Page 12

2019

Agatha has always enjoyed Patric’s company. When they worked together, certainly, but maybe more so since he’s retired.

Patric, at sixty, could have stayed on in his job as chief of police, but Agatha’s predecessor wanted to pass the baton on. Now he talks as if his time in charge was another era.

What Agatha has always liked about Patric is that his years in the force didn’t have a detrimental affect on him. Patric doesn’t dwell on the horror and Agatha knows that he’s seen plenty of that.

Patric, like Agatha, makes a point of highlighting the lighter side. He knows Agatha pulled a body out of the lake a few days ago. He was there, after all. In a town like this, those situations are about all hands on deck. But he doesn’t ask her immediately what’s happening. Instead, as she follows him through to his kitchen, he asks her if she’s heard that the bar on the road to Neilim is closing.

‘I’d forgotten it was still open,’ Agatha says.

‘That bar stayed open through the Second World War,’ Patric says. ‘My father used to drink in it, when he was driving the trucks.’

‘Why’s it closing now?’

‘People come to town to drink.’ Patric shrugs. ‘It’s easier, when everything is concentrated. Look at us in . A choice of bars. Big changes.’

‘Makes policing a bit easier,’ Agatha says. ‘And we may have a choice, but we all still end up in Elliot’s, don’t we?’

Patric smiles.

‘I got a call from the owner of the Neilim bar once,’ Patric says. ‘A few locals had got rowdy with some miners that had stopped in. Bit of a brawl had broken out. A couple of the miners were Russian. Age-old. I told the owner I wouldn’t be there for three hours. I was dealing with some guy who’d knocked his wife’s teeth out.’

‘What did the bar owner do?’

‘He rang the bell and told them to drink up, that it was closing time. It was only five in the afternoon. They were too pissed to notice. They reacted like sheep, emptied their glasses and left. Beat the crap out of each other on the road outside but it wasn’t his bar that got smashed up.’

‘Russians should know better than to go into an isolated bar full of Finns.’

‘You’d think.’

They’ve taken seats at Patric’s kitchen table; the old linoleum tablecloth is covered in circular marks made by hot cups over the years. Patric fusses at a pot of coffee and places two slices of home-made blueberry pie beside the coffee mugs. He’s an excellent cook.

‘Any word on the American?’ he asks.

Agatha smiles.

‘I suppose Jonas has been talking.’

‘You know he can’t keep a secret.’

They both laugh. Jonas wouldn’t tell anybody if he was having a heart attack. Her other officer, Janic, though. . .

‘Eat,’ Patric says, nodding at the pie. ‘You’re skin and bone.’

‘Oomf. I’m trying to lose a few pounds. I can’t even feel my bones any more, I’ve so much cushioning.’

‘You’re too skinny, already. It’s all the worrying.’

Agatha raises her eyebrows.

‘And have you had something to worry about, lately?’ Patric probes. ‘Beside this case? Anything you need to tell me about?’

Patric knows everything. He knows that when the phone rings or there’s a knock on the door, Agatha’s first reaction is always panic.

‘Not a thing,’ she says, and that’s true because there have been no calls or door knocks.

She just knows there will be, eventually.

‘And the children?’

‘I think they’re okay. I hope. There are little flare-ups. But it’s been two years.’

Patric nods then picks up her fork, cuts off some pie and holds it to Agatha’s mouth until she’s forced to eat, like a child.

She takes the fork and pretends to poke it at his eye.

‘Enough, old man. I need your advice.’

‘Leave this shithole and move to Helsinki.’

‘So you’ve said, many times. You also made sure I was appointed to this job, so it’s a little contradictory.’

‘But you should be doing a better job in the capital. You’re too smart for this town.’

‘Apparently not. I’ve managed to track down the American. I’m just. . . not sure. Something doesn’t add up.’

‘You’ve interviewed him already?’ Patric asks.

‘Not properly. Spoke to a member of the police department where he lives. He has no record– one of the cops even knows him, says he’s a good kid.’

‘What are the chances of you finding the one person in America the cops have intimate knowledge of in a good way?’

Agatha laughs.

‘He’s from a small town, albeit in a big country. New England, seaside place.’

‘So, what’s not adding up?’

‘He’s at home and is acting normal. After murdering a young woman and dumping her body in a lake? And clearing out her cabin to fake her disappearance? Is he a complete psychopath?’

‘You think they don’t exist? And you don’t know how he behaved for the day or two he was here after she disappeared. The fact he’s acting regular at home might not mean anything. Maybe he’s convinced himself it’s all a bad dream now. It could have been an accident, you know. He might not see himself as a murderer. Just a guy who made a mistake. Seems to me, leaving her in the lake the way she was. . . it was amateurish.’

