Fear Of Broken Glass: The Elements: Prologue

by Mark, David

  Elin – If you read this it’s not good.

  Use diskettes only and back up somewhere safe.

  Go through the Ash tape still in the video recorder and watch the end of the tape.

  Glovebox in car.

  H.

  She pulled the folded sleeves of the expandable file open. The front section labelled background notes, he’d said. She saw them - five diskettes at the bottom of the front section with his handwriting on the top - background notes. More diskettes. Next to them was a note. The Pastor at Æsahult. Sturla and Gotfrid, he had written. She thought of the slip of paper in his car and reaching it from her wallet, removing it. Scheiser, it said, wondering what why the hell he would have written the word at all. Hasse had used the word often she remembered, still having no idea why he had written it. The last time she had heard him using it he had been sitting at his computer. That was when the thought struck her. The video recorder hadn’t been in Hasse’s car.

  Saturday 17th October 1987

  Ash was laid out across a sheepskin on the floorboards. Somewhere outside Fabian was on watch duty. He watched Bok, wondering what part he had to play. He was sat at the table, looking thoughtful. Ash thought about asking him but decided to wait until later, sitting up to feel his jeans. They were nearly dry. Feeling cold, he stood up and put them on, smoothing out the material, placing his hands in his pockets and stopped. He was careful, removing it gently. He removed a folded piece of paper, still damp. Justin’s drawing. He leaned to one side and unfolded it carefully over the table, smoothing it out. It had been damaged by the rain, the edges and creases torn. Ulrika sidled up to him looking down, her head close to his.

  He nodded at the unspoken question: ‘I forgot I had it.’ They studied it in silence. ‘He said a drawing of something reveals its true nature.’ Ash looked at the drawing, running his eyes across the intricate lines, patiently rendered by a master hand. ‘Justin had a good eye.’

  Bok walked forward to stand and bent forwards to look at it. ‘This is a drawing of the painting?’

  Ash looked up.

  ‘I recognize it.’ Bok glanced briefly across at Ulrika then returned his attention to the drawing.

  Ash wished he had never taken it out. ‘You have seen this?’

  The big man nodded. ‘In church, Æsahult church. You say this is Odin?’ Bok asked.

  ‘Chivers, the man who came to visit us, he said it was.’ Ash looked up. ‘Is it?’

  Bok didn’t answer his question, conviction taking form in the intensity of a gaze Ash had never seen before. He felt Ulrika tense to his right, glancing to the doorway. If Bok was going to make any move on them he would never make it to the door in time. Still, he didn’t trust him. He took a deep breath, trying to relax.

  ‘You followed the inscriptions. The frame and the painting. Hörgrlund,’ Bok said.

  ‘I never mentioned anything about Hörgrlund,’ Ash replied, eyes narrowing, tense.

  Bok stared back.

  Ash waited without saying anything. He turned to Ulrika who obviously found the situation uncomfortable.

  ‘Who gave you this job?’ Bok said with a hint of accusation.

  Ash took his time before answering. ‘Conrad wanted to know more about the runes on the frame.’

  Bok was scowling now. ‘Tell.’

  ‘I helped translating the runes.’

  ‘You know runes?’

  Ash shook his head. ‘I lied. Like I said, I needed the money, so I brought someone along who did, my mate Daniel. He left with the Baron in the other car.’

  What if he didn’t? He didn’t have much to lose either way... Ulrika did on the other hand. ‘Okay, I had a job working at a dig.’ He held his eye, ‘Archaeological excavations?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Denmark.’

  Bok scowled. The tension was so thick Ulrika had already withdrawn to the bench, sitting down. Bok nodded for him to continue.

  Ash licked his lip, taking his time realizing this Alvar Bok was one hell of a hard nut to read. Bok in Sweden couldn’t know anything about the stinking pits and dark holes at Lethragard. ‘They needed helpers,’ Ash continued, keeping his voice low. ‘I broke the rules, got fired.’

