Page 26

2019

Agatha stares at the mirror image in front of her.

The last time she’d seen Luca, her sister had been in a hospital bed. She’d looked like death warmed up, and even though they are identical twins, it sure didn’t look it that night, the night after she almost killed her own children.

Now, Luca looks more like her old self, more like the sister Agatha remembers. The one who could lure you in. Who could cause so much damage.

She looks back at Agatha, uncertainly. The fact the door hasn’t been slammed in her face is probably giving her hope, but Agatha still doesn’t invite her in.

‘What are you doing here?’ Agatha says.

‘Your call,’ Luca answers.

‘ My call? I didn’t ask you to come here. I told you to stay away.’

‘I was staying away.’

‘No!’ Agatha shouts. ‘Don’t you lie to me.’

‘I’m not lying.’

Luca is shivering. Agatha scans her face, her pupils; she’s looking for the signs. Her sister could be just cold but it’s more likely she’s faking it for sympathy.

‘If your lips are moving, you’re lying,’ Agatha spits.

‘But I’m not. I haven’t been near since that last time—’

‘Olavi is not a liar!’

‘I haven’t been here,’ Luca protests. ‘I’m living in Helsinki. Agatha, I swear, I have not been near the children. I wouldn’t—’

Agatha slams the door.

She won’t listen to it.

She stands against the door, holding it closed with her body. Every part of her is trembling.

Luca has done this before. Sworn blind. Sworn on her life, on Agatha’s life, on the kids’ lives. Been convincing with it, too.

Patric faces Agatha, his expression as horrified as hers.

Agatha is waiting for Luca to start banging on the door. To break the glass, maybe. She’s done that before, too, when her snake lies haven’t worked.

But all Agatha hears is a little, desperate laugh and it chills her to the bone.

That’s followed by the crunch of footsteps on the snow.

Agatha sinks to the floor, her head in her hands.

Her phone, charging in the corner, rings; Agatha jumps.

It’s starting, she thinks. The harassment.

‘It’s only Jonas,’ Patric says, looking at the screen.

Agatha sobs, then, while Patric hugs her, telling her it will all be okay.

‘It won’t be okay,’ Agatha says. ‘She’s here now, Patric. And she won’t leave until she causes chaos. You know what she’s like. She’ll act normal, everything will be fine, and then she’ll start doing things. Little things– I’ll question if she even meant them. I’ll question if I’m being too hard on her. Then she’ll slip up. She’ll call me a selfish bitch. Show me what she really thinks. It will get worse. And it has to get extreme before she’ll stop. I knew she’d come back. I knew her promise meant nothing. She can’t even do it for the kids.’

‘I won’t let her hurt them,’ Patric says. ‘I promise.’

Agatha is filled with despair. It’s never-ending. She will never be rid of her sister.

Agatha wakes the next morning to an unsettled feeling in her stomach, before she remembers what happened the night before.

Luca is back.

The foggy feeling in her head takes a while to recede. Patric had made her take a sleeping tablet to send her off. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have slept a wink.

Agatha checks in with Becki again, then stands in the shower, barely even aware of the water.

The kids are safe. Luca doesn’t know where they are. Not yet, anyhow. If she’s determined to find them, it won’t take her long to figure it out. The detection genes run strong in the Koskinen family.

What if Agatha just left? Put the kids in the car, emptied her savings and drove to Sweden? They could start again, couldn’t they? In a new town where nobody knows them; where they know nobody.

Where they’ve no friends, no support network, nobody looking out for them.

Agatha groans. Why should they have to run? Why should their lives be uprooted?

Not to mention, Agatha has a job to do. She has a duty to the people of . To the women who’ve died. To her cases. To Alex, even.

Agatha was always the sister who did the right thing. And she’ll do it now. If it kills her.

Agatha winces. She’s so stressed, she’s massaged knots into her hair with the shampoo. Her scalp aches.

She rinses her hair and then clears her head of all thoughts of Luca. For now, at least.

It’s this grim determination that gets her dressed and into her car, even if she does look left and right on the street before running out to the vehicle.

Agatha drives to the local council building to discover that the only staff present at this hour of the morning is the cleaning crew.

She didn’t return Jonas’ call last night. But this morning she listened to the message he left and it only served to validate the suspicion that’s been niggling at her.

She recognises the young man mopping the floor of the corridor. Elliot’s nephew.

‘Hi,’ she says. ‘Lassi Niemenen’s office?’

‘Down the hall,’ he says. ‘But it’ll be locked.’

‘Right. I need to check something. To do with council work.’