‘I know,’ Agatha says. ‘But I feel like I shouldn’t close off other avenues. We’re going to speak to the people he was here with, too. If he was behaving strangely, then they should have picked up on it.’

‘And what other avenues do you think you should be on?’ Patric pours more coffee. Agatha takes a tentative sip, aware this is her sixth or seventh cup of the day and Patric makes it strong.

‘One of the woman’s friends said something,’ Agatha says. ‘About. . . about everybody knowing who killed her.’

Patric shakes his head, slowly.

‘For God’s sake,’ he says.

‘I know,’ Agatha agrees. ‘But should I. . . do you think I should interview him?’

Patric stands and walks to the sink. He pours the dregs of his coffee out and she can see his shoulders tense. He takes a few moments then turns around.

‘For twenty years,’ he says, ‘every time something happens, his name comes up. A tourist missing for a few hours. A crash on the motorway. An accident on the slopes. Someone losing a cat. I’m so tired of it. Twenty years of people telling me I should arrest him for so much as the wind changing. Twenty years of people assuming they know how to do my job.’

‘But. . . there has been reason to be suspicious of him,’ Agatha says, cautiously.

Patric looks at her, like he’s disappointed.

She exhales, a troubled sound.

‘You want my opinion?’ Patric says. ‘Interview him, if you think there’s a need. But Agatha, the man deserves some peace. I’m ashamed of how this town has treated him over the years. Me included. I would hate to see you pressured down the same path.’

Agatha listens and she hears what Patric is saying. He’s right, of course he is. She just wanted to come and check.

Whoever murdered Vicky Evans, she will find them. Whether it was the American or somebody closer to home.

But she can’t help the growing feeling in her stomach that something very bad has happened in . Is happening in .

Again.

Alex takes a slice of pizza from one of the many laid out on a long banquet table at the top of the hall.

He’s in a giant vaulted room, reminiscent of some sort of royal dining area. Lodge is a series of separate buildings, he’s learned. The main building contains the reception, bar and restaurant, and is the starting point of all the planned activities, including buses to the ski chairs.

Behind the Lodge are the saunas. Alex has never seen such an array of options for sweating to death. That building leads to the frozen lake, part of which has been kept ice-free so the tourists can have a dip after their eucalyptus sauna, or whatever else they’ve been enduring.

Beyond that building and across a little bridge is Santa’s house, a quaint white and red wooden affair. Alex has seen children leaving there, gifts in hand. Then there’s this communal dining hall, a huge building with giant entrance doors and a roaring log fire at its far end. It wouldn’t be out of place on a Game of Thrones film set, Alex thinks.

Alex sees some of the staff gathered at the far end. They’re all in what he now realises is the uniform of the activity guides. There are other staff in the Lodge, but these are clearly the ones who knew his sister best.

He eats the pizza slice without tasting it, though he is aware of it being slightly bitter. He glances at the sign in front of the plate he chose from. Reindeer pizza. Delightful. He wonders how much Rudolph he’ll end up eating on this trip.

He walks to the end of the hall.

Niamh is at the table facing away from him; he spots her by her red hair. She’s sitting beside the manager guy, Harry, Alex realises. They’re hunched in a heated conversation– their body language marks them apart from the people they’re sitting beside.

Niamh turns away from Harry, spots Alex, and slides off the bench.

‘Come and join us,’ she says.

Alex follows her, registering that she doesn’t return to where she had been sitting but instead escorts him to the far side of the table. He tells himself it’s because there isn’t room for two to sit where she was, but a little part of him wonders if she’s keeping him away from this Harry guy– or if Harry wants Alex kept away from him.

When Alex sits down, it’s next to Nicolas.

‘You’ve met most of the guys,’ Niamh says, taking a pew on his other side. ‘We’re more or less the full guide contingent.’

She throws out some more names around the table. Alex nods at them in turn. With the exception of Harry, they’re all in their twenties, early thirties at most. All of them look fresh-faced, healthy, outdoorsy types.

‘I’m Harry, the manager.’

It speaks. Alex looks at the man and detects a Finnish accent, which he’s starting to get more of an ear for.

‘Harry’s from ,’ Niamh says. ‘One of the only locals.’

‘You hired my sister?’ Alex says.

‘No,’ Harry says, quietly. ‘The owner does the hiring. I just manage the place.’

‘You do the firing, though,’ Nicolas says. ‘Don’t you, Harry?’

It sounds like a loaded statement.

‘It was a ten-kilometre detour and one of the snowmobiles ended up in the lake.’ Harry sighs.

