Trap

by Lilja Sigurdardóttir

  This was starting to feel familiar, although it was a touch too dramatic to call it a pattern. She would pursue Sonja, finally have her in her arms, and then screw things up without knowing exactly how, before starting to pursue her again. Agla could feel her cheeks flush and a familiar feeling made its appearance – guilt.

  It was as if Sonja had breathed new life into the guilt that her mother had rid her of when she was just ten years old.

  ‘Guilt is what causes women the most problems in life,’ her mother had said. ‘If you can lose the guilt, you’ll be free.’

  She’d said this after Agla had lain in bed in tears, having sneaked down to the harbour with her brother’s fishing rod and lost it.

  ‘Take a look at your brothers,’ her mother had said. ‘They don’t have regrets. They just forget and carry on. They put it all behind them. You can’t change the past anyway, so why let it worry you?’

  After her mother had left the room and told the raging boy to grow up and get over it, Agla lay silently in bed and thought. She knew that her mother was right. Those nagging pangs of conscience did nothing but hold you back. That was when guilt had left her and had only made a reappearance decades later – when Adam had walked in on her in bed with Sonja, little Tómas holding his hand. The whole family’s life was instantly wrecked … by her. Ever since then it felt as if everything linked to Sonja brought back that guilt, blended with another emotion that had also started to make a habit of showing up: shame.

  Agla sat on the edge of the bed, lifted her arms and stretched. A day in heels yesterday had left her with a sore back. It would be flat shoes for the rest of the week: flat shoes, trouser suits and her attention on the bank. Sonja would be occupied with her computer work, so sorting things out between them would have to wait until they were both free. However much she longed to catch the next flight home and do her best to gain Sonja’s affections, that wasn’t on the agenda. Now real life would have to take priority.

  There was one call she had to make to ensure that everything was in order, to prevent a misunderstanding later on.

  Ingimar picked up before the phone had even rung once.

  ‘I just wanted to make you aware of something,’ she said.

  ‘Yes?’ Ingimar said, and she could hear his heavy breathing.

  ‘When the invoice reaches you, the interest is the LIBOR rate plus the usual Deutsche Bank rate.’

  ‘Why?’ Agla could hear his displeasure in the single word.

  ‘Each payment is reduced,’ she said, ‘as the LIBOR interest rate is lower than you had in mind, but then there’s the opportunity to offset the companies’ interest payments against corporation tax, as long as the loans are on the usual terms.’

  ‘Even though the payment ends up within the same group?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So we get a tax break on this?’ Agla could hear the laughter in his voice.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said, ‘as long as we use what are considered usual terms – the LIBOR rate, for example.’

  Ingimar sniggered softly. ‘I’m not sure if you’re crazy or you’re a genius,’ he said and Agla smiled to herself before ending the call.

  She went to the bathroom and ran the shower. Talking to Sonja would have to wait until she was back in Iceland. Now she would have to put on her hard outer shell, smother her pangs of guilt and concentrate on business. She needed to be able to think clearly. The week ahead of her was an important one.

  32

  Sonja reproached herself all the way to Amsterdam. The flight leaving Iceland far too early in the morning hadn’t helped. It was never a pleasure to have to wake up in the middle of the night, and now she was in the airport shuttle taking her into the city. Normally she found a train ride relaxing, the rhythmic motion reminiscent of a resting heartbeat and providing a feeling of security, but this time she found the sound irritating. All she saw out the window now seemed ugly, her mind not registering the clear sky or the budding trees but only the garbage by the motorway running beside the track and graffiti tags on the walls of the cuttings the train passed through. She felt that her life had gone backwards over the last week and she hadn’t been developing in the right direction. If it wasn’t enough that she had let Adam trap her yet again, she hadn’t withstood the temptation to sleep with Agla, which brought with it all the usual expectations and disappointments. On the phone the previous day she had gone on and on about all kinds of bank business that she knew perfectly well that Sonja had no interest in. She had heard enough of that kind of crap – about acquisitions, leveraging, mortgaging and whatever all that stuff was called. Her attention never failed to go in other directions whenever that bank stuff came up. There was probably some element of masochism in having had both a husband and a lover in the banking sector, considering how boring she found it all. But she knew that Agla had blabbered out of awkwardness, because she had no idea what else to talk about.

  Sonja had so many times in the past promised herself that she would stay away from Agla, as the relationship brought her constant emotional turmoil and disappointment, but this week had left her previous promises to herself in ruins. She had once again lost control and been helplessly carried along by her passion, as if swept away by an irresistible flood.

  Now there was a pick-up ahead of her and being distracted was not an option. She had to maintain her focus on the business at hand, be cautious, all her senses alert and her nerves primed. Anything that looked out of place in this business could indicate a hazard, it was vital to ensure Agla wasn’t going to distract her.

  Leaving Centraal railway station she walked out into damp air. It had rained recently and there was a heavy scent of approaching spring. It was clear that Iceland was only nominally a part of Europe; there was at least a month to go before any sign of spring would show near the Arctic Circle, while here there were banks of colourful tulips in flower.

