Cold Breath (Gunnhildur Mystery Book 7)

by Quentin Bates

  ‘Cold,’ he said. ‘You could make another pot, you know. Now that you know how it’s done.’

  Eiríkur filled the percolator again, and once he was back sitting down, Ketill continued.

  ‘It was the scream that made me stand up and take a look. I’ve never heard anything like it. A real howl, like an animal in pain. It made me shiver. So I took a look, just pulled the curtain back to see what was going on.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘You know, violence is normally very quick. It takes seconds. It’s nothing like the movies. By the time I got to the window it was almost all over. There was a body on the pavement, not moving, and someone standing by it. There was someone else on the ground as well, and a big guy looking around. I reckon the big guy and the second man on the ground had a ruck where I couldn’t see them, up against the wall.’

  ‘Did you see these people? The big guy and the other one?’

  Ketill shook his head.

  ‘Not clearly. Don’t forget it was dark and there’s not a lot of light from those streetlights.’ He sighed and jerked his head towards the percolator. Eiríkur dutifully filled a mug for him. Ketill slopped in a few drops of moonshine. ‘What do you want to know? Jog an old man’s memory.’

  ‘To start with, I want as much of a description as you can give me of these two people, good enough to rule out the chap we have in a cell, and hopefully enough to be able to identify these people.’

  ‘You’ll be lucky. It was over in a few seconds.’

  ‘Think. Please. Tell me what you think you saw.’

  Ketill sipped his aromatic coffee and closed his eyes.

  ‘The big guy was tall. Around two metres, I reckon. Big but not fat. He looked pretty athletic. Dark hair. Dark clothes, a leather jacket of some kind and jeans, I think.’

  ‘Dark hair? You’re sure?’

  ‘Sure. That’s about the only thing I can be sure of. A big guy with dark brown or black hair and a beard.’

  ‘All right. And the other one?’

  ‘The other one was a woman. I’m sure of it. Quite slight. Sort of mousy hair, shoulder length.’

  ‘All right,’ Eiríkur said slowly. ‘So you saw a man on the ground, presumably the victim, and a woman standing next to him. Then there’s another man on the ground and the big guy appears. Right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So you didn’t see the assault take place?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And where did they go?’

  ‘Up the street,’ Ketill said, nodding in that direction. ‘Towards Rauðarárstígur.’

  ‘Did you see their faces? Even for a second?’

  ‘The woman, yes. She looked right up at me. They they were gone, and they didn’t hang about. A moment later there was some drunk who practically walked into the guy on the ground, and it wasn’t long before the street was full of blue lights. Made me sick, it did. Seeing those lights flashing, just like the day Páll Oddur Bjarnason hauled me off to the cells.’

  ‘You’re certain it was a woman?’ Eiríkur repeated. ‘Absolutely sure?’

  ‘Not absolutely, but sure enough. I watched them jog down the street, and if that was a man he had a lovely arse.’

  *

  Hans cleared his throat, perched a pair of frameless glasses on the end of his nose and peered at some hastily written notes.

  Sævaldur folded his arms, cocked his head on one side and waited.

  ‘Be my guest,’ he said. ‘I’m looking forward to hearing this.’

  Rikki glared, beads of sweat forming in the stubble on top of his head.

  ‘My client,’ Hans said, looking up to check that Sævaldur was paying attention. ‘My client spent yesterday afternoon at a gym, where he trained for two hours. There are witnesses who will confirm this.’

  ‘You’ll naturally supply me with all their names and addresses?’

  ‘Of course,’ Hans said. ‘From four in the afternoon until six he was at the Laugardalur swimming pool, where he swam for thirty minutes and spent an hour in the hot tub. Again, there are witnesses who will corroborate this.’

  ‘I don’t give a crap about that,’ Sævaldur said. ‘This is all seven hours before your client beat the life out of someone on the street. Get on with it, will you?’

  Hans looked mortified.

  ‘Officer, you said just now that you wanted a detailed breakdown of my client’s movements, so that’s what we are providing you with.’

  ‘All right, just get on with it then.’

  ‘My client had a meal at Kúl on Frakkastígur and was there until ten that evening.’

