Lindstrom Alone

by Moss, John

  “The central lake district, I think.”

  “And why, exactly, are you here?”

  That is not an existential question, Harry.

  As her smile faded, he felt a chill. He was about to explain when a woman from reception approached their table and handed him a manila envelope. A copy of Miranda’s file had reached the Bentley before he did.

  “Do you mind?” he asked before opening it.

  “Not at all. I see it is from the police in Canada. From Toronto. It is a nice place?”

  “Yes, it is,” said Harry. “A nice place. Look, are you going to arrest me?”

  “What for? You are on private business, yes? But police business, as well, I believe.”

  “I should get something to eat. I hate to be rude but what I’m on is nobody’s business.”

  “Do not worry, Mr. Lindstrom. It is not so confusing.” She pressed her lips together and sighed. “It is confusing, yes?”

  Okay, Harry. Enough of this.

  Harry opened the envelope and set out photographs of a frozen corpse on the table between them.

  Well done, Harry. Nothing sets the opposition at ease like pictures of a naked dead woman.

  Inspector Arnason picked up the pictures and examined them carefully, tilting each to the natural light coming in under the window archway. Her facial expression hardened without changing. She had seen it all before.

  “You are a licenced investigator in Toronto?” she asked, setting down the photographs. “What about Nanaimo? Please you explain.”

  Ha, a grammatical error.

  “Simple,” said Harry, ignoring Karen. “I spent part of my growing up on Vancouver Island.”

  You’d better clarify, Harry.

  “Later, as an undergraduate, I studied at the University of Victoria for a couple of years. My parents were living in New Brunswick at the time, on the other side of the country. When I was a student, I took a bus trip up to Nanaimo, but my childhood friends had moved on. It’s a beautiful town. Coastal bushland, mainland mountains in the distance, and semi-depressed. That attracted me when I wanted to set up as a private investigator; it seemed like a good place to start. Semi-depressed. Not many murders. I was only interested in murder. Familiar but strange. I was an outsider in a place I knew well.”

  She was listening as if what he said was important.

  “You went to jail.”

  “They let me out.”

  “Then, you left.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “My friend who had encouraged me to locate there, then urged me to relocate in Toronto. More anonymity, useful in my line of work, and more murders. She’s a police superintendent in homicide.” He tapped the return address printed on the top of the manila envelope.

  “Were you trained for police work?”

  “No, I was a philosopher.”

  “You are joking.”

  “Cambridge PhD, professor of philosophy at Huron College, southwestern Ontario. And I suppose that accounts for why they put me in jail.”

  “You go to jail in British Columbia for the practice of philosophy.”

  Harry was charmed by her precision. He was sure her English was learned second-hand, not on location. Her accent was perfect, her syntax too perfect.

  Not always.

  “I had a disagreement with a judge.”

  “That is not a good thing in Sweden.”

  “He insisted I answer a question from the witness stand the way he wanted me to.”

  “Really! How extraordinary.”

  “‘Yes or no,’ he asked. ‘Neither,’ I replied. I was a witness for the prosecution and they already had a good case. But I was asked if, in my professional opinion—”

  “As a philosopher?”

  “As a private eye, trained mostly by Dashiell Hammett and Elmore Leonard.”

  “They are famous detectives in your country?”

  “No. Well, possibly. Anyway, I was asked, ‘Do you see the man who was holding the gun in this courtroom?’ I tried to explain that I saw a man who looked like the accused and he had been holding something in his hand that might have been a gun. But the eyes play tricks, they fill in details.”

  “So you are a philosopher but not a disciple of John Locke?”

  “Uh? Not really.”

  “You do not accept Locke and Berkeley, that knowledge arises from the experience of the senses.”

  “Uh, well, yes and no. In this case, no. I refused to state unequivocally that the accused was, or indeed, was not, the culprit. I was more in a Nietzschean frame of mind at the time. I was sent to jail for a week, for contempt of court. That seemed absurd since it was the court that held me in contempt and not the other way around. My friend suggested I relocate to Toronto, which I did. And how do you know about the empiricists, Inspector Arnason?”

