Hekla paused at the end of the pool and rested. Thirty lengths was respectable, she decided and hauled herself out onto the edge, not bothering to swim the few meters to the steps. It was cold and she instantly shivered, drops of cold rain that wanted to be snow landed on her back as she made for the hot tub at a brisk pace.
There was space alongside two chatting women and a man who appeared to be asleep in the scalding water as Hekla lowered herself gingerly into the tub, gasping at the sheer intensity of the heat after the chill air.
“Young Tommi’s being confirmed this year, you know. I don’t know where the time’s gone,” the larger of the two women said. “It seems like it was only yesterday he was being christened.”
“You’ll be a great-grandmother before you know it, if he takes after his father,” the smaller one laughed.
Hekla relaxed and stretched her neck back to ease the stiffness that had accumulated across her shoulders over the last few days. It felt odd being in this pool. Normally she would have gone for a swim at the pool nearer home, but that only opened in the afternoons, which meant that she would have to take at least one of the children with her. She reflected that there was no way she could take one twin and not the other, and with both in tow, there would be no thirty lengths for her. So a visit to the Grafarvogur pool it had to be while the children were at a neighbor’s house for a few hours, combining it with a couple of other errands in town.
“We had wondered about the catering. My Muggi wants to use the masonic hall, of course, but I’m wondering about which caterer to use.”
Hekla closed her eyes and let the sound of the two twittering women wash over her as she let the tension seep out of her legs and into the hot, sulphurous water.
“Did he really?” The smaller woman asked mischievously. “He never told me about that, the little devil.”
“He did, my Muggi said he saw him at it.”
Hekla came to with a sudden jerk, conscious that she had almost been asleep, and looked up to see the pale blue eyes of the corpulent man with elegant grey hair she had hardly noticed looking into hers with a disturbing intensity. Flustered, she looked away and ran a hand through the short hair above her ears, massaging her scalp with her fingers while the man looked at her with a mixture of confusion and surprise. He opened his mouth as if to speak, and quickly shut it again, as if he’d thought better of it.
“What those boys don’t get up to. But it’s so much better for them than being cooped up inside in front of the television all day, don’t you think. Are you going to Florida again this year?” The larger one asked, the pair unconscious of the tension brewing next to them.
“Oh, next month, I think. February’s such a miserable time, isn’t it?”
Hekla risked a glance back at the man and saw that without the two women chatting next to them, he would have said something to her. She forced a brief smile at him and stood up, hot water cascading from her arms as the chill air bit again, just as the man opened his mouth to speak. Before he could say anything, she had waded past him and was up the steps and trotting to the changing room.
He stared at faces in the street, hoping that eventually he would see the features of that blasted woman who had caused him so much grief. Jóel Ingi was furious, mostly with the woman he knew only as Sonja and who was still there on personal.is, where he had stumbled across her and so much else. He wondered what Hinrik had done and why he needed more money so soon. The man had promised results and so far he had the feeling that his cash had been wasted, nevertheless, he’d been left with no option but to dig into his savings.
Angry, he walked faster, as if the expended energy would make him feel better. He knew that he should have gone to the gym to work off a little of the aggression he could feel building up in his biceps. The urge to vent some of the pressure grew inside him and, without realizing it, he found that he was almost running along the street, with passersby giving him quizzical looks.
He fought to control his breathing, which came in gasps, and to calm down he told himself over and over again that there was nothing he could do. He would have to wait. He conjured up a warm, soothing voice in his mind, which he tried to imagine guiding him when he felt this way, the dark brown, earthy female voice that normally reassured him. He slowed his pace and his heart gradually stopped pounding. The sensation of overwhelming pressure in the center of his chest began to fade and he took deep breaths, great gulps of clean air, which he released as slowly as he could. Suddenly he felt exhausted; it was time to rest.
Hekla looked over her shoulder as she hurried from the changing room, through the turnstile, and into the car park. Behind her a pall of steam continued to rise from the open-air pool; she hoped the man was still in the hot tub where she had left him. She had changed at a speed the bulky man could hardly hope to match, she thought, throwing her towel onto the back seat as she sat behind the Toyota’s wheel and groaned as it whined and declined to start.
“No. Not now, you bitch,” she whispered to the car, leaning forward and resting her forehead on the steering wheel while forcing herself to rest the starter for a few seconds. “Go on. Do it. Do it for me. Start,” she muttered, gasping a sigh of relief as the engine coughed into unwilling life, leaving a cloud of black smoke behind it.
With a glance over her shoulder, she gunned the Toyota’s complaining engine and the car slipped sideways as the wheels failed to grip on the frozen ground, finally finding a purchase as she eased the accelerator and the wheels stopped spinning. The car bounced across the car park just as a heavily built man jogged from the pool door, catching a glimpse of Hekla’s cropped head behind the wheel of the battered red Toyota as his own four-wheel-drive car started the first time.
He sped onto the main road, narrowly avoiding a collision and waving his apologies to the driver of the bus that had managed to stop just in time. Not knowing which way the red car had gone, he hoped it had gone right and sped faster than was wise though the slush. He took the first roundabout at a dangerous pace and prayed that the police weren’t out, putting his foot down along the road past Korpúlfsstadir and the course where he occasional played a few holes. He ignored the speed bumps and was finally rewarded with the sight of a down-at-heel red car in the distance. Resisting the temptation to put his foot down and close the distance, he kept it carefully in sight, and was able to see well in advance which way it went at the next roundabout.
The red car was making its way along Vesturlandsvegur, the main road that passed through the last suburbs of the city outskirts before the stretch to the Hvalfjördur tunnel and the countryside beyond.
He chewed his lip and wondered where the car was going. He was certain it was the same woman. The hair was different, cut very short and made spiky by the moisture and steam, but she looked so familiar. That figure was the same, with those heavy breasts that he’d last seen encased in electric-blue PVC. He told himself bitterly that he had seen more of them through the blasted woman’s demure swimsuit than he had during the session at the Arctic Hotel that had cost him so dear. On top of that, her listing was still there on personal.is.
From under the lids of half-closed eyes he had watched her relax in the hot tub, concentrating on the face alone, certain that the strong jawline and narrow, slightly kinked nose in a long but shapely face belonged to the same woman. Watching the car from a distance and with time to think, his blood boiled with anger at the humiliation, as well as the fact that she had bled his account dry. Taking deep breaths and telling himself to be calm and maintain a steady speed as the red car passed through Mosfellsbær without stopping, he reminded himself that the bitch had at least kept her word. She had skinned his credit and debit cards, but had only used them once, plus he had been released from his bonds exactly when she had said he would be. That didn’t detract from the fact that he’d had to borrow money for the first time in years to tide himself over that month.