  ‘Now we’re getting somewhere, I hope.’

  ‘At ten my client went to the home of Geir Franzson and stayed there until approximately half-past midnight. He is unsure of the exact timing, but he states that he returned to Aneta Lisowski’s home, and was asleep there when she returned from work at one in the morning, as I believe she has already confirmed.’

  Sævaldur nodded slowly.

  ‘And Geir Franzson’s address? If it’s the Geir Franzson I think it is, then he lives in Fossvogur, so I reckon your client could have left there at midnight, made it to Njálsgata, done the job, and been back at his girlfriend’s place before one, knowing that’s when she’d be back from work and could vouch for him being there,’ Sævaldur said slowly, looking sharply at Rikki. ‘So who’s the patsy who’ll confirm your client’s presence at Geir’s place until past midnight?’

  ‘Her name’s Aníka Björt,’ Rikki said, coughing as his throat went dry. ‘Geir’s on holiday somewhere. There were only the two of us there.’

  A grin spread across Sævaldur’s face.

  ‘And how old is Aníka Björt?’ he said with gentle menace. ‘Or does she belong to someone else, like Geir? Or is this just bullshit?’ he said, shaking his head, then looking up as there was a knock at the door and Eiríkur’s face appeared.

  ‘Could I have a word, Sævaldur?’

  ‘Sure, my boy. We’re about to knock off while I run a few checks. Tell them to take this naughty boy back to the cells, would you?’

  ‘Tell me about Lars Bundgaard,’ Ívar Laxdal suggested.

  ‘Hold on,’ Skúli protested. ‘How about you tell me about Lars Bundgaard? I spoke to some policeman in Belgium a couple of hours ago when I called Lars’s number. What’s going on here?’

  ‘I know. That’s how you were traced. How long have you known Lars Bundgaard?’

  Skúli blanched. ‘Am I some kind of suspect here? What’s going on? What’s happened to Lars?’

  Birna leaned forward over the table.

  ‘I’m uncomfortably aware that as you’re a journalist, I have to be rather more cautious than I might otherwise be.’ She looked steadily into Skúli’s eyes, as if waiting for him to flinch, until she seemed satisfied that what she said would go no further. ‘All right. All I can tell you is that your friend is dead. No,’ she said, holding up a hand as Skúli opened his mouth. ‘I can’t answer any questions because I don’t have any answers to give you. It’s in the hands of the police over there.’

  ‘Was it an accident, or was he murdered?’

  ‘Why do you ask if he was murdered?’

  ‘Because you’re here asking me questions. If Lars had got drunk and fallen in the river, then I don’t imagine I’d have some weird secret service outfit breathing down my neck.’

  ‘That’s a reasonable answer,’ Birna admitted. ‘And I’m not sure what you mean by some weird secret service outfit. But, yes. Lars Bundgaard was murdered, shot in his apartment. Now, how well did you know him?’

  ‘I thought I knew him pretty well,’ Skúli said, bewildered. ‘But maybe I didn’t after all. We both worked as interns for a few months on that local paper in Århus about ten years ago. We got on pretty well, although Lars was very politically minded and I’m not particularly.’

  ‘You mean radical?’ the man broke in.

  ‘Call it what you will. Lars had a big social conscience. We ke
pt in touch occasionally. Not regularly, but we’d talk a few times a year.’

  ‘And when did you last meet?’ Birna asked.

  ‘Three, maybe four years ago. It was before Dagga and I got together, so more than three years ago.’

  ‘Were you aware of his work?’

  ‘Of course. As I said, we’ve stayed in touch, but not frequent touch. Lars was passionate about what he did. He could go on about social injustice for hours, and he’d get more and more angry in the process. So Lars was murdered?’

  ‘Our colleagues in Antwerp believe so,’ Birna said, arms folded on the table. ‘I’ll be honest with you, Skúli. We had an urgent request from Brussels to check you out.’

  Skúli shivered and he could see Dagga hugging Markús tight.

  ‘And what are you going to tell them?’

  ‘Probably just what you told us – that as far as we’re concerned, you’re a fairly harmless journalist.’

