Cold Steal

by Quentin Bates

  ‘The names ring a bell,’ Björgvin said thoughtfully. ‘A company called Sólfell Investment, which went bankrupt a while ago for quite a few million and with no assets. I’ve encountered Vilhelm Thorleifsson and Elvar Pálsson before. Not recently, but their names have cropped up. This is the character who was murdered in Borgarfjördur, right?’

  ‘That was Vilhelm.’

  ‘He had been involved in some investments, but I gather his business isn’t in Iceland these days. You know the kind of thing with companies owning shares of other companies and the trail going dead in Cyprus or Tortola? He had been a shipbroker a few years ago and did some deals in West Africa, something to do with landing illegal fish outside the EU and getting it repacked with all the right certificates. There was an EU investigator enquiring about him not long ago, but I don’t think it came to anything.’

  ‘But are he and Elvar Pálsson working together?’

  ‘Probably.’ He smiled wryly. ‘It’s not a big country, you know. Iceland’s business community isn’t that large, so you can keep tabs on who’s doing what even when it’s nothing we need to take a direct interest in. The hard part is when we do have to take an interest because it gets so complex.’

  ‘Why does all this stuff have to be so complicated?’ Gunna asked, knowing that the question was a stupid one but still determined to ask.

  Björgvin shrugged and smiled weakly. ‘It’s hard to tell,’ he said finally. ‘I suppose it’s fashionable to tie things up in knots, and it keeps the accountants and lawyers in business. Let’s say that if there are many entities involved, then ownership can get very complex, with percentages of this owned by one company and a share of something else held by another, and so on. That’s one reason,’ he said and paused.

  ‘And the other?’

  ‘It’s the obvious one. It’s to discourage people like you and me from figuring out what’s really going on. The more complex the ownership, especially when foreign subsidiaries are involved, then generally the more reason there is to dig into what somebody wants to keep quiet.’ He sighed and leaned back. ‘And it’s worth keeping in mind that much of this is aimed solely at avoiding paying tax. It’s when it becomes evasion rather than avoidance that it gets sticky.’

  ‘Rather you than me, Björgvin. But could you have a look at these people, or have a trawl through the archives?’

  He rocked gently back and forth in his chair, chin in hand. ‘I’ve heard these names before, Jóhann Hjálmarsson and Sunna María Voss. Any relation to Jón Vilberg Voss, by any chance?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet, but it sounds likely.’

  ‘Ah.’ Björgvin’s face lit up. ‘I know him, slightly. He’s practically a relative, actually. His ex-wife is my cousin.’

  ‘Small world.’

  ‘In the rest of the world there are supposed to be six degrees of separation between any two individuals. That’s the theory. In Iceland, it’s something like two degrees at most. Like I said.’ He grinned. ‘It’s a small country. What’s your theory on all this?’

  Gunna splayed her palms wide. ‘The murder says payback to me. Very professional and no traces, no leads. I’m wondering if he did a deal that went sour and someone is settling a score, maybe to maintain face. If it’s anything to do with the companies that these four people owned, or still own jointly, then I really don’t want the others to be blasted on my patch.’

  Orri found he was sweating by the time he reached the van. His breath gradually slowed and his heart stopped racing as he wondered if almost being seen had given him the shock, or if it had been the unexpected sight of the dentist’s statuesque wife in the mirror that had given him a turn.

  He switched on the engine and listened to it hum as he conjured up the sight again in his mind; he shivered as he realized what could have been if he had been a few minutes earlier or later. He could have walked straight into the woman, or else her boyfriend could have found him on those metal stairs with nowhere to go. Orri felt slightly sick at the thought. He had been inside countless people’s houses and never took chances. His visits were careful and he made sure people were at work or on holiday when he arrived to relieve them discreetly of their valuables.

  Orri felt he had let himself down and couldn’t understand why he had gone against his instincts by breaking his own rules twice in quick succession. He slipped the van into gear and headed back to town. Shaken, he drove more slowly than usual. By the time he pulled up outside his flat at the less fashionable far end of Kópavogur his growling stomach insisted it was lunchtime.

