12
I needed to do one last thing for my father to better understand him. It was the least I could do, a personal farewell before returning home. I simply couldn’t leave Carrie alone any longer. A couple of extra days in Mariehamn would never be enough to catch up with 20 lost years anyway. I felt bad about rushing things, but I had to get back. I rang Carrie to check how she was. She said the baby hadn’t dropped out yet, but it wouldn’t be long and she was getting really worried. I couldn’t wait to join her in London. I wanted to be there for her, protect her, help her through the pain. I wouldn’t be long now.
I didn’t tell her about my little plan, because I knew she wouldn’t have approved. She would have said I was mad, but I was determined to go through exactly what my father had gone through. I needed a ritual and this had been his.
I had a coffee back at the house before grabbing a towel and a bottle of aquavit. Darkness was falling quicker than expected as I drove off in my father’s car. It didn’t matter, because I wouldn’t be long. Or so I thought.
13
Eva was patrolling the late shift alone and had stopped for a break at the northern junction. As she was pouring the umpteenth refill from the thermos, she thought it was time to stop drinking so much coffee. It made her edgy. She didn’t mind working nights, especially as there was nothing else to do on this godforsaken island.
What she did mind was the lack of men. The few decent ones were taken and she wouldn’t touch a married man with a bargepole. Timo cheating on her was the reason she’d demanded to be transferred from Helsinki five years ago. Then there’d been Ernst, another mistake she had to cope with every day. She’d sworn to herself never to get involved with a colleague again. She hadn’t been with anyone for two years, but she was still glad she’d come to Mariehamn. It was a dream place for sailing and skating. Eva had brought her mother and at least she’d met a man in Mariehamn. Maybe Rudolf was a bit pompous, but unlike many older men he wasn’t chasing 20-year olds and, most importantly, Eva’s mother wasn’t alone any more.
A car looking like Sandberg’s Skoda shot past, but Sandberg was dead, unless it was his son – Magnus. Smiling to herself, she thought that she’d enjoyed frisking him – one of the few perks of being a police officer. But what was he doing driving in the middle of the night? Or was the car stolen? Too many questions, she needed to check it out. Eva quickly emptied her mug and set off. She’d have to guess at the next junction, but she’d find the car in the end. None of the roads went very far.
14
I parked the car facing the bay and sat staring at the headlight beams for a while before turning them off. Once my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, I could see thanks to the moonlight. Before getting out, I had a last sip of my father’s aquavit, not Scandinavia’s finest, but good enough for heating purposes. I walked over to the hole to have a look, but it was completely iced over and I’d forgotten to bring something to crack it with.
I took the warning triangle from the boot, walked back to the hole and bashed the newly-formed layer of ice. When I returned to the car, I stopped halfway to take in the surroundings, trying to imagine my father in the same spot.
The ice was a giant dance floor reflecting the moonlight, with the snow-covered pines wafting in the shadows, too shy to dance in the spotlight. They were the last living beings he’d seen before dying. They’d witnessed my father’s death and lived here night and day all year round without ever moving. I wished they could speak to me.
My conversations with Dahl and Thor had convinced me to do this. It was only by doing what my father had done – what he’d ‘had to do’ according to his friends – that I could truly understand him and override whatever cultural barriers there were between us. I wanted to experience what had been normal for him, his essence. Retracing his last moments would help bridge the gap. I knew I’d never be able to completely step into his shoes, but this would definitely bring me closer. The swimming had been something he’d cared so much about that it had killed him.
The silence was total except for the polar wind. I had another confidence-boosting sip of aquavit before undressing and leaving my clothes in the car boot. Once I’d shut it, I rushed to the hole with the towel as my only protection. It was freezing. Only a madman would do this and I was hoping that my father could see what his son was putting himself through.
