The Last to Disappear

by Jo Spain

Genres: Hard-Boiled

Synopsis

When Alex Evans is informed that his sister's body has been pulled from an icy lake in Northern Lapland, he assumes his irresponsible sister accidentally drowned. He travels to the wealthy winter resort where Vicky worked as a tour-guide and meets Agatha Koskinen, the detective in charge. Agatha is a no-nonsense single mother of three who already thinks there's more to Vicky's case than meets the eye. As the two form an unlikely alliance, Alex also begins to suspect the small town where his sister lived is harbouring secrets. It's not long before he learns that three other women have gone missing from the area in the past and that his sister may have left him a message. On the surface, Koppe, Lapland is a winter wonderland. But in this remote, frozen place, death seems only ever a heartbeat away.

Release date: May 12, 2022

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 400

Sample

Prologue

Koppe, Finland

1 November 2019

At first, white-hot agony.

She can’t think. Can’t react.

The ice-cold water paralyses every muscle.

Her entire body becomes one desperate plea: let it end.

Nobody can bear this and live.

Just when it feels as though she might die from the pain, the stinging needles recede, replaced with a deep ache as her cells attempt to adjust to the shockingly low temperature.

The surface. She needs to get to the surface. The thought crowds everything else out.

Survival instinct kicks in, over the fear, the denial, the incomprehension.

Her legs kick, her arms flail, seeking the hole through which she fell, the break in the ice.

Up, up, and her head is clear and she’s gasping for air.

The sudden intake of oxygen brings an explosion of adrenaline and now she knows what she has to do.

One. Fight the debilitating throbbing that could force her back under.

Two. Get out of the water and on to the ice.

Three. Find safe ground.

She’s lucky; this registers somewhere in the back of her brain. Some people go in and never find their way out. The last thing they see is a sheet of impenetrable ice, the promise of light on the other side. She has been trained for this. She, at least, has a chance.

Her hand throws itself on to the frozen surface, the section that hasn’t cracked, and splays there like a safety anchor.

She sees a figure; remembers who it is. She calls for help. At least, she thinks she does. Her mouth opens, but she’s not sure any sound is coming out. There’s so much to say.

You’re wrong. It doesn’t matter. I won’t tell anybody.

The figure just watches. There’s no offer of help. And now, the person is walking away.

The woman in the lake sees crimson splashed on the white snow that covers most of the ice, thick snow that lured her to the thinnest, most dangerous part of the lake. It’s so distractingly beautiful, red on white, that she almost forgets it’s her blood that’s been spilled. That the ragged line that trails towards the broken ice must have dripped from her exposed wound as she tried to run to safety.

Her hand reaches and slips and reaches and slips but finds nothing.

She tries to scream. It’s beyond her. The pounding inside her head and the stabbing sensation of the freezing water have stolen her voice.

Who’d hear, anyway?

She’s alone, trapped in a frozen lake, nothing but birch trees and forest animals for miles; a whole lot of white nothingness.

She’s not perfect. She’s done a lot of stupid things. Things she regrets.

But she doesn’t deserve this.

She didn’t see this coming.

There are so many people she wishes she could talk to one last time. So many people she loves, people she hasn’t told in a while.

She still thinks she’ll be okay. This doesn’t happen. Not to people her age. She can’t just die. Somebody will find her and save her.

Her body starts to go numb. Her thoughts drift. Her scrabbling hand falls still.

The last thing she sees before the icy water claims her is a new snowfall.

It’s breathtaking in its beauty.

Gentle, soft crystals fall on to her face. And fall and fall.

And fall.

London, England

Mid-December 2019

‘Your first mistake, Alexander, was bringing them to a chophouse for lunch. These bastards don’t want steak and ale, even if your hipster joint does serve chips in an aluminium basket and the table is reclaimed wood from the Tower of London. They want a Louis XIV dining experience: £400 bottles of port, ortolan birds eaten under white napkins, baba soaked in Armagnac.’

Alex stays mute as Charlie pauses his lecture to inhale a mound of Ossetra caviar, followed by a large gulp of Screaming Eagle wine.

‘Lucky for you, the project manager phoned me. I got them into the Connaught for the chef’s table. Focking steak. Christ, you’re an amateur. We want them to stay with us when they get the contract. They’ll need lobbyists all year round.’

