Now it was time for a gentle approach to sway the other party’s opinion. ‘Sonja loves her son more than anything, and that works both ways. Tómas loves his mother, as all children do, and children should be with their parents.’
‘With their parents, yes! And what does this so-called parent do? Leaves him behind with an immoral financial criminal!’
‘I’ve managed to look after him pretty well,’ Agla said. ‘He goes to sleep early and I put ordinary cheese in his sandwiches.’
Now Tómas was standing in the doorway with a Lego edifice in his hands that he had been thoroughly proud of that morning, deciding that it was a monster.
‘Take a seat, please, and let Tómas show you what he made with his Lego bricks this morning.’
Tómas went to his grandmother and handed her the mass of bricks as she sank onto a chair.
‘Drink your coffee while it’s hot,’ Agla said.
There was nothing more she needed to do. She had won. Defeat could be seen in the woman’s body language. Now she would leave peacefully and maybe even feel that she had achieved something. It could well be that the cup of coffee here at the kitchen table could be a step towards mother and daughter becoming reconciled.
‘The way you live…’ the woman muttered, glancing sideways at Agla, not quite ready to admit defeat, but Agla decided to take her comment as an observation on Sonja’s sparse apartment.
‘I’m working on buying a house,’ Agla said, giving her a warm smile.
114
Reykjanes was mostly grey and yellow, even though spring had certainly arrived, with pale-green patches of pasture to be seen down by the sea. The lava fields that filled the peninsula, covered in a thin layer of moss, seemed hardly to change from one season to the next.
Sonja sat in the window seat as the aircraft approached to land, her head against the glass, enjoying swooping over the landscape; and for the first time in almost longer than she could remember, with nothing to deliver. She was free.
But freedom had a different feel to it than what she had expected. There was a strange lethargy inside her, along with the delight, as if these two emotions were oil and vinegar in a bottle that could only be mixed with a great deal of effort – and even then, there was no guarantee which taste would be the stronger. That was what Sebastian had told her in that little ante-chamber in the mausoleum in Mexico.
‘You’ll never be the same person again,’ he had said. ‘Everything changes when you kill someone. And that’s the price of freedom.’
At the time she hadn’t paid attention to what he had said as she was too occupied with the technical side of his proposal.
‘You’re the only one she lets come close without a bodyguard,’ he had continued.
‘Except Amadou. You could get Amadou to do it,’ she had said.
‘Amadou is useless. He’ll be so stressed out he’ll get drunk and blab the whole story. And he only has one hand.’
Sebastian had undoubtedly underestimated Amadou. There had been an unbelievable strength in that one arm as he had tightened the noose around Nati’s neck. Sonja shook off the thought. Nati’s face in the throes of death had come back again and again to haunt her, and it had been all she could do to turn her thoughts elsewhere to something joyful before the gloom took too strong a hold of her. Now she was safe and she was free, and she would constantly remind herself of that. She hoped that time would work in her favour. She would think of it in such a way that, when Agla had to go to prison, she would be sitting out a sentence for both of them. She herself had already served a long enough sentence, even though it hadn’t been a formal one, surrounded by prison walls.
From now on she would pay her taxes on time, never park in front of a hydrant and never give in to the temptation to cross a junction with the lights on amber. And then, gradually, life would hopefully forgive her.
‘This is about business interests,’ Sebastian had said. ‘There’s a deal between me and the Icelander to split things between us once Nati is out of the game. He looks after business in Europe and I handle America. Mr José had promised me America and I had my own routes, and then Nati persuaded him to start this Iceland connection, and my business became chaos. Then she murdered the old man and was going to start using limpets and all kinds of things!’
‘Killed the old man? It was Nati herself who murdered Mr José?’
This took Sonja so completely by surprise that she didn’t wonder who the Icelander he had mentioned might be, simply assuming him to be Adam, not Húni Thór. She had not even thought about what he had meant by the limpet until a few hours later.
