Cold Steal (7 page)

‘Aunt Bertha?’ Eiríkur asked.

‘It’s a shop.’

‘It’s in Reykjavík,’ her husband explained, filling in the gaps. ‘They sell all kinds of old junk there.’

‘Antiques, he means,’ Matthildur corrected. ‘Ævar, why don’t you go and look in the garage and see if anything’s missing there?’

‘Don’t be stupid, woman. I always lock the garage. Unlike you, who’s always leaving the back door unlocked.’

‘I do not!’

‘Excuse me, can we get back to the matter in hand?’ Eiríkur demanded, trying to sound as stern as he could. The old man stamped from the room, banging the door behind him. ‘Could we start again?’

Matthildur Sveinsdóttir took a deep breath. ‘Yes. Well, Ævar and I went downtown to do some shopping, like we usually do once a week or so because we like to have a walk around the centre and have a coffee in Hotel Borg or somewhere. Ævar misses town so much since he retired, you know,’ she prattled and Eiríkur groaned inwardly.

‘I appreciate that, but what did you see in this shop?’

‘That? I told you, didn’t I? I saw a gold clasp just like mine, the one that came off my mother’s best dress that she had from her mother. I’d been meaning to sew a new bodice for it for years and never got round to it, and now that the arthritis is playing merry hell with my fingers I probably never will, but I was going to pass it on to my daughter one day, you see, that’s why I kept it in the drawer upstairs.’

‘So you are sure it’s the same one as yours? How do you know?’

‘Well, I said to Ævar straight away that it looked just like mine, and so we came straight home and I looked in the drawer upstairs and it was gone,’ Matthildur said with aggrieved triumph.

‘You didn’t go into the shop and look at the . . . what was it? A clasp? What is it exactly?’

The old lady pursed her lips in impatience. ‘A clasp. A set of gold decorations for national dress. Surely you know what I mean?’

‘Gold? Was it worth much?’

‘I don’t know, young man, but Aunt Bertha had a damned respectable price tag on it. Surely you’ll go and look? It was in the window an hour ago.’

Eiríkur nodded, pretending to understand. ‘Is anything else missing from the house?’

‘Ævar’s watch, the smart one that he hardly ever wears, and I think Ævar said there was some money in the drawer as well.’

‘And you have no idea when these items disappeared?’

‘They didn’t disappear. They were stolen,’ Ævar’s voice boomed furiously from the door. ‘There’s nothing missing from the garage.’

‘You checked all the cupboards, did you?’ Matthildur asked.

‘Of course I did. You don’t think I went out there and didn’t have a proper look, do you?’

‘Do you have a list of what’s missing?’ Eiríkur asked quickly, hoping to nip another squabble in the bud.

‘Well, not really,’ Matthildur said after a moment’s thought.

Eiríkur closed his notebook. ‘In that case, I’m going to go down to this Auntie Bertha place now. I need you two to go through the house, put together a list of what you think is missing – as detailed as you can make it – and to think hard about when you last saw these items so we can have an idea of how long they have been missing.’

‘Why do you need to know that?’

‘Because that will give us an idea of when the break-in might have taken place,’ Eiríkur said, calling on reserves of patience. ‘And that means I can try and tie it in with other similar incidents, and hopefully get an idea of who might have been responsible.’

‘All right,’ Ævar growled. ‘You do that, young man, and when you find out who it is, I want to break his fingers one by one.’

He drove past a couple of times and was pleased there wasn’t a soul to be seen; not that the streets being deserted said all that much. In this kind of neighbourhood people walked from the door to the car and no further. The exclusive cul-de-sac where he could see the dentist’s house at the end was quiet. There was no car to be seen and no lights on inside. It was the same further along the street at most of the houses on the seaward side, the ones he was most interested in, and at this time of the afternoon, experience told him that people could be unpredictable in their movements, though middle-aged people generally kept office hours.

He pulled on his gloves before leaving the car. Normally he preferred to simply walk in while the owners were at work or preferably on holiday somewhere far away, giving him time to concentrate without interruption. This time of day was dangerous and Orri knew he was taking a risk, reproaching himself again for breaking his own rules. People could appear unexpectedly, but he admitted to himself that it gave him a buzz of excitement.

