Frozen Assets

by Quentin Bates

  ‘Thanks. Now, I’m sure there won’t be any need for you to call these guys and warn them that we’re on the way, will there? Any more than there’ll be any need for us to pass anything on to the tax office?’

  She raised an eyebrow. Boxed into a corner, the man shook his head.

  30-08-2008, 1205

  Skandalblogger writes:

  It’s who you know . . .

  Just how does Scaramanga stay open? Mundi Grétars still has the enviable reputation of running Iceland’s last-remaining house of ill repute. Of course, we all know that the place is supposed to be a club like all the others. But unlike Odal and Bohem, where what you see is pretty much all you’re going to get, Mundi has a different set of rules. He knows that not discouraging the dancers from having their out-of-hours freelance activities doesn’t do the bar takings any harm at all.

  So just how much public money goes across Mundi Grétars’ bar, and how much of it makes its way back again? Skandalblogger hears that there’s a surprising number of our elders and betters who find their way to Scaramanga now and again, and some of these fine gentlemen are so concerned about the young ladies’ well-being that they send after-hours taxis to drive them home . . .

  A little bird whispers to Skandalblogger that several of our respected public servants, including a gentlemen’s club of highly placed law enforcement officials, have repeatedly torpedoed civic plans to withdraw Scaramanga’s licence. One of these guys, so we’re told, has formed a frequent and meaningful relationship with a young lady who dances. We’re sure his missus would be delighted if she knew . . .

  We’re the soul of discretion . . .

  Bæjó!

  ‘You know either of these guys, Geiri and Gústi?’ Gunna asked as she parked the car outside the block of flats in Breidholt among everything from wheelless wrecks perched on blocks to shiny SUVs.

  ‘Gústi’s an old favourite. Goes back a long way, assault, dope, the usual.’ Sævaldur grinned. ‘It’ll be interesting to catch up with him again. Ágúst Ásgeirsson, his name is. Didn’t you come across him when you were on the city force?’

  ‘You mean Gústi the Gob? Remember him well, a right creep he used to be. Wonder if he’s mellowed since we last met?’

  The outside door was wedged open and Sævaldur stepped inside to peer at the mailboxes. He wrinkled his nose at the sour smell in the block’s lobby.

  ‘You’ve forgotten what fun it is going to places like this, eh, Gunna?’ he said grimly as they ascended the bare concrete stairs.

  ‘Not having to deal with slobs like these is one of the perks of being a country copper. Maybe you should try for a transfer to Skagaströnd?’

  ‘Bloody hell, no. I don’t know how you manage with all those yokels. Right, this should be it,’ he said, hammering on the door.

  There was silence. Sævaldur hammered again.

  ‘Gústi! Open the bloody door, will you? It’s the law!’

  An eye appeared at the peephole and after a moment the door inched open to reveal a stubbled face, puffy with sleep.

  ‘What do the coppers want with me?’ he growled.

  ‘So you do remember us? How nice. Open up, we need to talk.’

  ‘Got a warrant?’

  ‘Don’t talk crap. I said talk, not search.’

  The little two-room flat was bare. A full-barrelled snore could be heard from the flat’s one bedroom. Sævaldur and Gunna took kitchen chairs while Gústi sat back on the sofa, flexing generous biceps and letting the towel he was wearing slip open, and leering at Gunna.

  ‘Who’s the bird, Sævaldur?’ he demanded. ‘I like big strong girls.’

  Gunna ignored the question and held up Einar Eyjólfur’s picture. ‘Seen this guy?’

  ‘Dunno,’ Gústi replied without looking.

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Poor bloke,’ Gústi said flatly.

  ‘He was in the Emperor on Monday evening, probably around or shortly after midnight.’

  ‘Shit, that was days ago. How should I know?’

  Gunna pretended to consult her notes, looking down at the paperwork in front of her as Gústi spread his knees a little wider.

  ‘Ágúst Ásgeirsson,’ she muttered as if speaking to herself, and looked up sharply. ‘This could well be a murder investigation, and you’re one of the last people to see this person alive. I can see you’ve had convictions for assault in the past, according to your record. I’d like to be able to rule you out as a suspect, but with this in front of me, I could have doubts.’

