He hoped that the dynamite hadn’t become useless. If it wasn’t usable, then he had no idea what he would do. His plans would be back at square one. He sat on the camping chair and took out his phone. He would have to sort this out. School would just have to wait; this was much more important.

Searching in Icelandic yielded no results, though, but a search for ‘sweating dynamite’ in English did. He read through a couple of chatroom posts and a wiki article that matched what he was looking for. Apparently, the nitroglycerine was leaching out of the dynamite; to stop it happening he needed to turn the sticks regularly. He didn’t waste time reading all the words of warning about how sensitive nitroglycerine could be; he knew perfectly well that explosives needed to be handled with care. He gently turned every stick over so that the damp side was facing upwards. That way he hoped the liquid would leak back into the sticks. The worrying thing was that, according to the wiki article, dynamite ought to be kept somewhere cool. The temperature in the boiler room could vary. Sometimes the hot water pipes running along the wall from the inlet valve would hiss and then it would become warm, and at other times it was quite cool down here. But there was no point worrying about it. He had no other place to keep the explosives, and he preferred to have it somewhere close by, where he could keep an eye on it.

There was, however, a bigger headache – and that was how to solve the detonator problem. All this explosive was of no use if there was no way of setting it off remotely. He shut the boiler-room door behind him and so that he wouldn’t be heard walked lightly up the grass verge rather than the steps. Not that he needed to bother; his father had already left and his mother was asleep, and would sleep well into the day.

Outside, on Tjarnarbakki, he saw a man looking at the sky, his phone in his hand. Anton watched his strange behaviour, until he heard a buzz and saw the drone whizz across the lake.

‘It’s a no-fly zone,’ he said to the man in English, assuming he had to be a tourist, as this was common knowledge. ‘This is the approach path for passenger aircraft landing at the city airport. You could cause an accident.’

The man quickly landed the drone.

‘Sorry, I didn’t know,’ he said.

‘But the drone should know. It should be programmed so it won’t work in a no-fly zone.’

The man smiled apologetically.

‘You can get round anything,’ he said. ‘A computer is just a computer.’ He packed the drone away into its case. ‘You live in one of these houses?’ he asked, gazing along the street with admiration.

Anton pointed to their house and the man nodded as he admired it.

‘Lucky you,’ he said.