Cold Comfort

The bedroom was empty, the duvet on the bed thrown back. Gunna took a deep breath and pushed open the bathroom door. A cloud of steam billowed past her. She peered into the gloom, the room’s light hardly piercing the steam and reduced to a white orb in the middle of the ceiling. She could see the water running at full power in the shower cubicle, and a dark shape against the cubicle wall showed her where Bjarki Steinsson was.

Here we go again, she thought, turning to Eiríkur. “We’re going to need an ambulance, I reckon. Get one called, will you?” she told him and gingerly opened the cubicle door.

Gunna looked down at the body curled against the wall and breathed a sigh of relief as Bjarki Steinsson gazed up at her with water cascading through his thin hair and down his face. There was misery in his eyes-but at least he was alive.

She gestured to Eiríkur to take a step back before she squatted down on her haunches and looked into Bjarki Steinsson’s blank brown eyes rimmed with red.

“Bjarki?” she said gently. “What happened?”

“It’s just too much,” he said hollowly.

“Look, come on out of the shower, will you? You’ve been in there for a long time.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said finally, after a long moment’s thought. “None of it matters now.”

Gunna stood up. She leaned over him to turn off the flow of scalding water and there was a sudden silence. She pulled a thick towel from the rail, opened it and held it out to him.

“It’s going to be all right,” she said softly. “Come on, we’ll get you dried off and sorted out. All right?”

He nodded dumbly and dragged himself unsteadily to his feet, every movement seeming to cost him pain. Gunna was surprised at just how thin his limbs were as he stepped, shivering already, from the shower cubicle. He immediately sat on the closed toilet seat and his shoulders hunched forward, emphasizing the pale paunch that contrasted with the thinness of the rest of his body. She wrapped the towel around his shoulders and pulled another from the rack.

“Get the manager out of here, and make sure he keeps quiet,” she said to Eiríkur in a matter-of-fact voice so as not to alarm the forlorn man sitting in front of her. “And look out for that ambulance, will you?”

Eiríkur disappeared, taking the manager with him.

“All right, Bjarki. They’ve all gone. Stand up again, please.”

He obeyed as if in a trance, and she reached around him to wrap the second towel about his waist before taking his hand to lead him to the bedroom. She sat him down on the end of the bed and crouched down in front of him.

“Bjarki, tell me what happened. Have you taken any pills or anything like that?”

The question seemed to spark him into consciousness.

“God, no.”

“What then?”

“I was just going to go away. Away from everything. I’ve wanted to do it for years, just walk away.”

“Where to?”

“To the house in Spain.”

“You have a house there?”

Bjarki nodded. “Nobody knows about it, not even the witch,” he whispered. “Bjartmar fixed it up for me at a good price. I was going to go there and not bother coming back.”

“So what went wrong?”

“You did,” he said with a first flash of animation. “Stopped me at the airport yesterday.”

“Customs stopped you leaving the country with an illegal amount of foreign currency,” Gunna reminded him.

“Illegal, crap. All the top dogs can do it. If you know the right people, you can do what you want.”

“But why yesterday? What brought this on if you’ve been planning it for so long?”

Bjarki shook his head. “We went there a couple of times, Svana and I. Nobody knew us. It was perfect. Then she died.”

Gunna felt a presence behind her and look round to see Eiríkur and a green-suited paramedic. She looked back at Bjarki Steinsson, who seemed to have slipped into a trance.

“He’s all yours,” she told the paramedic. “Look after him. He’s had a bit of a tough time.”

The man nodded. He kneeled down where Gunna had squatted and patted Bjarki’s knee.

“All right, are you? My name’s Siggi and I’m here to help you,” he said cheerfully.

Gunna squatted again and looked at Bjarki’s blank face.

“It’s going to be all right, Bjarki,” she said softly. “These gentlemen are going to take you over to the hospital for a few checks and some rest. I’ll look in on you later if that’s all right.”

Gunna felt her head spin as she sought out Ívar Laxdal. As the last few days had become increasingly complex, she had found the man’s presence in the background a reassurance that she was on the right track, even when she seemed to be getting nowhere.

“Gunnhildur,” Ívar Laxdal’s rich baritone intoned behind her. “Coffee? I’m just going to the canteen.”

“Good idea.”

“What’s happened? Did you locate Bjarki Steinsson?”

“Yup. Last night at Keflavík, trying to skip the country like all the rest of Iceland’s brightest and best criminals. Put him in a hotel and took his passport away. He seems to have suffered a breakdown during the night. He’s at the National Hospital now, under sedation and observation.”

“Has his wife been informed?”