Looking at her, there was no indication that these were her preferred eating habits – endless pizzas, noodles, burgers and all kinds of junk food. Most evenings seemed to end at a cinema, where Agla guessed Elísa shovelled down sweets, as there were usually two or three transactions made at the snack bar.

Then there was a long period with no transactions, followed by the single large payment she had made herself, and shortly after that a transfer to a woman called Katrín who, according to her personal ID, was twenty-five years old and whose legal residence was abroad. It seemed that whenever Elísa came into some money, she gave it to this woman. The same pattern had been repeated for more than two years, right up until Elísa had been jailed in Holland a few months previously.

Agla thought over everything she’d discovered, and however much she tried not to let it prey on her mind, the question kept coming up: who was this Katrín and why did Elísa give her almost all her money? Surely she had to be a dealer.

The warder appeared, ready to take her back to the kitchen for lunch.

Elísa sat there, as usual telling the other women a story.

‘It all started when I got a loan,’ Agla heard her say as soon as she entered the kitchen.

‘All problems start that way,’ the bookkeeper said.

Agla stopped herself from snorting in derision. She had found out all about the bookkeeper and knew she had embezzled money belonging to the shipping company she had worked for. It had started with a few small amounts, according to the court documents Agla had found online.

‘I knew that this guy was well dodgy,’ Elísa continued. ‘But I was completely skint. I didn’t know what to do, and they were about to throw me out of the room I was renting. I’d already been to the guy who’d paid me pretty well to fuck me before, but he’d found someone else. So I ended up hunting through garbage bins for bottles to sell so I could buy cat food – the cat was wailing, it was so hungry, you see. Then, when I’d scraped together enough for a tin, he just turned his nose up at it and walked away. That was when I lay down and cried.’

‘And?’

To Agla’s ears it sounded as if both the bookkeeper and Vigdís demanded the answer at the same moment. They seemed captivated by Elísa’s tales of woe.

‘Well, I met this guy at a party that evening and asked if he could lend me a hundred thousand krónur. He said “yeah, no problem”, and we went back to his place and he just got the money out of a drawer and handed it to me.’