Cold Steal (2 page)

Orri had left Lísa in bed. Their relationship was an odd one, dominated by them both working shifts, Lísa managing a canteen at a factory where production was only ever halted for a day at Christmas, and him at a freight company’s depot on an industrial estate on the city outskirts. His other activities also ate into his time and he had never got round to telling Lísa that he had volunteered to work reduced hours when the company had been forced to make cuts. In fact, all but a few of the mostly middle-aged staff had taken a cut in hours, and it didn’t seem to have mattered. The old boys just worked harder to make up for it, which was something Orri failed to understand.

He yawned as he clocked in, already wearing his overalls and steel toecap boots, his helmet under his arm. He looked into the coffee room where two of the old boys were leafing through newspapers a week old and grumbling about the state of the country.

‘Good morning.’

‘Good morning, Orri,’ the one facing him replied while the other one, a corpulent man with a roll of fat at the back of his neck, the sight of which made Orri feel queasy, continued to look through last week’s small ads. ‘And how might you be this fine day?’

‘Not so bad.’

‘You’re early today. Your Lísa must have been at work last night?’

‘Nope. She’s still asleep.’

‘The lazy bitch. I’d have kicked her out of bed, demanded eggs, bacon and coffee be brought to me, and an early morning roll in the hay to kick off with.’

Orri snorted with laughter. ‘Yeah, right,’ he retorted. ‘I’ve seen your old woman and it’d be a brave man who told her to do anything.’

At the next table, Dóri the foreman closed his newspaper and stood up with a slow smile. ‘That’s what you youngsters can’t get into your heads. Gentle touches. That’s all it needs. That’s what has them eating out of your hand and running to get your breakfast when you whistle for it.’

‘If you say so,’ Orri said, already bored with the non-stop talk of women and their bizarre habits that seemed to obsess his older colleagues. ‘What are we starting with today?’

‘Six pallets to go to Akureyri. Two for Raufarhöfn on the same truck, so those need to go to Reykjavík today. There’s a couple of crates to go to Djúpivogur and another shipment for the Westmann Islands, but that’s not on pallets yet. Eight collections to make in Reykjavík, two in Keflavík and there’s a delivery from Akranes due at eleven that’s being forwarded to somewhere or other. It has to go to the airport, anyway,’ Dóri reeled off in a flat monotone as he read the list from a clipboard.

Orri yawned. ‘What am I doing then, boss?’

‘I’m not the boss, young man, but I’d suggest Alex does the Keflavík run from Hafnarfisk in the fridge truck as usual and you do the Reykjavík collections in the Trafic. Does that meet with your agreement?’

‘Alex is in today?’

‘He’d better be if he wants to keep his job, that’s all I can say,’ Dóri said, taking off his glasses and folding them away in the breast pocket of his overall. ‘Late yesterday. Late today and late twice last week. Not good enough and I wouldn’t put up with it, but I’m not the boss, as you know.’

‘I’ll have a word.’

Dóri looked at him with his face screwed into a frown. ‘Up to you. But the old man doesn’t need to put up with Alex being a dick. There are a dozen immigrants a week knocking on the door asking for work.’

As the old man left him to it, Orri tapped at his phone, put it to his ear and listened to Alex’s voicemail kick in with a few sentences of rapid Latvian that he ignored.

‘Hi. It’s Orri. Where are you, man? You’re going to get sacked if you keep coming in late,’ he said in bland English as he walked through the door and saw Alex swagger towards him with a smile. He paused and dug in his pocket, raising a finger at Orri as he did so.

‘Don’t bother. It’s a message from me,’ Orri called out. ‘Telling you not to turn up late again if you want to keep your job.’

‘Hey, don’t worry. He can’t fire me,’ Alex said with a grin. ‘I didn’t mean to be late.’ He whistled. ‘That girl. Man. She just wouldn’t let me go. Know what I mean?’

‘Yeah, yeah. I know. But she won’t like you so much if you’re under her feet at home all day, will she?’ Orri said.

‘You have some stuff for me? I have space next week if you have some goods to deliver.’

She was early for her midday shift, arriving at the Hverfisgata station with an hour to spare, certain that Ívar Laxdal would be looking for her. In two years with what had been formed as the Serious Crime Unit, she had found that serious crime seemed to occur in fits and starts, and Gunna and her colleagues had found themselves investigating anything from car theft to a cartel of youthful but computer-savvy mobile phone thieves, as well as the occasional crime so brutal that she asked herself repeatedly if this was something new. She wondered if people were reporting things that had previously been sorted out behind closed doors, often with more discreet violence.