  Gunna was amused to see a brief look of fury in the man’s eyes, quickly replaced with irritation and finally with concern at the realization that not cooperating would do him little good.

  ‘Yeah, I seen him.’

  ‘When? On that night?’

  ‘Dunno. A few nights ago. Got into a ruck with some bloke in the bog. Must have trod on his toe or something.’

  ‘And what happened? Who was he arguing with?’

  ‘Don’t know. Don’t care,’ the surly mountain of a man replied, clearly not used to being overawed by the police. Gunna eyed him frostily, and scribbled notes in silence for long enough for Gústi to start fidgeting with the errant towel.

  ‘Tell me more.’

  To Gunna’s relief, Gústi closed his knees and sat up as his confidence ebbed away.

  ‘I heard a racket from the Gents and went to check it out. Happens all the time, two drunks having an argument, and one of them was him,’ he said, suddenly cooperative and pointing at the dead man’s photo. ‘That’s all. Told ’em to pack it in or get out. End of story,’ he added lamely.

  ‘And the other man?’

  ‘Dunno. Big bloke. Foreign. That’s all.’

  ‘Time?’

  ‘Dunno. Early. One-ish.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘Dunno. Wasn’t any more trouble, so they must have packed it in or fucked off out.’

  ‘As for this foreign bloke. Description?’

  ‘Tall. My height. Hell, it was dark, y’know?’

  ‘Thank you,’ Gunna said smoothly, rising to her feet as Sævaldur hauled himself upright. ‘You’ve been a great help.’

  ‘That’s all right. Always happy to help police ladies,’ he replied with a grin, before shooting a scowl towards Sævaldur.

  ‘Don’t push it, Gústi. We can always do you for indecent exposure, just like last time. Remember?’ Gunna asked sweetly.

  ‘How do you know? That was years ago . . .’ he protested as Gunna stepped out of the flat without waiting for Sævaldur to follow.

  6

  Monday, 1 September

  Gunna took advantage of Snorri and Haddi being out of the station to shove open the long lower panel of the office window and light a furtive Prince, in defiance of state policy on smoking throughout government buildings. Without feeling even slightly guilty, she leaned back in her chair and read through her interim report on Einar Eyjólfur Einarsson’s miserable death.

  Nobody appeared to have seen Einar Eyjólfur, 178cm tall, short fair hair, dressed in a pair of jeans and a black shirt, leaving the Emperor sometime in the early hours of 26 August.

  With no more evidence to work on and nothing to indicate violence, the case would probably be shelved indefinitely, an unsolved case to haunt her on sleepless nights. Gústi the Gob was not a realistic suspect and the news that Sævaldur had brought him in for questioning was disturbing. She hoped it was for no good reason other than for Sævaldur to vent his spleen on someone.

  ‘But why Hvalvík?’ Gunna muttered to herself.

  ‘Chief?’

  A door banged and Gunna dropped the butt of her cigarette out of the window before closing it. ‘In here, Haddi.’

  She decided to end her interim report and hit Save before standing up. There were other matters that needed to be attended to as well as Einar Eyjólfur Einarsson’s case.

  ‘All right?’ Haddi asked, sniffing the air accusingly.

  ‘Yup. Fine. I’m
going to lunch if you’ll be so good as to man the barricades.’

  Outside Hafnarkaffi, Gunna debated whether to have lunch there or go home for a sandwich. She weighed the idea of a hot meal, heavy on the potatoes and swimming in thick sauce in a noisy cafeteria, against tuna and tomato sandwiches washed down with fruit juice while skimming yesterday’s papers.

  Hot and noisy won. Inside, she picked up a tray and filled it with a dish of cauliflower soup and a plate of fried fish and boiled potatoes. Looking around for a seat, she noticed an arm waving to her.

  ‘Gunna. Here.’

  ‘Hey. Stefán, when did you get in?’

  ‘Just now. The missus is at work, so I thought I’d drop in here and catch up on the news.’