There’s a stand-off. The young man knows she’s the chief of police. But she’s not the boss in this building.

‘I can get a warrant.’ She sighs. ‘But what I need to check has nothing to do with a crime. It’s just to do with the town. I need to look at planning laws and I think the information I need is in Lassi Niemenen’s office.’

The young man absorbs this and she can see him calculating what response will cause him the least trouble.

‘Will you just be in and out?’ he says, and she knows she has him.

Five minutes later, she’s sitting in Lassi’s office.

She phones Jonas from the landline.

‘I recognise that number,’ he says, when he picks up.

‘I’m in Lassi’s office,’ she says. ‘I got your message.’

‘It might be nothing,’ he says. ‘How did you get in there?’

‘Flashed my boobs.’

She can practically hear Jonas’ blushes.

Agatha touches Lassi’s computer. His private screen is password-protected, but she can log in as a guest. Agatha curses. It was too much to hope for that she could just access his desktop. If he’d left it unlocked she could have faked seeing something by accident. But if she cracks his password, she’s already made anything she finds unusable.

She’s not entirely out of options. Luckily for her, the town’s council business records are accessible to all local bureaucrats, including police officials. The database includes the minutes of monthly council meetings, the annexes to those meetings, as well as basic town operations, like planning applications.

‘Tell me what you have,’ Agatha says. ‘This Canadian mining firm?’

‘Confirmed a few years back that there’s a large deposit of precious metals, particularly cobalt and nickel, in the region. Their application for a mining licence was rejected in 2016. Unani-mously, by all the councillors.’

‘And yet, now they’re back,’ Agatha says.

‘It certainly looks that way. But I can’t find any indication that land has been rezoned for mining, anywhere. So I don’t know why they’re sniffing around, just that Janic was right. There’s a small group of them up in the hotel at the moment and word on the grapevine is that more are coming. There’s blood in the water. Somebody has told them they have a chance.’

‘Okay, I’ll let you know if I discover anything,’ Agatha says.

She hangs up.

Over the years, Agatha has learned to speed-read quite well, but even she’s not that good. So she types in ‘planning’, then ‘mining’, then ‘licences’, and tries to get through the most recent applications as quickly as possible.

Nothing jumps out at her.

Agatha sighs and sits back.

She types in ‘nickel’.

Nothing.

So she tries typing ‘tourism development zones’. She knows the councillors weren’t all entirely happy about the hotel being built on the side of the mountain, especially as it threatened some of the existing tourism businesses, like Lassi’s Lodge. But she also knows that their biggest fear was that mining would come to the town. So, back when the hotel was built, the entire mountain was zoned solely for tourism.

She finds what she’s looking for, buried among the details.

It’s in the annexe to the June meeting.

Lassi Niemenen submitted an application to ‘reconsider the zoning of the north side of the mountain for tourism purposes’.

Agatha reads his memo. Three times.

She can see how it might have been misunderstood or flown under the radar.

To somebody not doubting Lassi’s intentions, it would read as he wanted it to be read. Z oning for tourism purposes.

But the mountain is already zoned for tourism.

What Lassi wants is the mountain’s current zoning reconsidered .

For other purposes.

‘Fuck,’ she mouths, to nobody.

Lassi is selling out .

She grabs her phone and texts Jonas. They have a friendly judge in Rovaniemi. Jonas was right– a warrant for Lassi’s bank accounts will be easier to land if there’s a hint of impropriety at council level. Agatha knows the Lappish authorities are hypersensitive to corruption in local politics, following the allocation of suspect mining licences in the past. All Jonas has to do is tell the judge he thinks the councillors are meeting with mining companies.

Text message sent, Agatha sits back. She looks around Lassi’s desk. Opens a few drawers. Nothing jumps out at her.

She goes to the filing cabinet. In the first drawer, it’s all innocuous council business.

And then, in the second drawer, not even hidden, is a brochure from the Canadian mining company, the CRP Group. Inside the first page, there’s a Post-it.

Looking forward to future endeavours.

Agatha takes the brochure.

Outside, Elliot’s nephew is waiting anxiously.

‘It’s okay,’ Agatha tells him. ‘I just wanted to access the central database. I’m allowed to do that.’

‘Then why did you need Lassi’s office? You can do that from anywhere?’

That took you a while, Agatha thinks.

But, he’s still not the sharpest tool in the box.

‘Oh, I thought Lassi had left something on his desk for me.’

The young man’s face relaxes.

‘As a matter of interest,’ Agatha says, ‘you know that woman who went missing? Vicky Evans?’

