ANYONE WITH INFORMATION IS ENCOURAGED TO CONTACT THE METROPOLITAN POLICE.
I turned to Quinn. “You think they know more than they’re saying?”
“Hell yeah. But my guess is they don’t know much more than we do, except how he died.”
“Like this.”
I made a gun of my hand and pointed it at my eye. Quinn turned away in annoyance. We didn’t talk again until our flight was called.
Chapter 40
We landed at Arlanda late morning and passed through border control, again without incident, the agent barely glancing at me before she returned my passport. We’d lost an hour traveling east; it was midafternoon when we boarded the small plane for Norderby.
The other passengers all seemed to be commuters or residents returning home after a visit to the mainland. A deadheading flight attendant, a couple of young guys in T-shirts and skinny jeans who discussed an IT merger, switching back and forth from English to Swedish. A leonine old man shepherded three small towheaded grandchildren into their seats. Beside me, Quinn chewed nicotine gum and read a Jo Nesbø novel.
Within minutes of takeoff, heavy clouds obscured the world below, a veil that occasionally thinned to allow a glimpse of the Baltic Sea, gray as wet granite. I shifted uncomfortably in my tiny seat, grateful the flight was only half an hour. Lack of booze and sleep, coupled with hours of increasingly hectic thought, had left me feeling as though the skin was being peeled from my face, layer by layer.
“Stop it,” Quinn said for the hundredth time as I twitched.
I tried to focus on Greece: being there with Quinn, photographing some Cycladic cliffs. Sun and heat and ouzo. I’d go cold turkey from speed, drown my cravings in the sea. It could happen. I raked my fingers through my hair, drummed them on the armrest. It could happen.
After about twenty minutes we began our descent. A gap opened in the clouds, as though someone had cleared a dirty windshield. I leaned over to peer down at the medieval walled city of Norderby: orange-tiled roofs and a small cluster of white houses. More a village than a city; a candy village, small enough that I could bite down and shatter it in an instant. Outside its walls, an ugly industrial building marked the ferry terminal, where a large white ship was docked. An eyeblink and it was all gone, blotted out by clouds.
I watched idly as the flight attendant strolled down the aisle, checking seat belts and tray tables. The three towheaded children stared at a picture book, lips moving in unison. When the flight attendant reached the rear of the plane, she stopped beside a man with a thatch of gray Eraserhead hair staring intently at his laptop. I swiftly looked away, waited several seconds, and glanced back again. The flight attendant gestured at the gray-haired man’s computer.
“Holy shit,” I whispered.
Quinn glanced up from his book, irritated. “What?”
“That guy back there—don’t look! It’s Gwilym Birdhouse.”
“Gwilym Birdhouse?”
“Shut up! Yes,” I hissed. “He’s on the plane.”
“So?”
“Just, he’s here, too.”
Quinn craned his neck to look behind us. “You’re right—that guy kinda looks like Gwilym Birdhouse.”
“It is Gwilym Birdhouse.”
The flight attendant strode down the aisle as the recorded announcement played, first in Swedish, then English. I tried not to look toward the back of the plane.
“Why’s he here?” I asked.
Quinn shrugged. “You saw that CD—he’s a producer for Svarlight.”
“Yeah, but—”
“But nothing. Don’t hear zebras when it’s horses, Cass.”
“What the hell does that even mean?”
“The most obvious answer is usually the right one.” He picked up his book again.
I sank into my seat and buried my face in the in-flight magazine. Quinn made sense, but I wasn’t buying it. I could think of another reason Birdhouse was here.
The Book of Lamps and Banners. He might have heard it had been stolen and was interested in buying it. He was friends with that guy Malloy, who was definitely a racist. And he worked with Svarlight. That was still a big jump to being involved with a plot to kidnap and perhaps murder for a rare book.
Then again, musicians are notoriously susceptible to crazy belief systems, including fascism. Maybe Birdhouse simply wanted The Book of Lamps and Banners, but knew nothing of its dicey provenance. He wouldn’t have to be a Nazi to buy a stolen rare book from a white supremacist; just a collector with a wiggly moral compass.
