‘From what he told me he’s already been given the go-ahead. I thought it was a done deal?’

‘In theory, sure, but there won’t be a formal decision until after Twelfth Night, when the board convenes for its first meeting of the year. If people start talking, they might defer the vote. Politicians do have a tendency to get cold feet once the media get involved.’

‘Well, I wasn’t going to have him dragged here in handcuffs or anything. And as you know, news of the murder up at Groth’s broke yesterday.’

When they’re done going over the day’s tasks and Byle has left, Karen steps into the office she has been assigned. It’s a small, windowless space normally used to store confiscated personal effects and still half taken up by an enormous safe. She sucks her stomach in and squeezes past, puts her laptop down on the desk and logs into the network.

Chapter 43

43

The summary of the contents of Fredrik Stuub’s laptop is one of the shortest Karen has ever seen. The links to the various documents and websites only take up a couple of pages. And Larsen was right, both the documents and the search history seem focused on a handful of subjects. Karen decides to save the mushroom picking and dog deworming for later. Instead, she opens a horizontal Word document labelled ‘The Huss Family’ and finds herself staring at a painstakingly constructed family tree. To make the tree fit on a single page, the text is absolutely tiny.

Karen zooms in and starts skimming through the names from left to right, noting that the Huss name doesn’t appear until the early nineteenth century. Until then, Scandinavian heritage and patronymics seem to have dominated – box after box of Anderssons, Nielssons and Karlssons, who apparently made their livings as crofters, fishermen and, in a few cases, customs agents. In 1867, however, a Gerhard Huss moved in from somewhere and married a Hilda Andersdotter, she notes before letting her eyes move on to their son, Albin Huss, mine owner.

As Byle has told her, Old Huss and his wife had apparently not been blessed with a son and had instead been forced to make do with two daughters. Both had married and kept the family genes alive, but it had been the end of the Huss line. With a growing lack of interest, Karen continues to peruse the family tree, confirming that Fredrik Stuub was indeed William Tryste’s father’s first cousin. Both members of a family that was once Doggerland’s richest. And yet, Fredrik’s earthly possessions at the time of his death had amounted to just 70,000 marks, a house, and sizeable tracts of essentially worthless land.