‘The girl in the lake?’

‘Yeah. You ever see her in here? Visiting Lassi?’

‘No.’

He shakes his head. He’s eager for Agatha to go.

Agatha smiles.

She’s a few feet down the corridor when he calls after her.

‘My uncle Elliot did, though. I heard him talking about it in the bar after she went missing. She’d come in looking for Lassi but he was in a meeting. Elliot saw her outside his office. He came out and they had an argument. Elliot said Lassi was going to fire her ass. . .’

Agatha turns around, trying not to show anything on her face.

‘When was this?’

‘Just after she went missing. . .’

‘Not when Elliot mentioned it. When did she come into the council office?’

‘Ages before she died. Like, a few months anyway. June, maybe.’

‘I see.’

Agatha hesitates. She can’t figure out why he was reluctant to let her into Lassi’s office but is happy to impart such important information.

‘She was nice,’ he says, looking down at the floor. ‘I met her in the bar once or twice. She seemed like a nice woman.’

‘Thank you,’ Agatha says. ‘She was.’

They stare at each other and the kid nods slightly in acknow-ledgement.

Vicky and Lassi.

Agatha is joining the dots.

The bar is not open yet and there’s no answer from Elliot’s house. A neighbour tells Agatha she thinks Elliot’s gone on a snowmobile trip and will be away for the day.

So Agatha drives on. She wants to question Elliot about Kaya but she can do it another time. She doesn’t know if he was involved back then– by covering up for Lassi or maybe even being responsible for what happened. But, right now, her focus is on Vicky. That’s where all the evidence leads.

Lassi lives in a huge house outside town. It’s ostentatious and– with the exception of a nod to local timber in its roof– not in keeping with the area. Too much glass, for a start. Nobody puts glass windows that large in a house in Lapland. They bleed heat.

But Lassi would rather be living in LA, so that’s the house he’s built.

Agatha waits impatiently at the electric gates. She’s there so long she has time to consider the many benefits of large gates when it comes to people turning up at your front door that you’d rather not see.

They open eventually and she drives up the spruce-lined road. She remembers all this area as forest, back when Lassi lived in town, before he’d fulfilled all his entrepreneurial dreams.

He’d taken his wife’s inheritance and, to be fair, while some men might have squandered it, Lassi made it multiply. Some of it was even for the good of the town. That’s always been the problem with Lassi. If he was bad through and through, the townspeople would have turned against him. But he isn’t, which means he can get away with a lot. How much, Agatha isn’t sure.

Lassi opens the door. He has no porch, another ridiculous absence in a Lapland house. He doesn’t invite her in, but Agatha catches a glimpse of his wife in the background, scurrying up the marble staircase in the centre of the reception hall, before he steps out into the cold. He’d rather freeze than allow her across his threshold.

‘Ah. The little chief.’

Agatha stares at Lassi.

‘Have you come to apologise for how you spoke to me yesterday?’

‘I’ve come to ask you about your relationship with Vicky Evans. And while we’re at it, Kaya Virtanen and Mary Rosenberg.’

Lassi tugs at his goatee beard.

‘Two missing women and a dead one. I’d say this is a conversation we can have with a lawyer present.’

‘Innocent people rarely need lawyers when they’re talking to the police,’ Agatha says.

‘No, Agatha. Lawyers are always necessary. It’s only poor people who don’t use lawyers. Rich people always do. But seeing as you so blatantly doubt my innocence, let me tell you this for free: I had no relationship with any of the women you’ve mentioned, bar being an employer to one.’

‘You’ve never had kids,’ Agatha says. She knows she’s in a tight spot, that she has a tiny window to provoke some slip from him before he does get a lawyer.

‘Never wanted any,’ Lassi says. ‘My business is my baby.’

He examines her, knowing there has to be some relevance in her statement.

‘It’s strange none of the women you’ve slept with over the years got pregnant,’ Agatha says, a thin smile on her lips. ‘Come now, Lassi, we all know you’ve had some. . . let’s call them, “extramarital adventures”. Were you very careful? Or is there a problem with, you know?’

She glances down at his groin. When she looks up at him, his face is still placid but his eyes have darkened.

‘If I had had affairs and if I’d fathered any children, it would still be of no consequence to you,’ he says. ‘Unless, of course, I decided to stake a claim to one of the kids. If the mother was, let’s say, unstable. Then everybody would know who I’d fathered. Wouldn’t that be interesting? Who knows, little Agatha, who I’m related to in town?’

