He had been temporarily transferred to another station after the accusation, and he was lonely, missing her and the boys. Although she felt sorry for him, she was also relieved in many ways not to have him there all the time, as regardless of how hard she tried to convince herself, there was always the same irritation with him deep inside her. He had got them into this mess. He had given the girl a beer, and that was what seemed to have set this whole crazy thing off.

It wasn’t yet midnight when she sat at the computer to see if the pdfs of any of tomorrow’s papers were online yet. Over the last few months she had found that sometimes you didn’t have to wait until past midnight for the next day’s paper to be ready. She checked the main media outlets, but so far there was nothing. Midnight was half an hour away, so she wouldn’t have to wait long. She opened Facebook and scrolled through the news feed. 88She couldn’t see anything about the case, as she had blocked anyone who had commented negatively on it. That left only a few people, mainly from back home in the Faroes, who didn’t follow Icelandic news. Of those who were local, there were just some colleagues from the bank and a few youngsters, friends of Kiddi’s.

Her heart skipped a beat when Katrín Eva appeared in a picture. It was one of her own photos that by some evil coincidence had shown up in Marita’s ‘memories’. Klemmi was in Katrín Eva’s arms; she guessed that he was around three years old, so she had just started babysitting him. It had been beneath Kiddi’s dignity to look after his little brother, even though they had offered to pay him. He had wanted to get a proper summer job, outside the house, so he had spent the summer on one of the tills at Bónus. Katrín Eva had looked after Klemmi all that summer, and sat for them every now and then over the winter, and had continued to do so right up until … Right up to when she had decided to go home howling to her mother, saying that Jónatan had raped her.

Marita deleted the memory, then searched for the picture and deleted that as well. If only it was as easy to delete people in real life as it was on Facebook.

She checked the papers again and saw that the first one had appeared online. She downloaded it and scanned it quickly. There was nothing on the front or back covers, or on the first couple of pages. And then it was there; almost half of the fourth page. It was yet another digest of the reported circumstances and the interior minister’s short response to the paper’s questions, with a pledge to find out what progress had been made on the case – as if there was anything to check on.

Why didn’t the police write this off like any other stupidity? Surely they received dozens of complaints every day about this or that. One from a pissed-off mother, clearly angry that her daughter had been given a beer, could hardly be any more serious than anything else. This interior minister ought to have better ways to spend her time. 89