54

Agla had to tell María to speak slowly and clearly, as her internet connection seemed to be poor and the Bleep app didn’t seem to be able to keep the sound quality clear. The image broke up into blocks and pixels, but Agla could just make out that María was on the move, holding the phone in front of her with one hand while she steered with the other. Now was exactly the time when a proper phone would have been handy, one on which they could have held a normal conversation, but that wasn’t an option at Hólmsheiði. Instead she sat hunched in the library with the screen turned away from the all-seeing eye on the ceiling, so that no one would realise she was using the computer to make a call. Fortunately, by now the warders trusted her completely and only checked on her every couple of hours.

‘The owners store the aluminium in the warehouses, get a payment for taking delivery of it, and immediately apply to have it released, which can take a long time. Sometimes that can take close to two years. And then they simply put it straight back into storage to get another payment, instead of selling it. It takes a week to get aluminium into storage, and never less than a year to get it out again. So the overall storage time for all the metal gets longer and longer. And Meteorite buys more and more warehouses as they fill up. Strictly speaking, they’re not stockpiling it, but they’re still restricting the flow onto the market, and that’s how the price of the aluminium available on the open market rises.’

Now Agla was starting to see a clearer picture.

‘I’d bet…’ she called into the screen in the hope that María could hear her. ‘I’d be ready to bet that the payments from Meteorite for storing aluminium from the Icelandic smelter go direct to the smelter’s parent company abroad. That way the parent company doesn’t care if the smelter sells its production very slowly – they still get an income from the storage payments. Undoubtedly other smelters do the same thing. It’s better for the parent company to get paid for storing production, and then they can always sell it later for the same or more than they would get for it today. It’s absolutely brilliant!’

Bleep lost the connection and some interference came out of the speaker.

‘What did you say?’ Agla asked.

‘Everyone except the taxpayer comes out a winner,’ María repeated. She always had to make some kind of point like that, Agla reflected. ‘Just as long as there’s no tax paid on production in Iceland.’

‘The taxpayer just wastes it on some crack-brained nonsense,’ Agla said in irritation.

‘Like building prisons…?’ María said and the connection was lost.