Charlie claps Alex on the back with enough force – had Alex been choking – to dislodge the incriminating object.

‘Fucking steak, Charlie,’ Alex says, quietly. ‘It’s fucking with a U, not an O.’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘And it was vintage côte de boeuf.’

‘Old steak. Bloody hell.’

‘The Cassidys will be lucky to get the contract, Charlie,’ Alex says. ‘I’ve thrown everything at it, but the government doesn’t know what it’s doing with the ports and it can’t afford the technology these guys want to sell.’

‘They’re going to have to do something to keep the beggars out, Alex. It’s the people’s will. The PM has to announce a plan to deal with Brexit customs checks. Why not the Cassidys? Magic, contactless customs. Bloody geniuses, those brothers.’

‘I think the PM’s budget stretches to cardboard signs and black markers,’ Alex retorts.

‘We need more lubrication, you dry sod,’ Charlie says, and stands up abruptly, off to locate Serena, the hostess.

Alex fills his glass with the dregs of the wine and surveys his work colleagues, all one hundred and twenty of them packing out the large, dimly lit cellar room of The Fig House. This is the annual Christmas party of Thompson, Mayle & Sinclair, or TM&S for those looking to save breath. But the only concession to Christmas the impeccably appointed Lebanese establishment has made is the table centre pieces: intricate berry garlands surrounding plain white candles. The room is still scented with the exotic musk of night-blooming jasmine; ornate copper amphora vases nestle beneath traditional arches, and the leafy plants lurking in corners are reminiscent of summers in cedar-lined gardens.

The firm’s event organiser has chosen The Fig House because it’s popular, not because it’s seasonal.

Fock Christmas anyway, Alex thinks.

He had assumed when he started working in the Regency-era building that houses TM&S that he was the only one who hadn’t come up through the Eton, Balliol ranks. This was mainly because every single person in his office spoke in the dreary, uniform drawl of the upper classes. He’d been wrong.

Take Christian in auditing, a working-class lad from Leeds. Annabel in accounts was born in a regular middle-class suburb of Newcastle. Neither of them started out a million miles from Apple Dale village, where Alex grew up. Christian and Annabel, though, have battered any Northern melody out of their speech. Unlike Alex, who is still mocked mercilessly for his accent. His nickname around the office is Stainless Steel, in honour of Yorkshire’s gift to the industrial world and because Alex is not known for showing much emotion.

Charlie Mills’ family started off in a working-class block of flats in the East End of London. But Charlie, Christian and Annabel’s chameleon-like abilities serve them well in the business they’re all in.

Lobbying.

The great skill of pretending to know everything so you can convince others, who are also only pretending to know what they’re doing, that your way is best.

Alex is such a good lobbyist, he doesn’t need to fake an accent. He just fakes everything else. His sister Vicky once told him he was the living incarnation of Don Draper from Mad Men.

Vicky has always had an unerring talent for articulating Alex’s most secret fears.

Last month, Alex had been part of a team working on a contract for a private health insurance provider. Their job was to massage the figures in order to convince senior officials in the Department of Health that beds in the NHS were more costly to run than beds in private hospitals.

Alex, the son of a union-organiser postman and a village school teacher, had delivered the presentation smoothly. Only he could see his soul seeping out of his body as he spoke.

The Faustian bargain was signed when the department reps jumped all over the numbers, saying that they had been looking for exactly those kind of stats to back up a new policy direction. They’d all laughed and toasted their future partnership with coffee wheeled in by workers on minimum wage.

Charlie returns with an even more expensive bottle of wine.

While they don’t share the desire to piss money into the wind, Charlie is still one of Alex’s best friends. He’s an interesting character. Charlie spent his first six years in a tiny council flat with his four brothers and sisters, all seven members of the family squashed into three small bedrooms. His entrepreneurial father, a Del Boy-meets-Alan Sugar type, had managed to progress from bus driver to coach driver to coach owner to coach-fleet owner. Charlie’s father’s empire on wheels paid for Charlie to go to Trinity College in Dublin, which was much easier to get into than the top English unis but carried just enough elitist cachet to have TM&S recruiters overlook the obviously absent blue blood.

Charlie is still likeable, despite his new-found snobbery.

