Thin Ice: An Inspector Gunna Mystery (Gunnhildur Mystery Book 5) (19 page)

‘Mister psychologist, aren’t you?’

‘I try my best.’

She leaned close to him. ‘Have you thought about . . .’ she said, jerking her head to where Össur lay half asleep in the lounge, curled up on the sofa. ‘About what I said?’

‘Yeah. I like the idea,’ he said and watched Tinna Lind’s face crack into a smile. ‘It’s a question of picking the right moment and not getting noticed.’

‘So what do you reckon?’

‘I’m not sure at the moment. We can either try and run for it, and get a flight from Akureyri, which is what I reckon Össur has in mind. Or – this might be safer – we get hold of the dosh, stash away about two thirds of it and just give ourselves up.’

Tinna Lind frowned. ‘You’re not serious?’

‘It’s all right for you. You’re the victim here. It’s different for me. Össur will sing his heart out once the police get hold of him, and I can expect a sentence of some kind, although by the time the justice system gets round to it, it’ll probably be a year’s suspended sentence. If it even gets that far.’

‘I think we should go for it.’

‘You want to just leave?’ Magni asked, pouring the meat into a deep saucepan and adding the contents of tins of chopped tomatoes. ‘Just cut yourself off completely? Walk away from family, friends, all that stuff?’

Tinna Lind’s nose wrinkled. ‘If you’re coming with me, then yeah. Let’s do it.’

Magni stopped stirring the pot and stared.

‘You’re certain of that? We’ve known each other for what? Four days?’

‘Yeah. I’m certain. Mind’s made up.’

‘All right . . .’ he said slowly.

‘And you? Is your mind made up?’

‘To be honest, no it’s not. I have ties that I’m not ready to walk away from just like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘I have kids, to start with.’

‘And how often do you see them?’

‘Well, yeah. You’re right there,’ he conceded. ‘Once a year, if that. Maybe I wasn’t top-quality husband material.’ He put the spoon down and reduced the heat under the saucepan to its lowest setting. He turned back to face her where she had resumed her seat on the worktop as she watched him cook. ‘So, what do you think?’ he asked as he put his arms around her. Tinna Lind responded fiercely, hugging him tight and wrapping her legs around his waist.

‘What is there to keep you here? No job? Kids you never see? A couple of ex-wives who hate you?’

‘You’re doing a great job of persuading me here.’

‘And this old bastard that you and Össur robbed. What’s he going to do when he tracks you down,’ she whispered in his ear, her head resting on his shoulder.’

‘He’s going to break my legs,’ Magni replied. ‘That’s if he finds out who I am, and unless he gets hold of Össur first. Össi’s the one he really wants. Össi worked for him, I think. I’m not part of this criminal stuff. I just used to drink with these guys in the Emperor. I didn’t really hang around with them anywhere else.’

‘So why don’t we just give the old guy what he wants?’

‘What he’ll want to start with is his bag of money back. The second thing he’ll want is Össur. I’m probably third on the list.’

‘All right. Let’s give him some of what he wants,’ Tinna Lind murmured. ‘How about we give him Össur to play with while we disappear with the money?’

‘I’m looking for Össur Óskarsson.’

‘He’s not there,’ the young woman with a toddler at her ankles and a baby on her hip said, looking around the door. ‘Thank God,’ she added with heartfelt relief.

‘Any idea where he is? When did you last see him?’

The woman looked Gunna up and down. ‘You don’t look like one of the lowlifes he hangs around with.’

Gunna showed her warrant card and the woman relaxed.

‘In that case, please lock him up when you find him and don’t let him out,’ she said with feeling. ‘The last I saw of him was the middle of last week.’

‘You remember which day that was?’

‘Wednesday, I think.’ She stopped to consider. ‘But it might have been Thursday. Hold on, I had the doctor on Thursday and I saw Össur when we were going out, so it must have been Thursday.’

‘Does he usually disappear for days at a time?’

‘It’s nothing unusual, not that I keep tabs on him.’

‘Somehow I get the impression that you don’t get on?’

‘We don’t,’ she said with even more feeling. ‘I can’t stand the sight of him and hate having to live in the same building. We’re thinking of selling up and moving if it doesn’t improve.’

‘Noisy, is he?’