  Bok’s eyes burned with curiosity, tapping his finger on the edge of the stool. ‘The truth is always the greater,’ he said. His voice had taken an edge to it, impatience showing beneath his control. ‘Now how exactly, did you find out about this archaeology job?’

  ‘Why all the questions?’ Ash retorted, raising his voice.

  Bok spread his legs apart on his stool, leaning forwards elbows resting on the table. ‘You are safe here, are you not?’

  Ash looked around at Ulrika. ‘So far.’

  ‘If I meant you any harm, then we would not be sitting here, having this little conversation, would we?’

  That was true. ‘It was on the list from the paroles job pool. It was either that or construction.’ He remembered.

  ‘Parole?’

  ‘Prison, yes. I do stupid things that get me into trouble.’

  Stupid things like get hooked up with the wrong people.

  He had blessed his luck at the time. Yet, as Ash suspected, luck had nothing to do with it.

  ‘And Conrad Baron? He approached you, after you started working?’

  Ash nodded.

  ‘Where did you meet him?’

  ‘He called me. Then we met up at the embassy.’

  ‘At the British Embassy?’

  ‘I told him I was an archaeologist.’

  Ash’s eyes wandered back to Justin’s drawing. A dangling noose or something that walks and talks with me, Hörgrlund and Helvegr. Ash pictured the runic inscriptions on the frame in front of him, glowing in the golden flicker of candlelight.

  It belonged here.

  ‘They didn’t succeed in getting rid of the church,’ Bok said. ‘That was the whole point in painting that...’ he nodded at the drawing.

  Ulrika woke, looking around. She saw Ash on the far side of the cabin, Bok at the other next to the cupboard hidden in the shadows. More candles had been lit, each giving off a little heat. Together with the heat from the stove it made the cabin snug and warm.

  She sat up and rose from her bed. ‘Can’t sleep...’

  Bok motioned for her to sit and she did, taking the sheepskin on the floor. She removed two pillows that could have been cushions and sat down on one of them, settling herself, legs crossed within his enormous baggy jeans. She saw for a moment Thomas’s face, the look of frozen incomprehension and thought about the story that had been the worst decision of her life and tried to shut it all away. ‘What’s going to happen to us?’ she asked in a small voice.

  ‘It is a new day.’ Bok rose and left the table, walking slowly around the cabin, extinguishing one candle after the other, muttering as he went. ‘You must try and get some more sleep; sleep deep, sleep well. What tomorrow brings, only the Norns can tell.’ He walked to the arched door, and opened it, lifting the latch, pausing on the threshold to the antechamber. ‘I’m going to take a little look around before closing down for the night. I will wake you. Before dawn.’

  Ulrika watched him step out into the night closing the door behind him, thinking of who it was that had tried to shoot Thomas. Or had it been her?

  Sitting in the comfort of her apartment Elin Vikland tried to focus. She had made herself something a little to eat and tried to sleep, resting for a couple of hours before her restless mind took over. She made herself a black coffee then sat down at her computer, cursor blinking, waiting for a command.

  Why was the video missing with Ash’s testimony on it?

  Chivers. She had barely given him a second thought. What had happened to them? Chivers had taken it. Had he been involved in Hasse’s death? Hasse had interviewed him yesterday morning. She had arrived at the scene later the same day. The nightmare of Hasse Almquist’s lifeless face returned to haunt her.

  She placed her hand in her pocket. Inside was t
he batch of Hasse’s five diskettes with the two she’s made backing up his case files from his PC. She placed them all on top of the black metal case of the desktop computer, inserting the first into the A-drive. The drive whined, accepting it; she waited for the memory to load, calling up Almquist’s directories in DOS then selected all and entered the command, copying all directories to her computer. She re-read Hasse’s neat handwriting as she waited for the machine to complete the process of copying the second diskette. If Denisen’s death had been an accident gone wrong, it was the nature of Hasse’s death that scared her.

  Had he been silenced because of what he had found out?

  She repeated the procedure with the third.

