Cold Steal

by Quentin Bates

  He quickly did as he had been told. Standing on the desk, he lifted the ceiling panel, put the little control box next to the light fitting and opened the aerial. He clipped the two tiny crocodile clips to the wires leading to the light and saw an indicator on the control box begin to glow. Using a ballpoint pen, he pushed a hole through the ceiling panel, relieved that the old-fashioned fibreboard was soft and there was no need to use the drill he had brought with him, and pushed the barrel of the camera into the gap. With droplets of sweat breaking out on his back in spite of the chill, he replaced the panel and hoped that he had fitted everything correctly. He swept off the desk, even though he had left no footprints, and made for the other office, where he went through the same procedure before heading for the back door.

  He was down the fire escape and back in his car within a minute, the high-viz tabard identifying him as a contractor rolled up under the seat, and a few seconds later he was speeding through Kópavogur towards the main road and home. Orri smiled to himself. The sight of the covert camera in its package in his postbox had given him an idea and it had taken only an hour or two to find just what he was looking for. There had been no call from the Voice and Orri decided to see if he could turn the tables.

  An hour’s shopping later, he pulled up outside the block of flats. In the lobby he made sure there was nobody about before he used his picks to tease open the lock of the postbox above his own, which he knew belonged to a flat that had been empty for months and was likely to stay that way. Using lumps of modelling clay, he fixed a small camera of his own in the postbox to stare out through the gaps in the grille, shut the box and checked it to be sure it wasn’t visible except to someone taking an exceptionally close look. He jogged up the stairs feeling like a man with a good day’s work behind him and knowing that he would be able to download the footage from the camera direct to his phone.

  A nurse had come to attend to Maris and change the dressing on his hand, giving Gunna the opportunity to make a few phone calls from the corridor.

  ‘Hæ, Eiríkur, anything interesting?’

  She could hear his phone crackle and his voice echoed in the bare flat.

  ‘Nothing much. I’m dusting for prints and there’s a full palm print on the living-room table, with a lot of dents around it. Looks to me like someone has been busy with a hammer.’

  ‘That would account for the broken fingers?’

  ‘It could,’ Eiríkur said. ‘I’ll have to check against our victim’s prints, but it looks like everything has been swept right off the table and onto the floor. It’s a real bloody mess in here. Has our boy said anything?’

  Gunna looked around and wondered how long it would take to change Maris’s dressings.

  ‘Not a single truthful word. He claims he was moving a wardrobe and it fell on his hand.’

  ‘Bullshit. There isn’t even a wardrobe in here.’ She could hear a door creak open. ‘There’s one in the bedroom, but you can see it hasn’t been moved for years. For fuck’s sake . . .’

  Gunna distinctly heard a crash through the phone.

  ‘Eiríkur, are you all right?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ he answered after a pause. ‘I opened the wardrobe door and a load of stuff came crashing out onto the floor. All electrical stuff, drills, that kind of thing. There must be a dozen of these things. Why would anyone need a wardrobe full of power tools?’

  ‘Stolen goods?’

  ‘Looks like it to me. Listen, I’ll have a proper look through all this stuff and get back to you.’

  ‘Fine. You do that while I have another chat with our friend. You’d better see if you can rustle up a squad car from the Hafnarfjördur station to help you if there’s a lot of stuff there.’

  ‘Wow, a DeWalt cordless, I always wanted one of those.’

  ‘Eiríkur, keep your mind on the job, will you?’

  ‘Hell, there’s a few laptops here as well, all sorts, and a couple of those computer games consoles. It’s like a treasure trove.’

  ‘Write it all down, there’s a good boy, and call me back when you’re done.’

  There was no water anywhere, but a stream that chattered and bubbled past the ruined farmhouse was good enough. With no cup to drink from, Jóhann had no choice but to kneel on a flat rock and lower his face to the water that startled him with its chill.

