Page 13 of Odin

Unless they could just forget about it, and pretend it hadn't happened.

After all, the first night hadn't meant anything to him, so the second probably hadn't, either. The power would be back on by now, so they wouldn't have to share a room again, let alone a bed, or huddle together for warmth.

She shook herself. The last thing she should be thinking about right now was hot sex, especially after she'd had so much of it. What she should be doing was taking a look at how well the body in the necropsy fridge was defrosting, to see whether she could at least x-ray it before the police arrived tomorrow. Because everything would go so much more smoothly tomorrow if she could confidently say Karl and Jorunn had found a Viking, instead of some modern day murder victim.

Well, they still might have been murdered, just...far enough in the past that the killer was likely to be just as dead as their victim.

Just as long as the police left without arresting her. Was that too much to ask?

She'd also like it if they kept her name out of the news, but if this body really was the find of the century, like Karl said, because Otzi the iceman was so last century, news headlines were probably inevitable. And if her name was in the news for a good reason, linked with an incredible discovery...that could only be a good thing, right?

She stopped off in her (still freezing) guest room to get her camera, so she could get some good preliminary shots of the ice mummy. The university had several of them in the supply room and one mounted on a set of scaffolding up on the ceiling of the scanner room, but she always felt more comfortable with her own equipment.

Besides, if any of the pictures from the university cameras got wiped because of the power outage, at least she'd have the ones she'd taken. She knew Karl took backups when he was out at site for the same reason. They'd even taken extra solar panels to charge all the equipment this trip. Freyja shook her head. She'd never get used to the idea of solar panels in the snow. Or snow at all, really.

Thinking about snow...how bad was the blizzard last night? Surely it had stopped snowing by now.

Freyja peeked through the glass front door, and was surprised to see...nothing, really. Everything was white.

Usually, you could see the curve of the driveway, and the road in the distance, with the village up on the next hill, but she might as well have been in Antarctica for all she could see now. There was snow piled up as high as the steps, with a drift even covering most of the doormat. And there were snowflakes still floating down from a sky that was almost as dark as yesterday, when she'd ordered Olaf inside.

She hoped he wasn't out there shovelling snow again. They'd need earthmoving equipment to shift this load, or a week of proper summer weather, because one man's muscles and a shovel just wouldn't cut it.

But she wasn't supposed to be thinking about Olaf right now. All of her focus should be on the ice mummy, and what she might discover.

She forced herself to head for the necropsy lab, no matter how much she wanted a coffee, because she'd learned the hard way that it was best to deal with dead bodies before breakfast.

She scanned her security card at the door and breathed a sigh of relief that the electronic locks were still working. Not that anyone would want to break into this lab to steal stuff, but there were valuable artefacts in the climate-controlled artefact rooms, like coins and jewellery and things, which would probably fetch a high price on the illegal antiquities market. Or so she imagined, seeing as she knew nothing about illegal markets at all, but the legal market...which seemed to be a kind of catfight between museums, as far as she could tell...were already salivating over the finds, and competing to design an exhibit worthy of displaying them. She hoped whoever got the ice mummy would be willing to show them to the world. Some discoveries needed to be shared, and not hidden away. Whoever the mummy had been in life was nothing compared to how famous they'd be in death.

If Karl was right...

Freyja reached for the door handle to the walk-in refrigerator. She took a deep breath, then prayed silently that this discovery would change her life for the better. She wasn't even sure who or what she directed the prayer to, as she wasn't the least bit religious. Maybe the Judeo-Christian god, or the Norse pantheon the mummy had believed in. Who had the leader of the Norse gods been again?

She considered reaching for her phone to check, before she remembered – it was Odin, the one they called the All-Father. Not because he screwed anything that moved like Zeus, but because he was considered the guy responsible for creation, or so Lara had told her one night at the end of last season, after a lot of aquavit.

"Odin, I could do with a bit of your favour right now," she said as she yanked down the handle, and threw the door open.

"Fuck me," she breathed at what she saw.

The autopsy table sat in the middle of the fridge, just where she'd left it, awash with water, but the body was gone.

"Odin, you are an arsehole," she snapped, as she slammed the door.

SIXTEEN

Freyja could see the headlines already. It'd be THE BODY THIEF STRIKES AGAIN everywhere from here to home, never mind that she'd never stolen a single body, let alone this one. The media hadn't cared about destroying her life and livelihood last time – all they'd cared about was getting more traffic to their websites with their horrible clickbait headlines, and this time would be no different. And with the police coming tomorrow...they'd arrest her for sure.

Even worse was how devastated Karl would be, having finally found his holy grail...only for it to go missing. Getting arrested would almost be a relief if it meant she wouldn't see Karl's face when he found out the body was missing.

Unless she could find the body before the police arrived.

If she could, then no one need ever know it had gone missing.

Only it could be anywhere by now. If someone had stolen it while she'd been on that video call to her family, before her attempt to pick up at the pub, they could be anywhere within a two day drive. They could be anywhere in Europe by now...if they hadn't put the body on a plane, in which case it could be absolutely anywhere.

Except...she hadn't seen tyre tracks in the snow when she'd taken the scooter out, which was why she hadn't seen the ice patch until she hit it. Nor had there been any tyre tracks when she'd wheeled the scooter back from the crash site yesterday, and then the blizzard had hit, and no one with any sense would have been out in that.

Even now, the roads were impassable, and there was no way a helicopter could have landed in the courtyard without her noticing.

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