She carried it indoors.
Back in her bedroom, she flipped open her laptop and logged on to the Thomocoin site, carefully typing out the string of characters of the wallet address and then the private key which her mother had copied out on that scrap of paper three years before.
Wow.
At the current Thomocoin price of $338, Mum’s total holdings were worth $2.6 million!
Wow.
Dísa scrolled over the transaction history. Mum’s initial purchase was there at the Thomocoin launch price of a hundred dollars. So the price had more than tripled over three years. Not a bad result since during that time prices of all the other cryptocurrencies had fallen sharply and had only recently recouped their losses. As Grandpa had said, more Thomocoin had been added to the wallet over the years with the label ‘commission’, and Mum had made a steady series of top-up payments, presumably with the bitcoin she had also received for selling Thomocoin to all her friends.
For a small town, Dalvík contained quite a few wealthy people, Dísa knew. Throughout the twentieth century, it had been a big fishing port, its harbour crammed full of small fishing boats, which meant that when in the 1980s fishing quotas had been granted to every fisherman based on his catch in the year 1983, it had been a bonanza for many of the town’s inhabitants. Over the years, almost all the fishermen had sold their quotas on to the large fishing company which now dominated the town and its harbour. The bright little fishing boats had disappeared, to be replaced by large trawlers fishing the consolidated quotas with brutal efficiency. As a result, Dalvík’s former fishermen had serious money to invest. As did their heirs.
Mum had known them all.
For the first time, Dísa wondered what would happen to all her mother’s money. She didn’t know if Mum had made a will, but she knew that under Icelandic law the children inherited most of it anyway. Which meant her and Anna Rós.
With $2.6 million they should be able to secure the future of Blábrekka.
Yet another tear ran down Dísa’s cheek.
Mum would like that.
The back streets of Dalvík were dead. Which was just how they should be at 1 a.m. in the middle of a pandemic. They had probably been just as dead at 10 p.m., but he wanted to be safe.
He always wanted to be safe.
He was walking uphill out of town towards the ski lift, which was dimly discernible in the moonlight. Behind him the horizon shimmered green — the northern lights. He paused for a moment to admire them, then left the road to skirt the village along the lower slopes of the mountain.
As he approached the church, silhouetted against the fjord, he counted back to figure out which was the house he wanted.
It was large by Icelandic standards, a simple rectangular structure made of concrete with a corrugated metal roof, a double garage and a shed. He had decided to try the shed first, around the side of the house.
It was unlocked. He couldn’t see anything inside, but he avoided risking the flashlight on his phone until he had shut the door behind him.
The shed was full but well organized. A snowmobile took pride of place in the centre, and two sea kayaks leaned against one wall. Shelves stacked with tools, tarpaulins and fishing equipment lined the back wall. Bags of salt, shovels and spades crowded the front wall near the door.
He stood and thought. He needed a good hiding place, but not one that was too good.
His eyes alighted on the kayaks.
Perfect.
He unslung the day pack from his shoulder and took out a plastic bag. He extracted the item with his gloved hands, and dropped it into the kayak, out of sight a little way down from the seat, at about the place where your feet would go.
Then he turned off the flashlight on his phone and slipped out of the shed into the Dalvík night.
Eleven
The aeroplane descended as it approached Akureyri, following a broad valley with mountains pressing in on either side until it passed over a small airport and banked 180 degrees above the town to head back towards the runway at the head of a fjord. Although Akureyri was the largest town in Iceland outside the Reykjavík area, it was tiny by American standards: fewer than twenty thousand souls clustered around a twin-pronged church on a hill at the head of a long thin fjord that pointed due north towards the Arctic Ocean.
Magnus searched for the settlement of Dalvík halfway up the western shore, but it was hidden by a kink in the fjord. He remembered he had stayed there once with his father and little brother on one of their joint trips back to Iceland from Boston when he was a teenager, but he couldn’t recall much about it, except there were a lot of fishing boats.
As the plane landed he checked his phone. One missed call. Eygló.
He considered skipping it, but if he was going to call her back, now was the time to do it, before he became fully embroiled in the investigation.
‘Hi, Magnús,’ she said as she picked up.
‘Hi.’
‘I got your text that you won’t be here tonight. When are you expecting to get back?’
‘Hard to say. You know what it’s like. If we crack the case today, then maybe tomorrow night. But it could be longer, maybe even a week or more.’
‘Oh.’
‘What is it?’
‘I need to talk to you.’
‘Can it wait?’
‘Not really. I got an interesting email on Friday,’ Eygló said.
‘Oh yes?’
‘It was from an English university. Southampton. They want to talk to me about lecturing there.’
‘That’s good.’ Magnus hesitated. ‘Would they want you to move?’
‘Not right away. I can do it on Zoom from next term. But they would like me to move there next academic year, if I get the job. Next September.’
‘I see.’
‘I think I’m going to say “no”, but I wanted to speak to you first.’
‘Would it be good for your career?’
‘Yes. It’s a good university. And it will make the TV documentaries easier to do if I am living close to London.’
‘What about Bjarki?’
‘A couple of years in British schools would be good for him.’
‘Sounds to me like you should at least go for the interview,’ Magnus said. ‘Or talk to them on Zoom or something.’
Silence. Although she was hundreds of kilometres away, Magnus could feel Eygló’s expression. Not good.
‘Eygló? What is it?’
‘Don’t you know what it is?’
Magnus knew. But he didn’t know what to say.
‘Bye, Magnús.’ And she was gone.
Magnus stared out of the aircraft window as it taxied towards the terminal.
On the surface, all was well with his relationship with Eygló. But for almost a year now, she had been signalling she wanted more. She wanted more permanence. She wanted Magnus to actually live with them. She wanted to get married. She wanted to have a child with him.
And he didn’t. Not really.
He didn’t understand his lack of enthusiasm, and neither did she.
After all, he had been searching for permanence for years, for a family, for a place he could call home, and Eygló was offering that. He and she got on well together. She understood him. Small, lithe and sexy, she was undeniably attractive, in an impish way.
He loved her.
Didn’t he?
He said he did.
In which case, why didn’t he leap at Eygló’s suggestion that they build a life together?
Magnus hadn’t given her an answer. He hadn’t even really acknowledged the question. He was hiding from it. Which was why he had spent the first Saturday night in weeks at Tryggvi Thór’s house.