Frozen Assets

by Quentin Bates

  Bjarni Jón Bjarnason closed his eyes and collapsed in a heap on the sofa. ‘Bitch. That’s totally unfair. The fucking bitch.’

  ‘What the hell do you expect from some stupid lesbian communist fuckwit? You can’t expect them not to stick a knife into you now they have a chance, not after the way you’ve treated them in the past,’ Sigurjóna sneered.

  ‘It’ll be forgotten on Monday,’ Bjarni Jón said with satisfaction, levering himself to his feet to pour himself a hefty drink. ‘Want one?’

  ‘No,’ Sigurjóna said with determination, standing up.

  He poured a stiff vodka and brought the bottle with him to the table. Sitting down, he extracted a small cigar from an inside pocket and put it between his lips.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake. You’re not going to smoke that in here, are you?’ Sigurjóna demanded, scowling at him.

  ‘Yes, I bloody well am,’ Bjarni Jón replied airily.

  ‘In that case I’m going to the office.’

  ‘Do whatever the hell you like,’ he said, lighting up and contentedly blowing smoke towards the expensive abstracts on the walls for the first time. ‘You always have done, so why change now?’

  He felt happier with the arrangements for his fall-back plan. The airport had been too carefully watched and the hours in the air would have been too dangerous, leaving too much time for him to be noticed, calls to be made and a discreet tap on the shoulder at the destination airport where security would be tight in these days of international terrorism. He wondered how the unfortunate Ib Torbensen was feeling. Probably being waited on hand and foot in an Icelandic hospital.

  He stretched out in the narrow bed, extending his feet past the end of the heavy duvet that was made to suit someone twenty centimetres shorter, and wondered what time it was.

  Late in the evening he had tucked the little grey Toyota away behind the unobtrusive tarred wooden shed set well back from the road but with a view through the rattling windows of rain-laden skies to the west. The back door had opened with the same piece of plastic he had used on the fat policewoman’s door, only even more easily. Weeks before he had scouted out the area, noting the locations of remote summer cottages in case he might need to disappear. It wasn’t something he expected might happen, being a respectable employee of an international company, albeit with a false passport, but he’d done it anyway out of force of habit.

  He had two days to wait for Horst’s ticket off the island, two full days to lie low and stay out of trouble. Normally he would have relished the prospect of two days of solitude to spend watching a little TV, stretching and meditating, but this time Erna sashayed in front of him every time he closed his eyes, grinning as she peeled off her clothes.

  The car would have to be dumped, he decided. The fat policewoman would certainly by now be aware of the number and make of the car rented on the Danish guy’s credit card, so sometime during the day he would need to replace it discreetly. He wondered about laying a false trail for the fat policewoman to follow, even a strike of some kind to give them something else that would overload the country’s tiny police force beyond being able to seek out a single person making a quiet departure.

  ‘It’s all right, Mum,’ Laufey said. ‘I don’t mind staying with Sigrún.’

  Sprawled in an armchair, she returned her attention to Facebook and Gunna gave up.

  Sigrún leaned on the door frame with folded arms and grinned. ‘Don’t worry. She’s fine here.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure,’ Gunna said fretfully.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Sigrún said soothingly. ‘Is it that bloke who was on the news yesterday that you’re after?’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ Gunna admitted.

  ‘Then don’t worry about it. She’s fine here for a few days.’

  ‘Thanks, Sigrún. I owe you a huge favour,’ Gunna said, turning up her coat collar as close as it would go to her cap to trot the hundred metres uphill through the rain to her own house.

  She threw herself through the front door. Inside, she shook rain off her jacket, took it off and hung it on the door before kicking off her boots. Although the place felt empty without Laufey, it had a feel of habitation about it.

  ‘Hello!’ she called out loudly, striding to the kitchen to look around. Plates and dishes that she had not used were stacked on the draining board. In the living room, an empty wine bottle stood on the table.

  Gunna cast about, called again and went over to look at the sofa, rearranging the scattered cushions with swift movements. Spotting something white peeking from under a cushion in the corner, she pulled at it gently.

  ‘Hi, Mum.’

