The Mistake Read online

  Everybody Makes Mistakes

  A mutilated body is found on a lonely street in Reykjavík.

  Detective Grímur intends to see that justice is done.

  Kjartan Jónsson vows that his daughter’s killer will be punished. And that the punishment will fit the crime.

  Prime suspect Gunnar Atli desperately needs to prevent his own dark secrets from coming to light. And he’s not the only one.

  Fine lines separate truth, justice and vengeance. Put a foot wrong, and any one of them could be making the biggest mistake of his life.

  In Iceland, the winter shadows grow long...

  #3

  The Mistake

  Grant Nicol

  #13 Press

  ntp-13a03

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  Copyright Grant Nicol, 2014

  Cover design copyright Number Thirteen Press, 2015

  All characters and events are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Number Thirteen Press

  Kindle version 1.0

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  ~

  #1

  A small pair of blood-splattered feet were the first things Snorri Pétursson saw as he swung the beam of his flickering torch across the snow-covered lava field. They looked so foreign in such a place that at first he thought he had to be seeing things. When he ran the light further up the legs across the torn black tights and black skirt he could see that the young woman they belonged to was no longer alive. Her eyes were wide open but staring lifelessly ahead at nothing, covered with a thin layer of blood that criss-crossed her cornea like a fishing net. Her startled appearance gave her a look of being taken completely by surprise. By the state of her head that was exactly what had happened. The damage her small frame had suffered had been truly devastating. It would have been difficult to do more damage to her with a baseball bat.

  Snorri shuddered as he thought of what she had gone through. He tried to rub some warmth into his arms through his jacket as the cold started to take root in his limbs. He wasn’t sure if it was the face of the dead girl or the increasingly heavy snow that was gathering on his shoulders that was responsible but he had started to shiver. The dark around him was impenetrable. Beyond the tiny radius of his torch was a void so complete he could have been on another planet. What a strange place to die he thought. So cold, so alone and so very far from home. Wherever home was. What could have possibly led her to this place?

  He turned his attention to the upside-down car nearby and tried to picture the order in which events had played out. When the car had rolled she must have flown head-first through the windscreen straight into the treacherously uneven rocks. There was no way she could have possibly been wearing a seatbelt. A big mistake. It would be hard to say which impact had done the most damage but the end result had certainly never been in doubt.

  The top right-hand corner of her skull had been torn away leaving a flap of flesh and bone hanging by a thread or two of bloody tissue. An eerie window into the recess of her cranial cavity. It was a part of her that no one should have ever seen. At least the end would have come quickly. Her shock, great as it might have been, would have been mercifully short-lived. He stumbled over to the wreck and inspected the interior for signs of life. As he took his hat off and scratched his bald head something struck him as not quite right. A pair of shoes with their shoelaces tied together, inside the car, lying on the upturned ceiling.

  It was as if they had been sitting on or near one of the front seats when the car had turned over. That in itself wasn’t too unusual, the dead girl was after all barefoot and her shoes must have gone somewhere. But these were big, way too big for a girl of her stature. They were men’s basketball boots, at least size 11. Many sizes too big for her little feet. The owner of the shoes had to be at least 6 feet tall and she would have struggled to make 5’ 6” in a pair of high-heels. Maybe she hadn’t been alone in the car; that was the only explanation he could think of. He ran his torch beam across the back seat looking for clues as to who might have been with her. Amongst the mess of shopping bags and food wrappers he saw an empty bottle of Brennivín. That would go a long way to explaining how the car had crashed. It was possible she hadn’t even been driving at the time of the accident. Maybe someone else had been, the Brennivín drinker perhaps, and that was what had caused the car to roll over onto its roof.

  He was going to have to make a more thorough search of the area now just in case there was someone else who needed help, or had to be arrested, or both. If there had been another occupant it would have been reasonable to expect them to stay as close to the car as possible. Unless of course, they had something to hide.

  The snow was whipping around him now as the wind picked up and turned the strengthening downfall into a whirling dervish’s dance around his face. The going would be slow and tedious, every step he took he would have to check where he was putting his feet so they didn’t go down a crack or a hole that would turn his night into an absolute disaster. A sprained ankle all the way out here in the middle of nowhere was the last thing he needed. The circumstances called for a slow and methodical approach. He would need to stay calm and remind himself that while the girl was beyond help there still might be someone else out there who needed his assistance.

  Luckily for Snorri he didn’t have too long to wait for the answer to his dilemma. Not more than twenty feet from the girl’s body another figure lay motionless in the snow. His initial reaction was that he had another fatality on his hands. He knelt down next to the man who had also lost his shoes during his ill-fated evening and reached to feel for a pulse in his neck. There were no obvious wounds on him as there were on the girl. Despite the lack of any signs of life he appeared to have come through the crash in relatively good shape. For a dead man. His face was lifeless and his eyes closed but there was very little blood on him. He looked almost peaceful, as if death had brought with it a great relief of sorts.

