Thin Ice: An Inspector Gunna Mystery (Gunnhildur Mystery Book 5) (3 page)

‘What? Oh, you’ll be all right. I expect we’ll drop you off somewhere tomorrow.’

‘Where?’ Her eyes widened in confusion. ‘Why? Who are you two?

‘Eh? I shouldn’t tell you. You know, you’ll tell the police and everything.’

Erna’s face softened as she looked him in the eyes, arms wrapped around herself. ‘Help us get away. I won’t say anything to the police,’ she whispered. ‘But don’t hurt us, will you?’

‘What?’ Magni looked surprised at the suggestion. ‘Why should I want to hurt you?’

‘Your friend?’

‘Össi?’ He laughed. ‘He won’t hurt you.’

‘He already did. Didn’t you see?’

A tear crept down Erna’s cheek.

‘He gave you a bit of a tap, but you were screaming at him,’ Magni said. ‘And Össur’s a nervous type. Know what I mean?’

‘This place is called Hotel Hraun,’ Tinna Lind announced, marching into the kitchen and dropping some brochures on the table. ‘See? Hotel Hraun offers peace and seclusion in its selection of twelve luxury rooms, all with full en suite facilities. Guests have the opportunity of sampling some of the finest Icelandic cuisine in our exclusive restaurant,’ she read out. ‘That’s the big room out there, I guess. Anyway, the place is open seven months a year, but closes from November to April. So nobody’s going to come here until April. That’s cheerful, isn’t it?’

‘We won’t be here long, just you see,’ Magni said.

‘We have a car and no petrol and we’re stuck in an empty hotel miles from anywhere. Oh, and I already checked, the phone’s not working. So how do you propose getting back to civilization, or even have any ideas on what we eat once the freezer’s empty?’

‘I . . . er. That’s for Össur to decide. He’s the man,’ Magni said as Össur appeared in the doorway. ‘I’m just the hired help.’

Erna looked up, lifting her eyes from the floor.

‘Where do we sleep?’ she asked, eyes darting around the room.

‘Up to you, I guess,’ Magni said. ‘There’s plenty of rooms to choose from.’

The house was the cheapest place Gísli and Drífa had been able to find, a ramshackle building dating back to a time before building regulations had been anything more than a loose set of guidelines. In the intervening years a string of owners had put their stamp on the place one by one, adding an extension here and a bathroom there, as well as a couple of sheds outside.

There was a front door that was rarely used, while the parking spaces at the back of the house meant the back door was the entrance that everyone used. Gísli and Drífa were living in the kitchen and the room at the rear of the back-to-front building, while the living room had become a workshop while the new floor was being laid on old joists. For Gunna it was a relief to escape the city and spend a couple of hours with young Kjartan Gíslason on her lap while Gísli, Laufey and Steini hammered and sawed in the next room.

‘You look tired, Drífa,’ Gunna said when there was a lull in the hammering.

‘Yeah, a bit.’

‘Keeping you awake, is he?’

‘Twice last night,’ Drífa yawned. ‘Which is a good night.’

‘The house looks good. Or it will do once the living room’s done.’

‘I hope so. I don’t know how Gísli would have managed without Steini to give him a hand. He’s such a lovely man. Where did you find him, Gunna?’

‘Floating in the harbour at Sandgerdi a few years ago.’

Drífa looked sideways at Gunna, unsure if this were a joke of some kind. ‘But you knew him before, didn’t you?’

The question gave Gunna an awkward stab of recollection. ‘Sort of. I knew who he was and that he had been at sea with Laufey’s father. Steini was on board when Raggi was lost and took part in the search. I know he was at the memorial service, but to be quite honest, I was such a wreck that day that it all passed in a daze.’

She shivered at the recollection of those weeks, first the call from the command centre to tell her that Ragnar was not accounted for, a phrase that she found ridiculous at the time, the visit from the ship’s commanding officer, ill at ease and formal in his dress uniform, and the difficult calls and visits from others he had sailed with. The part that she found hardest to accept was that there had been no body, no remains, nothing to pack in a box and bury where she and the children could visit it. There had been a formal inquiry that placed no particular blame anywhere and culminated in an open verdict. There had been no discernible reason why Ragnar should have vanished under the hull of the disabled coaster the Coast Guard vessel had towed clear of the bay where it had grounded, and his dive partner at the time had not been able to account for his disappearance.

