‘I don’t know. I’m done with her.’
‘What do you mean you’re done?’
He stared at me blankly and looked at his watch.
‘You must have some idea where she could have gone.’
‘She wanted to go to London.’
‘Did she know anyone in Mariehamn?’
‘She went to the yacht club a lot.’
He wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t know.
‘Anywhere else?’
‘Your father asked the same question.’
So my father had been round. At least I knew I was on his trail.
‘What did he say?’
‘Like you, he called me a liar, told me I must know where she is.’
‘Shouldn’t you?’
‘I’ve got enough on my hands without worrying about my ex girlfriends.’
‘Who dumped who?’
‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘Was there a particular moment?’
‘Not really, we just... drifted apart.’
‘What happened with my father?’
‘He was irritated. In the end I told him to check out my boathouse. Anna liked hanging out there when we were together, but I only go there in the summer.’
If there was the slightest chance my father and Anna had gone there, I needed to see it.
‘Where’s the boathouse?’
23
It was a good 15-minute walk. The small bay was on the outskirts of Mariehamn. Bengt had told me the key would be under a flowerpot on the window ledge. I did find pot fragments on the ground below the window, but no trace of the key. Turned out I didn’t need it. The door was open, not that it was a great omen after what had happened at my father’s house, but this was a smaller place and I couldn’t hear anything, so I went in.
Boathouse was a fancy name for an upgraded garden shed with a table, two chairs and a bed-cum-sofa. It was a single room with a freestanding wood stove but without running water. The view was breathtaking from the top of the wooden stairs at the back of the house and I followed them down to the jetty. A little further down the shore was what looked like a snow-covered beach. When I looked back up at the house perched on top of the rock, it wasn’t particularly impressive, but what a location! Who cares about size when the archipelago is your living room?
When I went back in, the only traces of recent human presence I could see were cigarette butts. I picked them up to check the brand. They were all the same – a name embodying the American West. Whose could they be? I had neither Thor’s nor Bengt’s number, so I rang my father’s solicitor Dahl to ask for Thor’s, but he was out on his yacht again – I could hear the wind whistling in the background. Yes, Anna smoked Marlboros, he thought. He wasn’t sure about Bengt and didn’t have his number, but Bengt had told me he never went to the boathouse in winter. Judging from the dust on the table, it certainly didn’t look like it had many visitors.
I followed the road behind the house and found a side road leading down to the beach. It was difficult to picture bodies frying in the sun in the same spot only a few months ago. My father lying on the ice sprung to mind. There were no body imprints in the snow, but there were other tracks, snow-covered but still discernible. A car had driven down to the shore and seemed to have stopped. There was a rectangle in the snow – a shadow cast by the car? It could be a melting effect triggered by its heat. What had it been doing here? It didn’t look like it had driven back up the hill, because the tracks continued down onto the ice. It would have stopped and then driven onto the ice, unless it had come from the ice and driven up the hill. In any case, it had come to standstill, but why? I looked around. There was nothing besides the boathouse, which was perfectly visible from the beach. Someone had driven here and someone had been in the house. It could be the same person, in which case he or she would have got out here, walked up to the house over the rocks, up the stairs, had a cigarette – there were several cigarette butts in the house. Or had someone been waiting in the house?
I couldn’t really tell from the cigarette butts if there had been more than one person in the house, but it felt like there had been only one. Did this mean that the smoker was also the driver? Had the smoking and the driving even happened on the same day? Thor should be able to determine if the tracks were made around the time of my father’s death. I gave him another ring and he said he’d be there in half an hour. I waited in the house, staring down at the spot where the car would have stood. I knew that Anna was a smoker, but had she also been the driver?
When Thor’s ice yacht zipped into the bay, I went down the stairs to show him the tracks. He thought they must have come after last week’s thaw, definitely before my father’s death; otherwise they’d be icier and shallower. He added that anyone driving down here must know the area well.
‘Which means it could be pretty much any local?’
‘It’s a small cove between two larger bays and most people don’t even know about it. The turning is pretty much invisible from the road.’
‘So two people showing up here at the same time would be quite a coincidence?’
‘Unless they had a date?’
‘What do you think of Bengt?’
‘Not a great yachter.’
‘Is he reliable?’
‘What are you getting at?’
‘I don’t know. Could he be hiding something about Anna? She’s gone and he used to be the boyfriend – the reason she came here. He claims she didn’t even contact him before leaving.’
‘So ask him.’
‘Does he have a car?’
‘He runs a garage.’
‘Can you see what type of car it was?’
Thor glanced at the tracks again.
‘Wide and heavy.’
I looked around at the house, the bay, the house again, the side road, the bay again, but it didn’t make me any wiser.
‘Maybe it was just kids driving around, having a fag and a shag, but not necessarily in that order.’
