‘I’m surprised you showed up here,’ said Eggert icily.
‘Helga and I were good friends, back in the day,’ said Sharp. ‘I wanted to come.’
‘You know your Thomocoin is the reason why she was killed?’
‘We don’t know that,’ said Ómar.
‘I know Helga was worried,’ said Sharp to Eggert. ‘Ómar told me. But it’s going to be fine. That’s why I’m in Iceland. To speak to the government. Dot the i’s and cross the t’s on an agreement for an exchange here.’
‘Here?’
‘Yes. Iceland’s the natural place to start. No one uses cash any more, so the infrastructure is in place for non-cash payments. We won’t go straight to Thomocoin being used in shops, but the first stage is an exchange where you can convert Thomocoin into krónur. The Icelandic government gets that. I’ve got a meeting at the Central Bank in a couple of days.’
‘I told you, Eggert.’ It was Hafsteinn. ‘See, Dísa? What did I tell you? Thanks for coming all the way from London, Sharp.’
‘I wouldn’t have missed it.’
The man had charm, Dísa was forced to admit. He looked trustworthy. Dísa could see Eggert was beginning to doubt his scepticism.
But this exchange was years, years, late. For three years Thomocoin had been taking in real money with the promise that the fake money they gave trusting people in return would be worth something very soon.
Well, it wasn’t.
Grandpa was going to lose everything. Including Blábrekka. They had all grown up here: Dísa, Mum, Grandpa and their ancestors going back generations. Dísa had tried to save the farm, had come very close to saving it, but she had failed.
The sadness of that fact, on top of the greater sadness of her mother’s death, was overwhelming.
Dísa didn’t know why Gunni had killed Mum. She suspected that Uncle Eggert was right and it had something to do with Thomocoin. Half the people in the room had trusted Helga, who had trusted Dísa, who had trusted Ómar, who had trusted Sharp. And now they were all going to lose everything.
Dísa was acutely aware of her and her mother’s position in that chain.
She felt responsible.
And she also felt angry.
‘Dad?’
He ignored her, listening to Sharp.
‘Dad?’ She tugged his sleeve.
‘Yeah?’
‘Can we talk for a moment?’ She looked at the crowd. ‘Outside? You’re going back to Reykjavík right after this, aren’t you?’
Ómar’s frustration with his daughter flared. But then he nodded.
She led him out of the back door and a few metres up the slope towards the rock where the hidden people lived, watching over Mum’s private key. A key to nothing.
‘Dad. You’ve got to pay them back. You and Sharp. Pay them all back.’
‘Pay who back? Your grandfather? Eggert?’
‘Not just them. Everyone in Dalvík who invested in Thomocoin. And Mum’s colleagues at the hospital. All of them.’
‘And why would I do that? How am I going to do that? Where am I going to get the money?’
‘They paid good money for their Thomocoin. Where is that? OK, maybe you don’t have it, but Sharp does. And he needs to pay it back.’
‘You heard him. He says there’s going to be an exchange in Iceland soon.’
‘He’s always said that and it’s never happened. He sounds good, but I don’t believe him. Do you? Do you believe him?’
Ómar looked up in frustration and then back at his daughter. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Right,’ said Dísa. ‘Listen, it’s our responsibility that all these people are going to lose so much. You. Me. And Mum. Grandpa’s going to have to sell Blábrekka. You know that, don’t you? It will break him. And Grandma. And you know how Mum would have felt about that, how much the farm meant to her. We need to do this for Mum.’
Anger flared in Ómar’s eyes. ‘I warned you not to get your mother involved in this, didn’t I, Dísa? Don’t you remember? When I first told you about the bitcoin in the restaurant in Akureyri?’
Dísa nodded.
Ómar’s frustration spilled over. ‘I loved your mother, but she was greedy, you know that? When stuff was going on at the bank that shouldn’t have been, back before the crash, I had decided to blow the whistle. I spoke to Helga about it. And she talked me out of it. She said I should trust Sharp; Sharp knew what he was doing. She said we needed the salary, we needed the bonuses.’
He shook his head. ‘We didn’t need the bonuses. We didn’t need a Discovery and a Mercedes. But your mum wanted them.’
‘Dad!’ Dísa could feel her face reddening. ‘How can you say that! You lost us everything.’
‘I did,’ said Ómar. ‘And I will always regret that.’
‘So do something about it! Give the money back. Or get Sharp to give the money back.’
‘I don’t have it,’ said Ómar. ‘And I can’t make Sharp give it back. You heard him. He really does believe there’s going to be an exchange.’
‘Figure out a way, Dad,’ said Dísa.
Ómar watched his daughter stride back into the farmhouse.
He couldn’t face going back in there.
He walked up the hill, hauled himself on to a rock and looked out over the broad green valley.
It really was a beautiful place, his wife’s childhood home. The fjord stretched northwards, its mountain walls eventually coming to an abrupt halt as its waters opened out to the broad horizon of the Arctic Ocean. The flat island of Hrísey floated just a few kilometres offshore, a smattering of white buildings at its southern tip.
He smiled as he remembered how he and Helga had spent a July day out there, the first time he came to Blábrekka to meet her family. They had wandered through the summer houses and found a field of bright purple lupins. Helga had insisted that no one could see them there; Ómar thought the whole fjord could and, besides, there was a stiff breeze coming from the sea. Then Helga had crouched down, wriggled out of her clothes and asked him what he was waiting for, there was no wind down here.
He had loved her then. Her thick red hair, her wicked smile, her sense of adventure.
She had been proud of him, her hot-shot rising-star banker husband. She enjoyed being a doctor, she felt good fixing sick people, but she liked it even more if there was a banker’s salary to help things along. And that salary was shooting up, together with bonuses, as the bank found ever more creative ways to make money.
For the hundredth time, Ómar wished he had stopped the merry-go-round when he could have. It was true that he had asked Helga for her opinion and she had told him to go along with Sharp and the others. But he was the banker. He was the one who knew that secretly lending money to shell companies to buy stock in the bank wasn’t financial genius, it was morally wrong and probably illegal.
He accepted his responsibility for what had happened. He had accepted that he had broken the law and deserved to go to jail, along with four others. They could have taken Sharp down with them, who was then working for the bank’s London branch, but they chose not to.
And, actually, that had worked out. Especially when Sharp had given him the bitcoin and the price had gone up. And he had given some to Dísa, who had traded it so well.
Then another poor decision. Trusting Sharp on Thomocoin. Ómar still hung on to the hope that he hadn’t misjudged his friend, but he knew in his heart he was kidding himself. Dísa saw it. Dísa was smart about these things.
He wasn’t going to lose much. Unlike Dísa and Helga, Ómar had sold most of his bitcoin through Sharp — he needed the money to spend. Sure, he had invested some in Thomocoin, but not everything. Nothing like Helga’s investments.