  Christ, Hasse give me something. Some file, note or memo amongst the hundreds of files she was in the process of copying. She listened to the machine churning its way through the magnetic particles. It stopped and she ejected it, entering the fourth diskette, sitting back. When it she as finished with the seventh and last diskette she tapped in the command to view her drive. She found the files. Only then did she enter the new directory to view the files, at least twenty-five files on each diskette, making it more than a hundred and twenty-five items in all, plus the forty or so files she’d copied from his work computer, forming a complete record of everything he’s undertaken on the case, it seemed. She clicked on the first of the files and read the contents, proceeding to the next, then, to make sure

  Files from the Draugr investigations.

  She spent half an hour going through each file until she had a clear idea of the extent of the files – being the sum, the entire contents of fifteen years of investigation, reduced to the magnetic particles that filled less than five megabytes.

  Chapter 19

  FRAGILE LIGHT

  Fire he needs who with frozen knees

  Has come from the cold without;

  Food and clothes must the farer have,

  The man from the mountains come.

  Stanza 3, Hávamál

  Bok looked across to Fabian, the little light finding a way to his eyes. ‘You never ask many questions,’ he said with a nod, as if in approval.

  ‘If I asked you not tell,’ Fabian said as she pulled a blanket around her.

  The storm had calmed and the rain had stopped. Bok looked across at the seated blanket-shrouded figure as she looked out from the upper gallery that functioned as a veranda, down over the open ground sheathed in darkness below them, the trees still dropping their wetness.

  She looked at him in a way that was neither friendly nor hostile.

  ‘You’re not going to sleep tonight?’ Alvar Bok leaned back into his homemade chair, then turned slowly to face her, regarding her sympathetically. ‘It’s been a hard day for you.’

  Fabian hung her head. ‘I’ve had better.’ She reached into a pocket and produced a crumpled red and white packet of Marlboros, taking one out and lighting it with a dull brass Zippo, inhaling. She exhaled, blowing smoke rings.

  ‘You regret you made the call?’

  She looked across. ‘To you?’

  He nodded.

  She shrugged. ‘Part of the job.’

  Bok sat back wondering who she really was.

  ‘Missy, she got a nice smile,’ was all she said.

  Yes, she did. Perhaps he even understood. Fabian laughed a short bitter laugh. She understood. He understood that too as he looked up at the night sky. There was a lot that could have been said but they both knew there was no point in it.

  She shrugged, taking another pull as she turned her head to him and regarded him for a moment. ‘Maybe you got a nice smile too, mister. When you smile.’

  He smiled at that, giving her a bit of space and let her smoke. Until he asked the question: ‘So how did it go down?’ he asked quietly.

  She smoked some more. ‘There be two of them,’ she blew, ‘with Missy.’ She pointed to the top of her arm. ‘One had this cut, here, just like Missy said; the other be missing fingers too.’

  ‘You take care of them?’

  She nodded vacantly. ‘There be five more of them in the pass.’ She shook her head and brought the cigarette to her lips, again. ‘They shot her friend from the top, big red truck coming up from behind. No way to go, big rock in front. They had no chance.’

  Bok kept quiet, letting her talk.

  ‘I got two on the hill. Three of them down on road got away. They been there some time, waitin’ then shootin’. The one on the hill took the shot, killed the man in the car.’ She shook her head as she made a grimace, lifting the stub of a cigarette to her lips. ‘He no interested in talkin’ no more.’ She blew out more smoke rings. ‘So who they be?’

  Bok wondered at that. ‘Hired hands. Poland. Estonia.’ He answered as he turned his head. ‘That fit?’

  She shrugged, ‘No good with accents.’

  He could see it now. ‘Advance party of two. Main team of five.’ Bok replied softly. ‘That’s a lot of men for one painting.’

  ‘There still be three of them out there.’ She seemed to relax, turning back to the darkness beyond. ‘If I been faster, I could have saved him.’ Then she placed her forehead in her arms, smoke rising in whirls from between them.

