“Salt,” she repeated and told her to wrap up the toddler again and wait.

She got to her feet, went out along the deck, opened the door to the wheelhouse and shouted to the skipper, did they have any nappies on board? He turned and gave her a strange look.

“Yeah, yeah. Go and ask in the cabin.”

Ingrid walked across the heaving deck, lifted the companion hatch and took three steps down into a steamy darkness stinking of vomit, where the mothers with small babies lay, as well as five orphans aged from three to eight. She asked if any of them had any nappies. No-one answered. She asked again and nobody answered. Ingrid said she needed some nappies. A young mother got up from the berth on the starboard side, stuck her face out into the light, and asked who the hell she was.

Ingrid stood there with a lump in her throat, on the verge of tears, until a nappy was thrust into her hands. She asked where they got their hot water. There was a chorus of laughter. A voice shouted: in the galley.

She walked back across the deck and into the galley, which was also full of children, lying in pairs, on the floor and on benches, as well as two adolescent boys who got up and looked as though they were intending to greet her. A large, old woman in black was sitting squeezed between a table screwed to the floor and the bulkhead, and was asleep, her toothless mouth agape. Girded by the metal fiddles on the roaring stove stood a voluminous coffee pot spewing white steam out of its swan-neck spout.

Ingrid asked whether there was water in it.

One of the boys said no, coffee. Ingrid said she needed some hot water. He looked at his mate, who leaned in the direction of a tap above a small sink, filled a kettle and jammed it tight against the coffee pot.

Ingrid waited. She asked them where they were from. Mehamn. Honningsvåg. Komagfjord. Tappeluft. Gamvik. Havøysund. Snefjord. Gjesvær. Rolvsøy. Skarsvåg . . . The old woman’s blanket slipped to the floor, the youth who had put the kettle on the stove bent down and picked it up, shook it once and placed it over her again.

Ingrid asked who she was.

“It’s Jadviga, our neighbour. She’s Russian.”

And the water had boiled.

Ingrid took care not to spill the water on her way back across the deck, which was rolling more and more, into the bait house, and told Anja to pull some more rags from the scuppers. Anja looked at her and said:

“They’ve got salt in them.”

Ingrid laughed and told her to do so all the same.