Alex likes Annabel, too, but he can’t stand Christian, who’s rumoured to have screwed one of the interns on a promise of securing her a full-time position. Only the partners get to choose which of the interns gets to stay and it’s rarely based on whether they’re a good shag.

‘You’re very subdued, Alexander,’ Charlie says.

‘You know I can’t stand these things, Charlie, mate,’ Alex says. ‘Sodom and Gomorrah were less hedonistic.’

‘That’s your problem, Alex. You just want to earn money. No idea how to spend it. So, what’s the plan for Christmas?’

Alex picks up his refilled glass of wine and drinks deep.

‘Home,’ he says.

‘Your lovely sister going to be about?’

‘You’ve only ever seen photos of Vicky,’ Alex says. ‘I don’t know where this obsession stems from.’

‘Photos of her sun-kissed on a beach in Morocco in a string bikini, man,’ Charlie says. ‘I’m only human.’

‘Put it like this – if she deigns to come home, I won’t be letting you near her.’ Alex swirls the wine in the glass. ‘Anyway, I don’t know what Vicky’s plans are. Haven’t talked to her in months.’

‘She’ll be home to keep the focus off you, don’t worry,’ Charlie says, but his thoughts are already elsewhere, on Serena, who’s gliding past them in her tight white blouse and short black skirt, en route to sell another overpriced bottle of wine to one of their foolhardy colleagues.

Alex doesn’t want to return to Apple Dale for Christmas. He’s been trying to come up with an excuse for months but, ironically, the man who essentially massages the truth for a living can’t conceive of anything credible enough to pull the wool over his parents’ eyes. Nor can he say, Folks, I can barely live with myself these days and I sure as hell can’t live with seeing myself reflected in Dad’s judgemental eyes over turkey and ham.

He’s simultaneously resigned to and bitter about the fact that Vicky is the shining light in the Evans household. Twenty-six-year-old Vicky, whose biggest achievement to date seems to be not getting pregnant while she screws her way around the world, and who only ever phones home to tap her family for cash.

Alex is the one who’s got the big city job and an apartment in Marylebone. Alex is the one who’s paid off his parents’ mortgage.

So what if he made a mistake, once, when he was only bloody sixteen and barely knew he was born, let alone supposed to be protecting his future?

So what? Except his father won’t ever let him forget it; then there’s the fact he’s only gone and become a sell-out, too.

Charlie pursues Serena for the rest of the night but it’s Alex who ends up taking her home. Charlie Mills is a cocky chap with plenty of money, but Alex has plenty of money too and, ultimately, he has five inches’ height on Charlie, his hairline isn’t receding, he weighs about three stone less and is a good deal better-looking all round.

When the phone rings at 5.30 a.m., Alex wakes thinking it’s his alarm. He’s forgotten it’s Saturday. He can’t remember why there are black, lacy knickers on the floor, and the rain is so loud against the window of his top floor apartment, he’s already talking himself out of his morning run.

Then he sees Ed’s name flashing and answers the call.

‘Dad?’

‘Alex?’

‘What’s up?’ Alex shimmies quietly into an upright position. Serena barely stirs. She’s just as beautiful sans make-up, so much so Alex can forgive the fact her Bobbi Brown foundation is now spread across his 500-thread-count white pillowcase.

‘You need to come home,’ his dad says.

Alex blinks a few times, then tenses.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asks. ‘Is it Vicky?’

Of course he thinks of Vicky first. Why wouldn’t he? Vicky’s employment over the last few years has entailed bouncing from one dodgy tourist resort to the next. Vicky is the sort of person to see hitch-hiking as a cheap travel option, as though those nightmare stories involving missing backpackers could never apply to her.

‘Your mum’s in hospital. She’s had a heart attack.’

Alex inhales sharply.

Mum’s only fifty-five, he thinks. She’s too young to die.

‘Is she okay?’

Serena is waking now, her hand creeping across the sheet, trying to establish where she is without opening her eyes.

‘She’s fine. She’s stable. But you need to come up here. Now.’

Ed hangs up.

Alex stares at his phone.

Why the urgency, if his mother is okay?

There’s something Ed’s not saying.

Alex shivers.

Is his mother fine . . . for now?

As he dresses, he rings Vicky’s mobile. The line doesn’t even connect, just goes straight to voicemail.

‘Vicky,’ he says, once the automated message service plays out. ‘You have to come home. Mum had a heart attack. You need to get here, quick.’

