Helen clenched her jaw and silently looked past Werner and out of the window. A man on the other side of the street was walking two huge Rottweilers and obviously struggling to control them. One of the dogs dragged him over to the bushes next to the substation and started sniffing all around it.

She scratched her neck. “I had a nightmare last night that seemed so real. It woke me up. I went downstairs to look for you, and I heard you in the basement.”

Werner fixed her with a glassy look. “Oh?”

Helen rubbed her forehead. Her fingers were shaking. “I couldn’t bring myself to set foot in there; I’m sorry. It’s so horrible, Werner. I—I don’t know what to do.”

He regarded her in silence, his eyes narrowed to slits. For a moment, his expression felt accusatory, but she must have imagined it.

“We can only do this once, Helen,” he said softly. “There’s no second chance. We have to get it right the first time.”

Very occasionally, and especially when she was tired, Helen would look at her husband and—in a flash—see him as he might appear to a random passerby. A stylish man around forty, with slightly graying hair, a high forehead, and fine, aristocratic features. A lot of people would call him handsome. Helen hadn’t fallen so much for his looks; rather, it had been his inner strength that attracted her. Werner was the kind of man who was ten steps ahead of everyone else, who always thought things through and knew what needed to happen. But this morning, for the first time, she saw desperation in his eyes.

“There must be saws out there that you can use to cut through frozen flesh and bone. A hacksaw, maybe?” he wondered out loud. He picked up the iPad from the table, but his fingers hovered motionless above the screen.

“What’s the matter?”

He pushed the device away in frustration. “Suppose—suppose we get linked to all this one day. They’ll definitely go through our browser history if that happens.”

“I think they would, yes. But maybe we don’t need to look it up online.” She told him about the cordless drill the orthopedic surgeon used at the hospital. “Of course, I don’t know how well it works on frozen body parts. Nor do I have any idea how to bring something like that home unnoticed. It won’t fit in my handbag. But it might go in a—”

“What sort of blade would something like that have?”

Helen held her thumb and index finger apart. “About that big. Pretty thin. Like an electric bread knife.”

He leapt to his feet. “Get your coat.”

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