Chilled to the Bone (21 page)

Gunna tapped at the laptop and watched as personal.is loaded, a nondescript website she had heard of but never looked at. Jokes about the desperate people looking there and on other similar sites for companionship, or something more basic, had been enough to extinguish any curiosity.

She browsed curiously through the registry of users, startled to see that the site had several thousand with a sidebar listing those online and ready to interact. Blue for men, she guessed, pink for women. She wondered what the purple indicators meant, until she explored a few of their profiles and realized they were couples, mostly looking for adventurous young singles or like-minded couples.

Gunna shook her head in disbelief at the idea that all these people were online on a weekday at dinner time. The registry revealed several Sonjas, and she wondered if TinySonja or Sonja2 were who she was looking for. Frustrated at being told that a direct message could not be sent to either of them unless she set up a profile of her own, Gunna baulked at the idea. She read through both profiles a second time and saw that they had a coded email address within the details; she wrote a short message to each, asking for them to get in touch and including her mobile number.

The sheer variety of requirements and requests on the personal.is pages was bewildering as Gunna read through the profiles and requests for men looking for women and vice versa, men looking for men, women seeking women and couples looking for discreet adventures. She had to resort to a search engine to decode some of the English language terms and unfamiliar acronyms, and in some cases she was still unsure of what they actually meant, although she looked approvingly at some of the tools available and decided that a fully adjustable spreader bar in black lacquered steel might
make a useful addition to the police’s armoury for dealing with difficult drunks.

The key clicked in the lock and there was a blast of cold air as the front door opened and quickly shut again. Gunna thankfully closed personal.is and opened her email page instead as the double thump of Steini’s boots landing on the floor in the hall preceded him.

“
Hæ
,” he said. “Home alone?”

“Don’t think so. There’s a light in Laufey’s room but I don’t know if she’s in.”

“And Drífa?”

“No idea. Her car’s there so she may be in Gísli’s room, or she might be watching the TV with Laufey, or they might have both walked down to Sigrún’s place. I’ve not been home long and I haven’t seen either of them.”

“Hungry?” He dropped a plastic bag in the sink, washed his hands and dried them on a cloth before bending down to look over her shoulder. “Not doing work stuff, are you?” he asked.

Gunna could feel the droplets of moisture clinging to his mustache, which was on her neck as he wrapped his arms around her and the chair at once, one hand sliding inside her T-shirt.

“Yes, unfortunately,” she said. “What’s going on here? Feeling lucky, are you?”

“Who knows? When a man arrives with a bag of fresh fish and is ready to cook it, there’s no knowing how lucky he can get.”

Gunna stretched, feeling the ache in her legs and shoulders, leaning back in the chair as his arms wrapped themselves a little further around her. “What sort of fish? Boiled haddock’s not going to get you far, you know.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he assured her, withdrawing the exploring hand and standing up. “But it’ll be something good, so stay hungry.”

T
HE FEELING OF
being watched stayed with her and she was unable to shake it off. Hekla woke early and made her way silently to the kitchen while Pétur slept. The pain that prevented him from sleeping soundly had receded for a few days, kept at bay by painkillers, which he had finally and grudgingly resorted to. The last year had been a difficult one. Pétur’s health problems had caused him to retreat increasingly into a world of his own, especially when the pain in his leg kept him awake at nights, and he would sleep much of the day. Sometimes Hekla felt as if she’d become a lone parent, missing Pétur’s company and the activity and companionship they’d enjoyed before the accident had half-crippled him.

They had been friends long before they’d become the unlikely couple their friends saw them as. Their long acquaintance and the disparity in their ages gave them a closeness but also a distance that Hekla valued. She knew Pétur worried that one day she’d leave with a man closer to her own age and interests. She had sometimes scolded him for what she felt was a lack of trust, but then had to remind herself that the lack of trust could be justified. She hoped he knew nothing of the occasional adventures she’d indulged in with like-minded people Pétur would never be able to connect with. Those erotic adventures had eventually become the lucrative sideline that kept the family on an even keel financially, and as domination had become work before desperation had driven her to
rob a few clients, her own desire for it had faded, although, she reminded herself, her expertise was undiminished.

