‘I think I need a pint and a bloody strong shot of whiskey,’ Karl replies with a sigh. ‘Any kind but Groth’s.’

Chapter 48

48

‘Oh my God, what is that?’

Karl Björken leans forward and cranes his neck to see out the side window. They’ve turned off the motorway, just before the sign marking the border between Skreby and Gudheim counties. The house Karl is studying with a mix of fascination and disbelief is a four-storey building of pale yellow sandstone that looms up ahead, rising higher and higher the closer they get. The main body of the house is, aside from its size, relatively unremarkable, like a vertical rectangle. What makes the building reminiscent of a postcard from the German alps, rather than the windy moors of Noorö, are the four turrets at each corner, reaching toward the leaden sky. Each is topped with something akin to medieval battlements.

‘The old mining baron, Huss, had it built it at the start of the last century,’ Karen replies. ‘A physical manifestation of his delusions of grandeur, I suppose.’

‘Or compensation for a bloody tiny cock,’ Karl retorts with a wicked chuckle.

‘Could be. The locals call it The Complex. Legend has it he never picked up on the double entendre.’

Karen slows down and turns onto a dead straight gravel road lined by bare horse chestnut trees.

‘Of course he had to put in a fancy driveway, too,’ she comments, peering up at the house while she slowly drives up the tree-lined road. ‘It must be beautiful in the summer.’

‘You’ve never been here before?’

‘No, just driven past it on the main road. I used to love this house as a child, I thought it looked like something out of a fairy tale.’

‘Not so much anymore,’ Karl replies drily. ‘Check out the façade.’

They round a flower bed with something that looks suspiciously like a carp pond at its centre and park in front of the wide stone front steps. Karen kills the engine, bends down and looks up through the windscreen at the crumbling sandstone. From afar, The Complex may still look like a palace, but up close like this, she can make out both façade damage and a thin layer of soot.

‘Damp,’ she says, ‘and coal dust. Impossible to get off, apparently, and it’s particularly bad up here, what with all the coal mines everywhere. So, shall we get this over with?’ she says with a glance at her watch.

A couple of minutes to five. With luck, they can be out of here before six.

They are only halfway up the stone steps when one of the wide double doors is thrown open and William Tryste steps out to welcome them.

‘I assume you had no trouble finding this place?’ he says with a grin and extends a hand. ‘I didn’t exactly inherit a discreet house.’