Trap

by Lilja Sigurdardóttir

  Now the same thing was happening. They were at the bottom of the stairs, inside the outer door, so close to Mum, but his father was reluctant to let him set off up the steps.

  Tómas wondered if he should break his oath of silence and tell his father that it would be fine, but he decided against it. He understood that his father was frightened because he and Mum had run away to Florida, but all the same, it was lousy of him to threaten that he might never get to see her again. Tómas’s stomach tensed into a tight ball at the thought that his mother could be lost to him forever. He was determined not to speak to his father again until this was behind them and he got to see Mum more often – much more often.

  By the time his father finally did let him go, Tómas was starting to grind his teeth in irritation. Dad waited down below and watched as he ran upstairs, making sure that he went to his mother’s flat. As if he was going to go anywhere else! All he wanted was his mother, who already had her arms wrapped around him, whispering ‘my darling’ into his hair. The second the door closed behind them and they were alone, the floodgates inside him opened and he sobbed.

  Mum held him in her arms for a long time, rocking him back and forth like a baby, and after a while the sobs subsided.

  ‘Don’t bottle up the anger,’ she whispered. ‘It’s not good for you.’

  He nodded and sniffed, but inside he knew better. Anger was good. If he was angry and unpleasant enough with his father, he wouldn’t want to keep him for much longer and would let him go to Mum. And once he was with Mum, then he could stop being angry.

  47

  Agla’s jaw dropped as she opened the door. Adam immediately walked in, without waiting to be invited.

  ‘I’d like some news,’ he said and marched into the living room without taking his shoes off, taking a look in the bedroom on the way, and growling like a dog making up its mind whether or not to bark.

  ‘It’s all over between me and Sonja, Adam. The whole thing was crazy. I still don’t know what came over me.’

  Her denial bubbled over, even though she had only just put the phone down after begging Sonja to call her back. Adam’s presence had that effect: the shame drenched her like filth from a sewer.

  ‘I meant news of Ingimar,’ he said shortly and turned around. Agla could not make out if there was more contempt or hatred in his expression.

  ‘Ingimar, yes. Of course.’ She could have bitten off her own tongue. It was stupid to start blathering about Sonja. Of course he wasn’t here to talk about her. ‘We can expect to have halved the debt by the end of the year and be debt-free next year,’ she said. ‘That’s to say, they’ll write off the debt, if everything goes to plan. If everything works out as Ingimar and I expect.’

  Adam stared at her in disbelief. ‘How the fuck did you do this?’ he demanded.

  Agla shrugged. There was nothing she could say. There was no telling if he was carrying a microphone and, anyway, it was none of his concern. This was her business, which she had taken on. She had struck the deal with Ingimar and she would complete it.

  Adam snorted again and went back to the front door. Agla followed him and the instinctive thought popped up that maybe she should offer him a beer or coffee, but she swiftly banished the notion. This was no courtesy visit.

  ‘We all come out of this well,’ she said. ‘And the other debt – the one that’s in your name – that’ll be small change if everything works out with Ingimar.’

  Adam twisted round in the doorway and sent her a poisonous look. There was no trace of gratitude or relief on his face, even though she had lifted the noose from around his neck. All that could be seen in his expression were bitterness and maybe a little envy. This was all very familiar. They had all been like this, the boys at the bank, whenever she had been successful at something. They showed their annoyance and envy, as if she had taken something that was rightfully theirs. And she had always had the feeling she had grown up with in the little room that Dad had built for her at the end of the corridor at home.

  ‘You can shut up, you spoiled brat, with your own room and everything!’ was the endless refrain from her brothers whenever she protested about anything. But when she lay there alone in her tiny room and listened to the whispers and the giggling from the boys in their bunk beds in the room across the hall, she could not understand why they envied her solitude.

  48

  Sonja had to summon up every ounce of persuasion she could find to get Tómas to go back down the stairs to where his father was waiting for him. It had been a wonderful evening. They had played and read comic books and talked. But there had been no dancing. Somehow it was too short a visit for them to be able to lose themselves in something so frivolous. They would dance when he came for a weekend, Tómas said, certain that this curtailment of their time together was a temporary arrangement. And she agreed. She was in no mood for dancing. That was their way of being joyful together, with a pounding salsa beat in their ears, bouncing and laughing on the sofa.

  ‘London, tomorrow,’ Adam hissed to her as he took Tómas’s hand and led him away to the car.

  ‘See you soon, Tommi,’ she called after him as Adam pushed him into the back seat, his face wet with tears. That would hopefully stop shortly. She had told him he didn’t need to be too brave– didn’t need to hold his tears in. The truth was, she wanted him to demonstrate to his father that it was good for him to spend time with her.

  He seemed to have understood it at the time, but that had undoubtedly been forgotten by now.

  She held back until the car was out of sight then sat on the steps outside the block of flats and wept. Parting was normally hard, but this time it had been especially tough. They had just begun to reconnect when it was time for him to go, and she desperately needed this connection with him. It felt as if there was an invisible umbilical cord that kept them linked to each other, transporting vital sustenance – not just from her to him but the other way as well. If that flow was interrupted for too long, they both began to shrivel up.

