The Wake, page 13
part #2 of Black Ice Series
Leifur ran his hands agitatedly through his thick mop of hair, scratching his scalp as frantically as if he had nits. ‘We don’t know. Nobody knows anything about it except Gugga, and she’s dead. The answers died with her and we’ll never find out now.’
Ragga started the engine. ‘Let’s go back to Stórhöfdi. Sit down and have some coffee. Or wine. Anything. And try to think this through coolly before we make any rash decisions. Otherwise we’ll only make matters worse, as we know to our cost. The decision can wait a bit longer.’
She didn’t need to say any more. None of them could object to that. If only they had paused to think before they’d acted seven years ago, they wouldn’t be in this mess now. Ragga pulled away, turned out of the street and headed back in the direction of Stórhöfdi.
Chapter 12
Day 6 – Tuesday, 28 January
Although it was crowded in the small house, nobody talked much. Everyone was busy searching for clues that might explain what the dead woman on the beach had been doing here with her companions. The investigators were working on the basis that Alexandra’s account had been correct, though there was little evidence so far to support her story. On the other hand, they hadn’t found anything to disprove it.
The CSI team had mostly finished on the ground floor and were now occupied with the garden and cellar. They had been sent in as soon as the search warrant came through. A set of keys had been acquired from the estate agent, who said they hadn’t lent them out for any private viewings, thereby knocking on the head the idea that the dead woman and her friends had been prospective buyers. Nor was there evidence that anyone had been staying in the house. There were two bedrooms, one with a double bed, the other a single, neither of which had been used recently. The amount of dust on the cover of the double bed suggested that it hadn’t been disturbed for a very long time. The single bed, though less dusty, still looked as if it hadn’t been slept in for a while.
However, someone had clearly broken in through the back door. And an even more compelling piece of evidence that the woman and her companions had been up to no good was that all the door handles had been wiped clean, along with various other objects and surfaces. In addition, the floors seemed to have been hoovered or swept. The investigators concluded from this that the group, or possibly another individual who’d entered the property subsequently, had wanted to obliterate all trace of their presence. Given the thick layer of dust over everything else, it was hard to come up with any other explanation for the patchy cleaning. Why else would the efforts have been so haphazard – an object here, one section of a table or shelf there? And who in their right mind would wipe the handle of the front door when they left the house?
The CSI team’s main task was to ascertain whether the murders could have taken place on the premises. So far nothing pointed to that. There were no signs of blood or a struggle or that a corpse had been lying there, emitting bodily fluids that would be almost impossible to clean up effectively enough to evade detection by ultraviolet light or luminol spray. But, as Idunn was well aware, that on its own wasn’t enough to rule anything out. Neither of the bodies had displayed any visible stab or gun shot wounds, so their deaths were unlikely to have involved much loss of blood. Some murders were tidier than others; some killers were better prepared and wiser to the methods of the police.
As the house wasn’t regarded as a sensitive site, the detectives had been admitted to the ground floor as soon as the CSI team were done. Idunn hadn’t originally intended to look around since the property didn’t appear to be relevant to the deaths of the bodies on the beach: her role was solely to find out how and when death had occurred.
But when Karó had phoned to ask if Idunn wanted to see inside the house, then go to lunch with her and Týr, she had changed her mind. The address wasn’t far from the hotel and with the snow coming down this heavily she was unlikely to run into her father on the way there. Besides, the prospect was far more appealing than her plan to sneak down to the hotel restaurant and skulk in a corner, in the hope that Alexandra wouldn’t see her. Eating breakfast with her half-sister had been more than enough for Idunn. She was convinced Alexandra had been lying in wait for her, as the instant Idunn sat down with her slice of toast, the girl had materialised, smiling brightly, as if the two of them went better together than skyr and cream. Idunn had been saved by the appearance of Týr, who had come and joined them at their table. He had kept up a conversation with Alexandra, something Idunn had been incapable of. She had done no more than fake a smile or nod when required. Týr had even offered to escort Alexandra to the police station where they wanted her to look through footage of the cars that had recently come over on the ferry. He had added kindly that she had nothing to worry about, and Alexandra had thanked him profusely for this reassurance. Before Týr arrived, Idunn thought sourly, the girl had been yacking on about how much she was looking forward to it.
