Cold Steal (3 page)

He heard car doors slam twice in quick succession and a bang as the house’s front door shut, and he hurried on silent feet to the corner and saw a BMW parked squarely in the drive. Lights were being switched on inside as he looked around and made a dash for the street. It took a matter of only a few seconds before he was off the drive and walking along the road towards where he had parked the van around the corner, still loaded with boxes to be delivered.

His heart still in his mouth, he got in the van and was gone in a few seconds, still waiting to hear cries of anger and the slap of flat feet on the wet pavement. At the traffic lights at the end of the road he watched the mirrors carefully, but there was nothing to be seen, no cars behind him, nobody on foot. He peeled off his latex gloves and dropped them into the passenger side footwell as he congratulated himself on a job well done, laughing out loud as he left the quiet street behind him.

It was Eiríkur’s first day back and he looked tired, with bags under his eyes and a hangdog look about him.

‘Welcome back,’ Gunna greeted him. ‘And congratulations. How’s the little one doing?’

Eiríkur’s smile lit up his wan face. ‘He’s the most beautiful baby in the world, of course. But he’s been keeping us up, and so has his sister.’

‘Jealous, is she?’

‘A little. But we’ve been trying to give her as much attention as we can, but it’s not easy.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Gunna said. ‘I’m afraid you have to be firm as well as loving, unfortunately, and it can’t always be painless.’

‘I know. I’m not really sorry to be back at work, to be honest,’ he said, dropping his voice as if he were confessing a sin.

‘Don’t worry about it. I could never have stopped working. I’d have happily sold both mine if I’d had to spend all day every day with them.’

‘Where’s Helgi?’ Eiríkur asked, looking at Helgi’s unusually tidy and clearly empty desk.

‘On holiday. He’s driving to Blönduós today and he’ll spend the next two weeks in some remote valley helping sweet baby lambs into the world, and I imagine in the autumn he’ll want another week’s holiday to go and help his brother round up those same lambs and send them off to be slaughtered.’

‘Oh,’ Eiríkur said, and sat down at his own desk and watched his computer start up. ‘I didn’t realize he was on holiday. Are we busy? You want me to take over any of Helgi’s caseload?’

‘There’s an assault case that Helgi’s working on which I need you to do some work on. It’s a hit-and-run thing, but it seems that it might have been deliberate. You’ll find the notes on the system, so you’d best have a read through it and I’ll fill you in on the details afterwards. Then there’s a couple of muggings that seem to have got out of hand, with a little more violence than usual. That’s a lowlife by the name of Thór Hersteinnsson. We know it’s him, but there’s precious little hard evidence and nobody he knows wants to give a statement.’

Eiríkur’s face fell. ‘I’ve encountered this Thór before. Not the pleasantest of people, I have to say.’

‘He has an alibi for both muggings, provided by various of his friends and therefore dubious, so if you could crack one or both of those, we’ll be doing nicely.’

‘That’s it?’

‘Oh, no. We have a dead businessman to deal with. Don’t you watch the news?’

‘I thought Sævaldur would have been looking after that as we were both off?’

‘He is, but so are we. All of us under the Laxdal’s eagle eye. Briefing at two, so I’d better find something out about this man. You’ll be on this as well.’

Eiríkur sat back in his chair and gazed at the computer screen in front of him and the piles of paper between it and him, all of which demanded attention. Gunna could see his eyes starting to glaze over at the prospect.

‘Small, Medium and Large,’ Viggó announced from behind the desk in the corner of the garage. ‘Bang on time, my darlings.’

‘You go fuck yourself, fat boy,’ Natalia grunted with Viggó out of earshot, but only just; he cupped an ear.

‘Hey, what d’you say?’

‘I say, nice to see you, boss,’ she replied with a broad smile and exaggerating her accent almost to a parody of herself.

Viggó’s eyes narrowed as she bustled past with her box of cloths, brushes and sprays, and Valmira handed mops, buckets and the two heavy-duty vacuum cleaners out of the van to Emilija.

‘Hey, Small, Medium and Large!’

This time Natalia’s eyes narrowed while Emilija and Valmira pointedly ignored the names he had given them.

‘What is it?’ Valmira finally asked.

‘Which of you three has the first aid certificate?’

‘We all have first aid training. It’s in the contract, and you made us pay for it as well. Remember?’