Or maybe Quinn was right, and Birdhouse was here for a recording gig at Svarlight Studios. I stared out the window, hoping for another glimpse of Norderby. I saw only flat yellow fields and red barns, an array of big-box stores, and finally the airport runway. After we touched down, I retrieved my bag from the overhead bin and put on my fake Ray-Bans. Quinn slung his backpack over his shoulder.
“It’s raining,” he said, indicating my sunglasses.
“I don’t want Birdhouse to recognize me.”
“How long were you with him?”
“Only a minute or two.”
“I think you’re safe. Stop being so paranoid.”
People started to move in the aisle in front of us. I touched Quinn’s shoulder and pointed toward the back of the plane. “Let me out first—you wait and try to see where he goes. I’ll meet you inside.”
The airport terminal was a modular building, not much bigger than the plane. I staked out a spot near the exit, keeping my head down as I clocked everyone walking past. Gwilym Birdhouse ambled by, talking on his mobile, Quinn a few steps behind him. He followed Birdhouse out of the terminal and returned several minutes later, shaking rain from his leather jacket.
“He got a cab. It turned left onto the access road. That’s all I know.”
“Could you hear anything he was saying?”
“Yeah.” He gestured impatiently at me to follow him back outside, walked several yards from the door, and stopped to light a cigarette. “Dinner tonight with someone in Norderby. I think he’s here on vacation.”
“Vacation? Are you kidding me? That makes no sense. One of his best friends was just murdered back in London. Why would he come here? Plus it’s winter—who comes here in winter?”
“We’re here.”
“We’re not on vacation!”
Quinn took a long drag on his cigarette and sighed. “That’s for goddamn sure.”
Chapter 41
A taxi pulled up to the curb, discarded a passenger, then sat, idling. Quinn stubbed out his cigarette.
“Let’s grab that,” he said. “I rented us a car. There’s a hotel in Slythamn where we can stay tonight, it’s about an hour away.”
“Slythamn? Where the cement plant is?” I thought longingly of the confectionary city I’d seen from the air. “Why can’t we stay in Norderby?”
“Because we aren’t on vacation,” Quinn retorted, and hopped into the cab. “I told you, I looked up Svarlight online. There’s a postal address in Norderby and another in the boonies, out by Slythamn. We’ll check that out first. If we don’t find anything, we can go to Norderby and see if there’s anything there. After that, I’m done.”
“What about Birdhouse? Don’t you think that’s weird?”
“Just because you think it doesn’t mean it’s real, Cass. Especially when you’re spun.”
We picked up the car at a Swedish Rent-A-Wreck a few miles south of Norderby, alongside a muddy field populated by black sheep who watched us suspiciously from behind a wooden fence. The car was an older VW Jetta, dinged up but clean. The hose used to wash it down still sputtered in a puddle by the trailer that served as an office. The guy who ran the place barely spoke to either of us. He glanced at Quinn’s license, then ran a credit card through his mobile, handed Quinn a set of keys, and walked back into the trailer.
“In summer this place is filled with people,” Quinn said as we pulled back onto the main road. “Surfing’s big. And windsurfing. I think the
re’s a map in the glove box, if you want to see where we’re going. I know the way.”
I barely glanced at the map before tossing it into the back seat, instead stared out the window.
The rain had let up. Charcoal clouds surrendered to soft blue sky edged with lavender and gold. The late-afternoon light gave the countryside a comforting glow: fields and tidy houses, sturdy barns, a few small modern apartment blocks in seaside colors: maritime blue, lichen green, lighthouse red and white. I gazed into the distance at Norderby, where cars emerged from an ancient stone gate, orderly ants exiting a well-fortified nest. People bicycled and walked home from work or school. Children ran along greenway trails. It was a bucolic dream of twenty-first-century life: wind farms and winter pastures, cell towers and ancient stave churches; gulls above the indigo reach of the Baltic Sea.
