Cold Steal

by Quentin Bates

  Orri saw Lísa’s car parked outside and muttered a curse that she had managed to park it across two spaces. He switched off the engine and sat in silence for a while, listening to the car ticking as he gathered his thoughts. He had been surprised at how nervous he had been sticking whatever it was to that car downtown that morning, scared of being noticed and questioned. Orri felt that under normal circumstances his nerves were strong, but being unable to choose the time and place was uncomfortable, and not being able do his usual research troubled him, removing the illusion of control.

  Eventually he sighed, pulled the keys from the ignition with a click and made his way inside, his heavy work boots in one hand and his high-viz vest over his arm.

  In the lobby he rattled his postbox and was surprised to see there was a bulky padded envelope there with no stamp, just his name on it in typed capitals. Puzzled, he ripped it open and found inside a folded wad of notes circled with a rubber band. Looking around quickly to see if he was being watched, Orri counted the notes and decided as he did so that the hour’s detour that morning had maybe been worthwhile after all. The wad of 5,000 krónur notes was equivalent to a good week’s wages.

  He was on his way up the stairs with a spring in his step that had been lacking all day when his phone buzzed and he read the message as he pushed open the door of his flat and walked into the smell of something heavy on the spices.

  Orri stopped dead, leaving the door half open.

  Good evening, Orri Björnsson. You did well today. We have another task for you. Instructions for the job and on where to collect the equipment will be in your mailbox before morning. Reply with a blank message to acknowledge.

  In a daze, and with the feeling deep inside that he was doing the wrong thing, Orri thumbed the reply button and sent a blank message back with the door of his apartment still open.

  ‘Hæ. Who was that?’ Lísa asked. ‘Anything important?’

  Orri dropped his boots and his fluorescent jacket by the door, and shook his fleece from his shoulders.

  ‘Nah. Work stuff. What’s cooking?’

  Chapter Eight

  Bára sat in a café a few minutes’ walk from the Harbourside Hotel and waited for Gunna.

  ‘Working you hard are they?’

  Bára’s smile was thin. ‘I’ll have them house-trained in a few days, I hope.’

  ‘So what are you doing here?’

  ‘Checking security. Back entrances and fire doors, that sort of thing,’ she said. ‘And getting a break from madam upstairs.’

  ‘How are they getting on?’

  ‘He’s all right. He’s in bed by eleven and working at his laptop by seven in the morning. She sleeps to midday and is up until three. He’s worried, Gunna,’ Bára said, looking around her. ‘It’s easy enough to tell. There are phone calls that are clearly not friendly ones and I’d love to have a really good look inside his laptop, but there’s no chance of that happening. He never leaves it open and I suspect there are a dozen passwords to go through to get to anything.’

  Gunna looked over Bára’s shoulder at the morning activity unfolding. A ship was manoeuvring slowly in the still water of the harbour, assisted by a tug snapping at its heels to shove it into a berth. She shook her head irritably.

  ‘All right, are you?’ Bára asked with concern.

  ‘Yeah. I’m OK. Haven’t been sleeping well recently. Things have been awkward at home for a while.’

  ‘Are you and Steini not getting on?’

  ‘Steini’s lovely, as always,’ Gunna sighed. ‘He’s patient, always in a good mood and he cooks. So there’s nothing whatever to complain about. It’s my boy that’s causing me grief. You’re out of the loop if you haven’t heard.’

  Bára looked blank. ‘In that case I’m out of the loop.’

  Gunna took a deep breath. ‘Last year Gísli and his girlfriend—’

  ‘Soffía?’

  ‘That’s her. A sweet girl. Soffía got pregnant and the little boy, Ari, was born in April.’

  ‘Congratulations!’ Bára beamed. ‘Wow, Gunna a grandmother! That’s wonderful, surely?’

  ‘That’s the good part. Not long after Soffía got pregnant, Gísli, Laufey and I all went up to Vestureyri for my grandmother’s funeral. I stayed there with Laufey for a few days, but Gísli drove south the day after the funeral as he was going back to sea that night. He took a passenger south with him and the passenger got pregnant on the way.’

  Bára sat in silence. ‘Shit,’ she said finally. ‘That’s terrible. When . . . ?’

