‘María Gunnhildur Jónudóttir,’ María said, and the woman’s head tilted back as she looked down to type the name into the National Registry. It was clear that her reading glasses weren’t up to the job.
‘Jónsdóttir?’ she asked.
‘No. Jónudóttir,’ María replied. ‘My mother’s name is Jóna.’
‘I can’t find it in the registry,’ the woman said, tilting her head forwards this time to look at María over the top of her glasses.
‘That’s impossible,’ María said. ‘Of course I’m in the National Registry, like every other Icelandic citizen.’
The woman tapped at the keyboard again and shook her head. The cashier, who was standing quietly at her side, looking at the screen over her shoulder, shook her head in sympathy.
‘Is this some kind of joke?’ María demanded, aware that her voice was becoming shrill.
‘The only explanation that comes to mind,’ the woman said, taking off her glasses, ‘is that you’ve recently adopted your mother’s name, while the registry still has you under your patronymic.’
‘No,’ María replied. ‘It’s years since I changed my name. You must be using a version of the National Registry that’s years out of date, which I can’t believe.’
‘Well, no. We get an amended version every day. You’ll have to talk to the National Registry. There’s nothing we can do about it here. I’m sorry.’
‘You’re not the only one who’s sorry,’ María said. ‘And I’ll certainly be taking my business elsewhere in future.’
She reflected that there might be some value in her threat, as, while the bank staff didn’t have her ID, they wouldn’t be able to see that her accounts were generally either empty or overdrawn.
She spun around and marched away, and as she reached the automatic doors, she noticed out of the corner of her eye that the cashier who’d served her grinned at the one at the next desk and tapped her head.
‘I saw that,’ María yelled, but as the doors hissed shut behind her, she was gripped by a feeling closer to despair than fear.
69
His fingertips were sore, but Anton was satisfied with his day’s work. The bomb looked convincing, and as long as the detonator did its work, then all that would be needed was a little common sense to make sure the dynamite went off at once. In fact, the tool box looked harmless. Closed, there was nothing to indicate this was anything other than a well-used box that had once been shiny and new, but which was now endearingly worn, with a few paint splashes and stains, sustained over a couple of decades of use by his grandfather, after which it was left in their basement.
Opening the box, however, revealed the sticks of dynamite, a fuse leading from each one and fastened with garden wire to a longer fuse. On top sat the detonator, which he hadn’t yet dared switch on. He really didn’t want to have Gunnar anywhere close by when he tried it out. He was so clumsy and prone to fiddling that he would undoubtedly mess with the remote control and unintentionally blow them both up.
Gunnar had only just left, and Anton was mustering the courage he needed to put the end of the fuse wire into the little hole in the computer board, as Oddur had shown him, when his phone rang. His heart sank as he saw it was his father calling, as if he had been caught red-handed in the boiler room.
‘Where are you, son?’ his father asked, and Anton breathed a sigh of relief. Of course he had no idea what was going on in the basement. The stress was starting to get to him.
‘I’m with the boys,’ Anton said. That was an answer that always worked on his father, as if this was a catch-all explanation for any absence. With the boys.
‘That’s fine. I didn’t mean to disturb you. I just wanted to say that I’ve booked you and Júlía a table at a fantastic place, and it’s on me. OK?’
‘Sure, yeah. Thanks, Dad. You’re the best.’
‘You’re welcome, my boy. See you this evening.’
His father ended the call and Anton wondered if he was somewhere in town or working at home. Sometimes he would come home during the day and lie down for an hour in the living room, so it was possible that he was in fact lying directly above the boiler room.
The fuse wire had a ragged end, so Anton snipped it off clean and pushed it cautiously into the hole in the detonator, then snapped shut the red plastic cover to hold it secure. He took the remote and put it aside on the other garden chair. That way there was no risk that he could nudge it by accident as he tried it out. The remote looked like a doorbell; maybe Oddur had used a doorbell to make it. He was so clever in using all kinds of basic electronic stuff to make his robots. But that meant there was no security cover on the remote, of the kind Anton had seen in movies, so it was bound to be sensitive.
