Fredrik Stuub’s house is not unlike Karen’s own. A two-storey limestone house with a black slate roof, the kind of house you find on all three Doggerian islands. Here, though, the exteriors are darker, stained by coal dust that still clings to everything on the island like a thin film. Even as a child, Karen noticed that everything was somehow darker on Noorö than at home, that the soot and dust and dark shadows from the mountains seemed to make it hard for Noorö to breathe. Back then, she’d found it exciting, almost exotic. Now, it makes her feel dull and heavy.

But there is lightness here, too, she knows that. High up in the mountains and in the bays below, there is none of that oppressiveness, and in the far north, around Gudheim, the landscape is spectacularly beautiful. But here, in the interior, where coal mines are everywhere and the sea nowhere to be seen, Karen is overcome with gloom. She forces out a smile and turns toward Thorstein Byle to shake off her dreary mood.

‘How long had Fredrik been a widower, do you know?’ she calls out and pulls a pair of latex gloves out of her coat pocket while shutting the car door behind her.

She and Thorstein have driven over to Fredrik Stuub’s house after giving Sören Larsen their word ‘not to touch so much as a flyspeck’ before he can go over it himself. Now she nods for the two police officers on guard duty to stand down and walks briskly toward the house.

‘Not off the top of my head,’ Byle replies when he catches up, ‘but it must be years. His wife passed away just a few years after their daughter died and that must be twenty years ago now.’

Karen’s stomach flips again.

‘How old was she? The daughter, I mean,’ she asks as casually as she can manage.

‘Just shy of thirty, I think. Hep C, or I’ve been told. She’d apparently been rather out of control in her youth and been sick for a long time. Ulrika was her name. Her son Gabriel went to school with my youngest girl, that’s why I know.’

‘So Fredrik has a nephew,’ Karen says. ‘And who’s Gabriel’s father?’

‘That, I can’t tell you. But she definitely wasn’t married to him. I could try to find out, assuming she herself knew.’

‘Hold off on that. Let’s wait for the results of the autopsy before we start poking at old wounds.’

‘So you don’t think he was murdered?’

Karen pauses with her hand on the door handle.

‘Most of the signs certainly point to it, but we can’t be sure until we have the autopsy results.’

She pushes the handle down, opens the door and steps over the threshold. And as she does, she becomes sure.

*