  A towel tied around his waist, Gísli rubbed his eyes as he emerged from his room to find Gunna sending a wry half smile towards him as she held up a lacy white bra.

  ‘Well, my lad. It’s definitely not one of mine,’ she said. ‘Far too small.’

  ‘Sorry, Mum.’

  ‘Company?’

  ‘Yeah. She’s still asleep.’

  ‘All right. I won’t disturb you. I’ve just nipped in for a shower and a change. Got to be back at the station soon again anyway.’

  Gísli grunted and went past her to the kitchen, and soon the flat was filled with the aroma of brewing coffee.

  For some reason she couldn’t put her finger on, her bedroom felt different, as if there were a fleeting aroma of someone else that she couldn’t quite catch hold of. Gunna threw clothes in a corner of her bedroom, wrapped herself up for Gísli’s benefit and made for the shower. A few minutes later she was towelling off vigorously, and was soon feeling properly awake again in a clean uniform shirt at the kitchen table as Gísli poured fresh coffee into a mug.

  ‘Mm, hello. The smell woke me up,’ a small voice behind her said.

  Gunna turned to see a round freckled face and flood of red hair streaming over the shoulders of one of Gísli’s shirts.

  ‘Mum, this is Soffía,’ Gísli announced with sheepish pride.

  ‘Hello, Soffía, pleased to meet you. I’m Gísli’s witch of a mum, but you call me Gunna.’

  ‘I know who you are. Gísli said you were in the police,’ she said slowly, sitting on Gísli’s knee and moulding herself to him.

  ‘When are you sailing, Gísli?’ Gunna said, draining her mug.

  ‘Not until next week. There’s no hurry since they cut the bloody quotas again.’

  ‘Fine. Are you staying here? It’s up to you. I’ve no idea when I’ll be back.’

  ‘We’ll stay here for a while, I think,’ Soffía said carefully. ‘If that’s all right with you?’

  ‘No problem. I’ll be back sometime. Just make sure my lad washes up after himself, won’t you?’ she said, standing up and making for the door, by which time the young couple were already wrapped precariously around each other.

  In the lobby, she half closed the door and bent to pull her boots on again, looking out through the narrow window by the door to see that the rain was beating down outside harder than ever.

  ***

  He drove slowly through Hafnarfjördur, down the hill from the town’s southern entrance and stopped at the lower quayside, thought about going into the café on the dock where he had eaten several times with Matti, but decided against it.

  With the wipers struggling to clear water from the windscreen, Hårde drove slowly up the slope and along the southern edge of the harbour area, through a small industrial estate crowded with fork-lift trucks, badly parked vans and large plastic tubs of fish waste along the sides of the road. Looking for a suitable opportunity, he carried on past the industrial zone, before taking a U-turn to double back, this time passing the bay towards the town itself.

  Confidence, that’s the key, he reminded himself. A man with a smile and a purpose doesn’t normally get asked what he’s doing.

  He parked neatly in a bay in the town centre and got out of the car to reconnoitre on foot, the collar of his jacket turned up, hands deep in his pockets. The small precinct of shops where he bo
ught a couple of pastries had a few people walking around, but both the post office and the bank in particular were busy with longish queues. Chewing a sweet roll, he timed a middle-aged lady as she entered the bank — it took her an encouraging eleven minutes to get her business concluded and leave. He went back to the car, where he sat watching the passers-by while he ate a second roll and drank the carton of fruit juice he had bought.

  He unfolded the free newspaper he had picked up without looking at it carefully and was jolted awake at the sight of a photo of himself at the bottom of the front page, one that he recognized as the Swedish police’s mug shot of him.

  He swore, anger rising inside him until he carefully stifled it. Only the woman serving at the shop counter had seen him clearly, and she had been a foreigner as well, not likely to read an Icelandic newspaper. Nobody else would need to see him anyway, so the photo in the paper needn’t be an issue.

  What had caught him off guard was that the fat policewoman was obviously further ahead of him than he had imagined. Maybe that stupid taxi driver had told them something? Or Sigurjóna, a person he would never be able to trust.

  He looked back at the paper and saw to his surprise that Sigurjóna was there on the cover too, one scarlet-taloned hand shielding a sour pout from a photographer’s flash, and he chuckled grimly to himself, well able to imagine what would be going on now that InterAlu had dropped its Icelandic partners.

