Quentin Bates - Chilled to the Bone

“Not a word. Not a fucking word. Understand?”

Hekla nodded mutely, desperately fighting for breath, which came slowly as she began to pant in panic.

Unexpectedly, Baddó sneezed, swore and glared at the woman in front of him.

“I know who you are, I know what you’ve been up to. I know where you live and I know where your kids go to school. So don’t fuck about. Understood?” Baddó rasped, his eyes watering, and Hekla nodded mutely. “You have something I want. Where is it?”

“The pictures? They’re in the camera,” Hekla gasped.

Pictures? Baddó wondered, quickly realizing this could be a bonus. “Where are they?”

“In the other room,” Hekla said, regaining her breath, and Baddó saw her eyes widen as she looked past him.

“What’s going on here?” A cross, youthful voice demanded, and Baddó spun around to see a gawky teenage girl standing in the doorway.

“Sif, don’t ask any questions and do as the man says,” Hekla instructed, her voice husky and faltering. “Go to the desk in the living room and get the small camera from the bottom drawer, right at the back. Now.”

The girl disappeared and Baddó stared into Hekla’s eyes, seeing nothing but terror as they listened to Sif rummage in the other room. It seemed like an age before she returned, her hand held out. He took the camera from her and pressed the recall button, scrolling through the pictures with a grin on his face.

“You have been a busy girl, haven’t you,” he said and Hekla flushed.

“What’s this about?” Sif asked, peering through the untidy hair that framed her face.

“Never you mind. Now where’s the computer?”

“What computer?” Hekla asked and Baddó grasped a fistful of her white shirt, dragging her face to within a few inches of the ugly cut that ran down his cheek.

“I said, don’t mess me about. The one you took off one of your punters a few weeks ago.”

“I don’t know where it went,” Hekla said, desperately trying to avoid telling him that Sif had taken it.

“Stop, will you?” Sif squeaked, stepping forward and stopping as Baddó raised a hand. “It’s in Dad’s workshop. I put it back yesterday.”

“Show me.”

Baddó spun Hekla around, twisted one hand hard up behind her back until she gasped in pain, and marched her out of the kitchen and along the passage, bumping against the walls as she stumbled in front of him. In the dimly lit workshop, Sif fumbled among piles of boxes for the laptop case she knew should be there.

“Come on, will you? I don’t have all day,” Baddó growled, wiping his running nose on the sleeve of his free arm as the other hand held Hekla over a workbench, her face in the sawdust and shavings. “For fuck’s sake, there it is,” he said in disgust as Sif held out the laptop case, and at the same moment a fat black and white cat emerged from under the bench, purring and calling as it saw people in its domain.

Slackening his grip on Hekla’s arm, he reached for the laptop case and aimed a vicious kick at the cat as it stalked amiably toward him, its tail in the air.

“ Æi , no, Perla!” Sif screeched, dropping the case and sweeping up the nearest thing she could grab on the bench. Hekla stumbled, steadied herself, and heaved with all her strength just as Baddó let fly with his boot, missing the cat and losing his balance so that he stumbled against the bench.

“You stupid cow,” Baddó snarled, snorting through his half-blocked nose, the laptop case clutched in one fist while he raised the other and moved toward the girl. Sif squealed in fright, flung one arm up to cover her face and lashed out wildly with the other hand as Baddó swung, just as he was shaken by another thunderous sneeze.

In his own rarely used office, Ívar Laxdal hunched over a sleek laptop, reading from the screen.

“ ‘According to information that has reached Reykjavík Voice , four asylum seekers who arrived in Iceland in May two thousand and nine promptly disappeared and their whereabouts remained unknown until a Dutch human rights group uncovered evidence that all four were executed in Libya later that same year. Following the Libyan revolution, a great deal of documentation from the former regime has come to light, including evidence that the three men and one woman were rendered to Libya in contravention of the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees,’ ” he read out.

“What’s that about?” Gunna asked, peering at the laptop screen and continuing to read over Ívar Laxdal’s shoulder. “ ‘ Reykjavík Voice has copies of emails purported to have been sent by senior Icelandic officials sanctioning the immediate transfer, without passing through formal immigration channels, of four Libyan nationals who arrived on a scheduled flight from Amsterdam to a military aircraft that departed from Keflavík airport later that night to an unknown destination.’ Ívar, is there any truth in this?” Gunna asked. “Is this anything to do with Jóel Ingi and why he’s skipped the country?”

“I don’t know, Gunnhildur,” he said, his face grey and set like rock. “If it’s true, there’ll be hell to pay in all kinds of ways.”

“If it’s true, then we should be able to find out, surely. Immigration is part of the force, so can’t you demand the truth about it from the airport police?”

“I could. But I’m not sure that I should.”

“Come on, surely …”

Ívar Laxdal’s deep-set dark eyes looked back at her with no visible expression, but his face, sagging and exhausted, told her everything.

“I daren’t,” he admitted. “This needs to go upstairs. But in the meantime, I have to deal with the ministry, and there’s going to be some serious trouble later today if, or rather when, there are questions in Parliament. I have a feeling that this is what that damned lost laptop is all about.”

“If this is all public, is there any reason to worry about it? It’s not as if we’ve been looking all that hard for it anyway.”

“There hasn’t been much to look for,” Ívar Laxdal snorted. “If that pompous fool Ægir Lárusson had the sense to tell us the truth at the start, we might have got somewhere. It was always going to be a hopeless task and that’s not something I’m going to worry about. The ministry can sort out its own dirty laundry. I’m more interested in you catching up with this hoodlum who’s responsible for two murders in our back yard.”

Gunna sat on the bone-hard chair that Ívar Laxdal kept in his office, designed to encourage visiting dignitaries not to linger.

“If this is what the droids at the ministry are shitting themselves over, then it’s out in the open now. Reykjavík Voice is a bit off-center, and not that many people read it, but all the same, this can’t be hushed up now, surely? They even published this on their website in English, so it isn’t just a local thing that can be contained.”

“If this is the same thing, then you’re quite right,” Ivar Laxdal agreed. “On the other hand, the ways of civil servants are not to be understood by mere low-grade jobsworths such as ourselves.”

“We’re civil servants as well,” Gunna pointed out, amused by his description of himself as “low grade.”

“We are,” he agreed. “But we’re the kind of civil servants who actually achieve something, as opposed to the type who build themselves little empires and attend conferences while they wait for their pensions to kick in.”

His thumbnail scratched at the stubble under the point of his chin as he thought.

“Leave it with me, will you?” he said finally. “I need to talk to upstairs. You have a pet journalist at Reykjavík Voice , don’t you?”