Grendel's Curse

by Alex Archer

  “Ah, my raison d’être. I’d almost forgotten with all the excitement going on.” He pushed back his chair and disappeared into the master bedroom only to emerge a moment later with a small black box, which he plugged into one of the USB ports on the laptop Annja had retrieved.

  He booted up the laptop.

  “So what does that thing do?” Annja asked around a mouthful of food.

  Garin paused and looked at her quizzically. “You really want me to tell you or is this one of those questions where you’re just pretending to be interested to humor me?”

  “Humoring you.”

  “It could take a while,” he said. “I’m still hungry, so let’s leave it to do its thing and eat.”

  The device emitted irregular bleeps as it processed various algorithms blind, probing at the password while they ate until at last it fell silent.

  Almost exactly at the same time Garin’s cell phone chimed with an incoming text alert.

  He read it and smiled.

  “So, anyone wanna play a game of hot and cold?” His face was split with a grin, the kind of grin that reeked of “I know something you don’t know.” Annja was tempted to snatch the phone from his hand and read the text herself.

  “His mother thought it might have been his first girlfriend’s name.”

  “Well, it’s possible. What was her name?”

  “Kristina.”

  “Cold.”

  “Please don’t tell me that it’s her name with a number after it.”

  “Colder.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “Has anyone ever told you, you take all the fun out of things, Annja Creed?” he said, laughing as he turned the phone around so she could see the display. One word: Annja. “Guess you made quite an impression on our boy.”

  “Or he was leaving it for me as a message. It’s in there. I know it. Whatever we need to prove Thorssen’s in this up to his neck, it’s on that hard drive,” she said.

  He couldn’t argue with that.

  Garin popped the box from the USB port and stepped aside to let Annja have at it.

  She typed her own name in.

  The screen displayed a series of icons, some of which she recognized while others were a complete mystery.

  Her eyes were drawn to a folder on the desktop labeled Skalunda Barrow.

  She moved the curser and double tapped the touch pad to open it, expecting a list of documents, schedules and agreements. Instead, there were a series of photographs.

  Rather than jumping impatiently to the last image, she moved through them one by one, zooming in, determined not to miss even the slightest detail. As she balanced the machine on her knees, Garin watched over her shoulder.

  There were shots of the site when Lars had first arrived, shots of the caravan, even ones of him staking out the ground. She saw a crowd of people—including the girl, Inge—who were, no doubt, the army of volunteers who would have been working on the site if it hadn’t been shut down.

  She went through them all, slowly staring at them, hoping to see something, anything, that might shed some light on what was going on.

  She found the answer in the last dozen or so frames.

  These final photographs looked as though they’d been taken inside his caravan.

  The light was crisp and clean, casting strong shadows away from the object in the center of the screen.

  “What is it?” Garin asked. “I mean, apart from being a big twisted lump of metal?”

  Annja clicked through the final couple of images, putting them side by side while she tried to work out what she was actually looking at. “It’s not the same piece—look, it’s two,” she said. “You can see where he’s pushed them together here.” She pointed at the screen.

  It can’t be, she thought.

  “Looks like a sword,” Garin said.

  “Not just any sword.” Annja was scarcely able to credit what Lars Mortensen had found buried in Skalunda Barrow. “A broken sword...in the final resting place of Beowulf, a legendary warrior king.”

  “So it’s a king’s sword, then.”

  “It’s so much more than that,” Annja said, already certain this was what Lars had been desperate to keep away from Karl Thorssen, and absolutely stone-cold certain this was the very reason Thorssen had funded the dig. He’d been looking for a symbol. This was it. “Lars found his holy grail, Garin. Lars found the sword that proves an enduring legend. Lars found Nægling, the greatest sword in the world, the nailer, won by Beowulf after he’d slain the beast Grendel and his mother. The sword he held in death, broken on the scales of the great dragon.”

  33

  The nurse’s car was unfeasibly small; how anyone could sit comfortably in it Karl Thorssen didn’t know. It was a long time since he’d driven anything so confined. He didn’t think of himself as being a large man, but inside the dead woman’s hatchback he might as well have been a giant. He wedged his body into the tiny space it afforded. Mercifully, it was a short journey to his destination.

  He’d taken as little time as possible to clean up, put on a clean shirt and jeans, throwing the old ones on top of the carpet in the trunk before driving away.

  The shirt felt a little tight.

  It was new, so he had no way of knowing if his mother had bought one that was a little on the small side, or if he was putting on a few pounds. He felt the ridge of muscles in his stomach: washboard firm. The shirt was tight around the shoulders, too. His mother had obviously picked the wrong one up. Still, it would do.

  He drove to a small lockup garage on the outskirts of town. He could have pretended it reminded him of his youth, of getting started back when he was juggling his business from inside it. The truth was he kept it because of something his mother said about it being where the bodies were buried. He’d always assumed his father was in the concrete foundation, but he’d never been inclined to find out.

  Despite everything that had happened between them, he loved his mother and if she’d seen fit to do away with the man who shared his biology, then who could have blamed her? He’d seen the evidence with his own eyes, unable to protect her from his anger. Karl Thorssen had always vowed he wouldn’t become his father’s son, but look at him now, look at the blood on his hands.