I wasn’t convinced by his scenario. Anna being here – as suggested by the cigarettes, and then disappearing, made the whole thing odd. I couldn’t help thinking that Anna and the car were related. If this was my reaction and my wiring was anything like my father’s, he may have had the same thought. Who had driven the car? Thor didn’t know if Anna could drive and looking at the tracks, he could tell from the braking pattern that the car had driven down to the beach and not come up from the ice. He didn’t think it was Henrik’s car. He couldn’t guarantee anything, but his gut instinct told him the car was larger than my father’s Skoda.
‘Look.’
‘What?’
I couldn’t see anything.
‘Footprints. They’re melted and unsharp. It looks like at least three people got into the car – two big-footed and one smaller person walking up to the boathouse.’
He was right. When I looked properly, I could see what he meant. There were several of the larger prints and only one line of the small ones, which seemed to indicate that the big people went up to the house to pick up the lighter person. Had it been Anna waiting for a lift? Or were these tracks completely unrelated? I wasn’t quite sure where this left my attempt to retrace my father’s last movements, except that he’d probably been here too.
Could he be one of the people who’d climbed into the car? I still had a lot to learn before I could read the snow, something he’d probably been able to do. Maybe he’d seen something I couldn’t see. What would he have done in my situation? I was pretty convinced Anna had been in the boathouse. The question was where she was now.
24
We were deep frozen from stomping around in the snow by the boathouse and returning to the yacht club in Thor’s ice yacht didn’t help. I was chilled to the bone by the time we sat down by the fire place with our brandy-boosted hot chocolates, but I couldn’t sit still for long.
Thor had a yacht lesson to give and I needed to figure out what my father had been up to. I�
�d seen his map during my previous visits and it was time for another look. I fetched it and sat down by the fire place again, still chilled to the bone. It took me a while to find the boathouse bay, because there were literally thousands of islands. How anyone could find their way in this labyrinth was a mystery to me. Staring at the water maze without a clue only increased my frustration. According to Thor, my father didn’t have any favourite spots – he went with the wind and the weather. Finding my father’s GPS camera was more crucial than ever, but there was still no trace of it at the yacht club, nor could we dig up any recent photos on his PC.
Thor remembered Henrik losing a batch of important photos once and that he’d been using some backup system since. He didn’t know the exact set-up though. Where was that bloody camera?
25
I called Carrie from the house to update her on my latest expedition. She was getting impatient, wondering what the hell I was doing. When I tried to explain that I was looking for a girl my father had known, she said I needed to get my priorities right. Yes, my father was dead, but she was about to give birth! I said I was really sorry and that I would come home as soon as everything was sorted. Carrie burst out crying. She didn’t mean to rush me, but she was really stressed and hormonal. She needed me there with her, especially to protect her from her all-invasive mother. When she’d pulled herself together again, Carrie asked what I thought had happened to Anna.
‘Probably gone to London as Thor originally said.’
‘You really think so?’
‘I don’t think my father thought she’d left.’
I couldn’t quite believe she’d left either. Why would she have gone to the boathouse if she was leaving? To wait, but for what? A meeting? Was it because she had nowhere else to go after being thrown out of the yacht club? If she’d left Mariehamn, the question was how. Anna leaving on a private boat was unlikely in winter – small boats couldn’t handle the ice.
I went down to the ferry port to check if she’d taken a ferry. Again, I found myself with an exceptionally friendly but supernaturally slow clerk. To her credit, she didn’t attempt to hug me, but she did go into random 30-second silences just like the walrus back at the police station. For a moment, it occurred to me that they might be siblings or husband and wife. There was such an eerie synchronicity. Some locals might describe her as laid-back, but I’d say semi-comatose and I fought not to share my vision as she read through the names on the ferry passenger lists syl-la-ble by syl-la-ble. I’d probably made her day.
Nothing ever happened here, so when it did she bloody well made sure she milked every single vowel out of it, and I suffered for it. I couldn’t tell her that reading the first syllable of the names might be enough, or – let’s go mad – doing a search on the computer. I would have upset her, hopefully without provoking tears, but inevitably the question would have been who I thought I was, walking in there bossing her around. I would have been forced to apologise profusely. She would have lost her thread and started from the beginning again. At her pace. So when in Mariehamn it was best to do as the…
My self-control paid off when she did find Anna’s name in a passenger list on the day following my father’s death. She looked at me with the smile of a woman carrying her passenger records with pride.
‘On the Stockholm ferry?’
Caught out, she double-checked on her screen again and nodded. Did I detect a hint of excitement? Maybe I’d underestimated her. Maybe she did have a second gear after all. I guess I should have been reassured, but I wasn’t, because Anna had left right after my father’s death and he’d been looking for her. Was there a connection between his death and her departure? Had he found her or had she been running away from him? Now I really needed to talk to her, but she’d left the island and would be even harder to find. When I thanked the woman behind the counter, I realised that her smile hadn’t budged while I’d had all these thoughts about Anna. She was obviously recovering from the achievement of a lifetime.
As I was leaving she looked at her computer screen again and – hey presto – there was a sign of life.
‘Excuse me!’
I was halfway through the door when I turned.