  Ágúst Vilmundsson wasn’t having a good day. He had been late for work that morning, one of his men hadn’t turned up and he had had to reorganize the whole schedule for the day to fit in the six jobs that seven men would have to do between them, knowing full well that finishing four jobs of out of six would be good going.

  After the coffee break, he left the first job with two of the lads getting on well with the old lady’s new floor and decided that he would have to go and give a bit of moral support to the two finishing off fitting a kitchen in Kópavogur, but on the way he remembered that the sheaf of bills on the passenger seat would have to be paid and now was as good a time as any to stop off at the bank.

  Ágúst Vilmundsson cursed the rain as he drove into Hafnarfjördur, cursed it as he tried to find a spot to park and cursed yet more as he hurried across the car park to the bank with the rain fogging his glasses.

  Ten minutes later, he stepped back out into the rain, reminding himself for the hundredth time to get internet banking set up so he could pay bills in the evenings instead of having to do it when it didn’t suit him.

  At first he thought the drops of rain on his glasses were playing tricks on him, so he took them off and peered myopically about the car park. There was no doubt about it. He perched his glasses back on his nose and peered about him, spying a police car in the distance making sedate progress along the road between the bay and the rows of shops. He ran as fast as he could towards the road, crashing through sparse hedging plants along the road and waving.

  The police car drew to a gentle halt beside him and a window hissed down.

  ‘Got a problem?’ the young officer inside asked, looking over at him.

  ‘Some bastard’s stolen my truck,’ Ágúst Vilmundsson announced bitterly, as if the day hadn’t been miserable enough already.

  Sightings of Hårde trickled in, with each report filled and passed over to Gunna’s team. By late morning they had chased up a dozen leads, liaising with police in Reykjavík to coordinate inquiries in and around the city.

  ‘No, that’s perfectly all right. Thank you for your help.’ Gunna heard Snorri finishing a call and swearing under his breath the moment the receiver was on the hook.

  ‘What was that?’ she asked as Snorri scrawled ‘No further action’ across the report sheet in big letters.

  ‘Ach, you know how it is when there’s an appeal on the TV. That was an elderly lady in Húsavík. It seems there’s a Polish fishworker living in the flat above her who she thinks might be Hårde. The guy’s been living there for the best part of a year, he’s short and fat with a black beard, but as he’s foreign she thought it might be him in disguise.’

  ‘Sure you don’t want to check it out?’ Bára asked sweetly.

  ‘Please . . .’ Snorri said as the phone trilled again.

  Bára followed Gunna outside to the smoking spot by the back door and watched as Gunna lit up, frowning.

  ‘If you were in a strange country and needed to stay out of sight for a while, what would you do?’ Bára asked her.

  Gunna inhaled deeply and thought. ‘I’ve no idea off the top of my head. What about you?’

  ‘I reckon either somewhere very unobtrusive, right off the beaten track, or smack in the centre of things. If I was trying to stay out of sight and didn’t have to worry about cash, I’d book into the smartest hotel I could find. You remember how snobby and unhelpful they were at Hotel Gullfoss?’

  Gunna nodded. ‘You’re quite right, although I can’t see our boy checking in there somehow. But it fits. The man does have a certain style,’ she admitted.

  Gunna ground her half-smoked Prince beneath a heel and they walked back towards the incident room where Snorri was watching his computer screen while carrying on a conversation through the headset clamped to one ear.

  ‘Thank you, yes. We’ll follow that up. Goodbye,’ he said, hanging up.

  ‘Anything useful?’ Gunna demanded.

  ‘Petrol station attendant on Hringbraut. Reckon he sold Hårde a hot dog and a bottle of mineral water last night. Worth a visit, d’you reckon?’

  ‘Definitely. You’d best get on with that right now and check on that report from the girl in Hafnarfjördur who saw him this morning while you’re at it. But first, Snorri, tell me something.’

  ‘Chief?’

  ‘If you were on the run and wanted to keep a low profile, what would you do? Come on, let’s think about what one of us might do in Hårde’s position.’

