If this meal had been lunch or dinner, then there would be a snack next – one for either the afternoon or evening, so now she just had to wait. She lay down on the mattress, the yoghurt tub still in her hand, and spread the blanket over her, more to give herself a feeling of security than because of the cold. The cell was neither hot nor cold; instead there was a steady warmth that told her that this place wasn’t dealing with the Icelandic climate’s fluctuating temperatures.

She lay still and tried to control her train of thought. She needed to trace things back to their origins – to what had put her in this position. Her interest in aluminium producers and how some of them worked went back a long way, all the way to her time with the special prosecutor’s office, when she had done her best to get to grips with the extent of the whole aluminium issue. While she understood that every company wanted to maximise its profits, there was something about the way these international corporate giants treated tiny, stupid Iceland that made her furious. One smelter produced as much pollution as all the cars in the country put together; the Icelandic energy companies had made huge investments so they could provide the smelters with enough power, which the energy companies sold to the smelters at knockdown rates. All of this had been done under the pretence that the smelters would generate jobs and revenue for Iceland; but the fact of the matter was that some smelters brought in labour from overseas and a significant chunk of any profits they made remained abroad. The foreign parent companies invoiced their Icelandic subsidiaries for hefty sums, which meant these subsidiaries’ books showed minimal profits, and the parent companies avoided paying almost any tax in Iceland.

‘Cooking the Books Still in Fashion’ could be a good headline for an article in The Squirrel. She could detail how little had changed since Halldór Laxness first spoke about this phenomenon back in the forties; and demonstrate that Iceland had then been in much the same position as other former colonial nations that found themselves newly independent – easy meat for international finance and greedy traitors.

Now one such company was engaged in an even worse kind of swindle, that wouldn’t withstand much scrutiny. And that’s why she was here, locked away to keep her quiet. She hardly dared imagine how long her incarceration would last.