Agla came to as the girl handed her a tissue and told her that she still had twenty minutes left.
‘Let me make you happy?’ the girl suggested.
But Agla shook her head. All she wanted to do was to cry and tell her about Sonja – the whole story. So she told her how they had made love every day, sometimes twice, and could hardly keep their hands off each other. She told her how happiness flowed through her veins like blood rich with oxygen every time Sonja smiled; how she sometimes lay and watched her sleep, her heart glowing with thankfulness.
‘You love her very much,’ her stripper said.
‘Yes. I do.’
She loved Sonja. This was so much more than a moment’s infatuation or madness. She simply loved Sonja.
The stripper and one of the bouncers took her to the taxi. She had cried herself into a heap and was now unsteady on her feet. However, she demanded that the taxi take her to Sonja’s place. She had to tell her she loved her. She needed to tell her she loved her.
Outside Sonja’s block, she let the taxi go, certain that Sonja would let her in once she had announced her love. She would throw the foreign tart out and wrap Agla in her arms, while Agla would tell her again and again how much she loved her. She would tell her a thousand times, one for each time that Sonja had longed to hear her say those words, each time that she had been unable to say it.
Agla staggered up the steps and rang the bell for the top apartment, as she knew the old guy there would sound the buzzer without any fuss. Inside she lumbered up the stairs and hammered on Sonja’s door with both fists until she could see the light come on through the tinted glass above the door.
‘I have something important to tell you,’ Alga said breathlessly, when Sonja finally opened the door, dressed only in her burgundy dressing gown, her hair loose around her shoulders.
‘You’re drunk,’ she said, shutting the door in her face and switching off the light inside.
70
The jet gathered speed on the runway and then soared into the air. Its movements were gentle but quick, and Sonja felt as if she were sitting on a flying sofa. The leather seat was heavily upholstered and the table that separated her from Nati seemed to be polished wood inlaid with glittering, many-coloured tiles.
‘What do you think of the décor?’ Nati asked with pride.
‘It’s … very beautiful,’ Sonja replied. With her limited experience of private jets, she had nothing to compare it to. This was her first time in such an aircraft. Adam had flown occasionally in private jets to meetings in London for the bank, but she had never gone with him as she hadn’t wanted to be away from Tómas when he was a baby.
‘I designed it myself,’ Nati said, waving a hand at the designs on the walls – cacti, and birds and snakes surrounded by heavy green vegetation. Sonja wasn’t sure whether some sort of a plastic film had been glued up or if the insides of the plane had actually been hand-painted.
Nati snapped her fingers to summon the stewardess, who got to her feet and came over, even though the seat belt light was still glowing.
‘Champagne,’ Nati said. ‘And some snacks.’
‘I don’t know why I’m going to Mexico with you,’ Sonja said as the stewardess appeared and poured champagne into glasses for them.
She was exhausted after twenty-four hours in Nati’s company. The helicopter flight over Thingvellir and the waterfall at Gullfoss, the visit to the Blue Lagoon and the snowmobile trip had all made her feel as if she were a tourist herself. It was as if Nati was showing her a side of Iceland that she had forgotten existed. This was something she hadn’t experienced since before the financial crash. The previous evening Nati had told her to choose a restaurant and she had been through all the smartest places in town in her mind, and finally decided on one with a South American feel to it; one that she had felt would come up to Nati’s standards. And then Agla had to be there, drunk and jealous.
‘I need a friend,’ Nati said, raising her champagne flute. ‘A really good friend who can always be on my side, whatever happens. It’s a man’s world and we girls need to stick together.’
Sonja lifted her glass in agreement but barely tasted its contents. Over the last twenty-four hours there had been more than enough champagne for her. But not for Nati. She soaked it up as if it were her only sustenance, but it seemed to have no effect on her.
‘Do you want to be that friend?’ Nati reached out, laid a hand on Sonja’s and stroked it tenderly.
Sonja gently pulled her hand away and smiled awkwardly. Within just a day, it had become a practically automatic reaction to turn away from Nati’s touches and caresses without appearing to be rude.
‘To tell the truth, I dream of a simple life with my son, just doing an ordinary job,’ Sonja said quietly. ‘If I’m completely straight with you, I’m not sure that I’m the right person to be your friend.’
She immediately regretted being so honest: Nati’s face clouded over, and her dark eyes, which continued to stare at her, turned cold.
71
‘No, she wasn’t just in there drinking. I followed her in and saw her going into a lap-dance booth with one of the girls. And she was in there a long time.’
This was news almost too good to be true. This could be the opportunity María had been waiting for. She had sat in her office, with her back to the window, and listened with growing disappointment as Steini gave his report, reading out from a little notebook the times and places of Agla’s movements the day before. But then he’d mentioned the visit to the strip club. This could give María an opening, a chance to get closer to Agla, without her suspecting that she was being investigated again.
‘And she went home alone?’
‘Yeah. She was completely arseholed, could hardly stand on her own two feet. She was helped out into a taxi at … eleven forty-three, and it took her to…’ Steini flipped through his notebook ‘…Eskihlíð sixteen. She went inside but came out shortly afterwards and went home on foot, pretty slowly – she was all over the place. She reached her home, on the west side of town, at twelve thirty-seven.’