  ‘Did baby number two appear? Kjartan made his appearance about two months after Ari.’

  ‘Shit,’ Bára repeated. ‘So who’s the girl?’

  ‘That’s what makes it all even better. She’s my brother Svanur’s stepdaughter, and at the beginning of last year Drífa showed up on my doorstep in floods of tears, and she’s still there.’

  ‘She’s living with you?’

  ‘She was until last summer when we managed to get her a social housing flat in the village, so she and the baby are living around the corner and my Laufey seems to spend as much time there as she does at home.’

  ‘Life’s never quiet or easy around you, is it?’ Bára said with a wan smile. ‘And there’s me moaning about having to shepherd these two snobs all day. Speaking of which,’ she said, looking at her watch. ‘I need to be there in a few minutes.’

  Outside the café Bára turned up the collar of her coat against the sharp wind.

  ‘You want a lift?’

  ‘No, it’s all right. The Harbourside is right there and I need to have a walk around the back as well anyway.’

  ‘Fair enough. I’ll need to come and grill them again later today.’

  ‘Gunna,’ Bára said and hesitated. ‘Client confidentiality aside – you know how old habits die hard – and between ourselves.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Jóhann’s as worried as hell, like I said. He tries to hide it, but it shows. She’s up to something as well, with all the calls and texts she leaves the room to take, but I haven’t figured out what it is yet.’

  Orri’s back ached as he got slowly out of the truck, his high-vis jacket draped over one arm. In the canteen he listlessly changed out of his boots while his cup of coffee cooled on the table next to him.

  ‘All right, are you?’ Dóri asked, pushing his glasses up onto his bald head and putting down the crossword. ‘You look like shit, Orri.’

  ‘Slept badly.’

  ‘Never mind. Can you do a couple of hours tomorrow? Overtime?’

  ‘Yeah. Should be OK. Eight?’

  ‘Eight would be fine. Go on, go home and get your head down.’

  Orri nodded. His head was heavy and the few hours of sleep had been no rest at all. On top of that, he found himself concerned at Lísa being so suspicious of him, not that he could blame her, he told himself ruefully. He extracted his phone from his jacket pocket and keyed in a text message to her, ending it with a smiley face that he would never normally have used, hoping it would get him out of cooking that night.

  Alex stood in the corridor and smiled as Orri made to go back outside.

  ‘Hæ,’ Orri said.

  ‘Hey. Bruno ask about you,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Why? Is Bruno worried about my health?’

  ‘No. But maybe you should be, if you don’t get Bruno some goods.’

  ‘You tell Bruno he can go screw himself,’ Orri snarled in an angry retort. ‘I’m not at his beck and call, and you can tell him so. If there’s some gear, then I might let him have it, if he’s lucky. Or I might not.’

  He stalked out without waiting for a response from Alex, who was startled by Orri’s unexpectedly angry outburst. In the year they had worked together, Alex hadn’t even heard Orri raise his voice, let alone snap back in fury, and he wondered what was wrong. Girlfriend trouble probably, he decided as he walked after him.

  ‘Orri, man. What’s the problem?’ He asked, hoping to sound frien
dly. ‘I said, Bruno asks about you, nothing else.’

  ‘You know, Alex,’ Orri said. ‘Sometimes I wonder if this mysterious Bruno really exists or not.’

  Eiríkur felt his eyelids droop. He had watched half a day’s footage spanning the downtown streets of central Reykjavík from four of the series of cameras with not a sign of anyone in a green fleece dark enough and with distinctive stripes to match the fibres found in the basement of Kópavogsbakki fifty.

  The cameras closest to Aunt Bertha were the ones he began with, and while the shop’s owner was far from sure what time of day it had been when the man came in, he started each recording a few minutes before Aunt Bertha opened its doors at ten. Two hours later he had fastforwarded through two hours of footage from the four closest cameras and was starting to wonder if the woman had the right date.

  He took a break for half an hour, chatted with the communications centre’s staff and went outside for a few minutes’ fresh air to clear his head before starting again. He decided to stick with the same four cameras as before and told himself to keep to the area around the shop before going to the cameras further away.

