This was what Bragi had been expecting. Those two big busts had not gone unnoticed.
‘No, I’m not keeping anything back,’ he said with an apologetic smile. ‘I suppose I’ve been going more on gut feeling these last few weeks, considering I’m on the way out anyway.’
‘Gut feeling?’
‘That’s it. I haven’t been sticking too closely to the Analysis team’s instructions, and I haven’t been scheduling searches as much in advance. I’ve not been overthinking, but simply watching people and letting instinct take over.’
‘Hmm.’ Hrafn was clearly unsure how to respond. His eyebrows danced up and down on his forehead and he nodded eagerly as if wanting to somehow agree with Bragi but not understanding what it exactly was he wanted to agree with.
‘I reckoned that, as I was leaving anyway, it wouldn’t do any harm if I make a few stupid mistakes. But you can see what the results have been.’
‘I see,’ Hrafn said, laughing again. ‘Could we ask for a few more stupid mistakes?’
‘I’ll do my best while I’m still here.’
‘Ah. About that…’ Hrafn resumed rubbing his hands together. ‘There are people wondering if you could be persuaded to stay on, in some way or other. Maybe in some kind of advisory role?’
By now, Bragi was genuinely astonished. This was not what he had expected. ‘People?’ he said. ‘What people?’
‘Well … the Analysis team. And me.’
Bragi prevented himself from letting a grin spread across his face, even though he longed to. Up to now, Hrafn had done everything in his power to ease him out, apparently determined to recruit some keen young thing for the chief inspector’s position, and he had done nothing to hide his opinion that Bragi was out of touch and too old for the job.
But by staying on until August he would have enough time to build up a fund from his earnings from Sonja, enough for him to keep Valdís safely at home for the time she had left to live. There was no more that he needed.
‘No, thanks,’ he said, rising to his feet. ‘That’ll do me. Thirty years is quite enough.’
65
‘What’s that smell?’ Maggi asked, wrinkling his nose.
‘Oh, sorry.’ María sat up in bed then got to her feet. ‘It’s an old file that’s been in a damp store room for a long time. I’ll put it in the other room.’
She had no intention whatsoever of mentioning this murky additional assignment to Maggi, and she certainly wasn’t going to explain the Voice of Truth to him or where the folder had come from. Dubious that there would be much to learn from the folder, she had left it in the boot of the car for a few days, hoping that the smell would fade and that reading through it would become less onerous. The smell seemed to have been less pungent when she took it indoors with her, but its foul odour again flooded out the moment she opened it.
She took the folder to the other room and laid it on the diningroom table. She had already taken a quick look through it, checking the annual reports of the overseas parent company as well as those of the Icelandic aluminium company itself, but as far as she could see, everything looked fine. The invoices had been prepared along the usual lines and the key figures all appeared to be perfectly normal. She sighed. She should have known that there wasn’t much behind the Voice of Truth’s claims. He probably just had an overactive imagination.
She went to the bathroom, washed her hands and lifted them to her face. There was still a faint musty smell to her palms, an aroma of mould with the same sour undertone that came from a rubbish bin on a hot day, so she scrubbed her hands a second time and rubbed hand cream into them.
Back in bed beside Maggi, she looked over at him, lying on his back with his reading glasses halfway down his nose and a book on his belly. She was unsure if he were reading or asleep, but couldn’t be bothered to disturb him by switching off the reading light. She wondered as she began to doze herself whether she should be taking on this extra assignment that Finnur had handed her. She hadn’t been able to dig up anything significant linked to this Ingimar or his phone calls to Agla, and had to admit to herself that if Agla hadn’t been involved and if it had been about someone else, then she wouldn’t have had any interest in the case. It was probably best to return the folder tomorrow to its malodorous owner, and then let Finnur know that he could deal with bugged phone calls himself.