‘Thanks, Steini. That’s all I need for the moment. I’ll be in touch if there’s anything else.’
Steini got to his feet without a word and silently left her office. His brawny figure moved with a quiet grace – it was as if he floated a couple of centimetres above the linoleum floor. She had always found him to be an odd type. He was one of the special prosecutor’s staff, and, like the rest of them, held temporary police powers, but he never mixed with the others and never stayed long in the office; he simply gave his reports and was gone.
This was the first time that María had used him for an assignment. Up to now, she had always been turned down if she had requested surveillance of a suspect, on the grounds that it was either too expensive or there was no basis for it. She wondered why Finnur had decided that it was worthwhile having a tail put on Agla this time, when all they had was the hope that it might turn up something useful. The special prosecutor would be quick to ask questions when he came back from leave.
It went without saying, of course, that Finnur was hoping for something that could be grounds for a formal investigation. She was hoping for the same thing. She had dreamed of nailing Agla – or, rather, nailing her harder than she already had. The market-manipulation case would put her away for only a few months, at best, but everyone knew that she was one of the big fish in the whole financial crash. She was one of those white-collar criminals who got away with off-the-scale villainy and then sat there grinning as they were questioned, only a fraction of their crimes coming to light.
María swivelled around in her chair so she could see out the window. The wind hit the glass, peppering it with the little clicking sounds that came from the dirt that always seemed to fill the air these days – finegrained volcanic ash and the salt-and-sand mix the road authorities seemed to spend the entire winter spreading on the streets of Reykjavík and the entire summer sweeping up. She tapped her fingers i
n time with the hammering on the glass while her mind worked in overdrive.
She was not certain that she would find anything that could be pinned on Agla. In order to follow the money – the trail that led to the whole truth, she needed names. She needed the names of the people Agla was in contact with about whatever she was plotting with Ingimar Magnússon; and it wasn’t certain she would get them.
But she had found a way that would take her into Agla’s home – and hopefully to her phone.
72
The video gave a startlingly inaccurate account of what had really happened, even though it was put together from genuine events. Sonja realised that a completely false narrative could easily be formed from the elements that were left unsaid. Her padded plane seat was suddenly feeling very uncomfortable.
‘It doesn’t look good for me,’ she said and handed Nati’s phone back to her. She had no need to watch it a second time to understand what Nati wanted to make clear by showing it to her. The first images showed Mr José standing up from the table at the house in London and locking his hands around Sonja’s throat. From the chokehold, the sequence jumped to Sonja stumbling across Mr José’s body and mopping up his blood with towels. Finally it showed her and the one-handed Amadou wrapping the corpse in builder’s plastic sheeting and dragging it towards the steps leading to the cellar. The video had no sound so the events it depicted seemed very different from what Sonja remembered. She and Amadou manoeuvring the body out of the living room now looked easy, as none of the cursing, or sighing they had let out while struggling to manhandle the heavy-set dead man could be heard.
‘Amadou will testify that you were the one who asked him to chop the body up and feed it to the tiger.’
Nati smiled sweetly and Sonja ground her teeth, annoyed with her own stupidity. It was quite right that she had asked Amadou to help dispose of the body, although she had stressed that she hadn’t stabbed him, not that it mattered now.
‘Just in case, we kept a small piece,’ Nati continued. ‘What could be called a sirloin steak if darling José had been a bull.’ Nati made the sign of the cross over her face and muttered something that Sonja failed to make out over the whine of the jet. ‘And I know that Amadou keeps the head in the freezer at his place so he can take it out and spit on it when he’s in a bad mood. He was terribly upset with José after that business with his hand.’
Sonja lay back in the leather seat and closed her eyes. She felt strangely numb inside. It felt as if it was no longer enough to be angry, to be devastated that her hopes of being free with Tomas were smashed to pieces. Instead her mind searched coolly for some loophole, some tiny gap in the tightly woven netting that she felt was wrapping itself around her. But there was no loophole to be found, so up here, thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic, she finally gave up; gave up the hope that the nightmare she had stumbled into a year and a half ago would one day be over. It was never going to end. There was no way out and she would have to accept that. It made no difference how hard she fought, she would never be free. Even if she were to break away from Adam, then she would be bound to Nati instead. Every path that might have taken her back to some kind of normal life seemed to have finally been closed to her.
Sonja took a deep breath, sat up in her seat and looked deep into Nati’s brown eyes.
‘Now that I’ve thought things over,’ she said. ‘I’d really like to be your friend.’
73
Agla couldn’t remember having met María or her husband. As deep as she dug into her memory, the evening remained shrouded in a fog, and the things that weren’t foggy were the ones she would have preferred to have forgotten. María said that they had run into each other as she and her husband had been going into the club and Agla was leaving, but Agla has absolutely no recollection of it. Her mind seemed to go into a strange version of panic mode and she kept thinking that she was relieved that the cleaner had come in yesterday so the apartment looked pristine. Not that María was here to inspect Agla’s housekeeping skills. She sat on her sofa, hunched into a ball, with all her trademark determination swept away. She was slumped like a sack of misery and regret.
