The old man stopped yelling and instead began to sob. He didn’t reply, but simply repeated her name.

‘Úrsúla,’ he said. ‘Úrsúla. Úrsúla Aradóttir.’

‘You’re not hurt?’ Gunnar asked.

She shook her head as a police car came to a halt outside the shop and two police officers got out.

‘Can we keep this low key?’ Úrsúla asked, dusting off her coat. ‘Can you have the police take him away, but keep this under the radar? Nonni’s nerves are already shot to pieces. It’s better for him and the children not to know about this.’

Gunnar nodded. He would need to give the police an explanation for the handcuffs and persuade them to take a flexible approach. Normal citizens, even those working as bodyguards, shouldn’t carry handcuffs.

As the two police officers took Pétur away, he saw Úrsúla disappear into the shop, picking up a shopping basket on her way as she strode with determination between the aisles. Maybe it was his imagination, but he thought he saw she was trembling.

80

Úrsúla was jerked into wakefulness, the feeling of being choked so strong that she rolled out of bed and onto the floor, where she crouched for a moment while she regained her breath. Still half asleep, she passed a hand over her face, almost to convince herself that she wasn’t wearing a plastic overall and a ski mask, even though neither the Ebola outbreak nor Liberia had featured in her dreams. Maybe it was something as simple as the duvet resting on her face and hindering her breathing. Nonni muttered in his sleep, and so as not to wake him, she left the room and closed the bedroom door quietly behind her. Kátur sleepily got up from his basket and padded over to her. He followed her downstairs, where she turned on the tap in the kitchen and held a finger under the 185rush of water until it was numb with cold. She filled a glass and drank it down in one long draught, the cold water making her chest ache on its way down.

‘You want some water as well, Kátur?’ she asked, then filled the glass again and poured the contents into his bowl. He clearly wasn’t thirsty as he ignored it.

She was wide awake now and knew there was no point trying to get back to sleep, so she went to the living room, lay on the sofa and switched on the television. Kátur jumped up beside her and curled up at her feet, where he heaved a sigh so heavy it would have done a much larger dog credit.

She skipped between channels for a while. They had a long list of cable stations, but she had demanded satellite TV as well so that she could follow the news from anywhere in the world. This time she was lucky enough to find a report on the Ebola epidemic. She turned the sound down and took in the images as they rolled past on the screen. The sequences showed an emergency clinic in Sierra Leone that looked exactly like the one she had been at in Liberia. This one was also run by Médecins Sans Frontières; the hospital tent itself was the same and the staff putting on protective clothing outside used the same procedure as they had followed in Liberia. She watched them, and in her mind recited the regulations for dressing and undressing. Working with the doctors, she had ordered a dressing coach to be present for every shift, reading out the regulations while they prepared, and afterwards when they took off their protective gear, to minimise the possibility of a mistake that could cost someone’s life. Taking a glove off out of sequence could lead to infection.