She returned to the library, and even though the lunch hour wasn’t over, Ewa let her in, and she sat down at the computer. She shut down the window with Elísa’s bank account, and shook her head at her own behaviour. She couldn’t understand why she had been digging into this woman’s life; it wasn’t just that it was none of her business, but on top of that Elísa had a talent for being annoying.
She opened another of the Meteorite Metals annual reports and hadn’t scrolled far through it when she came across what she had been half expecting to find, sooner or later: the relocation of the company’s headquarters from Indiana in the US to Paris three years before.
Her heart beat a little faster as her suspicions grew, and it skipped a beat when she saw which bank handled the company’s business in France. This was what she had instinctively thought right from the start. Ingimar had a hand in this, and what was more, so did William Tedd.
And it wasn’t just that the bank William worked for in Paris handled Meteorite Metals’ business. It also owned the company.
31
Ingimar was almost at the bridge when his phone rang. He generally ran around the lake in a clockwise direction one day and anticlockwise the next. He tried to alternate the routes, but often the wind was what made the decision for him; he’d start by running with the wind behind him so he wouldn’t have to run against it until he had warmed up. He always jogged slowly and could feel that every step was taking a toll on his knees, but this was the nearest thing to an exercise routine he was able to keep to. He had set himself the target of jogging every day, and in his mind this was still what he aimed for. However, the fact of the matter was that he only found time to run around once a week.
He fished the phone from his pocket and put it to his ear, only managing to catch the second half of William’s agitated greeting.
‘Slow down, man,’ he said. ‘I didn’t hear what you said.’
‘A journalist from Iceland turned up at the warehouse today and tried to push her way inside. A woman called María.’
‘At the warehouse in Indiana?’
‘Yes. That’s why I’m concerned. Didn’t you say she was nothing worth worrying about?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Then what’s she doing in the States? She must be on to something if she’s made the effort to travel there in person to ask about aluminium in storage.’
Ingimar’s knees were suddenly even more sore, and he slowed his pace so that he was ambling along. He was a few metres from the bench with the statue of Tómas Guðmundsson, the Reykjavík poet, so he limped over to sit next to him. This particular run had now been ruined.
‘I’ll check her out. It’s the same woman who has been calling me constantly with all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories. She’s also been pestering the smelter with these half-arsed theories. Don’t lose any sleep over it.’
‘I’m not that concerned, but it’s best if we keep this to ourselves and a few others – the way it’s been up to now. It’s awkward if there’s some journalist sticking her nose in and asking all sorts of questions.’
‘I agree completely,’ Ingimar said. ‘I’ll check her out.’
‘Excellent,’ William said. ‘And now I’m about to pull the cork from a rather wonderful Leroy I was given. You should have been here to share it.’
‘Bye for now,’ Ingimar said, standing up.
He would have had nothing against tasting a fine wine, his body fragrant and oiled after an hour at the Turkish baths he always made a habit of visiting when he was in Paris. Instead he was here, in the Reykjavík drizzle, limping home to cook fish for Anton’s dinner.
32
‘Are you in a bad mood, my lad?’ his father asked as he put the fish on the kitchen table.
‘No,’ Anton said, reaching for the butter. If there was something you couldn’t have boiled fish without, it was butter. His father melted some rendered lamb fat to pour on his fish, while he preferred butter that he mashed into his food as if he was still a child.
‘Everything all right with you and Júlía?’
‘Sure,’ Anton replied.
It was true. They were fine. He had been at her house for dinner the day before and her father had clapped him amicably on the shoulder, and they talked about handball for a while before they all watched the TV together. Júlía found the customary time in front of the television after dinner a trial, but Anton enjoyed sitting there, squeezed between Júlía and her mother on the sofa, munching popcorn. There was something about it that gave him a warm feeling. When he grew up, he would have evenings like this with his own family. He had every intention of being the kind of dad who made popcorn and shepherded the whole family onto the sofa to watch lousy television, simply so they could all be together.
Evenings at his own house were pretty tragic: once his mother was in bed and his father was glued to the computer or out somewhere, he was left to watch TV by himself.
‘Did you think about finding me a job on a boat?’
Anton looked at his father.
‘What’s this obsession with seafaring, Anton? There are plenty of jobs out there that are less dirty and dangerous.’
‘You said you’d think it over,’ Anton reminded him.
His father nodded.
‘Are you short of money?’ he asked, as he always did when he was tired of whatever they were discussing and wanted to change the subject.
‘No,’ Anton replied. ‘Not now. But it’s Júlía’s birthday soon, and I was wondering if you could let me have a decent amount so I could take her out somewhere smart for dinner.’
‘Not a problem, my lad.’
His father sat up straight in his chair and looked across at him with interest. ‘Did you have a particular place in mind?’
‘I haven’t decided,’ Anton said. ‘I was hoping you could help me find some quality place with good food, and y’know, waiters and tablecloths. And maybe someone playing the violin. Or … y’know.’
His father grinned.
‘I know. You’re looking for somewhere that’s romantic and classy.’
