‘Who is this guy? Is he staying here?’
Torfi had dealt with more than a few dead guests in his years of working in hotels. But this one hadn’t tumbled down a flight of stairs at the end of a raucous company annual party or quietly failed to wake up. This person looked too young to be one of the Bristol Hotel’s usual cohort of guests, a slim youth with dark hair that spread across the pillow, while his blue eyes were wide open and staring, and his clothes were scattered around the room.
Everything about this was wrong. There was a proper procedure for this, and Sigríður definitely wasn’t following it. As well as that, dead guests tended to be found by the chambermaids, not by senior staff during the night, letting themselves into rooms with a swipe of a master pass key.
‘No,’ Sigríður said. ‘He’s not a guest.’
‘All right. We need to get an ambulance here right away. Isn’t Ásbjörn here?’
Sigríður shook her head.
‘No. And, yes.’
‘Who’s the duty manager? They should be dealing with this. And there should be paramedics here by now.’
Sigríður looked at him almost pityingly.
‘This is down to us.’
Torfi’s confusion was making him dizzy.
‘Who’s the duty manager tonight?’ he asked again, as if this wasn’t happening.
'That’s Ásbjörn, but he’s busy right now.’ Sigríður scowled and looked him up and down, as if measuring him for a coffin. ‘He’ll be here in a few minutes.’
‘He has something more important than this to deal with? And if this person isn’t a guest, whose room is this?’
Sigríður shook her head, shrugged and shivered. Her voice had a brittle quality to it when she replied.
‘Torfi. This is Alberto’s room. Was Alberto’s room. Understand? It’s up to us, you and me, right now, to make this go away. Understand?’
‘Fuck… I…’ Torfi stuttered. ‘I don’t think I can…’
This time Sigríður’s eyes glinted as she fixed him with a piercing gaze.
‘Listen. You’re in too deep already to back out of anything. So stop acting like a frightened schoolgirl and go fetch a laundry basket. One of the big ones on wheels’
Between them, he and Sigríður dressed the dead man, collecting his clothes from the bedroom floor before Ásbjörn arrived, his face flushed and serious. They bundled the corpse into the basket. Sigríður deftly stripped the bed and stuffed the soiled sheets on top of the body.
The three of them accompanied the young man on his undignified journey to the basement, leaving him just inside the big delivery doors.
Sigríður issued terse instructions.
‘Get the van from the front,’ she said in a hoarse whisper. ‘Take it round here. You know what to do. Dump our friend somewhere and come straight back here.’
‘Where do I go? You want me to go alone?’
‘Anywhere he won’t be found for a day or two, or longer,’ Sigríður told him.
‘Hvalfjörður, out in Hvassahraun somewhere. Up to you. Just be discreet and don’t get stopped by the police.’
The smarter a place looks, the darker the secrets it hides… Guests at one of Reykjavík’s smartest hotels never know what happens behind the scenes –including what brings a group of the city’s homeless to the Bristol Hotel every winter night while the rest of the world sleeps. When overworked supervisor Torfi finds himself given an unexpected promotion that comes with a respectable pay rise, he takes it as a lucky break – until he’s told to make a murder victim disappear, and that he doesn’t have any choice. That’s when his life rapidly gets a lot more complicated. What isn’t he being told? Torfi doesn’t know, but when police officers Haukur and Dagný start asking awkward questions, he needs to find answers – even though he knows only half of the story. Longing desperately to go back to his old, boring life, Torfi finds himself desperately out of his depth as his family are threatened and his problems spiral far out of his control.
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