  Yet as soon as Snorri’s fingers touched his neck, the dead man opened his eyes and began to scream. Although Snorri had barely made contact the man’s torment was undeniable. Snorri pulled his fingers away as fast as he could, hoping to put an end to the hideous noise emanating from the poor soul but it made no difference whatsoever. He put his hands over his ears and backed away. From a safer distance he stared helplessly at the tortured creature and wondered what the hell he had stumbled across in the middle of the Icelandic night.

  ~

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  Nine Years Later

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  #2

  Staring back at him was a man he no longer recognised nor wanted to know. Gunnar Atli Davíðsson hated the face in the mirror and today he felt even worse than he looked. A headache the size of the Faxaflói Bay had a grip on him and didn’t feel as if it would be letting go any time soon. Dizzy spells had plagued him for the last week. One had actually caused him to faint while standing over the sink at work. The unmistakeable signs of a man falling apart. The skin down the side of his arms started to tingle so he took a deep draught of cold water from the tap and hoped it would pass. When he closed his eyes the light above the bathroom mirror pulsed through his eyelids as if it were alive. Then everything slowly turned as black as the middle of a moonless night.

  When he came to, the right side of his face felt as cold as ice. Snow was landing on him softly like feathers from a ruptured pillow. At first he thought he might have suffered a stroke and was half-expecting to be paralysed down one side of his body. One by one he tested his limbs to see if they still worked. They all did. He eased his eyes open and was relieved to find he wasn’t lying in the middle of the street. It was in fact the tiny paved garden in front of his apartment block. Appa
rently after making it down the stairs from his flat on the first floor he had passed out in the snow, practically at his front door. He tried to push himself upright but decided it was an unnecessarily risky move. If history had taught him one thing it was that it was prudent in these situations to take your time getting up unless you wanted to wind up back on your arse straight away. Though it was dark out and the street lights were partially obscured by the old leafless tree and scraggly ferns that sat along the fence, his surroundings began to come into focus.

  He could see footprints in the fine coating of snow that had fallen overnight but it was hard to know whether they belonged to him or not. He thought it unlikely that they were all his. There just seemed to be too many of them. When he straightened his back he could see across to the rubbish bins in the corner by the fence. The black one was where it always sat but the blue one for recycling was sitting at an odd angle as though someone had leant against it or pushed it out of the way. It was hard to see exactly what it was but there was definitely something hidden behind it as though one of his neighbours had tried to stash a bundle of rubbish where they obviously were not supposed to. The harder he tried to focus on whatever it was lying behind the bin the more blurred everything became so he closed his eyes for a minute and tried to relax. When he opened them again he could see what it was, even if he wished almost straight away that he’d kept his eyes shut.

  It was a pair of legs, there was no doubt about that. They looked a little like the ones used in shop windows but it wasn’t a mannequin. They were the real thing and every inch of them was covered in cuts or bruises. Some of them tiny, some of them huge. Things were even worse than he had feared. He tried once again to get his face off the paving stone and this time was able to do so without feeling as though he was going to pass out. He dragged himself partially upright and leant back against the front of the building so he was sitting facing the bins and their ghastly companion. A little vomit dribbled onto his shirt front. He shoved a handful of snow into his mouth to get rid of the taste of bile. He could see more of the legs now and who they were attached to as well. The girl lay naked and lifeless. Whatever had happened to her had been extraordinarily violent. She was covered in contusions and abrasions from the top of her head to the tips of her toes. The worst of them were on her face. She had been cut from both corners of her mouth all the way up her cheeks in a ghastly facsimile of a smile like some horrid sideshow clown.

  He fought off the urge to vomit again and wiped the sweat from his forehead, even though the mercury was well below zero. How long since his last clear memory? He tried frantically to clear his head. According to his phone it had been fifteen minutes since he last looked at it and that had been as he hurried to the bathroom. How on earth could it take quarter of an hour to brush your teeth and get down a flight of stairs? He couldn’t remember walking a single step of the journey but when he turned towards the front door he could see that he’d even left it slightly ajar as he left the building.

  With an effort he crawled towards her feet and touched one of them. It was cold and waxy and no longer felt human in the slightest. The cuts on her were fresh and varied. She had been subjected to the most thorough of mutilations. No space on her body had been left untouched. Nothing had been spared, tattooed in the ink of hate by someone displaying incredible patience. Enough to match their dedication to cruelty.

  He felt the nausea rise within him again and this time it easily won the battle for control. He turned his head just in time and vomited. The warmth of his stomach’s watery contents melted a hole in the snow and slowly disappeared into the gaps between the paving stones. He forced himself to his feet and leant against the building for a minute. A bad feeling worked all the way through his body. It wouldn’t do for him to be found in such a compromising situation. He wasn’t sure if he should call for help or just run away while he still had the chance.

