‘You know I’m right; that’s why you’re making that face.’

Those words found their mark; I didn’t respond, just fiddled with my watch strap. At that point, Roland entered the shop.

‘This is Roland,’ I said. ‘My partner. And this is Diana, who was with Susso, up in Norway. Susso’s still there. They’ve taken her, Roland.’

‘Who? The cult leader?’

‘I don’t know,’ Diana said. ‘But I assume so.’

‘They threw Diana in the boot of a car and drove her up to Norway. Then they tried to kill her. But she escaped.’

‘As I can see.’

Diana pulled down the vizor of her baseball cap as though to limit what he could see.

‘He knows everything,’ I said. ‘Can I tell him?’

While I told him what Diana had told me, Roland distractedly played with the items on the counter. Then he pulled out his phone, pushed his glasses down onto his nose and tapped at the screen.

‘Runajärvi, Pangajärvi. Did I mean Rumajärvi? Could that be it? The Armasjärvi accident? No, what did I bloody type? Let’s see now. Rumajärvi. Rumajärvi is a village in Karesuando parish, Kiruna County. It’s five miles south of Karesuando.’

After a while, he continued:

‘Suicide wave in Rumajärvi. That’s from last year.’

He continued to read quietly; eventually, I was so impatient I took the phone from him. The article was from the local morning paper. It said three people in Rumajärvi had committed suicide during 2013 and that after that, the village had been abandoned.

‘You have to ask yourself,’ he said, ‘why they took you so far north. There’s that camping site up there. In, what’s it called, Skippagurra. Maybe it could be one of those trafficking things?’

‘Trafficking?’ Diana said. ‘You mean they were going to sell me?’

‘I’m just speculating.’

‘They were going to get rid of me. I’m pretty sure of that.’

‘No one would drive a hundred and fifty miles just to get rid of someone.’

‘But they would drive a hundred and fifty miles to sell me? A thirty-five-year-old woman with a child? There’s no way I’d be worth it.’

‘Hey. Listen to this. Suicide waves are extraordinarily rare, but when they do sweep the Cap of the North, it’s virtually always the Sami, primarily Sami men, who follow each other in death after despairing in stoic silence for years. But in Rumajärvi, it was completely ordinary locals who took their own lives. Says a local politician they interviewed for the article. The population plummeted from eighteen to one over the course of just a few months.’

‘Seventeen suicides?’ Roland said.

‘Three. The rest moved. Except one.’

He had picked up a blonde little girl doll in Sami traditional clothing and was lifting her skirt up to see what she was wearing underneath.