  She had booked a small apartment online, paying with the company’s PayPal account as a way of leaving as little of a trail as possible. Now she was turning over in her mind whether or not she could trust Bragi to keep an eye on everything so that she could take a direct flight home with the shipment, or if she ought to make it a dog-leg journey. Waiting in the taxi queue, she took out Bragi’s shift timetable and studied it. He would be on duty on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Tuesday would be a good day to go back with the shipment, giving her plenty of time to fetch, pack and plan.

  33

  Bragi sighed with relief as the aircraft’s wheels touched down on Icelandic soil. He always disliked being abroad without Valdís. He had lost all interest in exploring the world when she could no longer be at his side, and although his work meant watching thousands of people as they streamed in and out of the country, he felt no envy. He was satisfied being where she was. Now she was at home, he looked forward to opening the front door to the aroma of her face cream and the sound of the radio burbling.

  He had spent the whole of the previous afternoon walking around Nuuk, following the man who had taken Axel’s bag. He had waited, shivering in the cold, as the man went inside a small grocery shop, appearing without the bag but with a large box in his arms. For a moment Bragi had doubted whether he should continue shadowing the man, but he was certain that the bag’s contents were now in the box, which otherwise looked to be full of groceries. The man sauntered down to the dock with it and boarded a ship with a Holidays Arctic Cruise logo painted on its side. It was a substantial vessel, although nowhere near as vast as the cruise liners that called in to Iceland. In comparison, this one was a midget. A Canadian flag hung lifelessly in the still air at the ship’s stern. Bragi waited a while on the dock to see if the man would reappear, but there was no sign of him. Instead, anorakclad tourists festooned with cameras made their way up the gangway and before long the ship had left the dock and Bragi watched it steam out of Nuuk fjord.

  Back at Hotel Hans Egede, as he sat in the lobby and used the hotel computer to google, as Atli Thór c
alled it, Holidays Arctic, Bragi had formulated a theory – something that went against all of the accepted thinking that customs officers worked on. However, this time everything fell neatly into place. Holidays Arctic was one of a few shipping companies operating between Canada and Greenland. He leaned back in his chair and smiled. He felt that he had acquired an insight into a new dimension. All his years with the customs service had been about identifying patterns that everyone knew were there but which were carefully hidden. Now he could see it with his own eyes, as clearly as could be. There he sat, a time-served customs officer, not far off seventy, in a hotel in the capital of Greenland, with the biggest coup he could have imagined in his hands, and unable to tell anyone about it.

  Now back on home soil, with no baggage to wait for, he left the terminal immediately. He sat in his car and headed for home. He was going to sit with Valdís after dinner, put some beautiful music on, and think. And he certainly had something to think about.

  34

  When Tómas came in from football practice, his father was sitting with Dísa on the sofa in the living room. Since Thursday Tómas had only seen him fleetingly, so his promise to himself not to speak to his father had hardly been tested. Tómas was soaked through. The team’s coach had decided that it would be good practice to warm up with a run outside as the temperature was above zero, but it had poured with rain the whole time. It had been great to see the boys in the football team again, and, thankfully, none of them had asked where he had been. They just said ‘hi’ and got on with training. Duncan would have enjoyed a real football practice like this – it might even have prompted him to have a little respect for football. Instead, he was convinced that the only game worth playing was basketball, which Tómas felt was very narrow-minded of him. He liked pretty much all ball games, although football was, naturally, the best.

  He pulled off his wet clothes in the bathroom and was about to turn on the shower taps when he heard his father yell from the living room.

  ‘Take a shower, Tómas! Always take a shower after practice, remember?’

  He stopped in his tracks, went to his room and put on dry clothes. He had no intention of giving his father the satisfaction of seeing him do as he was told. He would have preferred to have stayed in his room, but hunger overcame his reservations. All that running had left him ravenous.

  His father got to his feet as he appeared in the kitchen. ‘Shall I make you a sandwich?’ he asked, but Tómas turned away and fetched the bread himself from the cupboard.

  His father watched in silence as he buttered the bread and sliced some cheese, and when Tómas sat down to eat, his father sat on the next bar stool, placed a hand on his back and patted him affectionately.

  ‘Don’t sulk, Tómas,’ he said, and there was something in his tone of voice that made Tómas long to punch his father in the face – hard.

  He took a hefty bite of sandwich and then another, so that his mouth was full and he would not be tempted to say anything.

  ‘Aren’t you going to talk to me?’ his father asked, a ghost of a smile playing across his lips, as if there was something funny about all this.

  Tómas shook his head and the smile vanished.

  His father coughed and he began to speak, hesitatingly. ‘Uh … I’m sorry if I was angry the other day, Tómas. It was a tough week for both of us. I hope you can forgive me one day for everything that happened in America. Yeah? I just wanted you back. Your mother had no right to take you away like that.’ His father’s voice gained strength now and the hesitation was gone. ‘Your mother and I had an agreement, and she broke it by running away to another country like that without even telling me where you were. So of course I was angry. What was I supposed to do?’

