What made the negligence of the data centres more incredible was that a very similar break-in had taken place only the week before at another data centre up the road.
That too had involved computers dedicated to bitcoin mining. Which was something to do with solving cryptographic puzzles to create more bitcoin, the emerging currency of choice for drug dealers and peddlers of ransomware. Bitcoin was based on something called a blockchain. For the blockchain to work, each new bitcoin transaction had to be incorporated into it through solving these puzzles, which involved massive amounts of computer power, and a lot of electricity. The ‘miners’ were paid in new bitcoin created when their computers ground out the solution to the puzzle.
Magnus realized he was going to have to find out more about bitcoin and its miners.
But not right now.
‘Can I leave this with you?’ he said to Sergeant Vigdís, his colleague in CID. ‘I’ve got the afternoon off.’
‘Sure,’ said Vigdís with a grin. ‘And I hope it all goes well with Ási.’
It was a half-hour drive from the data centre through the black roiling lava fields to Álftanes, a little peninsula facing Reykjavík, where Magnus lived. Temporarily.
He parked outside the brown wooden house. A breeze was blowing cold damp air in from the Atlantic — nothing new there for Iceland. There had been snow in the north of the country, but the weather in Reykjavík was its usual changeable self, grey clouds scudding in, dropping diagonally falling rain and scudding out again, leaving glimpses of the sun and glimmering rainbows.
Cold weather for a little kid to be outside, Magnus worried.
Not an Icelandic kid.
He grabbed the plastic football he had bought that morning from the car’s back seat and opened the front door of the house.
‘Hi!’
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ a gruff voice replied from deep inside. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at work keeping Reykjavík safe for its resident idiots? Or shagging your girlfriend?’
‘And a good afternoon to you,’ said Magnus, pouring himself a cup of coffee from the thermos and taking it into the living room where Tryggvi Thór, his landlord, was reading a book in English. The Boys in the Boat, Magnus saw, something about an American Olympic rowing team. Magnus planned to steal it off him when he had finished.
Tryggvi Thór grunted, furrowing his thick dark eyebrows as he read, the corners of his lips pointing downward in something close to a scowl. Magnus sat down opposite him and sipped his coffee.
‘All right, I’ll have a cup,’ Tryggvi Thór said.
Magnus poured him one.
Silence.
‘How’s the rape case going?’ Tryggvi Thór asked eventually.
‘Not good,’ said Magnus. That was another frustrating case, which he had been working on with Vigdís for most of the week.
‘They’re always tricky.’
‘Yeah. It’s the damn phones.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s a he-said-she-said. He says she gave consent; she says she didn’t. He says she’s been sending him texts begging to see him; she says she did want to see him, but she didn’t want to have sex with him.’
‘Sounds familiar.’
Magnus sighed. ‘His lawyer says she wants to see the victim’s phone.’
‘And the victim says no?’
‘She says her phone is private and there are things on there she doesn’t want anyone to see. Things that have nothing to do with the case. So she wants to back out of the prosecution. She says she doesn’t see why, just because someone raped her, she has to lay out her entire personal life before a court of strangers.’
‘Do you believe her? That the messages have nothing to do with the case?’
‘I think so. I can’t be sure. But I’m damned sure she’s telling the truth. She said no and then the bastard raped her anyway. She scratched him on the neck — we’ve got the evidence for that. But unless we can persuade her to turn over her phone, the bastard will walk free. And that really pisses me off. We never used to have this problem, but now it’s happening all the time.’
Tryggvi Thór shook his head. ‘I always hated rape cases.’
Tryggvi Thór had been a policeman, a detective like Magnus, in the Reykjavík CID. He had been kicked out of the force under a cloud in the 1990s and had escaped to Uganda to run a school. But after the death of his African wife, he had returned to his late parents’ home in Álftanes.
Magnus had returned to Iceland himself earlier that summer for a second stint with the Reykjavík Metropolitan Police — he had been away from Iceland for five years, back in his old job in homicide for the Boston Police Department. Given the tourist boom and the season, it had been a nightmare trying to find accommodation in Reykjavík. Magnus had been investigating a robbery with violence at Tryggvi Thór’s house when the retired cop had offered him a room. Magnus had accepted.
Three months into it, and the arrangement suited them both well. Tryggvi Thór was a grumpy bastard, and Magnus liked to be left alone. They respected each other’s desire not to be bothered. Yet more and more they found themselves talking.
Magnus was coming to realize he actually liked the grumpy bastard.
The doorbell rang.
‘Who’s that?’
‘A friend,’ said Magnus, leaping to his feet. He corrected himself. ‘Two friends.’
He opened the front door. A blonde woman wearing a cream-coloured woolly hat was standing there with a small boy clutching her leg. They both looked nervous.
‘Hi, Ingileif,’ said Magnus.
‘Hi.’ Ingileif hesitated, and then reached up to kiss him on the cheek.
Magnus squatted down on his haunches. ‘Hi, Ási,’ he said to the small boy whose bright blue eyes stared at Magnus from beneath a thatch of red hair.
‘Do you remember Magnús?’ Ingileif asked encouragingly.
The boy shook his head and clung more tightly to his mother’s leg. A wave of disappointment washed over Magnus. It was two months since Magnus had met the little boy for the first and only time, by chance on a Reykjavík street with his mother. Magnus knew that the encounter would have meant much less to the boy than it would to Magnus, but it hadn’t occurred to Magnus that Ási wouldn’t even remember him.
But then, why should he?
‘I thought we could go for a walk?’ said Magnus. ‘It’s not too cold, is it?’
The breeze was whipping Ingileif’s blonde hair around her cheeks, which were blossoming pink in the chill.
Magnus couldn’t help staring at her. Those cheeks were so familiar, the lips, her grey eyes. And that little nick on her eyebrow.
She stared back for a moment that was just about to become awkward when she answered his question. ‘No. We’re dressed for it.’
‘Great. Look, come in from the cold. And just wait a sec while I get something for Ási.’
He ducked back into the living room to pick up the bright orange plastic football he had bought earlier. Tryggvi Thór was on his feet to greet Magnus’s guests.
‘Good afternoon,’ he said to both of them. ‘I’m Tryggvi Thór. Magnús is my lodger.’
‘That’s very brave of you,’ said Ingileif.
‘I’m a brave man,’ said Tryggvi Thór. ‘I take it you and he are old friends?’
‘Old friends,’ Ingileif confirmed.
‘You don’t look like the kind of girl who would be stupid enough to go out with a policeman?’