15.

  I must have looked how I felt: dazed. When Amelia dug her elbow into my side and whispered, ‘How did it go?’, the best I could come up with was a shrug. I didn’t know. If I’d had to guess at what such a meeting might look and sound like, that’s what I would have come up with, more or less. Was that a reason to be suspicious? If I was a conspiracy theorist, maybe, but I wasn’t one. At least we had the footage. Together, later, the four of us could watch it and see whether what Xander and I had witnessed was genuine.

  Armfield, meanwhile, didn’t seem to want to dwell on the meeting. He preferred to look ahead. Within seconds he was on the phone to Lukas, the in-country fixer, confirming our updated travel arrangements. We were booked on the same flight as him and Macmillan, heading north to Rovaniemi.

  ‘We’re doubling back to visit a proposed nuclear facility on the north Baltic coast, and you’re heading north to get some film footage,’ he said.

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘The works. As I said, I asked Lukas to put together a trek combining snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, snowmobiling and husky-sledding. Along the way you’ll learn to ice-fish and build a snow shelter.’

  ‘An igloo?’

  ‘Yes – to sleep in. But don’t worry, you’ll be in cabins the other nights you’re away. They’re dotted along the tundra trails. And you won’t have to rely entirely on your fishing skills for food; Lukas has sourced local provisions.’

  ‘Local provisions?’

  ‘Reindeer heart, walrus tongue, that kind of thing.’ Armfield laughed. ‘I’m kidding. Given the forecast, you’ll have a good chance of filming the Northern Lights.’

  It was impossible not to be grateful, though I still felt that something was amiss. ‘Wow, thank you,’ I heard myself say, despite myself.

  ‘It’ll be hard work,’ he replied, deadpan.

  Beside him, Macmillan chuckled. Though I hated myself for it, his nonchalance triggered a wave of apprehension in me. My ‘We’ll cope’ sounded hollow.

  ‘Sure you will,’ he said.

  Armfield shrugged. ‘It’s all for a good cause, eh? I’ll rendezvous with you at the end of the trek in Hammerfest.’

  ‘Hammerfest?’

  ‘The Norwegian port. The Polar Flow will dock there. All being well, we’ll nose up into the ice pack so you can capture some footage of that. I’m hoping we’ll be able to take a look at one of the new offshore windfarms. They’re what GreenSword is all about, after all.’

  Having sped through our itinerary, Armfield turned around in his seat. The conversation was over for now. I didn’t have a further opportunity to talk to him as we shot through the airport and onto the little plane that would take us north. It only had about thirty seats. We were dotted among them rather than sitting together, so I used the hour or so to catch up on some sleep. When we disembarked at Rovaniemi airport, Armfield hustled us through arrivals, where Lukas was poised to whisk us away. I’d imagined that Armfield might accompany us into town, but he and Macmillan, having left us in ‘our fixer’s capable hands’, got into a waiting Mercedes, which immediately pulled away.

  Lukas was forty-ish and very short, no more than five foot two, but he was solidly built and his hand, when he shook mine, had an iron grip. He was wearing a hat with fur earflaps. Behind him, a sign on the airport wall pointed the way to Santa Land. It was April. But that wasn’t why I was feeling so confused; the speed at which Armfield had left us had rattled me.

  ‘The truck’s in the car park,’ Lukas was explaining. ‘We’ve a four-hour journey ahead of us. I have food and drink on board. Anyone need anything else before we set off?’

  We looked at one another and shook our heads.

  ‘Good, then let’s get going.’

  Within minutes we were in Lukas’s Mercedes 4×4 heading north.

  ‘What are we doing first?’ Xander asked affably.

  ‘Dogs,’ was Lukas’s one-word answer. The silence that followed made it clear he wasn’t about to elaborate. Who was this guy? Armfield had simply left us with him, and now he was taking us into the wilderness. The truck’s lights tunnelled into the darkness, illuminating a black strip of road bordered by banks of snow. I sat back, confused by what I’d witnessed that day, wondering what lay ahead.

  16.