  “I am sure you do not mean that to be a patronizing question, Dr. Lindstrom. Yes? We have a very good educational system in Sweden, very good universities. I went to Lund, myself, where I read philosophy. That was before I decided to be a policeperson and went into extensive training.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  Harry. Be careful. She’s very young.

  “And I do know who Elmore Leonard is, and Dashiell Hammett. John Travolta, Get Shorty, Humphrey Bogart, Sam Spade. We know these things, even in Sweden.”

  “Of course.” Harry felt like a bit of a fool and changed the subject. “Bernd Ghiberti told you about Nanaimo,” he stated, as if clarifying something they both understood. “I wonder why.”

  “Mr. Ghiberti? No. It does not matter. I am satisfied.”

  Don’t count on it, Harry.

  “It was Ghiberti. He’s dug into my past.”

  “We have met, Mr. Ghiberti and I. I have met also his mother, Birgitta. Stockholm is not so big.”

  “You know about his mother’s accusations, then.”

  “Yes, we do. And we have been talking to your superintendent.”

  “Not mine. I’m not a cop.”

  “Ms. Miranda Quin. She is your friend.”

  “She is.”

  “I am puzzled though. Why you are here?”

  “Are you in charge of the Ghiberti file, Inspector?”

  “There is no Ghiberti file, Mr. Lindstrom. But, yes, if there was, I would be in charge.”

  He nodded, appreciatively.

  “And you?” she continued in a sociable tone. “You are here, doing what, Mr. Lindstrom? Would you prefer Dr. Lindstrom or Professor?”

  “I’d prefer Harry. I like Sweden. I’ve never been here in winter.”

  “You are rather mature to be coy, Mr. Lindstrom.”

  Ouch. Harry, work with her. She could be useful. And even if she’s not, she’s preposterously attractive.

  Harry explained as clearly as he could why he was there.

  When he finished, she said, “You are here, then, for your friend, Ms. Quin.”

  Not really, he thought. He looked out the window. Large flakes of snow drifting downward filled the air. He could hardly see across the narrow street.

  She tried again. “You are here in case the Swedish police are not very good.” Harry looked back at her and let a wry smile pull his mouth slightly askew. “Well, then,” she summarized, “you are here in the service of evil, so to speak. If no one actually hires you until the job is done, neither the mother nor the son are your clients unless things turn out for the worse.”

  Holy perdition, Harry. Don’t get into an argument about evil.

  It’s just one of those words people use.

  Inspector Arnason leaned forward across the table. Being so tall, when Harry moved forward in his chair to accommodate her gesture, their heads almost touched. Then she tilted her head to the side and whispered, “You are here because there is much confusion and you are a man who likes clarity. There is an equal possibility of heinous crimes or of no crimes at all. You are a philosopher, Professor Lindstrom. You are intrigued by what you do not kn
ow even more than by what you do. It will be a pleasure working with you.”

  “Are we working together?” he whispered. “Why are we whispering?”

  “Unofficially, of course,” she said in a full voice, sitting back. “I have recruited you and you may use me as you wish.”

  Harry!

  But Harry felt old. Hannah Arnason made Harry feel old. It wasn’t intentional, there was no malice involved, nor was it because she was one of those people who seems to exist inside a photo shoot, perfectly lit, no matter what the light, and groomed to perfection. He felt any response was a betrayal; that Karen deserved better.

  Don’t be absurd, Harry. I’m dead. You’re hung up on guilt, not love.

  I haven’t done anything yet.

  And it’s unlikely you will. Not until you stop confusing what you miss for remorse.

  His reverie ended suddenly with the insistent jangle of her cell phone. It was a popular tune, the beginning of a song by the Beatles. He tried not to follow her side of the conversation by getting up and finding a sweet bun on the breakfast table that had unaccountably been left behind by the staff who presumably feasted on whatever the guests didn’t eat. He managed to devour most of the bun when she beckoned him back to the table. Before he got there, she stood up, ducking her head to miss the arch looming over their alcove.