When I touched the water it was absolutely glacial. This wasn’t a time to hesitate. Every second counted, but would I be able to get out? Didn’t I need ice prods? Every good Scandinavian knows that prods are for skaters who fall through thin ice that keeps breaking when they try to climb back up. I invoked the solidity of the ice to reassure myself. It was thick. I would be fine. At least that was the theory, now the practice.
I hesitated again. Why was I doing this? Why expose myself to the cold? Was I completely crazy? I could simply get back into the warmth of the car. No, it didn’t matter that it seemed stupid, because it wasn’t, not to me. My father had done it, so I was going to do it. I had to, I was about to. I was.
I took a deep breath before slipping into the water. At first, it felt like I was choking and I gasped for air, but I forced myself to stay in long enough to feel the cold compressing me. I was shrinking and couldn’t move. My limbs felt heavy. I had to get out. I would have preferred to scramble, but I was semi-paralysed and shaking. I tried to drag myself up but slipped back into the water just as I was getting a first knee on the ice. Now the water felt even icier. The first attempt had demanded a huge effort and I had to pull myself together for a new try. I needed to recover, but it was impossible in the icy water. I was trapped and started to panic. I should definitely have taken prods. Too late now. I tried pushing myself up with my palms. I gave everything – it was my last chance – and eventually managed to get both knees on the ice. I crawled away from the hole as carefully as I could, determined not to slip back in.
I dried myself as best I could, but my fingers were so stiff I could barely hold the towel. I’d never been so cold in my whole life. I had to rub the towel against my body with my palms. Somehow I was enjoying the ordeal, in the knowledge that the warmth of the car was only meters away. It was like an out of body experience. If only I’d had a sauna. The penny almost dropped, something almost clicked into place, but then it was lost. I was too cold, too rushed to remember. Maybe it would come back once I’d warmed up.
I hurried back to the car and pulled the door open. I didn’t. It was stuck. I tried again, to no avail. The front door wouldn’t budge either. I tried the other side, but all the doors were locked. The key must be in my trouser pocket – in the boot. I grabbed the handle. It was immovable too. I could see, almost touch, my trousers lying in the warmth of the Skoda. We were only separated by a thin sheet of glass. I ran around the car trying all the doors and the boot once more. They were definitely, firmly and unquestioningly locked. How could this have happened? How could the car lock itself? What had I done?! What the fuck was I going to do? There was no way I could walk back to the nearest village. I was naked at -15°C, not to mention the wind factor. I rubbed myself frantically with the towel, but it was encrusted with ice and my hair had already formed an icecap.
My only hope was to find a summer cottage and break into it. God knows where the nearest house was. I couldn’t remember seeing any on the way out. I would last an hour max at this temperature without clothes and I’d already wasted precious minutes. The countdown had started and my body temperature was dropping fast. How much would be left of me in an hour? Would my nose freeze off? My fingers, toes, feet? The prospects were grim and I was scared shitless. I was panicking, because I could see where this was going and I didn’t want to understand my father this well.
Eventually, I realised how dumb I was. All I had to do was smash the windscreen. I looked for a small rock, but it was harder than I thought. The snow was icy under the topcoat and it was impossible to penetrate the ice with my fingers. I tried hacking with the emergency triangle, bu
t it broke. Meanwhile, my fingers were getting weaker by the second. I finally managed to get a grip on a large block of ice and hurled it at the side window. The ice split, not the window. The car remained immaculate, indifferent, and I was getting seriously cold. My limbs were numb and I couldn’t even feel my feet.
I kept scraping off the snow, then the ice, looking for a rock. I scrabbled with my nails until they broke. I tried to warm my frozen fingers by breathing on them, but even that wasn’t helping after a while, as they were completely dead. I scraped and scraped, without feeling my hands, fingers bleeding, my body shaking uncontrollably. I was becoming an animal. This was it, I wouldn’t make it.