  The building itself was a wreck, abandoned more years ago than he could imagine, its gaunt concrete walls pitted by sun and frost and with deep cracks running from the ground like the branches of a tree to fade out higher up. The roof seemed intact and Jóhann looked with disquiet at the grey clouds that had replaced the bright dawn sunshine, threatening rain. The stillness of the dawn that had woken him had also been replaced by a cool wind that cut like a knife.

  At the back of the building what he guessed had once been pasture had been filled with a framework of rough wooden poles, nailed and lashed in place, with hundreds of cross bars running from side to side. Each of these was hung with fish drying in the wind. He stood helplessly underneath, staring at the headless fish hung tail up on the bars and it was a long time before the thought struck him that this was food.

  He scrambled as best he could up a triangular trestle at the corner of the structure. Halfway up he realized that he was faint with hunger and wondered just how long he had been there. He had long since given up wearing a wristwatch, relying instead on the phone that had become his constant source of data from messages to traffic updates to the simple concept of tracking the time. But now the phone was lifeless in his pocket. Had he been there a day or two days? He had no idea; he was only able to judge that he would collapse soon if he wasn’t able to eat. The thought spurred him to climb a little further and he reached out to snatch at one of the closer fish drying on a beam. A pair of them came away in his hands, one in his grasp and the other falling to the ground below as the twine holding them together parted. He was surprised at how light the fish in his hand was.

  On the ground he tore at it with his fingers, ripping it apart and retching. The strips of white meat were hard, far tougher than the dried fish in chunks that he occasionally bought in plastic bags to offer at conferences to foreign colleagues as a typical Icelandic delicacy for them to chew their way through.

  He chewed manfully and the fish gradually became a pile of desiccated skin and bone on the ground. Still hungry but no longer starving, Jóhann trudged back to the house, carrying the other fish that had fallen to the ground in his hands like a prize and wrapping his jacket around him like a shroud.

  Orri was relieved to have the place to himself for a change. He yawned and lifted his feet onto the table as he clicked the TV into life and scrolled through the channels. He had checked the camera he had fitted in the unused postbox opposite his own, bluetoothing the files in its memory to his phone and he checked the short video files one by one. The camera was motion-activated and he could see from the clips that it started to record its sequences as the outside door swung open or when someone came down the stairs.

  Mostly they showed people walking rapidly straight past, while some stopped to check their own mailboxes. One showed the rather superior elderly lady from the ground floor standing in the lobby where she daintily picked her nose with a crooked little finger as she waited for a taxi. The clip that showed the capricious teenage daughter of the couple on the top floor checking her lipstick and adjusting her ample chest to display maximum cleavage before going out was the one he watched several times with a grin on his face, but there was nothing to show anyone putting anything through the slot in his mailbox, apart from the postman with the handful of envelopes he’d already collected.

  They were all bills, none of them big ones but they were still outgoings, and his night-time activities that would normally have brought in extra cash had been curtailed, in spite of the windfall of cash the Voice had put his way and which he felt could not be relied on to continue for long. He might have to dig into his savings, he thought with misgivings, stand
ing up to make his way to the kitchen and see if there were the makings of a meal in the fridge.

  He found himself wondering where Lísa was, almost admitting to himself that he preferred it when she was there even though she talked too much. She liked to cook and that was what gave her food a spark of energy that the stuff he made lacked. Orri liked to eat and it was only after Lísa had elbowed her way into his life that new things had appeared in his diet, a variety of new flavours he had been suspicious of at first but soon found himself missing when he had to cook for himself.

  He was bent over the contents of the fridge when the door rattled and slammed.

  ‘Hungry, are you?’

  ‘Starving,’ he admitted, hauling himself upright to give her a kiss. ‘Are you cooking anything?’

  ‘Men.’ Lísa snorted. ‘They’re only interested in two things, and food is the other one.’

  ‘Beer, you mean?’

  ‘Yeah. Right.’

  ‘Well, we can discuss the other one after dinner, if you like?’