  His heart sank as he noticed Lísa’s tired Ford parked in his space. He tried to remember if she had mentioned she was coming over today, and he was tempted to drive away and have an hour or two to himself, but the thought of another spell in heavy traffic without anywhere particular to go wasn’t appealing and he got out of the car. He liked the girl, and she clearly liked him a lot. How they had become a couple was something he didn’t quite understand. It had been a rare one-night stand for each of them, as they both felt they had long grown out of spontaneous Friday night couplings with virtual strangers. But Lísa hadn’t gone home the next morning, and within a week it was as if they had been married longer than Orri’s grandparents.

  He took the flights of steps at a run, wondering if Lísa had come to cook, if a take-away was more likely, or if she expected him to take her out. Orri had no desire to go out and a takeaway would be his preferred option, he decided. A meal, an afternoon in front of the TV and an uncomplicated screw, either in bed or on the carpet if Lísa were feeling adventurous. But the smell of spices hit him before he had even reached his front door and he knew that he would have to be complimentary about something experimental.

  Lísa was hunched over a pan on the stove, her glasses teetering on the end of her nose as she pushed onions and peppers around in the sizzling oil.

  ‘Hæ, sweetheart.’ She smiled. ‘All right, are you?’

  ‘Not so bad,’ he allowed, dropping his jacket onto the back of a chair and disappearing into the spare room that he had used to accumulate junk of various kinds, although it was all ordered and he could put his hand on anything he wanted. He put the torch, his phone-jamming device and the lightweight backpack that folded down into a package the size of a wallet into a drawer and went back to the kitchen. Normally he would have stashed his burglary gear in the storeroom in the basement, but by now there was meat sizzling in the pan and the smell was making him hungry.

  He wondered if Lísa suspected what he did on odd afternoons and weekends, and why when he wasn’t at work he was so often out of touch. He poured a glass of the red wine that Lísa had brought with her.

  ‘Skál.’

  ‘Skál, honey,’ she replied, pouring the onions back into the pan with the chopped meat and adding a little water and a big squeeze of tomato paste. ‘Hot, or very hot?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘One chilli or two?’

  ‘Two,’ he decided. ‘Good day?’

  ‘Breakfast shift, so I’ve been up since five.’

  ‘Early night, then?’

  She pushed her glasses up and smiled invitingly. ‘If you say so. How was your day?’

  ‘Y’know,’ he said, sipping wine and thinking of the dentist’s wife and her voluptuous figure, which contrasted with Lísa’s spare frame. Still thinking of the figure in the shower, he gave Lísa a hug from behind, easily cupping her breasts in his hands.

  ‘You smell of swimming pool,’ he said, his nose in her still damp hair.

  ‘Forty lengths,’ Lísa said, wriggling free in his embrace as she stirred the pan. ‘Get me the big pot for the pasta, will you?’

  Chapter Four

  Gunna already felt frustrated at the lack of progress. Sævaldur and his team were busy with the murder scene in Borgarfjördur and she had to keep telling herself that she and Eiríkur had not been sidelined. She reminded herself several times that Ívar Laxdal had told her clearly to leave Sævaldur to his part of the
investigation and that she should concentrate on the victim’s background. One aspect that she had to admit to herself made it less easy to get to grips with the case was that Vilhelm Thorleifsson had been a deeply unsympathetic character. Every morsel of information she uncovered about the man convinced her that it would only have been a matter of time before he was murdered, as his companies went bankrupt leaving fuming creditors in their wakes, while he continued to live a charmed life.

  One contact whispered bitterly that it wasn’t just the impending financial crash that had sent him to do business overseas, but the fact that so few people in Iceland were prepared to trust him any more.

  A few hours on the phone, including a short conversation with the man’s estranged wife, had told her that the victim’s business partner Elvar Pálsson was living in London, as far as anyone knew, but had business interests in Britain and the Baltic States. Gunna reflected that half a dozen foreign police forces were now probably getting sick of repeated requests for information on this pair of Icelandic financial cowboys.

