Pyotr grunted. He bent to the floor to pick up his rope, which was lying in a sodden coil on the hearth. I didn’t know what to say. For something to do I began to gather up the remains of the Cossack’s dinner – his bowl and cup, his fork and spoon, the empty vodka jug – and perhaps it would all have ended there if I hadn’t noticed then the piece of paper on the floor beneath the bench, the one the man had carried in his fist and later folded and put inside his shirt. It must have fallen out while he slept.

I picked it up, opened it. It was a map. A maze of hand-drawn tracks across the snowy wilderness, an arrow in the right hand corner, pointing north. I thought of the Cossack’s smouldering fury when they arrived, of the woman’s suicidal six-hour sulk in the snow and then I understood; everything that was familiar about the two of them seemed at that moment to reveal itself. Even before the Cossack glanced over and saw me holding the map, even before he’d shrugged his massive shoulders and thrown up his hands and gestured towards the window at their sledge parked outside, even before he’d opened his mouth to speak, I knew what he was going to say:

‘Always when we drive, my wife and I, we argue.’

I thought of Geoffrey.

I thought of our last horrible scene in the car after his brother’s wedding in Salford, after I’d told him to come off the M6 just north of Manchester at junction 26 and go into Wigan; after we’d got lost in Wigan and been stuck in traffic for an hour and three quarters in the centre of town, then trailed slowly on for another hour through Hindley, Atherton and Tyldesley, and ended up arriving at the church when the wedding ceremony was just finishing; I thought of how we’d sat through the reception without speaking a word to each other and then walked silently back to the car, of how Geoffrey had taken the road atlas out of the compartment in the door on my side and said to me in that quiet voice that pretends to be patient and understanding but is in fact a hair’s breadth away from being speechless with incandescent fury, ‘Why would you do that, Harriet? Why wouldn’t you tell me to come off at junction 21a and then take the M62 all the way up to the M602 into Salford? Or junction 20 so I could have taken the M56 and picked up the western ring road until we hit the M602 there and gone in that way? Jesus Christ, Harriet, why would you take us in through the centre of Wigan on a Saturday morning?’