So back then she hadn’t yet figured out that nobody does anything for nothing? Agla thought, but said nothing.

‘And I was going to pay the rent and buy cat food and all that stuff, but the next day the money was all gone.’

‘How on earth did that happen?’ Agla heard herself say, surprised at her own reproachful tone of voice. She was standing at the worktop with the butter knife in her hand, staring at Elísa, who had a look of satisfaction on her face. Maybe she was just pleased that Agla had spoken to her for the first time in days.

‘Like you said,’ she said with an apologetic smile. ‘I’m a junkie. And junkies need junk.’

Agla wanted to bite her own tongue. She had not meant to speak to Elísa or any of the others. Her plan had been to take her sandwich and cup of coffee to the common room to eat there, as she had made a habit of doing since that awkward evening when Elísa’s attitude had upset her so deeply.

‘Of course,’ she muttered, still surprised at her own sudden need to express her opinions on this young woman. It was as if an inner bitchiness had welled up, and before she knew it, she had spat out something she had had no intention of allowing to be heard.

‘All the same, it’s called alcoholism these days,’ Elísa said. ‘I’m an alcoholic. If I didn’t drink, then I wouldn’t do dope. I do dope simply so I can drink more.’

Agla had to admit this was a tendency she was familiar with. In the past she had made a habit of snorting coke, just so she wouldn’t get too drunk. But her circumstances were very different to those of this slip of a girl.

She returned to the library, and even though the lunch hour wasn’t over, Ewa let her in, and she sat down at the computer. She shut down the window with Elísa’s bank account, and shook her head at her own behaviour. She couldn’t understand why she had been digging into this woman’s life; it wasn’t just that it was none of her business, but on top of that Elísa had a talent for being annoying.

She opened another of the Meteorite Metals annual reports and hadn’t scrolled far through it when she came across what she had been half expecting to find, sooner or later: the relocation of the company’s headquarters from Indiana in the US to Paris three years before.

Her heart beat a little faster as her suspicions grew, and it skipped a beat when she saw which bank handled the company’s business in France. This was what she had instinctively thought right from the start. Ingimar had a hand in this, and what was more, so did William Tedd.