Cold Steal

by Quentin Bates

  Ívar Laxdal found her in the detectives’ office as her computer was powering up.

  ‘Gunnhildur,’ she heard behind her as she typed in her password. ‘I hope you feel better for the break?’

  She swung her chair around and saw the granite face of the National Commissioner’s deputy, his blue eyes sparkling with an intelligence and humour his deadpan expression rarely betrayed.

  ‘Not bad, I suppose. Another week would have been good, but you can’t have everything.’

  ‘Indeed, and someone has to right wrongs and lock up bad guys.’ He looked around the deserted office. ‘Where’s Helgi?’

  ‘On leave, as of yesterday. Gone up north for a week.’

  ‘And Eiríkur?’

  ‘He should be here at twelve – first day after a month’s paternity leave.’

  ‘Paternity leave,’ Ívar Laxdal said as if the words hurt him. ‘In my day there was no such thing. I was at sea when my eldest was born and didn’t even see him until he was almost a month old.’

  ‘Thanks for the call yesterday. I was just watching the news when you rang up. Anything new?’

  Ívar Laxdal rubbed his chin, his thumbnail rasping against the bristles.

  ‘Yes. The victim is Vilhelm Thorleifsson, forty-one years old, resident in Copenhagen since 2009. His name hasn’t been released yet.’

  ‘He was shot? Any more details yet?’

  ‘Strangely, it was two rounds from a .22 weapon. I’d have gone for something heavier if I wanted to finish someone off, but if you’re accurate and it’s at close range, it’ll do the job well enough. There’s a witness as well, not that it seems she can tell us much.’

  ‘Serious stuff.’

  ‘As you say, serious stuff,’ Ívar Laxdal said. ‘The witness is nineteen years old, saw the whole thing at close quarters and is now traumatized and sedated. So we’ll see what comes out of it all.’

  Gunna saw with dismay that the screen of her computer was filled with emails demanding immediate attention.

  ‘What do you want me to do? Is Sævaldur looking after this one?’

  Ívar Laxdal let fall a rare smile. He was aware of the friction between Gunna and her chief inspector colleague and she knew that he preferred them not to clash.

  ‘Of course Sævaldur is involved. He was at the scene half the night with the forensic team and they’re still up there knocking on doors, if they can find anyone at this time of year. But this one is mine, I’m afraid, instructions from . . .’ He lifted his eyes to the ceiling. ‘You know what I mean. To start with I want Sævaldur and his team investigating the scene. I want you and Eiríkur working on the victim’s background.’

  ‘You said he lived in Copenhagen?’

  ‘That’s right. His wife and daughter will be here this evening. I’m sure she’ll be delighted when she finds out what he was up to.’

  ‘All right. You want me to meet her at the airport, or is that being done by family?’

  ‘Leave her until tomorrow. Start on his business background today.’

  ‘Another shady businessman?’

  Another rare smile. ‘I know how much you enjoy the company of men in smart suits, even if they’re dead,’ he said, silently leaving the room and contriving not to bang the door.

  ‘Yeah, right. Especially when they’re dead,’ Gunna muttered to herself.

  Natalia dragged hard on the last millimetres of her cigarette and threw the butt out of the window, where it joined the ones from the week before and the week before that on the roof of the garage.

  ‘Someone has been here,’ Emilija said, as if that were an offence of some kind. ‘The toilet has been used. I’m sure of it.’

  Natalia shrugged. ‘So? Somebody must live here, surely?’

  Emilija let herself sink deep into the leather sofa that filled one end of the apartment’s living room, directly opposite a vast TV screen that filled almost the whole of the opposite wall.

  ‘If whoever lives here had left the remote on the table, then we could have TV on while we work,’ she said wistfully.

  ‘Nobody lives here,’ Natalia said.

  All winter the three Reindeer Cleaners had arrived to clean houses in this smart, half-built suburb. Today’s job was to scrub the kitchen and the luxurious bathrooms, vacuum the living room and dust the bedrooms that rarely appeared to be slept in. The job had become easier and easier as there was so little to be done. The apartment was always as spotlessly clean as it had been when they left it the previous week. Nothing was ever out of place. The kitchen was never used and the bathroom remained pristine.

