It takes half a kitchen roll to clean up the puke, which seems to be practically unadulterated beer, and then I tiptoe upstairs and lie down in Ísafold’s bed.

Even though she’s my big sister, it’s my job to protect her, because I’m stronger than she is.

44

SATURDAY

19

Áróra wasn’t sure if her decision to go downstairs and meet Hákon in the breakfast room was based on a curiosity provoked by her nocturnal investigations, or on a simple desire to see him. She could see that he was tender and sensitive, and she had to admit that the smell of him and the hand that reached across the table to touch hers triggered a whirlwind of feelings inside her. She could well have entertained the idea of crawling back to bed with him after breakfast, pressing herself close to him under the warm duvet and breathing in his aroma. But the results of her research prevented her from making that suggestion.

Sitting alone upstairs in her room with a couple of empty coffee cups at her side, she wanted to laugh out loud once the extent of Hákon’s affairs had become clear. The whole thing was almost too weird to be real. It seemed that Hákon owned a company that owned another company, which in turn owned not just one hotel in Iceland, but a string of them; two or three in each part of the country. These were boutique hotels that didn’t need stars to attract the right clientele. The price alone saw to that. Áróra couldn’t be bothered to figure out how much it had cost to build this business, not forgetting the buildings themselves, which appeared to belong to a property company that seemed to belong to Hákon too, via a few financial twists and turns.

It looked as if Hákon Hauksson, who had been personally declared bankrupt – with debts of a good two billion krónur owed to a German bank, and not far off another billion owed to this and that fund – was sitting on property in Iceland that would easily be enough to cover all those debts. On top of that, if the media reports were anything to go by, this was all common knowledge. 45The pharmacy chain’s bankruptcy proceedings had been concluded, and the assets – or rather, the debts – had been shared out among the creditors. Most of these were Icelandic banks, which had mercilessly pursued people who were behind on their mortgages, but which had been unable or unwilling to use the same tactics on their largest debtors, such as Hákon.