Road 12 cuts through all three of Noorö’s counties, from Lysvik to Skreby and Gudheim in the far north. West of the road, the Skalvet mountain range rises up like a wall, sheltering the island from the winds off the Atlantic, while on the other side, the landscape climbs more gently toward another mountain range in the east. Not as imposing as Skalvet, but high enough to provide shelter for the villages scattered seemingly at random across the island’s interior.

Having left Kneought Brodal in Lysvik, Karen is following Thorstein Byle’s black Volvo in her Ford Ranger. Just north of the Skreby exit, they turn off the highway onto a paved but poorly maintained road and Karen only just has time to make out the words on the crooked road sign as she jangles past in Byle’s wake: KARBY QUARRY. PRIVATE ROAD.

She has seen that sign before many times as a child and always thought there was something ominous about the name, something forbidden and fascinating. She heard her cousins brag about swimming in the quarry even though it wasn’t allowed – and it may well have been true. Finn, Einar and Odd’s social lives revolved around daring each other and their friends to do stupid things, the more dangerous, the better. Seeing who was brave enough to jump into the toxic and freezing quarry water would have been right up their alley. And they had done their best to raise her in that spirit, too, during those long summer holidays. Egged on by her wide-eyed admiration, and maybe because having no sisters of their own they thought of Karen as a cute little pet, they taught her how to shoot a gun using rusty tin cans for target practice, kill chickens and distract the tobacconist in Vesle while Finn snuck in behind the counter and stole cigarettes. They taught her to smoke and to touch cow dung with her tongue without throwing up and to stand lookout while they kidnapped the neighbour’s ram. They taught her how to fight and how to take a beating without crying. She had loved them more than life itself.

And maybe it was because Finn was six, Einar four and Odd three years older than her, or maybe because she was a southerner, or maybe because she was a girl, or maybe simply because there were in fact some limits even in their confused boy brains, that they had never taken her to the quarry in Karby.

*

Thorstein Byle rolls into the turning area at the end of the road and pulls up next to a tumble-down barbed-wire fence with a sign that reads: NO FLY-TIPPING.

Karen parks right behind him and studies the piles of rubbish behind the torn-down fence. Broken wooden boards full of rusty nails, cracked plaster walls, wet cardboard boxes, two old prams, empty paint cans, dirty plastic containers, a rusty bike, a pile of broken roof tiles.