Quentin Bates - Cold Comfort

“Where’s the money?”

“Money?”

“Don’t play games.”

“It’s at home. It was all Helena Rós’ idea. She knew her husband had been seeing Svana, and she knew he was terrified of the publicity after he got into Parliament. She wanted to give him a hard time.”

“And the cash you got out of Hallur Hallbjörnsson and I suppose Bjarki Steinsson? At your home as well?”

Gulli Ólafs nodded miserably as Gunna looked out of the window to see a second patrol car draw up across the road, this time with Eiríkur in the passenger seat.

“Come on. We’re going to have a little trip to Hverfisgata,” Gunna said, getting to her feet. She took his arm and steered him discreetly out of the door.

Outside, Gulli Ólafs blinked owlishly in the bright sunshine. Gunna felt him tense, and took a firmer grip on his elbow just as he ripped his arm free and sprinted across the road. A bus coming towards him screeched to an undignified halt. Gulli Ólafs dodged around it and splashed frantically through the puddles until Eiríkur, the length of his spindly legs giving him a clear advantage, caught up with him in a tackle that laid both of them full length in the street.

Trying to free her mind of the image of Eiríkur as a galloping giraffe, Gunna walked towards where Gulli Ólafs had been brought down in a patch of gravel with his face in a puddle. Eiríkur was panting and holding the man’s right wrist in a lock behind his back. Gunna kneeled down and snapped handcuffs around his wrists.

“Thanks, Gulli. That makes things so much easier,” she said with satisfaction.

“Talk,” Gunna instructed. “Everything, please. We have all day ahead of us and as much of tomorrow as we need.”

“Where shall I start?” Gulli Ólafs asked plaintively, as if to himself. He was hunched in the chair, while Gunna sat back with her hands on the desk in front of her.

“You and Helena Rós. How long’s this been going on?”

“Almost a year.”

“Before or after she found out about her husband seeing Svana Geirs?”

“After. She was going to divorce him and come and live with me.”

“Who had the idea of these threats and demands?”

“What?”

“Come on. The demands that Jónas Valur, Bjarki Steinsson and Hallur have been getting. The inks on some of these letters match the printer in your office.”

“There are hundreds of printers like that about,” he said dismissively.

“Actually, no.” Gunna smiled. “It seems it’s a fairly unusual type, and there aren’t more than a handful in various offices. My colleague spoke to the dealer and found out that these were introduced right after the crash when nobody had any money, so they only sold half a dozen.”

“So? How does that implicate me?”

“Because other ones were printed on a cheap inkjet printer that matches the one in Helena Rós’ study. So who had the bright idea?”

“Well I did, sort of. I said something about it one day as a kind of joke.” He twisted his fingers in his hands.

“A joke?”

“Yeah. I said something about it to Helena Rós, just in passing. Then she came back with it a few days afterwards and she was serious.”

“So how did she find out about Hallur’s relationship with Svana Geirs?”

“I told her,” Gulli Ólafs whispered miserably. “I truly wish I’d kept quiet.”

“And how did you know about the Svana Syndicate?”

“Newsroom gossip. This kind of thing leaks out and it’s impossible to keep anything completely secret, but these rumours stay that way, just rumours. There are dozens of things going on all the time that we could never, ever use.”

“Like a story about property fraud involving some prominent people?” Gunna asked.

“Exactly. This stuff gets talked about but that’s as far as it can go. Nobody dares to go out on a limb with it and nobody will be quoted. So I followed Svana discreetly, watched her flat, saw who came and went.” He shrugged. “Easy enough. I was interested because of the connection with Jónas Valur and Bjartmar Arnarson. They screwed me over before and I’ve been looking for an opportunity to return the favour ever since.” His voice oozed bitterness as he spat out the names of the two men.

“And now they’re both dead.”

“Nothing to do with me! You have to believe that, surely!”

“You heard about this group who were sharing Svana Geirs between them, and knowing that Hallur was one of them, you told his wife, right? Why?”

“I, well … I’ve known her for years. Good friends, but never … you know …”

“You thought it might bag you a good story, return the favour to the people who screwed you over before and help you into her knickers, all at the same time?”

“That’s …” he began, and sank down and nodded.

“And it worked?”

He nodded again. “I was going to leak it to a gossip magazine or a website. That would get it out into the open so I could follow it up. That was the idea, expose Hallur as a man who was cheating on his wife. That would have made it a lot easier for Helena Rós to end the marriage. She’s a prominent figure in her own right and doesn’t need any mud thrown at her.”

“So you were going to engineer a scandal with Hallur as the bad guy?”

“I’m not proud of it. Not now.”

“I’m not here to pass any judgement on you. That’s for the jury.”

“Jury?”

“Undoubtedly. This will go to court.”

“Jesus … Look, it was Helena Rós who wanted to put pressure on her husband, not me.”

“Right, let’s backtrack. You say she wanted to apply pressure to her husband. When was this?”

“About three weeks before Svana Geirs died. Hallur was a bag of nerves after he got the first demand. Helena Rós is vicious. She wanted to pressure him and screw as much money out of him as she could. It wasn’t because she needed it; just to make him squirm. She knew he had money hidden away that she didn’t have access to, but didn’t know how much.”

“So she wrote the letters?”

“I did that, some of them anyway. Then Helena wrote more.”

“You sent them to his office or his home?”

“Both.”

Gunna felt her head throbbing but forced herself to concentrate. “You also sent letters to Bjarki Steinsson, Bjartmar Arnarson and Jónas Valur Hjaltason?”

“A few text messages as well,” he sighed. “They all responded, except Bjartmar. Maybe he just didn’t care. I don’t know.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to make them suffer too. I’m damn sure that bloke who threatened to strangle me was sent by Bjartmar or Jónas Valur, or that bastard of a son of his.”

“And you needed the cash, I suppose?”

“Shit, yes, all right. I bought a flat two years ago, not long before the crash. The payments on it have gone through the roof and I thought I’d be out on the street otherwise. The place has been for sale for the best part of a year and it’s only even been viewed twice.”

“So your flat is safe now?”

“For the moment.”

“Good. Interview suspended, fourteen twenty-five,” Gunna intoned, stopping the recording. “Maybe you’ll be able to rent it out while you’re in prison. We’ll take a break now.”

At the mention of prison, Gulli Ólafs’ eyes glazed over.

“I hear Högni’s been picked up,” Eiríkur said, sitting down at his desk and running his hands through his hair to dislodge some more of the gravel collected during his tussle with Gulli Ólafs.

“Do we have room for him?” Gunna asked, shaking painkillers from a jar and washing them down with lukewarm coffee.

“Yup. There’s a cell upstairs reserved for him. Helgi’s back,” he added. “Has Helena Rós been arrested?”