As soon as Idunn had finished breakfast, she excused herself on the grounds that she had to go upstairs and work. She had been as good as her word, and dealt with all the tasks she could do remotely, armed only with a laptop. This had mostly involved liaising with the Identification Commission, giving the other members a status update, and discussing the next steps for establishing the names of the deceased. As one of the victims had been recognised from a photo, there was no reason to pull out all the stops at this stage. For the time being, it would be enough for Idunn to keep the commission informed of any developments.
Alexandra had knocked on her door to announce that they’d postponed her appointment to go through photos of cars, so she was at a loose end if Idunn felt like doing something. Idunn had politely explained through the door that she was busy. As further evidence of Alexandra’s total failure to grasp the nature of their relationship, the girl had answered cheerfully that they would see each other later, then. Not if she could help it, Idunn thought. She’d rather go on working in her room until she keeled over on her keyboard.
Towards lunchtime, she found herself running out of jobs and becoming wildly impatient for the go-ahead on the autopsy of the young woman. Once the results of the MRI scan of the burnt body came in, she would be drowning in tasks again, but until then there was frustratingly little she could do. She had called one of her assistants to ask about the scan and learnt that it wouldn’t now happen until tomorrow morning. The machine was completely booked up today. Once the call was over, it wasn’t only disappointment about the delay that rankled with Idunn. She could have sworn she’d detected relief in the man’s voice when she told him she was still weatherbound in the islands. His concern had rung rather hollow too when he’d asked whether they would be back the day after tomorrow. She reflected that it shouldn’t really come as a surprise. She doubted she was the most popular boss in the world. Although no one could accuse her of being unfair or a tyrant, she was dry, unsociable and rarely in a good mood. She never attended work parties and shunned anything that could be classed as a social life with her colleagues. Those emails went straight in the bin. No wonder the coffee room invariably emptied when she looked in. The desks in the department were never as busily occupied as when she felt like a coffee. She just hoped her staff weren’t enjoying her absence so much that they were failing to get anything done.
Determinedly banishing these thoughts, Idunn brought her mind back to the present. She surveyed the modest living room they were standing in. The furnishings were very ordinary and nothing jumped out at her. Nothing of relevance for the investigation, anyway. There were several model ships which couldn’t possibly be of relevance to the murder. Idunn turned to the local officer, an older man who had bent down to examine one of them. ‘Did the occupant collect them or make them?’ she asked
The officer straightened up. ‘The man who used to live here was a model maker. Not a professional, just a gifted amateur.’
As the daughter of a trawler owner, who had frequently accompanied her father on board in her youth, Idunn knew her boats better than she cared to admit. She appreciated the level of detail – the rails, companionways, masts, nets, lights, rust stains and even the odd tiny coil of rope – all lovingly recreated. It seemed obvious that the craftsman had been to sea himself. ‘Was he a fisherman, then?’
The man shook his head. ‘No. He was a machine operator. Used to drive a fork-lift on the docks and had a mini digger of his own. Hired out his services as a private contractor. Took care of snow clearance for a couple of trawler companies. The church was a client of his too.’
Idunn, keen to avoid a conversation about local trawler operators, hastily changed the subject. ‘What about the daughter? The one who lived here until recently?’
‘She didn’t work at all, as far as I know. She was an invalid.’ The man caught Idunn’s eye meaningfully. ‘If you can call it that.’
Idunn didn’t like hints and insinuations. If people would only speak their mind, life would be a lot more straightforward. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked bluntly.