He took a deep breath and examined the bomb one more time. It looked good, convincingly bulky, and, going by the amount of dynamite and the information he had gleaned from the internet, it should be powerful enough to do its job.
Oddur had said that clicking the switch would make the bomb active, and a red light would come on. Anton’s heart beat hard enough to burst and his finger trembled as he placed it on the switch.
70
There had to be a limit to how long Meteorite could continue to accrue losses, and as things stood, the company’s owner, the bank in Paris, had to be getting nervous. It was this nervousness that Agla intended to home in on when she met the bank’s director. Tomorrow she would speak to Elvar about what he had found to entertain the director during his visit to Iceland. It would be important to make a serious effort to pamper him before they talked; she needed to put him in a positive frame of mind. All the same, she was not nervous about taking her proposals to him; this was something she could do better than most people.
She opened the online banking page to check on her Icelandic hedge funds. She made a point of having a stake in as many of them as possible, as spreading your assets around could work out well. It had also been to her advantage during her case, as she had been able to challenge the impartiality of one of the judges as he had investments in the same fund. It was the minor details that made the difference, something that so many investors overlooked. It wasn’t enough just to watch the big figures.
Invalid ID, the computer flashed up as she tried to log into her bank account.
She tried again.
Invalid ID.
There had to be a glitch in the bank’s system. She tried once again, closed the computer and stood up. She would try again once she had checked on Elísa, and then she’d go to bed herself.
Agla walked down the corridor, slipped past the big potted plants and the grandma-style side tables, which were intended to give the house a homely feel but really just resulted in clutter, and pushed open Elísa’s door. She was lying in bed, and at first Agla thought she was asleep, until she heard her sniff.
She sat down on the edge of the bed.
‘Everything all right?’ she asked, and Elísa shook her tousled head against the pillow. ‘What?’ Agla asked.
‘Sorry I didn’t come and get you. I fucked up.’
Agla placed a hand on her head and stroked her hair. It felt thin and dry to the touch.
‘Shh, Elísa. It’s all right. Don’t think about it now.’
‘You’re so good, helping me out, and I do nothing for you. I even screw up picking you up from prison,’ Elísa said, struggling to form the words through her sobs. ‘And I ought to know what it’s like having nobody to meet you when you come out of jail.’
‘Don’t cry. Shake it off,’ Agla said. ‘It’s a new day tomorrow, and a new day brings new opportunities. I’ll wake you up tomorrow, and you’ll go to work and apologise to the manager at the shop for forgetting to call in sick. Then I’ll collect you after work and we’ll go for ice cream.’
Ice cream was the only thing that came to mind that might cheer Elísa up. She had seen how fond she was of it when she’d looked through her bank statements. It seemed to work – Elísa’s tears dried up.
�
�Thanks,’ she whispered into her pillow.
Agla leaned over, kissed the top of her head and tiptoed out, quietly closing the door, as, judging by the sound of Elísa’s breathing, she was asleep already.
It was almost eleven, and for the first time in months Agla realised she felt tired. She again sat on the bed and looked around the small room. It had obviously been furnished with the help of IKEA, with a pinewood bed and a white plastic-laminated dresser, but the framed prints on the walls were something even her mother would have deemed out of fashion.
With the laptop on her knees she made another attempt to log in to her online account. Again, access was refused, so she tried logging into her accounts in the other Icelandic banks. She had the same result.
She decided to try her Swiss account, and was able to log in as usual, so it had to be a problem with the Icelandic central banking data centre. It was giving her the same result everywhere she tried.
Invalid ID.
71
The lock was stuck and it was dark inside The Squirrel’s office so it was clear that Marteinn wasn’t there. María wiggled the key impatiently, pushing at the glass door at the same time, until the key turned and the door opened.