It was clearly far into the night – the room was now dark and Maggi was fast asleep at her side – when she woke suddenly, as if a vision or a message had come to her in a dream. There was nothing wrong with the annual reports. Each was perfectly normal. What was wrong was that the two failed to tie up. The parent company’s figures showed staggering profits from the smelter in Iceland, while the Icelandic company’s figures showed a loss.
66
Sonja sat at the computer, scanning one web page about Greenland after another, but found herself unable to concentrate; her mind was on Tómas. The anticipation at being able to see him again left her practically unable to sit still. She would let him choose what to have for dinner, and then they’d go swimming, play silly games, dance around the living room and then she would read to him until he fell asleep. There was nothing more wonderful than reading to him until he dropped off, his head resting on her arm, and she would lie there and breathe in the smell of him. The aroma there at the top of his head was always as fresh as a spring day and it never failed to send her on an emotional journey back to the first weeks of his life, when she had hardly dared put this new-born miracle down, for fear that he could vanish from her sight. The days up to the weekend weren’t going to be easy ones. But until then she would use the time to organise the trip to Greenland.
She had just managed to fix her attention on a street map of Nuuk when the phone rang. Sonja regretted answering it as soon as she heard the low voice on the other end of the line. There was only one person who began a conversation by saying, ‘Yeah, hi,’ on the in-breath, and that was her mother.
‘Hi,’ Sonja replied quickly, and realised straightaway that was too informal, as her mother came back with a stiffer greeting.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I was hoping to speak to Tómas.’
So that was it. Her mother thought that Tómas was with her. She wouldn’t call Sonja for a casual chat. It had been made plain when she and Adam had gone their separate ways that her mother had nothing more to say to her.
‘Tómas isn’t with me at the moment,’ Sonja said.
‘Well, there was no reply at their place, and since Adam told me that you had access again, I thought—’
‘He’ll be with me next weekend,’ Sonja said. ‘Then every other weekend after that.’
‘That’s good of Adam, considering you ran away with the boy.’
‘That’s something of an exaggeration,’ Sonja said, making her words sound normal despite the anger she felt welling up inside at the thought of Adam and her mother sharing confidences. He mother seemed to be able to chatter endlessly to her beloved son-in-law about Sonja, without feeling a need to talk to Sonja – her own daughter. ‘I took Tómas for a break in Florida, and Adam wasn’t happy about it so he threw his toys out of the pram.’
‘Really? Is that the way it was?’ There was a disparaging tone to her mother’s voice.
‘Yes,’ Sonja said. ‘That’s the way it was. You’re welcome to call back at the weekend if you want to talk to Tómas.’
‘I expect I’ll have caught up with him by then.’ Her mother sniffed. ‘We stay in pretty close touch, me and Adam.’
‘So I see,’ Sonja said drily, and put the phone down. She could feel a burning sensation behind her eyes and sniffed hard to keep the tears at bay. It was a long time since she had promised herself never again to let her mother reduce her to tears.
She had only just put the phone down when the doorbell rang. She had got into the habit of checking the spyhole first before opening the door, and this time she could not believe her eyes. She instinctively stepped back and gasped before leaning forwards and ta
king a second look to be sure that she wasn’t mistaken. After the call from her mother, Sonja could hardly have expected the day to get any worse – but it certainly had. She flinched as there was a knock on the door.
‘Sonja! Open up! I know you’re there!’
There was no way out. She would have to open the door.
When she did, Nati waltzed in as if it were the most normal thing in the world, dropping a huge suitcase and a clutch of smaller bags. She was dressed from top to toe in figure-hugging leather and Sonja could not prevent her eyes from resting for a moment on her magnificent cleavage.
‘I’m on a stopover!’ Nati declared cheerfully. ‘And now you can show me your country!’
67
‘Yes?’
There was expectation in Finnur’s voice and María almost regretted that she had no news to give him. She closed the office door behind her and sat down on the chair in front of his desk.
‘You told me I could get some help,’ she said. ‘Anything I needed.’
