It’s not until Gertrud Stuub gets down on her stomach and, with one last helpless prayer, carefully inches her way to the edge to look down the precipice that hope dies.

Chapter 2

2

Karen Eiken Hornby pulls the door shut behind her and digs around her coat pocket for her packet of cigarettes. Leaning with her elbows on the cold railing of the front steps, she takes a deep drag and feels her heart rate slow. She stares blankly straight ahead.

It’s already pitch-black outside, though it’s only just gone half past four, but the December air is unseasonably mild. The light from the kitchen window pools on the ground around the large rowan tree. Only a few rapidly melting patches of snow remain of the four inches that covered the ground just a week ago. Anything that manages to freeze when the temperature dips overnight quickly thaws under the grey woollen blanket the sky has resembled over the past few days. The sounds of clattering china, laughter and yet another drinking song carry through the closed window.

Fisherman, take comfort,

The codfish is so cruel, so cruel, so cruel

Quench your thirst with spirits

It’s yule, it’s yule, it’s yule . . .

Cheers!

Without turning to look, she knows the seven people around the table inside are raising their glasses to eye height before lowering them and drinking as one. She waits for the bang of their glasses being slammed back down. There it is.

How the fuck am I supposed to survive another two days of this? she wonders.

There’s nowhere to escape for some alone time. Her mother and Harry are in the big bedroom – Karen had decidedly mixed feelings about giving up her double bed – and she has moved into the guest bedroom next door and will soon, for the third night in a row, do her best to ignore the noises on the other side of the wall.

It had seemed like a good idea when they planned the whole thing over a few glasses of wine at the Dunker pub, The Mine, a couple of weeks earlier. To have her closest friends come to stay with her over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Her mother and Harry were going to visit anyway and the more the merrier. Marike had assured her she was fine on the sofa in the living room and that she would bring both crispy pork roast and red cabbage. Kore and Eirik could take the sofa bed in the guest house with Leo and bring horseradish herring, gravlax and home-made mustard. Her mother had promised to bake both saffron biscuits and rye bread the moment she arrived, so Karen would really only have to make a big batch of juniper beer and season the snaps. Two days of good food, good conversation and long walks in the snow, because surely they’d get some snow soon?