  “We must go now. You would like to come, I think. There has been a naked body found in Hagaparken. She is covered in snow, perhaps murdered.”

  “Unless she wandered away from a sauna.”

  “No, there is no sauna in Hagaparken.”

  Harry retrieved the photographs from the table and slipped them back into the manila envelope with the copies of the police report. Hannah had taken a good look at the pictures, but when he had offered her the report itself, she had pushed it to the side. Either she was disinterested or she already knew what it said.

  He dropped the envelope off at the desk and asked for it to be delivered to his room. He would go over it later.

  As they drove north through the thick falling snow along the E4 toward Uppsala, Harry remarked that her Volvo wagon was much like one he used to own.

  “This is not my car,” she said. “I drive a Saab. It is also Swedish.”

  “But you’re not.”

  “I am Swedish, yes. But my father is Icelandic. He studied in Sweden and tried to take home a Swedish wife.”

  “Tried?”

  “My mother did not want to be married. She refused to go. She has never been to Iceland. I used to visit my father every year, and all my cousins. The chief constable is my favourite, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  The air was absolutely still as they entered the south gate. The snow had dwindled to a few flurries and then stopped as the sky filled with brilliant blue, and there was a hush over the landscape that Harry could sense, even before they passed the visitors’ parking lot and came to a stop near several official vehicles, including an ambulance and a police cruiser.

  The park was not at all what he expected. The new snow lying heavy on the bare branches of the hardwood trees was magical, but the discipline of the trees’ placement in columns and clusters among pavilions and broad open spaces accentuated the ways nature had been carefully organized, like an eighteenth-century English park, to make wilderness seem tame and accessible. The natural world, designed by a landscape architect to charm the human eye. As they trudged through the fresh snow, following a line of footprints toward a cluster of people in the distance, Harry marvelled at the patient conviction it would take to plant saplings and mound earth into contours for generations ahead.

  There were ski tracks here and there intersecting their progress. He followed them with his eye as they cut across broad swards of meadow, through the ghost-white trees and around strange buildings, over ponds and past ruins. Harry caught sight of the famed Copper Tents, originally stables built to look like an Arabian palace, striped blue and yellow, standing forlorn in the drifting snow.

  It had been a skier who found the body. The Haga Park was a very public place, even in winter, despite its relatively vast size and distance from the city. Harry preferred Nordic skiing through bushland and wilderness but had to concede there was a special charm to following trails set by skiers among pavilions and follies, greenhouses, a butterfly house, and a Chinese pagoda. All this was contrived by King Gustav III and his progeny for their people’s amusement, and their own. It was not like skiing in Algonquin Park, which Harry and Karen had always planned to do.

  In the shadows cast by the grand, sprawling pavilion, with its pale yellow walls and columns of white Gothic windows rising like a spectre out of the snow, a knot of people was gathered around the body. They were chatting, shuffling to keep warm although temperatures had risen with the snowfall far above what they had been during the night. They were waiting, apparently, for Inspector Arnason to appear on the scene.

  Harry was reassured. She had clout.

  The girl looked realistic rather than real. The falling snow had melted on contact with her flesh, until her temperature dropped to match the atmosphere, covering her with an opaque glaze. The covering glittered in the sunlight like a crystal shroud, accentuating her nakedness and at the same time allowing her a pathetic semblance of modesty.

  Inspector Arnason left him on his own while she spoke to various people, including an elderly man wearing old-style cross-country ski clothes made before synthetics. Harry noticed that his skis, which had been stuck upright in a snowdrift, were wood. And, inevitably, the poles were bamboo. The man looked like one of those annoying ads taunting North Americans for being less fit than a seventy-year-old Swede.

