flight to Reykjavik, shortly after starting work in Greenland. It was the first and last time she would take such a flight. A little girl had wandered into a group of huskies, and her face had been mauled. The sound of her crying, which hadn’t stopped all the way to Iceland, still echoed in Oddny Hildur’s ears, as did the desperate attempts of the girl’s mother to soothe the child. Oddny Hildur’s stomach tightened as she recalled how the girl had looked when she saw her several months later, on one of her few trips into the village, playing with an old doll by the side of the road. It was entirely possible that the dog outside was one of those that had attacked the girl. None of them had been put to sleep. She wondered whether she should swallow her pride and call Gisli, who was in charge of security for the area. He would accompany her to her apartment without a grumble, even though he was probably already asleep. He took his job very seriously, performed it devotedly and was incredibly obliging. On the other hand, she didn’t want to have to endure the ribbing of her co-workers for dragging people out of bed in the middle of the night to walk her the short distance home. She was unpopular enough at the moment. No, she would be fine by herself.
She had heard that dogs did not attack people unprovoked; there was no risk if they were left in peace. She would walk the short distance home briskly, and the dog would stay where it was and then disappear into the night. Before she knew it she would be in bed. Oddny Hildur turned off her computer and prepared to leave. Before she went into the corridor she looked once more through the window and saw the dog still staring at her. Suddenly it tilted its head, as if it were wondering why she had stood up. She regretted having given in to curiosity; now the dog knew that she was on her way out and would lie in wait for her at the door. However, it did not appear to be that cunning – it just sat there, still as stone. Oddny Hildur tugged at the curtain intending to block the dog’s view, but when it emitted a howl she was so shaken that she dropped it. Then she heard a muffled bark, but what startled her most was the creature’s sudden movement. She left the curtain as it was and hurried out. This was getting ridiculous. She turned off the light in Arnar’s office on the way out, but most of the other rooms were already dark. Their electricity came from a diesel-powered generator and she’d had to get accustomed to using it sparingly, which to her was a completely alien idea.
In the vestibule she put on a thick eiderdown jacket that had proven invaluable in this stormy place, and with the damaged face of the little girl in mind she took a scarf from one of the hooks and wound it tightly around her head, leaving only her eyes uncovered. Finally she put on mittens and pulled on the warmest boots she could find. Her shoes were wet, since she had once again forgotten to turn them upside down. The snow on them had melted as she worked, and made them soggy and cold. The same went for her hat, which had fallen off its hook onto the wet floor, so she also grabbed a fur hat to keep the wind and cold out of her ears. No one would miss it, or the scarf and boots, if she came to work early enough the next day. She pushed her trouser bottoms into the boots and stood up stiffly. She was so warmly dressed that she could barely move, and it would be no easier when she got outside, with the wind in her face. She drew a deep breath and opened the front door. Suddenly it struck her that perhaps the dog had been warning her, not menacing her – was there something else she should be afraid of?
The cold invigorated her and she pushed this thought aside. Her unease was probably all due to the video recording she’d just been puzzling over. Just before supper a clip had been e-mailed to her and her co-workers, showing Bjarki and Dori, the two drillers, mucking around in the smokers’ room. Oddny Hildur didn’t know who had shot the video; maybe they’d set up the camera themselves, since there were few others besides the two of them who could bear the little smoke-saturated room for any length of time. However, what had caught her attention was not their stupid antics, but something that shot past the window behind them without their realizing it. Since she had little interest in this kind of foolishness she hadn’t opened the e-mail before supper, when she could have asked her colleagues about it. Maybe the apparition behind them was part of the joke? She had tried unsuccessfully to pause the clip and get a better view of it, but the movement was so swift that she never managed to stop it in the right place.
It looked to her like a person wearing some kind of mask or strange headdress, and after it disappeared a red streak was left behind on the windowpane. The person – or whatever it was – had been holding something red, which must have bumped into the window or been dragged across it on purpose. But what was it? The rapid movement and dark red, irregular streak formed something of a gruesome backdrop to the drillers’ pranks, and her failure to figure it out unsettled her. Maybe she would laugh it off in the morning, but right now she wished she had an explanation. For some reason she couldn’t imagine stopping by the smokers’ room to see if any marks were still there. Deep inside she knew that it was out of fear that the dark red streak was blood.
Oddny Hildur exhaled in the doorway and put her hands in her pockets. The dog was nowhere to be seen. She walked out into the drifting snow and darkness for the last time.
Chapter 1
Thora Gudmundsdottir put down the overview of her last month’s work schedule at the legal firm. It was hardly what she would call encouraging reading: the cases taken by her and Bragi, her business partner, along with two paralegals, were numerous, but mostly small-scale and quickly processed. That was certainly good for the firm’s clients, but it didn’t put much in the till. Nor was it all about the money. The most exciting cases demanded a great deal of work and were more complex than the smaller ones, which were usually run-of-the-mill and monotonous. Thora groaned inwardly. She didn’t dare groan audibly for fear that one of the young lawyers would hear her. If he sensed that she were worried about the firm’s workload, he might start thinking of moving on, and they could not afford that. She and Bragi could never run the firm and everything belonging to it – not least their dreadful secretary, Bella – alone. Although it would be difficult to imagine how it could be possible to do her job any worse than Bella herself did it, Thora had no interest in stepping in for the girl, and Bragi would do whatever was necessary to avoid having to sit and take phone calls. So they would just have to accept this arrangement: these two young lawyers who appeared more interested in YouTube than Supreme Court judgements, and Bella, who also spent more time than was healthy on the Internet.
Thora turned back to the list of clients and cases. Divorces, bankruptcies and other financial entanglements were the most prominent types of case by far. There were some involving inheritances, paternity suits and sporadic minor cases. It was probably not appropriate to think so, but Thora longed for more criminal cases. They were much more demanding than divorces, which Bragi had been specializing in recently. He had built up a good reputation in this area, which meant that more and more people turned to the firm for help when their marriages were on the rocks.
Such cases, however, could often be quite colourful. One of her current clients was a man named Trausti, who wanted to change his name following his divorce since his wife had left him for another man with the same name. Of course it was no trouble to obtain permission to name oneself something other than what was recorded on the church register. But things became complicated when this was not enough for Trausti; he also insisted that their children’s patronymics be changed accordingly. He wanted to make it clear to everyone that he and not his wife’s new partner was the father of his children. Although the laws on namegiving allowed for changes in children’s surnames under special circumstances, the legislation had not foreseen this possibility, thus there was no easy resolution to the case. Thora thought it highly unlikely that a Trausti who did not want to be named Trausti would be permitted to change his children’s surname, especially in light of the children’s mother being totally opposed to the change. Her protestations only made her husband more determined to have his way, and in the end Thora gave in and sent a letter describing the matter to the Minister of Justice. By then Thora would actually have been completely willing to change her
At the time, her own divorce had certainly brought out less than the best in her and Hannes, her ex-husband. However, they hadn’t had the imagination for anything much beyond quarrelling over worldly possessions – which of them would get the flat-screen TV, and so on. Name changes would have been inconceivable. It was probably this experience that distinguished her from Bragi, who enjoyed working on such cases. He had been happily married to the same woman for three decades, and thus had no personal experience of marital failure. Thora, on