Somebody leans over Alex’s shoulder, places a bottle of something called ‘Lapin Kulta’ in front of him.

‘Harry fired a new guide yesterday,’ Nicolas says, bringing him up to speed. ‘Just because the poor chap got a few tourists lost. It’s not like they got frostbite or anything.’

‘Safety first,’ Harry says. He smiles; it looks more like a grimace to Alex.

‘That’s the motto around here, is it?’ Alex says.

The group falls silent.

A woman down the far end of the table sits forward. Alex can see her properly now. Long blonde hair, big blue eyes. In London, she’d be on the cover of a magazine. In , she probably spends her days encased in oversized overalls, chaperoning wealthy tourists on sleigh jaunts.

‘Vicky once brought a team on a cross-country ski and lost one of the group in the forest, remember?’

Fond smiles around the table greet her anecdote.

‘She said he was picking berries,’ the woman continues, ‘and she forgot to count when they moved on. She only realised when they’d gone a couple of Ks that he wasn’t with them. She didn’t tell anybody he was missing, just brought them on a loop trail. Everything looks the same to them, they’d no clue. But then she spotted his tracks and realised he’d followed them. So, she brought the team back on another loop. But the guy had got to where they turned around and followed their tracks back down. And this went on until she figured out they were chasing each other in circles and she turned her group around, said they were going home and met the guy coming up on his third lap.’

‘Vicky wasn’t fired, just so you know,’ Nicolas says. ‘Too pretty to lose her job, eh, Harry?’

‘Nobody complained,’ Harry says, and he shrugs. Alex notices a faint softening in his expression.

It continues like this. The guides take turns to talk about their memories of Vicky.

Alex should be taking comfort from it, but instead he finds their tales excruciating.

They’re doing what people do when somebody dies, he realises. They’re making a saint of his sister. And he knows that’s one thing Vicky wasn’t. She was real and flawed and messy.

It’s in the flaws and the messiness that he’ll find out what caused her death, he thinks.

He notices Harry and Niamh stay quiet. Maybe Harry has no stories about her, Alex thinks. He’s sure Niamh does, but he suspects, like him, she doesn’t want to reminisce, not when she’s still getting her head around the fact Vicky is gone.

The night wears on. People drink more. Harry leaves, the guides seem to relax more without the manager present, and a bottle of whiskey appears on the table.

Alex finds himself alone with Niamh as others drift away from the table.

‘I know you all knew her,’ Alex says. ‘Maybe better than I did, these days. But this. . . eulogising. It doesn’t sound like Vicky.’

Niamh smiles thinly.

‘No,’ she says. ‘But what are people going to say? Sorry your sister died but this one time she phoned in with a hangover pretending she was sick and I had to do her bloody job for her, the bitch?’

‘If that’s all she did,’ Alex says.

‘Vicky wasn’t an angel,’ Niamh says, nodding. ‘I’m telling you that as her best friend here, and I guess you already know. She could be blunt. A little selfish. But she was also kind and funny and, well, she was up for anything. I liked that.’

Alex takes a sip of beer.

‘What you were saying earlier,’ he says. ‘About not trusting the police. What do you mean?’

Niamh glances around, warily.

‘Ignore me,’ she says. ‘I was just ranting. It’s. . . well, up here, tourism is everything. You know what I mean?’

Alex does know. The message is as subtle as a brick.

‘The police think a tourist might have done it,’ Alex says. ‘An American.’

Niamh sucks in her cheeks.

‘Hmm.’

‘You know who he is?’

Her eyes fall from his. She knows.

He’s surprised by her reticence, especially after her earlier forthrightness. He wonders if somebody has had a word with her in the meantime.

‘Please,’ Alex says. ‘I’d just like his name. He’s not here any more, so it’s not like I can confront the guy.’

‘Fair enough,’ Niamh says. ‘I’m just not sure it’s going to be any help. His name was Bryce Adams.’

‘Bryce Adams. So, was she seeing this guy?’

‘She spent some time with him. He was only here for a fortnight. Good-looking. Not very smart. But, cute. In an American-footballer kind of way. We get a lot of them over here– very rich, very into a more exclusive experience. It’s far more expensive to come to Finnish Lapland than to hit the slopes in, say, France. Plus, they get all the adrenaline-junkie shit here. Climbing ice waterfalls. Driving Audis over frozen lakes. Snowboarding. You name it.’

‘Right. And this Bryce Adams guy, he was into the extreme?’

‘Yeah. He and his friends. And then at night, they hung out with Vicky and Beatrice and a couple of the other girls. I asked Vicky if she was into him, but she laughed it off. She was with him the night before she disappeared, though. Lots of people saw her go off with him. Then she was gone. And he left a couple of days later.’

