Cold Steal (23 page)

‘I don’t know any Elísabet, young man.’

‘Who is it, Margrét?’ A quavering voice called from inside.

‘It’s all right, Dad,’ she replied and looked back at Eiríkur. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know any Elísabet.’

‘I’m a police officer,’ Eiríkur said, opening his wallet to show his identification card. ‘I understand there’s a woman called Elísabet Höskuldsdóttir who lives in this block, but I don’t know which flat,’ he explained a second time.

‘I don’t know,’ the woman said, frowning doubtfully, and looking around to see an old man with white hair slowly approaching along the dim hallway, supporting his gradual progress with a stick in each hand.

‘He means the girl upstairs, Margrét. I’m sure of it,’ the old man said.

‘You’re sure? The one above, or on the other side?’

The old man pointed one stick at the ceiling, while Eiríkur expected him to fall over, holding his breath until the old man was again supported by two sticks. ‘Upstairs. Lovely girl,’ he said as Margrét scowled.

‘If you think so, Dad.’ she sniffed. ‘How do you know?’

‘She talks to me on the stairs sometimes, which is more than any of my other miserable neighbours do, and especially that idiot downstairs who plays deafening music all the time.’

‘Yeah. I can hear it,’ Eiríkur said. ‘It’s disturbing you, I take it?’

The music itself was hardly audible, but a persistent bass pulse could be felt rather than heard.

‘It is a little irritating,’ the old man admitted. ‘But it’s not as if I can go down there and punch him like I could have done forty years ago.’

‘I’ll ask a patrol to stop by and have a word with him,’ Eiríkur promised. ‘But you’re sure it’s Elísabet who lives upstairs.’

‘I’m sure,’ the old man said. ‘Margrét here doesn’t like her, but she always says hello to me, and she told me her name’s Lísa, so I assume that’s short for Elísabet.’

A few minutes later and after a quick phone call, Eiríkur was knocking on the door upstairs. He could hear his knocks echoing inside and knew that nobody was going to answer. He clattered down the stairs again to find the old man’s door still open and both the man and his daughter waiting for him.

‘I could have told you she wasn’t home,’ Margrét said.

‘I haven’t seen her for a while,’ the old man added.

‘She hasn’t moved out?’

The old man shook his head. ‘No. I’d have noticed. There’s been no coming and going for a while.’

‘You don’t know where she works, do you?’

‘I’m afraid not. All I can tell you is that she works odd hours, coming and going early in the morning or late in the evening. Something to do with food, I imagine, as she often wears those white clothes that chefs wear on the TV.’

‘And you don’t have a phone number for her, or know what car she drives, or anything like that?’

‘I’m sorry, young man,’ the old man wheezed. ‘I’m not sure I can help you any further.’

Eiríkur thanked the old man and made his way down the stairs as two officers in uniform stepped into the building.

‘G’day, Eiríkur, you called?’

‘Yeah, that was me. Just follow the racket, would you, and maybe have a quiet word with the occupant about antisocial behaviour?’

The taller of the two officers tilted his head to one side and listened for a moment.
‘Cradle of Filth
,’ he decided. ‘That definitely constitutes anti-social behaviour.’

Gunna looked up as Eiríkur arrived, breathless and excited at the hospital.

‘Found it,’ he announced.

‘What have you found?’

He grinned in triumph. ‘Our friend’s girlfriend. I know where she lives, and with a bit of luck she should lead us to him. That’s her,’ he said, placing a sheet of paper in front of Gunna.

‘Our mystery man’s girlfriend?’

‘Elísabet Sólborg Höskuldsdóttir. I found the riding club the logo belongs to and someone there confirmed that she had seen the guy in the picture with this Elísabet. So, find her and we find him,’ he said. ‘I hope.’

‘And have you found her?’

‘Not so far. I know where she lives and I have her driving licence photo. There’s a grey Ford Ka registered to her, so at least I have a little more to go on.’

‘You’ve put an alert out for the car?’

‘Already done it.’

Gunna looked closely at the picture and saw a young woman looking blankly past the camera. Unruly hair had been pushed back behind her ears and she saw thick lips and a stubby nose that gave the strong face a determined look, offset by the steel ring looped through the lower lip.

‘Distinctive,’ Gunna said. ‘But that photo’s almost ten years old, so she might well look very different now.’

‘Could be,’ Eiríkur said. ‘But at least I have some idea what she looks like, and if she can lead me to her boyfriend, so much the better.’

‘That’s brilliant,’ Gunna said and nodded at the computer monitor showing the shattered hand. ‘But she’ll have to wait. Take a look at that.’

‘Hell, that must be painful. Deliberate?’ Eiríkur asked, staring at the X-ray image of Maris’s smashed hand. ‘That’s no accident, surely?’

‘That’s my feeling,’ the doctor said, looking up from his desk at the other side of the room. ‘But you’d better get a specialist opinion on that.’

‘Listen,’ Gunna said, flipping through her notes. ‘Eiríkur, listen. The victim lives at Lyngvangur in Hafnarfjördur. Number 45, top flat on the right. I want you to get over there right away and have a good look at the place before we do much else. Take pictures and dust for prints. But I really want you to see if you can figure out how this happened. According to this gentleman,’ Gunna said, gesturing to the doctor who was again engrossed in his computer. ‘The victim had some kind of domestic accident.’

‘You think he’s lying?’

‘I don’t think he’s lying. I know so. So go and check it out while I have another word with him.’

Orri would have given almost anything to be somewhere else. Houses were much more familiar and easier to deal with. Offices had never been his style, and daylight even less so, but after the gut-wrenching experience of the motorcycle clubhouse, this had turned out to be easy, far easier that he had expected.

His experience that a man carrying a toolbox and wearing overalls and a yellow waistcoat attracts no attention was again proved right.

Not that this office had been a difficult one to get into, he reflected as he padded between the desks. He might as well have been invisible. The fire escape at the top of the external steel staircase was clearly this office’s smoking spot and it had been easy enough to open the door with a screwdriver jammed into the worn mechanism.

He froze as the front door of the office downstairs at street level rattled and he peered cautiously out of the window of what he assumed was the director’s office to see a security guard with a dog on a lead walk away, satisfied that the place was locked up, and not expecting anyone to break into an office on a Saturday afternoon.

The dog whined and pulled at its lead, aware of something that the man in the official cap and jacket with a logo on the back was clearly not worried about. The dog came to a stop, looking longingly at the upper floor windows and Orri jerked his head back, certain that it had seen him.

‘Pack it in, will you?’ He heard the security guard irritably scolding the dog as he made for the comfort of his van and Orri briefly felt sorry for the animal that was being prevented from doing its job, but relieved that the guard was too lazy to do his own job properly.

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.