Quentin Bates - Cold Steal

Natalia scowled. ‘Ten years.’

‘What? As long as that?’

‘At least,’ Natalia growled, spraying and polishing the mirror over the basin. She stopped, tensed, placed her hands on the edge of the granite slab the two basins were set in and jumped. She stood on the slab to polish the top half of the mirror. ‘Hjörtur will never agree to let Nonni out of the country. He thinks I wouldn’t bring him back.’

‘And he’d be right, wouldn’t he?’

Natalia looked at herself in the mirror and pulled a face. ‘Yeah. Probably. But it’s a long time to not see your home, parents, friends, all that stuff.’

‘Finished, ladies?’ Valmira asked, appearing in the doorway.

‘Almost,’ Natalia replied. ‘I’m just finishing polishing the mirror and Emilija’s busy with some old bastard’s shitstained toilet. Apart from that, we’re almost done.’

Emilija used her shoulder to push from her eyes a strand of hair that had come adrift.

‘Hey, Vala. When did you last get to go home?’

Valmira looked at her sideways with disquiet.

‘What do you mean? Home?’

‘You know,’ Natalia said, jumping neatly down from the granite slab and wiping off the marks her trainers had left. ‘Home. Yugoslavia. The place you lived in before.’

‘This is home,’ Valmira said shortly. ‘I’ve never been back and I don’t intend to,’ she added sharply before leaving the room.

‘Not a good question,’ Emilija said quietly.

Natalia scowled. ‘What did I say?’

‘It’s sensitive. Valmira had a bad time, what with the war there and everything. She was in hospital a long time when she was a kid. Didn’t you know?’

Natalia flushed the toilet and gave it a final squirt of bleach. ‘Hell, no. I didn’t know that. I don’t know her as well as you do.’

‘I don’t know much either. I don’t ask and I don’t think she wants to tell. But she lost some of her family in the war; I don’t know what happened to Valmira, but she was hurt, anyway. So now you know.’

‘She won’t be upset, will she?’

Emilija shrugged. ‘A few minutes, then she’ll be OK again. Don’t worry.’

‘Is that why she’s alone? No boyfriend, no husband?’

‘Nothing,’ Emilija said with a shake of her head. ‘There’s an uncle and some cousins. That’s it. I’m not even sure she’s ever. . You know.’

‘Played hide the sausage?’

‘Yeah. That’s it. Not that she wouldn’t want to, I reckon. But Valmira has a few big problems in that department. Best not to ask too many questions. Come on. Let’s get this finished and we can pack it in for the day.’

‘Would anyone have wanted to do Vilhelm harm? Anyone you can think of?’

‘I don’t know.’ Saga had hardly moved and her voice was toneless. ‘There must be plenty of people who would have happily broken his nose, but I don’t imagine they would have gone as far as killing him. But someone did, I suppose, and I don’t really know what sort of thing he was getting up to in Russia and Lithuania.’

‘Any business partners?’

‘Not really. Not any more. Villi was solo more or less, as far as I know. Not that he told me too much.’

‘All right, is there anyone in his business circles who might know more?’

‘Try the assistant. She might know who he was in bed with.’ Saga leaned forward and extracted a cigarette case and a lighter from a handbag at her side, camouflaged in the same leather as everything else around her. ‘Apart from her, that is. Although maybe not. The assistants tend to be decorative rather than useful.’ A lighter clicked like a pistol and she sent a plume of smoke up into the sterile air. ‘But if anyone knows, it’ll be his friends. The few he had left, that is.’

‘Names?’

‘Elvar Pálsson, Sunna María Voss. Those are the ones he seemed to take care not to piss off too much. I suppose a man needs to hold on to a few friends.’

A pale face appeared in the doorway and a girl in her early teens appeared. Gunna saw the same sharp cheekbones and thin lips as Saga’s, but framed in a younger face.

‘Mum?’

‘Not now, darling. I have to talk to this lady.’

‘About Dad?’

‘Yes, dear. About your father.’ The last word dropped from Saga’s lips like a curse.

‘Are you going to find the person?’ The girl asked, looking at Gunna.

‘I hope so. We’re doing our best.’

The girl nodded and withdrew, apparently satisfied with Gunna’s answer.

Gunna wrote down the two names. ‘Elvar Pálsson?’

Saga nodded slowly.

‘And Sunna María Voss?’

‘That’s her. They were at university together, all three of them. Elvar has been Villi’s partner in a lot of shady ventures. Sunna María married a dentist. We went to their wedding in Antigua. It was lovely,’ she reminisced and her face softened for the first time.

‘They are both here in Iceland?’

‘Sunna María and her dentist live here. Kópavogur somewhere. Elvar? Yeah. He’s around somewhere. He seems to pop up. Villi always knew where he was.’

* * *

Winter was best, dark all the time and no problem getting about without being noticed. When it was cold and dark, people also hurried more and didn’t hang around watching to see who that was across the street bundled up in a padded coat and hat. Summer could be good as well, but different. That was when people were away and left their stuff there for the taking, Orri thought, wishing it could be summer again and knowing that it wasn’t far away.

The street he was interested in was a new one, a row of low-slung houses with flat roofs, the street deserted and silent as only a cold morning could make it. He could see that each one had its lower storey dug deep into the ground as a basement while the long tinted windows above showed that these were houses for people with money, or access to it. The concrete of the walls was still a shiny grey, with a sheen that a year or two of weathering would dull if it were not painted, and the gardens were wide open. The straggling twigs at the edges would one day be hedges and trees, but for the moment they were little more than sticks scratching for a foothold and waiting for winter to end.

Deliveries in this exclusive half-built suburb had sparked his interest in the area. This part of Kópavogur on the older western side of the main road was fertile hunting ground for a man of his talents, he felt. As the area was hardly a fashionable one, it was populated by mostly prosperous middle-aged people, his preferred type of homeowner.

The waterside houses of this new street had all been finished, but on the landward side was a row of plots in various states of completion; one that was clearly weathertight and ready for work inside, while another was still a concrete foundation and another was not even that far advanced, still a series of trenches with the steel mesh in place, ready for the foundations to be poured.

He rubbed warmth into his hands, the rubber of the thin latex inside sticking to the wool of the gloves he wore over them. He had been discreetly walking around this quiet end of Kópavogur for a few days, paying particular attention to the street of new houses and making a habit of going purposefully the same way, so the neighbours would assume he lived there, or at least somewhere close by. Orri reckoned that being part of the scenery helped as he checked out the houses on the city side of the street. These were the smartest houses, the ones with nothing but rocks and water behind them.

Less chance of being noticed, he mused. Once behind one of the houses, there would be nobody to see him taking his time finding a way in around the back. The downside was that a rapid retreat by taking a short-cut over someone’s garden was out of the question. The slope down to the sea, not a problem in summer, was slick with melting ice and would take him only to the sea-smoothed rocks of the shoreline.