Winterlude

by Quentin Bates

‘Elmar, yes – and it’s not good.’

  ‘Well, go on, then,’ she said impatiently as Herbert made the most of his dramatic moment. ‘What’s he done?’

  ‘He’s managed to roll his car about six times and he’s on the way to the National Hospital in an ambulance. Out cold and he looks a godawful mess. Car’s a write-off and his mother’s going frantic.’

  Gunna cursed silently and at length with her hand over the phone.

  ‘You still there?’ Herbert asked eventually.

  ‘Yup. Give me half an hour. I’ll see you at the hospital.’

  Wednesday

  Anna Björg opened her eyes and was awake instantly, staring at the unfamiliar ceiling lit only by the dim street lamp outside glowing through the curtains. She brushed a lock of hair from her face and her heart sank as she looked sideways. Helgi’s bald patch gleamed in the half-light. She carefully slipped from under the duvet and pulled on as many of her clothes as she felt was necessary, stuffing her bra and socks into the pocket of her coat and pulling her boots onto bare feet.

  Her head spun as she looked regretfully at Helgi, asleep with one arm stretched out over the edge of the bed and his back to her. Anna Björg shook her head, told herself that married men had to stay strictly off limits from now on, and let herself out.

  As the lock clicked shut, Helgi woke and wondered where he was. His eyes adjusted slowly to the dim orange light and he tried to decide if he really had heard something or not. He rolled onto his back, extending an arm to seek out Halla’s familiar warmth next to him in the unfamiliar bed as memories of the previous evening came flooding back and he sat up, realizing that he was alone.

  ‘Shit. Hell and damnation.’

  It was a quiet, still night and the click of rapid footfalls outside alerted him. He pushed aside a few inches of curtain and stared out sorrowfully as Anna Björg’s dark figure, shoulders hunched, marched across the car park outside without looking back, disappearing along the street and around the corner into the darkness.

  Katla Einarsdóttir smoked furiously outside the hospital’s back door. Gunna had left her in the early hours of the morning with her elder son Einar holding her hand as Elmar was wheeled into surgery. The intervening few hours seemed to have added years to her.

  ‘Good morning,’ Gunna greeted her as cheerfully as she dared. ‘What news of the young man?’

  ‘He’ll live,’ Katla said shortly and pulled ferociously on her cigarette as it burned down to the filter. She threw it into what remained of the grass and lit another, sucking smoke deep.

  ‘Herbert still here, is he? And Einar?’

  ‘Hebbi’s bringing Einar back this morning. Elmar’s still sedated.’

  ‘And you? I know it’s a stupid question, but are you all right?’

  ‘Am I all right?’ Katla stared and laughed hysterically. ‘What kind of a question is that? Of course I’m not all right. My son’s car came off the road and he’s in hospital with broken legs and arms, and I don’t know if he’s going to be a vegetable if he wakes up.’

  ‘The doctor said last night that there were no serious head injuries. Look, he’s had a bad crash. It could have been so much worse.’

  ‘That’s easy for you to say. You don’t know what it’s like. First Aron, and now Elmar. For fuck’s sake. Haven’t I had enough of this stuff?’ she snapped, throwing away the remainder of her cigarette and stalking into the building.

  Gunna was in the lobby, her phone to her ear, when Herbert arrived with Einar, a broad-shouldered version of his younger brother but with hair cut sensibly and a businesslike air about him. Herbert had dark rings under his eyes and Gunna guessed he hadn’t seen much of his bed.

  She cornered him once Einar was closeted with his mother.

  ‘Right, what happened last night?’

  ‘Hell, I don’t rightly know. It was on the road coming into Hveragerdi. It looks like the road was icy, he was driving too fast and lost it on one of the bends.’

  ‘Any witnesses?’

  Herbert shrugged. ‘For what it’s worth, there was a truck about a kilometre behind him. The driver saw Elmar’s van on the bend and the next thing he knew it was rolling over off the road. It was the truck driver who called us out. When we got to the crash site, he was sitting in the van holding Elmar’s hand and keeping him awake.’

  ‘You said Elmar drove a van? What sort?’

  ‘I don’t know. A Toyota or a Nissan or some such thing.’