‘Sometimes. It’s more the way he undresses you with his eyes every time you see him, and those vile friends of his. There were some of them here yesterday looking for him.’

‘Can I come in? I could do with getting some questions answered.’

Gunna perched on a stool in the corner of what served as a kitchen while the woman fussed with coffee and gave the toddler an iPad playing cartoons to watch.

‘How long have you lived here?’

‘Two years.’

‘And has Össur been here all that time?’

‘Yes. He rents the flat upstairs. What’s he done? Anything serious?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you, but there are concerns about his safety,’ Gunna said, making an effort to sound diplomatic. ‘All I can say is it’s not trivial.’

‘No concerns here,’ the woman snorted.

‘Does he come and go at regular times or all hours?’

‘It can be him coming and going or his pals turning up at all hours. My husband works shifts and sometimes he can’t get a wink of sleep all day, and the next week he’ll be on days and there’s endless noise at night instead. Not loud noise, you understand, but people coming and going, shouting, that sort of thing. We’ve complained to the police but nothing happens,’ she added sharply.

‘Nothing regular? I take it he doesn’t have a job or anything as mundane as that?’

She snorted. ‘Job? I don’t imagine he knows what a job is.’

‘And his friends? Any idea who these people are?’

‘Lowlifes like him. I don’t know who they are, but there are plenty of drunks who find their way up there.’

‘And the people who came looking for him yesterday. Who were they? Bailiffs? Drunks?’

This time the woman looked dubious.

‘Well, they weren’t the usual crowd,’ she said finally. ‘One of them parked a motorcycle outside.’

‘I don’t suppose you happened to get the number?’

‘Well, my husband was at home yesterday and he likes motorbikes,’ she said and leaned down to the toddler. ‘Hey, darling, can Mummy use the iPad, please? Just for a moment?’ She clicked and swiped with her finger. ‘He likes bikes and cars and stuff, and he took a picture of the bike out of the window.’ She turned the iPad round to show a low-slung black bike on its stand in the street outside.

Gunna took it and enlarged the picture until she could make out the licence plate.

‘Thanks,’ Gunna said, jotting down the number. ‘Oh, and don’t worry about selling up quite yet. I have a feeling your neighbour might not be back for a while.’

Össur told himself to think straight. The door was locked. The pistol was on the bedside table. He had turned the television’s volume down low and now only disjointed images on a music channel flickered past him for a few seconds at a time, pneumatic women in skimpy clothes and flashy pseudo-gangsters of the kind he inwardly despised. Alli the Cornershop had taught him long ago that it’s better not to stand out in a crowd.

A vision of Erna squealing as he bent her over the back of the sofa downstairs, those designer trousers round her ankles, appeared before him and he relished the thought. Magni was clearly screwing the daughter, he decided. The loved-up sloppy grins on both their faces told the story clearly enough, and Magni looked as if he was falling for the girl in a serious way. In other circumstances, and if he’d thought about it, Össur might have been almost happy for Magni, but now the sight of them cooing to each other, their hands snaking under each others’ clothes, made him feel sick.

But he recognized, to his chagrin, that he needed Magni, and their biggest mistake had been not to ditch the two women right away and just take the car. That way they would have been free of the pair of them. A hunt would have started up right away, as soon as the women reached a phone and alerted the police, but there was a hunt in progress for the two missing women anyway, which would inevitably lead to him and Magni.

Össur picked up the pistol and weighed it in his hand. He put it down, comforted by the weight and feel of it, and reached for the bag of grass, before he put that down as well and told himself to get a grip.

They would have to get rid of the girls, he decided, after suitable treatment for the vinegar-faced old bitch. Then he’d have to lose Magni, but not until Össur had been delivered to somewhere close to an airport without registering on Alli the Cornershop’s radar.

He knew with a crushing certainty that the odds were heavily stacked against him, and he reflected that it had always been this way. Every time he felt he had made a little headway in life, something came along that would knock him back to where he’d started, broke and alone. He took a final toke on the spliff before crushing it out on the blonde wood of the bedside table and lay back watching the ceiling throb. Everyone was against him, even Magni. Especially Magni, he decided, and the sudden thought gripped him that the three of them would take the car while he was asleep and leave him alone in this empty building miles from anywhere to starve or until someone turned up in the spring, if he were to survive that long.

