Cold Comfort

The paramedic stood up and stretched. Gunna looked at the woman’s face, half obscured by waves of hair. The skin at the corners of the wide-open green eyes looked stretched, parchment-like, in a way Gunna felt would have been more usual in someone past retirement age. The abundant blonde hair was coarse and thick, and she wondered if its natural colour had been seen in the last twenty years. She tried to estimate Svana Geirs’ age and put it at around thirty-five.

“We’d better get ourselves out and leave the place to the technical team. Are you off?” she asked the yawning paramedic.

“As soon as the doc gets here to declare mortality,” he replied, stepping back and carefully not touching walls or worktops. “So, is this your first celebrity?”

“Sort of. I had a city councillor once. Heart attack jogging on the beach at Nautholtsv’k. Stone dead by the time we got there. Shame about Svana, though,” he sighed. “I used to have a poster of her on my wall when I was a student.”

Gunna and Helgi left the technical team swarming over the flat and met on the first-floor landing to compare notes. As many uniformed officers as could be found had already been dispatched to scour the area for anything that could be a murder weapon, and to start the long process of knocking on doors.

“Tell me about Svana Geirs, then,” she demanded. “The name’s familiar, but that’s it.”

“Well we’ll have to do a bit of digging. I suppose she was one of those people who are famous for being famous, if you know what I mean.”

“You mean she didn’t actually do anything?”

“She was on telly for a while with a fitness show on Channel 2. My first missus used to watch it, so that has to be five years ago at least, doing these daft exercises in front of the box. Never did her any good. The show was less about keeping fit than Svana’s tits bouncing up and down in a tight top. That’s about it. She sort of disappeared from view after that, but she still pops up in the gossip mags.”

“All right. So who wants to knock off a failed TV presenter? There was some real force behind it, and that was a single blow as far as I could see,” Gunna said. She would dearly have liked a cigarette, but a promise is a promise, and Laufey would know the second she walked in that Mum had been cheating.

“Time of death?” Helgi asked.

“Don’t know. Miss Cruz will give us an accurate idea later. It’s getting on for six now, so I reckon this afternoon sometime. She was still warm when we got here.”

The police’s only forensic pathologist was on long-term leave and the post had been covered by a series of replacements recruited from overseas. The latest was a woman from Spain with a double-barrelled surname who had replaced a tall Irishman and had instantly been christened Miss Cruz by her new colleagues.

“Who raised the alarm?” Gunna continued.

“The cleaner. Found the lift wasn’t working, climbed the stairs and saw the front door was open.”

“Open? So whoever did this was out pretty quick without waiting to cover their tracks,” Gunna said. “Did you check the lift?”

“Jammed between the third and fourth floors. Been like that for a week, the maintenance man says.”

“Top flat. Nobody comes up here without a reason. What about next door?”

“Nobody home. No sign of life.” Helgi frowned and rolled his shoulders as if they ached. “Well, whoever lives there is going to get a bit of a shock when he comes home from work. How do you want to organize this, Gunna?”

For a moment she wondered why he was asking her. Being in charge of a new investigation unit was a change that would take some getting used to after the years running the police station in rural Hvalvík, where weeks could pass with nothing more serious than a stolen bicycle. The offer of promotion and the shift to the Reykjavík city force had come as a surprise, and working as part of a larger set-up was already taking some getting used to. Although she had lived there in the past and knew the city intimately, Gunna felt vaguely uncomfortable in Reykjavík. Much had changed during the years she had taken it easy in her coastal backwater. The city’s pace of life had accelerated steadily for years until the crisis that saw the banks nationalized and the country plunged into a recession stopped progress dead in its tracks.

She had moved into the Serious Crime Unit’s new office as the protests outside Parliament were becoming steadily angrier, watching her uniformed colleagues disconcerted at the public fury they were on the receiving end of at demonstrations every weekend, while many of them felt a secret sympathy with the protesters and their impotent rage.

Gunna had flatly refused to move house from Hvalvík, and the forty-minute drive was proving a challenge in the mornings, but the journey home had become an oasis of valuable thinking time.

“Gunna?” Helgi asked again.

“Æi, sorry. Thinking hard for a moment. If you try and figure out what the lady’s movements were over the last couple of days, I’ll tackle the next of kin.”