“To get your baby stoned.”

“It’s not a baby, you jerk. It’s not anything. It’s a grain of sand. I can’t give up right away. I’ll give up tomorrow. I promise. Just not now. Two thousand. What’s that to you?”

Erlendur walked back to her. “But you tried. You want to give up. I’ll help you.”

“I can’t!” Eva Lind shouted. The sweat poured from her face and she tried to conceal the trembling that ran through her whole body.

“That’s why you came to see me,” Erlendur said. “You could have gone somewhere else to get money. You’ve done that until now. But you came to me because you want…”

“Cut that bullshit. I came because Mum asked me to and because you’ve got money, no other reason. If you don’t let me have it I’ll get it anyway. That’s no problem. There are plenty of old guys like you who are prepared to pay me.”

Erlendur refused to let her throw him off balance.

“Have you been pregnant before?”

“No,” answered Eva Lind, looking the other way.

“Who’s the father?”

Eva Lind was dumbstruck and looked up at her father with wide eyes.

“HELLO!” she shouted. “Do I look as if I’ve just come from the bridal suite at Hotel fucking Saga?”

And before Erlendur had the chance to do anything she’d pushed him away and run out of the flat, down the stairs and into the street where she vanished into the cold autumn rain.

He closed the door slowly behind her, wondering whether he’d used the right approach. It was as if they could never talk to each other without arguing and shouting, and he was tired of that.

With no appetite for his food any more, he sat back down in his armchair, staring pensively into space and worrying about what Eva Lind might resort to. Eventually he picked up the book he was reading, which lay open on a table beside the chair. It was from one of his favourite series, describing ordeals and fatalities in the wilderness.