‘Nothing to tell you,’ she said into the phone, leaning back in her chair and turning it away from the desk so she could look through the window at the pale-blue mountains in the distance. ‘I’m working on it.’

A burst of golden-pink rays of sunshine broke through the clouds and bathed the mountain slopes of Akrafjall; the light was so bright it seemed almost to belong to another world.

‘Talk to Óðinn,’ the prime minister advised. ‘He can cook up some kind of justification that’s totally impenetrable, but looks completely plausible.’

‘Yes, I don’t doubt that eventually I’ll be going to Óðinn for advice,’ she said. ‘But I’d like to hold off for the moment. The contracts are just waiting for me to sign them, and I can delay that for quite a while. I’d like to let the media storm over the street guy die down before I stir things up again.’

‘It’s fine to let one scandal drown out another,’ the prime minister said. ‘The more dust you kick up, the better.’

‘I’m not sure I agree with you there, Mr Machiavelli,’ she said, 134hoping that a lighter note would cut through the tension she could sense in his voice. But it had the opposite effect; the prime minister seemed in no mood for jokes.

‘Rúnar couldn’t handle the media and gave way under the strain before he scuttled away on sick leave. Now we’ll see if his successor can stick up for herself or not!’

Before Úrsúla could begin to digest his words, he had hung up, leaving her in no doubt: the call hadn’t been made to find out what the state of play was. He was cracking the whip.

‘What was that?’ Eva asked, staring at Úrsúla in astonishment. The call must have sounded as strange to Eva as it had been to her.

‘That was our prime minister,’ Úrsúla said with a sigh. ‘He wants the South Coast Highway shelved.’

‘What?’ The astonishment shone from Eva’s face as her jaw dropped. ‘What the hell?’

‘I know,’ Úrsúla said, turning over in her mind whether she should spare Eva the explanation or not. But she desperately needed someone to talk to. She needed someone else’s judgement and to think the matter through out loud. ‘There’s a problem with the finance,’ she said. ‘It seems that Ingimar Magnússon is one of the backers.’

‘Fuck,’ Eva said. ‘Fucking hell, in fact.’

Úrsúla laughed and sighed at the same time.

‘That’s putting it mildly. If this gets out, the government is going to be under fire for allowing negotiations for a state project to get this far without knowing who they were dealing with. If we keep quiet and carry on, and it comes out that we knew we were negotiating with Ingimar the Terrorist, then we have even more of a scandal on our hands. Ingimar isn’t the most popular person in Iceland.’

‘Hell and damnation,’ Eva said. Úrsúla wanted to ask her to swear some more, as it seemed to provide an outlet for the tension. She longed to sink the whole miserable business in a pit of fury and cursing. 135