‘Did you see him, after?’ Alex says. ‘Did you ask him any questions?’

‘No. I was busy and. . . well, like I said. When we saw she’d cleared her cabin, it was hard not to think she’d just left. That’s what others said to me, anyway.’

‘Others like who?’

‘I don’t know. Everybody. Anyway, no matter what I thought, I couldn’t start interrogating guests.’

‘But this Bryce guy was definitely the last known person with Vicky?’

Niamh shrugs.

‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘It seems that way.’

‘Did he seem the type to you?’

‘The type to kill somebody? I mean, is there a type? Would so many girls get killed if there was a type we knew to watch out for?’

‘Fair point,’ Alex says.

Niamh sighs.

‘Sometimes these guys, they come over and they get all pumped up. They drink too much, they think they can fuck all the tour guides. They can cause a bit of trouble but we’ve never had this before.’

Alex grits his teeth.

‘Do you know where he was from?’ Alex asks.

‘They were wearing Patriots jerseys in the bar one night,’ Niamh says. ‘So, I’m guessing Boston or somewhere near there.’

Alex absorbs this. It’s a start. Massachusetts is a big place, but a name and possible state is better than no name and fifty states.

Niamh downs a shot of whiskey. She’s drinking too much, Alex thinks. He barely knows her, but he can see in her face she’s not enjoying the alcohol; she’s using it to numb herself.

He wonders how he’d have felt had he witnessed Vicky being taken out of that lake.

‘Where are you from?’ he asks, trying to distract Niamh from the whiskey and himself from his thoughts. ‘Sorry, I haven’t asked you anything about yourself. I’ve also been meaning to thank you—’

‘Honestly, don’t,’ she says, quietly. ‘Don’t thank me. She was my friend. In as much as you can be in one of these jobs. I used to work in Thailand, a rep at a beach resort. I hung out with a couple of girls for an entire summer, thought we’d be mates for life. I -haven’t spoken to them, bar the odd comment on their Insta pages, in about three years. But Vicky was different and I suppose, even if we did go home eventually, Yorkshire’s not that far from Dublin. We probably would have met up.’

‘Dublin?’

‘Yeah. Though, I haven’t been home in a few years. Not properly, not for more than a week here or there. Don’t really get on great with my family, you know.’

‘Vicky was never home,’ Alex says.

Niamh frowns.

‘You look surprised,’ he says.

‘She talked about you all a lot. I assumed– well, I know she was here all this year– but I presumed you were close. She was much fonder of all of you than I am of my lot.’

Alex swallows. He takes a sip of beer to wash down the lump in his throat.

‘She tried to ring me,’ he says. ‘A few times, the week before she died.’

Niamh stares at him.

‘I think she needed me,’ he adds.

‘Don’t blame yourself,’ Niamh says. ‘Blame the person who killed her.’

‘If I can find out who that is and why they did it.’

Niamh nods sympathetically, but he notices she looks away quickly.

He follows her eyes. She’s looking over at the other guides, now lounging around the fire at the end of the hall.

His gut is telling him there’s more that Niamh isn’t telling him.

That she has more to say about Vicky.

Nobody wants to add to your pain, he thinks.

And that’s quickly followed by: Vicky, what the hell were you up to over here?

Agatha can hear Olavi moving before she sees him. She’s sitting up in bed, Vicky Evans’ case file on her lap, the photos from the lake and the morgue splayed across the crocheted bedspread. She’s been wondering how many officers she can bring in from surrounding areas to help blitz through on a door-to-door. If they can’t send help, she’ll have to go cap in hand to Rovaniemi and that will entail ceding some control of the investigation.

She’s also been wondering why Vicky was so eager to get hold of her brother in the week before she went missing. They’re still making their way through the other numbers on Vicky’s call log but Alex’s is the only one she attempted more than once. There’s an English landline in the records that Agatha now knows belongs to a lobbying firm in London. Where Alex works, Agatha suspects, though he didn’t mention it. He might have missed it, amid the shock of seeing his old mobile number there. Agatha wants to give him the benefit of the doubt. She doesn’t want to think that she also has to contend with Vicky’s brother keeping secrets from her.

Had Vicky been in debt of some kind? Her bank account details had come through this afternoon. The balance was healthy– very healthy, in fact– and she had no credit card bills outstanding. It didn’t look on paper like Vicky was in need of cash. She seemed to have been saving a regular amount every month since summer– €2,000 every four weeks, almost all of her monthly salary. Agatha wonders if that had something to do with her suggestion of an expensive anniversary gift for her parents. Had her argument with Alex inspired Vicky to live frugally and put proper money away so she could prove him wrong?

