Cold Breath (Gunnhildur Mystery Book 7)

by Quentin Bates

  She was relieved to have time to herself again. It seemed that Michel had been surprised at how quickly she’d arrived on the scene, but he had failed to realize that she had already been there, keeping a discreet eye on both the target and the two former mercenaries, hoping that they would finish the job by themselves.

  Admittedly Michel had followed procedure to the letter and, as far as anyone was aware, the hapless Pino remained a mystery man, although she doubted that Luc Kerkhoeve would fail to identify him.

  Once the car had warmed up and she had rubbed some warmth back into her numb fingers, she powered down the smartphone and drove away from the deserted shore, taking the road through the suburbs towards the city centre. After having been on her feet since midnight, she needed to sleep. But first she needed to check in and confirm that the assignment at the hotel had been carried out.

  Gunna watched the video sequence again and again, pausing it every time there was a clear view of the man. At first glance there was nothing out of the ordinary about him. His clothes were nondescript, jeans, a coat that gaped open to show a hooded sweater, trainers on his feet. The only striking thing about him was his eyes, pale and mobile, which flickered around the arrivals hall, taking in everything as he waited for a kitbag to arrive on the carousel, and then marching towards the exit. He seemed neither young nor old, with a timeless look about him.

  Gunna played the sequence repeatedly, trying to assess whether or not the man was travelling alone, all the while telling herself that an accomplice would hardly have travelled on the same flight. She stared at the man’s face, zooming in until he filled the screen, freezing the image as he looked unblinkingly at the camera he must have known was watching him.

  ‘So who are you, young man?’ she breathed, having reverse-tracked his movements through the terminal to see him arrive on a flight from Amsterdam.

  She wondered what his name was, where he came from and if anyone were waiting to hear from him. A wife or a lover? Maybe some soft-cheeked young woman was wondering why her calls weren’t being returned. There could be children, she thought, and felt sick. Was there a house or an apartment somewhere that would remain silent and empty until one day a bank or distant relative claimed it? And where? Where was this man’s home? He had travelled through Amsterdam in his Eastern European underwear, but he could have come from practically anywhere and would almost certainly have travelled in a dog-leg route of some kind to throw off anyone trying to track his movements.

  Again she told herself to calm down, to stop letting herself be frustrated by inactivity. It wasn’t her job to dig into the dead man’s life and past; other people would do it better than she could. All the same, she found herself running through the options. There must have been CCTV at Schiphol, and there had to be footage of him there that could be tied to his arrival there; he would certainly have been photographed as he checked in for his flight. That would provide a name, and a name and a picture were a start. Even a false name was a start, she decided. There had to be a credit card attached to that name, an address, and so on. Much would depend on co-operation with forces in other countries, although the terror tag that went with the incident would ring alarm bells and push the case close to the top of every priority list.

  But where were these people staying in Iceland, assuming the dead man hadn’t been working alone, she asked herself again. There had to be a bolt-hole, a hiding place, somewhere in or around the city. There had to be a car somewhere, rented or purchased. And where had the revolver come from, she reflected, wondering if they had brought it with them, and if so, how had it got through airport security measures? Or had it come some other way? It was more likely it had been acquired in Iceland, she decided, as anyone bringing in a weapon would hardly have gone for such an antique.

  Much of what needed to be done required team effort, but she was shut away in this comfortable out-of-town cage, left to hope the work was being done.

  She was still looking into the dead man’s eyes as she felt Osman appear soundlessly, padding on bare feet with a glass in his hand.

  ‘Gunnhildur, do we have orange juice?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’ she replied, shaken from her train of thought. ‘Sorry. I was miles away. Look in the fridge.’

  ‘There is no orange juice.’

  Osman’s voice was soft, with a hint of petulance.

  ‘Sorry. It’s on the list, so it should be in the next delivery when Ívar comes back.’

  ‘I see.’

  Osman sat down on one of the dining-room chairs opposite the laptop that had claimed Gunna’s attention. He looked at his watch and yawned while Gunna continued to frown at the screen in front of her.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked with a suddenness that took her by surprise.

  Gunna looked up and saw Osman’s frown of disapproval. It occurred to her that someone not giving him their full attention was something he was unused to.

  ‘Since you ask,’ she said slowly, turning the laptop around, ‘I’m looking at the man who came here to kill you. Does that face look familiar?’

  Osman’s eyes widened and Gunna watched his face intently, waiting for a hesitation or some reaction that would tell her something. Instead, he looked at the pale man’s face with nonchalance and shook his head. He sat back on his chair and lifted his feet onto another, crossing his bare feet across it. Gunna was struck by the size of them, and the wiry black hair that grew across his insteps.

  ‘I’ve never seen this man before,’ he said, and Gunna was inclined to believe him.

  ‘Well, we think he and his friends know who you are, and it seems they travelled a long way to do you harm.’

  Osman shrugged. ‘That’s nothing new. You don’t do good work without attracting enemies.’

  ‘What do you call good work?’

  ‘I run a charity. I founded a charity,’ he said, eyes flashing. ‘My work is to help my people, to make their lives better.’