The dream broke outside of Norderby, where we stopped at a congeries of big-box stores and gas stations. We made a quick run into a government shop to stock up on whiskey and cigarettes, a bottle of Myer’s dark for Quinn; then a supermarket for flatbread and cheese, Coke, and a few bags of chocolates to sate his sweet tooth. By the time we hit the road again, early dusk had fallen.
We headed north along the coast road. Quinn pointed out five tall stone pillars at the edge of a west-facing cliff. “That’s Galgkapt—Gallows Head. They used to hang criminals there and leave the corpses as a warning to approaching sailors.”
With the sun poised above the Baltic Sea, the stone gallows glowed crimson, fingers of a bleeding hand; then turned black against the sky. I shivered and reached to turn up the heat.
“How old are they?” I asked.
“Twelve hundreds? I told you, this was a Viking settlement before it became a trade center. There are Viking ruins everywhere. Older ones, too. Picture stones, graves. That CD, Stone Ships? The island’s famous for those. Graves shaped like boats.”
“Sounds like you liked coming here.”
“Dagney really dug it. She used to vacation here as a kid. But yeah, I did, too. More in summer than now,” he admitted.
I turned to stare moodily out the window. The mention of Dagney put me out of the mood to talk.
Norderby was on the island’s western coast. Our destination, Slythamn, was on the east coast and a bit north. The car radio didn’t work, so we drove in silence on nearly empty back roads, through a twilit landscape that resembled something out of a tale by the Brothers Grimm. Fields gave way to forests of evergreen and birch, interspersed with neat wooden cottages, whitewashed limestone houses with metal roofs, derelict homesteads collapsed into heaps of silvered wooden beams.
Then more fields, where an occasional solitary windmill stood sentinel—real windmills, with wooden sails and squat barrel-shaped housings—the pastureland divided by disintegrating stone walls and fences made of neatly latticed boards or branches. Watching it through the rain-streaked windows, the rumble of the car’s studded tires the only sound, I felt as though I’d fallen into that shadowy place between dreams and waking. When Quinn braked suddenly, my head snapped up. I’d nodded off.
“Sorry,” he said. “See that?”
He pointed into the gathering darkness at something hanging from the ghostly white limb of a birch. A shabby brown coat or sweater, I thought; then saw it was an animal. A fox, suspended by its jaw so that its mouth gaped open, black gums and white teeth and a shriveled curl of tongue. Its abdomen had been slit, exposing the rib cage and a snarl of intestine. I rolled down my window to get a better look.
“What the hell is that?”
“Like Galgkapt. A warning to the other foxes not to mess with someone’s sheep.”
The cold air smelled like Christmas, pine boughs and a promise of snow. We’d left the main thoroughfare for a rutted gravel road, not much more than a trail, surrounded by forest. No fields, not even a clearing that I could see. I shook my head, perplexed. “But there’s no sheep here. Where are we?”
Quinn lit a cigarette. “Svarlight has a post-office address in Norderby, and there was also that old address for a Bergstrand in Slythamn. I thought we’d check it out in case it’s Tindra’s father. The road didn’t have a name, but I think I can find it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course not. But it’s worth checking out.”
I gazed at the mutilated fox. “Do people do stuff like that here? Torture animals?”
“Not that I ever heard. Swedes are big on animal rights.”
“Then why hasn’t someone reported this?”
“Maybe no one’s seen it. Road doesn’t look like it gets much traffic.”
He backed up the car, turned it around, and drove off slowly. In the last few minutes, night had fallen like a guillotine blade. I saw a few specks that might have been snow. I felt an inordinate relief when we turned back onto what passed for the main road.
“We almost there?”
“Almost. Though I wouldn’t be in so much of a hurry if I were you.”
Within ten minutes, the fairy-tale landscape of forest and meadows butted up against an industrial one: corrugated-metal sheds, blocks of sagging prefab structures and one-story houses, their white stucco flaking off to reveal gray concrete. The few streetlamps illuminated no trees—no vegetation at all, save for patches of dead grass protruding from the concrete like hair. Lights shone behind the lace curtains in some windows, but the town had a joyless air.
“So people do live here,” I said.