He hesitates.

‘This is my new number.’

Please, don’t let me regret giving it to you, he thinks.

Koppe, Finland

 

 

‘He’s doing it again. Mom. Mom! He’s—’

‘I heard you!’

Agatha reaches into the glove compartment, rummages around until she finds some salted liquorice and tosses it into the back of the car. She turns her head to glare at all three children in the back.

‘Olavi, stop biting your arm. Eat that instead. Onni, stop telling tales on your brother. Emilia, will you help me with these boys, please!’

Agatha’s eyes return to the road, just in time to see the silver deer.

She lets the car roll to a halt on the compacted snow, not bothering with the brakes that will just make the vehicle slip and slide and possibly end up in the ditch that borders the forest.

They stop inches away from the reindeer, which stands completely still, eyeing the car’s bonnet with equal parts disdain and disinterest.

Agatha’s heart rate slows. Even the children stop squabbling and quietly observe the beast.

A rare glimpse of winter sun has broken through the clouds. It’s unusually strong for this time of year, casting everything in a blinding white light, including the pale deer.

There’s silence in the birch forest on either side. The trees nearest the road are bent double with snow, their branches like claws reaching towards the road.

‘Why’s he out in the morning, Mom?’ five-year-old Onni asks, because even at this young age, he knows it’s more common to encounter deer on the road at night.

‘Maybe he likes being different,’ Agatha says. She beeps the horn. The spell is broken. The deer gives her a mournful glance, then slopes back into the forest, taking his sweet time about it.

‘Can we follow him?’ Olavi asks and Agatha wishes she could say yes because anything that distracts her eight-year-old from arm-biting is a good thing.

‘I’ve got to see Martti,’ Agatha says. It’s followed by a trio of resigned groans in the rear. They know and accept that Agatha has to work but they’re also perfectly entitled to complain about having to sit in a boring doctor’s office for half an hour.

One more year, Agatha tells herself. Then Emilia will be fifteen and she can watch the boys at home when Patric’s unavailable and Agatha can’t get another sitter. She’s mature enough to do it now, but Agatha doesn’t want to take the risk. Emilia has to be old enough not to panic if anybody unexpected calls on the phone.

Or if anybody unexpected turns up.

 

The doctor’s surgery used to be in his house in the centre of Koppe, close to Agatha’s home, but when Martti took over a few years ago, he opened up a more modern clinic on the other side of their small town. It’s still close but Agatha has chosen to drive around Koppe, rather than through it, to get there. Everybody wants to talk to her since the news broke and they won’t hesitate to stand in front of her car so she’s forced to slow down, lower her window and give them updates. The town and its surrounds has a population of four hundred, though that can swell to over one thousand in residence on any given day, due to the tourists in Koppe Lodge and the Arctic Hotel.

The tourists come and go, but the residents are here all the time and they expect to be kept informed about what’s happening.

The problem with a place like this – everybody knows your business. The positive in a place like this – everybody knows your business.

But, for now, Agatha needs to keep this business private, until she has decided how to proceed.

The secretary has hung himmeli from the ceiling in Martti’s surgery and left straw out on the table in the waiting room for patients to have a go at making the traditional Christmas decorations themselves. Life can be slow-moving in the doctor’s – sometimes the old women come in and just want to talk. Sometimes the old men, too. Or, sometimes, nobody wants to talk and Martti has his work cut out for him.

The boys fall to their knees to see who can win by weaving the most elaborate geometric shape. Emilia slumps onto the couch, tucks her knees up to her chin and opens TikTok.

‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ Agatha says, with insufficient conviction to fool even herself. None of the children respond, and in a fit of guilt, she hands Emilia twenty euro for babysitting, then says they’ll stop at the garage for sweets on the way home. Emilia barely nods, already lost to the strains of a pop song and Addison Rae’s slick moves on the viral video site.

Martti is in his office with Elon, the fisherman.

‘Agatha.’ Elon nods in her direction, then hangs his head. Agatha touches his shoulder gently, while exchanging a look with Martti.

‘Quite a shock,’ Martti says. ‘But, thank God you found her, Elon.’

