Twenty minutes past four, Karen Eiken Hornby startles awake so violently the bed creaks. At first, she thinks something on the street outside woke her, or maybe a sound from the hotel corridor, and she lifts her head off the pillow to listen. The only sound is the faint keening of the wind against the window and a soft rushing of water through the pipes in the bathroom.

She lets her cheek sink back onto the soft pillow and feels sleep gently pull her back down into oblivion. But some part of her brain is resisting, making her closed eyelids flutter anxiously. Disjointed images flash before her in quick succession: Thorstein Byle’s worried face, Odd’s long, grey plait and the OP logo on his back, the photograph of Fredrik Stuub with flaming red hair, Leo stubbing out a cigarette on the railing, sweeping panoramas of mountain ridges and houses blackened by coal dust, Aylin’s voice saying ‘I’m to blame too, you know’, the whiskey boxes in Gabriel Stuub’s basement, the jars of protein powder, the sound of Sigrid’s bright laughter, Karl’s grateful look when she ordered him to go home, Cornelis wearily looking up from his computer and rubbing his eyes, Björn Groth’s pale face in the flickering fluorescent light, Leo’s back when he reluctantly got up on stage and picked up the guitar, Bo Ramnes raising his glass in a toast, the list of contents of Fredrik Stuub’s laptop: his email exchanges with the local paper, the bus company, the fisheries board, the hopelessly impenetrable documents, incomprehensible words like interleukins, neurodegenerative, acetylcholine, Baudoinia compniacensis, the drill holes in the blackened stones up by Gudheim, a wall with the shadow of a one followed by a per cent sign.

Suddenly, she’s wide awake.

She spends a few minutes slowly rewinding the film, searching for the right image. She’s looking for a word, a single word from the documents on Fredrik Stuub’s computer. A word she has come across somewhere else long ago, in a completely different context. An elusive little word that has burrowed into her subconscious and is now refusing to reveal itself. A bloody annoying little word that’s going to make it impossible for her to go back to sleep.

And now I need to pee, too, she thinks and sits up with a sigh. I’m going to have to get my laptop and go through it all again.

*

The toilet seat is cold against her buttocks and Karen studies the unhygienic wall-to-wall carpet while she answers nature’s call. Unlike the pub culture, the carpeted bathrooms are a part of Doggerland’s British heritage she could do without. On the other hand, she considers, there’s probably not a single person under sixty who still insists on having these hotbeds of mould in their bathrooms anymore.