But that assumed they’d handle the case in a routine fashion. If Driscoll wielded a lot of influence with the Icelandic authorities – a possibility she couldn’t dismiss – the police might be required to devote more resources than usual to the inquiry. The speed with which they’d arrived at the scene suggested this was disturbingly likely.

What was the best thing to do? Make a run for the airport? That would feel like betraying Kristjan and Erla – and Kodaka. If there was a route to the truth, it surely led through the tangled workings of Quartizon, here, in Iceland. On balance, she reckoned the Sol was as safe as anywhere else. And she certainly needed to be somewhere where she could study what was on the pages she’d hidden inside her coat.

The night porter at the Sol paid her little attention. Once again, her inconspicuousness – the cloak of obscurity she seemed to walk around wearing, even in Iceland – was in her favour. She headed up to her room and made herself some tea. The first time she’d used one of the sachets of green tea the hotel supplied the results had been uninspiring, which was only to be expected considering it was of Chinese origin, but any tea was better than no tea when she needed to concentrate. And she did need to concentrate.

Looking through the document confirmed her first impression. The grouped sets of six numbers, each followed by north or west, had to be geographical locations by latitude and longitude. And with latitudes in the sixties it stood to reason many of them were in Iceland.

She downloaded an app on to her phone that offered mapped locations for specific coordinates and looked several up. They were, as she’d suspected, in Iceland – mostly remote, hilly parts of the interior. Some actually impinged on the vast Vatnajökull glacier in the south-east of the country. She checked those three times and there was no mistake.

Based on the lengths supplied by the app for longitudinal and latitudinal degrees, minutes and seconds, each group of four appeared to cover about the same area, amounting more or less to half-kilometre squares. According to Kristjan, Quartizon had been buying up any Icelandic landholdings they could get their hands on. If the list she was looking at was anything to go by, their acquisitions exceeded his worst fears. And she was only looking at a fraction of the whole. There were all the other parcels they hadn’t got the chance to print out to be taken into account.

She picked her way through the notes appended to the list for clues to what was really going on. Kodaka had taught her that details were often more revealing than overall appearances. Details contained unfiltered information. And unfiltered information was exactly what she needed now.