‘I’m sure you have spoken at length to my colleagues yesterday,’ Magnus began. ‘I’ve come to ask you about Helga’s dealings in Thomocoin. I understand that Helga had invested in it herself, and that she sold it to a number of friends and neighbours?’
‘She did,’ said Hafsteinn. ‘Including me and her brother. But if you want to talk about that kind of stuff, Dísa is the expert. My granddaughter.’
‘I’ll get her,’ said Íris, leaving the room, and a minute later returning with a very tall, nervous-looking girl with light brown hair.
Hafsteinn and Íris seemed proud of their granddaughter, and with good reason. She gave a clear explanation of what Thomocoin was and how she had introduced it to her mother. Then she fetched her laptop, logged into her mother’s wallet, and showed Magnus her holdings.
‘Am I reading this right?’ said Magnus. ‘Two point six million dollars. Not krónur?’
‘Dollars,’ said Dísa.
‘Jesus,’ said Magnus. He turned to Árni. ‘Does Ólafur know she had that much Thomocoin?’
‘We only discovered it last night,’ said Hafsteinn. ‘When Dísa checked. We knew she had a few hundred thousand. Enough to pay off the mortgage on the farm. But not that much.’
‘I have to ask this,’ said Magnus. ‘Who inherits? Did Helga have a will?’
‘I’m due to see our lawyer tomorrow,’ said Hafsteinn. ‘I know she made a will right after the divorce, and I assume she left it all to Dísa and her younger sister, Anna Rós.’
‘Mum was going to use the money to bail out the farm,’ said Dísa. ‘And if I inherit it, that’s what I’ll do with it too. And so will Anna Rós.’
‘And how old is Anna Rós?’
‘She’s sixteen.’
‘She found the body,’ said Árni to Magnus, with knowing emphasis.
Dísa spotted it. ‘You don’t think Anna Rós did this?’ she said with a look of horror. ‘That’s just mad. Totally crazy.’
Árni had picked up the wrong end of the stick and started waving it around the room. ‘No, not at all,’ said Magnus. ‘I know how devastated both you and she must be about your mum. But in a murder investigation everyone gets asked difficult questions.’
He smiled. Dísa was watching him. She seemed to trust him. ‘All right.’
‘Is it easy to sell this Thomocoin?’ Magnus asked. ‘Is it quoted on one of the cryptocurrency exchanges? Coinbase or Binance, for example?’ He had checked his notes on the bitcoin-mining heist on the plane to refresh his memory about cryptocurrency.
‘That’s a very good question,’ said Dísa. ‘The answer is no, or at least not yet.’
‘Any day now,’ said Hafsteinn.
Dísa ignored her grandfather. ‘Thomocoin was launched almost three years ago, in December 2017. They said then they were working on an exchange that would allow investors to sell their Thomocoin for dollars or euros or even krónur, and it’d be ready in, like, a few months. But it still hasn’t been set up.’
‘Why not?’ asked Magnus.
‘They say that the regulators are taking their time.’
‘It’s the haters,’ growled Hafsteinn.
‘Haters?’
‘Yes. The big banks. The central banks. The governments. They all need to keep control of money. Thomocoin scares the crap out of them. If we all use Thomocoin, then who will need dollars? Who will need banks? So they’ve launched a global PR campaign to discredit cryptocurrencies, especially Thomocoin.’
‘What do you think?’ Magnus said, turning to Dísa.
She glanced at her grandfather, who was glaring at her.
‘Maybe,’ she said diplomatically. ‘I know Mum was worried about it. She called me last week to ask me what I thought. To be honest, I haven’t been following Thomocoin that closely. I gave Mum all my bitcoin three years ago. But it is a bit odd that it’s taken so long.’
Hafsteinn snorted.
Magnus wondered where Dísa had got her bitcoin from. Drugs? Very unlikely, looking at her. Bitcoin mining? A relative?
‘The thing is,’ Dísa went on, ‘if there is a problem, it wouldn’t just be for her. I didn’t realize it until Grandpa told me last night, but Mum persuaded all kinds of people in Dalvík to buy Thomocoin.’
‘And at the hospital,’ Hafsteinn added.
‘And if the exchange never materializes, presumably they’ll all be in trouble?’ Magnus raised his eyebrows. Dísa knotted hers.
‘The exchange will happen,’ said Hafsteinn firmly.
‘Did Helga ever say anything about her worries to you?’ Magnus asked the old man.
‘Not really,’ said Hafsteinn.
‘Yes, she did, Steini.’ His wife spoke for the first time. ‘That’s why she went to Reykjavík last week. To speak to Ómar about it.’
‘Ómar?’ Magnus asked.
‘Helga’s ex-husband,’ said Hafsteinn.
‘He was the one who originally told me about Thomocoin,’ said Dísa. ‘A friend of his set it up. I didn’t know Mum came to Reykjavík last week, Grandpa,’ she said to her grandfather. ‘Why didn’t she come and see me?’
‘Flew down and back in the day,’ Íris said.
‘Is he the one you originally got the bitcoin from?’ Magnus asked Dísa lightly.
‘Er...’ Dísa bore the expression, so familiar to Magnus, of an honest person who has just incriminated herself.
‘Never mind,’ he said. Buying bitcoin was still illegal in Iceland, as far as he knew; he wasn’t sure about Thomocoin. But he wanted Dísa’s help and trust, not her confession. ‘Can you give me your father’s details?’
After he had written them down, Magnus asked for the names of people Helga had sold Thomocoin to. Hafsteinn reeled off a list of a dozen names that he knew about, including himself, his son Eggert and Gunni Sigmundsson. Dísa explained that Helga had received a commission from every sale, and that she had in turn bought the Thomocoin from a woman called Fjóla Rúnarsdóttir.
‘Multi-level marketing,’ said Magnus.
‘What’s that?’ Hafsteinn asked.
‘More commonly known as a pyramid scheme. You get a commission on every product you sell to your friends. It could be vitamin supplements. Or cleaning products. Or a new cryptocurrency. Then when your friends sell the product to their friends, you get a cut of their commission on that. So the higher up the chain you are, or the closer to the top of the pyramid you are, the more money you make.’
‘Yes. I think that’s the way it worked,’ said Hafsteinn. ‘Sounds clever to me.’
‘Until eventually, someone ends up with lots of cleaning products and no one to sell it to. Or lots of cryptocurrency.’
Dísa was watching Magnus closely. ‘Maybe Mum was right to be worried.’
‘Did Helga keep a complete list of those names?’ Magnus asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Hafsteinn.
‘She will have done, knowing Mum,’ said Dísa. ‘It’ll be on her computer. You took that yesterday.’
Magnus turned to Árni, who nodded.
‘What about the password to your mother’s Thomocoin account? Can you give us that, please?’
‘It’s called a private key.’ Dísa looked at her laptop, open to her mother’s wallet on the Thomocoin website. ‘Don’t you need a warrant for that?’
‘We’ve got a warrant for her computer,’ said Árni. ‘We can easily extend that to her passwords.’
‘Then do that,’ Dísa said. ‘The thing is, if you’ve got the private key, then you can take all her money. Just like that.’
‘Don’t you trust the police?’ said Árni, bristling.
‘I think it would be smart to have a judge or someone like that involved,’ said Dísa nervously.
Magnus smiled. ‘You’re quite right. We’ll get a warrant. And we’ll ensure that a judge is around when the private key is first used.’