  ‘That’s good to hear,’ Skúli said bitterly, ‘but it’s not much of a professional endorsement.’

  ‘That’s what I’m going to tell my contact in Brussels,’ the woman said, and all the warmth disappeared from her voice. ‘But now you can tell me why you decided to contact Lars Bundgaard just as he happened to get himself murdered. There has to be a reason for it,’ she said.

  ‘What the fuck do you mean?’

  Sævaldur’s fury erupted; he immediately fought it back, though the anger was plain.

  ‘What I said,’ Eiríkur shrugged. ‘Helgi thinks so as well.’

  ‘Gunna’s boys,’ Sævaldur sneered. ‘She’s not around at the moment and I’m running this. I don’t like it when my officers go off-script and do their own thing without telling me.’

  ‘Sorry. I thought I was doing what the government pays me to do.’

  ‘The government pays you to do what I tell you. Now, Aníka Björt, the tart Rikki’s lawyer reckons he was with when Thór was murdered. You and Helgi had better go and find her and make sure she doesn’t trip us up on this. I’ve been wanting to put Rikki the Sponge away for years.’

  ‘Rikki didn’t do it. There’s a witness.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s a witness. Someone who lives on Njálsgata and looked out of the window. He saw Thór and Fúsi on the ground, and he said a man and a woman left the scene. A guy with hair and a beard. Rikki doesn’t have a hair on his head, so it wasn’t him.’

  Eiríkur stopped himself feeling sorry for Sævaldur as his eyes narrowed.

  ‘You’re sure about all this? I don’t want to see this case go down the drain.’

  ‘There’s more,’ he said. ‘We’ll have Miss Cruz’s report later, but she said that Thór’s arm had been dislocated, pulled clear out of the socket. So we should be looking for someone with at least some martial arts skills. That’s not the kind of injury Thór would have got in a fight with Rikki. There are plenty of marks on Rikki’s face, but none of them are new, and I don’t imagine he would have got away from Thór without taking at least a couple of punches.’

  Sævaldur folded his arms and stuck out his chest, but there was defeat in his eyes for a moment, until he rallied and scowled.

  ‘I’m not having this wrecked. Fúsi positively identified Rikki as the assailant.’

  ‘What if Fúsi’s telling tales?’

  ‘Come on. Fúsi has to be terrified. He wouldn’t point the finger at Rikki unless he was sure.’

  ‘That’s what I’m thinking. Will Fúsi back out of this?’ Eiríkur said. ‘He hasn’t made a formal statement yet, and we won’t get one from him until the doctor confirms he’s in a fit state.’

  ‘Then we’ll make sure Fúsi doesn’t back out of it, shall we?’

  Hanne cooked and Carsten brooded. The camper van had been lovingly fitted out, with almost every convenience they could want in such a compact vehicle. They had been close for almost all of the years they had spent together, their lives entwined, going back for more decades than it was comfortable to think about. Everything had been shared, the good and the bad, and there had been an openness to their long relationship that some people found startling.

  Now they had hardly spoken for days and the atmosphere between them had turned sour and hostile. Carsten felt adrift, wondering how Hanne could abandon the principles they had always lived by.

  Social justice had always been something she had fought hard for, standing up for anyone she felt had been mistreated or marginalized, and often earning herself black looks and dark whispers behind her back in the process.

  She had never failed to march to the nearest police station and bang the counter with her fist whenever she was sure the law had been broken, something that, fortunately, was a rare occurrence in her long career.

  He felt too tired to drive any further. The camper was off the road, parked in a campsite, empty at this time of year. They had parked and walked in silence to the nearest shop to stock up on provisions, still managing to walk arm-in-arm, while Carsten had an overwhelming premonition that something had finally appeared in their lives that would surely tear them apart.

  For the rest of the day they had spent the afternoon in the camper while flurries of snow hit the windscreen like handfuls of buckshot and a gusting cold wind rocked it on its wheels.

  Normally it wouldn’t have been a problem. They were both comfortable spending time together without the need to talk, each engrossed in a book or some writing. But now there was a new friction. Hanne’s jaw was set like a rock, telling him she was in no mood for affection or even small talk. Carsten sat in the front seat with a book in his hands, staring at the pages without seeing the words.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Hanne asked eventually, driven to break the silence. ‘You haven’t turned a page for more than half an hour.’