“Sure. Cement plant’s still open, though they lost most of their workforce when they closed the big processing facility. A lot of people left then, to the mainland or Estonia. That’s why no one’s happy they moved refugees in. But yeah, people live here. People will live anywhere.”
“Where are the refugees from?”
“Not sure. It was good for the school—they worried it might have to close. Not enough kids.”
“How come you know so much about this place?”
“I told you, I used to come here with Dagney.”
“But for what? The windsurfing?” I laughed.
“There’s a horse track outside Norderby.”
I stayed mum. When I first tried to find Quinn in Reykjavík, the only thing I’d had to go on was that he spent a lot of time in seedy casinos. I suspected people here would do the same, given the option.
Slythamn was a bleak pocket universe tucked into a Nordic Arcadia. There was no demarcation between residential areas and the factory grounds. Red lights blinked from power plants and a cell tower. Storage silos reminded me of guard towers in a prison block, linked by an Escher-like network of conveyors. Everywhere were yellow warning signs: FARA! superimposed on a lightning bolt.
Quinn turned onto a street more like a tunnel, hemmed in by chain-link fences topped with razor wire and more warning signs. These showed the silhouette of a man plummeting to his death. I couldn’t see what we were being warned against until the car stopped, and Quinn pointed out his open window.
“That’s the main quarry. Or was—it’s the one they shut down.”
A single pole light illuminated the quarry, which was more like a canyon, its sheer walls plunging well over a hundred feet to a vast dark floor. Abandoned machinery and vehicles stood everywhere, axle-deep in standing water. The roof of a long narrow warehouse had collapsed, the structure resembling a crushed caterpillar.
Yet the ravaged landscape had a sinister beauty, too, like the fox’s corpse, or those photographs of sheep’s skulls and deserted beaches. I wished I’d put film into the Nikon.
“I want to come back here tomorrow,” I said.
“You should see the rauks—the rock formations down on the beaches,” Quinn said as he shifted into first gear. “They’re beautiful.”
“Beautiful is overrated.”
“Hold that thought,” said Quinn. “We’re almost at the hotel.”
Chapter 42
We drove past an exit ramp blocked off by sawhorses, dodging potholes and toppled construction cones. Over
head, corkscrewed rebar and a twisted girder dangled from an overpass like metal viscera. Chunks of concrete littered the road in front of us.
Just past the ramp loomed a black mound the height of a house. In its shadow stood a limestone building painted baby-shit yellow. A vertical sign hung from one corner: SLAGGHÖGEN. Quinn stopped the car and let it idle.
“Nice,” I said. “It’s the Gulag Inn.”
“Close.” Quinn pointed at the sign. “It means Slag Heap Hotel.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“I shit you not. I got us a room in the main building.”
“What the hell?”
“Or we could stay there—probably a little cheaper.”
He pointed to another structure, set back from the empty parking lot: two rows of metal shipping containers stacked one atop the other. There were eight in all. Each had a metal door with a single window and a spotlight above the door. Three of the spotlights were lit.
“There’s more privacy in the main building,” Quinn went on. “I don’t think anyone else is staying there.”
“Why are we staying there?”
“Don’t go all Westchester on me, Cass. You got a wild hair to find those people—this is the closest place to where they might be.”
“And you don’t think anyone is going to remember two Americans staying in this dump?”
“Forgetting comes with the room charge. Trust me: no one here ever wants to remember anything.”
He pulled the car around back and parked, out of sight of the road. I sat fuming as he got out and walked toward the entrance. Finally I picked up my bag and followed.
Inside, the place looked like a time capsule entombed in the early 1980s, possibly somewhere in the Soviet bloc. Fake-wood paneling, black rubber mats on the floor, unshaded fluorescent lights. A square opening cut into one wall framed a closet where the receptionist sat. Young, probably still a teenager, her pert freckled face crowned by a black Mohawk that reinforced the sense that we’d entered a time tunnel. She wore too-tight clothes on a fleshy frame. She smiled as Quinn sidled up to the window, setting down her mobile.
The Book of Lamps and Banners Page 19