false smile. He proffered a hand for Diddi to put the knife into, when suddenly Diddi remembered what he had been told.

“No, f-f-fuck off! Leave me alone!” he yelled, slashing wildly and turning to run. He registered the door swinging to behind him and the shock of cold air hitting his face outside as a shrill alarm began to ring somewhere in the distance. He raced round the corner and along the street before remembering his instructions. He cut down a footpath and emerged in a street of quiet houses where a battered red car waited.

Panting uncontrollably, he collapsed into the passenger seat. The car was moving before he had even closed the door.

“OK?” asked the denim-clad, thin-faced driver as they stopped politely at the intersection to join the main road towards town. He smiled at Diddi cowering in the seat as they heard the first sirens coming the other way, a police squad car followed closely by an ambulance, and took the car as close as he could to the curb to allow the emergency vehicles a clear path down the middle of the road.

Diddi started to breathe more normally as they approached the main road, and he closed his eyes, trying to overcome the panic he could feel inside and to stop himself sobbing. He still clutched both the bag and the knife.

The mid-morning traffic was fairly sparse, and as the car pulled up at a set of traffic lights ready to turn into another quiet residential area, the driver looked over at him.

“Knife,” he said.

“What?”

“Knife,” he repeated, winding down his window.

Diddi silently handed it over. As the car moved off and around the corner, the thin-faced man sent the carpet knife spinning away into the thick hedge of someone’s front garden.

S
IGRÚN RAISEDA
questioning eyebrow as the newsreader finished the announcement.

“Robbing a bank? Do people really do that?” she asked. “I knew that kiosks and shops get held up sometimes, but not banks, surely?”

“It happens, though not often,” Gunna said thoughtfully, rummaging through the pockets of her fleece for her phone. “I’m just going to call Helgi …”

Sigrún stood up and refilled the percolator jug absently while Gunna listened to the phone ring.

“Hi, Helgi, busy?”

“No more than usual, chief. Plenty to do and not enough time to do it.”

“You want to take a morning off now and again. Does you good,” she replied. “Here, I just heard the news. Who’s the bank robber?”

“Ah. Actually, I was wondering if I should give you a call, and then I thought better of it.”

“Why? Me being off duty has never stopped you before.”

“No, that’s Eiríkur, not me.”

“Sorry. But OK, is there anything to this?”

She heard Helgi chuckle.

“The world’s stupidest bank robber, it seems. Daft Diddi walked into a branch of Kaupthing with a knife in one hand and got away with about a million in cash.”

“A million? That’s not much of a payday, is it?”

“Wouldn’t even get you a decent second-hand car these days.”

“And where’s Diddi?”

“No idea. The uniform boys are doing the rounds and we’re keeping out of it for the moment. The silly bastard only walked into the branch where he has his own account and the girl behind the counter knew exactly who he was. No attempt to hide his face, nothing, but he managed to disappear, so I doubt he was doing this alone. Poor lad, now he’s going to get into some real hot water.”

“He’ll get a suspended sentence, I suppose, when he shows up.”

“No chance. There was a chap there who tried to be a have-a-go hero and got in the way of Diddi’s knife. Slashed the tendons in one arm, so Diddi’s going to be facing GBH.”

Sigrún put mugs and a plate of biscuits on the table, while Gunna shook her head in despair.

“Unbelievable how stupid these people can be, isn’t it? Let me know what happens, will you? We ought to have a word with Diddi when he’s finally brought in and see if we can get him to admit that it was Ommi who beat him up.”

“Way ahead of you, chief. I’ve already warned the uniform boys that Diddi may have been keeping some bad company. I’ll let you know if anything exciting happens.”

“Fair enough. See you this afternoon,” Gunna said, ending the call.

“What was that?” Sigrún asked.

“Ah, the usual stupid, immoral people we have to deal with. A disabled lad walked into a bank with a knife, demanded money and got away with about a million in cash. But he slashed someone’s arm while he was at it, so it’ll probably be an additional case for us once the boys in uniform have brought him in.”

“Don’t you ever get tired of these people?”

“And how. But a morning off helps, and chocolate biscuits don’t do any harm. What’s happening with Norway?”

“Jörundur’s there now for a week, on a strict promise to behave and not touch a drop. If it works out, he’ll go back and I’ll go with him for a couple of days. The job sounds good. A year’s contract, decent earnings plus subsidized accommodation.”

Gunna absently dipped a biscuit a little too long in her coffee and it unexpectedly disintegrated.

“Damn,” she said mildly. “I mean, it’s going to be quiet without you two here. Laufey’s going to miss babysitting Jens and having a second mum to go to when I’m at work.”

G
UNNA MADE HER
way up the stairwell of a pastelcoloured concrete block of flats. The building was indistinguishable from the rest of the row that formed the final border of an out-of-the-way housing estate at the far end of Breidholt. This was where some of the city’s cheapest housing could be found, in cramped apartments that had once been smart and in demand as the first rung on the property ladder. More recently they had started to be seen almost as ghettos, where those down on their luck lived alongside the city’s more recent immigrants, as the spicy aromas in the stairwell bore witness to.

