Quentin Bates - Chilled to the Bone

“As you can see, Magnús, I’m not playing any games. You can see that, can’t you?” The man asked in a warm, avuncular tone, as if regretting that things had come to this.

“I haven’t done anything …” Magnús groaned, too drained of energy to offer resistance.

“Let’s just say that you haven’t done anything that you’re aware of, shall we?” The man smiled. “A woman showed up at your hotel yesterday morning. Tall, blonde, grey dress. What’s the scam and who’s in on it? Talk.”

Magnús hesitated. The man grasped a handful of hair and again propelled Magnús below the surface, reappearing what seemed like half a lifetime later with a gasp and the words tumbling out of his mouth.

“I don’t know, I swear. It’s nothing to do with me and I just saw her come in and go up to the room,” he gabbled, the words tripping over each other in his desperate haste to explain before his head was thrust below the surface again.

“All right, Magnús. Now, you tell me when she left. How long did she stay in the hotel. Whose room did she go to?”

“It was four-oh-six. There was a businessman in there. There was a phone call at reception at about twelve o’clock to say that there was someone in four-oh-six who was in trouble and would we send one of the staff to check, and that it was urgent. I went up there myself and there was a guy who had been tied to the bed. That’s the truth, and I didn’t see the girl again. She went in but I didn’t see her leave.”

“And the guy who was in the room?”

“He was packed and gone about ten minutes later.”

“You checked CCTV to see if she had left, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, of course. But I didn’t see her anywhere. She disappeared.”

The man stood up and Magnús could see him thinking. “The victim. Name?”

“Haraldur, I think.”

“Whose son?”

“I … I’m not sure.”

Again his head disappeared below the surface of the water.

“Any ideas?” The man asked.

“Samúelsson, I think. From out of town somewhere.”

“He settled his bill and left?”

“He’d paid for the room in advance.”

The man nodded slowly. “You know, Magnús? You’re working this afternoon, aren’t you?” he asked and continued without waiting for a reply. “You’re going to go to work as usual and you’ll get a phone call a few minutes after four, which is when you’re going to give me this guy’s name, address, phone number and his credit card number as well? You can get all those off the computer system, can’t you?”

Magnús nodded, prepared to agree to anything that involved not being drowned in the bathtub of a cheap rented flat.

“You’ll also go into the phone records and get me the number of the phone that called to tell you this guy needed some help upstairs. Understood?”

“I’m not sure I can-”

“Do it,” the man said in a cold, hard voice. “I’m not going to play games. I know where you work. I know where you live. I know where your girlfriend lives. You get my drift? And if anyone else asks you about this shit, you don’t know anything.”

He stood up and picked up his toolbox. Magnús strained against the tape holding his wrists as the man made for the door. “Can you …?” he pleaded.

“Use your teeth, can’t you?” the man replied with a smile that was even more unnerving than his scowl. “It’s only sticky tape. It’ll give you something to do while you think through what we’ve been talking about.”

It took Gunna an hour to tease just part of the story out of Valeria in a session that came to a halt halfway through when she ordered Hákon out of the room. Without her overbearing husband present, Valeria had spoken more freely, but Gunna could see that much of what she said was hearsay and gossip. A hard worker, she had only worked at the Gullfoss for a few months after its new owners, who owned several hotels in and around Reykjavík, had acquired it and set about modernizing its systems and standards. One of the city’s older and more respected hotels, the new owners wanted to smarten it up discreetly and make it more efficient, but without losing the patina of age and respectability that their more trendy hotels lacked. Staff from the other hotels had been brought in to start making those changes. Ástrós had been promoted to a supervisor’s job when she was transferred from the Harbourside Hotel and chose Valeria as the hardest worker to go with her.

Gunna wanted to track down Ástrós and push her harder than she had the previous day now that it had virtually been confirmed that Jóhannes Karlsson’s experience had not been a one-off-apart from its abrupt ending.

She stalked back into the lobby of Hotel Gullfoss at three, hoping that Ástrós would still be there. There she found her and two men struggling to remove the bed from the room that Jóhannes Karl had died in the previous morning.

“It has to go,” she panted as she hauled the mattress out of the door. “Policy. Someone kicks the bucket in the hotel, everything in that room has to go. Just as well it doesn’t happen too often. I’ll be right back.”

“It’s just as well the forensic team had finished in there,” Gunna said, half to herself, as Ástrós shuffled along the corridor with the mattress behind the two men carrying the bed’s frame. There were a dozen black bin bags that Gunna presumed contained the curtains, bedding and anything else from the room, which now looked stripped. A shadow of clean red carpet marked out where the bed had been, and showed just how old the carpet was.

Gunna peered at her phone, found Albert’s phone number and listened to it ring. To her surprise, it was answered after only a few buzzes.

“Albert.”

“ Hæ . Gunna. Any news? Sorry. I know it was only yesterday. I thought you’d seen the directive,” Albert said caustically.

Suspicious, Gunna was immediately on her guard. “Directive? Who from?”

“Upstairs. Due to budgetary restrictions forensics are now only able to attempt to perform miracles on even dates between one and five, weather permitting.”

“Sorry, Albert. Of course I saw that, but I didn’t think it applied to you. Look, I’m in this room that you went over yesterday. It’s been stripped so I hope you got everything you needed.”

“Yup, and I can tell you the name of the person who left that hair in the wash basin.”

Gunna was silent for a moment. “Already? I thought getting DNA analysis results took weeks? Go on, then. Make my day.”

“Barbie.”

“Barbie?”

“That’s right,” Albert laughed. “Barbie. It’s not real hair. It’s fake, from a wig. Plastic hair.”

“I see.”

“So we reckon it’s either Barbie or Elton John. Take your pick,” he said and paused. “Are you a bit slow today, Gunna? A blonde moment or a senior moment?”

“Ach. Sorry, Albert. No, just a bit preoccupied. There’s a lot going on at the moment.”

“I know. Knitting booties …”

“Get away with you,” Gunna retorted, and found that the reminder was not a welcome one. She stifled the urge to yell at Albert. “Do you reckon you can get any more information from that hair, whatever it is?”

“I’m not sure. I’ll have a stab at figuring out what the material is and you might be able to track down the supplier, that’s assuming it was bought in Iceland and not abroad.”

“Yeah, or through eBay or something. It could have come from anywhere.”

“I suppose so,” Albert said and she could hear the sound of voices behind him as his attention was no longer on what she was saying. “There can’t be that many wig suppliers in Iceland, surely? But that’s your department, something for the detectives to detect.”