Free Summerchill by Quentin Bates

cocked an ear as a car horn tooted outside. ‘Taxi’s here, I expect.’
    ‘I reckon I can manage that,’ Logi said, hoping that she would be back early enough to escape a serious hangover. ‘Got to help you keep your strength up.’
    ‘Shit, are you two still at it?’ one of the hard-faced women demanded, appearing in the kitchen with lipstick perfect and hair in a tousled arrangement that looked as if she’d spent the day in a high wind, but which Logi guessed had taken a great deal of time and effort to achieve. ‘Come on Brynja. Some of us have work to do and don’t have a stud waiting for us at home, so let’s hit the town, shall we?’

Sunday
    The silver car seemed lonely in the car park outside Reykjavík’s bus terminal. Sigursteinn, one of the traffic officers, peered in through the window and shook his head.
    ‘Nothing in there,’ he told Gunna as she arrived. ‘Where’s Helgi? It’s his case, isn’t it?’
    ‘Helgi’s off duty today, so the call came through to me instead. No keys anywhere, I take it?’
    ‘No such luck. It’s going to be a struggle to shift this thing, especially now the battery’s flat.’
    ‘In that case, you’d better be patient. I phoned the owner’s girlfriend and she said there’s a spare key, which one of your motorcycle colleagues has gone to collect from her. Give him ten minutes.’
    ‘Go inside for a coffee, shall we?’
    Sigursteinn looked hopeful and Gunna relented. ‘How come you found it here? Did a patrol spot it, or what?’
    ‘No. Someone must have nudged it because the alarm has been howling half the night – we got a call this morning when the bus station opened. It kept on until the battery died, I guess.’
    Inside the bus station Gunna and Sigursteinn spread out and talked to as many of the staff in the shops and kiosks as were awake, trying to work out how long the Outlander had been there.
    ‘It was here Friday morning, that’s all I know,’ the solid middle-aged woman at the restaurant counter said. ‘It was here when I got to work at six.’
    ‘You didn’t see anyone park it there?’
    ‘If I had, I’d have told you, wouldn’t I?’
    ‘Right enough,’ Gunna murmured to herself and moved on.
    Outside, with paper cups of coffee, they compared notes. ‘It was parked late Thursday night, after the last bus had gone,’ Sigursteinn said.
    ‘We can be fairly sure that whoever put it there wasn’t a passenger on a bus,’ Gunna said, and looked up as the rumble of a motorcycle told her the keys had arrived. The rider took off his helmet and switched off the engine.
    ‘Nothing like a little jaunt to wake someone up on a Sunday morning, is there?’ he said, handing Sigursteinn the keys.
    He clicked the fob and nothing happened. ‘We’d better get a booster pack down here to get this thing started. Can you ask around inside to see if anyone has one?’ he asked the motorcycle officer, who walked towards the entrance.
    Sigursteinn used the key to open the car’s driver-side door and walked around to do the same with the passenger door. Gunna peered inside the remarkably tidy car, which looked as if it had just been cleaned, wondering if maybe it had. She sniffed, detecting a sour smell, and flipped open the glove compartment to see a handbook and a bundle of paperwork.
    ‘Fucking hell!’ She heard Sigursteinn swear, followed by the sound of him retching as she hurried round to the open boot.
    Gunna clicked her communicator as she groaned at the sight that met her eyes. ‘Control, ninety-five-fifty.’
    ‘Ninety-five-fifty, control. G’day, Gunna.’
    ‘Can I have the cavalry out at BSÍ, if you would be so kind?’
    ‘Which cavalry would that be?’
    ‘I need a scene-of-crime team and enough uniforms to cordon off the bus station car park. There’s a body in the back of a car here.’
    ‘Will do,’ control responded. ‘Ambulance as well?’
    ‘This guy’s going to need a hearse, not an ambulance. There’s a hole in