Cold Steal (28 page)

‘Only “keep the change”. That’s all.’ He smiled, showing off a gap between his teeth. ‘So what’s he done?’

‘Listen to the lunchtime news and you’ll find out,’ Gunna said, handing him a card. ‘If you remember anything else, call me.’

The first security guard was an overweight young man with dead eyes. His reservations were overcome by Gunna’s warrant card, throwing his hands in the air in despair and calling his supervisor when asked for security tapes. Ten minutes later a flustered but slightly less corpulent young man appeared, shaking off a jacket that was a size too big for him. He checked Gunna’s identification before closing the door to pointedly shut out his junior colleague.

‘What can I do for you?’ He smiled ingratiatingly.

Gunna produced the picture of Jóhann Hjálmarsson. ‘I have reason to believe this gentlemen walked in here a few minutes after eleven o’clock on Friday morning last week. So, to start with I want to get that confirmed as I see you have a CCTV camera covering the entrance, and then I’d like to know where he went and what he did.’

‘Oh, right.’ The young man’s fingers flickered over a computer keyboard and he called up footage of the lobby. People walked back and forth with speeded-up steps, oddly foreshortened by the camera looking down on them. It took a few minutes to identify Jóhann Hjálmarsson walking in with a jaunty step and a smile on his face. Gunna was surprised that a man with a price on his head should look so cheerful as he walked through a set of revolving doors and out of the frame.

‘Now what? Where’s the next camera?’

‘By the lifts,’ the young man answered and the image switched to a bank of doors as people entered and left. He speeded up the replay and caught Jóhann Hjálmarsson entering a lift on his own. ‘There you are. He went upstairs at . . .’ He peered at the screen. ‘Eleven fifty-one.’

‘And you have cameras on the other floors as well?’

‘No, we don’t. Individual companies can do that for themselves. We just watch who goes in and out. What happens up there is their business.’

‘So there’s no way of telling which floor he went to?’

‘No, I’m afraid not.’

‘Hell.’

‘Well, not as such,’ he said, and he went back to the computer. He recalled the footage of Jóhann Hjálmarsson getting into the lift and ran it slowly. The doors closed and he pointed at the indicator.

‘Your friend got in the lift on his own, so you can see the light above the door? That’s the number of the floor.’

‘I can’t see the number, it’s not clear enough.’

‘Look. It’s on one for ground there. So if you watch the indicator, it flashes every time there’s a new number.’

They both watched intently as he slowed the replay down and counted.

‘I make that eight,’ he said finally. ‘It hasn’t moved for a while, which means the lift stays where the last person got out, until it’s called to go either up or down.’

‘And what’s on the eight floor?’

Orri sat back in the interview room chair, his hands in the pockets of his fleece.

‘Nice sweater,’ Eiríkur said, looking at the logo on the right side of the chest. ‘Where did you get it?’

‘It’s my girlfriend’s. It’s too big for her, so I wear it.’

‘It’s distinctive, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose so,’ Orri said, the distrust in his voice coming to the surface as he wondered where this was leading.

‘I have it on very good authority that someone wearing a fleece exactly like this one, including that distinctive logo, was seen on six occasions walking along Kópavogsbakki in the last couple of weeks.’

‘Kópavogsbakki? Where’s that?’

It was Eiríkur’s turn to sit back. ‘Nice try, Orri. You’re a driver. Don’t try telling me you don’t know every street and alley in the city, including Kópavogsbakki.’

‘So what? There must be hundreds of fleeces like this one around.’

‘Not so. The Kjölur Equestrian Club in Selfoss had a hundred made about five years ago and they still have about half of them. So that means there are another fifty in circulation, and more than half of those women, I’d guess. That means that at a rough guess there are twenty-odd men with fleeces like this, most of them living near Selfoss and with no reason to be anywhere near Kópavogsbakki.’

Orri shrugged and said nothing. Eiríkur leaned forward and looked into his eyes. A flash of uncertainty appeared and was immediately hidden as Orri regained his impassive expression.

‘I need to borrow your fleece for a few minutes.’

‘Why?’

‘We need to compare it with what our witness claims to have seen.’

‘And if I say no?’