  ‘Who lives in this place?’ Emilija asked. ‘I want to know who can afford to leave a place like this empty. If I knew who it was, hell, I’d screw the life out of him and live here myself.’

  A wicked smile flashed across Natalia’s sharp face. ‘A rich man, yeah. If I knew, I’d have him first.’

  ‘As long as he’s old and won’t last too long,’ Emilija mused.

  ‘Men again?’ Valmira asked, appearing in the doorway with the vacuum cleaner tucked under one arm. ‘Are we finished?’ She put the vacuum cleaner down by the door and ticked the boxes on her list. Everything had been done, even though nothing had needed to be done, but she still walked around the place to check.

  ‘Why do we clean this place, do you think?’ Emilija asked, letting herself fall backwards onto the deep sofa next to Natalia and lifting her feet onto the long coffee table, a deep grey slab of stone on four steel legs. There were bags under her eyes and she wanted to close them and spend the rest of the afternoon on that welcoming sofa.

  ‘A friend of the boss owns it,’ Natalia said. ‘I heard him talk about it once on the phone. He said he’d have the place cleaned every week. He thinks I don’t understand what he says,’ she added, grinning wickedly.

  ‘I’m not so sure. I reckon he wants you to think that,’ Emilija said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘No, Viggó’s a pretty stupid guy.’

  ‘It belongs to a friend of Viggó’s father,’ Valmira said thoughtfully, appearing in the doorway from the echoing hall and walking to the window. ‘Natalia, you’d better stop throwing those cigarette ends out of the window. Someone’s going to notice them. Anyhow, we’re back here tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow? Not possible,’ Natalia said with a flash of anger in her voice as she sat up straight.

  ‘Down the street. Booked for tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘Shit, why not now?’ Emilija asked, getting to her feet. ‘That means we have to come all the way out here tomorrow and we’re not paid for travel, are we?’

  Valmira walked stiffly away from the window and the others recognized the look on her face, knowing there was a depth of trauma in her that they could not understand properly and had never felt comfortable asking about.

  ‘Ready, are we?’ She asked, trying to sound bright.

  Middle-aged people were the best. Orri preferred not to steal from the elderly, not because his conscience might trouble him, but because there was something about the old that disturbed him. People who had retired had a strange smell about them, they lived among clutter and rubbish, and their valuables were scattered in the unlikeliest places.

  Middle-aged people had more of the easily disposable toys that were worth money, computers and gadgets that fetched good money and which the Baltic boys could sell easily enough. While the younger generation had its own expensive toys as well, those houses were more likely to have an alarm that worked or, worse, small children in the house.

  No, people in comfortable middle age with cash to spare and their offspring long gone were the best option. They were the people with everything in order: cash in a sensible place, a wad of dollars or euros left over from that last holiday, a smart laptop that had hardly been used, antiques on display in glass cabinets rather than at the backs of drawers full of ancient oddments. These were the people who had sat on their cash, not the mortgaged-to-the-h
ilt people in their thirties who had come out of the crash so badly.

  Orri wondered why he was in the old couple’s house, considering his aversion to the young and the elderly. But the answer was simple enough. The back door had been left unlocked. Hidden by a hedge on one side and in the shadow of the garage, it was just too easy to walk in and help himself. With a slim torch held between his teeth to cast a pool of light in front of him, Orri went through the bedroom drawers systematically. Some housebreakers would gleefully scatter everything in their wake, breaking anything that might be in the way and leaving trails of muddy footprints and worse. That wasn’t Orri’s style. He felt that making a mess was unprofessional. Ideally, he wouldn’t leave a trace, and sometimes days or weeks would pass before people realized there had been a visitor, by which time any trail had long gone cold and the goods had been safely disposed of.

  This time he was lucky. There was gold and silver to be had, a dozen krugerrands, a heavy necklace and a couple of bracelets and chunky pendants that he quickly stowed in his bag without looking too carefully. Metal was good and the Baltic boys would give him a price for it. Melted down, it became untraceable, and there was always a market for it.

