‘What on earth…?’ she heard Gréta say, and saw her snatch up a serviette to dab at the blonde’s front.

Stella rushed away, out of the restaurant, down the closed-off staircase, then the broad staircase, down to Harpa’s ground floor, where she took to her heels. The frost had hardened so that her lungs were seared by the first breath of cold air, and now she finally allowed herself to weep. She could have been in the blonde’s place, sipping champagne and sampling the Christmas-themed buffet, in between basking in Gréta’s adoration and admiring her cleavage in anticipation. But instead she was alone and shivering in the bitter cold outside Harpa, badly dressed, invisible and with sore nipples.

104

Pétur had managed to lose the black car outside the kiosk that morning, and since then he’d kept away from the main streets. He’d lost it by setting off along Laugavegur, sauntering as if he was unaware the car was following him, then once he had crossed Snorrabraut and was sure that there was another car behind the black one in the narrow street, he had doubled back against the direction of the traffic, leaving the Devil unable to turn around and follow him.

Since then he had kept to the shadows as much as he could, sticking to pedestrian streets and narrow roads, sometimes clambering through snow-filled gardens to avoid the main traffic routes where the Devil could be waiting in his big jeep.

He felt pretty good as he ambled along the waste ground by the harbour, a Bæjarins Besta hot dog warming his belly along with most of a half-bottle of booze he had been able to cadge from some tourists, who seemed to hold on to their cash less tightly than the locals, who were themselves undoubtedly more giving when they went abroad. There was something about travel that 232made people generous. He remembered that from his own time in Denmark. He wished the city library would stay open longer in the evenings, as he wanted to go straight there and find a book of pictures of Denmark so he could recall that time of his life. Denmark was just one big garden where everything that sprouted from the ground was edible. The delightful girl he had followed there lived in the countryside, where she taught him to pick apples from the trees and find roots called artichokes that they cooked with the fish he pulled effortlessly from the stream every morning. What was odd was that he had been about to be on his way back to Denmark ever since he had returned from there, so many years ago he had given up counting.

Somehow or other he had found himself living from one moment to another; time became a roundabout on which one day was like the next one, which always felt the same as the one before. He and Ari had always been on their way back, about to escape the temporal roundabout. He was on his way to Denmark, and Ari on his way back home.