Viggó spread his hands wide in innocence. ‘I don’t make the rules, girls. It’s not up to me.’

‘You not the boss then?’ Emilija asked, stacking the equipment on racks against the wall.

‘Yeah, I’m the boss.’

Emilija shrugged. ‘You don’t make rules. You not boss. Simple,’ she said, without stopping what she was doing. Both she and Natalia kept their conversations to the simplest Icelandic they could while Viggó was anywhere near, leaving Valmira to speak for them. None of them found it odd that they all used Icelandic every day between themselves as the only language they all had in common, but were careful not to let Viggó find out they could understand everything he said.

Valmira was different, they felt. She had come to Iceland with what remained of her family as a hollow-eyed child refugee from a war-torn part of the Balkans that she never spoke about. Only the limp that stiffened in cold weather and the occasional suppressed hiss of pain as she bent to pick something up gave away the old injuries they had never dared ask about. Valmira, or Large, as Viggó preferred to call her, had been in a proper office job before the financial crash had bankrupted the import company she had worked for practically overnight, and she spoke a dozen languages, including Icelandic as well as any local, apart from an accent that only tiredness brought out.

‘I’m the man in charge here and don’t you forget it,’ Viggó warned, his face reddening.

‘You daddy. He boss. Not you,’ Natalia said with venom behind her sweet smile.

‘You be careful, Small. Mind your manners or you’ll be sacked.’

Natalia smiled again, just as sweetly, her tiny teeth bared. ‘You daddy, he love me. He don’t sack people who work hard.’

‘Viggó, we’re doing another house on Kópavogsbakki tomorrow,’ Valmira asked, anxious to interrupt the banter between Viggó and the girls before it became a squabble. ‘Is there a reason why we couldn’t do it at the same time as the one we did today? I mean, it would save us a drive, and you know we lose out by having to drive all the way there twice.’

Viggó sat down again and propped his feet in their smart trainers on the desk. ‘We’ll do it tomorrow because that’s what’s on the rota,’ he said in a sour tone.

‘I know. I’m just asking. If we do the downstairs flat again next week, can we arrange to do them together? It saves time.’

‘We’ll see,’ Viggó decided. ‘It depends how I feel. But it has to be tomorrow, because that’s what the client asked for. Simple,’ he said, mimicking Emilija’s accent and eliciting an angry sideways look from her as she stalked to the canteen, leaving him to giggle to himself at his own cleverness.

‘You all know each other so no introductions needed,’ Ívar Laxdal announced to the room. A dozen people sat haphazardly in hard chairs. ‘Sævaldur, begin, if you please.’

The force’s red-faced and newest chief inspector stood up with his beefy arms folded.

The victim is Vilhelm Thorleifsson, forty-one years old, resident in Copenhagen. Married with one child,’ he began.

Ívar Laxdal made an impatient circular motion with one hand, a silent encouragement to get to the point, but Sævaldur either failed to notice or else would not be moved, as he went through the victim’s school and university qualifications before getting to the point.

‘The killing took place in a summer house in Borgarfjördur, owned by one of the victim’s companies. He was shot twice with a .22 calibre weapon, once in the throat, once in the head. We are looking for two people and we have practically nothing to work with. There are no prints at all that can’t be accounted for. There are a couple of footprints outside, but they could have been made by any of a dozen people. We do have a witness, Yulia Bushuyeva, says she’s nineteen, but she’s twenty-three according to her passport. Russian national, speaks reasonable English and doesn’t know more than a few words of Icelandic. According to her, the two men spoke English, but she’s not able to say whether they had accents or not.’

‘How long after the killing was the alarm raised?’ Ívar Laxdal asked as Sævaldur paused.

‘The girl isn’t certain. She raised the alarm by dialling 112 but she wasn’t able to describe where she was, so it took a while for the local force to get there, and by that time she had gone running to a neighbour, who took her in after he had seen what had happened. So, plenty of confusion.’

‘Any other witnesses?’

‘A man walking a dog claims to have seen a grey Audi A5 along the road that evening, but he didn’t pay much attention. It turned out he had spent the afternoon in front of the football on TV and was so drunk he could hardly walk. We’ve been knocking on doors all day and that’s all we’ve come up with.’

‘Can we be sure it’s an A5?’ Eiríkur asked.

‘He may have been drunk, but he’s a car dealer, so yes. We can be pretty sure of that.’

