The fact was, he was now in a state of suppressed terror. He had just spent nearly five hours running away from what he was certain was a biological death sentence. Whatever the hell it was back there in that hut, he, for one, was not going to hang around to find out. The whole place had stunk of sickness and death, which was why he’d ventured no further inside than the doorway. One look at that dying man on the sofa with all those pustules and black vomit, and Skeet was out of there. He had probably never moved so fast in his life. Propelled by fear and self-preservation, he had battled his way through the storm, ignoring the plummeting temperatures, the inherent danger of polar-bear attack, and struck out for the nearest settlement, the Russian mining community at Barentsburg.

Head down against the wind as the night closed in, he had concentrated on putting as much distance as possible between himself and that hut. True, he did feel a slight twinge of guilt about abandoning his two colleagues back there, but not for long. If they wanted to stick around in that place and go down with whatever bug that guy had, well, good luck to them, but Victor Skeet was going to look after number one, thank you very much. Skeet was an ice-core engineer by profession, although back home in Cambridge he liked to tell people he was an ‘extreme engineer’. Since joining the 145-strong community of scientists and support staff at the UK Arctic Research Station on Svalbard, he had kept largely to himself. When others chose to take their holiday leave in Britain, he had always opted for the shuttle flight down to Oslo. Yet he never spoke about what he got up to there. He knew people probably thought of him as a dark horse, and he didn’t care.

And now he had a plan. He would check himself into a discreet hostel in Barentsburg, paying cash, and in the morning he would get himself on to the very first chopper flight down to the international airport at Longyearbyen. If he moved fast he should be able to get off this godforsaken archipelago while the locals were still out searching for him in the snow. From there, he would fly to Oslo, where he could hide up for a few days in Agnetha’s flat. Lie low and wait for the fuss to die down. He just had to hope that brute of a husband was still away on the North Sea rigs.