  By now the streets were busier, with a thicker mass of pedestrians. Eiríkur paid attention to those walking with purpose rather than the ones who ambled the streets looking in windows here and there. After midday the streets began to fill with people in hiking boots and padded anoraks and he cursed the fact that a cruise ship must have been at the quay and disgorged a few hundred tourists to spend a couple of hours looking at the sights.

  The ticker in the corner of the screen said 15.32 when a nondescript figure in a yellow waistcoat walked past, and Eiríkur hardly noticed the dark green fleece with two narrow yellow stripes down the sleeve until the man had passed the camera and was out of sight. Suddenly he was wide awake and rewound the figure’s progress, this time with his eyes intently on the screen. He replayed the sequence as the man walked under the camera and away from it, slipping off the waistcoat as he walked and stuffing it into a pocket.

  He stopped the replay and called out to one of the others. ‘Hey, how do I follow this guy?’

  ‘Found a villain, have you?’

  One of the communications staff, a headset on one ear with its lead trailing at his side, leaned over the monitors.

  ‘This guy,’ Eiríkur said, pointing at the round-shouldered figure stopped in mid-stride.

  ‘All right. That’s Austurstræti. You know where this guy is going?’

  ‘A shop called Aunt Bertha.’

  ‘The shop full of old crap on Ingólfsstræti?’

  ‘I think they like to think of it as an antiques shop, rather than a place full of old junk. But yeah, that’s the one.’

  ‘In that case, we should be able to follow him over the street into Bankastræti.’

  His fingers flickered over the keyboard and a click of the mouse later they saw the dark green fleece appear, walking towards them, and this time Eiríkur could see the man’s face.

  ‘Stop it there for a second, can you?’

  The communications officer clicked. The picture froze and he zoomed in. Eiríkur found himself looking at eyes that glanced sideways out of the picture, shoulders hunched and a deeply ordinary face. Short brown hair and a few days’ worth of stubble surrounded a squat nose. There was a determined look on the face, its lips pressed together as if the man was concentrating and defensive, keeping the rest of the world at bay.

  ‘Can I save that as a still image?’ Eiríkur asked.

  The mouse clicked a couple of times. ‘Done. You want to see where he’s going?’

  As the image unfroze, the man continued, looking to left and right, until he disappeared around a corner. The communications officer looked expectantly at Eiríkur. ‘That’s Ingólfsstræti, and the shop he’s going to is a hundred metres away.’

  ‘Hell, I had hoped for a better view of him.’

  ‘Let’s wait, shall we?’ He said, fast-forwarding through the recording. ‘He’ll be coming back the same way, I expect.’

  The ticker had clicked to 15.56 when Eiríkur saw his target approaching, walking jauntily this time, stepping past the camera without noticing it. The communications officer switched the camera viewpoint to Lækjargata and then Austurstræti as they watched him retrace his steps, walking with quick steps that marked him out among the throngs of slow-moving tourists.

  ‘Didn’t take long, did he?’

  ‘He must have a car parked somewhere,’ Eiríkur said.

  ‘Or else he lives in the west end of town. I’ll bet he’s parked next to Bæjarins Bezta.’

  ‘Then he’d have cut through to Hafnarstræti. Unless he was going somewhere else first? Let’s look at Hafnarstræti and Tryggvagata, shall we?’

  The camera switched and they scrolled through enough footage without any sign of him.

  ‘We lost him,’ Eiríkur said despondently. ‘Shit.’

  ‘But you got a picture of him.’

  ‘I know. I was hoping for a car. A number would have taken me straight to him.’

  The communications officer yawned and stood up to go back to his desk. ‘What’s this character done, anyway?’

  ‘I’m not sure. He’s been the victim of a violent assault and for some reason hasn’t reported it,’ Eiríkur said. ‘And I have a feeling that he might well be the phantom housebreaker Sævaldur’s been looking for.’

  The communications officer hid a smirk. ‘See if you can catch the bastard before Sævaldur does. He’ll sulk until Christmas if you do.’

  ‘You called, young man?’ Gunna greeted Björgvin as he took off his glasses to rub his eyes.

  ‘Yes. Thanks for dropping by.’

  ‘No problem, I was about to disappear off home, so you just caught me.’

