‘Ingimar the Terrorist?’ Gunnar asked, and shivered at the thought. There was something sinister about the name, and while Ingimar hadn’t killed anyone, blowing up a radio station wasn’t something that Icelanders were used to.

‘That’s right. Ingimar the Terrorist. This absolutely must not be allowed to leak. The whole government would become a joke overnight. But it would be worse if anyone were to find out that a contract that would make Ingimar even richer is about to be signed. The government would look corrupt. So it seems that the only option left is to ditch the South Coast Highway, as the original tender becomes invalid if the financing package is altered.’

‘Oh,’ Gunnar said involuntarily. He had been looking forward to driving along that road.

‘The thing is this,’ Úrsúla said. ‘I need to be certain there’s no other way to fix this mess before I call the project off, because, as you can imagine, it’s going to do nothing for my popularity. This is an initiative that people have supported.’

Gunnar nodded. He could already imagine the furious hate mail that would cascade down on her.

‘So what do you want me to do?’ he said. 162

‘I want you to go to the prison at Hólmsheiði and talk to Ingimar Magnússon in person, on my behalf.’

67

‘Hæ, Gunni!’

He looked at the girl who greeted him so cheerfully, and saw that while her mass of curls had been tamed with something that made her hair shine, and the sides of her head had been clippered short, there was no doubt that this was Stella.

‘Hey, Curlytop! What are you doing here?’

‘I’m a cleaner,’ she said. ‘And you?’

‘I’m the minister’s driver,’ he replied. ‘Started exactly a week ago.’

He moved aside so that people making their way through the lobby could pass them. A crowd of media types had gathered outside, waiting for Úrsúla to appear and make her statement.

‘I heard what happened to your mother,’ he said.

Their eyes met, and he felt himself sinking into the endless depths of those dark eyes. They seemed somehow to have more darkness in them than any other eyes.

‘Yeah, she’s in care now, and she has to be medicated up to the eyeballs so she doesn’t go crazy. There was some damage to her frontal lobe, and other injuries.’

‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ he said. ‘I had the feeling that it wouldn’t end well when you both moved back in with him.’

He remembered his own desperate dismay, standing by the window and watching the two of them get in the man’s car. The guy was a powerfully built giant, and they were so delicate and small, like a pair of elves from another world. The girls who worked at the refuge had tried to comfort him with tales of reunions that had worked out well, when the dad had forsaken the bottle, stopped beating his family and everyone lived happily ever 163after. But he could see in their faces that no one expected to see that kind of happy ending this time.