  Gunna turned the laptop back round and closed it. ‘Who are your people?’

  ‘Anyone who has suffered. Those are my people.’

  ‘Everyone? All around the world? That’s ambitious.’

  ‘I mean in my country, the part of the world I come from, the place that is my home.’

  ‘So far you haven’t said much about where you come from. You still haven’t told me where that is.’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Try me.’

  Skúli had never been entirely comfortable behind the wheel. Dagga had decided that they needed a car, and had set about finding something small enough to be handy around the city while still big enough to accommodate a child seat and any amount of toddler paraphernalia. Occasionally she dropped a hint that sooner or later a second child seat would be required.

  Normally he relished the bus journey into town as twenty minutes of uninterrupted reading time plus a healthy walk. Dagga looked surprised but said nothing when Skúli muttered that he’d need the car for a change.

  He was earlier than usual, and although normally he would have started with a mug of coffee and half an hour spent checking messages, this time he went straight for the competing news outlets and social media.

  Few of the mainstream media had followed up on Pulse’s scoop of the previous day. But he saw that most of the other digital media had mirrored the story, and social media feeds had snapped hungrily at the report with all sorts of comments, including outlandish conspiracy theories from familiar names that normally made him either chuckle or despair.

  His Osman scoop had failed to oust Kyle McCombie from the headlines, as an irascible TV interview with him aired the night before had inflamed more passion that spilled over into angry exchanges.

  ‘Good for business,’ Skúli mused as Arndís hung up her coat and went to her desk.

  ‘What’s good?’

  ‘Extremist nutcases spouting venom.’

  ‘That racist guy again? How long’s he staying here?’

  ‘I
think he left late last night. I don’t imagine he’ll be missed.’

  ‘Only by his white supremacist friends. Did you get any feedback on your story yesterday?’

  ‘Not much,’ Skúli said. ‘I thought there’d be more. There’s a lot of shouting on Facebook, but that happens all the time anyway. No word from the ministry, no injunction, nothing.’

  ‘That’s a shame,’ Arndís agreed. ‘An injunction would have told us you were on the right track, and it would have been great for circulation. Silence doesn’t do much good.’

  ‘It’s not as if dignified silence is Steinunn Strand’s style, though. I’m still waiting for the secret police to come calling in the middle of the night.’

  ‘If she could send them, I’m sure she would.’

  ‘And . . . we have news,’ Skúli said as his inbox bleeped a new message and he peered at the screen. ‘Hey, come and look . . .’

  With Arndís looking over his shoulder he clicked the link and they watched as the news report began to play.

  ‘Where’s this from?’ Arndís asked as a barrage of French burst from the speaker.

  ‘My contact in Paris. She must have found something more on Osman.’

  The wide-angle, hand-held footage with rapid-fire commentary showed beach scenes of refugees overjoyed to have sand under their feet, children held tight as family groups waded through the shallows, and street scenes of people with no belongings other than what they could carry making their way through dusty villages.

  Skúli took a sharp breath as the scene switched suddenly to a brass plate screwed to a concrete wall among a line of others.

  ‘White Sickle Peace Foundation,’ Skúli breathed. ‘She’s been to Brussels. Brilliant, Sophie.’

  The camera followed people entering and leaving a building as he struggled to make sense of the commentary in a language he was only barely familiar with, until an indistinct figure, muffled in a sheepskin coat, appeared at the door, and he could make out the back of Sophie’s head as whoever held the camera hurried to keep up with her.

  ‘Do you have any comment to make on the allegations made about White Sickle Foundation by the Plain Truth?’ Sophie called in hoarse English at the figure striding away from her.

  ‘Are you going to agree to make White Sickle’s finances public?’

  A hand waved dismissively.

  ‘How is White Sickle linked to the death of Lars Bundgaard?’

  The figure stopped and turned to the camera, eyes burning with furious indignation.

  ‘I have no comment to make,’ the man snarled in abrupt English as he marched along the street with Sophie at his heels, repeating the same questions, until he vanished through a door that slammed in her face.

  ‘We didn’t manage to get any answers from the White Sickle Foundation,’ Sophie’s voice said as the screen returned to an image of the brass plate, before it dissolved into a now familiar portrait of Osman. ‘Except for a statement telling us that the only person authorized to comment is the director, who is currently abroad and not contactable. That’s Ali Osman, or Ali Osman Deniz, or Suleiman Ali Osman, or whichever name he’s currently using.’

  Skúli drummed the table in excitement.

  ‘She’s done it,’ he crowed. ‘She’s fucking done it!’

  ‘A parallel investigation by our team in Iceland has revealed that White Sickle’s director is in fact currently in Iceland as the guest of a senior government figure,’ Sophie said to the camera as Skúli whooped with delight. ‘Don’t forget to be with us again tonight for the second part of our investigation.’

  The report ended with the camera showing a boat abandoned on a sunlit beach, rocking in the waves lapping around it, panning to a shoe lost in the sand and lines of footprints disappearing into the grass in the distance.

  ‘My home was within sight of the blue sea,’ Osman said. ‘We lived ten minutes from the beach and an hour from the village in the hills my father’s ancestors had come from. That was always home even though we had lived in the city for three generations.’

