Quentin Bates - Chilled to the Bone

Last, he turned to the two faces, as if to confirm his suspicion. The tall blonde in the slimline dress bore remarkably little comparison to the dumpy-looking girl in the tracksuit, but the blonde’s bobbed hair accentuated her cheekbones, while the black curls made the other’s face look broader and rounder. Placing one as close to the other as he could, Baddó went from one to the other and, within a minute or two, he was sure. The set of the jaw and the shape of the nose told him that the two were either sisters, or else the same person.

He sat back thoughtfully.

“So who are you, darling?” he asked himself, looking at the clock and slipping his jacket on. “And who have you upset so badly that they’ve paid that evil bastard Hinrik hard cash to find out who you are?”

Gunna left Helgi and Eiríkur to deal with the staff at Hotel Gullfoss while she went back to her desk at the Hverfisgata police station, where paperwork galore awaited her. A note on her desk asked her to look in on Ívar Laxdal, the senior officer in charge of what was nominally the serious crime unit, except that a general lack of serious crime in Reykjavík had ensured it remained part of the team of detectives working from the cramped office. The unit’s chief inspector, Örlygur Sveinsson, had briefly returned to work to take up the post he’d been given, only to see a return of the long-standing back problem that had already kept him off work for a long time. His three-week stint in charge had been blessed by nothing that could be classed as the sort of serious crimes the unit had been created to deal with, leaving Gunna and the others to handle the usual break-ins, “borrowed” cars and stolen mobile phones during a wonderfully peaceful hiatus. Word had already spread that Örlygur’s departure for the couch at home seemed to have coincided with a spate of assaults, an attempted murder and a rape case that Gunna privately doubted would ever come to court.

She looked at the screenful of emails that needed to be dealt with, deleted half of them unread and immediately felt better before looking at Ívar Laxdal’s note, noticing that it had been written by the man himself, rather than a phone message relayed through someone else. She wondered if he was still at work, looked at the clock and decided to see if he could be found in person instead of calling his office.

“Ah, Gunnhildur,” Ívar Laxdal’s voice boomed behind her as she neared the canteen. “Coffee?”

His uncanny capacity to appear when needed, or when his presence was likely to be most awkward, never failed to unnerve his officers, although Gunna was starting to get used to it.

They had missed lunch by several hours and the canteen tables were being wiped down. Ívar Laxdal brought two cups of strong coffee and Gunna noticed her stomach complain. She felt the need for something solid and ruthlessly banished the thought.

“What happened at Hotel Gullfoss? Anything we need to worry about?”

“I don’t think so. Looks like one of those jobs that’s straightforward but takes some time. Helgi’s on top of it at the moment. Why? Something you have in mind?”

“Just the usual,” Ívar Laxdal said, a thumb rasping against the bristles under his chin as he scratched it while flipping through a list that Gunna could see had been written with an old-fashioned fountain pen on plain paper, rather than a computer printout. “We have a spate of break-ins in the western end of town. It looks like someone is targeting houses while the occupants are at work; every one has been carried out between two and four in the afternoon as far as the statements can tell us. There have been a dozen so far and it’s getting serious.”

“Is that one for me?”

“I think so. Read through the reports and let me know where you want to take it. Then we have a child abuse case, a boy of twelve who appears to have been not so much abused as ignored. He’s been throwing out all kinds of stories after he was caught shoplifting for the twentieth time and social services want it investigated,” he said with the bland air of a man reading a shopping list. “Then there are the usual stolen cars, one alleged rape and a mugging outside a nightclub on Friday night.” He looked up suddenly with the innocent smile that Gunna knew to be wary of.

“Go on.”

“I had a call from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” he said. “Believe it or not, we have an African desk at the ministry and it seems that a departmental secretary has lost a computer they would rather like back. It’s a MacBook, apparently, quite an old one.”

Gunna tapped the side of her head in disbelief. “You are joking, aren’t you? They want us to find a lost laptop?”

Ívar Laxdal looked impassive and broke into a smile as he handed the list over to her. “Gunnhildur, between ourselves, I don’t care one way or the other. The ministry won’t tell me much except that they lost a laptop and they want it back.”

“If they want it back that badly, their best bet would be to go through the small ads until they find whoever’s selling it.”

“I know. All I want to be able to do is tell them that I’ve assigned it to someone. Go through the motions, would you? Talk to someone there and pretend that there’s a hope in hell of finding their laptop. I’m a lot more interested in this fatality at Hotel Gullfoss. Tell me more, would you?”

“It looks like an old chap had booked himself a kinky escort and his blood pressure couldn’t cope with the excitement. Name of Jóhannes Karlsson, in his mid-sixties and no featherweight.”

“The shipowner?” Ívar Laxdal asked, an eyebrow turning into a questioning inverted V.

“No idea. Helgi’s looking into his background and trying to get hold of the man’s wife.”

Ívar Laxdal nodded sagely. “Tread carefully. If it’s him, then expect a few ructions. It’s a prominent family, well connected. Just make sure all the boxes are ticked.”

“You mean they donate heaps of money to one or other of the political parties?”

“Probably. They’re the kind of people who will have influential friends, so be prepared. But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about,” he said, depositing a file on the table. “This gentleman was released from prison in Lithuania and shipped home via Denmark. He arrived just before Christmas and the airport police had a chat with him. Hróbjartur Bjarnthórsson. Remember him?”

Gunna shook her head, trawling her memory for the tongue-twisting name.

“Better known as Bigfoot, maybe?” Ívar Laxdal prompted.

“Ah, yes. How could I forget him? Used to do a bit of debt collecting, didn’t he? Haven’t heard him mentioned for years.”

“He upset someone in Lithuania eight or nine years ago and ended up serving his sentence without a single day’s remission for good behaviour, or so I’m told. Anyway, he’s back now and I’d like an eye kept on him.”

Gunna frowned. “Has he done anything?”

Ívar Laxdal spread his arms questioningly. “Without a doubt. But are we looking out for anything specific? No. I’d be surprised if he didn’t do something, though. It’s not as if he’s the type to get a job emptying the bins for Kópavogur council. More than likely some scores will need settling, so it would be no bad thing if he knows a friendly eye is being kept on him, and that others also know we’re watching him.” He stood up. “I’ll leave the file with you and you can have a look through it when you have a chance, Gunnhildur. No pressure.” He smiled. “But if you look back to nineteen ninety-four, I’d be interested to see what your take on that is. It’s also interesting that he didn’t want to be shipped home to sit out his sentence in the four-star hotels we have for prisons here. In fact, he fought not to be shipped home. Why, I wonder?”