Was that why she’d phoned him? So she could tell him she’d enough saved to pay her way?

Olavi comes in just as Agatha grabs the last close-up photo of Vicky’s head wound and stuffs it into the folder.

His eyes are barely open, the top of his arm is a furious red and he’s sniffling.

She lifts up the bedspread and he climbs in, wordlessly, lying with his face away from her as she spoons his back and strokes his hair.

‘The bad dream?’ she asks him.

He nods.

She looks over his shoulder at the top of his arm. The mouth shield is working; the skin is sore but at least it’s intact.

‘You’re safe here, my darling,’ she says. She smells his hair. It’s getting darker every year. Olavi was practically blond when he was born. He still uses the same baby shampoo as Onni, even though she’s told him, at eight, he can use a more grown-up version. She thinks Olavi is unconsciously trying to stretch out his childhood as long as possible. Perhaps if he has another few years, he can block out the trauma he experienced early on.

‘Nobody is coming,’ Agatha whispers. ‘It’s just us four. You, me, Emilia and Onni, okay? We’ll always be together.’

‘You promise?’

He already sounds half asleep again, safe and warm in her bed.

‘I promise.’

Agatha’s tired, too. She’s starting to drift off, thinking she must remember to turn off the bedside lamp, when Olavi speaks again.

‘I saw Luca.’

Agatha’s whole body is at once awake and alert. She tries not to react, not to jump up from the bed to check the doors and windows. She concentrates on keeping very still and her voice very even, though her mouth is dry and her heart is thumping.

‘When?’ she says.

‘Last week.’

‘Where?’

‘Outside school. When we were playing.’

Agatha’s mind races frantically through the timeline. Last week. . . it’s about a week since the biting started up again.

Now it makes sense.

Last week. She had been in town, right up until she’d had to go down to Rovaniemi, and she hadn’t seen Luca. Does he really mean last week? Olavi still gets time mixed up. Sometimes he’ll say, remember yesterday , and he’ll be referring to something that had happened days ago.

‘What were you playing?’ she asks him.

‘Helmi let us build a snow fort. She said we could put pine cones in it for the elves.’

Agatha remembers. It was a mild day and Helmi had let the children outside. She’d confessed to Agatha that evening that she’d hosted a birthday party for her sister the night before and had a wine headache, so she had needed the fresh air as much as the kids. Agatha had seen the children in the yard when she’d passed by on the way to interview one of the local Sami herders about a lost, possibly stolen, reindeer. She hadn’t stopped; didn’t want to get stuck there talking to Helmi or have Olavi begging her to climb into his fort.

That was seven or eight days ago. If Agatha had been around, Luca would have known to hide. Then, when Agatha was out of sight, Luca must have emerged. . .

Agatha feels sick. She doesn’t even think to ask Olavi if he’s sure. She knows the children fear Luca’s return but they’ve never gone so far as to have dreamt it up. The last time any of them had seen Luca, they’d seen Luca. It hadn’t been a figment of their imagination. And it had thrown their lives into disarray.

Agatha won’t let it happen again.

Alex wakes early, his head still fuzzy from the night before. He hadn’t meant to fall asleep straight after returning to the cabin, but a combination of all the travelling, the Arctic air and the beer had knocked him out. He sees his phone on the pillow across from him and vaguely remembers he’d been looking up something just before he fell asleep.

Bryce Adams. The American.

Alex sits up. It’s 7 a.m. He has fifteen work-related emails– he can already see Charlie responding to the Cassidy account ones and looping Alex in. There’s a text from his father, which must have come in last night. Two words– any news?

No news is good news, right? Except in this instance.

Alex gulps down half a bottle of water and opens Facebook, an app he has an account on but never uses.

There are too many Bryce Adamses to count.

Alex opens Instagram. He doesn’t have an Insta account and has to set one up to view other users’ photos and comments.

Hundreds of Bryce Adamses.

He googles the name and Boston.

Too many hits.

To hell with this, he thinks.

He phones Charlie.

Wakes Charlie.

‘What? Oh, thank my lucky stars, Alex boy. Must have knocked the alarm off. Late night.’

‘Sorry,’ Alex says. ‘Charlie, that help you were offering me?’

‘Wait. Pen. Need pen. Have to write this down. Think I’m still drunk. Might need a reminder.’

Alex listens to Charlie scrambling for the back of some receipt or other, then for a pen.

