I showered and tarted myself up—as much as you can when you're in fifteen layers of thermals—in the hopes of seeing Ruben that night, but he informed me through a series of increasingly frustrated texts that he couldn't get away from Suzie, so it wasn't going to happen.

I didn't join them as I was still sore over Suzie's shouting at me that morning, and fragile enough to not want to face her.

Instead, I stayed in my sleeping bag pupa, listening to There in the World on my headphones and Googling Argentinian politics.

It turned out Argentina had had a legally recognised Neo-Nazi party since 2014—Partido Bandera Vecinal—but I was struggling to find much information about them in English, and my Spanish was more of the "Ask for two beers" variety than "Analyse the state of Argentinian nationalism", so I wasn't getting very far.

Besides, something about it all still didn't click, and I felt like there was a big piece of the puzzle I was missing.

Namely, I suppose, how we were connected to all this.

Dispirited, I tried another tack, and started searching for "death Antarctica Tom InTrepid" to see if I could find out anything more about Luca's partner's death, see if that turned up any clues.

I found news coverage pretty quickly.

I grimaced. Apparently it had been impossible to retrieve Tom's body.

I wondered how many corpses there were, frozen into the ice on this dark lifeless continent.

Explorers, adventurers all.

All dead.

How many Scotts were there for every Shackleton? How many anonymous frozen team members, unremembered, long unmourned?

I closed my eyes and sunk into my sleeping bag chrysalis, icebound bodies looming over me.

All had Sam's face, his salting of crystalline snow.

I shuddered. I had to get a control of myself, stop spiralling like this. I flicked to my messages, sent a meaningless question to Ruben, just to make contact, just to get a reply.

Just so he could pull me back to sanity.

He didn't respond, so I went back to his Instagram, thumbing through his pictures, trying to ground myself in everything good about him.

The penguin image of Suzie had even more likes now.

He'd posted another one too, only a few minutes ago. It was Suzie in the Ice Hotel hot tub, on a little outdoor verandah just next to the sauna and steam room.

He'd managed to angle the shot so you couldn't see any of the hotel, or the cabin the sauna and changing rooms were in. All you could see was the snowy mountains in the distance, the white valleys up close, that stunning array of stars.

It looked like Suzie was taking a bath in the middle of nowhere.

She was resplendent too, in a white bikini, stomach concave, her bare LA flesh sleek and incongruous in the alien  and inhospitable setting.

It was arresting, easily as good as the penguin picture, and the likes—probably aided by the bikini—were already ratcheting up into the thousands.

At least that should get her off our backs about the competition, give Ruben and I space to investigate Sam's death.

I texted Ruben again. Again he didn't answer.

I put my phone down and rubbed my eyes, my elbows constricted by my cocoon. I thought about Ruben, all the episodes of There in the World I'd just listened to; his journalistic integrity, the lengths he'd gone to to get to the truth, to good story.

If he could do it, so could I.

We could be Vikings together.

I jumped as my phone vibrated lustily next to me.

Ruben. He'd managed to extricate himself from Suzie at last.

I snatched it up, ready to answer.

But it wasn't Ruben.

It was Paulo.

I paused a moment before pressing the green phone, then cleared my throat and said, "hello?"

I hoped my voice didn't betray the fact I was both laying down and slightly terrified.

"Hello Jennie?" he said. His reception was pretty bad.

"Yeah, it's me."

"Hi. Sorry I missed your call. I was... Look, I was wondering, can I come see you? I could bring you over to see the research station. It's warm here. It's not far. I'll cook for you. You could come tonight. I can... I have a snowmobile, so I can bring you back."

I paused. I'd been about 3mm away from tripping out all night, so going out on some expedition into the unknown wasn't really at the top of my to do list.

Especially if...

But no, that was crazy talk.

Even if the Argentines had some political grudge with Russia over their Antarctic Territories, the chance Paulo—the only Argentinian person I knew—just happened to be involved was minuscule.

I'd be safe with him.

Of course I would.

So why were my instincts screaming that I shouldn't trust him at all?

I realised that I'd been silent for a good few seconds while I wrestled with my internal conflict, and in the end my crippling politeness won out over self-preservation.

I said, "Um, yeah, sure. Okay. Thanks."

"Great." I could almost hear him exhale. "I can be there by... seven?"

That was in 35 minutes.

"Okay," I said dumbly. "I'll meet you in reception."

Paulo said bye brusquely, and hung up the phone. I lay there with my own in my hand and wondered what I'd just done.

I'm investigating, I told myself. Like Ruben.

I wasn't going to be the next corpse.

Tell that to my endocrine system, which was pumping out stress hormones like I most definitely was.

I needed to talk to somebody about this.

I needed to talk to Ruben.

I could ask him to come with me. It was the perfect journalistic expedition. Visiting a research station? He was bound to be into it.

I wriggled myself out of my sleeping bag and struggled on with my boots and Perry Sport. Suitably dressed, I headed out towards the locker rooms.

It was bitingly cold, colder than it had been since the hypothermia incident. It ate the flesh off me, leaving me nothing but brittle, shivering bones.

I couldn't leave the hotel in this, surely?