I couldn’t give up. As long I was conscious I had to fight. There had to be a way out. There had to be – HAD TO – but I was so cold I couldn’t think clearly. Trying to ignore the pain, I made a last-ditch effort to look round. All I could see was pine trees, bushes, rocks and the damn car. The damn car. The car!
I should have thought of it earlier. I reached for the exhaust without thinking and – fucking pipe! – burnt myself. I cooled my hand in the snow. How could the damn thing still be so hot? Maybe it only felt hot because I was frozen, because I wanted to be burned. It occurred to me that I could use the car as a heater. I put my hands on the bonnet. It gave off some warmth and I lay down on it, but I was too far gone. I decided to give the exhaust another go. Using the towel to insulate my hands from the heat, I wriggled the pipe. When it came loose, a blast off heat blew through the towel and I burnt myself again. I didn’t care – I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel anything. I could only see the burn on my skin. I sat down in the snow.
Suddenly, I was feeling better. I was gradually overcome with a sense of well-being as the pain of the cold transformed into a warm wave swelling through my body. I knew I wasn’t warm, quite the opposite. I had to fight the feeling and force myself to dig again to find a rock that would break the windscreen, but the icy snow stood its ground. Although I was trying to be more aggressive, my scraping only became weaker. My energy was fading. I couldn’t control my hands any more. I thought of Carrie. I wouldn’t get the chance to say goodbye and to tell her how much I loved her. I’d never see our child. For the first time in my life I prayed.
15
Finland was supposedly a bilingual country, but the Swedish schools were being shut down and his parents had been forced to send him to a Finnish school. He’d suddenly found himself as the only Swedish-speaking Finn in his class. Swedish Finns were seen as arrogant imperialists and his classmates told him to go home to Sweden – a country he’d never even visited. He was being eradicated like the rest of the Swedish minority in Finland.
To block out the racist bullying, he escaped into his lead soldiers, which he moulded and painted to reconstruct The Battle of Narva from 1700, when Sweden had beaten Peter the Great’s Russian army. He’d started the soldier collection with his father before continuing with a Finnish-speaking classmate living in the same street. He thought he’d finally made a friend, but when their teacher asked the classmate to list his best friends, he omitted him. From then on, he avoided the neighbour and buried himself in his army display. It represented Sweden at its peak, when it had outdone Russia and been one of the great powers of the world. He focused on getting the colours of the uniforms just right – down to the smallest button and epaulette. He didn’t need any friends now that he’d created his own world where Sweden ruled. He kept his neighbour away, but he insisted on seeing the collection, and one day he finally let the classmate in with another friend. They crushed the soldiers by walking all over them. His Swedish army was slaughtered.
Following the massacre, he developed a protective shell reinforced by a determination to resist any more racist persecution. He wasn’t going to put up with what his parents had suffered. Sweden was one of the great nations of the world and always would be. As for Finland, it was just a footnote. This knowledge helped him through school and strengthened him in his resolve to turn the tide. He would show them.
16
I was skating through the archipelago’s stunning icescape. Weightless, gliding, free as a bird, until the ice abruptly gave way and I sank through it. I desperately tried to climb back up, but it kept breaking in front of me – an endless canal. When I looked round, desperate for help, all I could see was emptiness. The icescape merged with the sky at the horizon and there was absolutely no land in sight, nothing to reach for, no hope.
I’d landed inside a white void, a sphere of ice. I scraped and scraped and the scraping on the ice echoed, becoming scraping in the snow. I was naked, an animal digging for a rock and I finally found one, a giant stone the size of a medicine ball. I lifted it above my head and catapulted it against the car. When it bounced off, I tried again, but there still wasn’t a scratch on the car. It was so spotless and scornful that it seemed made out of armour plating. I was frozen numb. I was lost but couldn’t give in. I picked up the stone again and hurled it at the windscreen with a roar.
The female police officer and the nurse chatting at the end of my bed jumped out of their skin and if it weren’t for the police woman’s fast reflexes, they would have been hit. She’d spotted me lifting something out of the corner of her eye and shoved the nurse to the side as the jug crashed on the floor behind them.