Hekla brewed coffee and enjoyed the silence. Normally the house echoed with the games and activities of her two robust younger children, while her stepdaughter Sif was the quiet one of the house, an intense, withdrawn girl who kept to her own strange hours. Hekla had tried to connect with her, but felt that she had failed to reach the girl who now spent most of her time either in her room or staying with friends closer to college in Reykjavík. Hekla wondered if Sif had a boyfriend among the circle of odd friends she occasionally mentioned. She felt hurt and disappointed that Sif hadn’t allowed her well-meaning stepmother past her defenses. Or maybe there were no defenses? Perhaps there were things that Sif just didn’t concern herself with.

In the early darkness she could see the lights of Reykjavík in the distance across the bay and her thoughts went back to the day before and the picture of Jóhannes Karlsson in the newspaper. She dug out the paper from the recycling box and smoothed it out on the table in front of her. The fold had creased across the man’s face, a younger, smiling version of the man she had left angrily kicking at his bonds in one of the Gullfoss Hotel’s shabbier rooms. Angry, but very much alive, she recalled.

Jóhannes Karlsson had been sixty-six years old, according to the obituary that listed his parents, two brothers, a sister and several wives before going on to list his children from two marriages. The man had been wealthy, she assumed. He had sat briefly in Parliament, owned fishing vessels and a factory. According to the newspaper, he had been a wonderful father and grandfather, a much-respected employer and a pillar of the community.

Not such a wonderful character that he hadn’t been averse to being tied up and whipped hard in a dark hotel room by a
strange woman he had asked to talk as dirty as she could, she reflected, wondering what other skeletons might have been in Jóhannes Karlsson’s closet that didn’t make it into the newspaper obituary.

At any rate, it seemed, her lucrative sideline was at an end. She might have to a seek out a proper job at a time when her usual line of work was thin on the ground; living so far from the city was always going to make a regular job in Reykjavík awkward.

Hekla munched her toast as her thoughts drifted back to the arrogant old man at the Gullfoss Hotel, and the uncomfortable thought occurred to her that his death might have been linked to their session in the hotel room as she groped desperately through her mind for any details. He had been angry enough, but helpless, and his credit and debit cards had been carefully harvested. The old man’s eyes had blazed with fury when he realized he was being robbed rather than given the rough treatment he had asked for so specifically in his emails before the meeting. It had been a pretty good day. The second guy that afternoon had been just as lucrative and a decent enough old boy compared to the one whose obituary she was reading. He was polite enough at least for something of a happy finish before she emptied his wallet. Between them the two wealthy out-of-towners had been skinned for enough to keep the family afloat for several months if they were careful, and Hekla was inclined to keep her head down and stay out of sight.

She wondered if it was time to delete her listing on personal.is and allow Sonja to cease to exist completely. Hekla poured coffee into two mugs, added milk to both and sugar to one and carried them along the corridor. Alda and Alli were asleep in their bunk beds, and out of habit she listened to their breathing. There was a strip of light from around Sif’s bedroom door, the faint rattle of a keyboard inside and a low rumbling
sound. Hekla guessed the girl was playing another of those interminable online games she played with people in Japan or Spain. Pétur turned over in bed as she came into the room; she shrugged the dressing gown off one shoulder and handed him the two mugs.

“There’s sugar in the blue one,” she said, pleased to see him smile. “Sleep all right?” She asked.

“Yeah, fine. First time for a while.”

“That’s good. Don’t forget your pills.”

“No chance,” he smiled, counting white tablets into the palm of his hand and washing them down with coffee. “Cold out, is it?”

H
ELGI HAD BAGS
under his normally cheerful eyes. He was the kind of man who enjoyed practically any kind of work that was varied and interesting, so it was a surprise to Gunna to see him grumpy and answering questions in monosyllables.

“Can you find out about that car, Helgi?”

“Car?”

“The one that burned out at Grandi yesterday.”

“Car? What does that have to do with the Gullfoss Hotel stuff, for crying out loud?”

