‘That’s enough,’ the youngster had said, catching hold of both of the Devil’s hands to stop him. ‘That’ll do.’

The cell door slammed shut and the lights went out, and he could hear the young policeman yelling at the Devil, demanding to know what the hell he was thinking and if he had lost his mind.

Pétur knew then and there that the Devil didn’t think. He simply roamed the world and whatever was in his way would suffer the heat of his anger.

When the cell door had opened again, it was the young lad who threw a pair of shoes in to him.

‘Your shoes,’ he said, shutting the door again and switching off the light so that Pétur had to fumble in the darkness.

He found the shoes and put them on, ready to run the moment they’d let him out. He wanted to flee from the terror, to save himself from the Devil. He laced the shoes tightly but it wasn’t until he had them on that he realised they didn’t fit. Although these were police-issue boots, like the ones he usually wore, these weren’t his.

Pétur had felt a trickle of blood run down his face from where his scalp had grazed against the wall as he had fallen. He put his hand to the wound to stop the bleeding as he sat in the darkness and snivelled, while Ari took his last few difficult breaths. 213

94

The hot light that Stella’s grandmother had given her on her birthday would burn in her head for a while, but then fade away, and she hadn’t yet worked out what it meant. She would figure it out. She would learn to understand what it meant when her head was filled with the hot, blue-green brightness. So far she wasn’t sure whether she was being warned of something when it lit up, or whether it was an indicator that she was doing the right thing.

Mostly it came on when she thought of Gréta. Now, as she stacked packs of toilet paper on the shelves of the cleaners’ storeroom, remembering how Gréta and the blonde had walked away from her outside the grey apartment block, practically in step, hand-in-hand, her head blazed like a broken gas burner.

She growled in irritation as one stack of toilet paper toppled off the shelf and the packets bounced across the floor. She picked one up and hurled it against the wall, but it gave her no relief, and instead she found herself suddenly choking, so she snatched up the two bags of rubbish that came from some office that dealt with finance, banged the door shut behind her and hurried out and down the steps to the rear staff entrance.

Outside she drew the air deep into her lungs several times to bring some oxygen to her overheating head. The creepy journalist’s car was parked behind the rubbish skip in the lower car park. She hurried over to it. She was about to put her hand on the door handle when she realised that there was someone in the car with him. She was about to quietly back away, back to the ministry building, but was startled as the car’s door opened and Óðinn, the permanent secretary, stepped out.