  ‘What colour?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Blue or black. He hadn’t had it long and I didn’t pay much attention to it. I’ve been a bit busy as well.’

  ‘And where is it now?’

  ‘It’ll be in the pound behind the police station. A recovery truck collected it last night.’

  Gunna rattled her fingernails in an irregular tattoo against the wall as she thought.

  ‘Can you either get back to Selfoss and take some pictures of that van and email them to me, or get someone there to do it right now?’

  ‘Yeah, of course. I’ll get one of the guys at the station to do it,’ Herbert agreed, surprised at the intensity of Gunna’s demand.

  ‘You got a statement from the truck driver, didn’t you? This was definitely an accident?’

  Herbert looked suspicious. ‘That’s what the man said and I don’t have a reason to not believe him. He said it was a clear road and Elmar was driving fast as he hadn’t long overtaken him.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Gunna decided. ‘I’ll assume it was just an accident until I have a reason to think otherwise.’

  Helgi didn’t have much appetite for breakfast. The hotel was virtually empty and the girl who had been on reception the night before brought him coffee, avoiding his eye as she did so. He texted Halla and told her how much he was missing her, waiting for his phone to bleep in response as he munched toast and the coffee began to nibble at the fringes of his dull headache.

  He was wondering if the girl dispensing coffee stayed in the hotel at night, and if she had seen Anna Björg’s discreet departure, when his phone finally buzzed and he grabbed it.

  Missing you too. Have a lovely day. XX he read, and it only deepened his guilt.

  He finished a tub of yoghurt that sat heavy on his stomach and wondered if he could call Anna Björg, and what her response would be. He tried to rehearse a conversation with her in his mind but kept coming to a grinding halt.

  ‘More?’ a voice at his elbow asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘More coffee?’ the receptionist asked and Helgi searched her face for a smirk of recognition.

  ‘Er. Yes, please,’ he mumbled and picked up his phone again as the girl replaced the flask on the table with a full one. He poured himself a cup of coffee that he didn’t really want and punched in a text message to Anna Björg that he then deleted and started again.

  Going out to Tunga this morning. Meet for lunch? He wrote and pressed send, regretting it as soon as the message had gone.

  A Polish girl with the kind of tired face that said minimum wage and long hours showed Gunna to the day room of the rest home.

  ‘Henning is there, in the corner,’ she said in passable Icelandic, pointing to a man with heavy glasses and a thick cardigan in spite of the stifling warmth.

  ‘The guy in the wheelchair?’ Gunna asked in dismay.

  ‘That’s Henning,’ the girl confirmed. ‘Happy to have a visitor,’ she added with a smile that lit up her face.

  ‘He doesn’t get visitors often?’

  ‘Once a month his son comes to take him out for a few hours. Maybe twice. But not more.’

  ‘Right,’ Gunna said, straightening her back and already convinced she was wasting her time. ‘Take me to him, will you?’

  They threaded their way through the room, which was dotted with chairs, each containing an elderly dozing person, while the radio boomed from a corner of the room.

  ‘Henning?’ the Polish girl asked, leaning over him. ‘Visit for you,’ she said softly
and the old man’s face suddenly became animated. There was no lack of life behind the sharp blue eyes that looked her up and down.

  ‘Not often I get a visit from a pretty girl,’ he said, his eyes gleaming roguishly behind his glasses. ‘Not as pretty as you, obviously, Wioletta,’ he added with a sideways look at the girl. ‘Get us a flask of coffee, would you?’

  Gunna extended a hand and the old man shook it.

  ‘Gunnhildur Gísladóttir.’

  ‘Henning Simonsen,’ he replied, his eyes on the Polish girl as she threaded her way back across the room. ‘Good grief,’ he said. ‘That bottom. Once upon a time . . . She’s a good girl, that one. A real worker.’

  He grimaced and jerked a thumb behind him.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Gunna asked.

  ‘If you push, we can go to the dining room and get a bit of peace and quiet away from all these old women listening to the wireless.’

  The dining room was quieter. The Polish girl brought them coffee and left, Henning once again admiring her rear as she departed. ‘I tell you . . .’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Now, what can I do for you? About that Borgar, I’ll wager? God rest his soul. But he was a thieving bastard. I used to tell people to count their fingers once they’d shaken his hand.’