  Lísa shook her head and rummaged in her bag. ‘This is for you,’ she said, handing him an envelope.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘How should I know? Your name’s on it.’

  He read ‘Orri Björnsson, c/o Elísabet S. Höskuldsdóttir’ typed on the envelope.

  ‘Where did this come from?’

  ‘It was under the wiper on my car. Don’t ask me who’s sending you letters through me. Seems stupid, considering they could have just posted it to you.’

  She banged a pot onto the stove and poured water into it. Orri saw that she was annoyed and pretending not to be curious, although she looked sideways to see what was in the envelope as he ripped it open.

  ‘What’s so special about that?’ She asked, mystified, looking at the grainy print of Orri’s back, his hands in the unused mailbox. Orri stuttered in incomprehension. They knew he had tried to catch them out but had beaten him to it. There was nothing else in the envelope, no note, nothing that might indicate where it had come from.

  In the lobby, with the print in his hand, Orri looked around frantically, trying to figure out where the picture had been taken from and finally noticed a glint behind one of the mailbox grilles on the opposite side of the entrance hall, where a tiny electronic eye was watching him. He hammered at the steel front of the mailbox and pushed his fingers as far into the slot as they would go, but with no chance of reaching the contents inside. He raced up the flights of stairs and clattered back down with his lock picks, telling himself to be calm and take it easy.

  The fine pick refused to slide into the lock as it should have done, and squinting into the barrel, Orri saw the lock had been filled, he guessed with fast-setting glue. His shoulders sagged in defeat. The lock would have to be drilled out and he could hardly get the surly old man who looked after the block’s maintenance to force open a mailbox that wasn’t his.

  He went up the stairs slowly and while Lísa looked on with concern, he filled a litre bottle with water and took it downstairs with him. Looking outside to see if anyone might see him, he poured the water into the mailbox slot, hoping it would short-circuit something in the tiny camera and stop it spying on him.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ The querulous voice behind him was filled with fury. ‘Are you mad?’

  ‘Someone’s put glue in the lock,’ he explained plaintively to the elderly woman who had appeared from her flat, recognizing her as the one who had stood by the door exploring the inside of her beaky nose with a little finger.

  ‘What? Then get the maintenance man to come and look at it.’

  ‘I’m trying to wash the glue out,’ Orri said frantically as the last drops of water dribbled from the bottle into the mailbox. A puddle of water had already formed at his feet as it leaked down the front of the steel door.

  ‘I’m going to report you,’ the old woman hissed. ‘You’re a vandal, that’s what you are.’

  She slammed the door behind her and it suddenly occurred to Orri that the whole exchange had probably been recorded, along with his frantic attempts to get at the spying eye behind the grille. He trudged back upstairs to where Lísa was waiting in the doorway, arms folded.

  ‘Orri Björnsson, will you tell me just what the fuck is going on?’

  The car was deliberately inconspicuous. It had been drilled into Alex that gangsters could treat themselves to gold trinkets and eye-catching sets of wheels, but a man with something to hide was better off being inconspicuous, and Alex had a sinking feeling inside that he had attracted more attention than was healthy.

  He brooded, leaning on the wheel with the engine running, looking up at the dark windows of the flat. There was no doubt the heavies who had come calling the day before weren’t the brightest pair, and the message was intended for him. But what was the message, and who the hell were they?

  He closed the car door and walked silently around the building in the twilight. With a stiff wind blowing salt off the sea, there was nobody about. He almost tripped over the twisted frame of an abandoned bicycle, cursed and pushed open the door. The block of flats was an old one, with external walkways along the front leading to the individual flats. He hated these as they had filled up with snow last winter, and it was too easy to see who was going to which flat.

  With yet another sinking feeling, he saw that his flat was sealed. The lock had been changed and a police seal fitted to the door. That idiot Maris must have blabbed, instead of sticking to the story Alex had told him to tell before he put him in a taxi. Not that Maris had been in much of a condition to make sense the night before, Alex reflected, his face grey with shock and his teeth chattering.