‘Was expecting a couple of fat chars,’ Elon says, unhappily. Elon’s expression has always been one of inexplicable sadness, even when resting, but now he looks distraught. And like he hasn’t slept all night. Agatha didn’t either. They worked until the early hours and all of them were distressed afterwards.

Agatha wants to hug the mousy-haired man but she won’t. Elon spends on average four to five hours a day ice-fishing alone on Lake Inari and lives as a single man in his isolated cabin outside Koppe. Even by Finnish standards, he’s a man who’s more comfortable in his own company.

Martti insisted Elon come to his surgery this morning. Elon had spent the longest time on the ice, and possibly the most traumatic. Agatha can tell from one glance at Martti that Elon’s physical health is fine. His mental health is what’s of concern. Elon is in shock, though he’s not aware of it. But Elon won’t take any drugs that Martti wants to prescribe.

Tomorrow, he’ll be back out on the lake, fishing for char.

Elon leaves, promising them both that he’s fine.

Agatha and Martti look at each other and shrug.

Most of the town elders still call Martti the newbie, even though he’s been their doctor the last seven years and is in his forties. It doesn’t help that he’s so baby-faced, nor that his glasses are a little bit too large for his head, so he’s constantly pushing them up his nose like a schoolboy at his desk.

Agatha knows Martti has dealt with death many times. Old age. Vehicular accidents. Snowmobile tragedies. But, day to day, Martti’s job is more run of the mill. Wart removal. Broken wrists. Concussion after a ski fall. Frostbite. Domestic violence injuries; there’s a lot of that, come the long, harsh winters.

‘How long was she in the water, doc?’ Agatha asks Martti.

‘Hard to tell, Agatha. Temperature being what it is. I’m sending her down to Rovaniemi. They’ll do the post-mortem, give you something concrete. I suspect she’s been there since she went missing, so, six weeks. There’s nothing on her body that would indicate she was held captive first but let’s leave that to the experts. Has her family been informed?’

Agatha nods. A family member will be needed to make the definitive identification but Niamh Doyle, the one who had reported her friend missing, was at the lake when they drilled out the surrounding ice of Elon’s fishing hole and brought the woman’s body fully to the surface. Luckily, Agatha had grabbed Niamh when she fainted, preventing the woman’s head from hitting the ice and burdening them with a second casualty.

‘What have they been told?’ Martti asks.

Agatha sighs.

‘What we can confirm as of now,’ she says. ‘That she was found in Lake Inari. Drowned.’

Agatha’s district covers ten thousand square kilometres and several tourist resorts. To police all that, there’s just her and two others based in Koppe, plus a couple of officers located in towns around the lake. Sometimes, it can take hours to get to a location, even in an emergency. Agatha was at the lake within minutes of receiving the call. A coincidence. Agatha and her junior, Janic, had been near that section of Inari when Elon made his discovery. Not that it mattered how quickly the police arrived. The woman had been dead for some time.

The young woman’s family will want to know how and why she drowned, alone. Why nobody was there to save her. They won’t understand that in Lapland, tragedy is always just a heartbeat away.

That sometimes, there’s nobody to blame but yourself.

Though, in this case, Agatha isn’t so sure.

 

Leeds, England

 

 

Alex spends twenty minutes trying to find a parking space at the hospital, increasingly frustrated with each wasted second. Eventually, he convinces the chap at the payment office to let him park up on the kerb beside it, because Alex is very good at convincing people to do things even when they know they shouldn’t.

It’s a short dash to the front door of the hospital through the driving rain.

His mother is on the second floor, which Alex learns en route is home to the Intensive Care Unit. This is why Ed sounded off, Alex realises. His mother might still be alive but she’s not out of the woods.

Last year, Alex had tried to make his parents take out a private health insurance policy. They refused. One thing to have their mortgage paid off with their son’s ill-gotten gains, quite another to jump on the two-tier bandwagon slowly chipping away at the NHS. Alex pointed out to Ed and Sue that it was no longer a slow chip under the current government; it was a sledgehammer. Their romanticised version of the National Health Service was dead and they would be too if they didn’t take out a proper care policy.

His father is sitting outside his mother’s room when Alex reaches the second floor. He’s leaning forward on the chair, tilted at an angle that makes his son think he might tip over on to the floor if Alex doesn’t get to him first.

Ed looks up at Alex when he feels the hand on his shoulder and croaks one word.

‘Son.’

