And before she can say how or why the roulette wheel suddenly stops and the ball magically settles into the right slot with a faint rattle, she hears herself say the word she’s been looking for.

‘Baudoinia.’

*

Forty minutes later, Karen Eiken Hornby leans back against the wall and looks over at the window. It’s dark outside and will remain so for another – she glances down at the numbers in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen – three hours at least. She carefully puts the laptop down on the duvet and stretches out her legs. Her right foot has gone numb and she wiggles her toes to get rid of the pins and needles.

She closes her eyes and runs through what she has managed to find out online. Baudoinia compniacensis, a sac fungus known to cover buildings and trees with a black film reminiscent of soot and commonly found in places where distillation and storage of spirits take place. Prevalent near whiskey distilleries as a result of ethanol vapours escaping during maturing, an evaporation process often dubbed the angels’ share.

Angels’ share. She has obviously heard the poetic term before. The small volume of precious spirits that finds its way out of porous wooden barrels every year and rises into the heavens.

Or rather, she realises now, stains every surface around a distillery black. Impossible to get rid without a pressure washer and known to persistently return anyway. The images online of sooty façades, tree trunks, lamp posts and cars near whiskey distilleries in Scotland and the US. And the same thing near French cognac warehouses.

The articles about local residents’ attempts to bring class action lawsuits against distilleries for the impact on their property values. Hadn’t John told her once about a case his firm had been considered for but ended up not getting? Hadn’t he described his colleagues joking over an after-work pint about how they were glad they weren’t going to have to wage war against the whiskey industry because winning would have been a decidedly mixed blessing?

But Karen can’t recall ever hearing about anything like that on Noorö. There are no property values to maintain here. The growing number of vacant properties on the island can hardly be blamed on sooty exteriors. And the people who have stayed are used to it.

A thick, black film.

‘It’s the coal,’ Karen can hear Aunt Ingeborg say, back then. ‘The black gold. Without it, we’d have nothing.’

And that was a truth neither Karen nor likely anyone else had thought to question. Noorö houses were black because of the coal. But no one seems to be asking why certain parts of the island are still shrouded in a mourning veil, decades after the last mine was closed and the last coal piles removed.

No one, except Fredrik Stuub.