“Here, chief,” Helgi called softly, his finger on the mouse as he scrolled back through the digital recording.
“What do you have?”
“Look.”
Gunna and Helgi watched as the woman emerged from the lift on the fourth floor and made her way around the corner toward the room where Jóhannes Karlsson’s body was still spread-eagled on the bed as the forensic team examined every fibre in the place. She looked quickly left and right as she passed the camera, after which the camera recorded twenty seconds of blank corridor before it stopped.
“It’s automatic,” Helgi explained. “On the floors upstairs the cameras are fitted with motion sensors, so they start recording as soon as they sense someone moving.”
“I got the gist of that, thanks, Helgi.”
“So the next thing we see on the tape is this,” he said, eyes still glued to the screen as Jóhannes Karlsson emerged from the lift with a swagger, and looked both ways along the plush corridor just as the young woman had done, before disappearing from view.
“That’s it, is it? We don’t get a view of the door to the room itself?”
“Nope, according to that weird night porter, the cameras record the lift and the door to the stairs, so that they only record who goes to each floor, not who goes to which rooms. It’s a human rights violation, apparently, if they record who strays into someone else’s room.”
“And this is the kind of place lawyers can afford to stay in, so I suppose they have to be careful. Helgi, what’s your take on all this?”
Helgi sat back; the recording was paused with Jóhannes Karlsson’s back freeze-framed in the swing doors leading to the fourth-floor suites. “Simple. He orders a hooker, meets her in the bar downstairs. They go up to the room separately, although I’d bet the staff here knew exactly what was happening. She takes off her bra, his blood pressure goes through the roof when he gets an eyeful of her tits, he has a heart attack and she gets out as quick as she can.”
Gunna held her chin in her hands as she looked at Jóhannes Karlsson’s broad back on the screen, frozen in mid-stride. He had been a big man, and a muscular man in his youth, who walked with all the assurance that money or power can give.
“I reckon you’re probably quite right. I’m sure this isn’t a murder case, but we’re going to have to talk to this woman and get her side of what happened. I doubt we’ll even be able to pin an immoral earnings rap on her as it’s her word against ours that they were anything other than just good friends,” Gunna said thoughtfully. “Not that I expect Jóhannes Karlsson’s wife will be too impressed.”
“Right enough,” Helgi agreed.
Gunna stood up. “But as this guy was a wealthy man, and I’d guess he has a few friends in high places, we’d best cover our backs and do it all by the book, otherwise it’ll come back to haunt us later. I’m going to have a chat with some of the staff again. Go through the rest of the recordings, will you, and see if you can get a glimpse of her leaving the building so we can see when she left?”
María wasn’t home and the flat echoed. Baddó’s head buzzed after three beers and he reflected that a few years ago three beers would have been nothing more than the precursor to something better. Years of enforced abstinence had merely ensured that three beers made him want to spend the rest of the afternoon sleeping on his sister’s sofa.
He made coffee, and made it strong enough to bring him back to reality with a jerk. A sandwich of cheese and cold peas mashed into the thick bread helped settle his stomach and, with a second mug of extra-strong coffee at his elbow, he looked at the envelope on the table in front of him.
Baddó reflected that he could return it to Hinrik the next day, unopened, and tell him that he couldn’t do the job. But he knew that wouldn’t be acceptable to the man in the leather jacket who made barmen jump with a wave of his little finger. He shook his head, disappointed in himself that his curiosity had got the better of him, instead of turning down Hinrik’s job without asking any questions.
There were two photographs in the envelope. Printed on heavy gloss paper, but grainy and not as distinct as he would have liked. Looking at them carefully, Baddó decided that one at least was lifted from CCTV footage and showed a dark-haired woman in a tracksuit top zipped up under her chin and with the straps of a bag over her shoulder. The expression on her face was tight and determined, as if there were an insecurity or a tension about her. The ringlets of black hair fell past her eyebrows and around her head to her shoulders, as if she were hiding behind it.
The second photograph showed another woman. Taken in better light, this one was clearer, showing a woman in a pale dress, caught looking over her shoulder to give a three-quarter view of her face. Baddó admired the long legs that ended in surprisingly low-heeled court shoes.
Tall, he thought. She must be one-eighty, one-ninety if she can get away without heels.
He placed the two pictures side by side and tried to compare the dark-haired woman looking past the camera to the tall blonde smiling at someone or something to one side. He stood up and rooted in a kitchen drawer, eventually returning to the table with a cracked magnifying glass that had lost its handle. Any thought of sleep had gone and it wasn’t because of the extra-strong coffee cooling in a mug at the corner of the kitchen table.
He pored over both pictures, starting with the backgrounds. The blonde was standing in a big room, and Baddó could make out tables and chairs in the distance. A restaurant, he decided. Or maybe it could be a club of some kind, he decided. The dark-haired woman appeared to be in a corridor, with a blank wall over her shoulder and an indistinct sign tacked to the wall behind her, half cut off by the edge of the picture. He stared at it through the glass and finally made out the letters NCY EXIT picked out in large square letters.
“Emergency Exit,” he decided with satisfaction. That means a restaurant, a club, a hotel, a school, an office even. Or some kind of government building, maybe, he mused.
Last, he turned to the two faces, as if to confirm his suspicion. The tall blonde in the slimline dress bore remarkably little comparison to the dumpy-looking girl in the tracksuit, but the blonde’s bobbed hair accentuated her cheekbones, while the black curls made the other’s face look broader and rounder. Placing one as close to the other as he could, Baddó went from one to the other and, within a minute or two, he was sure. The set of the jaw and the shape of the nose told him that the two were either sisters, or else the same person.
He sat back thoughtfully.
“So who are you, darling?” he asked himself, looking at the clock and slipping his jacket on. “And who have you upset so badly that they’ve paid that evil bastard Hinrik hard cash to find out who you are?”
Gunna left Helgi and Eiríkur to deal with the staff at Hotel Gullfoss while she went back to her desk at the Hverfisgata police station, where paperwork galore awaited her. A note on her desk asked her to look in on Ívar Laxdal, the senior officer in charge of what was nominally the serious crime unit, except that a general lack of serious crime in Reykjavík had ensured it remained part of the team of detectives working from the cramped office. The unit’s chief inspector, Örlygur Sveinsson, had briefly returned to work to take up the post he’d been given, only to see a return of the long-standing back problem that had already kept him off work for a long time. His three-week stint in charge had been blessed by nothing that could be classed as the sort of serious crimes the unit had been created to deal with, leaving Gunna and the others to handle the usual break-ins, “borrowed” cars and stolen mobile phones during a wonderfully peaceful hiatus. Word had already spread that Örlygur’s departure for the couch at home seemed to have coincided with a spate of assaults, an attempted murder and a rape case that Gunna privately doubted would ever come to court.