  He was a monster.

  He visited the lockup on rare occasions, not to pay his respects to the old man but to be sure he hadn’t somehow clawed his way out of the ground.

  He rolled up the metal shutters.

  Boxes were pushed up against the back wall. They were full of things he no longer needed but couldn’t bring himself to throw away. Little pieces of his childhood, toys, memories. They took up almost a third of the garage but there was still space to fit the hatchback in comfortably. The headlights sent spiders and other night creatures scuttling for darkness, the only witnesses to the car being left there.

  This was a better solution than trying to dispose of the car, body and carpet all at once, when the city was already caught in the carnage that Tostig was creating.

  Thorssen stood back, glancing up and down the row of garages to be sure no eyes were on him. The place was deserted, and he locked up once again.

  He had no idea how many people still used these garages. Not many, surely? They had an air of abandonment about them. The railway station was only a few minutes away. From there he intended to get a taxi back to the house. He was being overcautious, but the time he spent around the assassin had rubbed off. He was even starting to think like Tostig.

  As he walked he tried to slip into his jacket, but found that, just as his shirt felt too tight, the seams of his leather jacket strained across his shoulders, too. So perhaps it wasn’t his mother’s fault, after all. He resolved to put a few hours in at the gym. In the end, he slung the jacket over his shoulder as though he didn’t have a care in the world.

  He heard a sudden burst of some too-cheerful ring tone he didn’t recognize.

  He slipped a hand inside his jacket pocket to retrieve t
he nurse’s phone.

  He swore at himself, resisting the temptation to end the call, then to turn it off.

  He knew that phones could be traced, that their location could be pinpointed using cell tower triangulation if they were still live—that didn’t mean switched on, just that they had juice feeding the SIM card from the battery. He also knew these things had memories, which meant the last recorded location of the phone was less than three hundred yards from where he’d stashed her corpse. He couldn’t disable the phone until he’d set up a false trail to lead the police or whoever away from the lockup.

  He stared at the screen, which said 1 Missed Call.

  What would Tostig do?

  He glanced around for inspiration and saw that he was now close to the main road. In the distance, he could hear the sound of a train approaching. He moved briskly, wiping the phone on the lining of his jacket to remove any trace of his fingerprints, banking on the fact that it would be handled several times before the police came to trace it. The plan taking root in his mind was simple: get on the first train in the station and leave the phone on a seat before slipping off again.

  It wouldn’t take long for the phone to be halfway across the country, and there was no guarantee the person who happened to find it would be some honest soul, either. Maybe they wouldn’t turn it into lost and found; maybe they’d look to reset it to factory defaults and have themselves a nice new phone for their troubles.

  The kids came out of nowhere.

  On skateboards, wearing hoodies and doing everything they could to make themselves look as though they belonged somewhere other than the suburbs. They did a couple of tricks on their skateboards, kicking up the board so it dragged across the ground, then started circling him as he walked, full of threat.

  “You don’t want to do this,” he said under his breath.

  He had seen their like before—self-important, entitled brats who wanted to be dangerous, wanted to intimidate, pretending they owned the streets. Good people lived here. He didn’t need to see under their hoodies to know they weren’t Swedish kids, not born and raised. This was what twisted his gut. This was what drove him. Seeing scum like this terrorize the streets where decent folks had lived all their lives. Too many of these people, frightened to set foot outside their door at night, had sent him letters of support, pledging money to his party.

  Thorssen felt the overwhelming urge to lash out and shove them off their skateboards, see how they liked being intimidated.

  The rage built inside him, starting low in the pit of his stomach like some furnace being stoked by their mere presence, the coals of hate flaring red hot. He wished more than anything he’d brought Nægling with him; he could have cut them down in an instant. That was what he was born—no, reborn—to do. He was a warrior. It was in his blood.

  A smile stole across his face as the larger of the kids approached him on foot, all swagger and ego. He kept his hood up. It was all carefully calculated menace.

  Thorssen heard the unmistakable click of a switchblade being engaged.

  His smile spread.

  He just watched the boy walk toward him.

  “Leave me, boy. If you don’t, your friends will be trying to stop your intestines from unraveling around your ankles. Please make it easy for me.”

  The kid looked at him with a clearly practiced sneer. Oh, yes, he was the leader. The others were his pack of dogs waiting for his signal to attack.

  They continued to circle, kicking their boards up every now and then so the wood scraped across the sidewalk. The acrylic wheel created a rhythm on the uneven concrete ground.

  Switchblade nodded to the pack; that was all they needed, his order.

  The first of them grabbed at Thorssen’s jacket, trying to wrench it off his shoulder, but he held on tight. His wallet was in there along with his house and office keys. Once, he might have surrendered them, let the kids have the cash to save the confrontation, but not now. Now he was a warrior. Now he was on fire. He would burn them.

  He felt the hot seething rage threaten to overwhelm him, felt his grip on his thoughts slip. His mind was flooded with memories of brutality and death. He could smell blood. Their frightened heartbeats hammered in his ears. He could taste the rot of their flesh as their bodies decayed, the cloying reek of dead skin, the stale scent of a woman on one of them, all of this and more.

