Trap

by Lilja Sigurdardóttir

  ‘Yes?’ a man’s voice said, and his heavy breathing could be heard.

  ‘When the invoice reaches you, the interest is the LIBOR rate plus the usual Deutsche Bank rate,’ Agla’s voice said.

  The man asked why.

  ‘Each payment is reduced, as the LIBOR interest rate is lower than you had in mind, but then, there’s the opportunity to offset the companies’ interest payments against corporation tax, as long as the loans are on the usual terms,’ Agla said, speaking firmly and fast.

  ‘Even though the payment ends up within the same group?’ the man’s voice asked

  ‘Yes.’

  Finnur switched off the recording, picked up his phone and dropped it into his pocket. ‘As you can hear, that was an intercepted phone call,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ María said, holding back the flood of questions she wanted to ask.

  ‘Interested?’ he asked in a low voice, one eyebrow raised.

  María was – she would have liked to have known a great deal more about this recording, but she held herself back.

  ‘That depends on how old this recording is and it also depends on why you’re letting me listen to it,’ she said calmly, reluctant to reveal her enthusiasm.

  He met her gaze for a moment and nodded. ‘This is all confidential, obviously.’

  ‘Naturally,’ she replied. It had been a long time since she had been involved in a confidential case. ‘Is this a case that’s in progress?’

  Finnur shook his head. ‘It can’t become a formal case,’ he said. ‘We can’t justify … what shall I say? … according to the rules, how we obtained this recording.’

  ‘Aha.’ María smiled. It was no secret that phone-tapping warrants were sometimes used a little too freely.

  ‘I know I can trust you one hundred per cent?’ There was a question in Finnur’s voice.

  ‘You can,’ María said. ‘But it’s uncomfortable not knowing where you want to take this.’

  It was true. She intensely disliked blurred lines.

  ‘Let’s say that we need something that could provide grounds for this to become a regular investigation. And if you take this on, then you’ll have to do it on the proviso that there is no formal warrant,’ he said. ‘On top of that, I’m the only one you discuss this with. However, I can provide assistance. Expense is no problem.’

  ‘How old is this recording?’ she asked, expecting that it was part of the chaos of the early part of 2008.

  ‘It’s ten days old,’ he said, and María suddenly felt wide awake.

  ‘I’ll take a look,’ she said.

  42

  ‘The overseas parent company has received the first invoice, and they’ll forward it to the smelter here, so everyone’s happy,’ Ingimar said with a smile.

  He led her into the living room, which was more old-fashioned than she had expected, with an antique sofa and chairs, cups and plates decorated with seabirds in a glass cabinet and liberation hero Jón Sigurðsson’s likeness on the wall. His room gave the impression of having been set up in the Árbær Museum as an example of the home of a well-to-do, turn-of-the-century burgher.

  ‘Can I offer you a drink?’ he asked, going to an old-fashioned bar on wheels.

  ‘Yes. Thanks,’ Agla said, taking a seat in the armchair that faced the window. There was a magnificent view over the lake in the centre of Reykjavík. The street lights were gradually turning themselves off and the daylight seemed to emanate from the lake’s mirror-smooth surface. ‘Beautiful view,’ she commented, taking a sip from the glass Ingimar handed her.

  ‘It’s complete bullshit that money isn’t important,’ he said, taking a seat in the chair next to hers and waving a hand at the window. ‘This is what money can bring you.’

  ‘True,’ Agla agreed, taking another sip.

  Ingimar swirled the drink in his glass so that the ice cubes rattled. ‘You’ve never made much use of your money,’ he said.

  Agla shook her head. ‘Only investments,’ she said apologetically.

  Ingimar smiled, wagging an amused finger at her. ‘I know your type,’ he said. ‘For you this is a game. Everything’s a competition for you.’

  ‘Almost everything,’ she said, thinking of Sonja. For Sonja she would buy a house like this one, complete with all the trinkets, including a dinner service painted with seagulls in a glass cabinet, so she could pretend to have come from a better family than she did. For Sonja she would do that. The idea made her feel more emotional that she was prepared for, and it wasn’t as if Sonja was likely to accept a house from her anyway. She never wanted anything from her, and now she wasn’t even answering her phone.