He patted his pockets, made sure his torch was in his pocket and switched on the phone jammer, a little device that would interrupt any mobile phone traffic within 15 metres once it was switched on, not that he had needed it so far.

Orri padded silently though the still house, the back door lock opened easily with a strip of plastic, the torch between his teeth and a pool of light sweeping the floor ahead of him. The living room was a vast open space of hardwood floor with a nest of deep sofas in the centre, and just a few ornaments scattered here and there, mostly modernist artworks that his professional eye dismissed as being too heavy to carry as well as too easy to identify and trace.

A narrow room parallel to the living room was a more fruitful hunting ground. He wondered about the slim laptop on the desk, along with the battery charger the owner had thoughtfully left with it, but decided against it, reasoning that first he would look for the smaller, more easily portable stuff. A drawer yielded an iPhone, not the latest, but presumably the one the owner had upgraded from and still worth having. A digital camera from another drawer found its way into his backpack, along with the handful of foreign currency that every house seemed to have somewhere. This time it was a bundle of dollars and an envelope stuffed with assorted euros and some Swedish and Norwegian notes.

The bedroom was where he caught his breath and Orri could not stop his rising excitement. He started with the old-fashioned dresser. Sunna María Voss clearly had expensive taste in jewellery, and the necklaces, pendants and a couple of heavy silver bangles were an interesting haul, but he felt there had to be more if he searched for it.

The top drawers in a chest glided open and he slid a practised hand under and behind the contents of each one in turn, feeling for packets of boxes without disturbing anything. The dentist had nothing hidden among his socks and underwear, but he felt his heart beat faster as he went to Sunna María Voss’s side of the wide bed and opened the first drawer. He leaned forward and bent his head close to inhale the lavender scent before he felt under and behind the frills inside to pull out a jewel case. He snapped open and was disappointed to find a necklace of pearls that gleamed palely in the light of the torch. Clearly old, and strung on a thread with a heavy silver clasp, he regretfully closed the case and replaced it. Pearls were old-fashioned and difficult to sell, not something that could be melted down into an anonymous lump.

He reflected that in the old days people kept their bank books in their bedrooms, but these days everything was online and traceable. Large amounts of cash had become an increasingly rare find, even in these difficult times when nobody trusted the banks as they had done only a few years ago.

Sunna María Voss’s bedside table in the pool of pale light thrown by the torch revealed nothing but a few paperbacks, a jar of lube and a pack of condoms that gave Orri a sudden rush of excitement, a few half-consumed packets of painkillers and fluff in the corners.

Deciding that he had seen enough, Orri went slowly through the living room and along the hall, where he inspected the pictures on the wall. Paintings could be worth money, although not worth stealing other than to order. There were only large black-and-white portraits of the dentist and his wife, singly and together, the dentist clearly older than his wife by at least a decade, Orri guessed.

A sound startled him and he recognized the rumble of a garage door, followed by the double thunk of car doors closing somewhere below him and the clang of a footstep on the metal staircase from the basement. He guessed that the house’s occupants were returning, cursing himself for having taken so much longer than he had needed to.

He cast about quickly, trying to decide where to go, and with the newcomers coming up from the garage in the basement, he made for the lobby and shut the door behind him. He had a moment of panic as he realized that the heavy front door was deadlocked. Although this would not normally be a problem to pick, there was no time to concentrate. He stood instead among coats and scarves hung behind the internal door, breathing long, deep breaths as he stayed calm, his hand on the handle.

A throaty laugh came from the stairs as the door leading up from the basement burst open and swung back to bang against the wall.

‘Be a little bit patient, lover,’ the husky voice said teasingly as heels clattered on the tiles of the hall and he could hear a man’s growl.

‘I’ve been patient all day,’ the second voice said and Orri could feel the urgency in the man’s tone. He risked putting his eye to one of the frosted glass panels on either side of the lobby door and could make out an indistinct image of a couple in a writhing embrace, mouths locked together.

He listened with mounting excitement as there was a rustle of clothing in the hall. There was a slow rip of velcro being pulled apart and he could hear the fumbling and giggling from both of them as they pulled at each others’ clothes.

