She heard a deep cough beyond the door, followed by a throat being cleared. Now Úrsúla’s fear crystallised into the image of the bearded man she had once trusted and then deeply hated with a child’s single-mindedness, and who had now made a new appearance in her life, dogging her steps at every opportunity. Only an old man would cough like that, so it was obviously Pétur. She wanted to fetch her phone and call the police, but her feet seemed to have no energy in them and refused to obey her. She sank to 118the floor with her back against the door. Right now the emergency button she had been promised would have been worth having. She could have pressed it and had Pétur arrested. She longed to have him locked away so there would be no more horrible notes on her car, or anyone hiding in the boot, or anyone knocking at the door when she was alone at home with the children asleep.

As if from a far distance, she heard a key being inserted into the lock and the door began to open. She instinctively leaned back against it. She pressed her feet into the floor and pushed her back against the door with every ounce of her strength, but she wasn’t strong enough. The door forced her back and before she realised it, Nonni was crouching at her side, her face in his hands as she wept through gritted teeth.

‘Hey, Úrsúla! It’s all right, calm down,’ Nonni said in his soothing voice, but somehow she couldn’t pull her mind out of the panic mode it had switched into to prevent Pétur from reaching her sleeping children.

‘Someone was knocking,’ she gasped. ‘There was someone at the door before you who knocked and I could hear him cough. It was Pétur, trying to get to us.’

‘No, Úrsúla. It was the old dried-fish guy, the one from Grindavík who comes once a month. He said he’d knocked but hadn’t wanted to ring the bell because it’s late and the children might be asleep. I ran into him just down the street.’

Úrsúla stared in confusion into Nonni’s eyes. She felt her heart sink, and the tears flowed down her cheeks. It had to have been the tryst with Thorbjörn earlier in the day that had broken down her defences, the gateway to her heart that she had these last few months kept locked and bolted.

‘Hey. There, there, sweetheart,’ Nonni said, his voice soothing, holding up a sizeable bag of dried fish. 119