I wondered if I was making a big, big mistake.

I plugged in my almost dead-phone in the locker-rooms, influencers glued to their laptops and screens all around me. Hopefully I could get at least a little charge before Paulo turned up to meet me.

Then I turned towards the hot tub, seeking Ruben. I'd been half expecting to find him in here on his laptop, fiddling with the pictures of Suzie, but there was no sign of either of them.

They weren't in the sauna either. I peeped in, my pulse responding to its memory, but neither Ruben or Suzie were  there.

I bit my lip, disappointed. Maybe Ruben had lost Suzie? Maybe he was back in his room?

Pulling my hood over my head, trying to cover as much of my face as possible, I crossed the short distance back to the hotel. My scalp prickled with the cold. I could feel ice form in the breath on my nostrils.

Ruben's unmistakable laugh rang out well before I got to his room.

It was coming from the restaurant.

I swerved through the ice columns and saw Ruben and Suzie immediately, tucked into one of the snow-cave booths.

His hand was on her face, and they were laughing.

I stopped sharp, stepping back slightly.

Ruben and Suzie?

Surely not.

They hated each other.

This had to be some mistake.

Just at that moment, Ruben saw me, and took his hand from Suzie's face to wave.

"Hey Scotch!" he yelled casually. "Over here!"

I clearly had made a mistake. Ruben wouldn't be so relaxed to see me if they were doing what I thought they were doing, not after what we did last night.

"Hi," Ruben said as I approached the table. "Glad you're feeling better. Join us?"

I shook my head. I wanted to tell him about Paulo, but didn't know how much I should say with Suzie there.

"We're on fire on Twitter," Suzie suddenly said, not looking up from her phone. "My notifications are off the hook right now." She clapped her hands excitedly.

"Ruben," I said tightly. "Can I talk to you? Alone?"

Ruben glanced from Suzie to me, then slid up from behind the table.

"Get me a sparkling water honey?" Suzie asked, still not looking up.

"Sure thing," he said. "Back in a sec."

Honey?

"Thanks babe," Suzie replied.

Babe?

Ruben led me behind an ice pillar, to an empty booth. I was feeling a bit discombobulated by the honey babe, the hand on the face, and just opened and closed my mouth, my mission forgotten.

"You and Suzie are getting on well," I finally said, stiltedly faux-casual.

"Yeah." Ruben looked uncomfortable. He coughed. "Did you see that penguin picture? I've got thirty thousand new followers since posting that."

He shook his head as if marvelling at a rainbow or waterfall, some miracle of nature.

"Remember Paulo?" I changed the subject, my cheeks burning. "The Argentinian guy who came to the portacabins that night we met Sam? Well, he's been acting kind of... suspicious. Something's definitely off. And he wants me to go there. To the research station. To see him. Tonight."

I bit my lip. "I'm not sure if I trust him. I think he knows more than he's letting on. About the incident. Will you... will you come with me?"

Ruben surveyed the restaurant, avoiding my eyes.

"Sounds good, Scotch," he said. "Only I promised Suze we'd set up a shoot in one of the ice hotel bedrooms. A monochrome style thing. I said I'd do it tonight, so..."

I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

"But you hate Suzie," I said, before I'd even had the chance to think. I cringed at the high, desperate note that had crept into my voice. "I thought you said you were here to investigate? To uncover the truth? That you hated all that social media bullshit?"

Ruben's lips narrowed into a thin line.

"Yeah," he said. "Well. There ain't no fuckin' money in news, and that's the truth. I've been at this game five years now, and I ain't never got traffic like that shot of Suzie got."

He looked at me challengingly, daring me to ridicule him. "Do you know how fuckin' cutthroat this business is? How fuckin' hand-to-mouth? Those guys are getting free fuckin' trips to the Maldives and ten thousand dollars per sponsored post,"—he gestured, flat-palmed, to the couple from Back of the Van, laughing at another table—"and I can barely make my rent. And you know what all the really successful travel influencers have in common? Do you know why that schmuck does so well? It ain't his photography, I'll tell you that for free."

I glanced over at the couple behind me, a geeky looking guy with close cropped hair and his willowy wife. Fine-featured and yoga thin, she was the spitting image of Suzie, just with slightly darker hair.

"They're the fuckin' posts that pay," Ruben said bitterly. "It don't matter how good your landscape shot is, how much fuckin' wildlife you get in there. It's gonna do ten times as well if there's a hot chick in jean shorts doing fuckin' yoga in front of it."

He shook his head, hands on his thighs, eyes on the glossy ice ceiling.

"Travel influencing is a couples game, Scotch," Ruben proffered like it was an apology. "I didn't design it that way. I just chose to play, for my sins."

He shrugged, and stood up, rubbing his eye wearily with his hand.

"Good luck with your investigation, yeah? Let me know if you find anything. I'd be happy to cover it on TITW."

Ruben pursed his lips and turned away from me, heading back towards Suzie. She held up her phone and pointed to it, mouthing something to him as he approached.

I stood and watched him go.

"Excuse me?" A girl in pink earmuffs with a massive DSLR shouted aggressively to me across the room. "Can you move? You're in the back of my shot."