‘You said Jóhann’s away, didn’t you?’ The man’s voice gasped.

‘Sweetheart, he’s enjoying himself in Frankfurt with his little Fraülein right now; you don’t need to worry about him,’ the woman’s voice assured her friend. ‘We have all the time in the world.’ She laughed. ‘Well, until tomorrow night, anyway.’

‘Come on, I want to see you without that dress hiding everything,’ the man almost panted.

‘Then you’d better help a lady with it, hadn’t you,’ she replied in a coquettish voice. ‘If you’re in that much of a hurry.’

Orri stood guiltily spellbound. He saw through the patterned glass as Sunna María Voss wrapped her arms around her lover’s shoulders and he lifted her off the floor as she twisted her legs around his waist. Orri prayed that the door would withstand the punishment it was getting as the man’s desperate thrusts impaled her against it, transmitting shock after shock to the door that rattled in its frame until he groaned and her moans subsided, then the two of them sank to the floor.

‘Well done, big boy. Well done,’ he heard Sunna María Voss say to her hoarsely panting lover. Orri looked around and saw with relief that there was a key hung on a hook inside the coat rack. ‘Now it’s my turn, maybe?’ she suggested in a sardonic voice as Orri clicked the lock, swung open the door, closed it quietly and fled into the twilight.

Aunt Bertha was in one of the old houses at the older end of the city centre, surrounded by shops selling overpriced sweaters and mass-produced plastic elves and vikings. Eiríkur looked in the window first, and in spite of his height, he had to stretch to see the knick-knacks displayed in the narrow window of the old house that had been built on a concrete basement in the old-fashioned way.

He wondered how Matthildur Sveinsdóttir had been able to see anything in these same windows as he went up the steps and pushed open a door that chimed a tune as he entered the stuffy, scented room. He peered around him at the racks of second-hand clothing, the shelves of fashionably antique porcelain and the old posters and photographs of forgotten movie actors on the walls.

‘Can I help?’ A voice asked. Eiríkur had to look around to see and found that it came from a woman in a black-and-white dress and a hairdo held in place as if by magic. A closer look as he approached the counter told him she was probably closer to his own age than the look she had adopted would have indicated.

Eiríkur opened his wallet and the woman looked at it with surprise.

‘Eiríkur Thór Jónsson. I’m a detective with the city force. There’s a clasp in your display case, a gold clasp and set from a set of national dress. Could I have a look at it?’

‘I . . . er. I suppose so,’ the woman said, clearly in doubt, pausing for a moment for a second look at Eiríkur’s wallet before she took a key from the till and opened a glass-fronted display case. She placed a tray in front of him. The clasp and chain gleamed in the afternoon sunshine streaming through the windows.

‘There’s a problem?’

‘It seems that this may be stolen goods,’ Eiríkur said, letting the heavy chain run through his fingers. ‘So, unfortunately, I’m going to have to take this away with me.’

‘What? But . . .’

‘I’m sorry. But until this is sorted out, I have to confiscate it,’ he said, taking a form from his folder and starting to fill it in. ‘Your name?’

‘Svandís Búadóttir.’

‘And you’re the manager?’

‘I’m the proprietor,’ she said, pushing out her chin and stretching herself to a height that almost reached Eiríkur’s shoulder.

Eiríkur completed the form and turned it round on the counter. ‘Sign here, please.’

‘You really are a policeman, aren’t you?’

‘The genuine article. Now, I’d like you to tell me how this came to be here.’

‘What business is that of yours? I mean, this is intrusion, surely? It’s intolerable.’

‘I’m sure the old lady whose bedroom drawer this was taken from thought the same.’

Her hands went to her mouth. ‘You mean it really is stolen?’

‘Very much so. Where did you get it from?’

‘Such a pleasant young man,’ she mumbled absently. ‘And such a beautiful set. He said it had been his mother’s.’

‘Did this pleasant young man leave his name?’

Svandís took a receipt book from under the counter, looked over Eiríkur’s shoulder as a couple entered the shop and smiled at them before her sour expression returned. She flipped through the carbon copies of receipts until she found the page.

‘There.’