Winterlude

by Quentin Bates

  ‘No! It’s not me! I just hang around with Elmar.’

  ‘So where’s his money coming from?’

  ‘Ask him, why don’t you?’

  ‘Because,’ Gunna said, relishing the boy’s befuddled expression, ‘your mate Elmar is in the National Hospital with his arms and legs in plaster and morphined to the eyeballs. That’s why.’

  She watched his eyes widen in fright.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘You can ask him yourself when he’s out of hospital. Now, where’s all that cash coming from? Don’t try and tell me he’s running a car and having a good time on dole money that wouldn’t cover petrol to get to town and back every day of the week.’

  Bjarni’s eyes glazed over as he shifted in bed and pulled the duvet tight to his chin where it met the fringe of hair that was plastered over the side of his head he had lain on.

  ‘He delivers stuff. Those big bottles they put onto water coolers in offices. That’s what he does.’

  Sunshine broke through a ragged gap in the clouds and gleamed on the white hillside behind Tunga. The farm was far from being isolated, only twenty kilometres from the hotel where Helgi had spent an eventful night, but it lay at the end of a dog-leg track and in the lee of a hillside topped by a rocky escarpment that sheltered it from the worst of the weather. While there was a dusting of powdery snow on the lower slopes and the rocks at the top showed their teeth through the deeper snow around them, the pastures flanking the track to the farm were merely lightly frosted with a white morning crust that was already melting in the watered-down sunshine.

  A dog barked briefly from the safety of a barn as Helgi parked the Daihatsu outside the farmhouse, in between an ancient Ferguson tractor with a wheel missing and the axle propped up on blocks, and a black Land Cruiser that dwarfed the police Daihatsu.

  Helgi sniffed and frowned to himself at the vaguely sour smell the breeze brought to him as he walked towards the farmhouse and tapped at the door. The distant dog barked a second time, then was silent. The farmhouse door swung open as he tried the handle and he stepped inside to the familiar aromas that brought home to him how much he missed the countryside.

  ‘Hello! Anyone home?’

  Only the clock over the kitchen doorway ticked in response. He closed the door and walked around to the back, to the warmth of the byre and a row of cows contentedly chewing, but there was nobody to be seen and Helgi’s back prickled with the feeling that he was not alone.

  The tracks of a set of tyres could be seen leading out of the yard and along the trail that passed below the farm and its barn towards the shore some distance away, and Helgi tried to remember the outline of the Tunga lands, more than fifteen years after his last visit to the farm.

  The gap in the clouds closed slowly and the glitter on the hillside faded to dull white as Helgi cast about, puzzled that there was nobody to be seen anywhere. He knew that Ingi lived in Blönduós these days, but Össur had stayed at the farm and either he or Reynir should be here somewhere, while the presence of the very new Land Cruiser in the yard indicated that someone was not far away.

  Helgi pulled his phone from his pocket and was relieved to see that a few bars of signal strength remained. He scrolled down to Gunna’s name and listened as it rang.

  ‘Gunnhildur.’

  ‘Hæ, it’s Helgi. How goes it?’

  ‘Ach. You know. Just been doing what I do best and practising a little police brutality on the blameless public.’

  ‘Business as usual, then?’

  ‘Yep. Chasing up Elmar Kjartansson’s alibi for Sunday, and he was nowhere near Hafnarfjördur, so he didn’t beat Borgar to death,’ she said. ‘Not that I expected it of him, somehow. And you? What news of the countryside?’

  ‘Nothing yet. I’m at Tunga and the place is deserted. Can you check out a vehicle for me?’

  ‘Sure. Give me the registration.’

  Helgi read the number off the Land Cruiser’s hulking rear end and Gunna repeated it as she wrote it down.

  ‘Got that. Is that a vehicle at this godforsaken farm?’

  ‘It is. It’s a swanky black Land Cruiser and not the kind of thing a poor sheep farmer can afford, so you might want to dig a little deeper than just who it’s registered to. I’d say that if anyone from here was in Reykjavík on Sunday, this is what they would have been driving.’

