The Near & Far Series
The Complete Box Set
Serena Clarke
Free Bird Books
Contents
A North So True
The Same But Different
All Over the Place
Also by Serena Clarke
Behind every secret is a chance for something true.
* * *
Zoe Bailey’s transient childhood left her with a passport full of stamps, an ambiguous accent, and nowhere to call home. And as a grown-up, her career at a relentlessly slick London PR firm has been half-hearted at best—until she travels on assignment to Lillavik as a not-quite-legit wildlife volunteer.
* * *
The tiny Swedish village holds a smorgasbord of secrets…and Jakob Westermark. Aloof and wild, like the wolves he studies, Jakob has good reason for keeping his distance. But when Zoe finds herself drawn to him, the temptation to mix pleasure with business is too strong to resist.
* * *
Then Jakob’s wolves are threatened, and suspicion turns her way. With more to lose than she ever imagined, Zoe sets out to untangle the hidden threads running through Lillavik…and maybe, finally, find her own true north.
What readers are saying about A North So True
“Everything you’d want in a novel. Romance, mystery, suspense, a hero who you fall in love with and a leading lady who you almost wish you could be. A great read that I couldn’t put down…definitely a must buy.” – Amazon reader
* * *
“Absolutely loved this delightful story. The gorgeous little Swedish village was so well described it made me feel like I was there. The story was gripping and the romance between Zoe and Jakob was heart-warming.” – Bookishly Inclined
* * *
“The best book I have read in so long…I was awake until 4am! I couldn’t put it down!” – Amazon reader
* * *
“A North So True combines the best of so many worlds…from ice skating and snowmobiling to gut-warming shots and hot baths, my senses soaked up every description.” – Random Book Muses
For everyone far away, but near at heart.
One
“Someone has to go.”
As her boss scanned the room, tapping a manicured fingernail on the meeting room table, Zoe Bailey kept her eyes on her notepad. Obviously, it was vital to make detailed notes about this client’s requirements. She only hoped that Alcina Sutton, the fearless and fearful head of Vertex PR, wouldn’t walk to the end of the table and see that the notes were mostly scribbled variations on not me not me not me.
Taking a quick glance around the table, she tried not to laugh. Everyone else was deeply involved in checking their phones, taking a very slow drink of water, or finding something fascinating in the sweeping view of London out the window. The prospect of an undercover trip to a wildlife lodge in the north of Sweden—in the middle of winter, no less—was beyond ghastly to the designer-clad people in the room.
“Is it really ethical though, Alcina?” one of them asked, looking for an out. “Are we on solid ground with this?”
That was rich, Zoe thought. In the years she’d worked here, she’d constantly seen Vertex strolling across moral quicksand in the name of creativity and innovation.
Alcina—or Sutton the Shark, as she was known behind her back—sighed deeply.
“Niall,” she said, as though addressing a toddler. “Clearly I wouldn’t ask you to do anything outside the law. We are simply going in and observing on our client’s behalf, seeing what any wildlife volunteer would see. Do I need to explain it for you again?”
Niall shook his head. “No.”
She had already explained enough. The client was actually a group of wealthy landholders in the north of Scotland, vehemently opposed to the proposed reintroduction of wolves to their countryside. On the other side was a group dedicated to seeing the wolves run free in the Highlands again, who had been using case studies from Sweden to support their cause. Now, Alcina had decided that someone must go to the village of Lillavik, posing as a volunteer wildlife enthusiast, and find the chink in their armour—some detail that would bring down their case.
Unfortunately, it was February, and the more Zoe’s colleagues heard, the more their worst fears were confirmed. This wasn’t après-ski, hot toddies and luxury chalets. It was trudging through the snow in sub-zero temperatures, documenting wolf poop finds, and probably getting frostbite. Their faces said it all: just no.
The last thing Zoe wanted was to draw The Shark’s attention, but she’d thought of a point that seemed relevant.
“What if someone googles the person who goes, and finds out they work for Vertex? Their cover would be blown.”
The Shark sent her a thin smile. “That’s not something you have to worry about, Zoe.” She forced out the ‘Z’ with a harsh buzz. “You’re not on the website.”
A titter went round the room, and Zoe felt herself flush red, but stood her ground. “Yes, I am.”
Alcina pursed her Louboutin-red lips. “We did some…reassessment recently.”
Reassessment? With everyone’s eyes on her, Zoe decided to say no more, and check for herself later. But her smouldering animosity for The Shark—shared by every single person at the table—flickered and flared into a steady flame.
Now her boss turned back to the room at large. “Here’s the deal: if I don’t have a volunteer by Monday lunchtime, I’ll choose someone myself. Be warned.”
She gave Zoe one last look and left the room, her heels tapping on the industrial-chic polished concrete floor. The door clicked shut behind her.
Around the table, there was a collective release of breath.
“Sutton the Shark strikes again,” Niall grumbled.
“I only just got over that terrible flu,” announced Cosima, sniffing ostentatiously. “I can’t possibly go.”