  He spoke in a slow, dark voice, deeper than his usual conversational tone and with a mesmerizing rhythm to his words.

  ‘My father and his brothers had always been involved in politics. The eldest of my uncles had been to university in France and when he came home, he entered politics instead of business. The family as a whole is branded with his name and reputation. He was murdered during the second conflict. Or we believe he was murdered. He was taken and we heard nothing more of him. He has to be buried on a hillside somewhere, along with the other victims of whatever faction took him, and that was never clear.’

  Osman paused and his eyes glittered. He poured water into a glass from a jug on the table and sipped.

  ‘All we could do was leave. In the first conflict – the first of many – the hundred days’ war, the family home had gone, somewhere in the empty zone in the centre of the city that nobody dared visit. My grandfather’s business had come to a standstill. He had traded in almost anything, spices, fruit, leather, clothes, but there was nobody left to produce anything. The country people were starving. In the village that we still think of as our home, my cousins had joined militias and gone to fight. The eldest son of my father’s brother was killed outright by a mortar shell. His brother was injured only a few days later, and now he does what he can with half a hand and one foot. The youngest brother survived the war and is now a prosperous landowner, although he’s worried about what is happening only a few miles away across the borders. Damascus is not far away.’

  The thin morning daylight that had flooded the house faded as a cloud drifted over the sun, giving the room a sudden chill. Gunna stood up and switched on the kitchen light.

  ‘My father took us north along the coast, driving an old van – the kind that European students used to drive all the way to India when the roads through Iran and Afghanistan were still safe for wanderers of that kind. Maybe that was where that old VW came from. I don’t know. We were all crammed into it, my father and mother, two grandparents, four children and three of my young cousins, as well as whatever we could salvage. We became refugees in our own country, until my father was able to grease the right palms and we went to a town on the coast, a pretty, friendly place where people were suspicious of us to start with, but not for long.’

  ‘To Turkey?’ Gunna asked as Osman paused.

  He waved a hand in impatience. ‘Quiet. I will tell the story. My grandfather had many friends throughout the region. He was a trader. A trader has to have friends and he has to be trusted. There was no electronic money in those days. Business was done in cash, or gold, or sometimes between banks, which was slow. Anyway, there were men in Turkey, in Cyprus, in Egypt, even in Italy and France, who had known my grandfather and trusted his word, and in turn they were prepared to trust my father because of whose son he was. They could see my grandfather in him, so he was able to trade. He had some money that he had been prudent enough to hide. At the end of our journey I helped him take up the floor of the old VW – I could not believe my eyes when I saw the gold coins in cloth bags hidden there. If the militias he had bribed along the way to let us pass had suspected, we would have all been corpses by the side of the road – my parents, my grandparents and seven children.’

  ‘You were lucky.’

  ‘Lucky? I don’t know. All I can be sure of is that there was no shortage of prayer. Maybe we were helped. Maybe someone was watching over us. Do you believe?’

  Osman gazed intently, his eyes like dark pools in their growing intensity.

  ‘No,’ Gunna said. ‘No, I don’t believe in anything upstairs or afterwards if that’s what you’re asking.’

  ‘You are truly an unfortunate woman, in that case.’

  ‘Perhaps. But I like it that way,’ she said. ‘Your father was able to rebuild his business and a new home?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘Where is the rest of the family now? Your brothers and sisters?’

  ‘
This is the hard part to tell. The whole thing happened again. In my part of the world it seems to happen once in a generation. We are sent a plague. There was a drought and people became unhappy, poor, hungry. The government did nothing except tell them to be quiet. The result was another war.’

  ‘You were involved in that?’

  ‘No, Gunnhildur. I left long before it started. My father was prosperous enough after a few years to send me and my eldest sister to be educated properly. I went to Europe; she went to the capital – it was not proper for a girl to travel abroad, otherwise she would have gone. The others went as well, apart from the eldest, who became an officer in the army. He is still there, I think. I have not been able to contact him and I do not know what has become of him. One day I will find him.’

  A lilting reggae beat pulsed from invisible speakers. A man at the counter didn’t look up as Skúli approached, unwinding his scarf as he made his way across the distressed wood floor, feeling his feet squelch in damp shoes.

  ‘Hi. I’m looking for Sif.’

  ‘So is everyone, darling.’

  The guy still hadn’t looked up. Skúli had become used to all kinds of treatment by people he approached in his line of work, but this kind of scorn was on a new scale.

  ‘How would you like to tell me where she is,’ he said slowly. ‘Considering I’m expected? Darling.’

  The guy looked up and peered at Skúli through half-closed eyes, screwing up his narrow face.

  ‘And who did you say you are?’

  ‘I didn’t. Sif asked me to come here, so how about you tell her she has a visitor?’

  ‘All right. There’s no need to be rude, is there?’ he drawled and went to a door set in the wall furthest from the entrance, opened it and called, all without taking his eyes from where Skúli stood by the counter.

  Skúli felt his breath snatched from him as Sif appeared in the doorway, beckoning to him, while the sharp-faced man went back to the counter and whatever he had been doing behind it that was more important than looking up.