Ívar Laxdal found her in the detectives’ office as her computer was powering up.

‘Gunnhildur,’ she heard behind her as she typed in her password. ‘I hope you feel better for the break?’

She swung her chair around and saw the granite face of the National Commissioner’s deputy, his blue eyes sparkling with an intelligence and humour his deadpan expression rarely betrayed.

‘Not bad, I suppose. Another week would have been good, but you can’t have everything.’

‘Indeed, and someone has to right wrongs and lock up bad guys.’ He looked around the deserted office. ‘Where’s Helgi?’

‘On leave, as of yesterday. Gone up north for a week.’

‘And Eiríkur?’

‘He should be here at twelve – first day after a month’s paternity leave.’

‘Paternity leave,’ Ívar Laxdal said as if the words hurt him. ‘In my day there was no such thing. I was at sea when my eldest was born and didn’t even see him until he was almost a month old.’

‘Thanks for the call yesterday. I was just watching the news when you rang up. Anything new?’

Ívar Laxdal rubbed his chin, his thumbnail rasping against the bristles.

‘Yes. The victim is Vilhelm Thorleifsson, forty-one years old, resident in Copenhagen since 2009. His name hasn’t been released yet.’

‘He was shot? Any more details yet?’

‘Strangely, it was two rounds from a .22 weapon. I’d have gone for something heavier if I wanted to finish someone off, but if you’re accurate and it’s at close range, it’ll do the job well enough. There’s a witness as well, not that it seems she can tell us much.’

‘Serious stuff.’

‘As you say, serious stuff,’ Ívar Laxdal said. ‘The witness is nineteen years old, saw the whole thing at close quarters and is now traumatized and sedated. So we’ll see what comes out of it all.’

Gunna saw with dismay that the screen of her computer was filled with emails demanding immediate attention.

‘What do you want me to do? Is Sævaldur looking after this one?’

Ívar Laxdal let fall a rare smile. He was aware of the friction between Gunna and her chief inspector colleague and she knew that he preferred them not to clash.

‘Of course Sævaldur is involved. He was at the scene half the night with the forensic team and they’re still up there knocking on doors, if they can find anyone at this time of year. But this one is mine, I’m afraid, instructions from . . .’ He lifted his eyes to the ceiling. ‘You know what I mean. To start with I want Sævaldur and his team investigating the scene. I want you and Eiríkur working on the victim’s background.’

‘You said he lived in Copenhagen?’

‘That’s right. His wife and daughter will be here this evening. I’m sure she’ll be delighted when she finds out what he was up to.’

‘All right. You want me to meet her at the airport, or is that being done by family?’

‘Leave her until tomorrow. Start on his business background today.’

‘Another shady businessman?’

Another rare smile. ‘I know how much you enjoy the company of men in smart suits, even if they’re dead,’ he said, silently leaving the room and contriving not to bang the door.

‘Yeah, right. Especially when they’re dead,’ Gunna muttered to herself.

Natalia dragged hard on the last millimetres of her cigarette and threw the butt out of the window, where it joined the ones from the week before and the week before that on the roof of the garage.

‘Someone has been here,’ Emilija said, as if that were an offence of some kind. ‘The toilet has been used. I’m sure of it.’

Natalia shrugged. ‘So? Somebody must live here, surely?’

Emilija let herself sink deep into the leather sofa that filled one end of the apartment’s living room, directly opposite a vast TV screen that filled almost the whole of the opposite wall.

‘If whoever lives here had left the remote on the table, then we could have TV on while we work,’ she said wistfully.

‘Nobody lives here,’ Natalia said.

All winter the three Reindeer Cleaners had arrived to clean houses in this smart, half-built suburb. Today’s job was to scrub the kitchen and the luxurious bathrooms, vacuum the living room and dust the bedrooms that rarely appeared to be slept in. The job had become easier and easier as there was so little to be done. The apartment was always as spotlessly clean as it had been when they left it the previous week. Nothing was ever out of place. The kitchen was never used and the bathroom remained pristine.

