The Polar Bear Killing (3 page)

There had been a few casual affairs, one- or two-night stands. But then Vigdís had overheard one of them, a handsome moron called Benni, talking to his mates about what it was like to screw a black girl.

That had put her off.

And the previous week, she had gone out for a drink with Magnus after work. His girlfriend Ingileif was in Hamburg for a couple of weeks. Magnus liked a couple of beers after work, a hangover from his Boston days, and Vigdís thought, why not humour him?

Both of them had had more than a couple of beers. Vigdís had enjoyed letting go of her habitual self-discipline. After so many
years working together, they understood each other well, but as they both got drunker, they both confided things. Magnus talked about his brother, Vigdís about her mother, but with affection not frustration.

They had left the bar unsteadily. Walked up an empty side street. Laughed.

And then Vigdís had kissed him.

For a moment he had responded, but then he had broken away. Laughed it off. They had gone home to their separate beds.

It had been a mistake. A big mistake. Why had she done it? Why?

It was all right at work. Magnus behaved as though nothing had happened. He was still friendly to Vigdís, allowing her to respond in kind.

But things had changed for Vigdís. She had enjoyed letting her guard down. She had enjoyed the sense that she was putting her career at risk by doing something she wanted to do. It enthralled her. It also scared the hell out of her.

That weekend she had gone out with some of her girlfriends and got blind drunk. There was nothing odd about an Icelander getting drunk in Reykjavík on a Saturday night, but it was odd for Vigdís.

She pulled out the full bottle of vodka she had packed in her suitcase.

Vigdís didn’t drink alone. Her mother drank alone and Vigdís had seen what had happened to her. They said alcoholism ran in families. Was her black father an alcoholic, Vigdís wondered? She had no idea, no way of knowing anything about the black American serviceman who had met her mother at Keflavík airbase one night in the eighties.

Her life was crap. No matter how many rules she followed, how often she did the right thing by her mother or Baldur or Magnus or even the lowlifes she arrested, her life was still crap. Being careful, being sober didn’t help.

She got a glass from the hotel bathroom, opened the bottle and poured a tot into it. She knocked it back. That felt good. She poured another.

V
igdís’s head was splitting as she listened to Ólafur summarize the case to the assembled police. She had woken up still clothed, and had barely had time to grab a cup of coffee before staggering off to the police station. The morning briefing had already started by the time she got there, and they all turned as she tried to creep in at the back.

The vodka bottle was half empty on her bedside table where she had left it.

‘Edda, what did you find yesterday?’

Ólafur was addressing the woman in charge of the three-person forensics team that had driven over from Reykjavík.

‘Basically, nothing,’ she said. ‘No casing – the shooter must have retrieved it. No bullet either, which means either the shooter picked that up as well or, more likely, it is still in the victim’s skull. The pathologist should be able to fish it out at the autopsy today.’

Poor Halldór had been sent back to the morgue in Reykjavík for examination.

‘Nothing of interest at the scene?’

‘No. Very difficult to make out footprints on the hard ground up there. There are four cigarette ends and two sweet wrappers, but that’s what you would expect from what’s essentially a tourist site. We’ll send the butts off for DNA analysis. There are a couple of rocks on the far side of the hill from the road – a good place for the shooter to stand. There are several different footprints around there. None of them is clear, and none of them matches either Alex or Martin’s boots. Somebody seems to have been walking a dog.’

‘What about the suspects?’

‘No immediately obvious signs of gunshot residue on them or their clothes. Nor blood. Once again, we’ll send the clothing back to the lab in Reykjavík for closer analysis, but I doubt we will find anything.’

‘How can you know until they have looked?’

Edda didn’t answer. Vigdís knew that Edda and her team were both sharp-eyed and accurate and that she didn’t take well to being bossed around by investigators.

‘Well, go back up there this morning and widen the search area.’

‘Thanks,’ said Edda. ‘Would never have thought of that myself.’

The remark flustered Ólafur. Edda flustered men anyway, even when not in sarcastic mode. She was tall, blonde, cool and beautiful, and she treated lustful police officers with a haughty disdain. Vigdís had tried that approach, but she couldn’t quite pull it off the way Edda could.