  She wiped away the tears with the back of her hand and took deep lungfuls of cold air. There was a taste of iron to it. The temperature was well below zero, and even though it was getting towards spring, the pale-green northern lights swayed in the night sky as if they were trying to cheer her up, even though they knew it was a hopeless effort. Without Tómas she could never be happy for long. Her dreams of how their life ought to be were not so grand that it was unfair to expect that they could become a reality, though. She simply longed for a safe place for the two of them, somewhere they could be unafraid and beholden to no-one, and the height of excitement would be deciding what to have for dinner at the weekend. She had experienced enough tension in the last few months to last her a whole lifetime. Plus, she had had enough of being without Tómas. She would have to put her plan into action as fast as possible. This couldn’t continue for much longer. She couldn’t stand it.

  49

  Amy was late that morning, which gave Bragi more time that usual with Valdís. He didn’t mind. His shift wasn’t until four that afternoon, so he was in no hurry to leave the house. He stirred the porridge, took a little on the tip of the spoon and fed it to Valdís. These days she ate such tiny amounts. She took cod liver oil and vitamins, and the girls did well persuading her to eat, but little by little she was fading away. She seemed to be declining, not just in spirit, but physically too; her body was wasting away, as if collapsing in on itself, and she had become as light as a feather. He had no illusions about his ability to prolong her life. She would leave when her time was over, but until that moment arrived, he would ensure she was comfortable. He owed her that.

  ‘Hello!’ Amy called from the hall, and appeared with a smile on her face. She kissed Valdís’s cheek, as if she were her grandmother or an elderly aunt, and Bragi went to the kitchen to make coffee. On the way he picked up the Fréttablaðið freesheet from the hallway and saw that there was little by way of news in it, just the same rumblings of discontent as the last
few months: fuel prices were rising, struggling companies were laying off staff in droves, and elderly and disabled people collected empty cans around the town to earn a few pennies for food. He leafed through the paper while the coffee brewed, marked the good news items with a cross, filled three cups and took them into the living room. He settled in his chair while Amy brought Valdís back from the bathroom and helped her into her rising chair. Her joints had become so stiff and she struggled so much to stand up that Bragi had bought the chair to make life easier for her. Amy blew on her own coffee and sipped at it between lifting a cup to Valdís’s lips so she could drink.

  Bragi began by reading out a news story about Bobby Fischer’s widow and how she stood to inherit from him, according to a regional court. Fischer’s name seemed to ring no bells with Valdís, but Amy nodded in satisfaction. He left out the story about the aftershocks that had followed the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, as he knew that it would leave Valdís sad and even frightened. Natural disasters had always been upsetting for her. Instead he read out the obituary for Elizabeth Taylor, and held up the page so they could see the picture of her, resplendent in a white dress with diamonds at her throat and a glass in her hand.

  Finally he read a news item that he liked, describing how a young MP, Húni Thór Gunnarsson, had been cautioned by police for interfering when staff from the financial crimes unit fetched some bankers out of a party where he had also been a guest. Bragi wasn’t a malicious type, but there was something about that stuck-up mummy’s boy that made his skin crawl.

  ‘Today’s reading is over,’ he said, and handed the paper to Amy, open at the society pages that Valdís had always read.

  He went to the bedroom and laid out his uniform on the bed. The shirt he had worn on his last shift was still clean and neat, so that could be worn again. He took the slip of paper Sonja had given him with the two names on it and put it in the pocket of his uniform trousers.

  50

  Walking through the doors into the special prosecutor’s offices, María had the feeling that everyone was watching her. As usual, she went straight to the coffee machine, and while the dark-brown liquid dribbled into a cup, she discreetly looked around. She must have been imagining things; her senses going haywire. Nobody was paying her any attention. The staff were all absorbed in their own work, every one of them with a workload that precluded any kicking back in office hours. On top of that, none of them had any idea about the side project that Finnur had handed her – based on the recordings of fifteen intercepted phone calls that did not officially exist.

  There were two meetings ahead of her before lunch; the first was in an hour, so she went to her office and shut the door behind her. Her emails could wait while she listened to Agla’s phone calls again; this time just the ones that might have a bearing on financial misconduct.

  The call that Finnur had played to her had certainly been the most interesting one. The sound file had been date-stamped, but it was difficult to tell if that was the date of the recording or the date the file had been copied from one computer to another. It was 16th April. María scrolled past two recordings that she now knew almost by heart having listened to them last night, and concentrated on the next most interesting one, in which she recognised the voice on the other end of the conversation; the voice that belonged to former bank manager Jóhann, a key figure in the special prosecutor’s investigation. There was no doubt that when the recording had been made, Jóhann had been drunk.

  ‘You’ve done a fantastic job,’ he said and she could hear him gulp down another slug. ‘But Adam and I are naturally concerned that things could turn out badly.’

  ‘You boys don’t need to worry about that,’ Agla replied shortly. It was clear that she was irritated. María was familiar with that dry, vexed tone with a note of sarcasm behind it. It was precisely the tone that Agla had used throughout all the interviews María had conducted with her concerning market manipulation.