  Although what appeared to be the pair’s main business vehicle in Iceland, Sólfell Investment, had ceased trading more than a year earlier, she found the names of Vilhelm Thorleifsson and Elvar Pálsson listed among the directors of a dozen companies. One had its address registered at the chalet where Vilhelm Thorleifsson had been murdered. Two were registered at an address in Kópavogur and the rest at the Reykjavík address where the defunct Sólfell Investment had been based. The national register showed her that Elvar Pálsson had his legal address registered overseas and the phone book listed a couple of the companies at the same Reykjavík address.

  After half an hour of producing a chart of ownership and cross-ownership on a whiteboard, Gunna stood back and admired her handiwork, shaking her head at the criss-crossed red, green and blue lines. With Vilhelm Thorleifsson’s name in the centre of the board, it was clear that there was a network of people with reasons to wish him harm as well as those he had collaborated with. But as well as Elvar Pálsson’s name, the multi-coloured strands pointed repeatedly at two more names and Gunna went back to the national register and the phone book to track down Sunna María Voss and Jóhann Hjálmarsson.

  Orri had done his homework. The house he had visited belonged to Sólfell Property ehf, a limited company owned by Sunna María Voss and her dentist husband, which was no surprise. There was nothing unusual in rich people putting their property into the names of relatives or companies. What was a surprise was that several more of the bunker-like houses in the street were owned by the same company, along with two more at different stages of construction, one of them weathertight and the other still a set of half-dug foundations. He found that Sólfell Property even had a website of its own that listed several exclusive properties available for short- or long-term lease via a letting agency.

  A few canny investments there, Orri decided as he spent an afternoon researching the street’s residents still further. He reckoned that around half of the twenty houses in the street were owned by their occupants, the rest could be owned or rented and therefore less easy to find out much about the occupants.

  ‘The dentist is dabbling in property.’ Orri laughed to himself as his fingers skimmed the trackpad of the laptop he had bought legally. He knew better than to have stolen goods lying around the flat. Merchandise was best disposed of quickly, he felt. Comparing the photos on Sólfell Property’s website with satellite images, he was able to work out which houses were theirs and wondered if these would be worthwhile targets. It would be worth scouting around, at least. Anyone in the market to rent a house like that would be no pauper, although the research might be a little more involved than with someone who had lived in the same house for years.

  Orri snapped shut the laptop and stood up, tossing his keys from hand to hand. A little drive out to the wealthier end of Kópavogur would not be a bad idea. Lísa wouldn’t be back for a few hours yet and maybe he’d be nice to her for once and take her out for a meal. Nothing too fancy, mind, no waiters with waistcoats or any of that stuff. A pizza, or a fish meal at one of the trendy places near the harbour that were half-empty outside the tourist season.

  Heading for the door with his fleece over his arm, he thought again about the dentist’s wife and the vision of her, eyes closed with water coursing over her face and jutting breasts, past the taut belly to the dark triangle below. The thought added a spring to his step as he promised himself he was only going to observe.

  The elderly lady was agitated and her husband fumed, standing up to take a few angry paces before sitting down again.

  ‘You’ve no idea when this happened?’ Eiríkur repeated wearily.

  ‘Of course not,’ Matthildur Sveinsdóttir squawked, fingers busy with the frayed tassels of a shawl draped over her shoulders. ‘It wasn’t until I saw my clasp in Aunt Bertha’s window that I realized.’

  ‘Aunt Bertha?’ Eiríkur asked.

  ‘It’s a shop.’

  ‘It’s in Reykjavík,’ her husband explained, filling in the gaps. ‘They sell all kinds of old junk there.’

  ‘Antiques, he means,’ Matthildur corrected. ‘Ævar, why don’t you go and look in the garage and see if anything’s missing there?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, woman. I always lock the garage. Unlike you, who’s always leaving the back door unlocked.’

  ‘I do not!’

  ‘Excuse me, can we get back to the matter in hand?’ Eiríkur demanded, trying to sound as stern as he could. The old man stamped from the room, banging the door behind him. ‘Could we start again?’

