Page 5

The snow has been driven and piled into mounds around the car park of Rovaniemi morgue, so high they look like artificial walls. The one-storey morgue is almost hidden behind them.

Agatha left Koppe at 6 a.m. this morning, not long after her old boss and friend Patric arrived to care for the children. She’d driven the four hours to the Lapland capital sustained by coffee and home-made korvapuusti .

The morning is still gloomy; it suits Agatha’s mood perfectly. Olavi had woken up three times during the night, screaming his head off, upsetting Emilia and Onni, though Emilia shrugged it off in true teenage fashion. Agatha had already been tired from the previous night, half of which had been spent on the lake. She’d needed eight, undisturbed hours.

Olavi had eventually fallen asleep in Agatha’s arms, his lips clamped around the red mark on his upper arm, and she’d been too tired to even try to dislodge either him or his teeth. She blames the sugary treats they’d bought in the garage after leaving Martti’s surgery and indulged in after dinner, but she knows his night terrors stem from something else altogether.

When Patric let himself in at 5.30, he’d woken Agatha gently, then carried a comatose Olavi back to his own bed, where Agatha knew he’d sleep peacefully for hours. Agatha, on the other hand, had no such luck.

The officer in the morgue reception remembers Agatha from her training period, and sends her straight down to the lab. Venla, the curly-haired pathologist, greets Agatha by handing her another coffee. Agatha realises she desperately needs to empty her bladder. She’s unconsciously hopping from foot to foot.

‘You didn’t stop on the drive, did you?’ Venla asks.

When Agatha shakes her head, Venla tells her the ladies is out of order but if she moves quickly, she’ll get in and out of the men’s before Leon, the caretaker, arrives for his scheduled 10.30 bowel expulsion.

‘Regular as clockwork,’ Venla says. ‘If he ends up on my table, I’m going to do an in-depth study of his colon for science.’

Agatha urinates faster than she ever has, sees there’s no toilet roll and thanks her lucky stars she has the constant Onni-ready packet of wet wipes in her handbag. Before she leaves, she hesitates, then charitably leaves a handful of wipes for Leon.

Venla is waiting for her with the fast-cooling coffee.

‘I’ll take you for lunch after,’ she tells Agatha. ‘We’ll have a girly afternoon. God knows I need it, with the amount of testosterone around here. Not to mention it’s a Sunday. You know my parents were obsessed with honouring the Sabbath? They’d spin in their graves if they knew I worked holy days. Where are you booked in tonight?’

‘The Nordic,’ Agatha says.

They talk as they walk down the dimly lit corridor and into Venla’s lab. Agatha takes a breath when she sees Vicky Evans’ naked body on the table in front of her, but Venla has been looking at the woman all morning and keeps speaking. Agatha has always thought that spending so much time with people who can’t talk has made Venla very chatty with anyone who does.

‘I’ll get us a table at the Red Deer,’ Venla says. ‘It’s around the corner. What time does the family get in?’

‘This evening,’ Agatha says. ‘Just her brother. Alex Evans.’

She approaches the body while Venla picks up the file at her work station.

‘I wouldn’t like to be in your shoes,’ Venla says. ‘I presume he thinks he’s bringing her home?’

Agatha nods.

Vicky was very beautiful, she thinks. Agatha is able to look beyond the damage that’s been done to the body by the water. The victim’s features are small and perfectly symmetrical, from her dainty little ears to her rosebud lips. Even the long post-mortem incision down her chest has been sewn back together in neat, exact lines.

Her hair has been shaved so Venla can examine the wound on her head. The woman had long brown hair when they took her from the lake, not unlike Agatha’s own dark tresses, but much sleeker.

‘It’s as you suspected,’ Venla says. ‘That injury wasn’t caused in the water. She was struck before she went in.’

‘Could it have been a fall?’ Agatha asks, a last-ditch attempt.

‘No,’ Venla says. ‘She was hit with something metal. Once. It caused enough damage. Could have been the tip of an ice axe, from the shape of the wound. Right-handed attacker, and hit when she was facing him or her. Drowning was the cause of death but she had a subdural haematoma that would have resulted in death in any case. I presume she was disoriented when she went under. Hopefully, she was so far gone, she didn’t feel anything.’

Agatha shudders.

She reaches out and touches Vicky’s face. Agatha doesn’t want to imagine how it would have felt for Vicky to have been alone in the icy lake, so far from home, so far from her loved ones, knowing she was dying.

‘I’ve got you, rakas ,’ Agatha whispers, stroking the cold skin of Vicky’s cheek.

She turns to Venla.

‘Any sign of sexual assault?’

‘None. She was clean from the water. But there’s no indication of any violence to the genital area and her clothes were intact. No trace of drugs in her blood. She was a very healthy, perfect young woman.’

‘Too young,’ Agatha says.

Venla is studying her, Agatha realises, and she blushes. She drops her hand and the pathologist turns away, pretending to be busy with her files.

‘Is twelve too early for lunch?’ Venla asks. ‘I fancy a glass of Chardonnay.’

‘Hm,’ Agatha says. She’s distracted. Venla looks up again.

‘What’s on your mind?’

‘Her cabin in the resort,’ Agatha says.

‘What about it?’

‘I haven’t told you what we found there when she went missing.’