The counsellor set her lips in a firm line, as if she wanted to stop herself from responding. She inspected Agla with an expression that could have been one of exhaustion or disgust. For a second it occurred to Agla that the counsellor knew what she and Elísa had got up to the previous evening, but that was impossible. They had been in a corner of Elísa’s cell, where they couldn’t be seen through the peephole in the door, and they’d been as quiet as possible, so nobody passing by could have heard their nervous giggles and stifled gasps. All the same, Agla could feel her heart pumping blood into her skin, and she blushed to the roots of her hair.
‘As the landlord, you need to sign this,’ the counsellor said, sliding a form across the table. It detailed her consent for ankle-tag monitoring equipment to be installed in the house. Agla signed it and slid it back.
‘Well,’ the counsellor said. ‘We need to discuss your own move to Vernd and your release on probation. It says in your file that you are financially well off and live comfortably. But the staff here say that you show considerable apprehension about being released.’
‘No,’ Agla said. ‘Not any longer.’
‘No nerves at the thought of walking out of here and getting to grips with life outside?’
The counsellor leaned forwards and gave her a friendly smile.
‘Not at all,’ Agla said, standing up. ‘I can’t get out of this cage soon enough.’
49
It was as if his mother could sense that this time he really wanted her to go to bed early, because she did just the opposite. She sat in front of the television, drinking slowly, making weird comments about the presenters on the news, mostly reflecting on their clothes or their family connections. On a normal evening he would have enjoyed it and laughed with her, sending a few examples of her odd turns of phrase to Júlía, but now he needed some time with the middle floor of the house to himself for a while – before his father came home.
‘That hairdo doesn’t suit her, and that can’t be a woollen dress. Wool would be much too hot in a TV studio,’ his mother muttered, slurping her white wine.
‘Hmm.’
Anton had no opinions on what material the presenters’ clothes were made from. They didn’t choose what they wore – they had stylists for all that; and their clothes weren’t even their own, so didn’t say anything about their personalities. It was pointless thinking about it. ‘I reckon he’s better-looking now that his hair’s gone grey,’ his mother said, pointing at the screen.
‘Who?’ Anton asked, looking up from his phone.
‘Him, there,’ she said, pointing again. ‘The son of that bloke … the minister.’
She was forgetting names now, so it wouldn’t be long before she would go upstairs to bed. Anton stretched to reach the wine bottle and refilled his mother’s glass. She took a long swig, and then he filled it to the brim.
‘Thanks, darling,’ she said, knocking back half a glass as if white wine was a soft drink. Normally she drank vodka, so for her white wine must be tame stuff. Anton was never going to drink, and he was never going to take any kind of pills; and he would never marry a woman who drank or took pills.
He looked through everything that Júlía had added to Stories on Snapchat, then went to Ask and sent a few questions her way, which he knew she would realise came from him. When she answered, he always got a warm feeling inside, like he was the coolest, best and smartest kid she knew. When he looked up, his mother was asleep, her head thrown back on the back of the chair, snoring quietly with her mouth wide open and the empty wine glass in her hand.
She would undoubtedly sleep there well into the night. He got quietly to his feet and tiptoed cautiously to his father’s study, where he carefully shut the door behind him.
The safe was behind a painting that was fixed to the wall on a set of hinges. When he had been a kid it had been fun to swing the painting aside and show his friends the hidden safe. He had often seen inside the safe when his father was using it, and knew that as well as the documents, it held stacks of banknotes. Under normal circumstances he would never steal money from his father – he had never needed to. He had always been given money for everything he had asked for. But this time it wouldn’t be easy to explain why he needed such a large amount.
Oddur had sent him a message, saying he would make a remote-control detonator, but it would cost half a million krónur. He seemed to be surprised when Anton replied and accepted the offer. More than likely Oddur had thought that this would be so much that Anton would not be able to raise the funds, and the matter would be forgotten. But it actually wasn’t so much that it would make a dent in his father’s cash reserves. He probably wouldn’t even notice that anything was missing. It wasn’t as if he sat there and counted the cash every week. And if he were to notice, then Anton would reply with what his father was always telling him: money in itself had no value; money was a tool.
Anton spun the combination lock a couple of times. He didn’t need to be a genius to crack this lock. His father used Anton’s date of birth as the key to practically everything.
50
María picked up her phone and took a picture. She could hardly believe her eyes. In another small town in another state was a warehouse identical to the first; the only visible difference was that this one was branded OR Metals Inc. Even the fence around the perimeter was exactly the same as the one surrounding Meteorite Metals.
María sent a picture to Marteinn with a short message:
Another metal storage unit in Ohio, the name is OR Metals. Can you check it out for me?
If anyone could find something out, then that person would be Marteinn. The question was whether he was so disappointed with her, he wouldn’t bother to reply.
She waited for the truck to emerge on the other side. She didn’t need to check that there was an exit, like there was at the other place, so she parked by the side of the road near the entrance so the driver wouldn’t see her when he drove out. She wondered if this warehouse was also stuffed full of aluminium, but didn’t have the courage to go inside and check it out. Meteorite had a night watchman, and this place was exactly the same. The prospect of another cold pistol muzzle in her face wasn’t an attractive one. She rubbed her wrists and decided that she would continue to follow the truck to see if it made a call at yet another warehouse.