  Alvar Bok leaned to his side and placed an arm around her shoulders. She flinched, but he held her firm, dropping his head. ‘We can only work with what is given to us. If another opportunity had presented itself, then he would still be alive. It is fate, not bad fortune that means one is with us and one is not,’ he said so softly, even for a big man like he. ‘It is lucky she made it this far. She has you to thank for that...’

  Fabian nodded, rising her head to take her last pull, flicking the glowing cigarette out into the wet of night.

  Yes, she was in doubt and who could blame her? She’d made this far and pulled them out of it, and for that he was grateful.

  Fabian sat up, beckoning with her head to the cabin behind them. ‘His friend got out from the passenger door,’ she looked across, past Bok’s arm. ‘I think the shooter was aiming for the driver. The dead guy just got in the way.’

  Bok looked out into the chorus of droplets. He shrugged. ‘Unless we can question them, there’s no way we can find out.’

  Fabian turned her head to the side and looked up at him. ‘Who is he? The dead one?’

  ‘Just another victim.’ Bok looked away into the dark, dropping his voice, looking deeply concerned. ‘No one sends seven men just because of a painting. I only fear the worst. So,’ he said wearily, ‘we must prepare for it.’

  ‘Prepare?’

  ‘You must leave here. You delivered what you should.’ He looked her in the eye. ‘There’s a last thing I want you to take care of.’

  ‘Take care ‘o what?’

  ‘I want you to go to Church, at first light.’ He looked across. ‘How long is it to your vehicle?’

  ‘An hour, at a light run.’

  ‘Twenty minutes to the church; with the walk from the track to the cabin, that’s an hour and a half. Too long. Go tonight. I’ll wake them early.’

  ‘Why I going then?’

  ‘To find someone. He is not an old man. Yet he sleeps soundly. Or so I am told...’ he paused, sending her another sympathetic look. ‘Then you are free to leave and can go home.’

  Fabian looked across. ‘This all gone bad, this one.’

  He looked away. ‘I know.’

  ‘What about danger money? Clause of contract. This one be double now.’

  ‘I’m sure they will double your fee.’ Bok thought about that. ‘I can argue for that.’

  She looked across, face as dark as the night. ‘Hey, mister...’

  Bok turned his head back again, slowly.

  She lowered her voice, a hidden threat emerging from within. ‘I nearly got killed today out there... I never been in nothing like this before.’

  He nodded. ‘Yeah, I know.’ He sighed, ‘That makes two of us.’ Bok returned his attention to those droplets and breathed in deeply, c
lenching his jaw. First he needed help, and there was only one place he could find that. He was still angry she’d messed up. ‘I will try and get double.’ And Almquist was dead, taking all he knew with him to the grave...

  ‘Double is good.’ Fabian said eventually, one side of her mouth rising in a half-smile. ‘Better than playing nurse maid.’

  He noticed her face then, straight and unblinking. It wasn’t an unhandsome face.

  ‘All this for some painting.’ She leaned forwards and sniffed the air, looking out over the edge of that gallery to a place deeper and darker than he knew she had ever seen before.

  Bok opened his mouth to speak, but the words took a moment to come, face dark. ‘It is not the painting, but what it hides they want. Anyhow,’ he spread his hands apart as if in a conciliatory gesture, ‘it’s not my fight.’

  Fabian studied him for a moment. ‘Bullshit mister. It your fight all right.’ She stood up, the blanket sliding into the chair. ‘You got that written all over your face.’

  As she turned to go, Bok said suddenly, ‘Be back here half an hour before first light.’

  She looked at him blankly for a moment, as if caught unawares.

  ‘No later. Then we move out.’

  ‘And if I don’t show?’

  Bok’s eyes lingered in hers, ‘Then we will come and find you.’

  Ulrika had stood there, hand to her mouth, open.

  Then she turned and fled. She ran, running as she had never ran before. Too scared to return to the car park, she ran, leaping over stone, around trees, just running, blindly, no sense of direction, no thought of destination, just to get away, alive. She ran and ran until she could run no more. And then she walked and ran some more. She kept going, heading in the direction she took to be north, to where she knew if she kept going she would meet the east-west highway.