Looking a little embarrassed, the man replied: ‘Well, she wasn’t exactly what you’d call ill. She had problems with drugs and alcohol. We once had a run-in with her when she was sent some cannabis in the post. She claimed it was for medical use, to help with pain and depression, and that she’d bought it online from one of those Facebook dope dealers, but she refused to reveal the name of the account. We let her off with a fine. Those accounts are always changing names anyway, so there’s not much point trying to pursue them from this end.’
‘So she had a substance abuse disorder?’ Many people found it hard to grasp that addiction was a disease, but Idunn wasn’t about to waste time arguing with the old policeman about something that had long been recognised within the medical community. In her experience, people rarely changed their minds, however compelling the proof.
‘I suppose you could say that.’
‘And how did she die?’ Idunn wasn’t going to hazard another guess. An individual wrestling with an addiction could die from anything, just like other people.
‘Overdose. She had an accident and was badly smashed up. While she was in hospital, she managed to get her hands on some drugs. Whether the overdose was deliberate or accidental is hard to say.’
Idunn twigged. ‘Was her name by any chance Gudbjörg?’
The police officer nodded. ‘That’s the one. Known to all as Gugga. She was the daughter of the couple who used to live here.’
Idunn had conducted the post-mortem. There couldn’t be many young women called Gudbjörg, admitted to hospital with multiple fractures, who had died of an overdose in the Westman Islands. Like the internet, Idunn forgot nothing. A high concentration of fentanyl had been present in the young woman’s blood, along with pregabalin, ibuprofen and diazepam. The last three had been prescribed by the hospital, but no one there would admit to having given the young woman the opioid. Idunn had concluded that the cocktail of drugs had proved lethal thanks to the addition of fentanyl, as tests on the dead woman’s hair had revealed that she had almost no history of using it, which meant she would have had little resistance to such a hefty dose.
Idunn hadn’t come to any firm conclusions about how the woman had taken the drug. There had been no tablets among her stomach contents, but that wasn’t particularly surprising, given her past drug use. Opioids in tablet form were prolonged-release pharmaceuticals, whereas addicts typically ground up pills and took them in other ways to get a more immediate hit. The fact the woman hadn’t swallowed them in pill form suggested that she had taken them intentionally. But her purpose remained unclear. Autopsies could reveal a number of things but they rarely provided answers to all one’s questions. Had Gugga taken the drug with the intention of ending her own life or had she just wanted to get high? And how had she got hold of it? Had she brought it with her when she was originally admitted to hospital or had a visitor smuggled it in to her?
The young woman had initially been treated at the University Hospital in Reykjavík, having been airlifted there after a bad fall on Heimaklettur, the rock by the entrance to the harbour on Heimaey. That was odd in itself, as the accident had happened in November, when the weather was hardly conducive to clambering around on sheer cliffs. What’s more, the woman definitely hadn’t been the outdoor type, all of which seemed like a compelling argument that she had been intending to throw herself off the north face of the cliff into the sea. The drop was a big one and there was no real question of how it would have ended. Ironically, though, her life had probably been saved by the fact that she had slipped and fallen while climbing one of the ladders on the way up. Yet when she was capable of talking again, Gugga had flatly denied that she’d meant to do anything other than walk up to the top to enjoy the view.
Idunn remembered the stories she’d heard as a child about sheep tumbling over the cliffs on Heimaklettur or on the small, uninhabited islands of the archipelago where the flocks were put out to grass in summer. Their bodies were rumoured to explode when they hit the surface of the sea, and the thought had given her nightmares as a little girl. She used to walk around staring at her feet in summer to avoid looking in the direction of Heimaklettur or the outlying islands. But that was a long time ago. Idunn reckoned she could pinpoint the day when she had toughened up and smothered all feelings of sentimentality. She had her father to thank for that. If he hadn’t turned out to be such a shit, she might be in the University Hospital now, patting the shoulder of a living patient, rather than wandering around the house of a dead woman.