‘Up to you. You haven’t been arrested, so you have every right to,’ Eiríkur said. ‘But it would confirm for me that you’re lying through your teeth.’

With a sigh of resignation, Orri pulled off his fleece, emptying his pockets of keys and oddments as he did so, and hung it from one finger to hold it out.

‘There you go.’

‘Thanks. I’ll be right back.’

‘No luck,’ he said. ‘I’ve watched the whole footage for the rest of the day and the guy you’re looking for hasn’t come out of the building. At least not before five o’clock.’

‘There’s only one exit?’

‘There’s a service entrance.’

‘And a fire escape?’

‘The service exit is the fire escape,’ he said. ‘It’s an old building.’

‘Right, but first you were about to tell me who’s on the eighth floor of this building.’

Gunna left the lift and stepped into a wide corridor with glass doors to the right and left. On one side the door had ‘Ath!’ etched into the glass in a splash of lettering that looked as if it had been done with a broad brush. On the other side the opaque glass of the door was etched with an image of a schooner under full sail, which she guessed must have cost a fortune. There was a group of companies sharing office space and the names were immediately ones she recognized with a feeling that she should have spread her net wider and earlier.

The doors were firmly locked on Blue Steel Investment, Sólfell Investment, Blue Steel Management, Bright Spring Shipping and Sólfell Property. She rattled the door and rapped on the glass, but although there was a distant light on somewhere deep inside, nobody came to answer the door. A distant telephone that nobody answered rang for a long time inside and finally gave up. After half a minute’s silence the ringing resumed, and Gunna decided not to wait for anyone to answer it.

Back downstairs the security guard had reached the end of the day’s recordings.

‘The door’s locked at six and people use the service entrance to get out,’ he explained.

‘And if someone needs to get in?’

‘Then they call whoever they want to see, and they’ll have to go down and open the service door for them.’

‘And there’s no CCTV at the back.’

‘I’m afraid not. People aren’t supposed to use the service entrance for day-to-day stuff, and hardly anyone does anyway, so I suppose we don’t worry about it.’

‘Maybe you should. After all, it’s the people who don’t want to be seen that are the ones you might want to check up on, not the law-abiding types at the front.’

Orri got out of the police car and slammed the door without a word. He scanned the car park and saw with relief that Lísa’s car was nowhere to be seen. He had no desire to spend any time evading her questions and made for the stairs just as the door of the bottom floor flat creaked open.

‘The police were here today,’ the sharp-faced woman who lived there told him with satisfaction. ‘I suppose it was you they were looking for?’

‘I expect you know damn well it was, you nosy old bitch,’ he snapped at her without breaking his stride and took the flights of stairs three steps at a time. ‘And I bet you showed them the way,’ he called back down.

He locked the door behind him, kicked off his boots and soaked in the shower, washing away the smell of the police station and that sarcastic bastard who’d asked all the questions. Sitting on the bed and drying himself carefully, he told himself to think straight. The police had found him through that stupid clasp he should never have sold like that, he decided; he should never have allowed himself that moment of sentimentality.

He wondered if he should contact the Voice and tell them what had happened. Maybe the Voice would leave him alone if he thought he was a risk?

He shivered at his recollection of the steel in the Voice’s measured tones he had heard in the cellar of that house on Kópavogsbakki. There was no mercy there, no room for doubt. If they thought he was a risk, just how ruthless would they be? He decided that he should just tell them he had been questioned. He wouldn’t mention that the police had placed him on Kópavogsbakki.

Call me,
he wrote in a text message to the number the Voice had given him.
We might have a problem.

The back of the building bore no resemblance to the glass and steel of the front. An unloading bay for catering trucks ended with a steel roller door that was firmly shut and a set of double doors next to it. A couple of cars were parked close up against a wall, but otherwise there was a windswept space that was empty on the office block’s side. On the far side of the yard was the back of a row of shops, some of them little more than a blank wall with a door set in it, others sporting grimy windows, but every one of them with a huge bin on wheels outside.

Gunna walked along the row, looking hopefully for CCTV cameras, but none was to be seen anywhere. Each door also had its own quiet smoking spot out of the glare of the customers at the front, with a scattering of cigarette butts on the ground or an ashtray neatly placed by the step.

