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and full of deep wrinkles and tired furrows. He had lived a long life, with plenty of space for the hiding of many secrets.

CHAPTER 7
    The waves rolled in on the white shore and glided slowly out again. The man at Wisting’s side had researched the movements of seawater for more than twenty years. His eyes narrowed behind thick glasses, biting hard on his bottom lip, he seemed to be concentrating and speculating.
    A fine mist blurred the air in front of them, and further on, the sea and sky merged together as though the horizon was a hallucination. A tent had been set up to shelter the search coordinators. Inside, two men stooped over a map, studying the shaded areas indicating the parts of the archipelago that had already been searched.
    Wisting took a step back to avoid an approaching wave that was bigger than the others. The man by his side remained standing, following with his eyes how the sea drew it back again. ‘One of the feet was found here?’ he asked, directing his question to Torunn Borg.
    ‘Six days after the first one,’ she confirmed, pointing towards Stavernsøya island where a team of people in orange waistcoats were searching in a chain formation.
    ‘There’s a gentle current on the surface,’ the oceanographer explained, ‘but the speed of the underwater currents will vary greatly. The local underwater topography makes it difficult to calculate the tidal currents.’ He pulled up the laptop bag that hung over his shoulder. ‘I need to find co-efficients for turbulence exchange and bottom friction,’ he continued. ‘They will vary with tidal and sea bottom conditions but are, at the same time, characteristics of the movement itself.’
    Wisting did not know what he was talking about. ‘How accurately will you be able to determine where the feet came from?’ he asked.
    ‘It depends on the accuracy of the data I put into the model,’ the oceanographer elaborated, patting his shoulder bag. ‘I need as much information as possible about the shoes as well: weight, buoyancy, and shape.’
    Wisting nodded at crime scene reports in Torunn Borg’s hand.
    ‘Water is not a homogenous mass,’ the oceanographer continued, taking the papers. ‘So there will be no guarantee that my results can be relied on.’
    ‘Will the fact that the feet have been in the sea for nine months make the calculations more difficult?’
    ‘Nine months?’ The oceanographer raised his eyebrows. ‘That certainly complicates matters.’ He looked out to sea again. ‘But when you come to think of it, in 1992 a storm washed several containers off the decks of a cargo ship in the Pacific Ocean. One of the containers opened up. It was packed with 28,000 bath toys, among them thousands of yellow plastic ducks. Ten months after the storm, lots of yellow plastic ducks popped up on the shores of Alaska. I used a dynamic, two-dimensional, depth-integrated numerical model to calculate the wave propulsion. In the data simulation, the bath ducks ended up on Knight Island far into the Gulf of Alaska, the same place that most of the ducks were found in reality.’
    ‘Impressive,’ Wisting said.
    ‘It’s reassuring to have theories confirmed by facts. We usually use buoys equipped with radio signals to study tidal flows, but they are expensive and have a tendency to disappear. Some of the ducks chose to continue their journey, floating very far north. Most were probably caught in Arctic pack ice. Some went in other directions. Six years ago, a yellow duck appeared on a beach in Scotland, and last year a couple more were found in England. It seems the pack ice carried them down the east coast of Canada to be captured by the Gulf Stream and carried to England. It’s quite fascinating.’
    ‘Have you found any in Norway?’
    ‘No, but it’s an absolute probability that they have reached here. If they’ve managed to travel on the Gulf Stream to Scotland, then there’s nothing to stop them from drifting to the Norwegian