The memorial service had been packed and Gunna had sat through it numb as uniformed figures filled the church behind her. What had stayed in her mind as the defining image of that grim day was ten-year-old Gísli in his best clothes with a look of confusion on his face, wondering where his stepfather had disappeared to while baby Laufey laughed and chattered to herself.

‘Gunna?’

It seemed suddenly unreal that the young boy and the girl who had been a baby in her arms on that long, cold day were now busily nailing down floorboards in the next room.

‘Gunna?’

She shook her head and hugged Kjartan as he gurgled on her lap.

‘Sorry, Drífa. I was miles away.’

‘You want me to take him?’

‘No, he’s fine here. I’m sure you don’t mind a break, do you?’

‘Not at all.’ Drífa laughed, and looked at the kitchen clock. ‘Do you want to eat here, or are you and Steini and Laufey going home?’

‘I’m happy to eat here. Shall we get a takeaway?’

Drífa fetched a menu pinned to the corkboard and they quickly selected.

‘Half an hour,’ Drífa said, putting the phone down. ‘Will you go, or shall I?’

‘I’ll go,’ Gunna decided. ‘After all, it’s granny’s treat. The place just down from the church, is it?’

‘That’s the one. It’ll be great not to have to cook for a change.’

Gunna poured herself half a mug of coffee and sipped. Kjartan sat with his hands on the table in front of her, playing with a spoon that tinkled every time he dropped it on the table top.

‘Gunna, I’m a bit concerned about Gísli,’ Drífa said quietly, peering through the open door at the three of them laughing and working in the other room.

‘What’s the matter?’ Gunna asked, her antennae immediately alert.

‘It’s his father,’ Drífa said haltingly and Gunna felt a chill for a second time. ‘I don’t know if I should tell you, really.’

‘Why? What’s the problem?’

‘I’m not sure. You know they were in touch for a while when Gísli went and found him? It was when he was having a really bad time, you know . . .?’

‘Yeah, I know,’ Gunna said. Gísli fathering two children six weeks apart had hit her hard, but she could not avoid seeing that guilt had eaten him up during those awkward months after Soffía had given birth to Ari Gíslason and Drífa had produced Kjartan Gíslason only a few weeks later.

‘Well, you know his dad didn’t want to know? Wasn’t interested?’

‘Yeah, and I wasn’t exactly surprised.’

‘He’s been in touch again. A couple of weeks ago his dad called and then came out here to see him. He’s not well and I think Gísli’s a bit screwed up about it. But you know what he’s like. If he has a problem, he keeps it bottled up inside.’

‘Tell me about it,’ Gunna said with a shudder at being reminded within the space of a few minutes of both the man in her life she would rather forget about and the one whose loss was still deeply painful. ‘I’ll have a quiet word if you like.’

Smoke belched from the upstairs window in a thick black column into the cold morning air. Eiríkur stood back, his nose wrinkled against the smell of burning plastic as he and two uniformed officers kept back the line of vaguely interested spectators.

‘Anyone in there?’ a voice behind him asked.

‘We don’t know yet.’

‘Because that’s my cousin’s place.’

The voice sounded worried and Eiríkur looked round to see a woman in a raincoat with its hood protecting her head from the drizzling rain.

‘In that case, you’d better come with me,’ he said.

In the shelter of a shop doorway she folded her arms and looked disappointed, as if she had always known that her cousin Árni would one day come to a bad end.

‘Árni, you say his name is? Whose son?’

‘Sigurvinsson. His dad was Sigurvin Jónsson. We’re related.’

Helgi was tempted to tell her that the man’s genealogy didn’t need to be traced, but he kept quiet.

‘He lives there alone?’

‘I’m not sure. He’s married to a woman called Inga Jóna Steinsdóttir, but sometimes they’re together and sometimes they’re not, if you understand what I mean.’

‘Children? I mean, any children who might be in the property?’

‘Inga Jóna has kids of her own, but they’re grown up and they don’t think much of Árni, so there’s not much chance of any of them being in there.’

‘A stormy relationship? Do either of them drink?’

The woman pursed her lips. ‘Let’s say that Árni wouldn’t knock your hand away.’

‘Drugs? Anything like that? Where does Árni work?’

