Reykjavík detective Gunnhildur Gísladóttir tries not to believe in ghosts. But when Helgi, one of her team is certain he's seen a man who had been declared dead more than fifteen years ago, she reluctantly gives him some unofficial leeway to look into it.
Has the not-so-dead man returned from the grave to settle old scores, or has he just decided to take a last look around his old haunts?
Either way, there are people who have nursed grudges for years, hoping for a reckoning one day. Even the rumour of his being alive and kicking is enough to spark a storm of fury and revenge, with Gunnhildur and Helgi caught up in the middle of it.
The seventh dark and atmospheric thriller in Quentin Bates's Icelandic crime series. A tense page-turner perfect for fans of Jo Nesbo, Henning Mankell and Søren Sveistrup's The Chestnut Man.
Praise for Quentin Bates:
'A great read - leaves you craving the next installment' Yrsa Sigurðardóttir
'A perfect book to curl up with in front of the fire' The Bookbag
'Well written and absorbing' Woman's Way
'Captures the chilly spirit of Nordic crime fiction . . . Fans of Arnaldur Indridason's Reykjavík mysteries will want to add Bates to their reading lists' Booklist
Stiff south-westerly wind, veering north-westerly later in the day. Mainly fair with some light cloud cover, moderate precipitation by evening. Snow showers or sleet overnight on high ground. Temperatures around 0°C.
Winter 2020
‘It was the neighbour who cut him down and called the ambulance,’ the young police officer with ginger stubble sprouting from his chin said apologetically, as if he should have been there to stop it happening.
The breeze hardly rippled the surface of the lake, a translucent shade alternating between grey and pale blue as the cloud cover broke to let in shafts of the late afternoon sunlight before re-forming to blot them out. Gunna shut the car door and didn’t bother to lock it.
‘Not to worry. Suicide, right?’
‘Looks like it. He was hanging from a rope slung over a beam in the barn and there was a chair that had been kicked away. Classic stuff, isn’t it?’
Gunna shivered. Violent crimes were invariably deeply unpleasant to deal with, but there was a depth of sadness about someone taking their own life, as if the misery that could drive a person to such an extreme permeated the walls and the ground where it had happened. This tranquil spot would never be a happy one as long as that rootless ghost was around.
The place felt mournful on this icy day with the chill stealing down from the hills. The wooden house was set back from the track that ran along the shoreline, half hidden behind spindly trees, and the young officer ushered Gunna past it to a barn tucked away behind, the curved metal sheets of its walls faded and rusted to the same shade as the scrub grass that surrounded it.
The corpse lay where it had been taken down, a blanket draped over it. A second young officer, his face pale, tried to look as if he knew what he was doing.
It was the contents of the barn that took her by surprise. One long bench was scattered with brushes, palette knives and screwed-up tubes of paint among other debris, and canvases were stacked carelessly against one wall. Gunna made out landscapes and upside-down human figures among them before she turned her attention to the blanket.
‘It’s not very nice,’ the young officer told her needlessly.
‘They never are,’ she said, drawing back the cover to see lank dark hair, thin at the crown, and a face that looked deeply weary. She had no desire to see the man’s neck, the makeshift noose still around it.
‘What’s the neighbour’s name?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t asked.’
‘Always get the names,’ Gunna told him gently as the other officer nodded morbid agreement from the doorway. ‘Always.’
‘He’s in the house,’ the young officer said. ‘With the doctor.’
Gunna carefully replaced the blanket. ‘We have an identity for this poor guy, do we?’
‘His name’s Áskell Hafberg,’ the young man said. ‘The artist.’
‘I’d never have guessed. Now, the doctor and the neighbour. Lead me to them.’
A squat man in a matching camouflage hat and waistcoat over a traditional patterned sweater sat in an armchair with a glass of something amber cradled in his hands while the doctor scribbled on a pad.
‘G’day, Ingólfur.’ Gunna greeted the doctor and held out a hand to the shocked neighbour, who put down his whisky and jumped to his feet. ‘I’m Gunnhildur Gísladóttir from CID. You’re the gentleman who raised the alarm?’
‘Good morning,’ he said, teeth chattering. ‘That’s me. Jónatan Bjarnason. I live next door during the summer.’
Gunna drew up a hard kitchen chair and they both sat down. ‘You found Áskell?’
