‘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.

That was typical of both María and Bleep. It was as if both of them had conspired to break the connection before Agla could come back with a suitable riposte. This Bleep software wasn’t as good as Skype or FaceTime, but had the advantage of being encrypted so that any trace of a conversation was erased as soon as it ended. As far as Agla was concerned, the prison authorities had no need to be concerned over things they knew nothing about.

Agla checked the clock. It was finally time to call Elísa. She rang the bell and when Ewa appeared, she let her know that she needed to make a call. She waited by the phone in the hallway for a little while, until Ewa had gone over to chat to Vigdís, so neither of them would be listening in.

‘Hæ. How are you?’ she whispered when Elísa answered.