  ‘Accounts here are delighted with the tax they can offset. We’re talking a few hundred million krónur every year, so it could hardly have worked out better,’ Ingimar said, lifting his glass, and Agla did the same. ‘Cheers,’ he said. ‘To us.’

  ‘Cheers,’ Agla echoed, and they touched glasses.

  ‘Another drink?’ he suggested.

  Agla shook her head. ‘No. That’s not a great idea before lunch.’

  ‘Coffee, then?’ he said and stood up. ‘I’ll get our morning cup?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ Agla said and followed him to the kitchen. It was a strange, dreamlike feeling to be having a friendly chat with Ingimar, in his house. Jóhann and Adam would quail with a mixture of fear and reverence if they knew. But her dread of Ingimar had seemed largely to evaporate as she had got to know him better, being on his side. It was undeniably better to be with him than against him. She knew plenty of people who had set themselves against this man and come off worse. He was like a spider, with a web that stretched into the most unlikely places.

  She sat at the kitchen table and watched as Ingimar counted the spoonfuls of coffee into the percolator.

  ‘So, now that all your dreams have come true,’ she said, ‘we’ll have to discuss what you can do for us.’

  43

  Bragi took a seat in the inspection room and leaned on the steel table with a deep sigh. His legs were killing him and he was too old to pretend to be more cheerful than he actually was. Atli Thór glanced at him, but Bragi wasn’t worried that he would think less of him for having tired legs. As far as Atli Thór was concerned, Bragi was the hero of the moment.

  They had been standing by the observation window when Bragi pointed at Axel Jónsson coming down the stairs.

  ‘Let’s take a look at this one. He gives me the creeps every time I see him.’

  Atli Thór had grinned slightly, but his expression had become one of astonishment when seven large packages of cocaine were taken from the base of Axel Jónsson’s case.

  ‘It looks like almost four kilos!’ Atli Thór whispered as if he was in church and the contents of the case in front of him were holy relics. ‘I’ll get the police in here.’

  He left the room and Bragi was alone with Axel Jónsson.

  ‘So, now you’re sat here and you’re trying to comprehend that the moment you’ve always feared has arrived,’ Bragi said, watching Axel sit completely still and expressionless against the wall on the other side of the room, staring at the floor.

  He had stopped talking as the suitcase was opened. Until that moment he had chatted happily – about travel, about this and that. His words were cheerful and rapid, convincing Bragi that he had a large shipment with him. Innocent people don’t talk so much. They seemed to be more frightened when taken aside by customs, waiting silently as their luggage was X-rayed, asking in surprise why they had been picked. Smugglers were the ones who acted as if nothing was wrong.

  ‘A shame about the next trip to Greenland,’ Bragi said now.

  Axel flinched. He looked up, met Bragi’s eyes and immediately looked away, staring at the floor again as he rocked impatiently in his seat. Bragi smiled to himself. That was the confirmation he had needed. He said nothing more, but waited, massaging his right knee with his knuckles. It had to be some kind of arthritis.

  Atli Thór returned with
two police officers, and once the paperwork was completed and Axel and the goods had been handed over to the police they went to the coffee room where the team were waiting in excitement. Someone had gone to fetch a large cream cake that stood on the table.

  ‘The man has a sixth sense!’ Atli Thór called out and slapped Bragi on the back in delight to celebrate their achievement. ‘A sixth sense!’

  44

  Thorgeir was in much the same state as when Sonja had seen him last. He was still wearing the same dressing gown. She wondered if it had been washed in the meantime – it didn’t look like it had. She stepped into the hall but declined his invitation to sit in the living room. She took an envelope of cash from her pocket and handed it to him.

  ‘And … y’know?’ Thorgeir asked, clearly agitated.

  Sonja smiled and put a hand into her other pocket to take out a small bag of cocaine. There was no mistaking Thorgeir’s obvious relief.

