Agla nodded.

‘Tell me how much you want for her,’ she said.

Sonja sat up sharply, and as she did so, the hardness returned to her eyes.

‘I don’t know what you’ve heard from Elísa, but the truth is that her situation is mainly of her own making,’ she said. ‘And I doubt that you can save her from it.’

‘I doubt it as well,’ Agla said. ‘But I intend to try. I want you to let her go, and for all the people under your control – which I understand is practically the whole of Reykjavík’s drug trade – to put her off limits, so that she can’t buy dope anywhere.’

‘You’re massively overestimating my influence,’ Sonja said, and looked searchingly at Agla for a moment. ‘Are you in love with her?’

Agla swallowed and shrugged. The last thing she wanted was to share confidences with Sonja.

‘Perhaps,’ she said.

‘I see.’ Sonja’s eyes were still fixed on her, but her expression had become gentler. ‘It’s the least I can do for you,’ she said. ‘I’ll pass the word around that Elísa is a grass. That’s the best way to make sure nobody will have anything to do with her.’ Sonja stood up and slipped into her coat. ‘I’m relieved that you’ve found someone to love. I was hoping that you weren’t still alone.’

97

The squawks of the seagulls drowned out her scream. As she had left the coffee house she’d signalled to Alex to keep his distance, and had then marched down to the quayside, where she stood and yelled with all her breath into the harbour. The tension that had been brewing inside her since Húni Thór had arrived, saying that he was taking the store, seemed to have boiled over as she sat opposite Agla in the coffee shop.

To begin with she had been relaxed and at ease, but there was something about Agla’s movements that put her on edge, the way she laid a hand on her knee; without wanting to, Sonja recalled those fingers inside her, and her body responded with a racing heartbeat and a flush of heat.

Agla had changed. She came across as uncannily cold, which was a surprise as while she had always been stiff, she’d never been icy. Sonja had always sensed that there was some kind of inner turmoil Agla was constantly fighting to conquer. But now that was gone. There was no longer any tension between them. Maybe that was no surprise, now that Agla knew all about her. Anyone who knew who she was, who genuinely knew what she did, could only have one feeling towards her: fear.

Now, standing on the quayside and yelling, she was swamped by a wave of regret, but she didn’t know if it was the pain of lost love that she should have experienced all those years ago when she left Agla and which had now returned with a vengeance, or if she was standing on the quayside mourning for herself, for the Sonja she had once been; the person she could have been.