Cold Comfort (32 page)

“I know. But he’s such a bastard.”

The pass over the heath still looked to Eiríkur like a scene from another planet, with its bizarre rock formations, unexpected pastel colours, and gouts of steam issuing from the ground at the side of the black two-lane highway. The descent down to the inhabited lowlands was almost a relief and the sharp sulphur smell of the steaming highlands receded. Eiríkur saw fields starting to turn to green as the first signs of spring showed themselves, while the layers of snow on the mountain peaks inland displayed a stolid determination to ride out the coming summer. He looked out of the window in the other direction and saw the distant blue shimmer of the sea in the distance.

“You’re a city lad, aren’t you?” Gunna asked.

“Yup, Seltjarnarnes.”

“So this countryside stuff’s a bit alien to you?”

“I’m afraid so. My parents were both from the country and moved to Reykjavík when they were young, but they never dreamed about going back to a farm or anything like that.”

“So you weren’t brought up on haggis and boiled sheep heads?”

“God, no. Mum and Dad used to love that sort of stuff, but they never made us eat it.”

“I’ll tell you a secret, young man,” Gunna said, taking her eyes off the road to look over at him. “I never liked it much either. But don’t tell Helgi. He’d eat sharkmeat and boiled skate for breakfast if his Halla would let him.”

“Not a word, chief,” Eiríkur promised. “What’s the score with Ommi now?”

“Not sure,” Gunna said. “I was going to leave him to stew for a few more days, but I reckon he’ll have had a day and a night to think and maybe make a few calls that won’t be answered. So we’ll give him another go now. It all depends on how unsure of his ground he is, I think. He was nervous yesterday, and by now I’m hoping he’ll be closer to frantic.”

Gunna showed their ID and drove in through the main gates to park in front of the prison. She stopped the engine and listened to it tick. “If anything sounds odd, just play along with me, all right?”

“Sure, chief.”

“Good. Let’s go. By the way, don’t worry about Sævaldur. His past misdeeds are going to come back and haunt him one day, don’t you fret.”

T
HE DOOR CLANGED
shut and the same warder took his place in front of it, staring over their heads. Eiríkur stood next to the warder and noticed immediately that Ommi looked haggard and irritable.

“Jæja, Ommi. How are you?” Gunna greeted him jovially. “Sleep all right?”

“Yeah. Like a baby,” Ommi sneered. “Who’s the kiddie?” He motioned towards Eiríkur with his chin.

“That’s Detective Constable Eiríkur Thór Jónsson, a rising star of the police force. I thought the lad needed to have a good look at you for future reference.”

“Yeah. Right. What’re you back for, anyway? You were only here yesterday.”

“Been thinking, Ommi?”

“Might have.”

“Come on. You haven’t slept a wink.”

Ommi shuffled his feet under the table and rubbed his hands together as if trying to comfort himself. It wasn’t cold in the interview room, but he shivered.

“I might look at doing a deal,” he muttered, eyes on the table between them.

Gunna sat and looked at him sideways before leaning forward with a sly smile.

“Ommi, you don’t have anything to bargain with,” she said slowly and clearly, not loud enough for Eiríkur to hear without listening carefully, although she was certain he was doing just that. “I have everything I need to hang Svana’s murder on you and put you away until you’re an old man. How old are you now? Thirty-three? How does being in here until you’re past fifty sound?”

Ommi’s jaw stiffened and his eyes blazed, but the colour drained from his face.

“You’ve spent too many years in here already,” Gunna continued, keeping her gaze on Ommi, waiting for him to lift his eyes. She wondered how far he could be pressured before his temper would burst its banks and have him back in solitary confinement. “If you don’t want to still be here when your hair’s falling out, you need to start telling me some secrets, Ommi. It’s not as if the people you’re protecting give a shit about you.”

Ommi sat up straight-backed, and Gunna did the same, maintaining eye contact and waiting for him to blink.

“I know already how the story fits together. All I need you for is to fill in the gaps,” she said.

“It’s between you and me,” he grated with an effort, blinking at last, and his chin jutted again towards Eiríkur and the warder. “Send them out.”

“You know I can’t do that,” Gunna said gently.

“You and me,” he snarled with lips drawn back to reveal discoloured teeth.

Gunna looked enquiringly at the warder, who shook his head. She sighed.

