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up.’
    ‘He will,’ I say. ‘Don’t worry, Kay. He will.’

The Snow Queen
    What a stark week it’s been. It snowed yesterday. Great grey clouds of the stuff came swirling through the air, like a ton of duck down shaken from some giant wintry pillow. People were so excited to see a heavy snowfall in central London that they came tearing out of their houses just to watch it. They were laughing. They seemed to like it. They immediately began scooping up frozen clumps from the ground and stuffing it down one another’s jumpers. I gave them a disapproving look as I walked by, like I was an old person or something.
    Snow makes me a little uneasy, always has. I hate the way everything goes so deathly quiet after a snowstorm. You can’t hear the comforting hiss of the traffic any more and your feet make no reassuring echo when they hit the ground. Everything’s muffled and silent and cloaked, like the world’s been shut up in a freaky padded cell. I want the world to be noisy, vibrant, active and alert. Especially today. Especially now.
    ‘Where are you? Where the fuck are you, Daniel? You bastard, you’d better come home.’
    I say this to no one in particular. Stood in the road outside my mother’s house, ankle deep in the snow.
    ‘This isn’t funny any more, do you hear me? You can’t leave me alone with them, we had a pact. Whatever you’ve done, whatever went wrong. No one bloody cares about it. No one!’
     
    Daniel never made it home that Friday night. He isn’t home still, he’s disappeared. There’s a manila file sitting on a desk at our local police station with his name written on it in bold black letters. My brother is officially missing. He’s been gone for over a week.
    We’ve barely slept since the night he disappeared, we look like ghouls, the lot of us. Every hour we can muster has been spent glued to the phone or out pacing the streets, desperately trying to find some living trace of him. In the past seven days I’ve spoken to relatives I didn’t even know I had: great-aunts, great-uncles, fourth cousins twice removed, people from the phone book that just happen to share the same surname. Between us we’ve probably spoken to everyone Daniel’s had more than a fleeting relationship with in his entire life: long-forgotten friends from college, kids he went on outward-bound courses with when he was a teenager, kids from his junior running club that haven’t heard from him since he was seven years old. And still there’s nothing. No leads, no evidence, no documents, no sight nor sound of him of any kind.
    Actually, that’s not strictly true. There is some footage of him leaving his office building last Friday night that was caught on his firm’s security camera. I’ve watched that footage maybe a hundred or so times in the last week and every time I look at it I try to pick out something new. Something in the way that he turns his head or swings his arms; something, anything , in the 10 short paces he takes to cross the screen that indicates an intention of some kind. Is he walking too quickly, is he anxious? No, it doesn’t appear so. Does he have his head bowed, is he depressed or forlorn? No, he’s looking straight ahead. Purposefully? It’s hard to tell. It lasts exactly 8.79 seconds this piece of film, just long enough for him to pass through the marble foyer of his building and make his way out onto the forecourt. How does he move? Not determinedly, not casually, not carefully, just, well, normally , I suppose. Which is an exceptional thing to say, because after he left the building at 7:00 p.m., no one has the least idea where he went.
    And so it went on. The next day and the day after that. Not a call, not a text, not a sighting, not a conclusive piece of information that we could use. He never got into his car, he didn’t visit a cash point, his passport is still safely tucked away in his drawer at home. He didn’t rent a car. He didn’t turn up at anyhospitals or police