In the end, Paulo turned out not to be dark or tortured at all. It was just that—as Dostoyevsky informs us—planning and executing murder can play havoc with the isolated mind.

We stayed holed up at Oates for the rest of the winter, shell-shocked. Paulo, Phil and I sharing heavy, world-weary glances while Stephen and Davey pottered oblivious around us.

We kept our heads down when the Russians turned up to clear the ice hotel, and blamed it all on the inevitable hypothermia. The governments that had lost citizens in the ice hotel disaster (all the influencers were either American or European, of course) appeared to accept this, with the caveat that a class action suite was launched against the Russian owners of Intrepid for not providing proper pre-deployment training. A lot of terms like Polar T3 Syndrome and Winter Over Disorder were thrown around.

Seems Antarctica is well known for sending people mad.

I was quite worried when I was interviewed by the police via satellite link-up from Oates, but they seemed mostly relieved that the only British Citizen on the trip had—thanks to an illicit affair with a polar scientist—moved away from the hotel, freeing them from the complex mess of Antarctica's lack of legal system and the ensuing international litigation.

It was quite the media sensation for a week, but by the time spring came and we at Oates could touch the world again, our little drama had been well buried under landslide over landslide over landslide of rolling global news.

After that, life at the research station went on. Davey did one more winter. Stephen transferred to Halley, where he saved a life quite miraculously in a crevasse incident a few years later.

The radiometer was reinstated, and despite the few weeks' blip, it still gave good results. In 2023, Phil got a Royal Society of Chemistry Prize for her groundbreaking research on atmospheric reactive nitrogen release and unprecedented shifts in global ocean currents.

She stayed at Oates until retirement. She even got married out there, to a Dutch girl working on ice cores, in a ceremony on the snow. Paulo and I beamed in to watch the wedding on Skype.

Me and Paulo?

As soon as the sun broke over the horizon and the planes recommenced their flights, we left Antarctica for good.

We were welcomed in Shetland with open arms.

I think my mum had gone through a very secret but very real process of grieving when Ben and I broke up, realising she may never have grandchildren.

It would have been slim pickings had I come back to our island of cousins single—the only available man under fifty being Barry Goodlad, who she'd already written off as an ill-tempered bampit.

Suffice to say, when I turned up not only assuring her I was finally home forever, but also with an extremely attractive—and exceedingly polite—young man in tow, she was delighted.

My entire family—including my bevvy of female cousins, much to my chagrin—treated Paulo like he was the second coming. They couldn't have been kinder if they tried.

Not that it was easy for him.

The events of that polar winter hung heavy on his mind, and he suffered three years of intense but intermittent depression in the wake of it.

At night, he frequently awoke gasping, gripping at the sheets. During the day he had long spells of quiet, times he couldn't bear to speak to anyone but me.

Luckily, we didn't have to pay rent on granny's cottage, so Paulo didn't need to work. My income from the shop was more than enough to meet our needs. He took long walks on the beaches, watched the whales, and tried to come to terms with himself. The official story was that we had visa issues, so none of the busybodies on the island batted an eyelid.

My father, still 100% committed to always staying at home at all costs, saw Paulo's relocation across the world as the greatest act of love anyone had ever performed in the history of monogamous relationships.

"So far from home," he would say, shaking his head at Paulo like he was some magnificent marvel. "No wonder the lad gets doon apon it. Get him another beer, Betty! Give him a seat by the fire!"

When I fell pregnant, we were glad Paulo didn't work.

I had a lot on by that time—I'll get to that later—so after Rosa was born he became her primary carer.

It was the best therapy he could have had. He managed to not only make peace with the demons of that winter, but with his own troubled childhood as well; that soft parcel of love and glee that carried his mother's name soothing the stormy ocean of his miry, rueful mind.

By the time Rosa was two, Paulo had picked up occasional work on the whale watching boats at Skaw. Just a year after that, he was on a research project again, studying killer whale pods at the University at Brae.

Five years in, he was mentally robust enough to revisit our Antarctic nightmare, applying for funding for a research project on the influences of microwaves on right whale migration behaviours.

Which leads us back to me.

Was returning to Shetland the end of my life? Did I work in the shop forever?

The answer is no.

Shortly after we came back, disturbed by my experiences, I set up a small charity called MicrowaveWatch, collating peer-reviewed articles on the ecological dangers of electromagnetic radiation.

It started off small. Just a website really, collecting all the environmental science—the migratory bird stuff, some of the results from Paulo's whale lab, irregularities in the behaviours of insects—but it slowly got bigger and bigger, until we had a global membership, turnover nearing the millions, and could afford to pay for research ourselves.

We became one of the hottest ENGO's in Europe.

I regularly had email contact and telephone strategy meetings with the top brass at GlobalGreen, though I never saw either Ben or Jocasta again.

But easily MicrowaveWatch's biggest achievement was in 2029, when we made Shetland the world's first electro-magnetic interference reserve.

No 3G. No 4G. Definitely no 5G.

Not even WiFi.

Some of the islanders were a bit sniffy about losing their mobiles at first, going back to wired-up internet, but when the tourism money started to flood in they soon changed their minds.

Turned out, whether imagined or not, electromagnetic sensitivity was surprisingly prevalent, and those people were prepared to pay big bucks to give their addled minds some peace.

Not just them, either—Shetland was quite the hip hotspot destination for parents desperate—at least for a week or two a year—to look their children in the eye, rather than the top of their scalps as they stared at the phones in their hands.

Things were good.

Paulo and I were happy, that's what's important to know.

We laughed together and took bubble baths together and grew our own vegetables in our cottage garden, looking over the sea. We watched the seasons change, the movements of whales and birds, and played with our daughter on the beach.

Life was good.

I often got invited to far-away places after the charity took off—observing the success of Shetland, a number of archipelagos wanted to go for EMI reserve status, and they all naturally wanted me to come and talk about it.

The Seychelles, The Maldives, Tahiti...

I turned them all down.

Antarctica was the last trip I ever took. I never left Shetland again.

But looking at my beautiful daughter, my perfect husband, how could I regret any of it? I didn't.

The ice hotel closed after that winter, and a new one did not materialise.

A lot of good came of those murders, it really did. Besides, it wasn't like we actually killed them. It was a pain ray. It was Antarctica that actually took their lives.

They never should have been there in the first place.

And of course, when the devastation of the global war finally came, the absence of masts made Shetland one of the safest places to be in the world, so a natural seat for the resistance. If it hadn't been for–

But wait, I've gone too far again.

That—as they say—is another story.

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