She wasn’t sleepy enough to doze off. Every time she felt rational thought giving way to the lightness of sleep, the uncomfortable feeling of not knowing what had become of Ísafold returned to gnaw at her, or she was startled into wakefulness by the boxy face of the man in the lift appearing as clear as day in front of her. This was no good. She got out of bed, switched on the little coffee machine and opened her laptop.

She’d need coffee to wash away the dregs of the alcohol in her system, and the sunshine, illuminating the room even though it was not yet four o’clock, would ensure she wouldn’t get back to sleep. She slid one of the disposable aluminium capsules into the coffee machine, wondering if this was environmentally friendly or not. She chose the black one, figuring that this had to be the strongest coffee.

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Iceland’s business newspaper answered her questions about Hákon Hauksson. A rambling feature article told her that he had inherited a chain of pharmacies. His father had been a chemist who had started out with one shop and from there built a business empire, which his son joined straight from school. When Hákon had taken over the business he had been a young man. The company grew rapidly, or so it seemed, and it was registered on the stock market. To begin with the shares rose sharply in value; due to the strict currency restrictions following the financial crash, Icelandic pension funds found themselves limited to investing in Icelandic companies. But the company’s share price began to drop after a poor set of annual accounts, and that was when the problems began.

As the share price continued to drop for weeks on end, it seemed Hákon became increasingly desperate. He secured a loan from a German bank and used the cash to invest in overseas companies; boutiques, print shops and advertising agencies all became part of a list of disparate companies he bought into. According to the article, he never intended to run these companies, but simply used them as collateral with which to pull in more loans, using that money to buy shares in his chain of pharmacies in Iceland, thus inflating the share price. But the whole scam collapsed like a house of cards, leaving Hákon with no assets, steeped in debt and facing a prison sentence for market manipulation.

Pushing things beyond their limits, making rash investments and growing too fast was nothing unusual in Icelandic business, and plenty of people had taken desperate measures that weren’t always legal. Hákon hadn’t been alone in this. But now he owned a hotel, one of Reykjavík’s smartest. This was strange. In fact, it was more than just strange. 39