When the first screw lands on the brick floor with a faint jingling sound, Karen Eiken Hornby is dripping with sweat, wine, tears and snot.

When the second screw comes out, she stands up, grabs the brass candelabra and kicks open the door.

Chapter 75

75

Karl Björken angrily drums his fingers against the steering wheel. Normally, he wouldn’t care about the ferry being delayed by snow and high winds. Any other day, he, like most of his countrymen, would stoically accept that man must bend to the forces of nature.

But today, he knows every passing minute is stoking Ingrid’s fury. For every passing minute, she is going to ask herself again why her husband didn’t leave work at a reasonable hour when he’d been told he could go home for Twelfth Night. Why would he have stayed at work well into the evening instead of coming home? And with every passing minute, she’s going to grow more convinced that it’s the news of her parents being invited that’s keeping her big coward of a husband away. And with every passing minute, there’s an increased risk Ingrid Björken might ask herself if she’s married to an arsehole.

Maybe she is, Karl thinks ruefully and resists the urge to honk his horn in frustration. Instead, he leans forward and looks up at the digital noticeboard above the on-ramp. The text that until twenty minutes ago had announced Severe delays. Irregular traffic is gone. The board is blank.

He could have been home now if he’d left half an hour earlier. But the irregular ferry service had caused the line to grow so long the car ahead of him had been the last to get on the previous one. His contention that it would be possible to fit one more car if everyone just moved over a little had fallen on deaf ears.

‘It’s full, you’re going to have to wait for the next one,’ a guy in an orange vest with the ferry company’s logo on it had told him.

He had considered flashing his badge but had stopped himself at the last second. They were all in the same boat here, so to speak, and he refuses to behave like the provincial doctors scattered across the islands, who invariably get out their passes and bypass the queue, whether they’re on their way to see a patient or going to the supermarket for their weekend shop. Everyone knows they do it but no one ever speaks up. Because one day it could be you lying there, grateful there’s a doctor in your town at all.