‘I need to find a Bryce Adams. A Yank. Might be from Massachusetts, or might just have a thing for the Patriots. Travelled to Lapland in late October, early November. In his twenties, bit of an adrenaline chaser.’

‘This is fun. I feel like a PI. Hey, do you think private investigator sounds sexier than lobbyist?’

‘Everything sounds sexier than lobbyist. Charlie, you know this social media shit. How do I get Facebook and Insta to let me into Vicky’s accounts? If I contact them—’

‘You’ll die of old age before they respond. You’re better off hacking in. Take a guess at her password.’

That hadn’t worked for the police, Alex thinks.

‘By the way,’ Charlie says. ‘Closed the Cassidy account late last night. Government is giving them the Channel ports. You’re welcome.’

‘What do you mean, you closed it? They didn’t make a decision to give that port contract in the last forty-eight hours. If it’s closed, it’s a miracle and it’s because of the work I did.’

‘Listen, there’s no need to get upset, I’ll make sure the partners know you had a hand.’

‘Jesus Christ.’

‘You’re not gonna lose it, mate, are you? Is Stainless Steel about to crack?’

Alex takes a deep breath. Ruthless fuck.

‘Charlie, shush. Tell me, who would have been working in reception in October?’

‘Our reception? Bloody hell, man, don’t you notice these things? Josephine, the blonde. She’s been there since summer.’

Alex thanks Charlie and hangs up. It’s too early to ring the office.

He sighs and sends his father a text– No news, anything from Mum? – and heads to the shower. When he returns, his father has typed back, No news .

At the station, a different officer, young with Elvis sideburns, tells Alex that Agatha isn’t in work yet. He helpfully gives Alex directions to Agatha’s house, which is just a street away from the station.

Alex can’t imagine a situation in England where he’d be sent to the chief of police’s home, even in Apple Dale, which is a relatively small village. But he doesn’t question it. It’s the exact convenience he needs.

He walks past a couple of sports shops on the main street en route to Agatha’s and thinks he ought to buy some more appropriate clothing. Agatha’s thermals and winter coat are doing their job but Alex still only has the bare minimum to wear over the thermals. Plus, Agatha hadn’t taken it on herself to buy him underwear, which brings its own problems.

At a stall selling hot chocolate and gingerbread men, Alex asks where he can find a shop to buy regular, non-ski clothes. The stallholder frowns, then suggests Alex go to the K-Market on the way into town. Or, he could call into the Versace store a few streets down. Alex is mind-blown. A supermarket or the local Versace outlet. How very ski resort.

The police chief’s house is a small chalet with the same pointed roof as its neighbours and fairy lights strung around the inside of the frosted windows. He has to knock several times on Agatha’s front door, inhaling the scent of the pine wreath hanging from a nail in front of his nose, before it’s opened; a tentative gap, through which a dark-haired teenage girl peeks out.

‘Is Agatha here?’ he asks.

‘Who are you?’ she says.

Another face pokes through the gap lower down– the fairer-haired little boy from the police station.

‘It’s the man whose sister died,’ the kid says.

He reaches past his sister and pulls the door open completely.

‘Onni!’ she snaps.

It’s quickly followed by a roar, this time from Agatha.

‘Emilia! Onni! What have I told you about the door!’

Agatha appears. Alex has only known her the last thirty-six hours or so but this is the first time he’s seen her properly ruffled. More than ruffled, in fact; she looks scared.

She catches sight of him on the porch and her countenance changes instantly, from fear to confusion, but in her eyes he can still see the remnants of whatever had passed through her mind when she saw the open door.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you at home,’ he says. ‘The guy at the station. . .’

‘No. It’s fine. Sorry, I didn’t mean to shout.’

She’s speaking more to the children than him. Behind her, he sees another kid emerge. He’s aged somewhere between these two, definitely too old to be sucking his thumb, which he’s doing right now.

He’s still in his pyjamas. They all are, Alex realises. Agatha is wearing a large sweater over a pair of check bottoms. He’s embarrassed; he’d presumed she’d be at the station by 8.30 a.m. but he’s gone and woken the whole family, by the looks of things.

‘I’m running late,’ Agatha says. ‘Please. Come in.’

Alex follows Agatha through to the kitchen.

‘Emilia, make Alex some tea or coffee. I’ll get dressed. Um, we can go straight to the lake, but I have to bring the kids somewhere afterwards, so they’ll be in the car.’

‘Mom, you said we were staying home—’

The teenager, Emilia, addresses Agatha, but Agatha cuts her off.

‘Not now, Emilia.’

