Karen smiles at the memory. ‘You go wherever you want.’ That was probably her mother’s tactful attempt to make it known that she didn’t expect Karen’s eternal resting place to be on the Doggerian islands. Maybe she would prefer to be buried next to John and Mathis in Haslemere in Surrey or scattered at sea. Eleanor Eiken had never felt compelled to control other people and was definitely not interested in being controlled herself.

Karen notes that she still feels the same; she doesn’t care where she’s buried when it’s her turn. Graves mean nothing to her. This is only her third visit to her father’s final resting place. She has never been back to Haslemere. Karen Eiken Hornby doesn’t believe in heaven or hell, or maybe she believes in both. But one thing she knows for certain: John and Mathis are with her every day, she doesn’t need a grave to remember them.

Dad, on the other hand. His soul might be lingering in these parts, she muses. Somehow, Walter Eiken had been the embodiment of Noorö’s barren landscape with his furrowed, weather-beaten face and his pragmatic relationship with laws and regulations. He’s with her, too, of course. The smell of brine and tar, diesel and sweat. The quick shifts of those ice-blue eyes with the yellow ring around the iris, which could turn in a second from frightening and wolflike to mischievous and playful. She remembers the days when he was out at sea, Mum and Karen alone in the house. The quiet worry when the weather was calm, the rumbling fear when the weather changed and the relief when his boat came in. The sound of her dad pulling off his boots in the hallway, his broad back bent over the kitchen table, his big, tanned hands firmly gripping his glass. A moment free of worry before the boat went out again. A never-ending cycle of worry and relief, as natural as the ebb and flow of the tide. All of it is still part of her.

Suddenly sensing a different kind of presence among the circling gulls, skuas and petrels, Karen’s eyes are drawn upward. She watches the white-tailed eagle as it majestically and seemingly effortlessly rides the updraughts. Well, Dad, she thinks to herself. Who am I to say?

Then her thoughts return to the phone call she had a few hours previous. The phone call that brought her here. Ingeborg had been firm on two points: now that she had finally come home, she had to go visit her father’s grave and she had to come to dinner that night. Celebrating Twelfth Night alone was out of the question.

‘I don’t know if I can make it,’ she’d said. ‘Work comes first.’