  Eventually we came to a halt beside a couple of log cabins in the middle of what felt like the definition of nowhere. It was well after midnight. Dogs barked in the darkness. Lukas opened the door to one of the cabins. An unlit log burner stood in the corner and two sets of bunks were pushed up against the walls. We dumped our bags in a heap on the floor.

  ‘Tikaani – the dog handler – must already have turned in for the night,’ Lukas said, nodding at the other cabin. ‘She will meet you first thing. Get some rest.’ He retreated, shutting the door on us.

  ‘Friendly chap,’ said Xander.

  ‘Not particularly,’ replied Amelia, before the penny dropped. Once it had she said, ‘Oh, I see.’

  The Mercedes started up again immediately: he wasn’t staying here with us, evidently. We looked at one another as the rumbling of the truck – and with it the barking – subsided.

  ‘We might as well do as he said,’ Caleb suggested, spreading his sleeping bag on one of the lower bunks. I took the one above him. Xander climbed onto the other high bunk. I couldn’t get to sleep immediately, and neither could he, it seemed: his face was illuminated by his laptop screen and he had his camera in his lap. He was frowning.

  ‘Something wrong?’ I said.

  ‘Bit of a glitch,’ he said evasively. ‘I’m sure it’ll be fine.’

  ‘What sort of a glitch?’

  ‘I transferred the film of the meeting to my laptop, but the file is very small. When I open it, I can only see a minute’s worth of footage. The first minute I filmed. That’s not right.’

  ‘Has it got compressed?’ I said, knowing that Xander would have the answer.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’ He was tapping away at his keyboard, his look of concentration turning to disbelief.

  ‘You’re not serious,’ I said.

  ‘A minute’s footage,’ Amelia repeated below me.

  ‘The file’s been truncated somehow,’ Xander said under his breath.

  ‘Or you pressed “stop” too early,’ she suggested.

  Xander shot her a look. ‘Yeah, I definitely did that. And I definitely didn’t check and recheck that the camera was on, focused and filming the whole time.’

  ‘So we’ve lost the footage?’ I said, incredulous.

  ‘We can’t have,’ said Xander. ‘It’s impossible. But …’ His voice dropped. ‘But, yes.’

  Caleb said, ‘Do you think someone’s cut everything but the first minute of the film you took?’

  ‘Looks like it. But who? The camera’s barely been out of my sight.’

  My stomach churned. What did this mean? Either Xander had made a mistake or somebody had tampered with our only evidence – apart from my few notes – of the meeting.

  ‘Why not just delete the whole file?’ Amelia asked.

  ‘Because doing it this way makes it look like an operator mistake, not deliberate?’ I suggested.

  ‘Did you back up the file? Or upload it to the cloud?’

  ‘No,’ Xander said quietly.

  ‘And the camera doesn’t do that automatically?’ asked Amelia.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’d have been better off filming it on my phone,’ she couldn’t help saying.

  ‘Thanks, Amelia,’ said Xander, but without heat.

  ‘Is there no way of retrieving the deleted footage?’

  ‘I don’t know. I won’t give up,’ Xander muttered, but he was shaking his head.

  I took stock. We were in the middle of nowhere. Armfield had headed off in a different direction. I wasn’t about to jump to the conclusion that he had tampered with the camera, but I couldn’t believe that Xander had cocked up so royally either. It would be days before I could confront Armfield. In the meantime, I had no idea what he and Macmillan were really doing in Finland, who they were meeting, or what their real business interests were.

  Something had felt off about the trip from the outset; now that feeling was stronger.

  I reassured Xander that the missing footage wasn’t vital. We’d witnessed the meeting; it was just a boring introductory this-is-roughly-what-we-have-to-offer pitch. Nobody had revealed any sensitive material, apart perhaps from the contents of the folders that had been slid across the table to Armfield. We’d see him again eventually. For now, I’d have to be patient.

  Trying to boost my spirits wasn’t working. Neither was my attempt to make Xander feel better.

  ‘I should have backed up the file straight away,’ he muttered.

  17.

  When I eventually slept that night, I dreamed I was back under the sea looking for treasure off Zanzibar. I found lots: rings, coins, even a gold bar. But it all crumbled to nothing in my fingers. At one point a seal swam alongside me. It turned its head as it went and barked in my face, waking me up.

