Far North - Michael Ridpath [17]
‘I’m glad you called,’ said Piper.
‘Do you mind if I put you on the speaker?’ said Magnus. ‘I’m here with two detectives, Árni and Vigdís.’
‘No, that’s fine.’
Magnus clicked the button on his phone and put down the receiver. ‘Inspector Baldur gave us some background on the homicide, but maybe you can tell us some more?’
‘You speak very good English,’ said Piper. ‘Better than your inspector. I wasn’t sure how much he understood.’
Magnus looked over his shoulder at Baldur’s closed office door. ‘Thank you,’ he said, resisting the smart-ass comment. ‘And so do you.’ Piper’s British accent was a local London one, as far as he could tell.
‘Right,’ Piper began. ‘Gunnarsson was killed at twelve forty-five on Wednesday morning. Shot in the chest in the hallway of his house with three rounds from a SIG Sauer P226. He died before the ambulance got there.’
‘Any witnesses?’ Magnus asked.
‘His girlfriend was in bed. She said the bell rang, Gunnarsson answered the door, she heard him talking to someone. The front door shut. A few seconds later there were the three shots and the front door banged again. Then she heard a motorbike start up and roar off.’
‘The neighbours hear it?’
‘Yes. Three of them. They heard the shots. They heard the girl-friend’s screams. And they heard the motorbike, although one of them said it could have been a scooter. Small engine. We’ve got CCTV pictures of several motorbikes at about that time on the Old Brompton Road and the Fulham Road which are the two main streets at either side of Onslow Gardens. We’re trying to trace them all now.’
‘Any Icelandic connection?’
‘Nothing firm. The girlfriend said that she heard Gunnarsson talking with the visitor in a foreign language. It could have been Icelandic. Or Russian. Or anything else that wasn’t English or Spanish for that matter. The girlfriend is Venezuelan, by the way.’
‘Russian? Why do you say Russian?’
‘We found a little yellow Post-It note with Gunnarsson’s address written in Russian letters. What do you call it? Cyrillic. It was screwed up in a ball by the gate to the front garden.’
‘That’s a rookie mistake for a hit man to make,’ Magnus said.
‘Yes,’ Piper agreed. ‘But it might not have been the killer who dropped it. The killer may well have been someone Gunnarsson knew. He did let him in, after all.’
‘In which case the killer could have been an Icelander,’ said Magnus. ‘Is there much of a Russian connection? Óskar had a Russian girlfriend, right, before the Venezuelan?’ Magnus checked his notes. ‘Tanya Prokhorova.’
‘We’ve interviewed her. She claims she dumped him two months ago. She’s a model, skinny, legs up to her armpits, but she’s switched on, all right. Degree in accounting – she claims she realized that Gunnarsson was actually skint which is more or less why she got rid of him.’
‘Does she have Russian friends?’
‘She does. She’s right in with the billionaires’ circle in London. And some of those are pretty dodgy. What about you? Have you turned up a Russian connection in Reykjavík?’
‘Not yet,’ said Magnus. ‘But we will ask around. Óskar was under investigation here for securities fraud and market manipulation.’
‘There are rumours in the City that some of the Icelandic banks got their money from the Russian mafia,’ Piper said.
Magnus raised his eyebrows and looked at his colleagues. Árni looked baffled. Vigdís shook her head. ‘We’ll check that out too,’ Magnus said, aware of his own ignorance. ‘We’ll call you at the end of the day with an update.’
‘Great. Cheers, Magnus.’
Magnus turned to his colleagues.