Twenty minutes later the truck appeared, driving back past the perimeter fence. María waited a moment before starting the engine and following it through the town the way it had come. It was getting dark now, and after a monotonous hour on Highway 90, heading east, she was struggling to stay awake. She opened a pack of potato chips and a bottle of water, and reflected that if the truck didn’t make a stop soon at a diner, then this would have to pass for dinner. She wound down the window to let in more air and set the radio to search, hoping for a station that offered something other than country and western and advertisements.
She was fighting to keep her eyes open and was scanning the side of the road for motels when the truck finally indicated and turned off into a rest area.
There had been diners and shops at some of the rest areas she had passed, but this one had nothing more than a shack containing toilets and coin-operated showers, and a large, empty parking zone. María was hoping that the driver had stopped for nothing more than a quick call of nature and would then drive on a little further to somewhere there would be a place to eat. But he took care to park the truck in one of the large diagonal parking bays in the middle of the rest area; it looked like he was stopping for the night.
She got out and went over to the toilet block where the smell smacked her in the face. She tried to breathe through her mouth as she peed, relieved that she had pocketed a serviette, as there was no paper. She washed her hands and eased the door open with her elbow so she could get out without having to touch the handle. Walking back to the car, she saw the driver with a bag in his hand, making his way over to a wooden table under some trees. She sat in the car and watched as he lit
a lamp and sat at the table. He was better prepared than she was. She checked her phone to see if Marteinn had replied, and he had:
They own two warehouses.
She sighed with relief. It was good to have Marteinn on her side. She would try to explain things for him in more detail when she was home and he was feeling more like himself.
So Meteorite Metals had a warehouse and OR Metals had two, which meant there was every chance there would be more companies and more warehouses, and the amount of stockpiled aluminium might be considerable. But she still failed to understand the reason for the truck movements. She got out of the car and set off across the rest area. She had learned during her time at the special prosecutor’s office that sometimes there was no need to work your way around the edges, trying to discover everything for yourself. Often a straight question was the best way to get answers.
‘Hi, I’m María. I’m a journalist from Iceland,’ she said, holding up her press card.
The driver stood up, still with his mouth full and a beer bottle in his hand. He leaned forwards to peer at her card.
‘Journalist, yeah?’
‘I’ve been tailing you today, and I can see you’re driving a loaded truck from one warehouse to another. Can I ask why?’
‘What paper do you work for?’
It was a question María was ready for. It was what everyone asked. But it was less embarrassing to explain to a foreigner: he wouldn’t know that The Squirrel was just a tiny online venture.
She accepted the beer he opened for her, perched herself on the edge of the table and gave him a quick lecture about The Squirrel’s importance to Icelandic investigative journalism.
‘I’m interested to know what you drivers are doing. The warehouse in Indiana is stacked to the roof, so why are the trucks driving in and out all day long? Can you help me? I can keep your name out of it, of course,’ she added. ‘I’ll just say I have an anonymous source.’
‘What’s in it for me?’ the driver asked.
‘We should be able to pay you something in return for information,’ María said quickly. She had no doubt that Agla would cover the cost.
‘I don’t mean cash,’ he said. ‘It gets lonely on the road, y’know.’
He took two steps towards her, standing close and trapping her between his heavy frame and the wooden table, which was bolted to the ground.
‘Excuse me,’ María said, taking an instinctive step to one side, but his hand closed around her arm, and she realised just what a dangerous position she was in. She was alone in a vast, deserted parking lot, and even if she managed to squeeze out a scream, it would be drowned out by the roar of traffic from the nearby freeway, and there was nobody anywhere near to hear it.
Time suddenly began to take on a strange elasticity as she was faced by the imminent danger. The clear thought formed in her mind, that if she did not react right away, within a few seconds, she would be petrified with fear, just as she had been when she had felt the pistol’s muzzle pressed into her cheek.
She leaned forwards and sank her teeth deep into the man’s arm. As he yelped and relaxed his grip, she sprinted for her car, not daring to look back to see if he was following her. As she dropped herself into the driver’s seat, she heard him yell ‘Stupid bitch!’ She started the engine and fumbled for the door lock at the same time, and a moment later the tyres screeched as she hurtled down the slip road to the freeway.
As she bullied the car up to eighty, she could feel there was no strength in her legs. A deep wave of nausea suddenly swept over her. She slowed down, pulled over, put her head out of the window and vomited onto the verge. A powerful smell assailed her senses, and her limbs were now so weak, she felt paralysed. It all merged together in her thoughts: the man’s sweat-damp face in the darkness and the stench of piss from the toilet.
51
‘I’m sure you’ll do a good job,’ Ingimar said into his phone as he weighed a perfect green avocado in his hand, applying gentle pressure to gauge its ripeness. It seemed fully ripe – a rarity in Iceland, where the distance that products had to be transported meant imported fruit and vegetables were generally sold unripe and needed a few days on the kitchen windowsill before they were edible.
