‘This is the guy, is it, Eiríkur?’ one of them asked as he approached
‘This is the gentleman,’ he replied, turning to the young man. ‘Manuel, or is it Julio?’
‘All right, where are we going?’ the first officer asked. ‘The station?’
‘No, I’m not sure he’s done anything wrong, so we just need a chat,’ he decided. ‘Drop us at the kiosk by the bank, will you?’
Jón Egill Hjörleifsson’s bluster had evaporated and he was sweating heavily. Gunna brought him a cup of coffee and sat opposite him.
‘Still nothing you want to tell me?’
‘No. Speak to Julio. He’ll confirm where I was on Saturday.’
‘We’re trying to find him right now.’
‘What! The little shit ought to be at work by now.’
Jón Egill cracked his knuckles and his eyes flashed around the room.
‘So Julio is one of your employees?’
‘He’s casual staff, does a few shifts when he’s not busy somewhere else.’
‘Where’s he from? Julio isn’t exactly an Icelandic name, is it?’
‘Portugal, I think. I’m not sure.’
‘And his work and residence permits are in order, I presume?’ Gunna asked.
‘I have no idea. I expect so,’ he retorted and started as there was a knock.
Eiríkur put his face, complete with a broad grin, around the door. ‘Chief, can I have a moment?’
Gunna nodded and looked at Jón Egill. ‘Two minutes and I’ll be back.’ Outside in the corridor Gunna wanted to ask Eiríkur what was so amusing, but knew she wouldn’t have to. ‘You found him?’
‘I did. He tried to do a runner, but I rustled up a patrol car to head him off.’
‘And?’
He confirms he was with Jón Egill Hjörleifsson on Saturday morning. In fact, he was cuddled up with him all night, until about eleven on Saturday.’
Gunna hooted. ‘Our tough biker leans to the lavender?’
‘He clearly has a sensitive feminine side, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Fair enough, so he has an alibi. I’d better let him go, in that case. I had a feeling he wasn’t our man when it came to the fire at Árni Sigurvinsson’s place, but he’s still tied up in all this somehow.’ She put a hand on the interview room door handle. ‘Listen, Eiríkur. I want as much pressure as possible put on this guy, so can you have a word with the immigration department and the food hygiene authorities, and ask them to have a close look at Jón Egill Hjörleifsson and his businesses?’
‘Will do. Oh, by the way, there’s an old boy downstairs who wants a word with you.’
‘What does he want? Not another talent scout for a modelling agency, is he?’
‘No, says he’s Johnny Depp’s agent and can you fly to the Caribbean to look after him for a couple of weeks as his personal trainer is on holiday?’ Eiríkur said, and there was a moment’s silence.
Gunna’s eyes widened in surprise. Her jaw dropped and she struggled for words as she realized that the usually reserved Eiríkur was making a joke; she was pleasantly surprised.
‘Why, you cheeky young bastard,’ she guffawed. ‘Get away with you.’
Eiríkur’s face showed his immediate relief that the remark hadn’t been taken badly. ‘He asked specifically to speak to the officer in charge of the missing persons inquiry. That’s you.’
‘OK. Give him a cup of coffee and tell him I’ll be along in a few minutes. I just need to tell our tough biker that his boyfriend’s confirmed his alibi and he’s free to go.’
* * *
Magni backed the grey Skoda out through the restaurant doors and drove it round to the front of the building. He left the engine running by the front door. There was no luggage to carry out to the car.
‘Come on, then,’ he announced. ‘Time to go.’
Erna went outside, blinking in the brightness of the day as a band of sunlight fought its way between the towering clouds, and stood uncertainly by the car.
‘Going in the front, Össi?’ Magni asked.
Össur shook his head. ‘No. I’ll sit in the back with one of the ladies.’ He sat in the car, making himself comfortable behind the passenger seat. ‘You,’ he said, pointing at Erna. ‘Get in the other side.’
Erna looked imploringly at Tinna Lind, who shrugged and looked quickly at the mound of snow in the middle of the yard, which she knew the stranger was still under. ‘Don’t argue, Mum. He has a gun,’ she muttered.