  Flashing lights from the street suddenly bathed the old tree and the surrounding walls in crazy carousel-like colours. The garden took on the atmosphere of a carnival of the damned, ugly and garish. A police car pulled up just outside the apartments and two uniformed figures of the Reykjavík police force leapt from the vehicle. They were on him before he knew what was happening.

  His ability to react quickly had been left upstairs with the rest of his mental faculties. Strong hands grabbed his arms and pulled them behind his back before handcuffing his wrists in place. He was pinned against the building by the taller of the two officers who obviously couldn’t tell that he was barely able to stand without assistance.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ he whimpered.

  ‘Well then you had better explain it to us,’ the tall one said.

  ‘Jesus, look at this,’ said the other.

  He knelt down next to the dead girl, getting as close to her as he could stomach. He rubbed his hand over his face and let out a low whistle.

  ‘Keep a good grip on him, Helgi. You’ve never seen anything like this in your life.’

  ‘Don’t worry, he won’t be getting away,’ Helgi replied.

  ‘Let’s get him in the car and get some help.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Gunnar Atli repeated.

  ‘You don’t say. Exactly what is it I don’t understand? Maybe you’d better start from the very beginning and enlighten us. And you can take a seat in our car while you’re doing it. How does that sound?’

  Helgi grabbed Gunnar Atli roughly by the shoulder and spun him around so the two of them were facing each other.

  ‘I’m not responsible for any of this. I’m very sorry it’s happened, but it’s not my fault.’

  ‘Why is that exactly? I don’t see anyone else whose fault this might have been. So why don’t you tell me, what is it I’m missing here?’

  ‘I’m not at all well,’ Gunnar Atli whispered. ‘I have this condition.’

  ‘He has a condition,’ Helgi mimicked.

  ‘She has a condition too. Commonly known as dead.’

  Gunnar Atli was pallid and sweaty despite the freezing temperature of the early morning. The shorter officer took a few steps closer to the two of them to get a better look as well.

  ‘He’s right you know. He doesn’t look right at all.’

  ‘Neither would you if you’d just done that to someone,’ snarled Helgi.

  ‘You got a point there. What did she do to you? To make you do that to her? She must have really pissed you off. Let’s get him in the car.’

  Helgi pulled him away from the building and towards the parked car. He opened the back door and pushed Gunnar Atli down into the seat before climbing into the front. He picked up the radio and called headquarters.

  ‘The caller was right. There’s a body here and we’ve arrested a suspect at the scene. You’d better send someone to collect her. She’s beyond any sort of medical aid, God help her.’

  ‘I told you, I didn’t do that,’ Gunnar Atli complained from the back seat.

  Helgi turned around to stare down Gunnar Atli.

  ‘Did you hear that, Gulli?’ he shouted through the door. ‘He says he didn’t do it. Should we just let him go then?’ Helgi laughed as if it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.

  When Gunnar Atli hung his head in surrender Helgi turned his attention back to the radio.

  ‘The suspect claims to have a medical condition. You’d better send an ambulance just in case.’

  Gulli got into the passenger seat with a morbid expression on his face. He wiped the perspiration from his brow.

  ‘I’ve seen some pretty awful stuff in my time,’ he said. ‘But that really makes me feel sick. I’ve always felt that it’s important to give people the benefit of the doubt but you might just be the one who ends all that.’

  Helgi put the radio down and turned to his companion.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What hope is there for anyone who’d do that to another person? That’s what I mean.’

  The two of them stared at Gunna
r Atli waiting for an answer. He in turn stared at his lap unwilling to meet their gaze. Helgi reached over and shook Gunnar Atli by the shoulder.

  ‘He’s talking to you. What the hell is wrong with you? That’s what we want to know.’

  Gunnar Atli shook his head slowly as if trying to find a rhythm that would keep him calm. Behind the three of them at the top of the street a black Mercedes had been sitting in the shadows, its driver carefully hidden from view. While the two police officers looked at Gunnar Atli and waited for help to arrive the car pulled out of its parking space and slowly drove off down Barónsstígur towards the city centre. When it was safely out of sight it turned its headlights on and disappeared into the night.

  #3

  Detective Grímur Karlsson was waiting for him at the front door of the city morgue. They shook hands and introduced themselves. Grímur said something about how sorry he was. Kjartan nodded and suggested they get in out of the cold. They walked downstairs together in silence. There was nothing to say that wouldn’t sound trite. It was no time for small talk. Grímur put his hand on the door of the room where the body was being kept but didn’t open it. The two men looked at each other, both unsure.

  ‘As I said to you earlier on the phone, she has sustained many injuries. You are going to find this rather upsetting. More upsetting than you might have imagined, I’m afraid.’

  Kjartan nodded but couldn’t make eye contact with Grímur yet. He was pleased he hadn’t allowed Helga to accompany him, he had been right to trust his instincts and put his foot down. There was no way she would have been able to deal with this without going off the deep end. He took a deep breath filled with resignation and defeat and signalled that he was ready. Grímur pushed the door open.