Jónatan shuddered. ‘I was only going to ask him if I could borrow a can of petrol for my outboard. I wanted to catch a few fish for dinner. Normally he’d lend me a few litres of fuel and I’d pay him in fish. He wasn’t in the house, and I figured he wasn’t home. I knew he wouldn’t mind, so I went out to the barn to get the can, and there he was.’
He shuddered again and sipped his whisky.
‘So you cut him down?’
‘I did. I had no idea how long he’d been there, all night or just a few seconds. When he was on the ground I realised he was stone cold, so he must have been there a long time. Christ, what a sight,’ he said, shoulders shaking at the recollection.
‘You knew him well?’
‘As well as anyone round here. Áskell knew damn all about insurance – that was my business before I retired, by the way – and I know nothing about art. So we talked mostly about fishing and books and occasionally we’d play a game of chess. He didn’t much like people with an opinion on art, so I suppose that’s why we got on so well.’
‘He fished as well, I suppose?’
‘He used to. Until his wife died.’
‘When was that?’ Gunna asked, and the doctor looked up enquiringly.
‘About five years ago. She drowned, just out there by the end of the jetty. He’d never fish in the lake again after that. He was happy to swim in it sometimes, said it brought them closer together. But he wouldn’t put a hook in there again.’
‘But he didn’t mind you doing it?’
‘That was different, he said.’
Gunna nodded and looked through the window to the stubby jetty with its rickety planks.
‘When did you last see him?’
‘The day before yesterday.’
‘And how was he?’
‘Miserable. Drunk and miserable. He still missed Birna terribly. He’d miss her more than usual, have a drink, miss her some more and that would go on for a week every now and again. I always thought he should have gone to the doctor, but he wouldn’t have it.’
‘Birna was his wife?’ Gunna asked, the sound of the name chiming with a memory somewhere deep inside as Jónatan nodded. ‘Had he been drinking steadily these last few days, do you know?’
‘He had.’ Jónatan coughed as the last of the whisky hit the back of his throat. ‘He wasn’t a happy man.’
Gunna flipped through her notebook and extracted a card.
‘That’s me and where to find me if there’s anything you want to talk about or anything you might remember. I need your name and a contact number and I’ll have to get a full statement from you later. You’re going to be out here all week, are you?’
Jónatan shrugged and stood up. His shoulders sagged and he shook his head doubtfully. ‘I was going to be, but I’m not so sure now. At any rate, I don’t live far from the police station, so if I’m not here, you can find me in town.’
Gunna followed him to the door and watched as he stumped down the track, shoulders hunched and hands deep in the pockets of his waistcoat, without looking back.
‘What do you reckon, Ingólfur?’
The doctor looked up from his notes. ‘Time of death around midnight, I’d guess. I’m sure the post-mortem will tell us he had been drinking.’
‘Cause of death? Not that I need to ask.’
‘Broken neck. Very quick and efficient. So many people manage to screw this up and end up strangling themselves, but this fellow did a good job of it.’
Helgi felt hot and even more uncomfortable as he waited at the bar, his patience wearing thin, until the barman finally approached, his expression asking wordlessly what sir would like to drink. Helgi opened his mouth to speak, but the voice was someone else’s.
‘A brandy. Double.’
The gruff voice at his side ordered with the authority of someone used to being listened to, and Helgi turned, ready to argue that he had been waiting for what felt like the best part of the day for the last beer of the exhausting holiday that had left him longing to get back to the familiarity of work.
‘Hey, pal …’ he began, as the barman took a glass from the rack overhead and poured.
‘What? Were you waiting?’ said a bronzed man with a face that looked as if it had been chipped from rock, glancing down at Helgi, who felt suddenly inadequate in his baggy shirt and with the skin peeling from the top of his sunburned head.
‘I was waiting,’ Helgi said. ‘Until you jumped in.’
‘Sorry, bud,’ the man said, dropping a twenty-euro note on the bar and placing a finger on it. He nodded his head sideways in Helgi’s direction. ‘Get this gentleman a drink as well, would you?’
Disarmed, Helgi’s frustration evaporated.
‘Thanks. I’ll have a brandy as well.’
‘Make it a double,’ the stranger ordered, lifting his glass in salutation. ‘Your health,’ he said in a grave voice. He sipped, rolled the spirit across his tongue for a moment, savouring it, then threw the rest down his throat in one smooth motion. He replaced the glass on the bar, nodded, and walked away without waiting for his change.
