‘Let’s go and get ourselves some waffles in the café,’ Úrsúla said, and the children galloped across the frozen pasture.

‘You could have spoken to that man a little more politely,’ Nonni said as he followed her out into the yard. She could almost hear the anger boiling inside him.

His temper had been on edge since that morning, when he had seen the new house rules. He was the only one who should answer the door, and only after checking the screen connected to the camera that had been rigged above the door.

They walked side by side, following the children to the café. Úrsúla was surprised at herself for not giving the man a proper answer, for not even showing him minimal courtesy, but the pattern on his sweater had left her in shock. It was a complex and rarely seen pattern: an octagonal rosette in grey and black across the chest. It was exactly the same one her father had worn.

57

Marita rubbed oil into the frozen leg of lamb and salted it generously. Her mother had always roasted a joint of lamb from frozen, 139but Jónatan had showed Marita how to let it defrost over two or three days in the fridge and a whole day at room temperature on the kitchen worktop before it went into the oven.

‘In this case, it doesn’t need to be rock hard before we slip it in,’ he had said, and they had laughed and giggled, and then he had kissed her and pinched her bottom, and she had been happy.

Now she felt slightly sick at the memory. This wretched case hanging over them wasn’t just poisoning the present, but all their memories as well; all the fun, and everything they had done together, was now veiled in pain and disappointment that she couldn’t be sure would ever be lifted. Everything had been ruined, you could say. The case had destroyed their life together – past, present and future.

Marita sprinkled paprika and curry powder over the joint and worked the red and yellow powder together with her hands until the spices had blended into an orange covering and her fingers were left numb by the frozen meat. Jónatan would just have to make do with a leg of lamb that had been roasted from frozen when he came home that night for a break between a round of shifts. She didn’t trust herself to go to the shop to buy something else for dinner. She’d just make a meal from what there was in the house.

She poured herself coffee from the flask. These days she was making a full flask of coffee in the mornings just for herself, because she was always getting herself cups and leaving them here and there around the house, and generally didn’t come across them again until the coffee was cold. She didn’t seem able to finish anything she started. She was halfway through folding the washing, so that there was a stack of folded clothes next to a pile of clothes just from the dryer, and the vacuum cleaner was in the corridor between the bedrooms because she didn’t have the energy to hoover more than one room at a time.