The inspector turned to his troops. ‘Anything interesting from the house-to-house? Anyone see the suspects approaching the henge?’

It turned out that there were two people on the northern edge of town who had heard what they thought was a gunshot that afternoon: one thought it was at five o’clock, another at five fifteen. That gave some indication of the time of death, and suggested, but didn’t prove, that if the two suspects had shot Halldór, it had been an hour to an hour and a half before they claimed they had found him. Then there were some desultory reports from the policemen who had been detailed to interview the inhabitants of Raufarhöfn. Nothing interesting.

Ólafur went through Alex Einarsson’s and Martin Fiedler’s statements, and detailed officers to corroborate their movements. Others were asked to search for a gun – none had been found at the farmhouse where they were staying – and to check up on every licensed firearms owner in the town to make sure that their weapons were secure and had not been taken, and to see if they had been fired two days ago.

‘Anything else?’

Vigdís spoke up. ‘We should also get a warrant to seize Martin Fielder’s computer.’ Her voice croaked. It was the first time she had spoken since she had woken up and the hangover was flexing its muscles. She cleared her throat. ‘He said he was online that afternoon. We can check.’ She was surprised the inspector hadn’t mentioned it.

As the group broke up, Ólafur turned to Vigdís. ‘Why were you late?’

‘I’m sorry, I overslept,’ she answered. ‘It was a long day yesterday.’

The inspector didn’t look impressed, which was fair enough. ‘I’m going to hold a press conference now, and then we’ll talk to the suspects again. Maybe a spell overnight will have focused their minds. Then I want you to take them to see the magistrate at Húsavík to issue a warrant to hold them for another week. We’ll get the warrant to seize both their laptops then as well. The prosecutor there is a woman called María. I’ll get her to meet you beforehand so she can prepare.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes. Do you have a problem with that? Don’t worry, María will present the case to the magistrate.’

‘But do we have enough evidence?’

‘They are our only suspects.’

‘I’m sorry, but in my judgement we have no evidence,’ said Vigdís.

‘Are you suggesting that we release them?’

‘Yes. We can take Martin Fiedler’s passport and request that he stays in town. Seize his laptop and have it analysed.’

‘Inspector?’ Björn, the young detective, had appeared.

‘What is it?’ said Ólafur, turning towards him.

Björn was with two men. One Vigdís didn’t recognize, but the other she knew all too well. Kristján Gylfason – smooth, silver-haired, and the most expensive criminal lawyer in Iceland.

‘Hello, Vigdís,’ said the lawyer, smiling. ‘Inspector Ólafur. I have been requested by the German Embassy to represent Martin Fiedler. This is Wolfgang Eichert from the embassy.’

Ólafur frowned, but shook Kristján’s hand and that of the young German diplomat, who was wearing a suit underneath his coat.

‘Can I see my client?’ Kristján said.

Ólafur glared at the two men. ‘Wait a moment,’ he replied. ‘I need to talk to the press first.’

Ólafur’s annoyance grew as the morning progressed. Now Kristján was involved, there was no chance of a confession, Vigdís knew, or of Ólafur persuading a magistrate to allow the police to hold him.

During a break in the proceedings, Vigdís asked Ólafur if she could go to Halldór’s house and speak to his family. Ólafur let her go. He had Björn to help him, and she was just a further irritation.

The policeman’s house was only a hundred metres from the station. The door was answered by a girl of about eighteen, short with close-cropped blonde hair and glasses. She had a delicate pointed chin and clear pale skin. Her face seemed to register no emotion as she saw Vigdís.

Vigdís introduced herself. ‘Are you Halldór’s daughter?’ she asked.

The girl nodded. ‘Gudrún.’

‘Can I have a few words?’

The girl led Vigdís through to a tidy living room. Vigdís scanned the photographs. She recognized Halldór from the case photos: a large middle-aged man with the beginnings of a double chin. She had never met him herself. There were some pictures of a younger Halldór with a woman with long dark hair – Halldór’s late wife, no doubt – and plenty of portraits of the woman by herself.

‘Mum,’ said the girl. ‘She died seven years ago. In a car crash. Dad was driving.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Vigdís. ‘For her and for your father.’ Vigdís had broken bad news many times to distraught families, but her heart went out to this girl who was now an orphan. ‘Are you alone? Are any of your family here?’