“Maybe we can go for a walk around the yard,” she said finally, and turned to the warder. “Can we do that?”

A
QUARTER OF
an hour later, Gunna and Ommi walked their first circuit of the yard. Eiríkur and the warder followed at a cautious distance as a biting wind from the north made Gunna shiver in spite of the heavy coat she had borrowed. Ommi appeared not to feel the chill through his hooded fleece.

“Tell me what happened that night at Blacklights. What really happened,” Gunna began.

“I don’t know it all. There was this bloke Sindri had some problem with. Sindri has a temper, just like his old man, and when he saw this bloke there, he blew. They had an argument and some people calmed them down, and that was that. Sindri was fucking furious; he’d been snorting and drinking all day and was really on a roll.”

“So it wasn’t you?”

“No. Didn’t even see it.”

“What do you think happened, then?”

“I reckon Sindri hauled this Steindór bloke out into the car park, gave him a good kicking and didn’t know when to stop.”

“So where were you when all this was going on?”

“With Svana and the rest of the band. They’d just come off stage.”

“And Óskar?”

“I reckon he was out the back with Sindri. Why? What did Skari say?”

“So what happened next?” Gunna asked, ignoring the question.

“Shit, all hell let loose. Bjartmar wound the sound up to the max and turned down the lights so the place was jumping. People everywhere, loads of noise. Bjartmar and Sindri came and found me, told Svana to get herself on stage and crank it up. Then, fuck me, but old Jónas turns up, Sindri’s dad, face like doom, and the three of them put the screws on.”

“Made you an offer you couldn’t refuse?”

“Sort of. Jónas said he had a very important assignment for me and it was urgent, had to be done right away.”

“Which was?”

“That was it, he didn’t say. But he put me in the back of his Merc and off we went.”

“Into the night?”

“Yeah. It was starting to get light by then and we went right out of town. I don’t like going past Mosfellsbær, me. But we ended up at this summer house and he left me there with Selma to look after me, said he’d be back in the morning and that there was a good wedge of cash in it for me.”

“This was Eygló Grímsdóttir’s place in Skorradalur, right?”

“Yeah. Nice place. I think old Jónas had a thing going with Eygló at the time.”

“You already knew Eygló by then?”

“Well, sort of. Selma and me, we’d been sort of, y’know, off and on, so I knew Eygló.”

They turned at the corner of the field and came back at a leisurely pace, this time into the wind, which stung Gunna’s cheeks. Ommi huddled deeper into his fleece.

“So, what happened?”

“Well, I was left there with little Selma to keep me company, and the next afternoon Jónas turned up again with Sindri in tow, and Eygló coming up behind in her BMW with Baddó.”

“Bjartmar?”

“Yeah. Well Selma was kicked upstairs and the three of them put their cards on the table.”

“Three of them?”

“Yeah. Eygló went off with Selma, I suppose.”

“All right. Go on.”

Ommi frowned.

“Jónas said they had a problem. A crime had been committed that they couldn’t sweep under the carpet. He said they needed someone to take the rap for it and there would be a wage in it, plus a bonus at the ind of the stretch. Would I be interested? Well I thought they probably wanted someone to do a year or a few months or something. So I said yeah, I could do some time for the right price.”

“But it was more than a few months?”

“Hell, yeah,” Ommi said. “I could see it was Sindri. He was as nervous as hell, fiddling with his keys, biting his nails, all sorts. Your lot would’ve chewed him up for breakfast,” he said with a slim smile. “Anyway, it took me by surprise when they said it would be a murder charge, and I said hey, that’s a bit heavier than what I’d had in mind.”

Ommi kicked a stone and sent it skittering towards the fence. “But that Jónas, he’s a sly bastard. He said I’d already said yes, so now we just needed to agree a price.”

“And I take it you did?”

“Yup. Shit, yeah. Those three … Life wouldn’t have been worth living if I’d turned them down.”

“How much?”

“A couple of mill a year, plus a five mill bonus when I got out, and he swore blind it wouldn’t be more than ten years, out in six or seven, tops.”

“And you agreed to that?”

“Pushed him up to two and a half a year, plus eight, and we shook on it.”

“A done deal? What then?”