Magni took the driver’s seat. Tinna Lind closed the hotel’s door for the last time and looked around. A few stray drops of rain strafed the yard, rattling on the car’s roof as she got in.
‘Belts, everyone,’ Magni instructed. ‘It’s going to be bumpy.’
The Skoda slalomed down the slope to the road, its wheels fighting to grip the surface under a foot of snow, momentum alone keeping it from coming to an undignified halt. Erna closed her eyes and Magni whooped with relief as the wheels finally found a purchase on the rutted single-track road, thankfully under a thinner layer of slush than on the slope leading from the hotel’s yard. He kept the speed steady, taking the corners gently and knowing that if they were to get stuck, nobody would be likely to pull them out. In the back of the car, the couple of shovels rattled next to two jerry cans of petrol and a bag of sand he had taken from the hotel, just in case they were to hit problems.
He glanced sideways at the track leading downhill from the road to the summer house where he had hidden the dead man’s van. To his relief there were no footsteps or tyre tracks to be seen in the snow.
At a junction he slowed and took the right-hand fork onto a main road that was virtually clear and looked as if a snowplough had been past only that morning. The landscape was flat and featureless beneath distant hills that were white higher up while there were signs of rapid thawing closer to ground level. At another junction Magni again slowed down and looked at the Selfoss sign that proclaimed only thirty-two kilometres, but instead put his foot down and carried on westwards instead of going south.
Össur sat still in the back, showing no apparent interest in the route or anything outside the car, one hand in his pocket where Magni had no doubt he was clasping the pistol.
‘Where are we going?’ Erna asked when the lake at Thingvellir appeared, its surface gunmetal grey in the flat light and rippled by the stiff wind.
‘That way,’ Magni said as he slowed at yet another junction, wondering whether to stick to the safer but more visible main road north of the lake or the less frequently used road by the water’s edge. He decided to keep to the sensible route, reasoning that the other road would probably not have been cleared and he had no desire to be forced to seek help.
‘My name’s Gunnhildur Gísladóttir and I’m overseeing the missing persons inquiry for Erna Björg Brandsen and Tinna Lind Bogadóttir. What can I do for you?’
The man sat upright in his seat. He was a handsome character, Gunna decided. He looked to be in his seventies but his hair was thick and combed straight back, while the lines on his face around deep-set blue eyes told her that this was a practical man who liked to spend his days outside.
‘My name’s Grímur Halldórsson and I live at a place called Holt. It’s between the Thingvellir and Apavatn lakes,’ he said and gave her a moment to draw a mental image of where the place might be.
‘I see. I know roughly where that is.’
‘Well, the weather’s been lousy recently and I haven’t been out a great deal. I don’t often watch the television and as I hadn’t been out anywhere for a week or so, I hadn’t seen the newspapers.’ He pulled a folded-up newspaper from his pocket and opened it on his knee. ‘So when I got to Mosfellsbær this morning I stopped for a coffee and a read of the papers at the shop there, and I saw this.’
Gunna recognized the page from one of the weekend papers, with pictures of Erna Björg and Tinna Lind, as well as one of a Ford Explorer like the one owned by Erna.
‘You’ve
seen these people?’
‘No. I haven’t. But I’ve seen this car.’
Gunna’s eyebrows lifted. A search through the vehicle registry showed that there were relatively few cars of the same model in the country.
‘Where?’
‘Outside Hotel Hraun.’
‘Which is where?’
‘About eight kilometres from my place at Holt. I ski that way sometimes when the weather’s reasonable. The hotel’s closed during the winter, so I go past there and check on the place now and again,’ he added.
‘And have you seen these people?’
‘No, I haven’t. There were two men there. Spoke to one of them and he said that they were there for a break and that Ársæll, that’s the owner, had said they could use the place for a few days. I thought it was odd – two men – but the man I spoke to said their girlfriends or wives or whatever had gone somewhere that day and would be back that night.’
‘Are they still there?’