  He tried his key, even though he knew it wouldn’t fit. The lock was too new. He already knew that a credit card would not slip past the door’s deep frame, and he smiled grimly at the idea of getting Orri to come and open it for him. But now it was important to know what the police had seen, or even if they had seen anything at all, so he stepped back as far as the balustrade would let him go and kicked, aiming, as he had been taught to do, as close to the lock as he could. The door creaked and buckled.

  Alex stepped back again. This time he took his time, aimed more carefully and let fly with a kick that saw the door crack open. Pushing at it with one shoulder, he saw that the lock was intact, but he had managed to splinter the tired frame. Not that it mattered, he decided.

  He left the lights off and went through the place rapidly. He was sure he had left nothing that would identify him when he’d gone out the night before, but Maris had probably spilled his guts, as expected. The place had been cleared out. There was nothing in his bedroom wardrobe and all the stuff he had been getting from Orri and which he knew he should have passed on was gone. It wasn’t a huge problem, just a minor irritation, but he knew that Bruno would not be pleased.

  He pulled the door closed behind him and tiptoed down the stairs. Outside he again walked round the building to approach his own car from an unexpected angle. With the engine running and the heater on at full blast, he opened his phone and dialled a number from memory.

  ‘It’s Alex,’ he said when the voicemail kicked in. ‘Call me. We might have a problem.’

  Maris looked less happy as Gunna knocked and entered without waiting to be asked. The smile had gone from his face and he looked drawn with pain as she sat down and made herself comfortable.

  ‘So, Maris, how are things since we spoke this morning? Feeling better?’

  ‘It hurts a lot. But it’ll be all right in a few weeks.’

  ‘You really think so?’

  ‘Yes. Going home soon. The consul was here, they’re going to get me a flight home.’

  ‘You want to go home, do you?’

  Maris nodded. Gunna decided this was a young man who had taken his misfortune badly. She had to steel herself to deliver bad news.

  ‘That might not be possible.’

  ‘What? But the consul said . . .’ he floundered.

&
nbsp; ‘This is the way it is, Maris,’ Gunna explained in a patient voice, looking into the young man’s anxious brown eyes which reminded her of the sheep being herded into the slaughterhouse at Vestureyri when she was a girl, convinced that behind the sad eyes was the knowledge that they would not be coming out again. ‘The health system in Iceland is hugely overburdened and you’ve managed to get yourself a very nasty injury that’s going to take up a huge amount of resources to put right, not to mention all the treatment you’re going to need afterwards to get your hand back to being of some kind of use one day. I don’t know what the doctor has told you, but your hand has been smashed and it’s going to be months or years before it’s any use to you,’ she said and paused to let her words sink in as tears began to well up in his eyes.

  ‘You’re going to need a huge amount of therapy,’ she continued. ‘And it’s going to take months. So you can understand that the health service would really prefer you to go home and get treated there. You see what I mean?’

  ‘Yes, I know all that. I pay for my flight home. My family know I’m coming.’

  Gunna jerked a thumb at the door. ‘They want you off their hands. You can understand why, can’t you?’

  Maris nodded and Gunna pointed a finger at her own chest. ‘On the other hand, I have a problem with that.’

  ‘How?’ he asked with a blank look. ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Because I know that a crime has been committed; not a trivial one, but a brutal attack. You get my meaning? I have a pair of thugs running around my city who are probably going to do this again to someone else before too long, and I’d like to catch them before that happens. So I’d like you to tell me who attacked you and why.’

  This time he looked bewildered and Gunna wondered if he was going to cry.

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘In that case, you’ll be staying in Iceland a long time. I can withhold your passport, don’t forget. I’m not letting my key witness leave the country,’ she said as the first tear made its way through the brown stubble on Maris’s cheek. ‘And on top of that we have the little matter of why your flat was crammed with stolen goods – that also requires a little explanation.’