  Gunna nodded in agreement as she looked up at Bjarni Björgvinsson’s bedroom window where the curtains were still drawn, and imagined the young man having to answer some searching questions after having been visited unexpectedly by a detective. She was fairly sure from the determined expression on the boy’s mother’s face as she left that she had been lurking on the stairs to listen to the exchange going on in her son’s bedroom, and that the end of a long tether had been reached.

  ‘OK, thanks, Helgi. I’ll give you a buzz back as soon as I know something. Good luck with them there yokels,’ she said as she ended the call.

  Helgi started the Daihatsu up again and bumped out of the yard, following the fresh tyre tracks leading seawards, thankful that it was still early and there would be daylight for a few more hours. The car bumped in second gear along a rutted track, and around the shoulder of ground that Tunga occupied the land dropped away into a long slope between the farm and the sea, with a square barn in the distance that even a kilometre away he could see had smoke coming from a chimney and a newer tractor than the ancient Ferguson parked outside it.

  Gunna downloaded the photos sent by Herbert’s colleague in Selfoss and set the printer running. It whispered to itself as it spat out sheets of paper.

  ‘Any luck with Borgar Jónsson?’

  Sævaldur Bogason’s head appeared around the door, grinning.

  ‘It’s not about luck, Sæsi,’ she replied. ‘It’s about asking the right questions of the right people, or so I was told at police college all those years ago.’

  ‘You know what I mean, Gunna. Any progress? Spoken to that headcase Kjartan?’

  ‘Actually, I have,’ she said, retrieving a dozen sheets of paper from the printer and examining the top one. ‘Why do you say he’s a headcase? He seemed remarkably well balanced to me, all things considered.’

  Sævaldur shook his head pityingly. ‘Shit. I remember the trial. He was practically crawling up the walls. I was sure he was going to beat some poor sap half to death just to take it out on someone. And what have you done with the rest of your team? It seems pretty empty around here.’

  ‘Eiríkur is on paternity leave and won’t be back for a couple of weeks,’ she explained, as Sævaldur snorted derision. ‘And Helgi is up north. I’m hoping he’ll be back tonight or tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Up north? What’s he doing there? You mean Akureyri?’

  ‘Nope. He’s checking out Kjartan’s brothers, who it seems have something of a track record of sorting out each other’s problems.’

  ‘You reckon? That sounds far-fetched to me. I’d pin my efforts on Kjartan.’

  ‘Maybe. But I can’t not check.’ She fluttered the sheaf of printed-out photographs in her hand. ‘And Kjartan has the most solid alibi you can find, in that he was still at sea somewhere north of Grímsey when Borgar Jónsson was killed.’

  Sævaldur looked sour for a moment. ‘You be careful of Kjartan, though,’ he warned.

  ‘I most certainly will. The man’s a bruiser and he has bully written all over him in big letters. But he didn’t murder Borgar Jónsson. Now if you don’t mind, I have to ask our friends in traffic for a favour or two.’

  Stefán was pleased with himself that the old Bronco that had been in his workshop the day before was now well enough to be outside, while something more modern and sleek was plugged into a computer on wheels parked next to it.

  ‘That’s the one, I reckon,’ he said, looking through narrowed eyes at the pictures Gunna showed him of Elmar’s wrecked van. ‘I thought it was one of those four-wheel-drive Nissans. A lot of people use them for work; plumbers, carpenters,
mechanics – that sort of business.’

  ‘You’re sure this is the vehicle?’

  ‘Well, not a hundred and one per cent, but as sure as I can be. That dirty patch on the side gives it away.’

  ‘And you got a look at the driver?’

  Stefán shrugged. ‘Young fella. Bad haircut,’ he said. ‘I didn’t look twice. Now, if it had been a young lady, I might have taken more notice.’

  ‘You’d recognize him?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

  Gunna dug into her folder and pulled out Elmar’s driving licence photograph, blown up to a washed-out A4 size, his pale eyes staring somewhere beyond the camera.

  ‘How about that?’

  Stefán stared at it and shook his head. ‘I don’t know. It looks like him, but I couldn’t swear to it. I only gave him a quick glance.’