‘She never boarded.’
‘She didn’t take the ferry?!’
‘That’s right.’
‘How do you know?’
‘All the passengers have to put their boarding passes through the check-in machine before getting on.’
She’d intended to take the ferry but hadn’t made it. Had she missed it, changed her mind or been held back? If so, by whom?
26
I searched my father’s house for his camera and finally dug up a prehistoric Agfa, but nothing remotely digital or GPS-inclined. The place had just been burgled, so that might explain that. Looking through his papers, I eventually found the camera manual with a receipt from a local camera shop.
Sven’s Camera Shop was closed, but it was unclear if it was for the day or for good, as there was no open/closed sign and the window looked like it hadn’t been dressed since the 1970s. A layer of period dust was there to testify that this was completely unrelated to the ongoing revival. Time had simply stopped in that window 30 years ago. I couldn’t remember, but it was probably still exactly as it had been when I lived in Mariehamn as a kid. That shop window lived in a time warp.
I banged on the door but there was no answer. When I asked in the bike shop next door, the manager immediately gave Sven a ring. All I could hear at the other end of the line was shouting, which made the cycle man smile.
‘He was having his nap. He’ll be down in a sec. Sven thinks he lives in Spain. It’s all mañana with him.’
I waited outside the camera shop for a good 10 minutes before there was any movement. The bike shop owner stood in his doorway watching me the entire time. Sven obviously hadn’t moved onto digital processing yet. I was about to give up, when I heard the faint sound of someone coming down a set of stairs. The next thing I knew, a man riddled with sleep wrinkles materialised in the door.
‘What do you want?’
And grumpy at that.
‘My father bought a camera from you.’
‘Not the first father to do so.’
‘A GPS camera.’
‘Fathers buy all different kinds of cameras.’
The more I looked at him, the more familiar he seemed. Where had I seen him? At the yacht club?
‘I’m looking for my father’s camera.’
‘Ask your father then.’
‘He’s dead.’
‘I need my sleep too.’
He pulled the door to, but I blocked it with my foot and held up the receipt.
‘Henrik Sandberg. I’m his son.’
The wrinkles went and his face opened up.
‘Henke! Why didn’t you say so?!’
Suddenly energised, he opened the door and dragged me in. He’d finally snapped out of his siesta setting.
‘You must be Magnus! Last time I saw you, you were…’
He tried to show me with the palm of his hand but couldn’t quite decide on a height. From the look of it I must have been small for a 10-year old.
‘It’s been a while.’
‘You can say that. Henke missed you.’
Did he really? I still couldn’t understand my father’s passiveness. Look where it had got us. It seemed such a waste that we’d never met again and never would.
‘What will you have?’
‘Oh… a glass of water.’
‘I’ve got some of Henke’s home-distilled. Top notch.’
I couldn’t refuse. He took out a bottle and filled the glasses to the brim. Was he trying to blind me?
‘To Henke.’
He emptied his glass in one go and refilled it before emptying it again and looking at me. I tried to refocus the conversation.
‘Do you know where my father kept his camera?’
He lifted his glass.
‘Skål.’
I dow
ned half the glass. I saw another hug coming, but really didn’t want it. Something about him reminded me of the hugging policeman and the ferry terminal lady. Maybe it was a cultural thing. If it was, I certainly hadn’t inherited it.
‘Bottoms up. Say omelette!’
‘Omelette’ was the Swedish photographers’ version of ‘cheese’ and he probably had the magic Finnish word lined up for me too. I barely had time to slurp the rest before he gave me a refill. This was Scandinavia, where protests were in vain as long as there was still aquavit in the bottle. Once opened, it had to be emptied.
‘Like father like son.’
Not sure what he meant – my father was dead. He gave me a slap on the shoulder, making me spill half of my glass. At least I wouldn’t have to drink that.
‘How can I help?’
‘I can’t find his camera. Thought it might be in for a service.’
‘Nope. It’s a work of art. Unbreakable. The death of the camera servicing industry.’
‘I can’t find any recent photos on his PC and the camera has vanished.’
‘I might be able to help.’
‘You know where the camera is?’
‘I can’t help you with the camera, but Henke was using an online backup system. I suggested it after he’d lost all the photos from one of his yachting trips. The GPS tagging was ideal. He only needed to add some notes and he had an illustrated logbook. The uploading is wireless and can be done from almost anywhere on the planet.’
Sven logged into Henrik’s account.
‘How do you know his password?’
‘I set it up for him. Henke didn’t believe in building fences. He said real-life fences become rabbit hutches in our heads. They’re against nature. We think they make things easier, but end up spending our lives trying to untangle them.’
‘Wasn’t he worried about his work being stolen?’
‘He would have loved people to steal his photos and see what he’d seen, because then he wouldn’t have needed a camera. He had it all in his head. The camera was only there to share.’
The Ice Cage — A Scandinavian Crime Thriller set in the Nordic Winter (The Baltic Trilogy) Page 6