The name nagged at her all the way back to town from Áskell Hafberg’s house overlooking the lake at Hafravatn. It was still nagging at her as she parked in the yard behind the police station at Hverfisgata, and by the time she was halfway up the stairs, she was cursing her own inability to remember why it rang a bell.
‘Busy, Gunnhildur?’ Ívar Laxdal asked, striding towards her, trench coat belted over his barrel frame.
‘A suicide up by Hafravatn. Helgi’s still on holiday and Eiríkur’s busy, so I thought I’d have a little drive in the country,’ she said, and watched his eyebrows close up into a single dark bar of a frown. ‘Not a pretty sight,’ she added. ‘I drew the short straw on this one.’
Ívar Laxdal nodded sagely. ‘One has to do that sometimes and let the youngsters have the exciting stuff.’
Gunna wondered how Helgi, still stricken with panic at the onset of deep middle age, could be described as a youngster, but let it pass.
‘Anyone we know?’
‘Áskell Hafberg. He was an artist, apparently, although I’ve never heard of him. Hanged himself from a beam in his workshop.’
‘Hafberg?’ Ívar Laxdal asked, gaping for a moment then quickly recovering his composure. ‘I didn’t even know he still lived in Iceland.’
‘You seem to know more about him than I do. Would you like to fill in the gaps in my knowledge?’ Gunna invited, getting over the shock of having seen Ívar Laxdal lost for words, albeit fleetingly, for the first time.
He pursed his lips and looked into the distance through windows that could have done with a wash, or at least a decent shower of rain.
‘Áskell Hafberg. Well I never,’ he said quietly, half to himself, before returning to reality. ‘A truly fine artist, deeply talented in my view and scandalously overlooked. At an artistic level he never fitted in with the establishment, if that’s what you can call it, and he rubbed them badly up the wrong way because he simply didn’t care. His paintings had a unique passion and a depth to them, and they sold, which is why I suppose the cultural mafia never liked him, however much they pretended to.’ He paused. ‘I have two pieces of Áskell Hafberg’s work at home,’ he added with a touch of shyness, and this time Gunna was astonished to hear the inscrutable Ívar Laxdal talk with such knowledge and feeling about art.
‘You collect art?’ she asked finally.
‘I do,’ Ívar Laxdal replied seriously. ‘When I can afford it. I have two of Hafberg’s early works. One of them I bought from the artist something like thirty-five years ago. I always knew it would be worth something.’
‘And the price has probably gone up now, or it will when news gets out that he’s dead.’
‘And suicide, Gunnhildur? No sign of anything suspicious?’
Gunna shook her head. ‘Nothing that I could see. He’d been drinking for a few days, apparently.’
‘The curse of the artistic temperament. Look after it, will you? I’d appreciate it if you’d do it sensitively,’ he added in a bleak tone. ‘One of Iceland’s finer artists, and maybe his death is what’s needed to get him greater recognition.’ He carried on towards the top of the stairs, waving a gloved hand in farewell.
Gunna had her hand on the office door when she realised what she should have done and hurried for the lift, emerging at the ground floor and making for the car park. She waved as Ívar Laxdal’s black Volvo rolled towards her and came to a halt.
‘Sorry,’ she panted as the window hissed down. ‘I should have asked you upstairs. Since you know about his art, do you know anything about Áskell Hafberg’s private life?’
‘He was something of a hell-raiser by all accounts, at least as a young man,’ Ívar Laxdal said slowly. ‘An enfant terrible, as the French would say. Children, I believe; several wives, including other men’s. He lived abroad for a long time and I thought he still did.’
‘And Birna? Does that name mean anything to you?’
Ívar Laxdal shook his head and frowned.
‘I can tell you about his work, but not much about the man, I’m afraid, other than that his wife died in tragic circumstances a few years ago.’
They had the aisle between them, Halla with the boys securely strapped in and their iPads in their hands in one row of seats, and Helgi sitting opposite, watching as Halla tried to make herself comfortable, folding her hands across her swelling belly. Pregnancy suited her, Helgi thought, feeling pleasantly fuzzy courtesy of the windfall double brandy in the departure lounge. The aircraft was ready to go and the plane bumped across the tarmac. Helgi felt Halla’s hand on his arm and for a moment they clasped hands across the aisle until the acceleration pressed them back into their seats and she turned away to make sure that Nonni and Svavar were still engrossed in their games.