  ‘No. I’m not all right,’ he said eventually. ‘Any more than you are.’

  The house stretched into the distance and Helgi decided that a place like this would suit him and his now large family, if only he could muster the income to match it. The white Range Rover in the drive would also have made a handsome replacement for his long-suffering Skoda.

  ‘Yes?’

  The woman who answered the door looked immaculate, but tight-lipped and brusque.

  ‘Helgi Svavarsson, I’m a detective with the city police force,’ he said, flipping open his wallet. ‘I’m looking for Aníka Björt Sverrisdóttir.’

  ‘What has she done now?’

  The question was delivered with a combination of force and despair.

  ‘Nothing that I’m aware of. But she may be a witness,’ he replied, and saw the woman almost sigh with relief. ‘I take it you’re her mother?’

  ‘I am. You’d better come in and I’ll wake her up. I’m Elísabet Hákonardóttir, by the way,’ she said, shutting the heavy door behind Helgi as he wiped his feet. He’d already checked on the family and knew exactly who the woman was.

  The hall was hung with framed magazine covers, charting Elísabet Hákonardóttir’s progress from model to actress to arbiter of fashion, until the images gave way to a series of photos of a girl with her mother’s looks but a surly pout that was all her own.

  ‘Wait.’

  Helgi raised an eyebrow and decided to do as he was told, standing with his hands behind his back as he inspected one framed cover after another of magazines that had been popular when he and Elísabet Hákonardóttir were considerably younger.

  It was a while before she returned, lips pursed in frustration.

  ‘She’s coming,’ she said curtly. ‘I hope.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Helgi said, hiding his impatience.

  ‘Can I ask . . . ?’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Has she done anything? Something she shouldn’t have?’

  Helgi shrugged.

  ‘I don’t know. But as Aníka Björt is under sixteen, then you have the right to be present. In fact, you ought to be present.’

  ‘Ah.’ Elísabet took
a sharp breath, her pointed nose lifting. ‘I wonder if there are things that I’d prefer not to know about.’

  ‘She’s a teenager, so it’s possible. Weren’t we all young once?’ Helgi asked gently, and tilted his head towards a figure in a thick white dressing gown approaching along the hall. ‘Looks like she’s here.’

  ‘Hello,’ the yawning girl offered. ‘You wanted to talk to me about something?’

  ‘Aníka Björt? My name’s Helgi Svavarsson and I’m a detective with the city police force. Can we sit down and talk? I have a few questions for you.’

  The girl nodded and looked at her mother.

  ‘Yes, yes. Go to the living room,’ Elísabet said, and Helgi could sense that she was keeping a tight rein on the tension inside her.

  Aníka Björt curled in an armchair with languid grace, thin legs tucked beneath her, the dressing gown practically enveloping her. Fine, pale hair fell straight on either side of her face, giving her the look of someone peering through a narrow window.

  ‘Can you tell me where you were last night, Aníka Björt?’ Helgi asked, hoping to sound reassuring.

  ‘I was out with Karin until about midnight. Then I came home and went to sleep.’

  ‘And Karin is?’

  ‘She’s in my class at school.’

  ‘And where did you go?’

  ‘We went to see a movie in Kópavogur.’

  Aníka Björt’s voice was flat, devoid of expression.

  ‘And when did that finish?’

  ‘Around eleven. There’s not much to do in Kópavogur, so we hung out for a while outside and then went home.’

  ‘So you saw Karin last night. Anyone else?’

  ‘Some of the others from school.’

  ‘Nobody else?’

  Aníka Björt shrugged.

  ‘No. That’s it.’

  Helgi delved into his pocket and took out some business cards. He dealt them like playing cards, one for Elísabet and two for Aníka Björt.

  ‘How did you get home, Aníka Björt?’

  ‘Bus. It stops at the bottom of the hill.’

  ‘So you’re five minutes home from the bus stop?’

  ‘Something like that,’ the girl agreed.

  ‘If you remember anything,’ he said. ‘Anything that might be important, I mean, then please call me.’