Frozen Assets

In the rental car lot, Hårde smiled grimly to himself as he heard the distant wail of sirens and prepared to drive on to the road, pausing at the exit to allow an ambulance followed by two squad cars to hurtle past and halt to disgorge a group of uniformed police officers led by a broad-shouldered woman.

There were uniforms everywhere, customs officers, airport officials, two paramedics and police officers from both the town and the airport.

One of the customs officers explained to Gunna and Snorri, while a groggy Ib Torbensen was revived by the paramedics and Bára went with one of the security staff to examine CCTV data.

‘Who are you?’ Gunna asked as soon as Ib Torbensen appeared to be awake enough to answer a question, but he shook his head in reply.

‘Icelandic? English?’ Gunna barked.

‘I’m from Denmark. It’s OK to speak English,’ Ib Torbensen said slowly.

‘What happened to you?’

Ib Torbensen thought as he raised his hands to his throat and massaged his neck.

‘I do not know,’ he said drowsily. ‘I went to piss, and woke up in the lavatory when someone was shaking me.’

‘When did this happen?’ Gunna demanded, reverting to Icelandic.

‘He was located at 16.35 in the departure lounge toilets,’ one of the security men replied.

‘And when’s he supposed to be flying, and where to?’

‘Billund, he says, and he’s missed his flight. It’s closed.’

‘What’s your name? Can I see your tickets and passport?’ Gunna asked, switching to unwilling English, attention back on the forlorn Ib Torbensen, now massaging the sides of his head with the palms of his fat hands.

‘My name is Torbensen. Everything has been taken from me, everything.’

He rooted in the pockets of his coat and jacket, and hauled himself upright to check the pockets of his trousers.

‘Nothing. Everything gone,’ he announced.

‘You’d better see if you can stop that flight from leaving and be quick about it,’ Gunna told the airport security officers. ‘There might well be someone on that plane masquerading as this gentleman. Snorri, you go with them and have a look. Be careful. This guy’s nasty.’

Snorri and the security men loped away, muttering into microphones on their lapels.

‘What worries me is if he isn’t on that flight,’ she muttered to herself. ‘Otherwise the bloody man could be anywhere by now.’

In the airport’s operations room, Gunna growled every time unwelcome news came in. Nobody had used Ib Torbensen’s seat on the flight to Billund. In fact, there were two empty seats, Ib Torbensen’s and another in the name of Gunnvald Ström.

The flight to Madrid had already departed on time, with Erna Daníelsdóttir on board. But nobody by the name of Hadre, Hårde, Hardy or Ström had boarded and the Hadre Erna appeared to have booked a seat for failed to check in for his flight.

Gunna was even more gloomy when she realized that in the furore around Ib Torbensen, she had overlooked searching Erna out and preferably questioning her for long enough for her to miss her flight.

Ib Torbensen was taken off to hospital in Keflavík for questioning and to be met by hastily summoned staff from the Danish Embassy in Reykjavík, while Snorri accompanied the groaning man, his neck in a brace, to get a statement. Gradually the crowd thinned.

‘Where did the bastard get to?’ Gunna fumed. ‘The bastard,’ she emphasized. ‘The bastard outflanked us. Never, never, never underestimate these people.’ She glared balefully at Bára.

‘He checked in as Ström,’ Bára announced.

‘What?’

‘He checked in,’ Bára repeated. ‘We’ve worked it all out. It’s all on CCTV. Come on, I’ll show you.’

At a computer terminal in the operations room, she showed Gunna what they had been able to piece together from the CCTV data.

‘He checks in here, hand baggage only. OK?’

‘Yeah, got that.’

‘So, next we see him, he’s here. That’s Hårde, isn’t it?’

Gunna peered at the screen and nodded. ‘That’s him.’

‘Right. Next we see him, he’s here, near the bar in the departure lounge, and it seems he sits there for a while. Now, this is the interesting part,’ Bára said, fingers flickering over the keyboard as she scrolled forward and called up material from other cameras. ‘He’s here in the walkway that leads to passport control, but he never gets there.’

‘How does that work?’

‘Who knows? You can’t get to the departure gates and the flights without going through passport control, and he doesn’t. The security chief spoke to all the duty officers and our man didn’t go through.’

‘So if he’s not on a flight, he’s either hiding somewhere in the airport, or else he’s sneaked out and is still in Iceland,’ Gunna said, thumping the table with her fist. ‘The sly bastard. Knocking that poor Danish guy out cold and letting him be found was just a diversion to take the attention off him while he did a runner.’