‘Does my mum need to be here?’ he asked the police officers at regular intervals throughout the interview. As time passed, Marita came to understand why. The male police officer did most of the talking, while his female colleague sat and watched mother and son, and jotted things down in a notebook. Kiddi had started by 227denying everything, until the police officer told him that they had evidence. They had found what they had been looking for on his computer’s hard drive.

‘You’re not as smart as you think,’ the policeman said. ‘It’s a lot harder than most people think to erase your trail from a computer. We have the IP addresses, and it’s clear that it had to be someone in this house. The family computer is clean; your father’s iPad is clean; and you’re the only one who uses your computer, aren’t you?’

Kiddi hung his head and Marita nodded. Kiddi always kept his computer in his room, and the one time that Marita had tried to use it, she had found it locked with a password.

As the interview continued, Marita found herself becoming increasingly numb. She sank into the sofa. She would have stood up and beaten the boy if only she had the energy; even with the police in the room. The anger inside her seethed and boiled, but it was a feeble fury, almost a hopelessness, and although she wanted to cry, she found that was also beyond her.

‘I wasn’t going to hurt her,’ Kiddi said. ‘I just wanted her to be frightened. For her to…’

He stopped and for a moment there was a deathly silence in the room. The police sat opposite them, waiting for them to break the silence. Marita took a deep breath and the words tumbled out of her in a confused order, her Faroese accent strong. The police officers watched her with their blank expressions.

‘You know that Jónatan, my husband … erm, Kiddi’s dad, was charged with rape. And it has to be because of that … Yes, that was earlier this year. And then somehow that went away. Or it was stuck in the system or something. Then this new minister picked the case up again, and it was in all the newspapers all over again, like the whole thing being raked over. And a lot that the papers said just wasn’t true. But Kiddi threatening the minister and wanting her to resign, that’s obviously just … Yeah. He must have thought he was doing something to help his dad,’ Marita said. 228

Kiddi leaped up from the sofa as if he had been hauled to his feet by an invisible wire that had been stretched to its limit.

‘Help him? I wouldn’t help him if I was paid for it! You’re always so fucking clueless, aren’t you? I was trying to help you. So the whole thing would be over, and you could go back to work, and people would stop judging you because of that arsehole you’re married to!’