Ingrid has a letter thrust into her hand and recognises the handwriting of Erik Falc, the doctor, and remembers some-thing she immediately forgets, as the children are no longer shy, they take her hand and look well dressed and well fed, peace children, full of mischief, and as she is about to ask Gunvor something to do with Nelvy – Arne is looking straight at her, as always, it is as if he has become her guard, while Fredrik is unable to take his eyes off the horses – Ingrid comes to a decision that has troubled her ever since she was overcome by those strange feelings in connection with the engineer’s life and death.

She leaves all the hustle and bustle behind and strides up the white road above the rectory, the two youths at her heels, before turning into a red house belonging to the person who was once the village chieftain, a large, towering man.

Nobody answers when she knocks, but a rankling far back in her memory causes her to open the door and go in, and she sees that the house is a mess, a house without a woman, with a man sprawled over the kitchen table amid dirty plates and cups, in a place which presumably once was very presentable, he looks as if he wants to be buried, and mumbles just as despairingly as when she arrived on the Salthammer last winter:

“It’s you, is it?”

His debilitated state puts her sufficiently at ease to sit down, while Arne and Fredrik stay on their feet, looking for something to rest their eyes on. She asks Henriksen if he still has the papers from his time as chairman of the Rations and Relocation Board.

No, he snaps, and continues to eye her until he realises all hope is gone, makes a half-hearted attempt to get to his feet then motions towards a chest of drawers buried beneath a pile of clothes and overalls. Ingrid gets up and pushes the clothes aside, pulls out one drawer, hears an irritable no, opens the next and sees a card-index file with five columns, a last vestige of order.

He says she will have to search, damned if he is going to do it.

She flicks through the alphabet and finds something that looks like a postcard without a stamp, with the name Jadviga from Mehamn written on it in a shaky hand. No surname, date or place of birth, earlier place of abode, or age, only that she was an evacuee staying with the Abelsen family in Finnvika, together with two boys Ingrid remembers from the galley on the Salthammer, and also the captain who buried Nelvy, Lukas Wara; they are all on the same card, only the boys’ dates of birth are given, they are in their mid-teens, and they aren’t brothers.