  Thorssen threw back his head and roared.

  A second hand darted forward, snatching the cell phone from his grasp—the nurse’s cell phone—it was all he could do to stop himself from laughing as the kids made their getaway. He let them go. It served his purpose.

  He fought to control his bloodlust as he stared into the leader’s eyes. His hate threatened to burst through the dam barely holding him back as the kid drew the switchblade across his own throat. A promise of what he’d do if Thorssen made a move toward him.

  “Run, little one, run. Run for your life.”

  34

  Annja finished her account of what had happened since the rally, leaving nothing out—telling Garin everything she knew, everything she suspected and everything she feared. Still, it didn’t amount to very much.

  Her fear was that the two shards of Nægling would have been lost in the remains of Lars Mortensen’s car.

  But she couldn’t believe Thorssen would have given up his prize so easily. Not when his man had taken the time to retrieve the dead man’s phone and pretend to be a cop to wheedle her location out of her. No. The sword wasn’t gone. His thug had got it before he torched the car and Lars along with it. Karl Thorssen had everything his heart desired.

  She needed to think this through, establish a chain of events.

  Someone had told Thorssen that Lars was coming to meet her.

  Which meant someone had to be playing both sides, someone who was close to Lars and close to Thorssen. It made sense for Thorssen to protect his investment.

  The question she kept coming back to was who?

  “So, Ugly here,” Garin said, pointing at the big man in the paramedic’s uniform, “is definitely your guy?” He was running through the footage again frame by frame just as she had done so many times already. He paused on the image of the paramedic.

  “Definitely.”

  “Okay, so, we can safely assume that he isn’t a caring health professional moonlighting as some kind of a hit man. Why, then, would he masquerade as a paramedic at Thorssen’s rally? That seems like a question we should be asking ourselves, don’t you think?”

  Annja studied the image of the man’s face trapped immobile there on the laptop screen, as he helped Thorssen into the waiting ambulance. “Because Thorssen knew he was going to need an ambulance.”

  He moved the footage to another familiar face.

  “And then we have this guy.” He jabbed a finger at scar-faced Nils Fenström, the pyrotechnics expert. “Victim of a fire in his fireworks factory. Now call me cynical but why would a special-effects guy be at a political rally?”

  “Why indeed...” Annja said, knowing there was only one answer that made sense when all of the parameters were taken into account. He’d rigged the explosion for Thorssen, and Thorssen’s hit man, the paramedic, was making sure no one talked.

  “It was all for show,” Garin said. “None of it was real. Smoke and mirrors. The hit man was there to get Thorssen out. What none of them expected was that the pyro guy would stick around and make a nuisance of himself, hence the little tête-à-tête you saw in the lobby. They couldn’t know Johan would catch him on camera, yet there was always going to be a risk with all of those journos around, so they wanted to get him out of there as quickly as possible. Right, Thorssen was never going to need a real ambulance. The explosion was rigged to purposely leave the stage area safe. It’s clever. It makes a martyr of Thorssen, without actually killing him, which is always going to be good for votes.”

  It fit.

  He moved the footage on to the dig where Thorssen, wrapped up in the passion of his monol
ogue, seemed not to notice the weight he put on his supposedly damaged arm, backing up the theory.

  It fit.

  “So what do we do?” Garin asked. “Loath as I am to suggest going to the police, it’s rather more mundane than what we usually get involved with. We’ve tied it up in a nice bow—Thorssen kills the archaeologist for the sword, blows his own rally up for votes and then tries to take out anyone who knows the truth or is likely to try and find it, like your good self. It’s all rather disappointingly prosaic and human—people never cease to disappointment me. So do we hand it over to the law and let them earn their paycheck? This proves that the henchman was working for Thorssen. Every link of the chain is in place. Even the usual lunkheads controlling the long arm of the law can’t screw this one up.”

  “It doesn’t prove he works for Thorssen. All it proves is that he was there, dressed as a paramedic. Thorssen will deny that he knew anything about it. He’s a public figure. He’ll claim he was a target of the assassin or something. He’ll wriggle his way out of it. It’s what he does, Garin. He owns people. He owns people in high places. And he wants to join them up there. We’re a couple of days away from the election and he’s already got an army ready to rise up for him.”

  “Fine. Then it’s option number two. We get the sword,” Garin announced. “Like you said, it’s a symbol. He’s banking on winning this election and riding a wave of unchecked pride to do it, Nægling above his head. That thing was powerful enough to slay a dragon. It’s powerful enough to bring down a government.”

  “Perhaps we should ask Roux what he thinks, if he’d ever pick up his phone.”

  “I wouldn’t trouble the old man.” Garin spoke in a way that screamed avoidance. He was keeping something from her.

  “What aren’t you telling me, Garin?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t lie to me. I always know when you’re lying. It’s why you’re a lousy poker player and Roux gets all of your money.”

  “There’s not much to tell.”

  “Which means there’s something, so spill.”

  “Okay. I’ve talked to him. He’s been here a few days.”