His father looked him up and down, and Anton had the impression the old man was proud of him.
‘My little boy’s becoming a grown man,’ he said, slapping him once on the arm with a heavy hand. ‘I’ll think it over and find a smart place for the two of you.’
Anton nodded and helped himself to more fish from the dish on the table; and to please his father he picked up the little pot of rendered fat and spooned some of it onto his fish, but keeping clear of the brown stuff at the bottom that the old man liked so much.
‘And a birthday present?’ his father asked. ‘Have you thought about that?’
‘Yes,’ Anton said and felt his heart beat faster.
The birthday present; that wasn’t something he was worried about, although he couldn’t tell his father that. He still had to figure out how to fit a timing switch to the bomb because he didn’t want to be running from falling debris as it went off. He was also finding it hard to work out just how much explosive he was going to need. There was nothing on the internet that told him how much to use to rip apart steel, smash glass and destroy concrete. It was difficult to work out how much dynamite was needed to change the world.
33
It was dusk by the time María returned to the spot where she had parked the car – between some trees not far from the road. Although she had done her best to stay in the shade, the day had left her sunburnt, and now that darkness was about to fall, mosquitoes buzzed in clouds around her and their bites already itched. All the same, she thought the day had been productive. She had counted ten fully loaded trucks driving into the warehouse, and the same ten trucks driving out the other side, still fully loaded, she was sure. She’d watched carefully as the drivers eased their vehicles over the speed bumps to spare their shock absorbers; such caution had to mean the trucks were carrying a lot of weight – what other reason could there be? The trucks were all the same size,
and were all clearly marked with the Meteorite Metals logo. The theory that had been taking shape in her mind as she’d sat on a log on the hillside above the factory was now fully developed. Her thinking was that the warehouse was empty. The trucks driving in and out again were purely for show, just to make it look as if there was some traffic in aluminium here, and it could be registered somewhere and used to play the market. This was all about smoke and mirrors, ensuring a profit for someone who could bypass regulations somewhere, cashing in on deals and swindling the community in the process. She wasn’t sure how the trick worked, but this was her theory. Now she just needed to confirm that the warehouse was empty.
‘It’s too simple,’ Marteinn said as she explained her theory to him over the phone as she drove back towards the motel.
‘Maybe,’ María said. ‘But maybe not. Sometimes things really are exactly what they appear to be. Maybe this shortage of aluminium is just that: a shortage of aluminium.’
‘Too simple,’ Marteinn said. ‘And maybe I could think there’s some other reason why you’re prepared to swallow such a simple explanation, María.’
‘Hey, come on!’ María was taken unpleasantly by surprise to discover that Marteinn’s determination to see conspiracies everywhere had brought him to this point. He clearly hadn’t managed to get his medication tuned. ‘No bullshit, Marteinn. I’m looking for support here, and if you’re not prepared to help then just let me know and I’ll find someone else.’
She was sure that, at the other end of the phone, his eyes were narrowing as his suspicion evaporated, and he was hunching over and hanging his head.
‘What do you need?’ he asked in a low voice.
‘It seems that as much goes into the warehouse as goes out,’ María said. ‘So I was wondering if you could go through directories online and find one or two people who do business with Meteorite Metals and store aluminium there, so I could try and talk to them – ask them about it.’
They ended the call and soon she was outside the door to her motel room. She parked and got out of the car with an uncomfortable feeling: Marteinn’s medication was still out of balance, and she wasn’t in Iceland to keep an eye on him. Going by the directions he was going in, she ought to call his column ‘The Voice of Suspicion’ instead of ‘The Voice of Truth’.
The air in her room was stale and she went into the bathroom and pushed the window wide open to let some fresh air in. The mosquito net was rusted to the window frame, so she couldn’t pull it fully across before turning on the shower, but she decided that a few more bites would hardly make much difference.
34
In the background there was some TV show about a couple renovating an old house. As soon as Agla registered what she was watching, she switched channels. She had been staring numbly at the screen without taking in what was in front of her. Instead, she’d been focused on the confused images passing through her mind – of Elísa buying herself ice cream, eating a hot dog at Bæjarins Besta or sitting in a darkened cinema. It was like a guided tour of Elísa’s life, seen through her bank statements. But this nonsense dissolved when she saw a young couple on the TV, painting the walls of their future home. She felt a stab of pain in her belly. She had looked forward so much to moving into the new house with Sonja. She had relished the idea of turning that white concrete lump into a home, having coffee in the mornings with Sonja, looking forward to being with her in bed, bathed in sweat and groaning with pleasure.
Elísa was having a bad effect on her. Since she had arrived, Agla had been confused; it was disconcerting to be so unsure what to make of the young woman, never certain what she would do next to offend, anger or simply leave her speechless. All the same, she had to admit that life in this cage wasn’t as dull as it had been.
These two feelings – heartache about Sonja and the boredom of prison life – seemed to sit at either end of a scale; seemed to pull her in opposing directions. But all of them – the psychiatrist, the prison chaplain, the prison officers – said there would always be emotional turmoil in the wake of a suicide attempt. So maybe this mental restlessness wasn’t just because of Elísa.
