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understood.’
    Magnus picked her up off the floor and threw her down on to the bed.
    It is extremely difficult to make love to a woman who won’t stop laughing.
    ‘Can I watch
LazyTown
now?’
    Harpa glanced at her son’s plate, which was empty.
    ‘Did you watch TV at Granny’s house?’
    ‘No.’ Markús shook his curly head and looked straight at her with his big clear brown eyes. Harpa knew that small children often lied, but not Markús. He never lied, at least not to her. Where did he get that honesty from? Not from his father, that was for sure.
    And not from her.
    ‘All right, off you go.’
    Harpa followed her child as he scampered into the living room and she slotted the DVD into the player.
    She went back into the kitchen and stacked their dishes in the dishwasher. She liked to eat with her son, even though it was early.
    From out of the kitchen window she looked out over Faxaflói Bay. To the right, behind the oil storage tanks, was the city of Reykjavík, a jumble of brightly coloured houses overlooked by the Hallgrímskirkja, its majestic sweeping spire boxed in by scaffolding. Straight across the bay squatted Mount Esja, a horizontalrampart of granite, still free of snow at this time of year. And to the left lay the small town of Akranes, stuck on the end of a peninsula, a thin trail of smoke emerging from its tall cement-works chimney.
    Her little house was right on Nordurströnd, the road that ran along the north-eastern edge of the prosperous suburb of Seltjarnarnes, which was perched on its own promontory sticking out into the bay. The house had been expensive because of the view, but Harpa had been able to take out a big mortgage to cover the cost, a mortgage that she had been easily able to service with her banker’s salary. She should have taken a straightforward repayment mortgage, but like many other Icelanders she had chosen a loan where the principal was linked to inflation. The advantage was that the monthly payments were lower.
    The disadvantage was that when inflation was high, for example after a massive devaluation of the currency, the value of the loan soon overtook the value of the house.
    She had no banker’s salary any more so she couldn’t afford the payments. The house was now worth less than the mortgage. She was going to lose it, that was inevitable. The only reason she hadn’t lost it already was the government’s temporary edict that the banks had to delay foreclosures until November.
    What would happen then? Perhaps the bank would be lenient. Or perhaps she and Markús would end up living with her parents like some teenage mother just out of high school.
    If her parents could keep their own house, that is. She knew they had financial difficulties – she was after all responsible for them – she just didn’t know how bad they were. And she was too afraid to ask.
    Why had she taken out that stupid mortgage? She had an MBA from Reykjavík University. She knew there was a theoretical risk. She had just been sucked up in the mindless optimism of jam today, jam tomorrow that had swept Iceland.
    She switched on the news. Something about ministers threatening to resign over the agreement the government had made torepay the four billion euros it had borrowed from the British government to bail out depositors in Icesave, the London Internet operation of one of the Icelandic banks.
    Then she heard a name that was all too familiar.
    ‘The Icelandic banker, Óskar Gunnarsson, former chairman of Ódinsbanki, has been murdered in his house in London. He was shot.’
    Harpa froze, the hot water running over the dish she was rinsing.
    ‘Óskar Gunnarsson was under investigation by the authorities in Iceland over alleged fraud at Ódinsbanki prior to its nationalization nearly a year ago. It is not clear yet whether his murder had anything to do with the alleged fraud.’
    Harpa grabbed her laptop and opened it up, looking for more information. As she waited for the computer to boot up,