  Tómas had no answer to that. He had no solution to all this. He just wanted to be with Mum. He stood up, fetched a pad and a pen from the junk drawer and wrote on it: I’m not speaking to you. Only to Mum and Dísa.

  His father groaned and Tómas could see the flush pass across his features.

  ‘We’ll see about that, young man,’ his father hissed, left the room and slammed the door behind him.

  Dísa went to the bedroom and shut the door behind her, and while Tómas finished his sandwich he could hear crashes and bangs from the garage, where his father seemed to be hurling things at the wall.

  35

  ‘Welcome to Paris!’ called a cheerful William Tedd, placing the emphasis on the correct pronunciation of the city’s name. He was an American who had worked for an American bank in France for almost a decade, but could still hardly speak any French, although he made an effort to put a decent French accent into his English when the occasion demanded it.

  ‘Thank you,’ Agla said, kissed him on both cheeks and took a seat at the table.

  ‘How do you like the place I picked for our meeting?’ he asked, excited, and Agla nodded her approval.

  It was a homely little restaurant in Chevreuse, on the outskirts of Paris, and the smell of garlic in the air was promising. The restaurant was housed in what seemed to have once been the gatekeeper’s lodge for the small chateau that stood at the top of the hill, its walls black with mould and surrounded by weeds.

  Their table was in a corner of the garden, separated from the rest of the dining area by a trellis with climbing plants growing through it. If there was one thing that could be said for William, it was that, while he was in some ways a standard American banker type, he knew how to take you by surprise. He was an excitable and demanding character and it was always satisfying to do business with him. He appreciated good food and had a knack for finding places to eat, unlike the London boys, who just went for the most expensive places, expecting that quality and price would go hand in hand.

  ‘I took the liberty of bringing a bottle with me,’ he said, pouring for her.

  She didn’t recognise the label, but, taking a sip, she found the wine dry and light.

  ‘Wonderful,’ she said, sipping again, and seeing how William’s face glowed with satisfaction.

  ‘I always bring a bottle here,’ he said. ‘Because they just have house wine that’s completely undrinkable. But the food – the food is a delight! Simple but wonderful.’

  ‘Which is just what you’re going to do for me,’ Agla said and William laughed.

  ‘Precisely! Simple but wonderful. Isn’t that the way we’ve always done things, ma chère Agla?’

  He was right. They had always done business well together. All the trouble in the wake of the financial crash hadn’t been his fault. He had carefully tied up every loose end, and the proof of this was that his name had appeared nowhere in the special prosecutor’s investigation into the business that he had been partly responsible for.

  Agla handed him the papers that detailed the part of the plan that he needed to know about and watched his boyish face gradually suffused with wonder as he read. To begin with he raised an eyebrow, then looked at her for a moment through narrowed eyes, then carried on reading. Finally his mouth fell open. He cleared his throat, took a sip of wine and put the paperwork to one side.

  ‘Big,’ he said. ‘A pretty big deal.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Agla said.

  ‘I need three days for this.’

  ‘You have twenty-four hours,’ Agla said.

  He sighed. ‘You Icelanders, always in a tearing hurry.’

  He took out his phone, selected a number and Agla heard him ask for a broker and an assistant to be sent to them at the restaurant with the sales documents already prepared with Avance as the vendor and AGK-Cayman as the purchaser, and then he read out the loan codes from the paperwork. He spoke fast, and completely forgot to add a French accent to his closing merci. Then he put the papers on the table and his phone on top of them.

  ‘This could be a fine start to a reincarnated business relationship,’ he said.

  Agla nodded. This would work out well for everyone who took a cut of the transfers – William, the bank in Luxembourg, the London boys, and not leas
t, her own partners.

  ‘To successful cooperation,’ she said, lifting her glass and clinking it against his.

  ‘I took the opportunity of ordering snails as a starter,’ he said as the waiter appeared with a dish hot from the oven and placed it in the middle of the table.

  ‘Wonderful,’ Agla said, inhaling the scent of garlic and dropping the red-and-white checked serviette into her lap.

  William had been the one who had taught her to appreciate a meal. Before they had met, she had always shovelled food down quickly, like a hungry dog, a legacy of having been brought up in a family of boys.

  ‘You’ll just have to do the same as they do,’ her mother had said when she was eight years old and complained that she was still hungry after a meal had literally been devoured by the boys in a few moments.

  ‘Can’t you just give me a portion first?’ she asked.

  But her mother had shook her head. ‘Is it right that someone gets a portion of their own and the others don’t?’ she replied. ‘You’ll just have to fight for what’s yours. It’s a hard world out there.’

  Little by little, therefore, it had become speed that made all the difference if she was going to eat her fill, as the boys seemed able to eat endlessly and didn’t share when it came to food. Somehow she developed the habit of leaning over her plate and shovelling it down as fast as she could. That had lasted until she met William, who had asked with a smile if she had been a hungry child.

  They had spent a whole afternoon in a little place in Montparnasse, where he had ordered seven courses then urged her to chew slowly and savour every morsel of them while they spent hours planning the world tour the money would take. Over the course of that meal, she had felt something inside her relax.