‘Right,’ he said. ‘But maybe not something that would stand up in court. You can have assistance for a preliminary investigation with the aim of finding something that could then stand up, in a formal sense.’ He opened his desk drawer and took out a bar of chocolate. It was one of those new tweaks on traditional Icelandic milk chocolate, and seemed to be addictive, because suddenly everybody seemed to be wolfing down huge amounts of this confectionary, which only a few months back had seemed uninteresting. Finnur tore open the wrapping, broke a couple of pieces from the bar, put them in his mouth and handed it to María.
‘Sea salt and caramel,’ he said.
She shook her head. She ate at set times, not just anytime she felt like it.
‘So I gather there are no active investigations in place,’ she said, suddenly doubtful and becoming aware once more of the discomfort she had felt before.
‘You know how it goes,’ Finnur said, chewing on the chocolate. ‘There are no active investigations in progress. But if you find something, then we can account for the costs incurred afterwards.’
‘And they’ll be registered to you?’
‘Yes,’ Finnur said. ‘What do you need?’ Finnur broke another two squares off the chocolate bar.
‘I think it would be worth following Agla to see what she’s up to; where she goes, who she meets, and see what comes out of it. And if it can be done, it would be worth keeping her phone tapped.’
‘Surveillance is no problem,’ Finnur said, his mouth full and shrugging his shoulders as if this were some trivial matter. ‘I’ll put Steini on to her and he’ll give you regular updates. The phone is more of a headache.’
‘How so?’
‘The one we know about is her Icelandic phone that she doesn’t use a lot. She has another number that we can’t get into as it’s registered abroad.’
‘I see.’
That explained why her phone was so little used. It was one of two. María would have to find out about the other number if there were to be anything useful from this investigation; if it could be called an investigation.
68
Agla sat still, trying to keep her attention on what Elvar the lawyer was saying to her, but her eyes flashed back again and again to the table where Sonja sat with a stranger. The woman looked to be a foreigner, with glistening black hair, golden skin and Latin American features. Sonja’s back was to her, but Agla could see the other woman’s face as she talked and talked, without a word being discernible. Sonja seemed to be transfixed, judging by the position of her head, and the way she was nodding.
‘Are you listening?’ Elvar asked, and Agla nodded, sipped her wine and redoubled her efforts to cut her steak into pieces manageable enough for her to swallow, but it wasn’t working as her throat was getting tighter and her appetite had disappeared.
This woman had to be the reason why Sonja wasn’t answering her phone. Maybe she was also the reason for Sonja’s disappearance and her mysterious arrival in Iceland clad only in shorts. And now she was here, sitting by the fire with this tart in Agla’s favourite restaurant, ruining the steak she would have otherwise been enjoying. She had brought Sonja here a couple of times, so it felt even more like a betrayal that she had chosen this place in which to entertain another woman. In fact, it was the only place in Reykjavík that offered a decent steak. Icelandic beef would never be listed among the world’s tastiest, but the Argentinians at the grill seemed to have a way of bringing the best out of the meat they had. The open fire cast a warm glow on the diners, providing an ideal atmosphere for trading confidences and flirting, just as Sonja and the woman seemed to be doing.
Agla glanced repeatedly in their direction and saw that the woman was tapping her foot under the table, no doubt waiting for an opportunity to touch Sonja’s leg. Agla felt her stress levels going off the scale. She sipped her wine again and nodded in agreement with whatever Elvar had been saying, just as if she had been paying attention. She wondered whether she should go over and say hello, simply to intrude on their moment, but she didn’t dare. She wasn’t sure that she would be able to keep herself together.
Elvar burbled on about the hearing ahead of them, while Agla emptied her glass and hoped that Sonja would make for the toilet. She didn’t have to wait long.
‘Excuse me,’ she said to Elvar as she stood up and followed Sonja.
Inside, there were two cubicles, both of them unoccupied, and there was no one at the sinks. Sonja was alone, standing in front of the mirror, her black dress hugging her body tightly, her hair loosely wound into a bun at the back of her head, and around her neck hung the necklace Agla had given her for Christmas.