“I can’t either,” said Lydia, looking smug. “I have my holiday in Mykonos already booked.”
Cosima nodded. “You can’t cancel that. Anyway, I think she already has someone in mind.”
Seven pairs of eyes flicked towards Zoe, then away.
She gathered her things and stood up. No Friday night drinks for her tonight. And if she was the one to go? This had never been the job of her heart…but she’d show them all, including Alcina Sutton, that she was a match for any one of them.
Two
Zoe lay across the lid of her suitcase and wrestled with the zip. Nope, it just wasn’t happening. She cursed and stood back up, considering the selection of bulky jumpers, jackets and socks. Something would have to be left behind. Hello, frostbite.
Her flatmate (and workmate) Denise—one of six of them squeezed into the warren-like Bayswater flat—stuck her head around the door frame.
“I still can’t believe you’re going.”
“Yeah…I can.”
She came in and perched on the end of the single bed, the only size that would fit into the tiniest of all the small rooms in the flat. Fortunately—or unfortunately—it didn’t see much action, so its narrow confines weren’t really a problem.
“That woman truly is a cow,” Denise said. “Didn’t your mum have any idea what she was getting you into? Wish I could have warned you.”
Denise was the receptionist at Vertex—storehouse of company knowledge, source of all juicy gossip, and unashamed proclaimer of truths. She was straight-talking and brassy, not PR-slick, and Zoe loved her for it.
She shrugged as she started pulling things back out of her suitcase. “She was doing me a favour.”
“You don’t have to work where she tells you to.” Then she paused. “On the other hand, if it wasn’t for that, we would never have met.”
Zoe s
miled at her friend’s U-turn from indignant to reflective. “Very true. And let’s face it, jobs weren’t exactly leaping at me in the street.” She squished a pair of socks down the side of the suitcase. “Anyway, plenty of people would kill to work for Vertex.”
She was trying to convince herself as much as Denise. She knew that her opinionated mother—a school friend of Vertex’s owner—was probably why The Shark didn’t like her. But when the last PR company she worked for folded, and her mother pulled a few strings to get her an introduction at Vertex, Zoe wasn’t going to refuse. Maybe she should have been more principled…taken the high road…but she wasn’t, and she didn’t.
Each of her parents was as high-powered as the other—her mother Madeline a PR consultant, her father Anthony a lawyer—and they travelled the world consulting as a team for international firms who’d got themselves in sticky situations of one kind or another. As a kid, Zoe had tagged along, mostly feeling like just another piece of luggage, although less stylish than her mother’s matched Louis Vuitton. An inconvenient sort of luggage, that needed to be fed and schooled and taken into account. She’d gone to a string of international schools, never staying long enough to settle in and make proper friends. On the surface, it was glamorous. In reality, for a shy red-headed kid with an unpredictable stutter, it was miserable.
Somehow, at fourteen, she’d convinced her parents that she didn’t want to go to the next posting in Bahrain while they rescued an American oil company from some highly dodgy crisis. Miraculously, they’d agreed that she could stay in London with family friends—if she promised to commit herself to her career studies, as chosen by them. She promised, hardly believing her luck. At the time, university or college seemed a long way off.
As it turned out, her parents decided she should study communications, which was a relief, considering the other option was law. If it seemed odd to others that her parents dictated her choice of degree, well, she didn’t really care. She had no clue what to do with her life anyway. All the years of being plucked up from one place and set down in another had left her feeling permanently scattered. At least the stutter had stopped at the same time as the moving around.
Now she held up two coats. “Blue or grey?”
“Grey. I like the fur. The contrast with your hair is so pretty.”
Denise was always telling Zoe how lucky she was to have naturally red hair, pointing to her own expensively-maintained blonde highlights. People—including herself—paid ridiculous amounts of money, she said, to achieve what Zoe had naturally. But having grown up being teased about it at every school she went to, Zoe remained ambivalent about her gingerness.
She hung the rejected coat on the back of her door, and threw the other one over her suitcase. “I knew she’d pick me. Everyone knew. And she’d taken me off the website already—it was a done deal. But I’m going to show her I can do it.”
Denise shook her head. “What a complete witch she is. Good for you.”
Zoe threw a lip balm into her bag. Chapped lips seemed likely, even if she avoided frostbite.
“Actually it’s fine, because there’s something else I need to do while I’m there.”
Denise squinched up her nose, puzzled. “What?”
“Claire.”
Her eyes widened. “Claire who disappeared? What about her?”
“Well…you remember the story, right?”
When Zoe had finally negotiated her way into a normal life, she’d said goodbye to her real parents, and moved in with Paul and Sarah Evans, the parents of her dreams. They lived in a regular house, on a regular North London street, went shopping at Tesco, watched Coro, gardened on the weekends, and had fish and chips on Friday nights. Paul was the son of Anthony’s godfather, a tenuous connection at best, but Zoe guessed that her parents were probably as eager to be free of the teenage her as she was to put down her suitcase at last.