‘He’s never done a lot of that, but he used to work at a garage up at Hellnahraun and he drives a taxi sometimes as well.’ The woman sniffed. ‘When he’s sober enough, that is.’

‘Your name?’

‘Hulda Benediktsdóttir.’

Eiríkur wrote everything down and added the woman’s phone number.

‘I’ll give you a call when we know anything,’ he said, handing her a card. ‘That’s my number, so if you hear from either Árni or Inga Jóna, I’d appreciate it if you could let me know they’re safe.’

The nighttime wind had howled, shaking the roof as they lay in their stiffly laundered hotel beds. Towards morning the wind had dropped, and when Magni rubbed his eyes and looked out of the front door in the daylight, he could see the slopes of the bowl of hills that surrounded Hotel Hraun on three sides white with snow. The yard and Erna’s pearly white Ford Explorer were also covered with a thick layer of snow, heaped into drifts around the car and anywhere there was a lee from the wind that brought the dry powder snow down from slopes higher up.

The yard, enclosed on two sides by the hotel’s wide L-shape, was dotted with the meandering track of a fox, but what attracted Magni’s attention were parallel lines that ran along the edge of the yard, into it and around the Ford, before snaking back down the hill alongside the road. He pulled on his shoes and went outside, examining the trails and noticing that the snow had been roughly dusted off the car’s registration plate.

‘So we’ve had a visitor,’ he muttered to himself, before going back into the relative warmth of the echoing lobby and wondering whether or not to tell Össur.

* * *

Steini had left early, his pickup loaded with toolboxes, for a job that Gunna guessed would keep him happily deep in the bowels of a boat somewhere for the rest of the day. She was sitting on the sofa, revelling in being home alone with her shift not due to start until midday, when she realized that Laufey was at home as well.

She turned up the radio and took the hated vacuum cleaner from its place in the cupboard by the door to run over the floor of the living room, expecting the noise to flush Laufey from sleep if she could keep it up long enough. But her dislike of anything more than the most essential housework won, and by the time Laufey emerged from her room, Gunna had retreated to the sofa with Steini’s iPad.

‘Cleaning up, Mum?’ Laufey asked, eyeing the vacuum cleaner propped against the wall.

‘Just the essentials, sweetheart. No more than that. Speaking of which, shouldn’t you be at school today?’

‘Not until this afternoon. Can I get a lift with you?’

‘You can, but it means going early. I’m meeting Soffía this morning. That means I’m going at ten, not a moment later.’

Laufey yawned again and nodded, vanishing into her room, and a moment later an insistent beat made its way through the thin panel, not loud enough to be worth complaining about, but not low enough to be easily ignored. Gunna dropped the iPad back on the table and returned to the vacuum cleaner, determined to at least make a dent in the housework.

Erna dragged herself unwillingly from sleep, wondering why there was an unfamiliar duvet on the bed, then wondering why she was still wearing her clothes, before the previous day’s events came flooding back and she wanted to scream. The room’s other bed was empty, the covers thrown back, so Tinna Lind had to be up already. She sat on the bed and stared blankly at the wall, as if it might provide her with the answers she was desperate for.

In the bathroom she found a tiny tube of toothpaste and scrubbed her teeth with a fingertip to get rid of the stale taste in her mouth. Her hair was a mess, she saw with dismay, and there was no brush or comb to be seen anywhere. There had been a hairbrush in her bag, but that had to be in the back of the car now.

It was the smell of roasting meat coming up the stairs that reminded her how hungry she was. There had been brunch yesterday with Sunna on the 19th Floor, then they had gone to Hafnarfjördur to check out that new antique shop she had heard about, and after that there had been nothing but the awful drive in the dark with those two men. She shuddered at the thought of it.

She went down the broad staircase with trepidation and her footsteps clicked on the tiles of the kitchen floor as the aroma of cooked meat drew her there. Tinna Lind and Magni sat at the table peeling potatoes and giggling at a joke.

‘Good morning.’

‘G’day, sleepyhead,’ Magni said with a grin. ‘The day’s half gone and you’re still snoring.’

‘I do not snore,’ Erna said in a tone that was intended to be cold but came across as hurt.

‘You know what I mean. Anyhow, there’s a roast dinner for breakfast, once the spuds are done. We had a little hunt around earlier and it looks like we could camp out here until the spring.’

‘I do hope not,’ Erna said, elbow on the table and the back of her hand to her forehead.