Free Chilled to the Bone by Quentin Bates

three officers here right now, and the one in charge is a woman called Gunnhildur. Maybe she’ll be able to put your mind at rest.”
    T HE PICTURE WASN ’ T clear, but it was clear enough. A broad-faced man with a goatee beard worn distinctively long had been caught on CCTV footage in a screenshot that was blurred but showed him looking almost toward the camera. Shortish hair and a faded dark leather jacket completed the picture. Gunna wondered where she had seen that face before with its determined look beneath heavy brows.
    When the man she had overheard in Yngvi’s office hadn’t found her half an hour later, Gunna zipped up her coat as high as it would go and strode out of the hotel’s entrance, the door grinding as it closed automatically behind her. Grit in the mechanism, Gunna guessed, screwing up her face in distaste as the wind swept flakes of stinging snow into her face; she could feel that the slush under her feet had begun to harden again in the thickening frost.
    There was no post-Christmas rush to the center of Reykjavík. With earnings having remained static for those fortunate enough to still be employed, while prices had risen since the financial crash that now seemed to have receded practically to the Saga Age, shoppers were hardly spending much—at least not until the new credit card month began, Gunna reflected. A few years earlier she had been seriously considering leaving the police to earn more money in a new environment with private security work, but with the upheaval of the crash vivid in her memory, she had resigned herself to holding on to her state pay check, and the transfer to plain clothes in Reykjavík after her rural beat in Hvalvík had made life more stressful but considerably more interesting.
    In the lee of a shop, she extracted her phone and punched in a quick SMS.
    At the office?
    She had hardly put her phone away when it buzzed in reply.
    Slaving away
    Coffee?
    5 mins?
    OK. Around the corner
    The cafe was almost empty, and as the man behind the counter chewed his lip every time someone walked past, Gunna assumed he must be the proprietor. He brightened as she pushed the door open and stamped snow from her boots.
    “I’m sick of winter already,” she said. “Coffee, please, and one of those things.”
    “What coffee you like?”
    “Just old-fashioned coffee-style coffee. My mate’ll be here in a minute and he’ll want something fancy with asparagus honey and organic goat’s milk, I expect.”
    The man took Gunna’s money and she had taken off her coat and was deep in the previous day’s newspaper when Skúli pushed open the door and followed her route to the counter.
    “How goes it at the rockface of contemporary journalism?”
    “Chipping away,” Skúli admitted, sitting down with a tall glass of coffee. “Still at
Reykjavík Voice
—four days a week now. They advertised for someone, couldn’t get anyone they liked, so they offered me an extra two days.”
    “So now you’re working eight days a week?” Gunna asked, biting into the something she’d blithely ordered and discovering it was covered in a sticky coating that clung to her teeth. “Shit, hell and damnation,” she cursed quietly, taking a mouthful of coffee and dropping the remains of the biscuit onto her plate.
    “Are you all right, Gunna?” Skúli asked with concern.
    “Yeah. Just a bit stressed at the moment. This guy,” she said, placing in front of him the screenshot Helgi had extracted from the hotel’s system. “Any idea who he is?”
    Skúli gave it a quick glance. “Is this some kind of test?” he asked as Gunna gave him a long stare. “You don’t know?”
    Gunna stifled the urge to snap back at him: No, I don’t know who this is, otherwise I wouldn’t be asking. “He’s a hack, I reckon, and someone I’d like to have a quiet word with, or else a chat with his editor.”
    “He’s not a journo.”
    “Sure?”
    “Of course I’m sure. His name’s Baddó. He was in prison