  ‘Me?’ Snorri said slowly. ‘I’d just live in the car for a couple of days, park up here and there, keep moving around. Maybe find a shed or something to lie low in, or maybe a boat somewhere. There’s plenty of decommissioned boats around that aren’t going anywhere. It depends how long,’ he finished.

  ‘That’s just it. It depends how long for,’ Gunna mused. ‘People get noticed around harbours now that they’re so quiet. I’m inclined to go along with what you said, Bára.’

  ‘Which was what?’ Snorri asked.

  ‘Do it in style. Check into the priciest hotel in town. Bára, as it was your idea, you’d better see to this. Go round all the hotels within spitting distance, do all of them.’

  Bára nodded and went to her desk to pick up the phone as Snorri pulled his jacket and squared his cap on his head.

  ‘Bára, you can ask Sævaldur — sorry, tell Sævaldur we want three or four of his people to help out with this and see if you can get round the whole lot before midnight. Organize it for lateish this evening, so it takes in people checking into hotels tonight as well. All right?’

  ‘Yup,’ Bára said, looking up as Snorri stepped out of the room, holding the door wide for Vilhjálmur Traustason accompanied by the brooding form of Ívar Laxdal.

  ‘Progress, Gunnhildur?’ Vilhjálmur asked gently, while the National Commissioner’s deputy cast his eyes around the room.

  ‘Bugger all, actually. Hårde’s been seen in practically every part of Iceland in the last twenty-four hours, and most of them we can discount entirely once we’ve spoken to the person calling in. A couple of sightings in Reykjavík and Hafnarfjördur, one from a petrol station on Hringbraut that sounds convincing, and then there’s a girl who works in a coffee shop in Hafnarfjördur who says she sold him a couple of Danish pastries. That’s convincing as the girl’s from Estonia and said the way the man spoke sounded familiar. Snorri’s on his way to interview her and see if there’s any relevant CCTV footage anywhere. That’s it for now. We’re organizing a sweep of hotels this evening in case he’s booked himself in somewhere.’

  ‘Yo
u think that’s likely?’ Ívar Laxdal asked forbiddingly.

  ‘I’m not convinced,’ Gunna admitted. ‘But I think we have to check. I feel it fits in with the man’s character. He does things in style.’

  ‘Up to you. But I’ve read the file from Sweden as well. He’s a military man and used to roughing it. Don’t rule that out.’

  ‘Point taken,’ Gunna agreed. ‘But I’m following Bára’s idea of the hotels in the first instance. I have the feeling that this might be a way of wrong-footing us as something we wouldn’t expect, so it’s worth a look. If nothing comes of it this evening, we’ll think again.’

  Gunna pursed her lips in irritation. ‘The problem is,’ she went on, ‘we don’t know what he’s waiting for. Does he have a deadline? We don’t know if he’s waiting for anything in particular other than a chance to get the hell off this island. We don’t know if he’s on his own or if he has friends helping him out. I’d really like to haul Sigurjóna over the coals one more time on this. If she’s not helping Hårde, she’d have a damn good idea who might be.’

  Vilhjálmur Traustason looked worried. ‘She is a minister’s wife,’ he reminded her.

  ‘A bent minister,’ Gunna retorted.

  Ívar Laxdal opened his mouth to speak when Bára interrupted. ‘Gunna! Chief!’ she squawked, hand over the phone.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The car’s been found.’

  ‘The rental car?’

  ‘Yup. It’s in Hafnarfjördur. A traffic warden saw it had been there past the time limit, wrote out a ticket, then she checked the number and it flashed up as missing. No doubt about it.’

  ‘Right. Snorri’s on his way, right? Tell Reykjavík to get a technical team and a dog on to it right this minute, and I don’t give a stuff if they say they’re busy.’

  ‘Lárus Jóhann.’

  ‘It’s me. I need a favour.’

  ‘Bjarni Jón. I hardly expected a call from you.’

  ‘Yeah. I have a lot to deal with right now,’ Bjarni Jón Bjarnason murmured into the phone. He tried to keep his voice as low as possible and was hoping that he could make a few necessary calls without alerting Sigurjóna, still sitting blank-eyed in front of the 24/7 News.