  ‘Good,’ he said, dropping the bag into the pocket of his dressing gown. ‘It’s a royal pain having to buy this stuff on the open market. You know how much this stuff costs? It’s insane what they charge for it now. Insane.’

  Serves you right, Sonja thought, delighted that he had been given a taste of his own medicine, even if it was in just a small way.

  ‘And you have something for me?’ she asked.

  Twenty minutes later she was standing outside Bragi’s place. It was a terraced house with a drive and flowerbed at the front – a sensible home; exactly the kind of house she would have expected him to live in. She waited, holding the slip of paper with the two names on it, as he pulled up in a car that seemed to be two sizes too small for him.

  As he approached her, he seemed to sense what she was thinking. ‘Economy. I no longer spend anything on things that don’t matter,’ he said as he walked towards the door.

  She followed him inside and this time he beckoned her to follow him into the living room. The sofa and coffee table were in a corner of the room while the centre was occupied by a hospital bed. A small old lady sat in a wheelchair next to it and looked at them with empty eyes as they entered the room. In the glass-fronted display cabinets, in between the porcelain figurines, Sonja could see plastic medicine bottles. Bragi stooped to kiss the top of the woman’s head and her expression brightened for a moment.

  ‘This is my wife, Valdís,’ Bragi said. ‘Valdís, this is Sonja, who is working with me now.’

  Valdís’s eyes focused on the visitor, but Sonja could not be sure if the introduction had been understood. It was obvious that this broken person had once been beautiful, with high cheekbones and thick waves of silver hair that lay over slim shoulders.

  ‘Hello,’ a young woman with Asian features said as she came into the living room with a fashion magazine in her hands.

  ‘Good afternoon, Stephanie,’ Bragi said. ‘This is my colleague, Sonja, who has dropped by for a cup of coffee. Did everything go well today?’

  ‘Fine,’ Stephanie said and took a seat next to Valdís, opened the magazine and began pointing to the pictures.

  The old lady seemed to be immediately engrossed in a dream world of beautiful dresses and parties, as if Sonja and Bragi were no longer standing there at her side.

  They left the room and Sonja had just sat at the kitchen table when her pay-as-you-go phone rang. She saw Adam’s number and excused herself, going out into the hall to take the call.

  ‘You have to go to London right away,’ Adam told her, his voice agitated. ‘Everything’s gone to fuck!’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ Sonja said with poorly feigned sympathy, and with a fixed grin on her face, unable not to gloat. ‘I’m supposed to go next week, aren’t I?’

  ‘You have to go this week,’ Adam hissed.

  ‘I can’t. I had planned to go next week,’ she said hearing him gasp for air as he made an effort to keep control of himself. She could imagine him standing with his fists clenched and the veins in his neck pulsing.

  ‘Now, if I were to get to see Tómas…’ she began, and to her amazement Adam immediately responded positively.

  ‘One evening, Sonja. He’ll come to see you this evening and you go to London tomorrow.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said quickly. ‘Okay.’

  Her heart swelled with delight. She would see Tómas today.

  Bragi handed her a cup of steaming coffee as she came back into the kitchen.

  ‘I’m going to London tomorrow,’ she said. ‘And I’ll be back during your Sunday evening shift.’

  Bragi nodded.

  ‘You can expect to have to travel straight to Greenland with the goods,’ he said, and groaned as he lowered himself into a kitchen chair. He was clearly having trouble with his back or his legs.

  ‘Greenland?’

  ‘Yes, and it’s a fantastically smart idea,’ he said. ‘All the effort that goes into tracking drugs is south to north. If you travel from north to south, then customs are pretty much just for show. This stuff goes from Greenland over to Canada by sea and who knows where it ends up? Probably in some big city over there.’

  ‘The stuff I’m bringing in to Iceland ends up in Canada?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Bragi said. ‘At least, a large proportion of it. And that’s logical, considering the volumes you’re carrying. I’m relieved that Iceland is just a jumping-off point for material that’s on its way to America. This stuff isn’t all going up Icelanders’ noses.’