It hadn’t been a wonderful holiday, Helgi thought. If Halla’s parents had just let them use the villa in Portugal, it would have been great, but the interfering old busybodies had insisted on being there as well, which would have been fine for a day or two but was far from all right for a whole two weeks. The villa was large and comfortable, close to the golf course that was so dear to the old man’s heart, but the walls were paper-thin and Helgi reflected that while he could live with a chaste goodnight kiss on the cheek, every night for two weeks was too much for a grown man.
He felt the brandy’s effects and wondered if he dared order another one once the drinks trolley appeared, or if that would prompt tutting and a frown from across the aisle.
He closed his eyes as the aircraft lifted off, and his thoughts drifted back to the brandy, and the bar, and the slab-shouldered man who had walked away without picking up the handful of coins that were his change.
There was something there that irritated him, a resemblance to someone he had once known, and being unable to call the name to mind infuriated him. The line of the man’s jaw and the slight cleft in his chin, the abrupt tone and the eyes narrowing as he realised he had been challenged for jumping the queue were somehow familiar. He tried to recall the few words the man had spoken, in easy, clipped English. There was an accent there behind the gravel in his voice that tugged at Helgi’s memory, and he settled into a troubled doze.
The brandy had worn off by the time they landed and found there was a delay and a couple of hours to wait for their evening connecting flight to Iceland. Halla settled herself and the two sleepy boys in a snack bar in a quiet corner of the departure lounge. Helgi reflected that it would be a late arrival, and Halla’s sister would be less than cheerful when she came to collect them from the airport. He shrugged mentally. That could be Halla’s problem. Standing in yet another queue, this time for coffee and fizzy drinks for the boys, he wondered idly if he had picked the right girl. He had slept with Stella a couple of times in his restless single years, but somehow had ended up with the warm, maternal Halla instead of her career-minded and resolutely childless sister, who would probably have suited him better.
He sighed as he carried a tray back to the table. Halla had become pregnant almost immediately, mirroring his first marriage, and Nonni and Svavar had arrived in quick succession, adding to the three sons they collectively already had between them: Halla’s boy and Helgi’s two from his first marriage. It nagged at him that this latest pregnancy hadn’t been discussed, it had just happened; as if it was meant to be, as Halla had happily told him.
Halla slept placidly through the second flight. This time Helgi sat with the boys, trying to read a paperback as they chattered at his side. He realised as the aircraft came in to land at Keflavík airport that for at least half an hour he had been turning the pages without taking in a single thing that had happened in the book. He sighed to himself, glanced out of the window and shivered as he saw below the long floodlit strip of Reykjanesbraut, the highway leading through the lava fields from the airport at Keflavík to Reykjavík. He told himself that he’d need to brace himself for the coming cold shock waiting for them outside the terminal building.
While Halla had been restored by three hours of slumber on the flight, Helgi took a deep breath at the carousel, telling himself that the third airport of the day was the last one and in less than an hour he could climb into his own bed. He hauled the cases from the carousel, cursed at the weight as he stacked them on a trolley and steered them towards the Nothing to Declare sign, just as a broad-shouldered figure strode past him, a leather bag hung on one shoulder and a modest case on wheels at his heels.
Helgi stopped dead for a second, and then pushed the trolley as hard as he could, the boys scampering behind him as he tried to catch a glimpse of the man again, ransacking his memory to recall the name that ought to go with the face that had suddenly appeared first at a busy Portuguese airport, and then striding confidently into the Icelandic night.
He dropped Erik Petter Tallaksen’s passport on the table and wondered why he was there.
He had brooded all the way from Vigo to the airport across the border in Porto and during the stopover at Schiphol. He knew it was dangerous, that this was the worst place in the world for him to be. This was precisely where some long-lost schoolmate or relative could run into him in the street with a smile, innocently asking where he had been all these years. Then they’d remember the rest of the story and any chance of staying under the radar would be gone if he wasn’t able to bluff it out by sticking to English.
But it had to be done. It had been too long. Fifteen years was a big chunk of any lifetime, during which his parents had died, his siblings had become grandparents and his wife had married someone new. With the whole world online these days, it hadn’t been hard to keep track of people and events back home. Now he would have to do his best to not attract any attention to himself.