Agla wrapped her arms around her from behind, her lips seeking out the soft skin at the back of her neck. The tension that built up in her belly as she touched her was almost painful.
But Sonja twisted out of her embrace with a jerk, and knocked away the hand that was instinctively stretching for the neckline of her dress.
‘I’m here with a friend, Agla!’ she hissed angrily.
‘Friend?’ Agla snorted. ‘Is that what she is?’
She tried to pull Sonja back into her arms, but she pushed her away. Her lips quivered and her eyes looked as if they might emit furious sparks.
‘Leave me alone, Agla,’ she said. ‘You’re drunk and being horrible.’
Agla steadied herself against the wash basin, suddenly feeling drunk and wobbly on her feet. She couldn’t understand it. Sonja attracted her with some kind of force that could not be resisted, while Sonja herself seemed to be able to set her own terms for how things should be, and could walk away so easily when they didn’t suit her.
But she had another woman to go home with, and Agla had nobody. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe, if she was to shake off the spell of this endless longing, she needed to do the same as Sonja.
A half-formed, mad idea appeared from the back of her mind as she recalled seeing a news report about a place in Kópavogur where women showed off their bodies.
A few minutes later she had – rather abruptly, it was true – dismissed Elvar then stormed out of the restaurant, making sure to pass the table where Sonja sat with the other woman and to knock over a glass with her handbag, as if by accident.
Heading to Kópavogur in a taxi, the desire for the feelings that swirled inside her at Sonja’s touch were so powerful that she felt her heart was going to burst, and at the same time she was so furious with her that she was hell-bent on finding the same emotion with some other woman. If Sonja could do without her, then she could do without Sonja.
69
It only took a moment for Agla to choose a girl. There was only one dark one, with black hair, in the place. She was determined to find out what it was that Sonja was looking for with her raven-haired tart. Some of the guys she used to work with at the bank had said that there was a special smell to dark women.
The girl took her to a cubicle, where Agla sat back in an armchair, taking gulps of poor-quality c
hampagne that she hadn’t ordered. The girl got into position, but over the smell of cigar smoke, the stink of spilt beer and a sour undertone that Agla tried not to contemplate might be ancient semen, she couldn’t detect any special scent about the young woman. She had booked a ten-minute lap dance and the girl was already peeling off her clothes, her hips jiggling rhythmically and one foot on the arm of the chair.
‘Are you okay with dancing for a woman?’ Agla asked.
For the first time the girl looked into her eyes and smiled. ‘Sure,’ she drawled, turned away, squatted down and deftly unhooked her bra. Life would be so much easier if all women could do that, thought Agla. Then the girl turned around, breasts on display. She had a fantastic figure, with a narrow waist and a large, full chest. Her skin darkened around her nipples, which looked almost black in the dim light, and Agla felt a lump develop in her throat. The girl danced for her, twisting and shaking in a way that would have looked good on a stage but which seemed absurd in this cramped space. She stepped out of her thong, but Agla’s eyes remained fixed on her breasts.
A moment later her time was up. Agla was so certain something important was welling up inside her, she booked another hour.
The girl continued where she had left off. The music merged with Agla’s pulse, which now followed the beat of the dance, quicker and quicker, faster and faster. It became a wild jungle whirl, with drums beating in the distance – a humid rain forest, dark skin that shone in the gloom, salty sweat and a pounding heart; South America right here in Kópavogur.
Then the girl’s hand stroked her hair and the spell was broken. This woman didn’t have the touch. It was uncomfortable to be touched by her. Agla was suddenly consumed by her desire for Sonja – so overwhelmingly that she felt she couldn’t breathe. And on top of that was the thought that Sonja was now at home with the woman from the restaurant. The thought hurt her like a stab to the heart and it was too painful to bear silently, so she leaned into the stripper’s breasts and let the tears flow.
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