For a moment time stood still as Agla watched the woman follow Sigurgeir the few steps from the door to the outer reception. Her hair was darker and she was taller than Agla remembered, but her quick movements and attractive face were at the same time both intimately familiar and strange. There was a scar on her chin that hadn’t been there before. Agla stared at it as if it could in some way explain all the missing years.

‘Sonja.’

She said no more, but it was enough to make Sonja glance up and stare at her in return.

‘Hæ,’ Sonja said, and there was an element of wonder in her voice.

Agla found herself unable to say another word, and even if her life had depended on it, she could not have defined the emotion that swelled inside her as she looked Sonja over. She wanted to go over and throw her arms around her, but the time that had been lost between them put that out of the question. They were no longer close and had become strangers.

She also longed to punch her.

‘How are you?’ Sonja asked, as if they were no more than casual acquaintances who met a couple of times a year to drink coffee and exchange superficial gossip. There was nothing in her answer that gave any inkling of why she had walked out and disappeared so soon after declaring her delight with the new house and with Agla.

Having whispered her love so often into Agla’s ear, it now came down to ‘how are you?’

Agla had no answer to her question. She turned away and knocked on the warders’ door to hurry Ewa along, and when she turned back, Sigurgeir was locking the outer door behind Sonja.

‘You know each other?’ Sigurgeir asked.

Agla shook her head.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not really.’

Ewa appeared with what she referred to as her magic wand, ran it over Agla’s body and read off the numbers.

‘She’s as clean as a whistle,’ she pronounced, smiling like a proud parent, and Sigurgeir opened the door to the visitors’ corridor, pointing her towards room number two.

Agla entered the room in a daze. But as she approached the glass she was wrenched from her thoughts, as if the earth’s gravity had hauled her back to the ground. Elísa was sitting hunched in a chair behind the window, weeping.

‘Shh, don’t cry,’ Agla said as she picked up the handset on her side. ‘I’m not angry with you, sweetheart.’

She had no intention of adding to Elísa’s guilt for having messed up her probation. She knew precisely how women felt when they were brought back to prison for the third or fourth time. They could dish out their own servings of self-reproach.

‘I’m just deep in the shit,’ Elísa said. ‘The Boss gave me a massive bollocking just before you got here.’

‘The Boss? The Boss came here? You mean the drugs Boss?’