He hadn’t believed her story about the bodies, no-one had heard about a boat sinking, so he thought it could have been a delusion, or what he called a psychosis, at best a nightmare, but yesterday he had been flicking through some old newspapers and found this, reported by N.T.B.

He picked up a page he had torn out and placed it in her lap. Ingrid read: “German survivors shot at by British pilots near Rosøy on 27th November . . . A German steamer named M.S. Rigel sank and survivors say British pilots strafed the lifeboats and those who had made it ashore . . . This proves how British pilots systematically shoot at survivors of sinking German ships.”

The news item was no more than six or seven centimetres long and three wide, dated December 7, which was three weeks ago, and there wasn’t a word about how many people had died, nor about any Russians, Ingrid had talked about Russians, hadn’t she?

She imagined the currents in the sea and the winds and all the islands and skerries between the islands of Rosøy and Barrøy.

“That’s a long way, miles and miles . . .”

“What?”

She didn’t answer.

This is the only report there is, he said, he had searched everywhere, but thought nonetheless that it was likely those things she had seen and experienced were what he termed realities.

Ingrid stared at him.

He asked if she had understood.

She asked whether she had been alone when she was found.

He said yes, but seemed unsure and appeared to be concerned that she had fallen into a reverie again. And she was going to ask how many boats there had been on Barrøy when they found her, but realised he was no islander. Then he told her without prompting that her medical record said a certain Lensmann Henriksen and a Leutnant Hargel had found her during a routine assignment.

She asked to see the case papers.

He said no and sat drumming his fingers on the file, looking out at the Christmas tree, where once again twenty-three lights and one star shone, whereupon he opened the file anyway, mumbling that she could read it if she wanted, there was nothing wrong with her, unlike her mother, he had treated her, too; on the contrary, all the evidence suggested now that Ingrid had been traumatised by war, like so many others, those who had been evacuated from Finnmark, for example, where the Germans had carried out a scorched earth campaign; refugees were streaming south in boat after boat, he’d already had lots of them here and really wished war could be stated as a diag-nosis, then there would be a kind of truth in his files.