  In fact, the barking was coming from outside, and it didn’t sound like just one dog. A chorus of yelping and yowling made me sit up in the top bunk. I’d forgotten I was in it, but bumping my head on the pine ceiling reminded me. I got up and dressed in long johns, overtrousers, a base layer, jumper, down jacket and snow boots, and headed outside to see what was bugging the dogs.

  It turned out that the cacophony was a greeting of sorts. Not for us, or the morning – although the sun was just above the white horizon – but for a woman I assumed was Tikaani. She was preparing breakfast for the dogs, who were in an enclosure surrounded by a chain-link fence.

  I called out a hello as I approached. The woman had her back to me and was tipping steaming mush into a row of about thirty metal bowls. She didn’t hear me at first over the noise of the dogs, but turned around when I called out a second time.

  She was young, in her early twenties at most, with a shock of blonde hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, and she wore a thick-knit jumper with a diamond pattern around the neck. She nodded as I approached, but did not smile. I introduced myself and asked if she needed any help.

  ‘You can take some of these over, if you like,’ she said, pointing to the bowls at her feet.

  ‘The dogs sound like they’d appreciate it,’ I replied.

  ‘Obviously,’ she said, as deadpan as Lukas had been. It seemed that all Armfield’s associates were as terse as each other.

  All the dogs were outside, straining to greet us now. I placed a bowl of the steaming sludge down in front of the nearest one and ran my hand through the super-thick fur on his neck and back as he tucked in. My own dog, Chester, seemed a very long way away.

  Returning to fetch more bowls, I saw that Caleb had come out of the cabin and was standing a little way off, his hands in his pockets. Once upon a time he’d have barged right in, but today he waited for me to wave him over. Between the three of us, we soon had all the dogs fed.

  As we gathered up the bowls – they’d all been emptied in under a minute – Tikaani told us each dog’s name. Two stood out to me: a mostly black dog called Victor and a little one named Mikka. Despite his dark colouring, Victor had the palest eyes: he seemed to stare right through me. Mikka was two-thirds his size, at most, and scruffy. She held her ears at comical angles and spun in circles as we approached. Despite her appearance, Tikaani explained, Mikka was the best lead dog in the pack.

  ‘Even in a whiteout she finds the trail. All the others respect her. Remarkable animal,’ Tikaani said.

  Caleb knelt down in the dirty snow beside the dog. She immediately stopped spinning, cocked her ears and pushed her nose against his bent knee. Whether the dog could smell his resignation or see it in his posture I don’t know, but I swear she was trying to comfort him. Tikaani noted it as well. ‘Kind too. She likes you.’

  Caleb, running his hand gently over the dog’s bristly chin, said nothing.

  ‘So, the dogs are fed, now it’s our turn,’ said Tikaani. ‘Bring your friends to my cabin when you’re ready for your breakfast.’

  Amelia and Xander were up and dressed. Amelia’s snow gear was electric orange, so bright it hurt to look at her in the morning sunshine. Xander’s big fur-fringed parka, by contrast, was a sober grey. I didn’t bring up the missing footage, but he wouldn’t meet my eye: clearly he was blaming himself for having lost it.

  Our breakfast looked a bit like the dogs’, from a distance, but happily it was different. Their sludge was a rough soup of warm water, kibble, hunks of fat and bits of fish; our porridge swam with granola, chocolate, nuts and raisins, and was topped off with a generous slurp of syrup.

  ‘There must be a thousand calories in this bowl,’ Amelia said by way of thanks.

  ‘You’ll need them,’ Tikaani replied. ‘You’ve a tough day ahead.’

  She’d opened the door of the wood stove to add another log, and a rush of heat pulsed into her cabin. Like ours, the single room was small and spartan, but she had a quilt on her bed and the table at which we sat was covered with a checked cloth.

  ‘What’s the plan, then?’ asked Xander.

  ‘This morning I will teach you about sled dogs. This afternoon we will make the first journey with them.’

  ‘Do we get to drive our own?’ I asked.

  ‘You don’t “drive” dogs, you “mush” them,’ Amelia said.

