The entire front of the base pops out, revealing something that looks like a mix between a pastry board and a shallow drawer. Karen jumps up too quickly, causing jolts of searing pain to shoot up her thigh and through her hip. Together, they stare down into Fredrik Stuub’s concealment.

For several seconds, the ticking of the clock on the wall above the kitchen table is the only sound, then Karen breaks the silence.

‘Don’t touch anything,’ she says, putting a hand on Byle’s shoulder. ‘Can you fetch an evidence bag from my car? Make it a large one.’

Then she pulls a pair of disposable gloves out of her coat pocket and gently picks up the laptop.

Chapter 17

17

She considers calling first. To say she’s on Noorö and ask if it would be OK for her to stop by. She decides not to. Giving her aunt advance notice of her coming would inevitably turn a simple visit into a full-on family get-together. The moment they hung up, her aunt would start to summon every single one of Karen’s blood relations on the island: first cousins, second cousins, third cousins, and probably their spouses and children, too. But going by Ingeborg and Lars’ house is something she can’t put off any longer. It’s only a matter of time before they catch wind of the fact that she’s on the island and they would never forgive her if she didn’t visit.

Besides, she has to admit she’s looking forward to seeing them and the farm again. After all, she did spend large parts of her childhood there.

And maybe, precisely because she hasn’t been back since, her memories are unvarnished by time. She can take each one out and study its pristine details, turn them this way and that without the contents changing. In her memories, everything is still the way it once was: the sheep, the regular grey ones and her favourite black-and-white ones with their soft, curly fleeces; the lambs she was allowed to help bottle feed – at least one ewe always died during lambing and every year her cousins would find at least one scrawny, abandoned, starving little thing in the fields.

Then the nights when Uncle Lars and the cousins took her out with them in the boat. Her own father, who unlike his brother-in-law lived off what the sea provided, never took her out. But here, she was allowed to come along when they went snag fishing among the skerries outside Gudheim. Only many years later had she realised snag fishing was illegal.