‘Nothing, really,’ Karl replies calmly. ‘But I’m neither deaf nor blind and being a detective, I know how to put two and two together. And I noticed the reaction last night when I put my foot in it.’

‘Well, no wonder. She just lost her mother.’

‘Not Sigrid’s reaction. Yours. Officially speaking, I know you were married when you lived in London and that you moved back after getting divorced.’

‘Then you know everything you need to know.’

Karl leans back and seems to contemplate her.

‘How long have we worked together?’ he says.

Karen shrugs.

‘Five, six years, I guess.’

‘Seven,’ Karl corrects her. ‘Do you trust me?’

‘You know I do.’

‘Don’t you think it’s time you told me the truth, then?’

She feels like she’s literally being torn in two. Her instinctive reflex is to keep lying. No one can know, not at work, only her closest friends. She had made that a condition of accepting the job offer from the CID ten years ago. Her boss at the time, a friend of her mother’s, knew her story and had made sure Karen’s lie became the officially recorded truth. Divorced, no children. No questions, no talking about her past, ever. It was the only way she had been able to carry on. If she sticks to that version now, Karl will never ask her again, that much she knows.

But on the other hand, the unrelenting weariness. The exhausting vacuum the lies leave in their wake. Karen swallows hard. Opens her mouth and closes it again.

Then she feels the warmth of Karl’s large hand as he puts it over hers, and in the next moment, she hears her own voice speaking. It sounds robotic and strange, she reflects, as though it’s coming from a great distance. It says:

‘You know I lived in England for many years?’

Karl nods and the voice continues.

‘I had a husband and a son there. John and Mathis. They died in a car crash.’

Karl looks like he’s about to say something, but he stops himself when Karen takes a deep breath.

‘I was driving,’ she says and looks him straight in the eyes.

He holds her gaze. Steadily, without looking away. Calmly waiting.

Then she tells him. Talks about the things that can’t be put into words. About the lorry driver suddenly veering, about John and Mathis both dying instantly, while she had been cut out of the car virtually unharmed. About the police officer who told her the lorry driver had been using amphetamine to get through the long hours on the road. About how she hadn’t been able to stay in London, that the only way forward had been the one that led back. Back home. To Doggerland, to Langevik and to the house she grew up in.