Quentin Bates - Cold Comfort

“All right,” Helgi said, scanning his notes. “Svana Geirs. Real name Svanhildur Mjsll Sigurgeirsdóttir, born in Höfn eighteenth of December 1976, making her thirty-three,” he added, peering across at Gunna.

“You really were top of the class in maths at school, weren’t you?”

“I was,” Helgi replied, letting the sarcasm go over his head. “According to the technical team, we have a single wound to the head and secondary injuries where the victim hit the floor.”

“Which we knew already.”

“Yup. Undoubtedly the cause of death, as Miss Cruz will tell us later, along with every detail of the young woman’s physiology. We have plenty of fingerprints and quite a few full palm prints, at least half a dozen sets,” Helgi continued. “We’ll find out soon enough if any of them match anyone we already know, but my feeling is that none of them will.”

“Why’s that?” Gunna demanded. “What’s your reasoning?” she asked more softly.

“Just intuition, I suppose,” Helgi replied. “I get the impression that this wasn’t premeditated, happened on the spur of the moment, and whoever did it simply ran for it. Hence the open door.”

“You may well be right, Helgi. Do we have a time of death?”

“Miss Cruz says that Svana had probably been dead between three and six hours, and she may be able to narrow that down for us.”

“So we can reckon she was knocked on the head between twelve and three.”

“That’s it.”

“What background did you manage to unearth?”

“Ah, fascinating. Svana Geirs started out as a model, Miss South Coast when she was a teenager, then was part of a pop group called the Cowgirls in the nineties, though they didn’t do all that well. You know the ones, playing all over the country in bars and whatnot? Don’t you remember Eurovision about twelve, fourteen years ago? She sang the Icelandic entry and came nineteenth or something. Nowhere near the top, did abysmally, like they always do. Then she tried her best with a solo career and a bit of acting but didn’t get far. For five or six years she was on TV with the boob-bouncing fitness show. That ended three years ago. Since then, she doesn’t seem to have done a lot, although she’s part owner of a fitness club on Ármúli.”

“Which one?”

“Fit Club.”

“That’s a new one on me. So where did you find all this out?”

“I asked my daughter,” he admitted.

“Ah. Fine police work, Helgi.”

He beamed back at her. “Wasn’t it just? Parents are Sigurgeir Sigurjónsson and Margrét Thorvaldsdóttir, Tjarnarbraut 26, Höfn. Both living. They’ve been informed, probably on their way here already. Svana was married twice, and lots of squeezes, mostly sporty types, football players, plus a few businessmen. A popular lass, always in the papers, but never for having done much as far as I know. Just for looking good, I reckon.”

“We’d better have some names.”

“Will do.” Helgi nodded. “Oh, that flat and the smart jeep outside weren’t hers. Both are owned by a company called Rigel Investment.”

“Aha. Now that’s interesting. Eiríkur can look into that. Where is he, anyway?”

“Going to be late. He called in to say his wife’s ill, so he has to hold the fort for an hour or so.”

“Ah, the joys of parenthood.”

“It’s all right for you. That’s all behind you now,” Helgi said grimly. Gunna knew that Helgi lived at a frenetic pace. With a son and a daughter in their late teens and a failed marriage behind him, he had embarked in middle age on a second marriage that had resulted in two small children in rapid succession. She wondered how he managed the sleepless nights and the aggravation of living with toddlers a second time around. He was always in a hurry, generally had something child-related on his mind, and a pair of child seats were strapped permanently in the back of his venerable Skoda.

“Too right,” she said firmly. “I can just wait until the grandchildren start to show up.”

“No sign of that, is there?” Helgi asked with alarm.

“I should bloody well hope my Gísli has more sense than that, for the moment at least. And Laufey’s still at school. Although that doesn’t seem to stop them a lot of the time,” she added gloomily. “Anyway, when Eiríkur gets in, will you put him on to tracing the owner of Svana Geirs’ flat and car? You said her parents are on the way?”

“Yup, flying here today or tomorrow morning.”

“I suppose I’d better look after them. See if you can fix a time to meet them, would you?”

“All right,” Helgi said, as Gunna pulled her coat back on. “Hey, where are you off to?”

“Not far. I’ll be back in an hour.”

Jón flipped through the pile of post and put the envelopes with windows at the bottom of the pile. Anything that looked like it might come from a lawyer or a bank received the same treatment, and this left him with a single postcard telling him that the jeep was overdue for a service.

As the jeep was no longer his, he dropped the card into the bin. After a moment’s thought, he dropped the rest of the post, unopened, on top of it. It felt good, but he knew that later in the day he’d retrieve the envelopes and open them.

The house echoed. Half of the rooms were already empty, as Linda had taken some of the furniture and virtually the entire contents of the kitchen, apart from the white goods, which would doubtless be repossessed sooner or later.

Some days were good ones, when Jón could shrug it off and convince himself that he didn’t care any more. This was a bad day, as he constantly ran through the trail of events that had tipped his little family over the brink into disintegrating. The smug face of the bank’s personal financial adviser, with his ridiculous gelled-up haircut, was the focal point that he had trouble excluding from his mind.

Café Roma was quiet. The pre-work customers had all gone to their desks and the mid-morning drinkers hadn’t got as far as a break yet. Gunna watched with amusement as Skúli came back with a mug of coffee that he put in front of her and a tall glass with froth on the top for himself. They sat on stools at the long bar in the window with a view of the bank opposite where a very few customers hurried about their business as the wind whipped fat drops of rain almost horizontally along Snorrabraut.

“How’s the new job?” Skúli asked shyly.

“Different. And yours?”

He grimaced. “Not great. Everyone’s waiting for the chop. No idea who owns the paper now. The editor’s gone, went to set up some kind of internet operation. Jumped before he was pushed, we all reckon.”

“So things aren’t great in the world of newspapers right now?”

“Things are, well, not easy? Got a story for me?”

“Possibly.”

“Anything to do with Svana Geirs?”

“Why do you ask?”

“It’s common knowledge that she’s dead, but of course we can’t say anything more than ‘a woman was discovered dead in her apartment last night’ until all the relatives have been informed. It’s not something you can keep quiet for long, though. The obituaries are already written, just waiting for the word to go.”

“Actually I don’t have anything to tell you, Skúli. It’s more the other way around.”

Skúli looked expectant.

“I’m after background, any dodgy deals, unpleasant friends or acquaintances. Who Svana’s friends were, any enemies she might have had. That sort of thing. But it needs to be a bit quick. The story’s all yours, assuming I can swing it when the time comes. But I need information that I won’t get from talking to her parents or business partners.”

“There’ve been rumours about that fitness club she owned part of up in Ármúli going into administration. No idea if it’s true.”