‘Hello? Anyone home?’ he called as he went into the living room. It was deserted, so he continued to the kitchen, where it looked as if someone had been interrupted in the middle of preparing a meal.

Úrsúla sat there on a tall stool at the breakfast bar, fear etched deeply into her face. It took Gunnar a moment to wrench his eyes from her and to realise that she wasn’t the only one in the kitchen.

114

Marita’s phone began to ring the moment she switched it on outside the airport at Vágur. There were at least five missed calls from Jónatan. She hadn’t wanted to answer him until she had arrived back home in the Faroe Islands. Kiddi and her mother were stacking cases in the back of the car, so she took a few paces away from them before she hit the reply button. She put the phone to her ear, but she couldn’t make out what Jónatan was saying. His furious gabble was no more understandable than the fuzzy sound of a badly tuned radio. She looked up at the hillsides and then down at the flat land by the airport building and felt a relief to be rid of the snow. A fall of snow never lasts long in the Faroes.

‘Kiddi saw you,’ she said to stop Jónatan’s tirade in mid-flow, as he demanded to know what she was doing travelling to the Faroes in the middle of winter without letting him know. ‘Kiddi came home, saw you, and left.’ 255

No further explanation was needed about what, where or when. He knew exactly what she meant.

‘I’m going to stay here for a few weeks while I think things over,’ she said, although that wasn’t true. She had no intention of returning.

‘We could make a new start,’ he said. The irritation over her sudden departure had vanished from his voice, replaced by a desperate tone. ‘All that legal stuff is over now, so we could put a real effort into sorting out our problems.’

‘I don’t need to sort out problems,’ she said, not even trying to hide the coldness in her voice. ‘But you definitely have stuff you need to work on.’

‘Don’t be like that,’ he said, and Marita couldn’t make out whether the touch of impatience she could hear in his voice was anger or frustration. ‘Are you talking about whatever it was that Kiddi thought he saw? I was teasing the girl; we were just playing the fool. He must have just misunderstood things.’

‘Katrín Eva’s lawyer called me today before I got on the flight. She asked if I would be sticking to my testimony that Katrín Eva had an unusually large amount of money when she left that evening, and I said I would. I remember thinking at the time that you certainly paid her generously.’

‘What are you talking about? What’s this bullshit, Marita?’

‘Rósa is bringing a case against you: purchasing sexual services from a minor,’ Marita said.