Then he remembered the depth of snow in the yard outside and reminded himself that Magni hadn’t been far off dying of exposure just that afternoon. He reassured himself that nobody would be going far for a while, as he curled himself into a ball under the duvet and put a comforting thumb into his mouth.

‘I need a warrant,’ Gunna said, without bothering to introduce herself.

‘What for?’ Ívar Laxdal asked.

Gunna looked up and down the quiet street, her phone at her ear. ‘I’m outside Össur Óskarsson’s flat. He hasn’t been seen for a few days and I want a look inside.’

‘You’re concerned for his well-being?’

Gunna laughed. ‘Not really. I just want to know where the hell he is.’

‘You’re concerned about his well-being,’ Ívar Laxdal decided. ‘Get yourself a locksmith and some uniformed back-up and get in there.’

‘On your authority?’

‘On my authority,’ he agreed. ‘Get on with it. I’ll fix the paperwork.’

‘Good. I’ll let you know what happens.’

She closed the connection and made a second call.

‘Siggi. Communications.’

‘
Hæ
. Gunna Gísla here. Can you check out a number for me?’

She recited the motorcycle’s registration number and walked a few paces along the street, listening to the muffled rattle of a keyboard down the line.

‘It’s registered to Jón Egill Hjörleifsson,’ Siggi said. ‘His address is Kirkjuholt forty-six.’

‘Good stuff, thanks,’ Gunna said and rang off.

Gunna arrived back at the Hverfisgata station in a black mood after spending two hours at Össur Óskarsson’s dingy apartment. She was determined to share her gloom with Ívar Laxdal, but he found her first at her computer in the detectives’ office.

‘Busy, Gunnhildur?’

‘You always ask the same question and I always give you the same answer.’

‘In that case you’re not the only one. We have another missing person to look for now. A middle-aged man called Brandur Geirsson, last seen the day before yesterday. He lives alone so nobody worried about him until he didn’t show up for work this morning. He lives in Akranes, so they’re dealing with it up there for the moment.’

‘Good. I’ve enough on my plate as it is.’

‘The good news is that the weather’s supposed to break tonight and there might be clear enough conditions for a search flight tomorrow between one weather front and the next.’

‘That would be great. If only we knew where to look and what to look for.’ She yawned. ‘I’m going home; it’s been a long and fruitless day.’

‘No luck with that apartment in Hafnarfjördur?’

‘It might have been interesting if someone hadn’t got there before us and trashed the place. It’s a disaster area. Every single drawer, shelf and cupboard has been tipped onto the floor and most of it’s broken, not that there was much of interest there to start with, except a couple of 9mm rounds that looked as if they’d rolled under the bed.’

‘D’you think the man’s armed?’

‘I wouldn’t rule it out.’

‘Prints?’

‘Working on it.’

‘Ideas?’

‘Oh, yes. It seems that a gentleman riding a motorcycle registered to Jón Egill Hjörleifsson was there looking for Össur yesterday, and it seems that Jón Egill Hjörleifsson has a record for the usual misdemeanours and is an Undertaker.’

‘You mean he organizes funerals or he’s a member of that law-abiding and much-loved group of philanthropists in Gardabær who happen to ride souped-up motorbikes?’

‘He might do both for all I know. But he’s certainly a biker. He wasn’t at home, so there’s an alert out for him to be brought in if traffic spot him before I track him down. But it seems clear enough that Össur has upset someone badly, and I’m starting to wonder if there isn’t a real connection here.’

Ívar Laxdal sat down and crossed his ankles with his legs stretched out, as if waiting to be told a bedtime a story. ‘Explain, if you’d be so kind,’ he instructed.

‘Someone rolled Alli the Cornershop for a pile of either money or drugs, or both, or so it seems. Össur Óskarsson has been involved with Alli for years and so has Árni Sigurvinsson. Árni came to a bad end, beaten up and then killed in a house fire. Össur has had the sense to disappear and now someone’s looking for him. There aren’t a lot of dots to be joined here, are there?’

‘Interesting.’

‘Except for the Undertakers getting involved. They have fingers in plenty of pies and the rumour is they’re aiming to become legitimate businessmen. But for the moment they’re in much the same business as Alli the Cornershop and they don’t like each other a lot.’

‘Evidence?’