Out of the shower, she wrapped herself in a dressing gown, sat on the sofa with her laptop and checked her emails. Her despondency instantly vanished when she saw a message from an unknown sender. It was from a Gmail address made up of a series of numbers, but when she saw the document from the Central Bank in the attachments she knew right away who the sender was. She forwarded the list to Agla, got up and went over to her desk and plugged the printer in.

In the bedroom she rooted through the pile of clean clothes, found jeans and a T-shirt, and decided that she could buy socks somewhere during the day and could get by without underwear, as she often did now. Her laundry system suited her perfectly, but would have shocked Maggi to the core. There were two piles on the floor – one of dirty stuff on its way to the washing machine, and the other of clean clothes that had come out of the dryer. The result was a circular flow of clothes; at some point, they spent time on her body as they transitioned from the clean to the dirty pile, like a hard-working official working his way through stacks of documents.

The system didn’t extend to underwear, though. She hadn’t managed to keep that side of things under control and resorted to frequent purchases of economy packs of pink or light-blue knickers, which cost a fraction of what she had paid for the classy lingerie she had worn while she and Maggi had been married. Socks had become disposable items. There was no way that she could be bothered to pair them up.

The printer had churned out the Central Bank’s list by the time she returned. The coffee left in the jug was cool, but she poured it into a mug anyway and sat down on the sofa with the printout.

26

Agla could make neither head nor tail of the Central Bank list that María had emailed her. She had repeatedly compared it to the data from the London Metal Exchange, and on the surface it seemed that the Icelandic smelter exported a healthy amount of registered aluminium through the LME system. The price level for these sales, however, was less than a third of what it should have been on the world market. The smelter’s revenues had therefore halved in size over the last three years. At the same time, though, large invoices were presented every month to the smelter by a company called Meteorite Metals, and the smelter paid them punctually.