Agla switched off the television and left the room. Guðrún was on duty so Agla took the opportunity to ask to go to the library. She was only supposed to work during the day, but she told Guðrún that she was bored. Having been with her at the hospital, Guðrún was inclined to let her have her way.
‘An hour,’ Guðrún said, shutting the door behind Agla, who pretended to examine the books. As soon as the lock clicked shut behind her, though, she sat at the computer. They often forgot to switch off the wifi in the evenings, and she was in luck – they had tonight too. In her experience the best remedy for heartache was work; it led the mind along other avenues – the right avenues.
She started by going to Companies House to look up William Tedd’s activities in Britain, before moving on to the US and French registries. He sat on the board of so many companies it was difficult to count them all, but after scrolling halfway down the list, she found the confirmation she had been looking for. He was on the board of Meteorite Metals. Agla clicked the blue tab to call up all of the board members’ names. She didn’t know a single one of them. This had to be a sham. There was every chance that the real power behind the company was William and Ingimar. She was about to take a closer look at the board members, but all the links were dead. No internet connection. The wifi had been switched off.
She went instead to Meteorite’s annual reports, which she had downloaded into her hidden folder. She had already been through a decade’s worth of reports and she only had the last two left to read. She scanned the balance sheet, and then switched back to the annual report from three years before to make sense of the figures, but without success. William appeared to have had his bank in Paris buy the company three years before, when it had been in poor shape. Since then it had run at a heavy loss. The amounts of money it had lost over the last two years were astronomical. This was bizarre. She knew William had an impressive track record of buying poorly performing companies, refinancing them so they could get their acts together, before selling them for many times what he had paid for them. On top of that, he was a genius at sniffing out cheap debt all around the world. So it wasn’t like him to buy a company that was doing badly, and then let it get worse. She contemplated a number of possibilities, while searching the reports for information that might confirm her theories, but none of them worked out. He did not appear to be using Meteorite as a dumping ground for losses incurred by other companies, as there was nothing to be seen in the figures to show that Meteorite had increased its borrowing or taken over any loans. The company did not appear to be buying the aluminium it was storing, as there were no stocks listed among its assets. She couldn’t understand it, and that was frustrating. There was no way that the bank, the owner of the company, would tolerate such heavy losses for long. Although William was in a key position at his bank and she knew it was keen to retain him – they were happy to pay him all kinds of hefty bonuses every time someone else made him an offer – she was also well aware that the bank had little patience for loss-making ventures.
‘Cut your losses – stop bleeding’ was a phrase she had drummed into her own staff at her bank in the past.
All this could mean only one thing. If William was running some dubious scheme with this metal-storage company, the bank had to be a part of it.
35
The little diner next to the motel had both filet mignon and surf ‘n’ turf on the menu, but María decided that the burger was likely to be just as good. There were very few customers in the place and the aircon had been cranked up so high that goose pimples appeared on her arms, so she decided to have her food to go. She asked for extra mayo and some plastic cutlery, which the elderly waitress made a fuss of searching for. Once she was outside, though, María decided to drive to the aluminium warehouse and eat in the car then rather than in her motel room.
She parked behind the aluminiu
m store, out of sight of the road, on a gravel track that had to be a service road for the water pipes and air-conditioning units that sat outside the warehouse’s perimeter. The burger was a good one, and she squeezed ketchup into the mayo to mix herself a cocktail sauce that she dipped her chips in. There wasn’t a single window on the high perimeter walls facing her; she was put in mind of a dark, impossibly steep cliff face. She finished her food and slurped up what was left of her Coke, the generous amount of ice the waitress had given her crunching in the bottom of the cup.
María got out of the car and took a deep breath. This was certainly an adventure, although maybe not as exciting as her sweating palms indicated. She only intended to get inside the building, into the section where the aluminium was supposed to be stored, and make sure that it really was empty.
At the front there were plenty of lights, but here at the back, there seemed to be very few. What was more, when she approached the exit through which the trucks emerged, she found that the chain holding the gate closed was slack, allowing her to slip easily through the gap. Inside the perimeter now, she listened out expectantly for the sound of an alarm. But there was nothing.
Next to the goods-out exit she spied a little door with a window in it. She found a large rock on the ground nearby, picked it up and hammered at the glass. She was surprised to find the glass didn’t break. For a moment she stood still, listening, but she heard nothing but the cicadas and the hum of traffic on the distant highway. She wielded the rock again, harder this time, and the glass gave way. She used the stone to tap the remnants of glass away from the edges of the frame. Then she stretched a hand inside and was relieved to find a normal lock, rather than the padlock she had expected. She turned the handle and the door opened.
She stood for a while in the doorway before setting off cautiously, still concerned about setting off any alarms, but after a few paces she was certain that there was nothing. She reflected that it probably wasn’t easy to steal aluminium – anyone trying to would need a fork-lift and a truck; and there needed to be some aluminium in the warehouse to steal – which she was sure wasn’t the case.
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