Nick and Kate went out for Sunday lunch and strolled home afterwards through Greenwich Park. Nick encouraged Kate to talk about what she and her friends had got up to in Tuscany, but that didn’t distract her for long from the subject she was finding increasingly fascinating: the identity of Nick’s father. ‘I’ll want to know everything that happens in Reykjavík as it happens,’ she told him. And he assured her she would. In the circumstances, it was an assurance he felt he had to give. Even though he had no idea what was actually going to happen when he presented the card Miranda had given him at the auction. From that point on, all bets were off. Which was something Kate definitely didn’t need to know.

Night came to Reykjavík at last. Wada ate a room service supper, then sat through a couple of hours of Icelandic Sunday night television before heading out for her rendezvous with Kristjan. It had stopped raining, but a chill mist clung to the streets. There were few people about. Even so, Kristjan wasn’t easy to spot in his black jeans, baseball cap and hoodie, one vertical shadow amongst many in the gulf of darkness between the city centre and the Harpa opera house.

‘Ready?’ was all he said before leading the way by an indirect route to the deserted stretch of Hafnarstræti where Quartizon’s Reykjavík branch office was located.

They walked slowly past the door, then doubled back when they were sure no one was following them or just wandering along the street behind them. They appeared to have this quarter of the city entirely to themselves.

Not that there would have been anything dramatic to be seen by anyone who’d happened along. Kristjan keyed in a six-figure number, the door unlocked itself with an obliging buzz and they entered the foyer. Motion-sensitive lighting revealed a space of marbled nothing. From there they took the lift two floors up, emerging into a featureless hallway. The lighting was motion-sensitive here as well. Double doors ahead had the distinctive and faintly mysterious Q inscribed on a plate beside them. They opened when Kristjan keyed in a second six-figure number.

And low lights came up as they entered Quartizon’s office.

It had the look of standard administrative premises: pastel carpeting and walls, with offices and conference rooms opening off a central reception area. The silence and the emptiness were eerie, but no more so than was to be expected from a workplace out of hours. ‘Third office along on the left,’ whispered Kristjan. ‘That’s where the terminal is that Ragnar says we can use.’

‘Not his terminal, I suppose,’ murmured Wada.

‘Definitely not. I guess it belongs to some colleague he’s happy to land in the shit. Come on.’

Kristjan loped ahead and Wada followed.