Paul and Sarah’s tech-mad daughter Claire was the only girl Zoe had known her whole life, even if they’d only seen each other once every few years. At the grand age of fifteen, Claire seemed effortlessly cool to the still-only-fourteen Zoe, and she was desperately excited to have a friend…maybe even a sister. And for four years, it seemed like she did. Until Claire disappeared, leaving behind a letter crushingly final in its rejection of her parents, Zoe, and the life they’d shared.
Over the following weeks she’d watched Sarah and Paul grieve, and then harden against their daughter. Sarah in particular was cut to the bone, so painfully heartbroken that when the shock started to subside, she refused to discuss it or consider trying to find Claire. She shut the door on her daughter’s room, and that was that.
But now, a decade later, Sarah was in the hospital, struck down by a devastating stroke. And when Zoe went to see Paul the weekend after The Shark’s ultimatum, he’d surprised her by tearing up when she told him about the threatened trip to Lillavik.
He stood up. “Come with me.”
He led her upstairs, through the silent house, and opened the door to Claire’s room. It was exactly as she’d left it. For the first time since Claire left home, Zoe stood in the room where they’d shared so many laughs, tears and secrets. Well, not all their secrets, as she’d come to discover. Claire had lived a whole other life online—headphones on in front of her computer, talking to gamers all over the world, figuring out some tricky coding problem, sketching out characters and inventing game worlds. Some of her character sketches were still pinned to the wall above her desk—quirky, tough avatars, full of sass and grit…a lot like Claire herself. Claire’s favourite had always been one of her earliest creations: Nova No-Show, a feisty rebel who operated on no one’s schedule but her own. Seemed like she’d been sending them a message, even back then.
Paul took a single paper from the desk drawer, and held it out to her. It was a page ripped from a magazine.
“I found this down the back of her desk, about a year after she left,” he said.
It was a profile of someone called Alvar Lundberg. He was once the owner of a medium-sized trucking firm, said the article’s introduction, but now he ran a game development company called Defrost Digital…located in Lillavik, Sweden. She looked up at Paul.
“Do you think…?”
“Maybe. Look at the bottom.”
There, in Claire’s handwriting, was an address—a Lillavik address.
“I should have done something,” he said. “But Sarah was so dead against any mention of looking for her…” He closed his eyes for a moment, years of what ifs cutting deep lines in his face.
“I remember her talking about this.” Zoe thought back to the conversations she and Claire used to have. “She said the new Silicon Valley would be in the snow, not the sunshine.”
He sighed. “I should have listened. I might have had a clue that she was planning something.”
“It’s not your fault,” she insisted. “She made her own choice.”
He just shook his head. “I know you don’t want to go, but if you do, please see if you can find out anything more. When I found this, I should have tried to contact her.” He pressed a hand over his eyes. “I just want them to make peace before Sarah dies.”
“She’s not going to die,” Zoe said.
But he gave her a steady, wordless look. Right then, she knew she’d go to Lillavik—if by some miracle Alcina didn’t choose her, she’d volunteer for the job. She nodded, and put the folded page in her pocket, and they closed the door behind them again.
Now she patted Denise’s hand. “It’s okay.”
She sniffed and ran a finger under each eye, in case of eyeliner smudges. “But that’s so sad.”
“I know. But I think I can find her, or at least get on her trail. I should have done it before. It’s been ten years, and soon it might be too late.”
“And what will you say if you find her?”
“Yeah…good question.”
It was exactly what she’d been wondering herself.
Three
Zoe pressed her forehead against the window as the train emerged from the wintry forest and slid into the snow-blanketed station at Lillavik. All she needed was a fluffy hat and some moustached guy to meet her, and it’d be a total Doctor Zhivago moment.
She’d been sleepy on the ride from Stockholm, but stepping out of the warm carriage into the chill snapped her awake. She looked at the clock above the platform. In England, one-tenth of this snow would have brought the entire railway network to a halt, but here, they arrived precisely on time.
From her spot towards the end of the raised platform, the scene in front of her was fairy-tale sweet. Stone buildings in shades of gold, cream and warm red stood low and snug along the street. It was just starting to get dark, and the road leading into the little town itself was strung with white lights. The blue-and-gold Swedish flag hung here and there, and next to the station, a frozen river wound through a snow-covered park. Everything was so pretty, she wanted to abandon her over-stuffed suitcase and make snow angels beneath the frost-kissed trees.
But her lungs hurt, and the metal of her earrings was starting to burn cold in her earlobes. She’d known it would be cold, but this? Brutal. Tucking her chin down into her scarf, she held a gloved hand in front of her mouth, hoping to take some of the ice out of the air before she breathed it in, but it made no difference. She pulled her woolly hat down further, and lifted her fur-trimmed hood (faux, of course) over the top. Unless she wanted Bengt Nilsson, wildlife conservationist, to collect a large block of ice from the railway station, she’d better wait inside. She pulled out the handle of her suitcase and headed for the doors.
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