‘I’ve no idea. They were there last week, I’m sure enough of that. I know when I’m poking my nose in and when I’m not wanted, so I left them to it. Then the weather kicked up at the weekend and, like I said, it hasn’t been travelling weather for a few days.’
‘Wait a moment,’ Gunna said and got to her feet.
‘Helgi? Eiríkur?’ she yelled, elbowing open the detectives’ office door and glaring at them. She snatched a file from her desk. ‘Helgi, with me, right now. Grab a map.’
‘Map of where?’
‘Thingvellir. Eiríkur, go and find the Laxdal and bring him to the interview room right now.’
The door banged behind her and a moment later she was showing the old man Össur Óskarsson’s mugshot.
‘Is this one of the men?’ she asked, as Helgi appeared and sat next to her.
‘We can do this the easy way or we can do it the hard way,’ Magni warned. ‘And I reckon we’re going to be doing it the hard way.’
‘Why?’ Össur demanded. ‘You’re not going that way, are you?’ He shivered as he looked at the road that trailed off into the distance next to a signpost, beyond which the white landscape at some point merged into the pale sky.
‘Because everything that goes through the tunnel gets filmed and the number recorded, that’s why. Sooner or later they’ll be on our trail and that’s one of the things that’ll be checked.’
‘So the law will think we’re still in the south and not up north somewhere?’
‘Precisely.’
‘But is the road passable?’ Tinna Lind asked dubiously.
Magni beat an impatient tattoo on the steering wheel with his thumbs. ‘That’s what we’re about to find out.’
The Skoda bumped down the shallow incline and Magni was relieved to see that the snow was no more than ankle deep. He kept to third gear and a moderate speed, his eyes glued to the road ahead and aware that even a shallow drift of snow could be enough to bog them down in spite of the Skoda’s four-wheel drive.
A couple of times the car grounded, but its momentum was enough to keep it going through shallow drifts that meandered deceptively across the road. In places the wind had stripped the road surface bare, down to the deep potholes and long pools of dark water that Magni tried to steer around whenever he could. There was no other traffic to be seen other than a couple of roadworks vehicles parked by the side of the road in the lee of a metal shed, and Magni was thankful that nobody was likely to have noticed them.
With the junction to join the Hvalfjördur road practically in sight, the Skoda finally crunched to a halt in a drift that was a little too deep and wide for the car’s speed to carry it across.
‘Now we’re going to have to dig,’ he said. He handed a pair of gloves to Tinna Lind. ‘Ready?’
The chill of the wind was a shock after the warmth inside the car, cutting through their coats and biting at their cheeks. Magni set to with a will, first pacing through the drift to see how far they needed to go and then scooping away snow from around the front of the car. Tinna Lind shovelled snow from underneath, trying to clear the depth of snow the car had grounded on, while Magni cleared a path in front until he reckoned they should make it.
‘Everyone out,’ he ordered. Össur scowled and Erna’s face displayed how perplexed she was.
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘Because the lighter we can make the car, the easier it’ll be to get through this lot,’ Magni said, clapping his hands together to restore the circulation. ‘And I’ll need you all to push.’
‘Push?’
‘Or you can just stay in the car until the fuel runs out and then we can all freeze to death together. Up to you,’ he said, getting into the driver’s seat and holding the door open as he put it into gear. ‘All of you, line up at the back, and when I shout, lift and push. Now!’
The car inched forward, the front wheels gripping intermittently and hauling the car forward while Erna, Tinna Lind and Össur bumped the car up and down.
‘Harder!’ Magni yelled from the driver’s seat. ‘Almost there! Go on, push!’
For a long moment the car seemed to sit still in the pit it had dug for itself as Magni dropped the engine revolutions as low as he could until all four wheels finally found a purchase. He sighed with relief as it gradually picked up speed out of the drift, leaving the three of them sprawling in the snow. Tinna Lind helped Erna to her feet and took her arm to help her totter through the tracks the Skoda had left, and Össur struggled to his feet, panting with exertion.
