‘Of course, who else? He has moved back home. You don’t remember him? He used to run around with my boys, causing mischief, until his mother put her foot down. The Eikens “weren’t appropriate company”, she said.’

Karen searches her memory. Nothing about the enthusiastic man she met up at the distillery rang a bell. And apparently no penny dropped for him, either, or he would have been even more genial, she thinks wryly to herself.

‘No, I suppose you were too little to remember all the children running about the farms around here. Besides, you only ever had eyes for Finn. My God, you worshipped that boy, and no wonder, he was handsome. Tall and wide like my father.’

Ingeborg’s smile expresses a mix of nostalgia and pride at the thought of her eldest son. Karen clears her throat.

‘So William used to play with the boys, you said? What was he like?’

‘Like most boys his age. I remember him being very talkative and very polite. He hadn’t been taught to say grace at home, but he always thanked me for the food. He could have grown into a decent man if his mother hadn’t taken him and his sister away to England. I saw him in Lysvik the other day, pale and skinny. A proper mollycoddle, the very picture of a Briton.’

‘Why did his mother move away?’ Karen asks, picturing William Tryste.

Mollycoddle is not the word she would have chosen to describe the tall man with the blue eyes. Annoyingly loquacious, but there was nothing wrong with the way he looked.

‘Well, I suppose being part of the Huss family wasn’t so glamorous once things started to go downhill,’ Ingeborg Eiken says and pauses to slurp her coffee. Then she continues.

‘Diana left her poor husband to face the music and ran back to her parents in Essex. British-born, she was, and always quick to point it out, too. I suppose the average intelligence went up significantly in both countries when she moved back home.’

She chuckles smugly at her own joke and Karen smiles politely.

‘He’s still alive, I’m told. William’s father, I mean,’ she says.

‘Ivar, yes. If you can call it living; the poor sod was put in the Lysvik nursing home many years ago. Wasn’t far past sixty when he started going doddery.’

‘Sounds like Alzheimer’s.’

‘Yes, everything needs a fancy name these days. Softening of the brain is what they called it in my day. Though back then it only happened to the elderly. Now, I feel like I hear about it all the time, and with young people, no more than fifty.’

Ingeborg pushes the basket toward her.

‘Don’t be shy, Kay-Kay,’ she urges. ‘At least one of each.’