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She also found a report on the number of developmentally disabled people in Iceland: it was around half a per cent of the population, which was not small. Thóra also looked specifically for information about sheltered community residences and discovered that the implementation of this form of living had begun in 1980, so there had been time to gather some experience regarding how they could best be run. According to the information she found, these units were homes for small groups of disabled people, generally not more than six, all aged sixteen or older and each under the one-on-one supervision of at least one staff member. The staff’s responsibility was to provide support and therapy, with a view to advancing the residents’ independence and life skills. The administration and setting up of these homes was at the expense of the state, although the money came from various of its budgets: construction costs were paid out of the Disabled Investment Fund, staff salaries from the Treasury, and communal expenses were taken from the residents’ insurance benefits, accounting for up to seventy-five per cent of the amount. All in all there were almost ninety such establishments in Iceland, totalling around four hundred and fifty residents.

The telephone on the desk emitted a peculiar sound, start-ling Thóra. The ring tone was very loud and high-pitched – their secretary Bella must have changed the setting, probably just to annoy her. Thóra suppressed her anger and lifted the receiver. ‘Yes?’

‘Your parents are here to see you; should I show them in, or tell them you’re not here?’

Thóra knew her parents were standing in front of Bella as she spoke. The girl was a lost cause. ‘Show them in.’ There was no point telling her off, if only because once Thóra started she wouldn’t be able to stop.

Her parents appeared in her office doorway, and after greeting them she invited them to sit down. They seemed ill at ease, and small talk about the weather did nothing to loosen them up. Finally her father got to the point, and the reason for their agitation became clear.

When he had finished explaining, Thóra stifled a sigh and took the paperwork her father was holding out to her. ‘So you don’t think you’ll be able to pay back the loan? Did this eventuality never occur to you when you bought the house?’ The property her parents had financed with a massive foreign-currency loan was a rather grand summer home in Spain; the purchase price looked high to Thóra, even without the doubled exchange rate of the euro. ‘The monthly payments would be crippling, even if you weren’t retired.’

‘We were advised that we could let it out, and the rent would cover the mortgage payments. The former owners said they were going to take care of it for us,’ said Thóra’s father, as her mother nodded vigorously beside him.

Thóra ground her teeth. ‘Of course they did.’ She flipped to the clause in the agreement that specified the payment amounts. ‘According to this, the property was purchased entirely on credit. A one hundred per cent mortgage is pretty risky, whatever the exchange rate, and I doubt that the rent would ever have covered the payments, even without the global financial crisis and a decline in the Spanish tourism industry.’ She looked up at them. ‘So you started renting it out? Did the rent pay off the mortgage, initially?’

They both looked sheepish, shifting in their chairs. ‘Well…’ said her father.

‘How much of the monthly payment did it cover? All of it? Half? A third?’ She hardly dared go any lower. ‘How do you think I can help you with this? And why didn’t you tell me that you’d bought a house in Spain? You’re in a very tight spot, it’s almost impossible to default on a mortgage.’

‘We didn’t want to get you involved at the time, but we were hoping you might know a way to get it converted to a bullet loan?’ He smiled weakly, clearly realizing this was not a viable option. Thóra’s mother still seemed hopeful, though, and was nodding her head even more energetically than before.

‘That can’t be done.’ Thóra didn’t want to waste their time pretending to entertain the idea. ‘Your position is even worse than it was, since you haven’t paid anything for several months. It’s probably been flagged as a bad debt at the bank, and if you don’t make a payment very soon you could wind up bankrupt.’

‘Is there nothing that can be done? Some sort of legal trick?’

‘Nothing I can think of. The lawyers who draw up these mortgages are no fools, and the bank loaned you the money in good faith. The sellers who conned you into buying this place also seem to have protected themselves pretty well, since it states quite clearly here that they offer no guarantee that you’ll be able to rent it out.’ Thóra gently laid the papers on her desk and tried to keep her composure. ‘This is a very tricky situation, and I’m sure you’ve tried to come up with a solution. The house is up for sale, which is good, but I doubt it will sell quickly and you’re very unlikely to make your money back on it. Whatever you do make should shrink your debt, at least. But the property market is as dead there as it is in Iceland, so the house is unlikely to sell any time soon.’ Thóra sighed. Her parents weren’t the first to show up in her office looking for a magic solution to insurmountable financial difficulties. ‘How were you planning to get yourselves out of this?’

‘Well, we do actually have an idea,’ said her father. Her parents exchanged a glance. ‘We can’t rent out this bloody place in Spain, except for a week here and there, but what we have done is put our house here in Iceland up for sale, and we’ve had a good offer that will allow us to pay off the other mortgage monthly until we can realistically put that house on the market. We’ve also found a nice flat we can afford without endangering the Spanish payments. The thing is, we’d have to hand over the house immediately, but we can’t move into the flat for two months. That is, if we decide to do it.’

Thóra’s mother had stopped nodding along with her husband and was watching her daughter’s reaction closely.

‘And where would you stay until your flat is ready?’ Thóra swallowed hard, just resisting the temptation to cross her fingers. She was an only child.

‘Well, we were thinking maybe we could just bunk in with you.’ Now they were both smiling eagerly. ‘We wouldn’t be any bother, and we’d even help out with the housework.’

Thóra was struggling to stay calm. Of course she wanted to help her parents out of the financial hole they’d dug for themselves. They had been very good to her throughout her life and she was more than grateful for that. Her problem with the idea stemmed from her own domestic situation. Her house was a decent size, but there were quite enough people living there already. Besides herself, there were her two children, ten-year-old Sóley and nineteen-year-old Gylfi; Gylfi’s girlfriend Sigga; and their son Orri, now two and a half. Thóra’s partner of several years, Matthew, had also recently moved in. The addition of a fourth generation to the household would eat away even more at their limited amount of private time. ‘I see,’ was all she could say.

‘It won’t be for long, probably not even the full two months,’ said her father cheerily. ‘I’ll find work and then we can go to a hotel or get another short-term rental somewhere.’

Clearly nobody had broken the news to him about the unemployment figures. She didn’t want to discourage him by pointing out how much had changed since he’d retired, or that right now the one thing the market didn’t need was a career banker, even one who had ended up as a branch manager. As far as she knew his only saleable skill was managing other people’s money, which made it even harder to understand how they’d been duped. In fact they’d been doubly cheated: tricked into putting their savings into equity funds which, according to the sales patter, made you a handsome risk-free profit on the interest; and then advised to take out loans against their property portfolio to buy everything their hearts desired. The original amount her parents had put into this fund would have covered the bulk of the price of the summer home when they’d made the decision to buy it, but now it had been whittled down to a third of the size and things looked dire for them. Their life savings were as good as gone, and their debt to the bank – the same one that ran the stock exchange – had been too much for them even before the crash of the króna had doubled the size of the loan.