  ‘Correct.’ Tikaani nodded and said to me, ‘Of course. Mr Lukas insisted on it. Four sleds, four dog teams, and a challenging route. He said you are experienced adventurers: scuba-diving, skiing, jungle-trekking, yes? This will be no ordinary tourist trip.’

  That Armfield – through Lukas – had organised this for us, struck me as extraordinarily generous. I couldn’t help being excited, if a little nervous. Outside, something had triggered the dogs into another gale of barking. The sound was thrilling and insistent. It ran right through me.

  Like the dogs, I wanted to get on the trip.

  18.

  After breakfast, Tikaani stood up and clapped her hands. ‘Right. It’s time to go.’

  We crunched after her to an outbuilding that housed her equipment.

  ‘First I’ll show you the sled, then we can attach the dogs,’ she said, dragging a dog sled out of the building.

  ‘As you see, the sled sits on runners. They’re like skis. But instead of wax on the bottom, we fit plastic strips. Different grades of plastic for different types of snow. The runners are fixed to the sled bed by stanchions.’ She tapped a strut with her foot. ‘They run on up to the handle-bow, with which you steer. Lean it this way or that, and the stanchions flex the runners to follow the dogs right or left.’ She looked around at us. ‘Now, here at the front, this black semi-circle of rubber is like a bumper to protect the sled if it runs into an obstacle. It’s called the bush-bow.’ Next she pointed to the red triangular middle section, which was made from the same sort of material as my rucksack. ‘This is the sled bag. It sits on the bed, and it’s for carrying equipment and supplies.’

  Moving to the rear, she went on. ‘You stand here, on cushioned footboards either side of the drag mat. Tread on the drag mat and you’ll slow the sled – and the dogs – down. If you need to stop faster, you tread on this: it’s called the bar brake. And to keep the sled in one place while you’re not on it, we use a snow hook.’ She picked up a vicious-looking metal claw attached to one of the stanchions by a rope. ‘Stab it into the snow and the sled should go nowhere.’

  ‘It’s a fair bit to take in,’ said Xander.

  Amelia shot him a no-it’s-not look. I have to say I agreed with her: everything made sense to me so far.

  ‘And this cloth box here,’ Tikaani continued, ‘at the very back of the sled, is called the tail dragger seat. In it, we keep food for the dogs. You can sit on this if you get tired, as long as the sled is under control.’

  ‘How do we connect the dogs?’ asked Caleb quietly.

  ‘With the bridle and gang-lines,’ Tikaani answered. ‘The bridle is the long rope that runs under the sled bed, through this fixing here, and on towards the team. Shorter gang-lines are attached to it at intervals, one for each dog. So, for today, you’ll each have six. Let’s get some out, shall we?’

  As we followed her back to the compound, Xander fell into step with me and Caleb.

  ‘The only time the camera was out of my sight was on the flight north,’ Xander said. ‘It was in the overhead locker then.’

  ‘I slept on the plane,’ I replied. ‘Did you?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘You did,’ Caleb observed. ‘And Armfield walked up and down the aisle more than once.’

  ‘You saw him mess with my luggage?’ Xander couldn’t keep the accusation out of his voice. ‘And you did nothing about it?’

  The old Caleb would have shot something vicious back, but all he said now was, ‘No. I mean, I have no idea. If I missed it, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Nobody needs to apologise,’ I said, giving Xander a look.

  ‘Except me,’ he conceded.

  We’d arrived at the dogs. Tikaani chose four, handing us one each by the collar. Mine, a deep-chested brindle male called Novak, bucked in excitement and swivelled to lick my face as I led him to the sled.

  Tikaani brought two dogs herself, one of them little Mikka. She showed us how to fit a harness (each dog had its own), slipping it over the dog’s head and carefully drawing each foreleg through. As she’d explained, the harness connected the dog to the bridle via gang-lines, but the dogs were also kept in place by a slimmer, non-weight-bearing lead that ran from the bridle to their collar.

  ‘Mikka here is up front with Ace,’ Tikaani said. ‘They are this team’s lead dogs. The most experienced, the best at following commands. Next come Alta and Buzz in what’s called the swing position. And at the rear, closest to the sled, sit Novak and Kona. This is the wheel position. They take the first strain of pulling, so they need to be strongest.’