  As satisfied as she was likely to get, Gunna nodded and made a few notes. ‘OK, thanks. That’ll do nicely.’

  ‘Happy to help. If I’d have known, I’d have looked a bit more carefully. You reckon this is the guy who, you know . . .’ He paused. ‘Borgar?’

  ‘I can’t comment on that.’

  ‘You want me to let you know if I see him again?’

  ‘I’d be surprised if you do,’ Gunna said, tapping the pictures of the wrecked van. ‘This happened last night and he’s in hospital now with a lot of broken bones.’

  She let herself into the NesPlast unit and allowed her eyes to adjust to the gloom before she went upstairs and switched on one light over the canteen table. The place was clean, much cleaner than it should have been after being empty for several years.

  She started in the kitchen area and went through all of the drawers, from cutlery at the top to one at the bottom containing old invoices, all dated a decade or more before. Moving on to the cupboards, she found only newly washed and dried glasses and cups, neatly stacked. She sat back down and shook her head in puzzlement. The place had been cleaned thoroughly. There was none of the dust and grime of downstairs. The office, little more than an alcove off the canteen, had also been swept clean, but there was no furniture. Desks and chairs had gone, and only the planner charts on the walls and faded outlines where pictures had been pinned indicated what the place had once been. Only a threadbare sofa occupied one end below the window.

  Gunna sat on it and bounced gently, feeling the springs squeal. She stood up and felt under the seat, lifting when she felt it move. Underneath was a duvet and a couple of pillows, still fairly fresh rather than having lain there all the years that Borgar had been in prison. She stared at them and wondered what it all meant. Had Borgar used this place, the last remaining part of his former sprawling businesses, as some kind of bolt-hole, a place to escape to when the gloomy hostel became too much for him?

  She lifted the duvet up, shook it and folded it in half, placing it on the floor with the two pillows on top. She searched the box under the sofa, fingers feeling for anything that might give her an idea of what Borgar had been doing there, but eventually stood up, admitting defeat, convinced that Borgar had spent an hour or two every day before his hostel evening curfew clearing up his one-time business.

  Straightening up, she saw a couple of books on the windowsill above the sofa, half hidden behind its back. She riffled through the pages of the two cheap thrillers and put them down again, turning back to the office where she scanned the walls, remembering Henning’s question about Borgar’s cubbyhole. There was nothing to be seen. The floor was an unbroken set of boards without a join anywhere, while the walls were blank and provided no clue. The only break in them anywhere was the electrical box, and staring at it she remembered that the team arriving on Monday had found the circuit breakers tripped, but that Sigmar had reset them downstairs.

  Gunna snapped her fingers. The circuits for the building were on the floor below. She clattered down the stairs, found the circuit box and took the metal key for opening the latch from its string. Upstairs it fitted the identical door and it swung open to show a single pair of circuit breakers, which she assumed had to be for the lights and power in the kitchen. She stretched and peered into the box, her head almost inside it.

  ‘Ah, there you are, my little beauty,’ she breathed, sliding her hand sideways behind the cabinet’s framework into a compartment that lay behind the panelling of the wall, and extracted an old Bible that she stared at in surprise, wondering if Borgar had found God during his time at Litla-Hraun.

  The Bible felt odd in her hands, as if its covers did not meet properly, and opening it she saw why, as a couple of small, hardback books fell out and landed at her feet. Picking them up, Gunna saw there was a passport with a star and crescent on the cover, and bearing the legend ‘Republic of Turkey’. The picture inside was undoubtedly a younger and plumper Borgar Jónsson than the one whose picture she had seen on the police files, but with a very unfamiliar name, while the two books were clearly savings accounts from banks she had never heard of, containing figures dating back more than six years and running into many thousands.

  ‘Turkey. Someone planning a new life,’ she said to herself, straightening up and looking out of the window at the gathering gloom outside. ‘So I don’t suppose our Borgar had found God after all,’ she decided, and the sudden harsh ringing of her phone brought her back to reality.

  The unmistakeable smell hit Helgi in the face. Somewhere a generator chattered discreetly and a few lights glowed in the gloomy barn where the carcasses of abandoned farm machinery crouched along one side. His shoes crunched on the gravel underfoot and he saw that a strip of light glimmered under a door at the far end.