‘Who lives in this place?’ Emilija asked. ‘I want to know who can afford to leave a place like this empty. If I knew who it was, hell, I’d screw the life out of him and live here myself.’

A wicked smile flashed across Natalia’s sharp face. ‘A rich man, yeah. If I knew, I’d have him first.’

‘As long as he’s old and won’t last too long,’ Emilija mused.

‘Men again?’ Valmira asked, appearing in the doorway with the vacuum cleaner tucked under one arm. ‘Are we finished?’ She put the vacuum cleaner down by the door and ticked the boxes on her list. Everything had been done, even though nothing had needed to be done, but she still walked around the place to check.

‘Why do we clean this place, do you think?’ Emilija asked, letting herself fall backwards onto the deep sofa next to Natalia and lifting her feet onto the long coffee table, a deep grey slab of stone on four steel legs. There were bags under her eyes and she wanted to close them and spend the rest of the afternoon on that welcoming sofa.

‘A friend of the boss owns it,’ Natalia said. ‘I heard him talk about it once on the phone. He said he’d have the place cleaned every week. He thinks I don’t understand what he says,’ she added, grinning wickedly.

‘I’m not so sure. I reckon he wants you to think that,’ Emilija said.

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘No, Viggó’s a pretty stupid guy.’

‘It belongs to a friend of Viggó’s father,’ Valmira said thoughtfully, appearing in the doorway from the echoing hall and walking to the window. ‘Natalia, you’d better stop throwing those cigarette ends out of the window. Someone’s going to notice them. Anyhow, we’re back here tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow? Not possible,’ Natalia said with a flash of anger in her voice as she sat up straight.

‘Down the street. Booked for tomorrow afternoon.’

‘Shit, why not now?’ Emilija asked, getting to her feet. ‘That means we have to come all the way out here tomorrow and we’re not paid for travel, are we?’

Valmira walked stiffly away from the window and the others recognized the look on her face, knowing there was a depth of trauma in her that they could not understand properly and had never felt comfortable asking about.

‘Ready, are we?’ She asked, trying to sound bright.

Middle-aged people were the best. Orri preferred not to steal from the elderly, not because his conscience might trouble him, but because there was something about the old that disturbed him. People who had retired had a strange smell about them, they lived among clutter and rubbish, and their valuables were scattered in the unlikeliest places.

Middle-aged people had more of the easily disposable toys that were worth money, computers and gadgets that fetched good money and which the Baltic boys could sell easily enough. While the younger generation had its own expensive toys as well, those houses were more likely to have an alarm that worked or, worse, small children in the house.

No, people in comfortable middle age with cash to spare and their offspring long gone were the best option. They were the people with everything in order: cash in a sensible place, a wad of dollars or euros left over from that last holiday, a smart laptop that had hardly been used, antiques on display in glass cabinets rather than at the backs of drawers full of ancient oddments. These were the people who had sat on their cash, not the mortgaged-to-the-hilt people in their thirties who had come out of the crash so badly.

Orri wondered why he was in the old couple’s house, considering his aversion to the young and the elderly. But the answer was simple enough. The back door had been left unlocked. Hidden by a hedge on one side and in the shadow of the garage, it was just too easy to walk in and help himself. With a slim torch held between his teeth to cast a pool of light in front of him, Orri went through the bedroom drawers systematically. Some housebreakers would gleefully scatter everything in their wake, breaking anything that might be in the way and leaving trails of muddy footprints and worse. That wasn’t Orri’s style. He felt that making a mess was unprofessional. Ideally, he wouldn’t leave a trace, and sometimes days or weeks would pass before people realized there had been a visitor, by which time any trail had long gone cold and the goods had been safely disposed of.

This time he was lucky. There was gold and silver to be had, a dozen krugerrands, a heavy necklace and a couple of bracelets and chunky pendants that he quickly stowed in his bag without looking too carefully. Metal was good and the Baltic boys would give him a price for it. Melted down, it became untraceable, and there was always a market for it.

A leather wallet made of some soft skin yielded a handful of cash in a variety of currencies, which he stuffed into a trouser pocket before he decided that enough was enough for a few quick minutes of easy work. It might take weeks for the couple whose bedroom he had invaded to notice that the cash and jewellery had vanished, and he made a swift exit. He clicked the back door locked. He dropped the torch into his jacket pocket and froze, standing with his back to the wall between the house and the garage.