The jet’s wheels touched down on the runway and Sonja switched on her phone. It pinged an alert to tell her there was a message. Although she knew immediately it could not be from Bragi, now that he was on compassionate leave following the death of his wife, she still started in alarm. But her heart softened with fondness as she read the message. Agla and Tómas had come to fetch her. In a few minutes she would walk through the terminal without feeling the slightest apprehension over customs, and wouldn’t even think of the shipment of coke that was still somewhere above the false ceiling in the corridor toilet at the airport. It would be an insurance if she were ever to need it.
Outside the terminal Agla and Tómas would be singing along to an ABBA CD in the car. She would plant a kiss on each of them – maybe even a couple of hefty ones, and driving along the long Reykjanesbraut road into town they would all sing along.
She would choose the first song, as she was the one who was coming home from abroad.
She didn’t have to think hard what it would. She’d choose the same one as always:
‘What’s the Name of the Game?’
Acknowledgements
Iceland, being an island far up in the North Atlantic, sometimes feels further away from the rest of the world than it actually is. The Icelandic language, while ancient and beautiful, is spoken by very few people, so writing in it means writing for a small readership. For Icelandic writers therefore, getting their books translated into a big language like English is very important, because it offers them a precious opportunity to present their work to more people.
My acknowledgements go to my publisher, wonder woman Karen Sullivan, and her extraordinary team, who have made the publication of Snare and now Trap an adventure. Editor West Camel has been my rock in the editing process, and I am very grateful for his help, always put forward with care and insight. My translator, Quentin Bates, one of the very rare Icelandic speakers in the world and a skilful crime writer himself, has of course been the key to getting this novel into English. Our collaboration has been inspiring, fun and without a single stormy moment.
Once a novel has finally been published in English, the process of marketing it begins, so I am very grateful to all the people who take an interest in and promote translated crime fiction.
I want to thank all the crime writers, Icelandic, Scottish and English, who have been so wonderfully welcoming and supportive, giving me encouragement, quotes and help. I am in awe of your generosity. In particular I want to name my sister – in crime only – Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, whose support has meant so much to me.
Last but not least I want to thank the readers who have read Snare and who will now read Trap in English. Thank you for taking the chance on a new author – at least, one who is new in your language. I hope you enjoy this book.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Icelandic crime writer Lilja Sigurðardóttir was born in the town of Akranes in 1972 and was raised in Mexico, Sweden, Spain and Iceland. An award-winning playwright and a screenwriter for TV, Lilja has written six crime novels, with Snare, the first in a new series, hitting bestseller lists worldwide. The film rights have been bought by Palomar Pictures in California. She lives in Reykjavík with her partner.
Follow Lilja on Twitter @lilja1972 and on her website: www.liljawriter.com.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Quentin Bates escaped English suburbia
as a teenager, jumping at the chance of a gap year working in Iceland. For a variety of reasons, the gap year stretched to become a gap decade, during which time he went native in the north of Iceland, acquiring a new language, a new profession as a seaman and a family, before decamping en masse for England. He worked as a truck driver, teacher, netmaker and trawlerman at various times before falling into journalism largely by accident. He is the author of a series of crime novels set in presentday Iceland (Frozen Out, Cold Steal, Chilled to the Bone, Winterlude, Cold Comfort and Thin Ice), which have been published worldwide. He is the translator of Ragnar Jónasson’s Dark Iceland series, available from Orenda Books. Visit him at www.graskeggur.com or on Twitter @graskeggur.
Copyright
Orenda Books
16 Carson Road
West Dulwich
London SE21 8HU
www.orendabooks.co.uk
First published in Icelandic as Netið by Forlagid in 2016
First published in English by Orenda Books in 2018
Copyright © Lilja Sigurðardóttir, 2016
English translation copyright © Quentin Bates, 2018
Map copyright © Martin Lubikowski
Lilja Sigurðardóttir has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–1–912374–35–9
eISBN 978–1–912374–36–6
The publication of this translation has been made possible through the financial support of
For sales and distribution, please contact
[email protected] or visit www.orendabooks.co.uk.
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