‘He was their grandfather. As for money – not as much as you’d think. Huss made his fortune in mining, but he had no sons to take over the company. Huss ran everything himself with an iron fist until the day he died. And when his poor nephew Ivar finally took over in the mid-seventies, the golden age of coal was a distant memory. Within a decade, time caught up with the Huss mining empire and things went south fast. The company was done in by a weak economy, soaring import prices and exhausted coal seams, but Ivar Tryste was left to personally shoulder the blame for the closures.’

Ivar Tryste. Karen vaguely recognises the name from interviews and newspaper articles from the mid-eighties. An image of a harassed-looking man with sad eyes suddenly flashes before her. But the image is fuzzy; she would have been in her twenties at the time and busy with other things.

‘No, there’s no fortune left, I don’t think,’ Byle continues. ‘They do still own fairly large tracts of land, but it’s neither close to the sea nor particularly fertile. They’ve probably sold some for pasture, but the prices up here aren’t like down on Heimö.’

‘When did the last mine close, do you remember?’

‘Both the quarries were still open in the early nineties, Karby and the one up in Hovnes, but the last mine closed in 1989, I remember it very clearly. Half the people around here lost their jobs; it was a bad time. Divorce and all kinds of trouble followed in the wake of the closure. My sister and brother-in-law were affected, like so many others. He lost everything and took to the bottle when the mine closed. Killed himself four years later, forty-six years old.’

‘I remember hearing stories about people trying to break into the owner’s house to give him a thrashing. So that was Ivar Tryste, Old Huss’s nephew?’

Byle nods.

‘Yes, it must have been terrible for Ivar. He’s still alive, by the way. If you can call it living. He’s in a nursing home in Lysvik, apparently gone with the fairies. Alzheimer’s, or so I’m told.’

She notes that Byle has become considerably more talkative in the short time they’ve spent together. Kneought Brodal’s foot-in-mouth tendencies this morning seem forgotten and Karen gratefully notes that Byle’s extensive local knowledge is going to come in very useful. She suppresses her frustration at his habit of sounding like what he’s telling her is general knowledge. She supposes it is, if you live up here.

Just then, a memory flutters by and Karen laughs.

‘Is the house still standing? “The Complex”, I mean. Isn’t that where the Huss family used to live?’