From the moment she had opened her eyes that morning, everything had worked against her. First the glass jug of her coffee machine had broken, so there had been no choice but to resort to instant coffee; and then the National Registry had been monumentally unhelpful, expecting her to fill in a whole stack of forms. Now the office light switch wouldn’t work, so she had to feel her way in the dark to the switch on the far wall, between her desk and Marteinn’s. She reached out a hand to turn on the light, her shoulder brushing against something as she did so. She was startled, unable to stop herself from calling out. She didn’t dare put out her hands to touch whatever it was in the dark, so she quickly switched the light on.
She didn’t recognise him as Marteinn. The blackened face was nothing like him. But as she stared at the man hanging from the ceiling, it gradually dawned on her that the mustard-yellow corduroys were Marteinn’s trousers and the worn leather shoes on the lifeless feet were Marteinn’s shoes. The corpse slowly turned through half a circle and then back, making the leather belt sitting tightly around the darkblue neck creak; Marteinn’s cowboy belt.
Before she realised what was happening, Radio Edda’s manager was at her side, trying to get her to her feet. She didn’t realise why he was there all of a sudden, until she realised that she was screaming with all the power in her body.
‘Come on out of here,’ the radio station’s manager said, pulling her towards the door.
But she didn’t want to leave Marteinn like that. She wanted to cut him down to see if he would start breathing again. The manager told her repeatedly that he was cold and that it was too late. She couldn’t understand how he could know that. Then she found that she could hardly stay upright, and the man half-carried her out into the corridor. She sat shivering against the wall while the man fetched his phone, standing over her as he called the emergency services.
It seemed as if she could hear the sirens wailing the moment the manager put his phone down. As the sound approached, it filled her with some hope that Marteinn might still be alive, and that was why the ambulance had its siren on. With that thought in mind, she stood up, rushed back into the office and up onto the desk, where she hauled at the belt that held Marteinn’s corpse as it swung gently.
A moment later she was back in the corridor and a police officer was asking her all kinds of questions. She answered everything calmly, and the policeman left, and then the radio station’s manager brought her coffee in a Radio Edda mug and she drank it in one gulp, hoping that it would bring her round from this nightmare.
72
Agla withdrew as much cash as each of her Swiss cards would allow then stuffed the notes into her wallet. The ATM had declined each of her Icelandic bank cards, debit and credit cards alike. Now, however, having received a confused call from María, she was beginning to join the dots in connection with this mysterious glitch in the banking system. She had struggled to understand what María was saying through her tears; she had skipped from her ID number to being imprisoned illegally and then to something about a dead man. She seemed petrified and said she was completely penniless, so Agla stopped off at an ATM on the way to pick her up outside the supermarket beside The Squirrel office.
‘I think somebody might be watching me,’ María said as she got into the Tesla. ‘Drive, drive.’
Agla drove away slowly and watched María out of the corner of her eye as she twisted round in the seat to check the street around them.
‘What was that about your ID number?’ Agla asked as she turned onto Sæbraut.
María finally sat back in the seat with a deep sigh.
‘It’s gone!’ María said. ‘It’s simply disappeared from the system. The National Registry said they’d check it out, so I filled in some forms, and the staff there put my name and number into the registry, but neither were there. They looked at me as if I was crazy.’
Agla couldn’t stop herself from cracking a smile. This confirmed what she had suspected. There weren’t many people who would be able to arrange something like this.
‘You wouldn’t happen to have encountered a certain Ingimar Magnússon since you started looking into this aluminium case for me?’
María sighed again.
‘Yes,’ she said, taking a tissue from her pocket and dabbing at her eyes. ‘Ingimar was sitting in my flat when I finally got home after days of being held illegally in some empty jail or hospital up there on the old US military base. He tried to threaten me, to stop me from investigating the aluminium storage units. And now he’s had Marteinn murdered – my assistant.’
