Quentin Bates - Chilled to the Bone

Looks like her only leading role, she thought, moving on to Facebook, where she was presented with a complete blank for Pétur Steinar, as there was no entry for that name. Hekla Elín’s name showed up, but with an anonymous avatar and an almost blank page. She saw that Hekla Elín had a relatively small number of friends, with an accessible list. She clicked and scrolled through them, looking for potential family members and alighting on Sif Pétursdóttir as a candidate. Her phone began to hum a discreet, insistent tune and she looked at the display and answered quickly.

“Yes?”

“Can you talk?”

“Sure.”

“Where are you?”

“At home. It’s not even seven yet,” she said. “Job done. It’s not as if I could have followed your man into the departure lounge,” she said. The man on the other end of the line sounded harassed. His usual manner, a combination of abrasive and jovial, peppered with off-color jokes, had disappeared. “Problems?” she asked.

“And how,” he replied. “Listen. This has to finish today. It’s of paramount importance that you finish the brief today, as quickly as possible. That machine has to disappear. You get my meaning?”

“This isn’t the same brief,” she said doubtfully. “This isn’t about who goes where and who they talk to, is it?”

“Call it what you will. Just put in your invoice as soon as the job is done and I’ll square it.”

“I’ll do what I can,” she said, listening to the labored breathing that gave away his impatience. “But I don’t have a lot to work on and I’m not promising anything.”

“Just get it done. I don’t care how. All right?” the voice said sharply and the phone went dead in her hand, leaving her to finish her toast and replay the conversation back in her mind, mulling over the option of simply sending in an invoice and calling an end to an impossible job before she went back to the computer screen and Sif Pétursdóttir’s family pictures.

“Ah,” she said to herself, clicking through them. “So that’s what you look like now.”

The tapping on the window of a bare branch of one of the stunted trees outside roused Baddó from a deep sleep. He was awake instantly and a hand went to his face as he awoke, fingering the drying scabs that had formed overnight. His jaw still ached and he washed painkillers down with a gulp of water so cold it was practically ice.

He had slept soundly, a relief after two days of running on adrenaline and keeping himself out of sight. Peering in the tiny mirror over the kitchen sink, he could see that his face looked no worse. The cut had lost some of its livid color and wasn’t quite so obvious, not that anyone looking him in the face was going to miss it. He wondered if his beard would grow back where the cut had sliced his cheek into ribbons.

Baddó stretched and looked out of the window at the snow-covered valley beyond. Although barely more than a few kilometers from the new main road, the summer house hadn’t been easy to reach. The Hyundai had been left by the side of the road on a bare stretch of ground where the driven snow would be carried off by the wind, although he was certain that a drift would now have collected in its lee. The hard part had been struggling through the snow, which had been untouched since the last person had been there in the autumn. He had been on the point of giving up and returning to the car when he finally found the place with the key hanging on a string inside the outer of the two doors, exactly where it had been kept the last time he’d been there more than twenty years earlier.

He had been exhausted and realized that hypothermia had been setting in as he fought through the snow. It had been bitterly cold, clear weather, while a stately dance was played out by the green and white bands of the northern lights shining on the crust of snow, undisturbed but for the tracks of a fox that had sniffed at the deserted cottage and gone elsewhere to hunt for food.

The microwave pinged and Baddó again privately thanked a God he had no belief in that the electricity supply hadn’t been cut off. The instant meal from the freezer was a welcome first hot meal in a couple of frantic days, and he flipped through a six-month-old newspaper as he forked up what the packet claimed were Cantonese-style noodles with chicken. Looking out of the window, he wondered whether to stay for another day to recuperate, admitting to himself that he was deeply tired. The attack and everything after it had taken their toll and his whole body ached, from his head to his feet.

He wondered about the men who had attacked him and if the one he had bottled had been badly hurt. He sincerely hoped so and his thoughts turned to whoever had sent those slack-jawed low-lifes to teach him a lesson. Turning things over in his mind, he decided there were a few candidates: people he had upset in the past who had long memories and harbored grudges. He smiled to himself, feeling the stiffness in his face. He could be patient and nurture a grudge as well as anyone.

With a start he remembered the fat envelope that Jóel Ingi had unwillingly handed over, and with his mouth still full of Cantonese-style noodles, he hunted through the zipped-up inside pocket of his coat and placed the package on the table in front of him, smiling to himself. He swallowed, pushed the remainder of the instant meal aside and tugged at the flap, pulling out a wad of notes. He thumbed the end of the first fat wad and froze.

He snapped off the rubber bands and lifted the 100-euro note on the top. Beneath it was a blank piece of paper, and beneath that was another. Apart from one note on top and another at the bottom, the whole of both wads of notes, the agreed 20,000 euros, was worthless, neatly guillotined paper.

Baddó sat back. One eyelid twitched violently. His instinct was to hammer the table with his fist and turn it into matchwood, but instead he took one deep breath after another. Jóel Ingi was a fool if he thought he could cheat Baddó. Bigfoot had a reputation and he would live up to it. Revenge would be administered and it would be harsh, but it would have to wait. He forced himself to think straight. The laptop that both Jóel Ingi and Hinrik had been anxious to find had to be valuable. It was time to pay Sonja a visit.

The man who hammered on the broken door looked like he would hardly fit through it, and Eiríkur was happy for him to go in front.

“Hinni! Open the door, man! It’s the law come for a chat,” he yelled through the letterbox, then went back to rapping on the door’s complaining timbers with a heavy set of knuckles. Behind him two more officers waited for the door to open, while Eiríkur brought up the rear.

A shadow appeared behind the single remaining glass panel and Hinrik’s bony form opened the door an inch, letting it stop on the safety chain.

“What?”

“Hinrik Sørensen? City police, as you well know, you being an old friend of ours.”

“What do the police want with us law-abiding citizens at this ungodly hour of the day?”

“Don’t talk shit, Hinrik. Open the door,” the first officer repeated, as Hinrik obediently closed the door, rattled the chain inside and opened the door wide.

The three drug squad officers, two bulky men and a woman with a healthy outdoors look to her red cheeks, swept past and the first one in secured Hinrik against the wall and kept him there.

“Any company, Hinrik?”

He smiled as the sound of the toilet flushing loudly reverberated through the apartment. The bathroom door opened and Ragga appeared in the doorway, eyes bleary but with a look of quiet satisfaction on her face.

“Good grief, cover it all up will you?” the first officer told her as the checked shirt loosely wrapped around her flapped open. He looked back at his colleague and shook his head, knowing that anything incriminating they might have found in the flat had just been consigned to the sewer, while Ragga grinned in delight.