‘Mum, the next step is that I have to get in touch with everyone in Iceland who knows Ísafold,’ she said in measured tones. ‘That’s relatives and neighbours, to figure out who saw her last and when. Like Daníel said, work out a timeline. He’s checking to see if she was registered leaving the country.’

‘I’ll call her friends here,’ her mother said. ‘Even if they haven’t been in touch, Karen or Abby could have heard from her if she’s thinking about coming home.’58

Her mother used the word ‘home’ to refer to Britain, but Áróra knew well that Ísafold was so stubborn, she always meant Iceland when she said ‘home’.

59

24

Daníel had pushed the mower in a circle around the garden a couple of times before he realised that it wasn’t picking up grass. The bag was full. He had been caught up in his own thoughts ever since Áróra had left, and now there was freshly cut grass strewn across the lawn. He’d either have to rake it up or else empty the bag and go over the lawn again to pick up the clippings. He took the second option, and the pleasant mutter of the engine was like an accompaniment to his thoughts, as if they needed the stream of bass notes to help them take root in the earth, otherwise they would fly away into the sky and flutter about in his imagination.

There were two aspects of all this that bothered him. To start with, there was Ísafold’s disappearance. The family had good reason for concern. It was perfectly true that people could vanish intentionally, in response to an argument with a spouse, or fleeing abuse, and there were teenagers constantly going missing, as he knew well from his years in uniform. But people like Ísafold, with a place to live and a family around them, didn’t just vanish – not unless something was very wrong.

He had made all of the usual preliminary calls to A&E, the police station, the women’s refuge, the Vogur rehab clinic. Ísafold hadn’t been seen at any of these places, and with each call the feeling grew inside him that there was nothing routine going on here, that this was all something strange. This was a feeling he often experienced as he began digging deeper into a case; there would be that little blink of light in his head, the pebble in his shoe, the irritating buzz in his ears that told him he was right to be suspicious. This was an insight that had more than likely always been there but which he had only begun to trust as he got older, and it always preceded something unpleasant.