Agatha feels the chill in the pit of her stomach.

They glare at each other for another few moments.

Agatha swallows and brings her focus back to the reason she’s here.

‘Kaya Virtanen was suspected of having an affair,’ Agatha says.

‘It wasn’t with me. Not that any of us could blame her for cheating on that oik. And I wouldn’t have said no, that’s for sure. Why don’t you ask Miika who she was with?’

‘Miika doesn’t know.’

Lassi snorts.

‘He kept that girl on a short leash. Of course he knew.’

‘What would you do, Lassi, if one of the women you were seeing expected you to leave your wife? You’ve never even considered it, have you? You run around on her, but you’re loyal to her, in some twisted way. Would it make you feel violent towards one of your women, if they forced you to choose?’

Lassi shakes his head, like he’s disappointed in Agatha.

‘I’m not the only man in this town to have the odd, as you put it, “extramarital liaison”,’ Lassi says. ‘There’s no such thing as a pure soul. But I had nothing to do with any of your cases.’

Agatha tugs at her bottom lip with her teeth.

‘A witness saw you arguing with Vicky Evans in the council offices last summer.’

Lassi smiles. Agatha’s not looking at his mouth, though. She’s looking at his eyes. She can see the calculations running behind them.

‘I have no recollection of that,’ he says. ‘Which witness?’

Agatha smiles back.

‘Can you tell me what was said between the two of you?’

‘I’m afraid not, as I can’t recall. Maybe you should ask your witness what he heard. Oh. . . did they just see an argument? Then perhaps they misunderstood. Perhaps we were just exchanging the time of day.’

‘In the council offices? My witness says you were in a meeting beforehand and Vicky was waiting outside.’

Lassi is bristling now.

‘Well, I’ll have to try to remember for you. Now, as I said, if you want to speak to me again, please do it officially and through my lawyer.’

Lassi goes to step back inside. His hand is on the door when Agatha speaks again.

‘I suspect I will have to talk to your lawyer, soon enough,’ she says.

‘Oh, yes?’

From inside her coat, Agatha pulls out the mining company brochure.

‘What made you decide to sell out, Lassi? You’ve always been anti-mining. You led the campaign against it. Is the Lodge in that much trouble? Are you broke?’

Lassi doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t need to. Agatha can see it written all over his face.

‘How do you think you’ll get this past the rest of the council?’ Agatha asks. ‘They might trust you, but even they’re not stupid enough to miss the mountain being sold out from under the town.’

‘The town doesn’t own that part of the mountain,’ Lassi says.

Agatha frowns.

And then she gets it.

‘When they built the hotel,’ she says, ‘you bought the rest of the land so nothing more could be built. Why not just build another hotel? Why mining?’

Lassi is silent.

Agatha shakes her head. She doesn’t know if he’s just greedy or if he’s desperate because he realises he can’t compete with the hotel.

‘What I don’t understand is how Vicky Evans put this together,’ she says. ‘Was it as simple as her overhearing you in your office? Why was she even there that day? Why was she looking for you? And why did she decide to blackmail you? Because that’s what happened, isn’t it? She saw those Canadian officials in with you and she put two and two together. There’s no point in lying. Jonas has already issued a warrant for your bank accounts and we know regular payments were made to hers. I assumed it was her wages; it won’t be hard to prove it wasn’t.’

Lassi’s face contorts into a snarl.

‘There was nothing between me and that girl and you won’t be able to prove anything,’ he says.

He steps back inside and slams the door in her face. Agatha turns and walks slowly back towards her car.

Alone, she thinks about what just happened.

And she’s also forced to revisit what he implied in their conversation and his reference to who he might have fathered in town.

She swallows back the bile in her throat.

He’s hiding more. She’s absolutely positive. Every time he tells her he knows nothing, it’s like an alarm going off in Agatha’s brain.

Agatha reaches her car and looks up at the house. Lassi’s wife is in one of the upstairs windows, looking down at her, dolefully.

You’ve made your bed, Agatha thinks, cruelly.

She drives away from Lassi’s house, through the electric gates that close like magic behind her. She phones Alex. It goes to voicemail and she leaves a message.

‘Alex, I have something. Call me back.’

In one regard, Lassi might be right, Agatha thinks. Miika might have known who Kaya was having an affair with.

And Agatha needs him to tell her.

Her head is so full, she doesn’t notice the car that pulls out behind her as she drives through town.

It follows her, all the way out the other side, as she heads towards the lake.

Alex wakes with a crick in his neck from sleeping awkwardly on the chair. The draught from the wide open cabin door is blowing bitterly cold air in his face.