  ‘Exactly. It’s Borgar’s death I’m investigating. I take it you were here on Sunday afternoon?’

  The old man grinned and sucked coffee through a lump of rock-hard sugar. ‘If I’d killed Borgar, I’d admit it straight out,’ he said. ‘I’ll bet prison’s more comfortable than this place.’

  ‘But there’s no Wioletta in Litla-Hraun,’ Gunna pointed out.

  ‘Ah, but maybe they’d allow her to visit an old man.’

  ‘You worked for Borgar for a long time?’

  ‘I did. I started NesPlast back in the eighties and we built a lot of boats but never made much money.’

  ‘But Borgar owned NesPlast. You sold it to him?’

  ‘I owned 60 per cent of NesPlast and Borgar owned the rest, so that’s why he wasn’t able to screw it up like every other business he touched. But he owned the building and rented it to NesPlast.’

  ‘Paying himself rent?’

  Henning shrugged. ‘It was a tax dodge of some kind. A way of making sure NesPlast never made enough of a profit on paper to have to pay tax.’

  ‘And it closed down after he went to prison?’

  ‘Well, the crash was around that time as well. There was no money about and nobody wanted boats. We were stuck with two expensive boats that customers defaulted on and there was no choice but to wind it up. My health wasn’t what it had been, and there was nobody to take over.’ He smiled to himself. ‘I was able to sell the two boats to a cousin of mine in the Faroes who came and sailed them home. Cash,’ he said, rubbing his hands at the memory. ‘Borgar wasn’t happy. Not happy at all. But by then he had other things to worry about.’

  ‘He had enemies, though, surely?’

  Henning reached for the thermos on the table. ‘Would you?’

  Gunna poured him another cup and he sipped it gratefully.

  ‘There were always problems. People were happy enough with the boats, but when it came to money Borgar would always screw customers somehow.’ He sighed and looked at Gunna steadily. ‘But to answer the question you haven’t asked, as far as I know there were dozens of people who would have been happy to break Borgar’s nose, although I don’t believe any one of them would have gone so far as to kill him. These people aren’t crazies, and for most of them I reckon this was so long ago now that it’s in the past. Fishermen are used to setbacks. They move on.’

  ‘I guess you’re right.’

  Henning looked quickly behind him. ‘But have you found his secret cubbyhole?’ he asked, with a conspiratorial gleam in his eye.

  Gunna tracked Bjarni Björgvinsson down to the smart newish house his parents owned and she waited while the young man’s mother went to wake her youngest son several hours before the usual time he was on his feet. She came downstairs with suppressed frustration in her eyes.

  ‘He’s still in bed. I don’t know what the matter is with him these days. He’s surly, he’s rude and he has mood swings. It’s driving his father and me nuts,’ she admitted.

  Gunna smiled inwardly. ‘Tell me about it,’ she said, trying to look sympathetic.

  ‘You have the same problem, maybe?’ Bjarni’s mother asked, clearly anxious for Gunna to have exactly the same headaches to deal with.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Gunna said guardedly, wondering whether or not to tell this worried woman that her son’s behaviour clearly spelled out either alcohol or dope, or both.

  ‘You have children as well?’ Bjarni’s mother asked.

  ‘A boy and a girl.’

  ‘They say girls are less bother. Is that true?’

  Gunna wanted to laugh. ‘I couldn’t say. But my mother certainly wouldn’t agree with that.’ She looked at her watch and listened for any movement. ‘Is he going to be long, do you think?’

  The woman shook her head and Gunna could see the grey in her fair hair. ‘I’ll go and call him again.’

  ‘How about I go and wake him up?’

  Her eyes bulged for a moment and she hesitated. ‘It’s a bit of a mess,’ she said defensively.

  ‘If a bit of a mess was the worst I had to be worried about in this job, believe me, it would all be so much easier. Where’s the boy’s room?’

  ‘At the top of the stairs, on the right,’ she said in a faint voice as Gunna took the stairs two at a time. At the top, the not unfamiliar smell of boy’s bedroom guided her and she rapped smartly on the door, didn’t bother waiting for a reply and clicked on the light as she stepped inside.

