The Shadow Killer

3

The woman who found the body was a widow of around fifty called Ólafía. She had gone down to remind the man about his rent and walked in on what she described as the ‘ghastly scene’. His rent had been due on the first of the month, she said, and he was never late. Admittedly, she hadn’t seen him for a while but then he was often away for a week or two at a time, sometimes longer. She had gone down to the basement and was about to knock on his door when she noticed that it was open a crack. There was no reply when she called his name, so, after a moment’s hesitation, she had gone inside to find out if he was all right and to ask why he hadn’t paid his rent.

‘Of course, it was mainly because I was worried about him,’ she assured Flóvent, as if fearing he would doubt her motivation and suspect her of nosiness. ‘The moment I walked through the door I saw him lying there on the floor. It was horrible, quite horrible, and I... I gasped, and, well, to be honest I screamed and ran back out again, slamming the door. The whole thing’s a nightmare. A terrible nightmare!’

‘So you found the door open, ma’am?’

‘Yes, which was very unusual because he always kept it locked. In fact, he told me he wanted to change the lock because it was so old it would be far too easy to pick. Maybe he was right, but then we don’t bother locking our doors any more than anyone else in this town. We’re just not used to it. I suppose it’s our old country ways that haven’t kept up with the times. Not with the way things are these days.’

‘Are you the only person with a key to the flat?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Where do you keep your key?’

‘My key? I hope you’re not suggesting I was responsible. What a nerve.’ The woman looked outraged.

‘No, ma’am, of course not,’ said Flóvent. ‘I simply need to know who else could have had access to the flat in the last twenty-four hours — or in general. That’s all. Is it possible that someone else could have taken your key, used it to enter the flat, put it back, then lain in wait for the man and attacked him when he came home? Or else picked the lock, as you mentioned? It must have happened yesterday evening.’

Ólafía’s eyes still radiated suspicion. ‘Nobody can have taken my key,’ she said firmly, ‘because Felix had it himself. He’d borrowed my spare to get it copied. Said he’d lost his own. Maybe that was why he was talking about changing the lock.’

‘Did you see Felix at all yesterday evening?’

‘No, not at all.’

‘And you didn’t hear any sounds from his flat?’

‘No, I didn’t. I was asleep by ten, as usual. That’s when most people in this house go to bed. I like my tenants to keep regular hours.’

‘Had Felix been renting from you for long?’

‘No. It was about six months ago that he enquired about the flat. I had to get rid of the previous tenants: a drunken lout and his wife, nothing but trouble. I have no patience with that sort of behaviour.’

‘You say Felix used to go away for a week or two at a time? Why was that?’

‘He was a commercial traveller, wasn’t he? Used to make regular trips out of town.’

‘And he’d always paid his rent punctually in the past?’

‘Yes. But he was a week overdue this time and I wanted my money.’

The man’s upstairs neighbours, a couple in their thirties, said they hadn’t noticed any comings or goings or heard any raised voices in the night. But then they had been sound asleep by midnight. They’d been renting from Ólafía for two years, so they’d lived there longer than their neighbour. They didn’t know him very well but both agreed that he had been a cheery bloke and easy to talk to — just as you’d expect a good salesman to be. They weren’t aware that anyone had a bone to pick with him and couldn’t imagine what it was all about or comprehend the shocking brutality of what had happened.

‘I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep in this house tonight,’ the woman exclaimed, looking anxiously at Flóvent. As soon as she heard that their neighbour had been murdered, she had telephoned her husband, who worked as an overseer for the British, and he had come home early.

‘I don’t believe anyone else in the building is in danger,’ Flóvent reassured her.

‘Who could do such a thing — shoot a man in the head like that?’ asked the woman.

Flóvent couldn’t answer this. ‘Did he have any dealings with the army?’ he asked. ‘Did you ever see Felix in the company of soldiers? Did any of them ever visit him, as far as you’re aware?’

‘Oh no, I don’t think so,’ said the woman. ‘I never noticed any soldiers round at his place.’

The man said the same. After asking them a few more questions, Flóvent thanked them for their time, then went and knocked on the door of the third set of tenants, an older couple who had been renting from Ólafía ever since her husband died. They informed him, unasked, that the husband had been shipwrecked off the Reykjanes Peninsula in a storm.

Neither of them had heard a gunshot; they had both been fast asleep at the time Flóvent believed the weapon had been discharged. They couldn’t tell him a great deal about Felix Lunden either. He wasn’t there much and never caused any trouble, never had noisy visitors or threw parties, didn’t seem to have many friends and wasn’t involved with a woman, as far as they were aware. Or if he was, they hadn’t noticed her visiting him. They knew nothing of his family circumstances.

‘Do you know if he had any dealings with the army?’ asked Flóvent.

‘No. Are you asking if he worked for them?’

‘Yes, or if he was acquainted with any soldiers.’

‘No,’ said the woman, ‘that is... not that we were aware.’

Flóvent sat with the couple for a little while longer before returning to Felix Lunden’s flat. The body had been removed and taken to the mortuary at the National Hospital. The district medical officer and photographer had left, but a uniformed policeman was standing guard outside to ensure that no one entered the flat. Flóvent was currently the only detective working for Reykjavík’s Criminal Investigation Department. All his colleagues had been seconded to other, more urgent policing roles at the beginning of the war, but he thought he might have to recall some of them to assist him with this case, which promised to be both complex and challenging.

He studied the bloodstain on the living-room floor, then examined the spent bullet that had been buried in a floorboard. He rolled it in his palm, picked it up between his fingers and held it to the light. Every gun left signature marks on the bullet, as unique as a fingerprint. If he could only find the firearm, he could prove that it was the right one by comparing the marks on the bullet to those produced by the barrel.

He recognised the make and calibre of bullet. It belonged to a Colt .45 pistol, the standard-issue sidearm carried by American servicemen. His question about whether the neighbours had seen Felix Lunden in the company of GIs had not been an idle one. All the evidence suggested that he had been killed by someone connected to the military, and the message was clear: Felix had deserved nothing better than a cold-blooded execution.