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photographs and so on. You’d come back in on Monday mornings all weather-beaten and enthusiastic.”
    “Well, I’m glad we had some fun together,” I muttered, poking at my pizza and trying to decide if I was too full to finish it.
    Mags looked up, a dainty triangle of pizza hovering precariously on her fork. “Oh, you did. Of course you did. I remember when you first met him—you were so thrilled to find someone as interested in Egil as you.”
    “You’re just too polite to say obsessed , aren’t you? You must have thought I was a total workaholic.”
    Her eyes twinkled. “Not a total workaholic. I could usually manage to drag you away for an evening or so.”
    I raised my glass of Coke. “My sanity salutes you for it.”
    “Well, it’s nice to be appreciated.”
    “You are, Mags. You are.”
    Her face looked very pink in the warm lighting of the restaurant, but she was smiling too.

Chapter Four
    Saturday morning, I drove in early to the Pride festival in Reykjavik, thinking parking anywhere near the centre might be a problem otherwise. I’d decided to do without my stick for the day, so I didn’t want to be stuck miles away. It left me with a couple of hours to kill before the parade, which I passed agreeably enough in Café Loki by the cathedral, under the far-seeing eye of Leif Erikson’s statue. I’d taken some work with me, but got none of it done. Picking up one of the free newspapers devoted to coverage of the weekend seemed to act as a signal to all and sundry that I was there for Pride and eager to talk about it.
    After I’d got over the initial awkwardness of working out that people were just being friendly rather than actually acquainted with me from my previous time here, I found it all quietly exhilarating. There was a real buzz about the place. The streets of Reykjavik were crowded and the mood good-humoured. There were plenty of small children in pushchairs or already sitting on fathers’ shoulders to look out for the first sign of spectacle. It wasn’t a warm day, but it was, at least, dry for now.
    Something caught my eye as I passed a side street on my way to what looked like a good viewing spot. I turned to see a flash of colour: Alex Winter’s unmistakable copper hair. He was walking with a young woman I didn’t recognise, petite and dark-haired. She was making animated gestures, and his head was turned towards her.
    I hurried on. Maybe it was antisocial of me—all right, I knew it was—but I felt I’d seen enough of Alex lately. I wondered who the woman was, though. One of his fellow summer students, presumably. They must have turned the other way when they got to the end of the street; at any rate, I didn’t see them come past as I stood in the comforting anonymity of the crowd.
    We heard the parade before we saw it—or rather, we heard the beeping of the motorcycle policemen’s horns that heralded its approach. The two policemen smiled at the crowd as they waved them firmly back off the road, and were closely followed by some tough-looking women on even tougher-looking motorbikes— Dykes on Bikes , declared the back of one woman’s jacket. A forest of Pride flags followed, held aloft by a group with matching blue T-shirts but no proclaimed group identity I could see. The following float was again a puzzle—the men and women on it seemed to have dressed up in whatever fancy dress they had lying around the house, rather than working to a theme. As I watched, the float stopped so a pair of giggling young women—or possibly boys in drag, I was too far away to tell—could be hoisted up to join the dancers on the back.
    The whole parade was a little like that—cheerfully home-made, relaxed to the point of being shambolic, reminiscent more of English village carnivals than slick, American-style parades.
    I blinked. Where had that thought come from?
    Sven, I realised, and a curious defensiveness crept over me at the realisation. We must have watched the parade together last