No fentanyl had been found when Gugga’s hospital room was searched, so however she had come by the drug, she must have used all of it. According to the University Hospital in Reykjavík, it was inconceivable that she could have stolen the drug while in their care as she had been unable to get out of bed the entire time she was with them. After transferring to the islands hospital, however, she had been capable, towards the end of her stay, of dragging herself around with the aid of a walking frame. Nevertheless, a stock check had revealed that no pills were missing from the hospital’s controlled-drugs cupboard, so she couldn’t have got hold of them there. The possibility couldn’t be entirely ruled out that she had been administered the fentanyl by mistake and that another patient had been given her medicine, but this was regarded as implausible. For one thing, she would have had to cotton on to the mistake and grind up the pills once she was alone. For another, the concentration in her blood had been higher than any doctor would have prescribed in a single dose.
The least plausible scenario was that someone had deliberately given her the drug with the intention of murdering her. The woman didn’t have any legal heirs or any enemies, according to those who knew her. Nor had she received any visitors during the days immediately preceding her death. And there had been very few in the weeks before that. The only drugs-related item she had among her possessions when her hospital room was searched after her death was a bottle of CBD capsules and another of vitamins for strengthening nail and hair growth. It was unclear who had brought her the bottles but it must have been one of the tiny handful of people who had come to see her. According to the local hospital in the islands, she had brought them with her from Reykjavík.
‘I remember the young woman,’ Idunn said now. ‘It happened very recently, didn’t it?’
The police officer nodded: ‘Yes. At the beginning of this month.’
‘I did her post-mortem. Tell me, has anything more come to light about where she got hold of the opioids?’
The policeman shook his head. ‘No. But we sent everything we found among her possessions for analysis, in case any of the capsules in the bottles she had with her could have been used to smuggle in the drug. We haven’t had the results yet.’
The case would hardly be regarded as a priority. Even if it turned out that the capsules were packed with ground-up fentanyl, it would never be possible to determine whether Gugga’s death had been an accident or suicide.
Idunn saw no reason to continue the conversation, as what more was there to say?
But the police officer seemed unwilling to leave the subject. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if this case turned out to hinge on drugs. I expect those people were searching the house for them. Maybe they fell out when it came to dividing up the spoils. That’s one theory the connection to this house has thrown up.’
Idunn merely nodded. Even if this conjecture proved right and it had been a case of an argument that had got out of hand, the nature of the quarrel would have no influence on her verdict about the cause of death. She searched her mind for something to say. Judging by the police officer’s expression, he was expecting her to accept the conversational ball: your turn.
Týr came to her rescue by entering the sitting room, apparently looking for her: ‘Would you like to see what sort of things they appear to have handled?’
Idunn didn’t have any real interest in this, but anything was preferable to continuing the present conversation. Týr led her from room to room, pointing out the objects that bare patches in the layer of dust showed had been touched or moved. He explained that there were no fingerprints on any of them as they had all been wiped clean. Nor had any trace of blood been found on them. This came as no surprise to Idunn since none of the items in question would be suitable as weapons: a jewellery box, some model ships, books, cosmetics and other random stuff. Nothing particularly sharp or heavy.
After being cleaned, it appeared that everything had been returned more or less to its place, except in one instance where a sizeable object was missing from the table just inside the entrance hall, judging by the bare patch in the dust. Of course, it could just have been wiped as part of the general clean-up, but the rectangular shape suggested that something had been removed. It was possible that the people Alexandra saw had stolen it, or that it had been used as a murder weapon. After all, Idunn reminded herself, she might still detect injuries on the burnt body during the post-mortem, and most killers would have the sense to dispose of the murder weapon. Idunn was more curious to know what the object was than what had become of it. For it to have been the murder weapon, it would have to be heavy but lacking in sharp edges, so that it could have been used to bash the victims over the head. Neither body had displayed any visible head trauma, but the autopsies might reveal internal injuries beneath the scalp. Idunn doubted this would be the case with the woman who had been sitting by the rocks, from the cursory examination she’d already made of her, but it couldn’t be ruled out.