‘You mean I’ve humiliated myself by coming here to ask you for discretion for no reason? I was sure you had seen me. We made eye contact.’
‘There’s nothing humiliating about it,’ Agla mumbled. She was completely confused. It was obvious that the woman was deeply distressed, and in some strange fashion that helped overcome her own disgrace at having encountered someone she knew at a strip club in Kópavogur. She knew precisely how María must be feeling. She just needed to find some way to comfort her, to cheer her up.
‘Would you like a line?’
‘What?’ María looked up, then shook her head when she realised what Agla was offering her. ‘I work for the special prosecutor, remember?’
‘Or a beer?’ Agla asked.
‘Yes, that would be better,’ she replied with a wan smile.
Agla’s mind was in overdrive as she went to the kitchen to fetch two beers; she decided she needed a snort herself, even if María didn’t want one. She took a jar from the kitchen cupboard, screwed off the lid and shovelled a little coke into her nose, using the end of a teaspoon. A little injection of self-confidence was what she needed right now.
Back on the sofa she sat next to María and, after a few sips of beer, she cleared her throat and tried to think of something to say that would calm this unexpected guest’s fears.
‘You don’t need to be concerned about me,’ she said. ‘There’s plenty you can say about me, but I’d never use this against you in any way. Whatever happens in the investigation into me and my affairs, you can rest assured that this isn’t anything that I would ever use to your disadvantage. I wouldn’t mention this to any of your colleagues at the prosecutor’s office, or to anyone else. In fact, I have no recollection of having met the pair of you at that club.’
‘Thank you,’ María whispered, and Agla saw that the hand that held her beer trembled. ‘Oh, I really don’t know what we were thinking.’
She blinked rapidly as if she were holding back tears and Agla felt the sympathy well up in her heart.
She had said she had been there with her husband, that it had been his idea, but Agla wasn’t going to believe that María had agreed just like that to go down to Kópavogur to watch women peeling off their clothes – unless her own interests lay in that direction.
Maybe it was the ridiculousness of the situation, or maybe it was the buzz the coke had given her, but without thinking, Agla leaned over and kissed María on the lips.
74
María knew she had taken things too far. She had taken herself by surprise, and now that she was back in her car, the everyday items that symbolised normal life and that now surrounded her – Maggi’s best jacket still neatly packed in the cellophane in which it had come back from the dry cleaner; the tatty old gloves she only wore to scrape snow off the car; the Elvis CD in the player – all somehow seemed to accuse her of deceit. Of course, it had been just that: pure deceit; a betrayal of Maggi and their whole life together. There could hardly be anything further removed from them and their lifestyle than a drunken visit to a strip club. Maggi would never be seen dead in a place like that. She had played out the lie simply to try to win Agla’s trust by pretending to be in a similar situation, and somehow the strip-club scenario had been a perfect way to build a bridge.
It was when Agla kissed her that she realised she had gone too far – further than she trusted herself to go – and that she was about to lose control of the situation she had created. Bewilderment had taken control of her, and the anger and revulsion she had often felt for Agla as they had sat opposite each other in the interview room during the market-manipulation case had found its release in the ringing slap she delivered to Agla’s face.
But she had achieved what she had set out to do. Agla’s secret phone was now in her pocket; she had snatched it from the table as she swept out with her nose in the
air. This was the phone registered in Luxembourg, and there would be a lot more interesting activity on this one than on the Icelandic number. Now she would have to work fast, before Agla could discover that the phone was missing and that this bizarre visit had not been personal after all, but linked to a live investigation on which María was working.
This kind of approach was completely at odds with María’s character – the personality she had built up, shaped and polished over the years. Maybe she would have done thoughtless things like this when she was younger. But now it felt as if Finnur’s discreet request that she step outside the usual framework of rules had set her off down a slope where the ground was loose under her feet and there was no safety rope to hold. She didn’t like it. This was too close to her old self.
She sent Maggi a text message to say that she would be working late that evening and wouldn’t be home for dinner. Now she would need to be quick to clone the data from Agla’s phone before she could notice its disappearance and put two and two together. It would be as well to do it while the office was almost deserted.
75
Giving up was truly a remarkable experience. Sonja was unable to remember when she had last been so relaxed. She had fallen asleep during the flight and hadn’t woken up until the jet was on the ground, after which she had humbly walked over to the car that was there to meet them and watched sleepily out of the window on the way through the city. She had stopped caring what was going to happen to her. Nati was in control, and she was just following. Her life was no longer in her own hands; it was pointless trying to fight, like an animal caught in a trap.
Next to her, Nati spoke to the driver in rapid Spanish, while the front seat was occupied by a man wearing sunglasses who said not a single word, but who had escorted them from the aircraft to the car, opening doors for them. There didn’t seem to be a great deal of attention from customs when arriving in this country. She reflected that her life would have been so much easier if Iceland had such a free-and-easy attitude.
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