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‘He’s doing it again. Mom. Mom! He’s—’

‘I heard you!’

Agatha reaches into the glove compartment, rummages around until she finds some salted liquorice and tosses it into the back of the car. She turns her head to glare at all three children in the back.

‘Olavi, stop biting your arm. Eat that instead. Onni, stop telling tales on your brother. Emilia, will you help me with these boys, please!’

Agatha’s eyes return to the road, just in time to see the silver deer.

She lets the car roll to a halt on the compacted snow, not bothering with the brakes that will just make the vehicle slip and slide and possibly end up in the ditch that borders the forest.

They stop inches away from the reindeer, which stands completely still, eyeing the car’s bonnet with equal parts disdain and disinterest.

Agatha’s heart rate slows. Even the children stop squabbling and quietly observe the beast.

A rare glimpse of winter sun has broken through the clouds. It’s unusually strong for this time of year, casting everything in a blinding white light, including the pale deer.

There’s silence in the birch forest on either side. The trees nearest the road are bent double with snow, their branches like claws reaching towards the road.

‘Why’s he out in the morning, Mom?’ five-year-old Onni asks, because even at this young age, he knows it’s more common to encounter deer on the road at night.

‘Maybe he likes being different,’ Agatha says. She beeps the horn. The spell is broken. The deer gives her a mournful glance, then slopes back into the forest, taking his sweet time about it.

‘Can we follow him?’ Olavi asks and Agatha wishes she could say yes because anything that distracts her eight-year-old from arm-biting is a good thing.

‘I’ve got to see Martti,’ Agatha says. It’s followed by a trio of resigned groans in the rear. They know and accept that Agatha has to work but they’re also perfectly entitled to complain about having to sit in a boring doctor’s office for half an hour.

One more year, Agatha tells herself. Then Emilia will be fifteen and she can watch the boys at home when Patric’s unavailable and Agatha can’t get another sitter. She’s mature enough to do it now, but Agatha doesn’t want to take the risk. Emilia has to be old enough not to panic if anybody unexpected calls on the phone.

Or if anybody unexpected turns up.

The doctor’s surgery used to be in his house in the centre of Koppe, close to Agatha’s home, but when Martti took over a few years ago, he opened up a more modern clinic on the other side of their small town. It’s still close but Agatha has chosen to drive around Koppe, rather than through it, to get there. Everybody wants to talk to her since the news broke and they won’t hesitate to stand in front of her car so she’s forced to slow down, lower her window and give them updates. The town and its surrounds has a population of four hundred, though that can swell to over one thousand in residence on any given day, due to the tourists in Koppe Lodge and the Arctic Hotel.

The tourists come and go, but the residents are here all the time and they expect to be kept informed about what’s happening.

The problem with a place like this– everybody knows your business. The positive in a place like this– everybody knows your business.

But, for now, Agatha needs to keep this business private, until she has decided how to proceed.

The secretary has hung himmeli from the ceiling in Martti’s surgery and left straw out on the table in the waiting room for patients to have a go at making the traditional Christmas decorations themselves. Life can be slow-moving in the doctor’s– sometimes the old women come in and just want to talk. Sometimes the old men, too. Or, sometimes, nobody wants to talk and Martti has his work cut out for him.

The boys fall to their knees to see who can win by weaving the most elaborate geometric shape. Emilia slumps onto the couch, tucks her knees up to her chin and opens TikTok.

‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ Agatha says, with insufficient conviction to fool even herself. None of the children respond, and in a fit of guilt, she hands Emilia twenty euro for babysitting , then says they’ll stop at the garage for sweets on the way home. Emilia barely nods, already lost to the strains of a pop song and Addison Rae’s slick moves on the viral video site.

Martti is in his office with Elon, the fisherman.

‘Agatha.’ Elon nods in her direction, then hangs his head. Agatha touches his shoulder gently, while exchanging a look with Martti.

‘Quite a shock,’ Martti says. ‘But, thank God you found her, Elon.’

‘Was expecting a couple of fat chars,’ Elon says, unhappily. Elon’s expression has always been one of inexplicable sadness, even when resting, but now he looks distraught. And like he hasn’t slept all night. Agatha didn’t either. They worked until the early hours and all of them were distressed afterwards.

Agatha wants to hug the mousy-haired man but she won’t. Elon spends on average four to five hours a day ice-fishing alone on Lake Inari and lives as a single man in his isolated cabin outside Koppe. Even by Finnish standards, he’s a man who’s more comfortable in his own company.

Martti insisted Elon come to his surgery this morning. Elon had spent the longest time on the ice, and possibly the most traumatic. Agatha can tell from one glance at Martti that Elon’s physical health is fine. His mental health is what’s of concern. Elon is in shock, though he’s not aware of it. But Elon won’t take any drugs that Martti wants to prescribe.

Tomorrow, he’ll be back out on the lake, fishing for char.

Elon leaves, promising them both that he’s fine.

Agatha and Martti look at each other and shrug.

Most of the town elders still call Martti the newbie, even though he’s been their doctor the last seven years and is in his forties. It doesn’t help that he’s so baby-faced, nor that his glasses are a little bit too large for his head, so he’s constantly pushing them up his nose like a schoolboy at his desk.

Agatha knows Martti has dealt with death many times. Old age. Vehicular accidents. Snowmobile tragedies. But, day to day, Martti’s job is more run of the mill. Wart removal. Broken wrists. Concussion after a ski fall. Frostbite. Domestic violence injuries; there’s a lot of that, come the long, harsh winters.

‘How long was she in the water, doc?’ Agatha asks Martti.

‘Hard to tell, Agatha. Temperature being what it is. I’m sending her down to Rovaniemi. They’ll do the post-mortem, give you something concrete. I suspect she’s been there since she went missing, so, six weeks. There’s nothing on her body that would indicate she was held captive first but let’s leave that to the experts. Has her family been informed?’

Agatha nods. A family member will be needed to make the definitive identification but Niamh Doyle, the one who had reported her friend missing, was at the lake when they drilled out the surrounding ice of Elon’s fishing hole and brought the woman’s body fully to the surface. Luckily, Agatha had grabbed Niamh when she fainted, preventing the woman’s head from hitting the ice and burdening them with a second casualty.

‘What have they been told?’ Martti asks.

Agatha sighs.

‘What we can confirm as of now,’ she says. ‘That she was found in Lake Inari. Drowned.’

Agatha’s district covers ten thousand square kilometres and several tourist resorts. To police all that, there’s just her and two others based in Koppe, plus a couple of officers located in towns around the lake. Sometimes, it can take hours to get to a location, even in an emergency. Agatha was at the lake within minutes of receiving the call. A coincidence. Agatha and her junior, Janic, had been near that section of Inari when Elon made his discovery. Not that it mattered how quickly the police arrived. The woman had been dead for some time.

The young woman’s family will want to know how and why she drowned, alone. Why nobody was there to save her. They won’t understand that in Lapland, tragedy is always just a heartbeat away.

That sometimes, there’s nobody to blame but yourself.

Though, in this case, Agatha isn’t so sure.