Gunna’s voice hardened. She had never had to pull rank on Helgi in the year they had worked together. “Look, just do it, will you? It may have nothing to do with anything, but I want it eliminated. All right?”

Eiríkur listened to the exchange in confusion, almost as if he had surprised his parents in the middle of an argument.

“And you, Eiríkur, first of all, I want you to start with the credit card statements you got from Jóhannes Karlsson’s son—start looking up those places where his card was used on the day he died. They’re all pricey establishments and hopefully they’ll be able to remember something useful.”

Eiríkur nodded. “All right. I’ll let you know what I find
out,” he said and scuttled from the room without another word.

Helgi sighed. “And you, chief?” he asked. There was a fatigue in his eyes that hadn’t been there the day before.

“Me? I’m off to meet Magnús Sigmarsson’s girlfriend to start with, and then probably his next-door neighbor again.”

“If you ask me, the key to all this is somewhere in these hotels,” Helgi said abruptly. “I’d bet anything there are staff at these places who know just what’s been going on. I’m not sure that this Sonja could have operated without someone on the inside to smooth the way for her.”

“More than likely, but none of them are saying a word,” Gunna agreed. “Are you all right, Helgi?”

“Yeah. Just had a rough night, that’s all. I’ll see you when I’ve found out about this car.”

G
ÚSTAV
F
REYSTEINN
B
ÓASSON
was uneasy. There was something about the hard-faced man in the leather jacket that was both disturbing and intriguing, irresistible qualities that he knew he would later regret his interest in.

He turned the beermat over in his fingers, inspecting the hotel’s understated logo on one side and the
250k
that the man had written on the reverse in neat letters, along with the seven digits of a mobile phone number. A quarter of a million krónur wasn’t a lot of money, barely enough to cover the bills for a month in the tiny flat he occupied in the eaves of an old wooden house at the top of Reykjavík’s Thingholt district. On the other hand, times weren’t easy. The company that owned the hotel group had instituted a pay freeze, supposedly across the board, but it was rumored to apply only to junior staff, and 250,000 tax-free krónur would sit happily in the piggy bank for a rainy day.

Gussi wondered idly if it would be worth asking for more, maybe enough for a weekend in London and a little culture:
the Tate, the Globe, Drury Lane. He sat back and smiled weakly at his daydreams while his thoughts drifted to poor Hekla. A striking and thoroughly talented girl, he remembered. He had to hand it to her, she had worked a scam that anyone could be proud of. Sadly it was a scheme that couldn’t last in a small place like Reykjavík. In London or even in Copenhagen, she would probably have been able to get away with robbing wealthy elderly men indefinitely, so long as she didn’t do it too often, and as long as her looks lasted. But Gussi reflected that Reykjavík was a terribly provincial city and eventually she would undoubtedly be caught out.

He stood up and looked out of the narrow window with its view over a slice of the winter city in its shades of dull grey. If he stood with his face close to the window and craned his neck, a partial view of the spire of Hallgrímskirkja could just about be seen. He weighed things up in his mind. It was years since he had last seen the girl, back when she was young and green, before she disappeared from the business. He wasn’t even sure if she had recognized him in his cheap polyester company suit behind the check-in desk on the couple of occasions he had noticed her at the hotel. Probably not, he thought. He was greyer and not as trim as he’d once been, and his heavy horn-framed spectacles were as good a disguise as any.

It went against the grain to give the girl away to a hoodlum like the hard-faced man who called himself Jón. Jón, he thought, chuckling. The man was no thespian. Any name but the most commonplace one imaginable would have been more convincing. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if he had any obligation to Hekla, apart than the fact that they shared a profession they’d both left, temporarily, he told himself, and the money would come in very useful if he could bargain the man into doubling his offer.

His mind still wasn’t made up as he left the house huddled in a coat that had once been stylish. It was his day off. He’d
meant to sleep late and give himself a few extra hours under the duvet before the switch from a few days of evening shifts to a week of nights. A coffee in town would settle his stomach, he felt, and he could think while he walked through the crisp frost that he hoped would wake him up properly.