Ingrid went into the North Chamber and decided to sleep there, where a hatch in the floor led down to the kitchen, allowing the heat to rise. She shook and beat the eiderdowns, made the bed, went downstairs again and drank some lukewarm coffee as she re-read the letter from Barbro, whereupon she scrunched it up and placed it in the pile on the floor.

But she didn’t set it alight.

She went into the sitting room to put some wood in the stove and noticed that her grandfather’s bedroom door was ajar. She took hold of the handle, wanting to close the door, but she had done this a short time ago, she had shut the door and now it was open again, the house was silent, nothing stirred.

She heard a click, then distant, sustained thunder from the bowels of the earth, she backed into the kitchen and stood rooted to the spot, for much too long; then she returned and wrenched open the door and was angry with herself for not hav-ing done so in the first place, whoever it was could have got away.

But she could smell nothing, she heard no shuffling steps, mumbling voices or the sound of a cat, only the same faint hissing sound, inside and out. She unhooked the lamp from the sitting-room wall, went right inside her grandfather’s room and established beyond all doubt that nobody was there, neither in the bed nor underneath it, neither in the corner cupboard nor in the chest, which she opened and closed, and sat on the lid with the persistent hiss of silence so loud in her ears that she had to scream.

Then the silence was total.

She put on her coat and went out into the falling snow, stopped and surveyed the buildings, the barn, then the quays and the boat shed by the sea, suddenly wonderstruck at all the things that had kept her on the island, which in truth were nothing at all. Soon the snow would turn to rain, the island would become as brown as scab and the sea grey, unless the wind changed.