Skreby grew up around the Firth of Skre, a long arm of the sea that cuts through Noorö’s eastern mountain range along a natural fault line. The village is flanked by Goat Back Mountain in the north and Halfen in the south. And even though the mountains loom ominously over the town, compared to Skalvet on the west coast of the island, they appear no more imposing than two coal piles. Neither one rises more than 1,500 feet above the waves of the North Sea, while the highest peak in the Skalvet range is over 4,000 feet.

Karen relaxes as she follows Byle’s car and takes the opportunity to study her surroundings. She absently notes that the sun has won its battle against the clouds and is infusing the December scene with a golden glow. They pass sleepy barns, frozen pastures, fallow fields and a petrol station.

As soon as they turn off the highway and onto Skrebyvägen, the farms become more numerous: cottages with narrow strips of land that once yielded a complementary source of food and income for beach fishermen and people who didn’t own a boat, plots that were primarily farmed by women while their men – the men who only had tiny anchors on their graves – were at sea, toiling aboard other men’s ships.

The road gradually takes on the appearance of a traditional village high street, with simple terraced houses from the 1920s and 1930s on either side, built during the golden age of coal mining. Karen glances down the seemingly deserted side streets. Half the houses are probably empty, she thinks and feels a pang of melancholy as she studies the stillness. There’s something heavy and hopeless about the soot-stained houses. Granted, Noorö has always been the most sparsely populated island in the Doggerian archipelago, but she can’t remember it ever being this desolate, not even on Boxing Day.

Rural flight. This is what it looks like, she thinks to herself. Unlike on more urbanised Heimö and picturesque Frisel, where the population decline has been successfully reversed in recent years and where Doggerian expats from Scandinavia, the UK and the continent are now settling once more, on Noorö, the trend has been the opposite.