‘My grandparents and my brother are coming from Reykjavík
this afternoon. And the neighbours have been kind. It’s hard to keep them away. But I just want to be alone a bit, actually.’

‘You live here all the time?’ Vigdís asked.

Raufarhöfn was far too small for its own high school, which meant local students would go to boarding school far away. Unless they left school early to get a local job. Gudrún looked too studious for that.

‘I’m in my first year at the University of Iceland,’ Gudrún said. That made her a little older than Vigdís had guessed. Icelandic kids didn’t go to university until the age of twenty. ‘I just got home for the summer holidays three days ago.’

‘Can you tell me about your father? What he was like? What did people in town think of him?’

To Vigdís’s relief, Gudrún was happy to talk. Vigdís let her tell stories about her childhood with her dad that could be of no conceivable use to the investigation, but that relaxed her, gave her comfort.

Halldór had escaped Reykjavík soon after the car accident and had accepted a posting in Raufarhöfn, taking his two children – Gudrún and her older brother Sveinn – with him. There Halldór tried to make a new life and had succeeded. He made friends in the town. He found the policing dull, but he was an enthusiastic member of the search-and-rescue team. A year after he arrived, he had played a big part in the rescue of a farmer who had fallen off a cliff in a snowstorm. That had made him popular in town, and had clearly made Gudrún proud. He was a keen shot; he would go hunting foxes with a couple of the locals, as well as target shooting on a friend’s farm.

The affection of the daughter for her father was obvious, and painful to see.

‘Have you any idea why Halldór was up at the henge? Did he like that spot?’

‘No, he didn’t. I think the henge is cool – it gives the town something to make it unique, and this town needs something. But Dad thought it was just kind of dumb. There are a few people in town who agree with him.’

Which implied that Halldór had probably been lured up there. Either he had seen something suspicious or someone had arranged to meet him. It occurred to Vigdís that Ólafur had not even arranged for Halldór’s phone to be analysed to see whom he had spoken to on the day of his murder.

Gudrún didn’t think Halldór had had any enemies in town, although she knew that some people thought him officious. He kept a closer eye on the law than his predecessor had.

‘How did your father get on with you and Sveinn?’ Vigdís asked.

To Vigdís’s surprise, Gudrún didn’t answer at first. She looked as if she was about to burst into tears. Vigdís waited.

‘Dad and I had a wonderful relationship,’ Gudrún said. ‘But Sveinn? That was more difficult.’

‘Why was that?’ Vigdís asked softly.

‘He is three years older than me. He was studying chemistry at the university, but he dropped out last year. He had trouble with drugs.’ Worry flashed in her eyes as she glanced at Vigdís. ‘I’m not sure I should be telling you this since you’re a police officer. But then I suppose he’ll be in your files anyway. He was arrested at least twice. That’s what made Dad really angry: that his son was in trouble with the police. He didn’t say it, but I know he blamed it on Mum not being around, that he hadn’t brought up Sveinn well by himself. Which is completely wrong. Sveinn’s a nice guy, a good guy. He just has trouble with drugs. Lots of good kids have trouble with drugs, don’t they?’

‘They do,’ said Vigdís. She moved over to the collection of photographs on a side table. ‘Is this him?’

There was a picture of Halldór, a younger Gudrún and a teenage boy with curly fair hair standing in a marsh. The boy was holding something.

‘Yes, that’s him,’ said Gudrún, picking up the photograph.

The something the boy was holding was a rifle.

‘Was Sveinn a good shot?’ Vigdís asked.

‘Yes,’ said Gudrún. ‘Not quite as good as Dad. They used to shoot together at a local farm.’

Then she looked at Vigdís in alarm. ‘No. Sveinn didn’t shoot Dad. No!’

Vigdís felt bad about worrying Gudrún over her brother. She left the house and walked down to her car, which she’d parked outside the station.

It would be easy enough to check on Sveinn. According to Gudrún, he was in Reykjavík when his father was shot. That would be easy enough to verify.

She called Magnus at police headquarters.

‘Did they confess?’ he asked.

‘Far from it,’ Vigdís said. ‘A guy from the German Embassy is here with Kristján Gylfason. They’ll be out by lunchtime.’