She pulled out a brown felt sack, and seawater gushed in. Ingrid told her to stuff one of the reindeer skins in the scupper as she grabbed the sack, dipped it in the hot water and washed the boy, who was screaming in the freezing air, opened her blue suitcase and extracted Eva Sofie’s bra. Anja almost stopped crying, and Sara asked what it was. Ingrid put it down and pulled out one of the pinafores, bit through the hem and ripped off two strips, folded them five times and laid them on top of each other around the boy’s groin, then tied the nappy around them. Anja adjusted it, put on his old clothes and tucked him in under the sheepskin – and Ingrid recalled a fly which awoke on the window sill, buzzed feebly, then lay on its back and trod thin air with its six spindly legs and died; and how she picked it up between her fingertips, opened the window and threw it out, and this was just before they came back, Lensmann Henriksen and Leutnant Hargel, only the two of them, she could make out the boat in a grey bank of fog and hear their cries, two self-important men in a dory gliding slowly towards the island . . . But why had she been “bruised”?

Anja had laid a hand on her arm.

Ingrid asked if the children easily got seasick.

Anja said no, even though they had never even seen the sea before they boarded the Salthammer. Ingrid opened the cake tin and gave them a cake each, telling them they were called teacakes. They stared at them, gobbled them down and asked for more. She said they would have to wait, told Sara to keep an eye on the tin, got to her feet and went out again as a breaker swept over the aft quarter.

The weather had cleared up, the wind grew stronger the further from land they came, a biting north-easterly gale from dead aft, and still the men sat and stood on the deck, flapping their arms to keep warm, smoking and cursing. Ingrid went into the wheelhouse, where the skipper had his ear turned to the ceiling, listening, and pointed upwards as he spotted her, could she hear what it was, this sound, like tinkling glass?

She said yes.

“Hell and bloody damnation,” he shouted. “Ice.”

The sea ahead of them was open as far as the eye could see. The boat lurched forwards, was slowly sucked astern again, the metallic sounds from the roof intensified, the clatter of tools and other objects in the chart house, the engine’s irregular knocking, he swore and asked whether Ingrid knew how to handle a boat.

She said yes.

“I knew it.”