  ‘And you just caught me as well,’ Björgvin said with a bleak smile. ‘I’m finished in half an hour and won’t be back until Thursday.’

  ‘Excellent, a long weekend.’

  ‘We’re moving house starting tomorrow, so I expect we’ll need every minute of it. But that’s nothing to do with why I asked you to come over.’

  ‘You weren’t going to ask me to help you shift furniture?’

  ‘Not unless you’re offering? But we have plenty of spare hands,’ he said, lifting a folder from the top of a filing cabinet behind him. ‘This is what I wanted you to have a look at.’

  Gunna pulled up a chair, sat down and watched the rows of figures on the document Björgvin ran his finger over blur into one.

  ‘I’m not great with numbers, you know.’

  ‘That’s all right. You don’t need to see the amounts.’ He reached for a notebook and started drawing circles. ‘I just wanted to give you an outline of it all.’

  ‘Elvar Pálsson and Vilhelm Thorleifsson had both been in the shipbroking business at one point, and as far as I can make out, they both still have interests in shipping. In 2007 they were able to get a loan of around ten million dollars from a pension fund.’

  ‘Ten million? Good grief.’

  ‘It gets better. With a partner, they were able to buy a factory ship that operated in the Pacific, and it made a profit. Not a huge profit, but it did well enough. In 2010 it shifted to West Africa and worked there, where it did very well in 2010 and 2011. We estimate it earned between twenty and twenty-five million dollars in those two years.’

  Björgvin’s grey eyes lifted and looked into Gunna’s.

  ‘A profitable venture, surely?’ she asked. ‘Now you’re going to tell me the pension fund never saw a penny of its investment back?’

  ‘You’re way ahead of me, but this is where it gets interesting and also difficult, as none of this happens in Iceland. The ship, Bright Spring II, was registered in Belize, owned by a company in Cyprus and managed by a company in the Isle of Man, and both of those companies were subsidiaries of a company in Luxembourg.’

  ‘Were?’

  ‘That’s the operative word. The whole operation went bust early last ye
ar. It seems the ship’s main engine failed and it was sold off to a Norwegian company based in Morocco to be either scrapped or repaired, but that’s neither here nor there. All of that complex ownership and management structure is purely there to avoid paying tax anywhere, and what is interesting is that all of those companies are brass plates, with no staff or offices, and it’s not easy to track down who the directors are, or were. But what is quite clear is that Bright Spring II was in fact managed by Elvar Pálsson from his office in Reykjavík.’

  ‘Before he moved abroad.’

  ‘Exactly. He moved to London not long after the ship was sold and the companies were wound up.’

  ‘And the pension funds?’

  ‘Out in the cold,’ Björgvin said, his bleak smile returning. ‘There’s no sign of the original ten million dollars, or the proceeds of the ship, or the approximately twenty-five-million dollars it earned in the roughly two years it operated off West Africa.’

  ‘It may be a stupid question, but where did all that money go?’ Gunna asked, her mind reeling.

  Björgvin shrugged. ‘Your guess is as good as mine. We have no power to investigate these foreign companies unless their authorities are prepared to co-operate.’

  ‘And they’re not, I take it?’

  ‘Not a hope. The whole point of using companies in these jurisdictions is to keep out inquisitive types like me,’ he said and reached for another folder. ‘But this one is closer to home.’

  Björgvin smoothed out a sheet of notes and again reached for his pad.

  ‘More circles?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. But not so many this time. Sólfell Investment was set up in 2005 and didn’t do anything at all for two years. The directors were Sunna María Voss, Jóhann Hjálmarsson, Vilhelm Thorleifsson, our other errant shipowner, Elvar Pálsson, and a gentleman called Boris Vadluga.’

  ‘That’s a new name. Who’s he?’

  ‘A Latvian businessman who likes to invest his money in profitable schemes.’

  ‘Legally profitable, or otherwise?’

  Björgvin smiled briefly. ‘I don’t think he’s worried either way, so long as there’s a profit involved in such a way that he’s not going to find himself in court, and guess who the partner in Bright Spring II was? Anyway, in 2007 Sólfell Property invests a very substantial chunk of cash in land in Kópavogur, right by the water.’