  A cousin of Gunna’s husband, Stefán Jónsson had gone out of his way to take her son Gísli under his wing after Raggi’s death. There had long been an unspoken bond between her and Stefán built on deep respect, but which had never become an outright friendship. Gísli had followed Stefán to sea on one of the trawlers owned by the village’s only large fishing company after Stefán had gone out of his way to put a word in on his behalf.

  ‘Good trip?’ Gunna asked, starting with the soup, contrary to local custom.

  ‘Not bad. A hundred and twenty tonnes. Blowing a bastard all the way home, though.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Deep off the west.’

  ‘So, will my Gísli be going there this year as well?’

  ‘No. It’s the Barents Sea for them. We took their quota as well as ours last year. This year they can have ours. I’m getting too old for these long trips.’

  ‘Get away, Stefán. There’re years left in a young man like you.’

  Stefán impatiently drummed his fingers on the table.

  ‘What’s on your mind?’ Gunna asked, recognizing the symptoms, in particular the heavy grey eyebrows swooping down over a frown as he tried to understand something he hadn’t fully got to grips with.

  ‘I was coming to see you later today anyway. About this chap.’

  ‘Which chap?’

  ‘The one you found out there down at the dock.’

  Gunna looked up from her meal. ‘And? What about him?’

  ‘I’m damned sure I saw him, or his car, or something.’

  ‘Tell me more,’ she said softly, knowing that there would be little need to ask many questions.

  ‘It was the night we sailed, Monday—Tuesday. I was up very early and went up the valley to have a look at my stables and had a drive round the dock too. You know, like you do.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘The boys look after the horses for me. But it’s in the blood. We were sailing at five that morning and I don’t like to go without seeing them off.’

  Gunna nodded, lunch forgotten in front of her.

  ‘Well, it was still dark, of course. Anyway, someone was there on the quay, which is a bit odd, but I thought nothing of it at the time. Who was the dead man, anyway?’

  ‘A kind of yuppie type who worked for a PR company in Reykjavík.’

  Stefán sniffed. ‘Then what the bloody hell’s someone like that doing out here in the middle of the night?’

  Gunna thought carefully while Stefán looked expectantly at her. It was unfortunate that the only potential eyewitness to what had happened up there had spent the last week at sea, but if this unidentified vehicle had anything to do with Einar Eyjólfur’s disappearance, then it pinpointed the time and date of the crime.

  ‘Anything else, Stefán? Make, model, number, anything like that?’

  ‘Big jeep sort of thing, not a Land Rover. Dark colour, black, blue, maybe? Couldn’t guess what kind, though. I only saw it for a moment as it went past. It looked pretty new to me, but what do I know? But I can tell you there was a JA in the number. That’s all.’

  ‘JA?’

  ‘That’s right. JA, Jóhanna Arnarsdóttir. It’s the missus’s initials, otherwise I wouldn’t have noticed.’

  ‘Thank you, Stefán. That’s a big help,’ Gunna said finally. ‘Now, if you’ll come up to the station with me for half an hour, I’d like to ask you to give me a statement. And then I have a report to rewrite, and some questions to ask,’ she added grimly.

  7

  Tuesday, 2 September

  ‘Gunnhildur?’

  Vilhjálmur Traustason’s hair was not so much carefully brushed as painstakingly sculpted. Youthful dark waves had long since given way to a thick distinguished grey that swept back from a parting as straight as a line ruled on a page. Admittedly the grey made him look older than his years. But all the same, it suited a senior officer, it suited his spare frame that had once been athletic, and he felt it suited the gravitas he wanted to project.

  ‘Yes, Vilhjálmur, what can I do for you?’

  Gunna turned to face the chief inspector. She had hoped to make one of her regular visits to the Keflavík station without running into Vilhjálmur Traustason, but there was no such luck on this occasion.

  ‘I wanted to speak to you about, er . . .’ he mumbled. ‘I wanted to speak to you. We had better go to my office,’ he decided.

  Vilhjálmur shut the door and waved Gunna to a seat, where she watched him as he scanned his desk.

  ‘Sævaldur has charged this man, Ágúst Ásgeirsson, with the murder of Einar Eyjólfur Einarsson.’

  ‘What? Gústi the Gob? He’s a nasty piece of work, but he’s not up to murder,’ Gunna said angrily. ‘That bloody Sævaldur, always taking the shortest cut he can.’