  Harry looked down at the girl. The sun was warming her icy carapace and it was melting, sliding off contours of her body, exposing her skin. Harry watched in horror as she turned from what might have been an artist’s mannequin or a grisly sculpture into a frozen corpse.

  She was young, still in her teens. She was blonde. There did not appear to have been a struggle. There were minor scrapes around her ankles, nothing severe enough to suggest she had been shackled. The surface skin on the bottoms of her feet was finely lacerated, but not enough to draw blood.

  Harry ran his eyes along the length of her body. Her eyelashes had been the last part of her to release their burden of frozen snow; they looked unnaturally white and full. Their weight drew down her eyelids, but what he could see of her eyes indicated they had been brown, although now they were almost colourless, opaque, reflecting the blue of the sky.

  “She was pretty,” said Hannah Arnason, who had moved up beside him and was watching him think. “There is no blanket wrapping, Harry. I doubt she is connected to your Toronto murder.”

  Harry bent down and because the ice covering on the girl’s fingers had melted, he was able to examine her nails. They didn’t appear to have been cut recently but they were painted with black matte polish on the inside curves.

  10 OLD TOWN

  ON HER INVITATION, HARRY AND HANNAH ARNASON MET for a candlelit dinner in a cozy cellar restaurant off Vasterlanggatan in Gamla Stan, the oldest part of the city. He had been to the old town before, but in the summertime. Passing in winter among canyons of office buildings and chain stores, through the bleak archways on Helgeandsholmen, and across a busy street channelling gusts of ice-laden snow and furious eddies of exhaust from passing traffic, he was relieved by the sudden transition that placed him in a blazing maze of cobblestone passageways and well-lit alleys. Gamla Stan offered warmth and intimacy to counter the frozen darkness. The haunting medley of stone work and brick and wood from different eras, sometimes all in a single façade, created an ambience that was even more inviting in the illuminated night than in the long twilight of summer.

  Harry appreciated the Swedish genius for making winter habitable. He looked around their underground cavern as they sipped postprandial liqueurs and, for a moment, he was almost content. Karen had been with him the whole evening, and yet in no d
iscernable way did she intrude through a sumptuous dinner and the free-flowing discussion that circled again and again, always coming back to the Ghibertis.

  Harry could see that Hannah was puzzled by him. Tiny lights glinting off stemware and cutlery from the myriad candles around them shimmered in her hair and sparkled in her eyes. But Harry talked to her like a normal person, an experience her profound good looks had probably prevented since puberty. There was no hostility in his restraint. He wasn’t wary, resentful, or struggling with a stifled libido. He was enjoying her company.

  While they briefly extolled Birgitta Ghiberti’s capacity for aging gracefully, an elderly man with a face like a satchel approached their table. He was sporting a bad dye job but his pitch-black hair was cut mercifully short.

  You don’t often see someone that old so obviously suffering the ravages of nicotine, Karen whispered. They’re usually dead by his age.

  Harry smiled. His gesture caught Hannah’s eye as she glanced up at the man who came to a stop by her shoulder.

  The man leaned down and said something to her in Swedish. He handed her a small paper envelope that she peered into, then folded into a square and tucked into the palm of one hand.

  Harry could smell the stench of stale tobacco from across the table. Somewhere in the back of his head, a balance was moving toward equilibrium, with the hyper-fit septuagenarian of that morning being countered by this man, of the same age, hovering on the brink of self-induced annihilation.

  Inspector Arnason said something to the man and he answered, and then he stepped back and stared at Harry until she waved him away. He shambled off into the gloom of their candlelit crypt and she looked at Harry with a mixture of amusement and disappointment, the way a mother might, at her own delinquent child.

  “Is there a problem?” said Harry, addressing the self-evident when an explanation did not appear to be forthcoming.

  “There is.” She seemed uncomfortable, as if he had let her down. “Professor Lindstrom, where did you go last night after I dropped you off at Bentleys?”

  “Why?”

  “Please tell me.”

  “I went to bloody sleep. What’s going on?”