Ingrid braced herself and asked why they had beaten her. The interpreter answered angrily, off his own bat, that hiding survivors from the Rigel was punishable by death, no matter whether they were deserters, Russians or Norwegians.

“Deserters?”

Barbro took a step forward and bellowed:

“Ingrid wants t’ know if thi fucked ’er.”

A gasp ran through the assembly, the interpreter blushed and barked at her to shut her mouth. Barbro didn’t move. She repeated what she had said, and the interpreter repeated his command with a snarl as Hargel glanced enquiringly from one to the other. The interpreter turned to him and whispered in his ear, as if sharing a confidence. Hargel’s face lit up and he turned to Ingrid.

“Ah, you’re pregnant? My warmest congratulations.”

Ingrid was taken aback. Then she burst into laughter. Hargel’s smile faded into something resembling concern, he folded his arms, was there anything else?

Ingrid said no.

He shook his head and said:

“Schöne Frau, why do you always go around in those rags?”

The interpreter muttered in Norwegian:

“Not important.”

And announced to the crowd: “Keep it short. This is a military camp, not a tribunal. Next.”

The woman wanting to complain about Henriksen shouted that the Rations and Relocation Board had filled her house with refugees she had neither the space nor food for, she had three small kids and an ageing mother to take care of, and her husband was in Lofoten.

Hargel’s distant, guttural voice:

“Mein Gott.”

Ingrid watched as silent, emaciated prisoners, four at a time, squeezed onto a meat scale to prove officially that they weren’t dead, heard a considerable number of kilos in German being divided by four, smelled wet straw, sweat, diesel, cowshed and rotten herring as winter bore down on them through the open doors. Money was handed over and the steelyard was carried into the swirling snow by two prisoners and loaded onto the back of the lorry. Ingrid clambered up, sat beside Barbro, with her back to the cab, and placed her mittens over her invisible belly.

~

Ingrid had been here before, accompanying her father, with a borrowed horse and cart, her on the horse and him in the cart, his voice, could she see anything around the next bend, could they get through?

She was his lookout, her fingers gripping the stiff, white mane hard, the creaking shafts and the slapping of the straps against the horse’s sweaty hindquarters, a summer that dissolved into white smoke when Barbro shouted in her ear that it war divilish cold.