Charlie’s there, taking a large tray from Niamh, who can barely make eye contact with either of them.

‘Would you like to, er, come in for breakfast?’ Charlie asks.

Alex wants to die at how awkward the whole scenario is. He can’t understand why Niamh didn’t ask Beatrice or somebody else to drop the tray over. But having met Cecelia in the kitchen a few days earlier, he takes a leap and guesses the tray was in Niamh’s hands and she was ushered on her way before she could protest. That, or Niamh is batshit crazy.

‘No, thanks,’ she says, blushing. ‘I have to, em. . .’

She trails off.

‘Right-o!’ Charlie says. He tries to give her a tip but she won’t take it.

When she’s fled and Charlie’s closed the door, Alex stares at his friend like he has ten heads.

‘Are you some sort of fucking moron?’ Alex asks. ‘A tip?’

Charlie shrugs.

He places the tray on the table. It’s filled with pastries and coffee and orange juice.

‘It’s not a full English but it’ll see off the hangover,’ Charlie says. ‘Bugger me, I don’t know how on earth you’re going to drag yourself back to London. It’s a bloody smorgasbord of women. The lads who work over here must have blue balls half the time. Thank fuck for the ice baths.’

‘I don’t have a hangover,’ Alex says, calmly. He’d drunk a lot less last night than his friend, who has to be on a plane in a couple of hours.

‘Quick bite, shower and then I’m out of your hair,’ Charlie says. ‘I flew into Ivalo, so it should only take me thirty minutes to get there. Unless you need me to stay?’

Alex shakes his head. He sits up straight and hears his phone fall to the ground. He must have slept with it in his hand most of the night.

‘That wasn’t on,’ he says.

‘What?’

‘Niamh. Last night. The woman has been through a lot the last few days.’

‘She came on to me, mate,’ Charlie says. Then his face grows more serious. ‘You’re not very angry, are you, mate? I didn’t force it, you know. I wouldn’t do that.’

Alex says nothing. He looks at Charlie, sees the earnest expression on his friend’s face.

‘It’s fine,’ he says, his voice tight.

‘Anyway, that’s not important. Talk to me. Theories on Vicky. What do the police have?’

Alex sighs.

‘They looked at an American tourist for a while. Interviewed everybody here. There are some dodgy characters about town. But, the answer is, they have nothing. I spoke to the Yank who Vicky was last seen with while you were snoring in my bed last night. He sent me over the last pictures taken of her.’

‘The Bryce Adams guy?’ Charlie says.

Alex nods.

‘What’s your plan then? Leave them to it? There’s always the PI route, you know.’

‘I’m not the police, Charlie,’ Alex says. ‘And the woman in charge, Agatha, she’s actually decent. She knows what she’s doing.’

‘Got a whole murder squad, has she? A big case board? This doesn’t look like the sort of place that has a CSI lab.’

Charlie says all this through a mouthful of Danish pastry.

‘Yeah,’ Alex says. ‘I thought that at the start, too.’

He reaches down and fumbles for his phone on the rug, buried in the pile of blankets.

‘People don’t just get accidentally murdered,’ Charlie says, with his usual tact. ‘Did she piss off somebody here? Steal someone’s fella? Knock a guy back?’

‘Vicky wasn’t the sort who’d steal someone ,’ Alex says, dismis-sively. ‘I think it was something more serious than that. She left me a message. Of sorts. Something that I think has struck a chord with Agatha.’

He’s found his phone and checks the screen. A missed call and voice message from Agatha. He’ll call over to the station once he gets Charlie on his way.

‘Well, your sister was the sort to get a few hearts racing, Alex,’ Charlie continues. ‘And these small towns. You know what they’re like. Claustrophobia hits. Men get frustrated. Women get bitter. People cover up for each other. Scratch any small town, find a viper’s nest. I’d best hop in that shower and get a wriggle on. The dance clubs of the frozen north wait for no man. Listen, before I do, I have to tell you that I haven’t been entirely honest with you.’

‘About what?’

‘I didn’t just come over to kit you out and do a bit of clubbing. One of the partners in TM the photo he was looking at last night is still there but is no longer zoomed in on Vicky’s face. Now he can see the whole photograph: Bryce beside Vicky, the glass of wine Vicky is holding, the window behind them.

Alex squints at the photograph.

‘Are you all right?’ Charlie asks. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

Alex looks at Vicky’s arm, extended in front of the window.

He has seen a ghost.

Of sorts.

A ghost that’s just given him a message.