Karen doesn’t need to look around the designer kitchen to understand what she means. A warehouse worker from Noorö, and one with links to a criminal motorcycle gang to boot, was probably not the son-in-law Katja’s parents had hoped for. After a quick glance at Karen, Katja continues.

‘I suppose dating Gabriel was a form of rebellion. Dad’s retired now, but he had a pretty senior position on the fisheries board and Mum’s a dentist. They wanted me to get an education before I married and had children, but I was in love and too clueless to know all his plans were just castles in the sky. And by the time those rose-tinted spectacles came off and I realised what my future was going to be like, it was too late. We had the children and . . . well, I suppose I was too proud to admit I’d been wrong.’

‘How long were you married?’

‘Almost seven years. It was pretty good at first. Like I said, Gabriel was always sweet to me and the children, even if he was impossible in all other respects. But nothing ever came of his grandiose plans to start his own business. One day it was a garage, the next some kind of import firm, but he never made a move to make it happen, or to leave Groth’s. And when he started to try to curry favour with the OP, I realised it was a disaster waiting to happen.’

Katja seems to have a pent-up need to talk. As she teeters between grief and anger, they listen attentively without interrupting.

‘In the end, I gave him an ultimatum; it was either me or them. And for a while, I honestly thought he’d cut his ties with the OP. He seemed more settled, worked and made money. In fact, he claimed to have been promoted at Groth’s, made foreman or something like that and given a raise. And I believed him.’

‘But . . . ?’

‘But eventually I realised it was just his usual bullshit. When I confronted him, he admitted he hadn’t been promoted, that the extra money came from his whiskey-stealing scheme. And he’d found a “foolproof” way of swindling the Groths, he told me. That’s when I’d had enough. I took the children and left him that night.’

‘And how was he going to swindle the Groths? Do you know?’

Katja Stuub shakes her head.

‘No idea, I never asked. It was obviously just a flight of fancy.’

*

‘I’m not so sure about that,’ Karl Björken says half an hour later in the car on board the ferry back to Lysvik.

‘No, he was probably up to some mischief, but the question is whether whatever it was would have been enough to make someone slit his throat. And if so, what it has to do with the murder of his grandfather.’