Alex has always very firmly placed himself in the category of not-a-dick but he’s also never been in the category of brother-to-a-murder-victim before and he can’t help but feel impatient at this woman’s disorganisation. At the station yesterday, she’d impressed him with her preparedness for his questions. Now, he’s having very unkind thoughts about mothers of young children being given important jobs.

Vicky would have torn him a new one if he’d uttered that thought aloud.

‘Sure,’ he says, mentally planning the call home to get hold of somebody in the Met.

Agatha hesitates and he can tell she wants to defend her situation. Instead, she bites her lip and rushes from the kitchen.

Fifteen minutes later and after a lot of kid-wrangling on her part, Alex and Agatha are in her car and heading on the road out of town to see where his sister was found dead.

Alex looks over his shoulder at the three kids in the back. The girl is on her phone, the two boys on tabs.

The middle kid, the one whose name he doesn’t know, speaks without even looking up.

‘Do you know how to play Roblox?’

‘I do not,’ Alex says.

‘What do you know how to play?’

‘Poker,’ Alex says without hesitation. ‘And Call of Duty.’

‘Is that the one with the sex workers and car thieves?’ the teenage girl asks.

‘Emilia,’ Agatha says.

‘Sex workers?’ Alex repeats.

‘Prostitute is an offensive term,’ Emilia says. ‘Though I suppose in that game, they’re called hoe—’

‘Emilia!’

Alex almost smiles.

The car falls silent again.

‘That’s Grand Theft Auto,’ Alex says, after a few minutes. Agatha grimaces. The kids giggle.

They’ve been driving for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes.

Alex might be imagining it, but Agatha seems to be relaxing the further they get from town.

‘It’s a long way,’ he says.

‘Not much further.’

‘I guess I thought it would be closer to the resort,’ he says. ‘How come she was this far away?’

Agatha glances in the rear-view mirror at the kids, then makes a face at Alex that tells him to hold off until they’ve arrived.

She pulls off the road and they descend around a hair-raising bend, made more terrifying by the fact the ground beneath them looks and feels to Alex like sheer ice. Worse, Agatha drives like she doesn’t expect to meet anybody, taking the turn wide.

‘You’re a skilled driver,’ Alex says. ‘I can’t even see where one lane starts and another ends.’

Agatha shrugs.

‘Winter tyres,’ she says. ‘Plus, it’s deserted.’

‘But you get some traffic, right?’

‘Of course, but everybody takes it easy. That’s why it takes so long to get anywhere. Crashes are one of our worst fears, to be honest.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Some of the resorts use tour buses; there might be twenty or thirty on board. If one crashes somewhere outside a town, it could be a while before we hear about it and then it takes a while to get to them. And if they’re not already dead in the crash. . .’

‘The cold gets them,’ Emilia says from the back. ‘You should never leave your vehicle. Not while it’s still warm.’

She sounds deadly serious. Something in her knowing tone makes Alex shiver. He wonders how young is too young up here to learn about such awful things. Or whether that kind of warning is fed to kids with their mother’s milk.

They arrive at their destination and park up. Agatha leaves the keys in the ignition and the heating on as she and Alex get out of the car.

‘It’s taken us a while to drive here,’ Agatha says, as they walk in the direction of the lake. Alex can see its frozen mass through the thin, leafless trees that poke up from the snow. ‘We’d have been here quicker by snowmobile,’ Agatha continues. ‘Everybody crosses their nearest section of the lake in winter, you see. Very few drive around it.’

They clear the reedy trees and arrive at the lake’s edge; Agatha walks straight on to the snow covering it.

Alex hesitates. It takes a couple of seconds for her to realise she’s not with him.

‘What are you doing?’ Agatha calls back.

Alex stares at the thin layer of snow in front of him.

‘It takes getting used to,’ he says. ‘The notion of stepping on to a lake.’

‘But you’re already on it,’ she says, confused.

Alex frowns. He looks down at his feet again, kicks away some of the snow, realises that there’s packed ice beneath.

‘We’re parked on it,’ Agatha continues.

‘What?’

Alex glances back at the car.

‘But the trees,’ he says.

‘They’re in the water,’ Agatha says. ‘Alex, parts of this lake are so thick, they race cars across it. You’ve seen the advertisements. The big hotel in is hosting an annual Porsche event as we speak.’

‘But Vicky. . .’

‘Six weeks ago. Inari had only started to freeze. The ice was still thin in parts.’

Alex takes that in. If his sister had been on the lake six weeks later, does that mean she’d still be alive?

But of course not. She didn’t just drown. She was attacked.

He follows Agatha. Daylight has arrived and now he can see how isolated they are. He does a 360-degree turn– all he can see for miles is the open expanse of the lake and the surrounding trees. You could scream yourself hoarse out here; nobody would hear you.