The sight gave her a pang in the centre of her chest that was instantly dispelled by the smell as she walked along the row of doors. At the end she stood in thought as one door finally opened and a man in a grubby white apron stepped outside, lighting up and taking a deep drag on his cigarette. He did a sudden double take on seeing Gunna stalking towards him in the glare of the security light and she could tell that an innate sense told him of the presence of the police.

‘G’day,’ he offered, cautiously rather than with any outward sign of nerves.

‘Hæ.
You work here, do you?’ Gunna asked.

‘No, officer, I just come here for the fun of it.’

‘Sarcasm will get you nowhere, I’m afraid. Tell me, what’s on the other side?’

‘This place, you mean? It’s a sandwich bar. Lots of offices round here and hungry office types after their decaffeinated sandwiches and free-range coffee.’

‘But quiet on a Sunday evening, surely?’

‘Not as busy,’ the man admitted, jerking a thumb at the office block opposite. ‘But we do a good few takeaways and you’d be surprised how much business there is at weekends with all those suits and flunkies doing overtime.’

‘Were you here on Friday? Around midday?’

‘I was. Why? Who’s asking?’ he said with a sour note in his gravel voice. ‘Not that I can’t guess.’

‘You’ve probably guessed right. City police, CID. And you are?’

‘I’m Finnbogi Finnbogason. I don’t suppose you’re here to do a health and safety inspection?’

‘Far from it. But I’m hoping you might be able to help me.’

Finnbogi Finnbogason looked back at her with narrowed eyes as he drew deeply on his filterless Camel. ‘Go on.’

‘How many shops are there in this row?’

‘Half a dozen. Why?’

‘Smokers in every one?’

His face creased in suspicion. ‘Near enough, I reckon.’

Gunna jerked her head towards the block of offices that towered over them. ‘I’m wondering if you see much of what goes on next door, comings and goings from that place.’

‘It happens. A good few people use the back door as a shortcut, and there’s a guy from the insurance company on the fourth floor who leaves arm-in-arm with his secretary while his wife’s sitting in her car out the front waiting to catch them,’ he said with a laugh as dry as rustling paper. ‘She’ll figure it out one day, and that’ll be worth watching.’

Gunna took out the picture of Jóhann Hjálmarsson from her pocket. ‘I’m looking for this man; he probably came out of that door sometime on Friday.’

Finnbogi’s eyes narrowed even further. ‘And what’s he done, may I ask?’

‘You may ask if you like, but I reckon you know I shouldn’t tell you. Let’s just say that we’re concerned about his safety. It’s no secret. He’ll be on the evening news tonight.’

This time his eyes widened. He dropped the butt of his cigarette and quickly ground it out under his toe. ‘Dead?’

‘I hope not. I’m looking for when he came out of there and who was with him.’

‘I didn’t see anything.’

‘No, but you could ask around among the staff and the people who work in the other shops.’

His lip curled. ‘You’re asking me to do your police work for you?’

‘Not at all. I’m asking you to be a public-spirited citizen who doesn’t want an unexpected visit from environmental health. I’ll drop by tomorrow and see what you’ve found out.’ She handed him a card. ‘Or call me if you find something.’

He shook his head and grinned, as if accepting defeat with good grace. ‘Strange women giving me their phone numbers doesn’t happen every day, sweetheart,’ he said, tucking her card into a pocket and patting it. ‘I’ll give you a call if I hear anything. Hell, I might give you a call even if I don’t hear anything,’ he added with a lewd wink.

*   *   *

‘Eiríkur let him go?’

‘He did,’ Gunna said. ‘We could have arrested and charged him for the theft of the clasp that came from Aunt Bertha.’

Ívar Laxdal looked dubious. ‘And why didn’t you?’

‘What’s the hurry?’ she asked, looking up as Eiríkur came in and hung his coat on the back of his chair. ‘We can pick Orri Björnsson up whenever we want, but all we have to charge him with is an offence that will get him a suspended sentence, and that’s assuming it even gets to court.’

‘You have all the evidence.’

‘We do, but a smart lawyer could argue that the old lady is too senile to know what day it is or that there’s a reasonable likelihood that Aunt Bertha could have mixed things up,’ Gunna said. ‘Plus, he’s worried now. He knows we’re interested in him and I’d like to keep him worried.’