  ‘Go away, will you? I said I’m not well,’ a voice whined from beneath the duvet. ‘And turn the light off.’

  Gunna strode to the window, swept the curtains aside and aimed a kick at the end of the bed. ‘I don’t care if you’ve got the plague and you’re missing an arm and a leg, you can wake up,’ she snapped, leaning down and roughly hauling the duvet back a foot to expose Bjarni’s head sunk in a deep depression in the pillow. He stared back at her dumbfounded through eyes heavy-lidded with too much sleep. ‘My name’s Gunnhildur. I’m an investigating officer at the city police force’s serious crime unit and I have some questions for you to wake up and answer.’

  ‘What . . . ? Now?’

  ‘Now. Right now. Either you wake up and pay attention, or I’ll call up a squad car and you can sit in an interview room at Hverfisgata wrapped in your smelly duvet and answer questions there,’ Gunna said, lifting a mess of magazines and CD cases from the room’s only chair and dumping it all on the desk under the window so she could sit down. ‘Your call. Make your mind up.’

  ‘This is police brutality,’ Bjarni said in a tone that carried little conviction. ‘And you need a warrant.’

  ‘You’ve probably been watching too many American cop shows. Sorry to destroy your misconceptions, Bjarni, but I don’t need a warrant. And if you think this is brutality, I’ll call up a squad car right now to collect you,’ she said, looking meaningfully at the ashtray on the windowsill overflowing with roaches. ‘And we’ll have a good look through this room in the process. I don’t suppose you’ve bothered to hide your stash all that carefully, have you?’

  Bjarni quailed and hauled the duvet up to his chin.

  ‘Where were you on Sunday?’

  ‘Er . . . out.’

  ‘I can figure that out for myself. Where were you and who were you with? What time did you leave here and when did you return?’

  ‘I went out about two with Elmar and we just mooched around a bit downtown, went to a mate’s place and then came back here and did some PlayStation.’

  ‘Until when?’

  ‘I don’t know. Some time in the night.’

  ‘Who’s this mate and where’s his place?’

  ‘Jóhann Eggertsson, his name is, lives in Lyngrími. I don’
t know what number.’

  ‘In Grafarvogur, yes? Did you go anywhere near Hafnarfjördur on Sunday?’

  ‘No, not on Sunday.’

  ‘You were out with Elmar Kjartansson in that blue van he drives, were you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘When you said you weren’t anywhere near Hafnarfjördur on Sunday, what does that mean? That you had been there with him some other time?’ Gunna asked, extracting a picture from her folder.

  ‘He wanted to go there a few times last week. I don’t know why. He’d go round town, see a few people and then he’d go round this industrial place, round and round these garages and stuff. I don’t know why.’

  ‘Anything in particular he was looking out for?’

  ‘He said he was looking for someone for his brother, but him and Einar don’t get on,’ Bjarni said in a petulant tone. ‘Look, can you leave the room so I can get up?’

  ‘I’m not finished with you yet,’ Gunna snapped, holding up the picture printed onto an A4 sheet showing a grainy version of what Borgar Jónsson had looked like a decade previously. ‘Seen this man?’

  Bjarni peered briefly. ‘Never seen the guy.’

  ‘Look again, Bjarni, and don’t play games. Reykjavík’s full of CCTV cameras and whatever Elmar’s been up to, you can bet your life you can be implicated.’

  The boy flinched at the thought, swept a lock of greasy hair out of his eyes and looked again. ‘Yeah,’ he said sulkily. ‘I think that’s the guy he was looking for. We saw him in town one time.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Outside some Bónus shop. Don’t know which one.’

  ‘Where else?’

  ‘Near that industrial place near Hafnarfjördur.’

  ‘Both times you were out in that blue van Elmar drives?’

  ‘Yeah. The blue van he got from someone he works for.’

  ‘Elmar doesn’t work, though, does he? Yet he always has plenty of cash. How come? What’s he doing – dealing? Are you involved in this as well?’ Gunna said, rattling out questions faster than the bewildered young man could cope with them. ‘You know how many years you’d be looking at for possession with intent to supply?’