They walk for a couple of minutes until they arrive at some markers on the ice.

‘This is where she was found,’ Agatha says. ‘But that doesn’t mean it’s where she went in. The lake is over one thousand square kilometres and she could have floated from anywhere. She could have been over the other side when she went in.’

‘It feels so isolated.’

‘Well, you know. Everything is up here. Next stop east is Russia.’

Agatha points in the distance, then pivots and nods back in what Alex thinks might be the direction of town.

‘Through the trees over there, can you see it?’

Alex squints but he’s not sure what she’s looking at. She pulls a small pair of binoculars out of her coat pocket, focuses them and hands them to Alex.

He looks through the sights and spots a rooftop.

‘That’s the dining hall at the resort,’ Agatha says. ‘There are trails on the lake where they take the snowmobilers and cross-country skiers. Vicky was scheduled to check the cross-country trails early that morning. I don’t know if she ever did. Certainly none of the other guides saw her.’

‘So, she could have been attacked at any time, anywhere,’ Alex says, quietly. ‘Which means, you really do have no murder scene.’

He knows enough to understand this is a problem.

‘Precisely,’ Agatha says. ‘I have to build this case based on verbal evidence. I need people to talk.’

‘And what if they lie?’

‘I’m very good at being able to tell when somebody is lying,’ Agatha says. ‘Eventually.’

‘Eventually?’ Alex snorts.

‘Yes. I’ve found, Alex, that a lot of people are good at telling a lie once. Twice even. But it takes a lot of skill to continue lying. To be consistent with the detail.’

Alex shakes his head.

‘You don’t believe me,’ she says.

‘I work in a business where people lie for a living,’ Alex says.

‘Yes, but I’m sure everybody is expecting everybody else will lie,’ Agatha says.

Alex shrugs. She has him there.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what I thought I’d see coming out here. It felt important.’

Agatha glances at the markings on the ice.

‘I would have done the same,’ she says.

Alex wants to move his feet to walk back to the car but he can’t seem to make them work. There might be nothing here now, but it’s hit him: this is where his sister’s body was brought back up on land. If that fisherman hadn’t been here, how long would Vicky have been underwater? Would she have ever been discovered? What if her body had got caught in reeds?

He shudders, unable to expel the thought from his mind.

‘This lake is sacred to Sami people,’ Agatha says.

‘They’re the indigenous population?’ Alex says.

Agatha nods.

‘You’re not Sami?’ he asks.

‘No. Janic is. You met him in the station this morning. Inari, the town further up, houses the Sami parliament. We’ve a few Sami working down here but they mainly farm reindeer. They’ve been very badly treated by Finnish people and non-Sami Laplanders over the years. Tend to keep to themselves.’

She hesitates, reluctant to make him leave but clearly eager to get going.

‘Will we?’

Agatha nods in the direction of the car.

Alex crouches down. He touches the ice.

Then he stands and makes himself walk.

As he follows Agatha, he feels a buzzing in his pocket. He takes off his mitten, feels the bite of the cold on his fingers almost immediately. He reaches inside the pocket of the coat for his phone, which buzzes again with a second text message. They’re both from Charlie. The first is a screenshot of a photograph from Instagram that Alex hasn’t seen before. It’s a picture of Vicky and a man. They’re both smiling; the man has a mouthful of blinding white teeth and both are wearing the ubiquitous blue ski suits he’s seen on half the tourists at the Lodge. They have sun visors pushed up on their heads and the man has his arm around Vicky. Alex squints at the photograph. In the upper left corner, he sees the Insta handle name for Bryce Adams from Georgetown. The second message says: Found your boy, that’s him in the pic. Haven’t got number for him yet, try a DM?

‘Something important?’ Agatha has halted her progress and is studying his face.

Alex looks up.

‘Just home,’ he says.

‘Don’t take your mittens off too much,’ she says. ‘Or have your phone out for long. The cold saps the battery. Even if it is mild today.’

‘This is mild? I can’t feel my face.’

‘This is practically balmy, my friend.’

In the car, the temperature had said minus seven.

‘I’ll be right behind you,’ he says. ‘I’ll send a quick reply.’

If Agatha is wondering why he wouldn’t wait until they were back in the vehicle, she doesn’t say. She cocks her head, examines him with that knowing gaze of hers, then turns and walks back.

Alex opens his new Insta account, briefly wonders how he already has five followers, and uses it to search for Bryce’s account. From there, he sends a quick direct-message request.

His fingers are trembling. Mostly from the cold, but partly adrenaline.

Then, before he returns to the car, he stares one last time at the spot on the lake where Vicky was found.