  A leather wallet made of some soft skin yielded a handful of cash in a variety of currencies, which he stuffed into a trouser pocket before he decided that enough was enough for a few quick minutes of easy work. It might take weeks for the couple whose bedroom he had invaded to notice that the cash and jewellery had vanished, and he made a swift exit. He clicked the back door locked. He dropped the torch into his jacket pocket and froze, standing with his back to the wall between the house and the garage.

  He heard car doors slam twice in quick succession and a bang as the house’s front door shut, and he hurried on silent feet to the corner and saw a BMW parked squarely in the drive. Lights were being switched on inside as he looked around and made a dash for the street. It took a matter of only a few seconds before he was off the drive and walking along the road towards where he had parked the van around the corner, still loaded with boxes to be delivered.

  His heart still in his mouth, he got in the van and was gone in a few seconds, still waiting to hear cries of anger and the slap of flat feet on the wet pavement. At the traffic lights at the end of the road he watched the mirrors carefully, but there was nothing to be seen, no cars behind him, nobody on foot. He peeled off his latex gloves and dropped them into the passenger side footwell as he congratulated himself on a job well done, laughing out loud as he left the quiet street behind him.

  It was Eiríkur’s first day back and he looked tired, with bags under his eyes and a hangdog look about him.

  ‘Welcome back,’ Gunna greeted him. ‘And congratulations. How’s the little one doing?’

  Eiríkur’s smile lit up his wan face. ‘He’s the most beautiful baby in the world, of course. But he’s been keeping us up, and so has his sister.’

  ‘Jealous, is she?’

  ‘A little. But we’ve been trying to give her as much attention as we can, but it’s not easy.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ Gunna said. ‘I’m afraid you have to be firm as well as loving, unfortunately, and it can’t always be painless.’

  ‘I know. I’m not really sorry to be back at work, to be honest,’ he said, dropping his voice as if he were confessing a sin.

  ‘Don’t worry about it. I could never have stopped working. I’d have happily sold both mine if I’d had to spend all day every day with them.’

  ‘Where’s Helgi?’ Eiríkur asked, looking at Helgi’s unusually tidy and clearly empty desk.

  ‘On holiday. He’s driving to Blönduós today and he’ll spend the next two weeks in some remote valley helping sweet baby lambs into the world, and I imagine in the autumn he’ll want another week’s holiday to go and help his brother round up those same lambs and send them off to be slaughtered.’

  ‘Oh,’ Eiríkur said, and sat down at his own desk and watched his computer start up. ‘I didn’t realize he was on holiday. Are we busy? You want me to take over any of Helgi’s caseload?’

  ‘There’s an assault case that Helgi’s working on which I need you to do some work on. It’s a hit-and-run thing, but it seems that it might have been deliberate. You’ll find the notes on the system, so you’d best have a read through it and I’ll fill you in on the details afterwards. Then there’s a couple of muggings that seem to have got out of hand, with a little more violence than usual. That’s a lowlife by the name of Thór Hersteinnsson. We know it’s him, but there’s precious little hard evidence and nobody he knows wants to give a statement.’

  Eiríkur’s face fell. ‘I’ve encountered this Thór before. Not the pleasantest of people, I have to say.’

  ‘He has an alibi for both muggings, provided by various of his friends and therefore dubious, so if you could crack one or both of those, we’ll be doing nicely.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Oh, no. We have a dead businessman to deal with. Don’t you watch the news?’

  ‘I thought Sævaldur would have been looking after that as we were both off?’

  ‘He is, but so are we. All of us under the Laxdal’s eagle eye. Briefing at two, so I’d better find something out about this man. You’ll be on this as well.’

  Eiríkur sat back in his chair and gazed at the computer screen in front of him and the piles of paper between it and him, all of which demanded attention. Gunna could see his eyes starting to glaze over at the prospect.

  ‘Small, Medium and Large,’ Viggó announced from behind the desk in the corner of the garage. ‘Bang on time, my darlings.’

  ‘You go fuck yourself, fat boy,’ Natalia grunted with Viggó out of earshot, but only just; he cupped an ear.

  ‘Hey, what d’you say?’

  ‘I say, nice to see you, boss,’ she replied with a broad smile and exaggerating her accent almost to a parody of herself.