She’s already dead, Alex thinks. He can see it in his father’s eyes, in the hollowed-out, devastated expression on his face.

‘I came as fast as I could,’ Alex utters, a completely useless thing to say but something that he thinks he should.

He thinks of his sister Vicky listening to the two voicemails he left her. She’ll be in an airport now, not even aware her mother is dead. She’ll be crushed.

‘She’s in an induced coma,’ Ed says, and cocks his head at the room behind them.

Alex, confused, looks in the window.

There’s Sue propped up in a bed. She’s hooked up to various wires; her blonde hair, normally curled and set, is flat against her head and the side of her face is bruised. But she is still very much alive. Alex looks back at his dad.

Ed’s own dark hair has thinned since the last time Alex saw his father, though his beard is thicker than ever. They’ve always been hairy men, the Evanses. He remembers as a kid, his parents bringing them to Whitby beach, his father’s bare chest covered in tufts of black hair as he carried both Alex and Vicky, one in his arms, one on his back. The strongest man we knew, Alex thinks. In every way. Something he admired as a small boy, hated as a teenager.

How could you ever amount to much, when your father was a giant?

Alex wonders what has happened to reduce Ed so, to take so much out of the man that he can’t even stand up.

‘What is it?’ Alex asks. ‘What have they said? Is she brain-dead? Is it something else? Did they find something else?’

‘Your mum’s fine,’ Ed says.

He heaves himself to a standing position so they’re face to face.

‘The heart attack was brought on by the news. It’s Vicky, Alex. She’s dead.’

Alex blinks.

The world falls out from beneath his feet. Everything is moving slowly and quickly at the same time. Alex can hear his heartbeat, his breathing; feel his father’s grip on his arm. But his vision is blurred, the lights overhead are buzzing, and the blood has turned cold in his veins.

‘What did you say?’ he asks.

‘Vicky is gone, Alex.’

‘She can’t be gone. She’s in Finland.’

‘We got the call in the early hours. That’s when your mother fell ill.’

‘I don’t understand. How did she die? What happened?’

Alex is unable to process the information.

‘Was it a car crash? Did she fall?’

Alex is shaking Ed. He needs to know everything, right now.

‘She drowned,’ Ed says, without emotion. He’s adjusting, bury­ing his own feelings in order to respond to the violence of Alex’s reaction. ‘They say she was in the lake for weeks. We hadn’t heard from her since September. We weren’t worried. The last time we spoke, she said it was getting busier over there, there were loads of tourists. We thought, she’ll be home for Christmas. You know what she was like. She wouldn’t phone unless she needed something. God knows what they think of us, that we didn’t even realise she was missing . . .’

Ed’s head slumps.

Alex is frozen to the spot.

‘She can’t have drowned,’ he whispers. He doesn’t recognise his own voice.

He hasn’t spoken to her in months.

Had she been trying to reach him?

Had she dialled his old number only to find it was out of service?

He’d deliberately not sent her the new one.

Alex almost retches.

‘You’re in shock,’ Ed says.

Vicky, Alex thinks. The warm body next to his when they were small, the pest who was always telling tales to their parents. The little girl who once wrote an essay about how Alex was her role model because he’d done something nice for her that week. The teenager who nicked his cigarettes and took his first expensive car on a joyride just to push his buttons. The woman who could make him laugh and seethe in equal measure . . .

Vicky. Twenty-six-years-old, Vicky.

And even while he’s trying to absorb the punch to the gut, Alex feels a rising anger.

This is so typical of his sister, to cause them all this pain, to take such risks that she’s ended up bloody killing herself. How dare she? How could Vicky do this to them?

He turns away from his father, and without thinking, punches the wall.

It’s only the fact it’s some sort of cheap plastic divide and not actual concrete that saves Alex from breaking his hand.

The pain shoots through his knuckles and wrist and Ed grabs him before Alex can draw back his arm and add another dent to the first one.

‘No,’ Ed says.

Alex drops his arm. He doesn’t need to do it again. The force was enough the first time to redirect what he was feeling from emotional to physical.

‘I need you in control,’ Ed says, cutting through the mists. ‘I can’t leave your mother.’

Alex swallows.

‘They need a family member to officially identify the body.’

Alex looks at Ed. His father can’t expect him to get on a plane, to go to a strange country, to function like a n. . .