The boat didn’t look like the sixty-foot whaler it was, but rather a floating warehouse, where people of all sizes wrapped up in so many layers of clothes they could scarcely move stood and sat and lay around, among suitcases and boxes and chests and furniture and sacks and mattresses. In the bows a wooden pole had been erected in the harpoon gun mountings and covered with a canvas tarpaulin, which stretched as far as the ship’s rails on either side, and formed the ridge of a tent under which, judging by the number of boots, ten people lay. There was a huge commotion around a German soldier who punched a man repeatedly in the face until he fell backwards and lay on the deck howling.

The skipper flew out of the wheelhouse, looking as if he was going to pounce on the soldier, but controlled himself, the German didn’t notice and just bent down and pulled the screaming man by his feet to a net that was used to load and unload goods, yelled something in German to the skipper, who turned his back on him in obvious contempt and then spotted Erik Falc and his party on the quay.

The skipper was a man in his early forties with thick, black hair, flecked with steel-grey, and an equally thick, chocolate-brown beard, bare-headed in sub-zero temperatures. He ignored the German and raised his arms in supplication to the doctor.

Erik Falc understood the gesture and gave a slight nod.

The skipper shrugged, went over to the winch and lowered the crane hook. The soldier grabbed the four corners of the net and attached them to it, and the writhing man was hoisted up onto the quay, where the carers extricated him from the net, got him to his feet and draped a jacket of the kind Ingrid was wearing over him. He hung limply in their arms, bleeding from his nose and a cut to the head. Erik Falc examined the injuries and asked him a few questions. The man shook his head. The carers led him to a waiting vehicle. The next moment the German soldier climbed up onto the quay, brushed the snow off his uniform and handed the doctor some rolled-up documents before unleashing a torrent of anger and striding off to the nearest storehouse, where troops were quartered.

“At least there won’t be a guard on board then,” Erik muttered, his head bowed and his eyes fixed on the papers. “That’s something.”

Ingrid wasn’t listening.

She was on her knees inspecting the ladder the soldier had scaled, but it was low tide, four metres down to the deck, and there was ice on the rungs. A child shouted:

“She won’t make it! She won’t make it . . .”