‘Good stuff,’ Magni said when they reached where he had stopped in a clear patch of road. ‘With luck we won’t have to do that more than a couple of times.’
The Special Unit went in first and it wasn’t long before six black-clad figures emerged.
‘The place is empty,’ Steingrímur said with clear disappointment in his voice. ‘And it’s a hell of a pigsty.’
‘Eiríkur, go round the back and check the rest of the building, take pictures of everything, including those tyre tracks,’ Gunna instructed. ‘As soon as the forensic team show up we need to get the place swept for prints so we can find out just who has been here.’
The hotel’s yard was full. Two squad cars had come from Selfoss and Lárus Erlendsson had brought every available officer with him. The Special Unit had been delighted to be mobilized after a quiet few months, and as well as Gunna, Eiríkur and Helgi, six more officers in two squad cars had been dispatched on the hour’s drive to where Hotel Hraun occupied its quiet niche in the hills beyond Thingvellir.
Even Ívar Laxdal had arrived in his sinister black Volvo, the forensic unit following behind him. He emerged from his car and walked over to the door where Gunna and Helgi waited.
‘Situation, Gunnhildur?’
‘The place is deserted. The Special Unit has swept it and we’ll go in and have a quick look behind the forensic team,’ she said, unable to hide her chagrin. ‘They’re not long gone.’
‘How do you know?’
Gunna looked at the sky. ‘There was a bit of snowfall last night, I think; there’s been some rain this morning and the snow’s melting, but those tyre tracks are very fresh. Too crisp to be more than a few hours old, I’d say.’
‘New tyres as well,’ Ívar Laxdal said.
‘And a mobile phone black spot, too, I see,’ Gunna said, looking at her phone. ‘If it’s them, it’s no surprise their phones dropped off the networks out here. It looks like four people, judging by the footprints in the snow, and you can see where the car was parked when they all got into it.’
‘Hell and damnation. We could have had the lot of them if we’d been a couple of hours earlier.’
They watched as the two forensic technicians in their white overalls trooped in through the hotel’s front door.
‘Four sets of footprints tell me that Erna Björg and Tinna Lind are alive and that they’re all together.’
‘Which is certainly something to be thankful for. D’you want to do a press conference?’
‘I think so,’ Ívar Laxdal decided. ‘If this man is armed, we ought to warn people not to approach him.’
‘Fair enough. Will you do it or do you want to get someone higher up the food chain to talk to the press?’
‘I think I’m far enough up the pecking order to be able to take that kind of decision.’ Ívar Laxdal’s smile was as wintry as the terrain around them. ‘Although I’m wondering if the officer in charge of the investigation shouldn’t be the one who meets the press?’
Gunna blanched. ‘Really? You look so much better than I do in front of the cameras.’
‘We’ll do it together. I’ll see if I can get RÚV and Channel Two to send camera crews up here right away. If this man is dangerous, as you say, then we ought to get the warning out on tonight’s evening news.’ He looked around at the hotel in its sheltered position with hills on three sides. ‘A lovely spot in the summer, but damned desolate at this time of the year,’ he commented.
‘You’ve been here before?’
‘A few times, dinners and the like. It used to be quite an exclusive place, but it’s years since I was here last. What’s that heap over there by the forensic van?’
Darkness was approaching by the time the deserted whaling station hove into view, its pier a shadow against the water, glittering in intermittent moonlight beneath ragged clouds. The Skoda’s headlights swept the road ahead and Magni found himself relying on the reflective marker posts along the sides of the road. The road was mercifully clear of snow and he told himself that he had underestimated the power of the Gulf Stream that flowed around Iceland and the warm south wind to keep the coastal regions clear of snow. There had been no more need to get out and shovel the car clear of drifts, but he fretted about being late. He had wanted to be clear of the winding road around Hvalfjördur and to have completed this leg of the trip in daylight, but the long Kjós road had been a slow drive, even with just that one nervous patch they had been forced to struggle their way through.
Thin Ice: An Inspector Gunna Mystery (Gunnhildur Mystery Book 5) Page 18