Gunna sensed the sharp smells of garlic and ginger, mingled with the more subtle tinges of spices she did not have names for, as she peered at a door that was bruised and had clearly been repaired more than once. A broken pushchair containing a black plastic sack of rubbish occupied the corner of the landing.

A thickset teenager wearing a black T-shirt and with a baseball cap sideways on his head answered the door with a frown across his face. “Yeah?”

“I’m looking for Justyna,” Gunna said.

“Who wants her?” he demanded truculently.

“Police. Where is she?”

The boy shrugged his shoulders and jerked a thumb towards the flat’s passage before turning on his heel without a word. Gunna knocked on the first door and opened it gingerly. A bright light inside shone above a heavy sewing machine festooned with orange fabric and a pale-faced woman hunched over it as the machine hummed. A pencil secured an untidy bun of greying fair hair and she held a pair of oversized scissors crosswise in her mouth.

“Justyna?”

The woman looked up and nodded, finished the seam she was stitching and stood up to pick her way through the folds of fabric to the door, which she shut behind her with relief.

“Kitchen,” she said firmly, before yelling, “Nonni! Where are you?”

There was no reply from further along the corridor, but an insistent beat that pervaded the whole flat was enough to tell them both that the teenager was there.

“Your son?” Gunna asked, wondering if the boy had shown up in any of the reports passing across her desk.

“Yes. His father is not here any more, so now we two are here only,” she said stiffly.

“How long have you been here?” Gunna asked.

“Fifteen years,” Justyna replied, lighting a cigarette and leaning against the kitchen units. Gunna opened her notes and looked over at the tired woman staring back at her. “I’m investigating the death of Svana Geirs. I understand that you cleaned her flat?”

Justyna nodded.

“And when was the last time you cleaned it?”

“Every week. So a week before she died.”

“Always on the same day?”

“Yeah. Always same day, but not same time. Sometimes morning, sometimes later. Never cleaning if she have people there.” Justyna ground out the stub of her cigarette into a saucer and fiddled with the packet in her other hand.

“Is this a private arrangement of some kind?”

“Is agency. They arrange, fix times. Most times I cleaned her flat when nobody there. Two, three times she was home when I clean. Not more.”

“Which agency?”

“Reindeer Hygiene. They clean many houses, flats, offices. But I guess business not so good now.”

“Do you do much work for them?”

“Before, every day. Even Sunday. Now, two, three days every week.”

“And you do other work as well?” Gunna asked.

“Work, work, always work,” Justyna replied bitterly with a frown that deepened the web of lines around each eye. “Teenager is expensive and no maintenance any more. Two, three days cleaning houses. One day, maybe two, cleaning hotel.”

“And what are you sewing?”

“Extra work. Not black,” Justyna added hurriedly. “Tents. Repair before summer comes. Tent company rents them to tourists.”

“All right, I’m not concerned with whether or not you’re working on the black. I’m interested in Svana Geirs. Did you ever speak to her?”

“Only the first time I go there. She show me around.”

“OK. So, tell me about Svana’s place. Was it clean normally?” Justyna looked thoughtful. “I see lot of people’s houses. Svana’s place …” She shrugged. “OK. Same as most. If people are too lazy to clean themselves … it’s not hard.”

She shrugged again and looked around the flat’s tiny but spotless kitchen. “This place should be cleaner. Not easy with teenagers.”

“Tell me about it,” Gunna agreed with heartfelt conviction. “I have two. Now, about Svana’s flat. I’m interested in anything unusual that you might have seen.”

“Nothing special. I see lots of strange things in people’s houses. Svana, she have lots of friends. Or maybe same friend come a lot. I always change the bedclothes and take to wash. Always very dirty, drink, food, other stuff,” Justyna said with a curl of her lip. “Bedroom toys as well, she sometimes leave them on the bed. I put them away.”

“So you cleaned everything.”

“Ceiling to floor. Every week.”

“Wiping everything down?”

“Everything.”

“Always the same way?”

“Always the same. Start with kitchen, then bathroom. Then big room, bedroom and hall last. Polish everything. Vacuum everything.”

“And was this regular, the things you saw? The bedclothes, the toys and things like that?”

“I think so. A lot of drink, lots of bottles. No food, only takeaway. Pizza and things. But whisky, vodka, gin, wine always, always bottles to throw away. Always lots for bathroom, empty packets.”

Gunna raised an eyebrow and Justyna curled thumb and forefinger into a circle that she slid sharply down the index finger of the other hand to indicate a condom.

“Also make-up, lots of make-up, hair dye, stuff to look younger. All rubbish. Sleep good, eat good, you look younger.”

“How about the keys? Do you have a key?” Gunna asked.

“Key at agency. We collect keys for all the houses each day. Sign for them, give back when we finish.”

“And the alarm code?”

“Is new code every week. Also get from agency.”

“And the day you found Svana, did you have a code?”

“Yes, I go with code and key, but everything open.”