  He knew that this was not a good idea. It went against all the rules of good policing, but that would mean going back to Blönduós and calling in Anna Björg or another of the local station’s few officers to come with him. He glanced at his phone and saw that with no signal, there was no chance of calling anyone to join him.

  Taking a deep breath to summon his courage, he listened at the door to the silence on the other side, wrinkling his nose at the smell before pushing the door open. Inside was a single light that illuminated the workshop where a still hissed on top of a gas ring. On the far side of the long room a dozen plastic bins were the source of the smell and Helgi knew exactly what he had stumbled across as he backed away as silently as he was able before turning and making for the door.

  ‘All right, Helgi?’ a deep voice asked as he emerged into the daylight. ‘What might bring Helgi Svavarsson from the police all the way out to Tunga on a winter morning?’

  ‘Hello, Össur. I was passing and wondered if Ingi might be about anywhere?’

  A pair of dark eyes took stock of Helgi from the shadow of a wide-brimmed hat stained by rain and bleached by sunshine.

  ‘Our Ingi’s been working over at the Hook these last few weeks, building some new offices for the town council or some such. But since you’re here you’d best come up to the house and have a cup of coffee. I can’t speak for Reynir, but Mother’ll be happy to see you,’ he ordered and strode over to the tractor, leaving Helgi where he stood.

  The tractor thundered into life and Össur reversed frighteningly fast in a half-circle towards Helgi and the Daihatsu.

  ‘That’s your city wagon, is it?’ he shouted over the roar of the engine. ‘I’ll go first so’s I can pull you out when you get it stuck in a puddle.’

  Helgi got back into the Daihatsu and took the track back up to the farm slowly, wondering if Össur had seen him go into the barn and if he suspected that the still at the back might have been seen. At any rate, he was sure that even Össur would know that the smell of fermenting raw brew could hardly be missed. Maybe he didn’t expect anything to be done about it and for a blind eye to be turned for old times’ sake? Wondering where Össur’s brother Reynir might be, Helgi had no real choice but to follow the tractor back towards the farmhouse, relieved that as the Daihatsu breasted the rise, his phone pinged back into connection with the rest of the world.

>   ‘Progress, Gunnhildur?’ Ívar Laxdal asked gently as Gunna gulped a glass of water in the deserted canteen.

  ‘Good grief, what a bastard this man was,’ she said with feeling. ‘He screwed everyone he could, dropped people in the shit without a moment’s hesitation and he’d have mortgaged his grandmother if he could have got away with it. I’m starting to wonder if whoever finished him off wasn’t doing the rest of us a favour.’

  ‘How’s Helgi getting on?’

  ‘No idea. I had a quick call to check a vehicle registration, but that’s all so far. I expect he’ll report in when he knows something. But I can’t help wondering if I’ve sent him on a wild-goose chase up there in the north.’

  Ívar Laxdal nodded wisely, his meaty hands clasped around a mug. ‘Anything you need?’

  ‘Other than manpower, obviously?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Gunna felt as helpless as she usually did when faced with this question.

  ‘Ideally I’d like Eiríkur back off paternity leave and back here running around for me. But that’s too much to hope for. So . . .’

  One of the Laxdal eyebrows gradually lifted from its habitual position as Gunna grinned wickedly. She placed the evidence bag containing the Turkish passport and the bankbooks on the table.

  ‘If you had a spare half hour to drop by the National Security Unit and ask what they make of these, then I’m sure you’d get an answer out of them a lot quicker than I would.’

  The dog that had barked from the barn now sniffed around the Daihatsu’s wheels and disdainfully cocked a leg against one of them before trotting to the farmhouse door, proud of its work. Helgi saw a wrinkled face appear at the kitchen window and break into a smile on seeing him.

  ‘Before we go inside,’ he said, and Össur turned round to face him, ‘you must have an idea why I’m here, surely?’

  For the first time Össur’s face showed a change of expression as he scowled. ‘Yup. I’m not Sherlock Holmes like you, but I can join the dots.’