‘Murdered?’
‘Yes. Marteinn is dead. I found him hanging from the ceiling when I got to the office this morning.’
Now the tears were running freely down María’s cheeks. Agla pulled off the road into the coach park next to the Sun Voyager art installation on the sea front overlooking the bay and stopped the car.
‘I know Ingimar well,’ she said. ‘He’s a wolf and he’ll stop at nothing when it comes to business. He plays dirty tricks on anyone who gets in his way; it seems to boost his ego. But he wouldn’t go as far as killing someone. I can’t believe that, María.’
María buried her face in her hands.
‘I don’t know what to believe anymore,’ she said. ‘The police said they’d look at every angle and wouldn’t just assume that it’s suicide,’ María said, sniffing. ‘Or maybe they do that with every fatality they investigate, I don’t know. I’m absolutely not my usual self right now. And now the police will come and pick me up when they find out that the ID number I gave them doesn’t exist. And I can’t be locked up again, because I’m sure I’ll freak out completely if I’m put in a cell. I mean really go crazy.’
Agla couldn’t help feeling a twitch of satisfaction deep inside that María had had to experience incarceration for herself; after all, she had said often enough that she hoped Agla would spend as long as possible behind bars. But Agla kept quiet, took out a stack of notes and handed them to María.
‘Do you have a place to go where you can keep out of sight for a few days? A friend out of town, or a summer house; anything like that?’
‘Can’t you just talk to the police and explain everything?’ María asked.
‘That’s going to be a headache and a half,’ Agla replied. ‘I’m guessing that you mentioned my name to Ingimar, as my ID number has disappeared as well.’
María groaned, but took the bundle of notes as she got out of the car.
‘I’ll walk home from here,’ she snapped. ‘Call me when you’ve found out how I can get myself back again.’
She slammed the car door, and Agla drove away. It wasn’t until she was passing the Harpa conference centre that she realised she had forgotten to give María a few encouraging words. It wouldn’t have don
e any harm to show a little empathy – show that she had some understanding of what María had been through. Agla growled with irritation at her own shortcomings. There were good reasons why María and pretty much everyone else didn’t like her.
She found Elvar’s number in her phone then linked it to the Tesla’s hands-free system. She would have to bring forward the French bank director’s visit to Iceland. Sorting this whole affair out was becoming urgent. She signalled left and turned onto Hverfisgata. She would be at Bónus in time to collect Elísa as her shift ended.
73
Anton felt that he had never been more alert than at that moment. He was physically tired and his back was sore after bending over the bomb for so long the day before, but his senses were sharp and ready to react, and it felt as if his eyes saw everything more clearly and his ears picked up even the tiniest sounds. He lay in bed, admiring the pattern of roses that surrounded the light in the ceiling and listening to the hot water gurgle in the radiators.
Straight after school he had gone down to the boiler room to arm the bomb again, and then deactivate it, just for the kick that came with it.
It felt like the adrenaline his body had injected into his bloodstream had wiped clean his mind and senses so that he had gained a clearer awareness of the world. It seemed to have made him even more convinced that he was doing the right thing; that the bomb would change the state of things in Iceland. That could only be a good thing.
The first time he had clicked the switch on the bomb yesterday, he had done it with his eyes tight shut, his body tensing unconsciously; but when he opened his eyes and saw the red light on the detonator and the remote control on the garden chair, just a metre away, he felt a burst of pleasure. It wasn’t unlike when he and a friend had tried vaping. The nicotine mist with its menthol taste had enveloped him, he had felt his legs go weak under him and was filled with delight – that was until the nausea took over. But this time there was no nausea, just a clarity of thought that he had never before experienced. The little white doorbell button on the remote, which sat just an arm’s length away, marked the dividing line between life and death. Anton felt himself swell, as if this power nourished him and the skinny, spotty boy he had so recently been vanished for ever.
Cage Page 17