She grabbed the ladle in the bucket, propped him up and moistened his cracked lips. He writhed and groaned. She shoved a cushion under his head and fetched a funnel, stuck it down his throat until he retched and forced open his singed eyelids and tried to resist with his hands.

She held the ladle in front of his wild eyes.

He nodded, drank a few drops, coughed and raised his mangled hands as if to study them, and display them to her, or to God, as soot-blackened tears streamed from his scorched eye-sockets down his skeletal face, finding nowhere in his smooth, young features to stop them, making him look as if he had never been human, nor ever would be.

She grasped the hand missing only fingernails, sat holding it, staring into space, when she suddenly felt an imploring tremor, as if he were preparing to die. She began to shake the limp body, shouted no, no, grabbed the ladle and forced more water down him, causing more fits of retching, which eventually abated, reducing him to a whimpering infant, and the stench that permeated the warm kitchen was unbearable.

She got to her feet, went into the larder and stopped in front of the rows of shelves stacked with preserves and canned food. She grabbed a jar of redcurrant jelly and spooned the contents into a cup, mixed it with warm water, breathing through her mouth, and began to force a thin, red liquid down him. He coughed and spat and had to gulp to avoid choking, managed a few greedy gulps, brought them up again, swallowed a few small spoonfuls, she counted them, and he kept them down, until he passed out.

Ingrid placed the cup on the table, wiped her face on her jumper, heard two sobs, which were her own, and declared in a loud voice to the walls that this could not be true, before once again making sure that he was breathing, whereafter she went out into the driving snow and stared up into the darkness.

Only to realise that there was no way out of this.

She walked down to the landing stage and put out the boat, rowed around the northern promontory, where she had the wind in her face and kept beneath the jutting rock face, headed south through the foaming breakers to the fleet of nets, where the cries of the birds above Moltholmen were carried to her on the wind.