“They went back to the city; said I should stay put and wait there quietly. They left a case of vodka and a couple of beers, told me to enjoy the TV until I got a visit. So me and Selma, we made ourselves comfy. A week later you lot came calling and I just put my hands up and that was that.”

Gunna nodded to herself. Very little that Ommi had said had taken her by surprise, except that he had been so open after such a long silence. They turned again at the top of the yard and she saw that he was starting to feel the chill.

“Want to go back inside?”

“Not yet.”

“So you got a decent nest egg put away somewhere for you as long as you kept quiet and did the time. What went wrong?”

Ommi grimaced. “I’ll tell you what. I was starting to feel all right in there. Stopped smoking, worked out every day. Put an inch on my biceps. Feeling good. Then I began to hear whispers. Sindri moved abroad. OK, fair enough. Then I hear Bjartmar’s in trouble. He’d got right out of the speed and clubbing business, and went respectable, stopped being there when I called. That’s what went wrong. I couldn’t have the cash going into an account with my name on it, so I wanted it in Selma’s name. But Bjartmar said he’d invest it for me, get a good return and I’d have a big old whack waiting when I got out.”

“And did he?”

“Yeah. Put it all into the stock exchange here and there, a load into shares in banks, and lost the fucking lot when the banks went tits up.”

“That’s when you decided to walk out?”

“Yeah. I couldn’t get through to Bjartmar or Jónas. Couldn’t find Skari’s number, like he’d dropped off the surface of the earth. Selma asked a few questions for me, but her mum and Jónas had fallen out by then. I wasn’t getting any answers, so I reckoned I’d go and ask questions myself. Thought if it came to it, I’d just talk to you lot and tell you everything.”

Ommi looked directly at Gunna for the first time since they had started walking. “I thought they’d stitched me up.”

“Looks like they had.”

“Maybe. I couldn’t get to Jónas or Bjartmar. Calls stopped at their secretaries, and their offices are like this place,” he said bitterly, waving a hand at the high wire all around them as Gunna recalled the security cameras outside both Bjartmar and Jónas’s offices.

“The fire at Bjartmar’s home, was that you?”

“Addi did that. A bit of a warning.”

“And Svana? Why did you go to her?”

“To get to Bjartmar. I’d heard she was still shagging him sometimes. So I turned up at the gym one morning and waited until she came out. When she got in the car, I jumped in the passenger side and we went back to her place for a bit of a private talk.”

“When was this? Which day?”

“Morning. Don’t know what day.”

“But she couldn’t help you?”

“She said that she knew Bjartmar was away and she’d talk to him when he came back.”

“That was true enough,” Gunna said. “Bjartmar really was abroad.”

“Was it? I couldn’t be sure. Svana was sweet, but she was never that bright.”

“And Daft Diddi? That was you, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. Look, I’m not proud of that, understand? I was getting desperate, out of cash. Eygló helped out with a few shekels and found us that place to crash in, but she’s short of cash herself after she put hers into property that won’t sell.”

At the bottom of the yard, Gunna felt her phone begin to vibrate in her pocket but ignored it. As they turned, she could see Eiríkur and the warder following them, huddled miserably deep into their coats.

“So Svana was fine when you left her?”

“Yeah. Right as rain. She’d had a lot done since I saw her last, new this, new that, looked like a million dollars. I swear it, I didn’t touch her, honestly. But if you bring the bastard who did it in here, I’ll make him wish he’d never been born.”

Gunna wanted to believe him, and for once Ommi’s voice had an earnest quality that was startlingly fresh.

“Fair enough. But Skari? What happened there?”

“Jesus. Found out why I couldn’t get hold of him. The twat had gone and moved back to Crapsville with his fat girl,” Ommi said with a shake of the head. “Me and Addi went out there to look for him, and when we did find him in Keflavík, it wasn’t the way it should have been. He just went apeshit. Said he was straight now and wanted to keep it that way.”

“So Jónas had squared all the witnesses? Skari and Svana?”

“Yeah, and the rest of them.”

“Understood. What was the upshot with Óskar? How come he’s in such a bad way?”

“He went fucking wild when I told him he’d had his payout from old Jónas for saying his piece in court that put me away, but I’d been left out in the cold. He laid right into me and I gave it all back, plus a bit more.” Ommi sighed. “I’m a lot stronger than when I was put away. I shouldn’t have done it, but fuck it. He wanted a ruck and he got a proper one.”