Thin Ice: An Inspector Gunna Mystery (Gunnhildur Mystery Book 5) Read Online Free Page A

you like.’

2
Friday
     
    Smoke belched from the upstairs window in a thick black column into the cold morning air. Eiríkur stood back, his nose wrinkled against the smell of burning plastic as he and two uniformed officers kept back the line of vaguely interested spectators.
    ‘Anyone in there?’ a voice behind him asked.
    ‘We don’t know yet.’
    ‘Because that’s my cousin’s place.’
    The voice sounded worried and Eiríkur looked round to see a woman in a raincoat with its hood protecting her head from the drizzling rain.
    ‘In that case, you’d better come with me,’ he said.
    In the shelter of a shop doorway she folded her arms and looked disappointed, as if she had always known that her cousin Árni would one day come to a bad end.
    ‘Árni, you say his name is? Whose son?’
    ‘Sigurvinsson. His dad was Sigurvin Jónsson. We’re related.’
    Helgi was tempted to tell her that the man’s genealogy didn’t need to be traced, but he kept quiet.
    ‘He lives there alone?’
    ‘I’m not sure. He’s married to a woman called Inga Jóna Steinsdóttir, but sometimes they’re together and sometimes they’re not, if you understand what I mean.’
    ‘Children? I mean, any children who might be in the property?’
    ‘Inga Jóna has kids of her own, but they’re grown up and they don’t think much of Árni, so there’s not much chance of any of them being in there.’
    ‘A stormy relationship? Do either of them drink?’
    The woman pursed her lips. ‘Let’s say that Árni wouldn’t knock your hand away.’
    ‘Drugs? Anything like that? Where does Árni work?’
    ‘He’s never done a lot of that, but he used to work at a garage up at Hellnahraun and he drives a taxi sometimes as well.’ The woman sniffed. ‘When he’s sober enough, that is.’
    ‘Your name?’
    ‘Hulda Benediktsdóttir.’
    Eiríkur wrote everything down and added the woman’s phone number.
    ‘I’ll give you a call when we know anything,’ he said, handing her a card. ‘That’s my number, so if you hear from either Árni or Inga Jóna, I’d appreciate it if you could let me know they’re safe.’
     
    The nighttime wind had howled, shaking the roof as they lay in their stiffly laundered hotel beds. Towards morning the wind had dropped, and when Magni rubbed his eyes and looked out of the front door in the daylight, he could see the slopes of the bowl of hills that surrounded Hotel Hraun on three sides white with snow. The yard and Erna’s pearly white Ford Explorer were also covered with a thick layer of snow, heaped into drifts around the car and anywhere there was a lee from the wind that brought the dry powder snow down from slopes higher up.
    The yard, enclosed on two sides by the hotel’s wide L-shape, was dotted with the meandering track of a fox, but what attracted Magni’s attention were parallel lines that ran along the edge of the yard, into it and around the Ford, before snaking back down the hill alongside the road. He pulled on his shoes and went outside, examining the trails and noticing that the snow had been roughly dusted off the car’s registration plate.
    ‘So we’ve had a visitor,’ he muttered to himself, before going back into the relative warmth of the echoing lobby and wondering whether or not to tell Össur.
    * * *
     
    Steini had left early, his pickup loaded with toolboxes, for a job that Gunna guessed would keep him happily deep in the bowels of a boat somewhere for the rest of the day. She was sitting on the sofa, revelling in being home alone with her shift not due to start until midday, when she realized that Laufey was at home as well.
    She turned up the radio and took the hated vacuum cleaner from its place in the cupboard by the door to run over the floor of the living room, expecting the noise to flush Laufey from sleep if she could keep it up long enough. But her dislike of anything more than the most essential housework won, and by the time Laufey emerged from her room,