Now she could hear the young woman who had been talking to the child. She was angry and her voice slid up into falsetto.

‘That’s your fucking problem,’ she screeched.

A door slammed shut and silence fell.

Footsteps on the gravel. Someone was nearby and that made her uneasy, because whoever it was didn’t make themselves known.

‘This is going to hurt.’

It was him. The one who had driven her car, the one who had beaten her unconscious. What was going to hurt? She curled up and tensed her neck muscles, bracing for a blow. When her head was tugged to the side, she yelped, terrified at not knowing what lay in wait.

It took a while before she realised he was peeling the tape off her head. He did it slowly and not without care. Her head moved from side to side as he tore at the strips. She tried her best to stay upright but still fell over; he helped her up while talking soothingly to her.

‘You don’t have to be afraid.’

When he got to her hair, he immediately turned gentler.

‘We don’t want you to be bald. I’m about to wax your eyebrows now. Are you ready?’

But he didn’t tug; he pulled slowly and held the skin in place with his fingers. She cautiously opened her eyes, expecting to be blinded by the light.

He was squatting down, watching her. With his dark curls and brown eyes, he looked more like a French alpinist in a travel catalogue than a Norwegian. An alpinist with frostbite on his face. Behind him, there was nothing. Just a vast, hazy emptiness.

The place was barren like a fell. A mountain plateau without contours, covered in gravelly moraine. Heather and willow crept across the rocks like sparsely woven rugs.

The Audi was parked some way off; next to it was a van. There were no other people in sight, and no sun either, and she couldn’t say whether it was day or night. The wind came at them in violent gusts and in the lulls, there was the faint sound of waves; far below them the sea cut a bay into the grey Arctic landscape.

To separate the tape from her hair, he had to rip it. The pain was superficial but it was as though the nerves in her scalp were hardwired to her tear ducts. He pulled off the tape covering her mouth last. He did it slowly, stretching out her lips. Afterwards, she felt completely raw. Pieces of tape lay in tangles on the ground around her, silvery on one side and completely white on the other; the hair that had been ripped out of her scalp stuck to it in lanky skeins.

He tore off strip after strip from the parcel of tape around her hands. She didn’t want to be near his face, so she sat with her head lowered as if bashful.