  Viggó’s eyes narrowed as she bustled past with her box of cloths, brushes and sprays, and Valmira handed mops, buckets and the two heavy-duty vacuum cleaners out of the van to Emilija.

  ‘Hey, Small, Medium and Large!’

  This time Natalia’s eyes narrowed while Emilija and Valmira pointedly ignored the names he had given them.

  ‘What is it?’ Valmira finally asked.

  ‘Which of you three has the first aid certificate?’

  ‘We all have first aid training. It’s in the contract, and you made us pay for it as well. Remember?’

  Viggó spread his hands wide in innocence. ‘I don’t make the rules, girls. It’s not up to me.’

  ‘You not the boss then?’ Emilija asked, stacking the equipment on racks against the wall.

  ‘Yeah, I’m the boss.’

  Emilija shrugged. ‘You don’t make rules. You not boss. Simple,’ she said, without stopping what she was doing. Both she and Natalia kept their conversations to the simplest Icelandic they could while Viggó was anywhere near, leaving Valmira to speak for them. None of them found it odd that they all used Icelandic every day between themselves as the only language they all had in common, but were careful not to let Viggó find out they could understand everything he said.

  Valmira was different, they felt. She had come to Iceland with what remained of her family as a hollow-eyed child refugee from a war-torn part of the Balkans that she never spoke about. Only the limp that stiffened in cold weather and the occasional suppressed hiss of pain as she bent to pick something up gave away the old injuries they had never dared ask about. Valmira, or Large, as Viggó preferred to call her, had been in a proper office job before the financial crash had bankrupted the import company she had worked for practically overnight, and she spoke a dozen languages, including Icelandic as well as any local, apart from an accent that only tiredness brought out.

  ‘I’m the man in charge here and don’t you forget it,’ Viggó warned, his face reddening.

  ‘You daddy. He boss. Not you,’ Natalia said with venom behind her swee
t smile.

  ‘You be careful, Small. Mind your manners or you’ll be sacked.’

  Natalia smiled again, just as sweetly, her tiny teeth bared. ‘You daddy, he love me. He don’t sack people who work hard.’

  ‘Viggó, we’re doing another house on Kópavogsbakki tomorrow,’ Valmira asked, anxious to interrupt the banter between Viggó and the girls before it became a squabble. ‘Is there a reason why we couldn’t do it at the same time as the one we did today? I mean, it would save us a drive, and you know we lose out by having to drive all the way there twice.’

  Viggó sat down again and propped his feet in their smart trainers on the desk. ‘We’ll do it tomorrow because that’s what’s on the rota,’ he said in a sour tone.

  ‘I know. I’m just asking. If we do the downstairs flat again next week, can we arrange to do them together? It saves time.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ Viggó decided. ‘It depends how I feel. But it has to be tomorrow, because that’s what the client asked for. Simple,’ he said, mimicking Emilija’s accent and eliciting an angry sideways look from her as she stalked to the canteen, leaving him to giggle to himself at his own cleverness.

  ‘You all know each other so no introductions needed,’ Ívar Laxdal announced to the room. A dozen people sat haphazardly in hard chairs. ‘Sævaldur, begin, if you please.’

  The force’s red-faced and newest chief inspector stood up with his beefy arms folded.

  The victim is Vilhelm Thorleifsson, forty-one years old, resident in Copenhagen. Married with one child,’ he began.

  Ívar Laxdal made an impatient circular motion with one hand, a silent encouragement to get to the point, but Sævaldur either failed to notice or else would not be moved, as he went through the victim’s school and university qualifications before getting to the point.

  ‘The killing took place in a summer house in Borgarfjördur, owned by one of the victim’s companies. He was shot twice with a .22 calibre weapon, once in the throat, once in the head. We are looking for two people and we have practically nothing to work with. There are no prints at all that can’t be accounted for. There are a couple of footprints outside, but they could have been made by any of a dozen people. We do have a witness, Yulia Bushuyeva, says she’s nineteen, but she’s twenty-three according to her passport. Russian national, speaks reasonable English and doesn’t know more than a few words of Icelandic. According to her, the two men spoke English, but she’s not able to say whether they had accents or not.’