  ‘You’ll have to watch yourself with Ingimar,’ Jóhann said with a groan. ‘You’ll really have to.’

  ‘I know all about that,’ Agla said, still dryly, but with impatience in her voice.

  ‘He’s far more dangerous than you imagine—’ Jóhann droned on, and it was obvious that he had a story to tell.

  But Agla cut him short. ‘You don’t need to tell me,’ she said firmly. ‘We can talk about that later.’

  Then there was a click as the recording came to an end. María wished Agla had let him carry on ranting so that she could find out more about this Ingimar. Maybe that would have given her a clue as to who the man Agla and Jóhann regarded as so dangerous might be.

  The answer came sooner than she could have hoped. There was a soft knock on her door and a messenger handed her a brown envelope clearly marked Confidential. She signed for it, and quickly tore the envelope open.

  Inside were Agla’s phone records. But for the past month they were strangely sparse. Could she have another phone? Or was she simply not in frequent contact with many people? María highlighted in yellow the number Agla called most frequently. This was an unregistered number, and by comparing the dates with the recordings, she could see that this number belonged to her lover, Sonja, whom Agla seemed to call most frequently when she was drunk, judging by the recordings she heard the previous night. There was one overseas number on the list that she appeared to have called repeatedly. María consulted an online phone directory and saw that it was a Luxembourg number. According to the Luxembourg phone book, it belonged to someone called Jean-Claude Berger. She recognised the address; it was the same block as Agla’s registered domicile. That was something that had irritated her many times; an overseas residence complicated all kinds of formalities in the market manipulation case. Another quick search revealed that Jean-Claude was listed as the building’s concierge. She highlighted all the calls between them.

  Next María went to an Icelandic directory and tried some of the Icelandic numbers on the list, and found that these were all food outlets that offered home delivery, apart from the last one. That had been the conversation on 10th April, the same day that the call Finnur had played for her had taken place, according to the date stamp. The name next to the number in the directory was a familiar one: Ingimar. Ingimar Magnússon.

  María was startled by a colleague putting his head around the door. ‘Aren’t you coming to the meeting?’ he asked.

  She jumped to her feet. She was notorious for her fanatical punctuality, and now she was already ten minutes late.

  51

  The same gloomy atmosphere seemed to exude from the house, despite its immaculate exterior. The steps were swept and the front door had recently been treated with oil so that the hardwood fragrance carried down to the street in the quiet, elegant London district, where all the houses were inhabited by the wealthy and the privileged.

  Sonja stood for a few moments below the steps before she managed to muster the courage to knock. She had dreadful memories of this house. She felt that the place was so steeped in terror and pain that she could practically hear the echoing screams of the victims of the person who lived here, Mr José … and of the terrible pet he kept.

  There was no person Sonja feared more, and although she tried to contain her emotions, her experience of him was such that the only option she had was to be terrified of him. She felt the goose pimples break out on her legs as the heavy door creaked open. Allowing the door to creak like that had to be deliberate – an extra measure to instil fear in visitors. Everything else about the house was well looked-after and a few drops of oil to do away with that sound would have been no problem for the occupants.

  ‘You must be Sonja,’ said a warm female voice with a Mexican accent. ‘Welcome.’

  Sonja followed the woman and without meaning to be was mesmerised by her rear. She wore a skin-tight dress and her hips swung seductively as she walked. Her shiny black hair hung almost to the middle of her back, and a cloud of perfume surrounded her.

  ‘You hav
e met my husband, Mr José,’ the woman said, turning and gesturing towards the stocky Indian who was dressed as he had been the last time Sonja was here – in a singlet and shorts – and who glistened with sweat even though the temperature was more bearable than it had been during Sonja’s previous visit.

  He made straight for Sonja and planted energetic kisses on both cheeks, pulling her so tightly into his arms that she was sure her clothes would be soaked with his sweat.

  ‘He’s very affectionate,’ the woman said with a smile, extending a hand. ‘I’m Nati. Mucho gusto.’

  ‘Mucho gusto,’ Sonja mumbled in reply, conscious that her voice was half an octave higher than usual. Fright seemed to have tightened her vocal chords. But she was relieved that there was a woman here. Her thinking may not have been entirely logical, but she felt a female presence would reduce the odds of this coming to a bad end.

  ‘Dinner is ready,’ Mr José said, to Sonja’s complete surprise. The last meal she had eaten here had ended in bloodshed, so she had hoped that this time she would be able to pick up the goods and make a rapid exit.

  The couple stood either side of her, and between them led her to the dining room, which was more tastefully decorated than it had been last time she saw it. A finely woven Spanish-style rug occupied the centre of the floor, there were comfortable sofas in the corners and the dining table was laid with silver and porcelain. Mr José took a seat at the end of the table, while Nati pulled back a chair for Sonja and slid it under her as she sat down. Then she took her place at the end opposite her husband and rang a tiny silver bell. The tinkle of it was still echoing when the pale servant Sonja had seen the last time appeared, bearing a tray with three bowls of soup.