I came to standing on the bed with two women staring at me and after a momentary confusion I quickly slipped back under the sheets. The nurse checked my temperature, which was normal, so I was left with the police officer – Eva Mikaelsson. She must have been about my age and her blue eyes looked familiar, but they were probably just stereotypically Nordic. Or maybe I remembered her for frisking me and holding me at gunpoint. She got straight to the point this time too.
‘Idiot!’
Now what had I done to her?
‘People like you don’t deserve to live.’
I noticed the bandage on my left hand and it slowly dawned on me what this might be about.
‘You could have lost much more...’
‘What?’
‘…than a pinkie and a toe.
I peered under the covers. My right foot was bandaged too.
‘That bloody car!’
‘Those clever little Skodas lock automatically after 30 seconds. You’re not the first one to be caught out.’
‘What a stupid invention.’
‘What did you think you were doing?’
‘I wanted to understand my father.’
‘By following him into the grave?!’
She was right, I should have told someone about my farewell swim, but if I’d told Carrie she would never have let me go.
‘Who found me?’
‘I did.’
‘How did you know I was there?’
‘I happened to drive past.’
‘Happened?’
‘Five minutes later and you’d have been dead.’
Eva had to go. I liked her way of cutting the crap. I suspected not much got by her and what did was viewed with quiet irony. It was my stupid fault that I’d almost died, but she’d been there to pick up the pieces. She was right, I needed to be more careful with my life.
‘Guess I should thank you.
‘Don’t do it again, not without a sauna.’
As she left, I finally realised what was odd about my father’s swim. I could suddenly recall him having a winter dip and running back to the sauna. I used to hate sitting in the sweat box, because I couldn’t breathe, but he would force me to stay, telling me to relax. I’d never been able to take it and used to gasp for air like a fish on dry land. He argued with mum about it every time we got home. She just couldn’t understand the obsession with physical sensations. What was the point of being freezing cold or over-heated? How could anyone prefer a cold swim to a nice cup of tea? I thought they made for a great combination (provided I didn’t get locked out again while swimming), but my mother couldn’t bear the Scandinavian obsession with nature. The poor woman hated camping,
but had ended up in a culture that was happiest under the canvas and crapping in the woods.
Having been through a cold dip like my father, I found it very odd that he’d lain down afterwards. Surely, he would have rushed back to the car? He might have died on the way from heart failure, but he wouldn’t have lain down neatly next to the hole. It didn’t make any sense. Even if he was as stupid as me and locked himself out of the car, he wouldn’t have returned to the hole. It was the last place he’d want to be. I knew, because I’d been there, but maybe I was trying too hard to make it all add up. Having a heart attack in those conditions wouldn’t be entirely surprising. The Forsmans did think it looked like a display when they discovered him, but it must have been a pretty unusual scene for them to bump into during their skating. It must have been so unexpected and terrifying that the only way to cope with it was to see it as surreal or staged. It seemed a natural reaction and if I’d been in their skates, I would probably have been under the same impression. Whatever the logical considerations, the question marks around my father’s death were still bugging me. I had to keep going.
17
I went straight from the hospital to my father’s house. The bandages on my hand and foot had to stay on for a while, not that the lost finger and toe would ever grow back. The cold dip had marked me for life because of a stupid car lock.
My father going for a cold dip in the middle of the night still didn’t add up. It wasn’t something I wanted to repeat. Maybe, like me, he’d had a couple of drinks and done it on a whim, out of existential despair, or just to feel he was alive. I did that back home – cycled up hills like a lunatic to feel the pain. The release was always orgasmic, but did that mean my father had been driven by a similar sensation? I began to realise I’d never find out.
The Ice Cage — A Scandinavian Crime Thriller set in the Nordic Winter (The Baltic Trilogy) Page 4