Frozen Assets: An Officer Gunnhildur Mystery by Quentin Bates

Author:Quentin Bates
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Women Sleuths, Hard-Boiled, Mystery & Detective
ISBN: 9781616950569
Publisher: Soho Crime
Published: 2012-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

24

Monday, 22 September

The second-best Volvo hummed through Hafnarfjördur in the morning sunshine, with the faintest dusting of white on Esja’s slopes in the distance above Reykjavík a reminder that the short days of winter weren’t far away. Gunna had always had misgivings about what she saw as the mountain’s brooding hulk and had never understood the fondness people born in its shadow always professed for it. Gunna found Esja less than impressive compared to the dramatic sheer slopes of her childhood home.

She toured a few of the taxi ranks at Grensás and Lækjargata, near the shopping centres and the big hotels, and cruised slowly down Raudarárstígur to the Hlemmur bus station and across past the police station to the main road into the town centre, looking out for Matti’s green Mercedes, wondering as she did so if this was the right thing to be doing.

She headed out of town, and stopped at the Höfdabakki traffic lights next to Nonni the Taxi’s yard, scanning the car park outside for the green Mercedes. Gunna wondered whether or not to go in and ask for Matti’s whereabouts, but decided against it, unwilling to send him a message that could be misunderstood if not delivered personally.

Gunna checked the time and decided to take a round trip through the Bakki district and Kópavogur before a final look through Matti’s normal haunts in the old western end of the city.

Lunchtime traffic thickened as she gunned the Volvo out of Kópavogur and on to Kringlumýrarbraut back towards the city. Passing the airport, she wondered idly how the billionaires with their little summer houses around Skildingarnes would be preparing for the invasion of their territory if the city were to have its way and close the airport to make way for more building south of the city centre.

‘It’ll happen. Money talks its own language, as Mum used to say,’ Gunna grunted to herself, pulling up at the lights at Lækjargata for the second time that day and seeing that the taxi rank there was empty.

‘Hell. Lunchtime, I suppose.’

She drove slowly past the slipways and the remnants of the old town, where rusting houses clad in corrugated iron were gradually being replaced with steel and glass, and past Kaffivagninn. She thought of stopping there, but since office types had discovered the old dockers’ eatery on the quay, it had gone upmarket and lost some of its attraction.

Further along and beyond walking distance from the office district, she pulled up on a patch of waste ground opposite Grandakaffi among a cluster of taxis, pickup trucks and a bus at the end of its route. For a moment she admired the trawlers in their blue-and-white Grandi livery at the quayside and listened as a group of men in paint-spattered overalls engaged in a friendly argument in some Eastern European language as they made their way from a half-painted ship over the waste ground towards the café. They fell silent as they noticed her uniform, nudging each other as they passed her.

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