Once he had walked out of the airport into the chill outside and taken his place on the bus with the tourists, he had felt vulnerable. He longed to turn around, walk back into the terminal building and buy himself a one-way ticket right back to the sunshine and the place he now thought of as home.
He hadn’t set foot in his native country in fifteen years, had hardly spoken a word of his own language for just as long. Occasionally he had heard snatches of conversation, especially when he had been in Denmark or Norway, and had grinned to himself as these Icelanders abroad blithely assumed that they could drink and argue at the tops of their voices without fear of being understood.
Sitting in this bare and ruinously expensive hotel room with its view of a lot more city lights than he remembered from the old days, he felt the walls closing in on him, the doubts tugging at his conscience. It had been a mad decision, made on the spur of the moment. But there were things he had to attend to, people he needed to see – even if he dared not let them see him.
It was past midnight when Halla finally put the key in the lock and pushed the door open. Helgi followed with Svavar in his arms. Still on his feet but practically asleep, Nonni shuffled in a daze towards the room he shared with his brother.
‘Shoes off, Nonni,’ Helgi said quietly.
He took the sleeping Svavar straight to the boys’ bedroom and laid him in the bunk bed. He gently pulled off his shoes and tucked the duvet around him, while Nonni shambled in, yawning, and crawled gratefully into his own bunk.
‘Good lad,’ Helgi said, kissing the top of his head. ‘My turn in five minutes,’ he muttered to himself as he switched off the light.
Halla leaned against the counter, one hand on her belly and the other cradling a steaming mug.
‘There’s hot water if you want some tea,’ she said as Helgi dropped into one of the kitchen chairs. ‘You’re going to work tomorrow, aren’t you?’
‘Anxious to get rid of me, are you?’
‘Idiot,’ she said fondly, sitting opposite him and taking his hand. ‘Was that a terrible holiday?’
‘Much as I’m fond of your parents, you can have too much of a good thing.’ Helgi yawned. ‘The only moment we had to ourselves was when they took the kids to the market and left us behind.’
‘Yeah. That was a fun couple of hours.’
‘They weren’t out of the drive before we had our clothes off,’ Helgi said. ‘We could try a rerun?’
‘In your dreams, old man. Five months gone and we’ve been travelling all day. Do you really imagine I have the energy for that kind of stuff?’
‘A man can live in hope,’ he said seriously. ‘And yes. I have to go back to work tomorrow. Twelve till eight.’
‘I’m quite proud of you, Helgi. You know that?’
Helgi sent her a suspicious look.
‘Why?’
‘Because we spent almost two weeks with my parents in the same house and you didn’t complain. Well, not all that much. But on top of that, you didn’t call Gunna once to find out how she was doing.’
‘Gunna’s a big girl. She can look after herself.’
Halla sipped her tea and sighed. ‘It was a lovely break, and I suppose it’ll be the last one for a while.’
‘It’ll be the last one we can afford, especially if we’re going to try and move to somewhere bigger next year.’
‘I know. I haven’t even wanted to think about house prices while we’ve been away. I’ll bet they’ve gone up another five per cent while we were in Portugal.’
‘Let’s hope the underworld has been busy and there’s some overtime to be had. We could do with it.’
Halla gave him a tired smile.
‘You’re back at work already, Helgi. I can tell. What was all that at the airport?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘You went right into cop mode at the airport in Porto. Don’t think I can’t tell. What was that all about?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ Helgi said, stretching his arms over his head and then reaching out to place one hand on the bulge that touched the kitchen table. ‘Just a face in the crowd. Someone I thought I recognised, but I can’t put a name to the face. It’s frustrating.’
‘It comes with age, old man.’
‘Maturity, you mean, young lady.’
‘Whatever.’ Halla yawned. ‘Come on. Old people like you need their sleep.’
Halla slept on her side, a hand by her face and a curl of her hair wrapped around one finger. Helgi drifted between sleep and half wakefulness as the trials of the day seeped out of his bones and faces flashed through his mind.
He sat up in bed with a start.
‘Ingvar,’ he said, his voice urgent. ‘It was Ingvar Sturlaugsson.’
‘What’s the matter?’ Halla asked sleepily as Helgi lay back on . . .
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