‘It doesn’t look promising, does it?’ Ívar Laxdal said.

‘It looks professional,’ Sævaldur agreed. ‘Not least because according to . . .’ he consulted his notes. ‘According to Yulia Bushuyeva, one of the two men made sure she saw Vilhelm being shot and told her to “tell them what you saw”. Or so she says. And the only piece of evidence we have is a hammer.’

‘What sort of hammer?’

‘A sledgehammer with the handle cut off about halfway, to make it easier to hide, I guess. I’d imagine they planned to break the door down, but according to the girl, it wasn’t locked and they walked right in on them. Screwing by firelight,’ he added with a leer.

‘So we comb every hardware shop in the country until we find someone who sold a sledgehammer recently?’ Gunna suggested. ‘I take it this was a new hammer rather than an old one?’

‘It looks brand new. It’s at the forensic lab now being checked for prints and anything else it might tell us.’

‘Gunnhildur?’ Ívar Laxdal said in a bleak voice. ‘Background?’

‘Businessman. University drop-out. Married, one child. Supposedly lives in Copenhagen, but seems to have been on the move a lot in the last few years. He had business interests all over, but it seems he saw which way the wind was blowing a few years ago and disposed of most of what he had in Iceland before the financial crash, which was when he decamped to Copenhagen.’

‘So no fool, then?’

‘Not stupid, at any rate. Vilhelm Thorleifsson had interests in Lithuania, Latvia, Denmark, here and also at one time in West Africa.’

‘Africa?’ Sævaldur asked. ‘How did that happen?’

‘Shipping,’ Gunna said. ‘He’s from a fishing village in the Westfjords.’

Sævaldur smirked. ‘A relative, maybe?’

‘Not as far as I know,’ Gunna shot back. ‘My relatives tend to be of the poor but honest variety. His father owned a boat and he sold it for him, after which he worked for a shipbroker and did very well selling tonnage and quotas on his own account. The Africa connection is something I haven’t got to the bottom of in the couple of hours since I came back from leave. I gather he was contracted to sell a ship, sold it to himself at a knock-down price, and ran it himself, so there’s one of probably many unhappy clients there.’

‘Do you think it’s relevant? Unhappy clients with grudges to settle?’

Gunna spread her hands in question. ‘Who knows? If there’s some serious money involved, then it certainly could be.’

‘Next move?’ Ívar Laxdal asked.

‘I’ll be speaking to his wife in the morning. Eiríkur will be digging into our victim’s business affairs and has already contacted police in Denmark and various Baltic States to find out if they have anything on him. We also need to consult financial crime. It seems Vilhelm Thorleifsson was investigated for insider trading in the aftermath of the crash, but there was nothing that could be nailed down, even though he came up smelling of shit.’

Ívar Laxdal clapped his hands once.

‘Go. All of you. Get on with it. Gunnhildur, a word, if you please. Sævaldur, come and find me before five. That’s it,’ he ordered and the room cleared in seconds. ‘You and Sævaldur can thank your lucky stars that upstairs wants me to head this. None of us is going to come out of this well,’ he warned her in a low voice once the room had emptied.

‘You think so?’

‘What do you think, Gunnhildur? A contract killing carried out by two professionals, probably foreign, who have undoubtedly left the country by now and the weapon is at the bottom of Borgarfjördur. We don’t have a hope in hell of cracking this without a very lucky break somewhere along the line.’

‘I hope you’re wrong about that.’

‘I’m always right,’ he said. ‘You know that. But,’ he added and paused.

‘But what?’

‘Sævaldur will get nowhere. With luck he’ll get a sighting of one of these people and possibly a description. If we get anywhere, the answers are going to come from his business background. So dig as deep as you like.’

He sorted the haul in the basement, leaving Lísa upstairs, rolling pastry with a look of concentration on her face and a smudge of flour on the end of her nose. The silver went into one pile, the gold into another, and then into bags. One thing he had put into his bag without looking at it closely was a heavy bag of stiff, old paper that crackled between his fingers as he spilled its contents onto the bench. He fingered the eight heavy gold clasps and let the long chain coil itself into a pile. He scooped it into his palm and weighed the chain in his hand, hundreds of finely wrought links that flowed like water through his fingers with a single gold cylinder at one end, and a single decorated gold tube as big as his thumb and which clunked as it landed heavily on the bench.