  Matthildur Sveinsdóttir took a deep breath. ‘Yes. Well, Ævar and I went downtown to do some shopping, like we usually do once a week or so because we like to have a walk around the centre and have a coffee in Hotel Borg or somewhere. Ævar misses town so much since he retired, you know,’ she prattled and Eiríkur groaned inwardly.

  ‘I appreciate that, but what did you see in this shop?’

  ‘That? I told you, didn’t I? I saw a gold clasp just like mine, the one that came off my mother’s best dress that she had from her mother. I’d been meaning to sew a new bodice for it for years and never got round to it, and now that the arthritis is playing merry hell with my fingers I probably never will, but I was going to pass it on to my daughter one day, you see, that’s why I kept it in the drawer upstairs.’

  ‘So you are sure it’s the same one as yours? How do you know?’

  ‘Well, I said to Ævar straight away that it looked just like mine, and so we came straight home and I looked in the drawer upstairs and it was gone,’ Matthildur said with aggrieved triumph.

  ‘You didn’t go into the shop and look at the . . . what was it? A clasp? What is it exactly?’

  The old lady pursed her lips in impatience. ‘A clasp. A set of gold decorations for national dress. Surely you know what I mean?’

  ‘Gold? Was it worth much?’

  ‘I don’t know, young man, but Aunt Bertha had a damned respectable price tag on it. Surely you’ll go and look? It was in the window an hour ago.’

  Eiríkur nodded, pretending to understand. ‘Is anything else missing from the house?’

  ‘Ævar’s watch, the smart one that he hardly ever wears, and I think Ævar said there was some money in the drawer as well.’

  ‘And you have no idea when these items disappeared?’

  ‘They didn’t disappear. They were stolen,’ Ævar’s voice boomed furiously from the door. ‘There’s nothing missing from the garage.’

  ‘You checked all the cupboards, did you?’ Matthildur asked.

  ‘Of course I did. You don’t think I went out there and didn’t have a proper look, do you?’

  ‘Do you have a list of what’s missing?’ Eiríkur asked quickly, hoping to nip another squabble in the bud.

  ‘Well, not really,’ Matthildur said after a moment’s thought.

  Eiríkur closed his notebook. ‘In that case, I’m going to go down to this Auntie Bertha place
now. I need you two to go through the house, put together a list of what you think is missing – as detailed as you can make it – and to think hard about when you last saw these items so we can have an idea of how long they have been missing.’

  ‘Why do you need to know that?’

  ‘Because that will give us an idea of when the break-in might have taken place,’ Eiríkur said, calling on reserves of patience. ‘And that means I can try and tie it in with other similar incidents, and hopefully get an idea of who might have been responsible.’

  ‘All right,’ Ævar growled. ‘You do that, young man, and when you find out who it is, I want to break his fingers one by one.’

  He drove past a couple of times and was pleased there wasn’t a soul to be seen; not that the streets being deserted said all that much. In this kind of neighbourhood people walked from the door to the car and no further. The exclusive cul-de-sac where he could see the dentist’s house at the end was quiet. There was no car to be seen and no lights on inside. It was the same further along the street at most of the houses on the seaward side, the ones he was most interested in, and at this time of the afternoon, experience told him that people could be unpredictable in their movements, though middle-aged people generally kept office hours.

  He pulled on his gloves before leaving the car. Normally he preferred to simply walk in while the owners were at work or preferably on holiday somewhere far away, giving him time to concentrate without interruption. This time of day was dangerous and Orri knew he was taking a risk, reproaching himself again for breaking his own rules. People could appear unexpectedly, but he admitted to himself that it gave him a buzz of excitement.

  He patted his pockets, made sure his torch was in his pocket and switched on the phone jammer, a little device that would interrupt any mobile phone traffic within 15 metres once it was switched on, not that he had needed it so far.

  Orri padded silently though the still house, the back door lock opened easily with a strip of plastic, the torch between his teeth and a pool of light sweeping the floor ahead of him. The living room was a vast open space of hardwood floor with a nest of deep sofas in the centre, and just a few ornaments scattered here and there, mostly modernist artworks that his professional eye dismissed as being too heavy to carry as well as too easy to identify and trace.