The annoying neighbour with his nose in police business wasn’t suspicious. Quite the opposite, he was the personification of innocence.

105

When Áróra woke up on Daníel’s sofa, it took her a while to figure out where she was. It was with surprise that she realised she must have fallen asleep moments after he had told her to lie down, spreading a thick woollen blanket over her. He had wanted to know how she had come by a black eye, but she had just shaken her head.

‘You should see the other guy,’ she had muttered.

The last thing she remembered was stretching out, tense with nerves, on the sofa, sweating but also shivering with cold, her eye aching, the coarseness of the blanket prickling, and still with the pounding heartbeat that had hammered in her chest since she and her mother had watched the flat on Engihjalli from the car as the police and forensics officers had gone about their work.

People had come and gone, got into cars and drove away, came back and got out again, went back into the block, occasionally stood for a while and chatted, drank coffee, ate snacks from paper bags. Her mother had sat with her knitting, taking the odd break to look up at what was going on outside the building.

‘What do you think’s happening?’ she would ask, probably thinking out loud rather than directing her question at Áróra, and clearly not expecting any reply.

Áróra felt the tension mounting, and when the team in white overalls took their third coffee break, she longed to jump out of the car, march over there and yell at them to get back to work, to get on with finding something inside that could tell them what had happened to Ísafold.

She was close to bursting with impatience, when Daníel seemed to sense it, crossed the street and got into the back of the car.

‘Let’s go home and get ourselves some coffee,’ he said in his mild tone of voice. ‘This is going to take a long time, and there’s nothing new so far.’254

At Daníel’s place, her mother had gone to the guest room to lie down, and Áróra wondered how many times a day she needed to take the weight off her feet, while Daníel told her to close her eyes on the sofa while he made coffee. He spread the blanket over her, and she fell asleep so soundly that when she woke up, it took her a while to get her bearings.