  He sipped his coffee and looked thoughtfully down at the floor. Sonja wordlessly handed him the slip of paper that Thorgeir had given her.

  ‘The mule is Illugi Ævarsson. The other name, Thorsteinn Thorsteinsson, is the lawyer who makes the payments and hides the cash,’ Sonja explained. ‘I don’t know if you can do anything towards putting him out of action.’

  Bragi nodded and folded the slip of paper into his uniform shirt. ‘Let’s see,’ he said.

  Sonja finished her coffee and stood up. She was already mentally planning a trip to Greenland.

  45

  María went through the collection of sound files Finnur had sent her. She had been surprised that he had sent them, not from his office email address, but instead via a personal Gmail account. She realised that he wanted to be cautious, as these recordings had been carefully excluded from any official records. There were fifteen files, all phone calls, and most of them lasting less than two minutes.

  She had already requested a listing of Agla’s phone calls over the last month; doing this was by now practically a formality and the phone companies routinely handed over phone data and no longer argued about it. She had placed the request for Agla’s calls among a pile of others that were being sent, so nobody noticed that an extra one had been sneaked in.

  She disliked this kind of working practice – and that was putting it mildly. It would have been closer to the mark to say that it upset her to step outside the rules, although she had been aware from the outset, from when she started investigating cases related to the financial crash, that sooner or later she would have to get her hands dirty. This, strangely, was the first time that she had needed to bend the rules in person, though. She could find solace in the request having come from higher up. This was Finnur’s responsibility.

  It was almost dinner time, so she packed everything up and decided to listen to the recordings at home. They always had dinner at seven, even when Maggi cooked – her preference for regularity had infected him over the ten years they had been together. She appreciated the routines they had built up and which were her lifeline, part of the persona she had, with great difficulty, forged for herself, and that made her wild younger years increasingly distant – a painful memory that became fainter as time passed. She had been a crazy teenager, completely at the mercy of her own whims. It was not until she was into her twenties and woke up one morning after a party with a raging hangover in a heap of naked strangers that she decided it was time to change.

  She held her jacket closed around her on the way out to her car. It
was blowing hard down by the sea. She had parked some way from the office in order to secure a space where the doors of the cars parked alongside would not damage the paintwork on hers. It wasn’t as if this was some classy car – it was just an economy model that she had selected after carefully comparing figures on fuel consumption and breakdown frequency, but any tiny dents in the paint infuriated her. She could simply not understand why people didn’t take more care when they opened their car doors in public car parks.

  When she arrived home, Maggi was about to put food on the table. It was five minutes to seven; she smiled with satisfaction.

  ‘Hi, darling,’ she said, planting a kiss on his cheek. ‘What’s for dinner?’

  ‘Tuna and pasta,’ he replied, and there was no need to say more. There was always a healthy salad with dinner.

  This lack of friction in their relationship was something she always treasured. She sat at the table and he spooned food onto the plates. She had established a rule that the portion on the plate was dinner. Seconds were only at Christmas. This was how they both stayed slim.

  ‘I need to work after dinner,’ she said. There was an agreement about that as well. Weekday evenings were available for work, if required, except for Friday, which was movie night.

  ‘Okey dokey,’ Maggi said. ‘I’ll go for a swim.’

  She cleared up after dinner. This was another household rule: the cook didn’t have to wash up. She filled the kettle to make some tea. She was tired and needed a dose of caffeine before listening to all fifteen phone conversations.

  46

  Tómas shivered with impatience while his father searched his pockets, patted his stomach and ran his fingers inside the waistband of his trousers.

  ‘You know if you have your passport with you, or there’s any trouble, then you’ll never see your mother again,’ he said.

  It was like the dream he had so often. He would be walking up the stairs in his Mum’s block and the smell of the place would set his heart racing as it brought with it the promise that soon … soon he would be able to throw himself into his mother’s arms, she would kiss the top of his head, crush him to her and whirl him around. But the staircase was long in his dream, stretching away above him, so he had to climb and climb without getting any closer to his mother.