  Vilhjálmur looked pained. ‘Sævaldur is a very competent officer and he—’

  ‘Gets results, as you keep telling me,’ Gunna finished for him. ‘And how often do they get released as soon as it comes to court? How many times have Sævaldur’s victims sued the police for wrongful arrest or whatever?’

  Vilhjálmur Traustason was certain that he had a winning smile that he could treat his staff to when they needed his support. But in reality the sight of a slab of pearly dentistry without a shred of warmth to go with it was chilling rather than encouraging.

  ‘Well. Your record of arrests is actually rather impressive,’ he smiled. ‘Very good work with the arson case and with that fisherman landing over his quota.’

  ‘The arsonists were a bunch of fourteen-year-olds who didn’t need a lot of tracking down and you know perfectly well that Albert Jónasson’s case was all down to the Fisheries Office and not me.’

  ‘Still, you were the arresting officer and that’s what counts. Results,’ Vilhjálmur said with an imperious lifting of his angular nose. Gunna suddenly realized that he reminded her of nobody more than a Roman emperor. A toga would suit him.

  ‘It’s a crying shame we have to arrest people like Albert for just catching a few bloody fish. The man’s a perfectly law-abiding character and—’

  She stopped short, seeing Vilhjálmur’s eyes glazing over.

  ‘We’d best leave the politics to the politicians, shall we?’ he said, unable to conceal his lack of interest. ‘What I wanted to discuss with you is the review procedure.’

  ‘Review procedure?’

  ‘I’ve already had the files emailed to you, so you can assess your team’s performance against a set of criteria and we can collate statistics on effectiveness, initiative, et cetera, all of which can be cross-referenced against age, experience and a whole range of other factors. You’d be amazed at what a useful tool this can be in assessing which staff are best placed in which spheres of activity. Which areas our training needs to be focused on. That kind of thing. Spreadsheets are marvellous things.’

  ‘More paperwork?’ Gunna asked, trying unsuccessfully not to sound sarcastic.

  ‘The thing is, Gunnhildur,’ he continued, as if she had not said a word, ‘we have been working on identifying officers who might be suitable for new roles, and you are one of those we have identified.’

  Gunna stared, waiting for the next revelation.

  ‘You see,’ he went on smoothly, �
��in some divisions we have isolated personnel resource shortfalls that we are looking at rectifying.’

  ‘Which means you’re short of staff here and there, and you want to shuffle people about to plug the gaps?’

  ‘Erm. Those weren’t my words, but in essence, well, yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘As you are aware, there are difficulties with personnel and although recruitment is improving we have a problem with retention. So we have a need to deploy people to meet their optimum potential.’

  ‘Which means?’

  Vilhjálmur grimaced. He was getting a familiar sinking feeling that he was no longer running this meeting. Leaning forward, he looked down his nose at Gunna sitting in front of his desk.

  ‘Which means,’ he continued in what he hoped was a tone of voice that would spin the conversation around, ‘that as a skilled investigator, if you were to put in an application for a vacancy in detection, there is every possibility that you would be successful.’

  Gunna sat in amazed silence for a moment.

  ‘Does this take you by surprise?’

  ‘It does,’ she was forced to admit.

  ‘It would mean stepping up a grade, as the post carries an inspector’s rank.’

  ‘And what’s the catch?’

  Vilhjálmur looked pained. ‘Catch? What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’ve never believed in free lunches. So, being an experienced investigator, I’m naturally always looking for what’s underneath. Force of habit.’

  He cleared his throat, looked upwards and Gunna thought again of how a laurel wreath would suit him, nestling around those grey waves.

  ‘New grade effective from the first of October, you’d take over your new post on the first of December and you would have two months’ leave after stepping down at Hvalvík to relocate.’

  ‘Aha. Where to?’

  ‘There would be a reasonable relocation grant. The post is with the Egilstadir force, based in Seydisfjördur.’

  ‘So there is a catch,’ Gunna said with satisfaction.

  ‘It depends how you wish to look at it. Some officers would see it as an opportunity. A small force, fairly quiet, a chance to make an impression with the switch to plain clothes. You aren’t tempted?’