Today everything was going his way: a friend on the south-west regional police force had promised that on her return to Iceland, María would get the treatment she deserved for her interference; the avocado in his hand was just right; and in front of him was a woman who ignited something inside him, so waiting in the queue for the checkout was no hardship. She wore a leather jacket and a pair of skin-tight leggings that hid nothing. He held his phone in front of him so it was not too obvious that he was checking her out. Occasionally he would allow himself to ogle women, but it was rare for him to start a conversation or make a move to pick them up. Maybe he was getting old. Any thoughts of sex were tinged with sorrow, and sometimes he felt that a moment’s delight was hardly worth the effort. As she filled her bags at the checkout, the pretty woman’s jacket flapped open to reveal a low-cut top offering him a glimpse of her cleavage.
The woman looked up and caught him staring at her, but instead of taking offence she smiled briefly, and he smiled back, apologetically, placing his basket on the counter and emptying its contents onto the conveyor. Once the woman had paid and had finished packing her purchases into her shopping bag, she sent him another smile, as if in farewell. Ingimar felt warm inside. The smile told him that if he had made the effort, he could have got somewhere with this woman.
‘There’s an offer on avocados,’ the lad behind the till said. ‘Buy one, get one free.’
Ingimar grinned.
‘Great,’ he said, and jogged back into the shop to pick up a second avocado from the fruit stand. He didn’t need a second one, but he took it as a symbol of how life was treating him today. He was certain that this evening, when he had blitzed it in the blender with tomatoes and spices, and put it on the table with a bowl of nachos, it would taste wonderful.
Ingimar dropped the bag on the back seat of his 4×4 and got in. It was unfortunate that he wouldn’t be able to see the expression on María’s face tomorrow, when she found the police waiting for her. That was something he would have enjoyed. Maybe he would be able to get his friend to take a picture of her meeting the reception committee. He would undoubtedly do that for him. Ingimar counted himself fortunate that he had many good friends and generally didn’t find it hard to get people to do him a favour.
He started the car and glanced in the rear-view mirror, but it had been moved slightly, so instead of seeing the view behind the car, he found himself looking into his own face. The second he looked into his own eyes without intending to, the warm feeling of luck and happiness vanished, and he could no longer face the thought of going home. Rebekka would be waiting for him, either drunk or asleep, doped up with pills, along with an unhappy and hungry Anton, who could not be pleased, it seemed. A snarling revulsion at the thought of home welled up inside him.
Across the car park, the pretty woman was taking her time arranging stuff in the boot of her car. Hell, it couldn’t take that long for her to sort out her shopping, could it? She had to be waiting to see if Ingimar stopped to speak to her. If he did, he’d have hooked her within a few minutes, and in an hour he would be getting out of her bed, and looking for ways both to escape and to rid her of any expectations about seeing him again. He couldn’t be bothered with it. Fate constantly sent him tempting offers, just like a buy-one-get-one-free avocado, but that didn’t mean he had to accept them all.
He took out his phone and called her.
Experience told him that whenever he felt there were too many signals from various directions flagging up how fantastic and smart and fortunate he was, it was time for some abuse.
‘Get yourself over here,’ she ordered. ‘I’ll be furious if you’re not here in thirty minutes flat.’
Once he had been flogged, he would be relaxed and satisfied with his lot, which in reality was no
better or worse than anyone else’s. Then he would go home humbly and make the most of the evening with Anton, just like any normal man. Because he was just a normal man. Just a mortal man.
52
Agla found herself sliding into a deep depression as she watched Elísa finish packing her belongings. Agla fussed and repeated yet again all the things she had been through with her twice already.
‘Call as soon as you get to Vernd, and my lawyer will bring you the phone and the car. It needs to be charged up every four hundred kilometres, but to be safe it’s worth doing it when it’s down to twenty per cent. If you can’t plug it in somewhere, then just go to a fast-charging point. It doesn’t cost anything.’
‘I know,’ Elísa said and gave her a beautiful smile.
Agla wondered what it had been that had initially repelled her, as now she felt herself melting when Elísa smiled at her.
‘Work hard and make sure you’re back at Vernd for dinner at ten to six – be sure you’re not late. And aim to be sure you’re home at ten to eleven so there’s no chance of accidentally breaking the rules.’
‘I know it’s strict,’ Elísa said.
Agla realised that Elísa knew all this, but somehow felt that she wasn’t taking it seriously enough. There was something about the look on her face that indicated a disregard for the probation regulations. Breaking the rules even once would mean being fast-tracked back to Hólmsheiði.
‘I’ll be at Vernd in a week, and then we can help each other out,’ Agla said.
Elísa reached for her hand and pulled her to the corner, out of sight of the window. Agla felt herself flush with excitement as Elísa pressed herself against her, but was too flustered with concern to risk a hurried fumble. The prison officer would arrive any moment to drive Elísa to Vernd.
She held Elísa’s face in both her hands and looked into her eyes.
‘Be good, my darling. Seriously. Be good.’
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