by Moss, John
Bloody was an ancestral memory, a genetic expletive. Harry didn’t swear very often, but sometimes that particular word burst through from his querulous English forbearers, who were normally subdued by the Swedish and Scottish and German chromosomes running in his blood.
Armason seemed in no hurry for an answer, as if the sinister implications of her query needed time to take effect. Harry felt trapped, not sure if he should get up and walk out, laugh, or roundly protest the absurdity of this disconcerting twist in the evening’s events.
Easy, Harry. Just because the messenger looked like a smoked cadaver, doesn’t mean he’s the angel of death. No one accused you of murder. Not directly.
Bloody hell, Harry mumbled to himself, with the subliminal trace of a Northumbrian accent. Lost somewhere in his DNA was the capacity to swear in Swedish. And despite six years living in England, he had not picked up the Cambridge vernacular, in contrast to university associates who returned from a summer session at Oxford sporting an Oxonian lisp that stayed with them for life.
He tried to read the expression in Hannah Arnason’s eyes, but they gleamed with myriad flames. He leaned back, she leaned away. The softened light on contours of her cashmere sweater undulated like moonlight as her body moved beneath the material.
Focus, Harry, something is seriously happening here.
“We seem to have a problem. My constable has brought me certain information that compromises our situation.”
“Our situation?”
“We could go down to my office. Or we could be civilized and order another brandy. At state expense, of course. Nothing you say will be held against you in a court of law, not until you sign a statement of confession.”
“Well, we should be civilized, for sure. And what would you like me to confess to?”
“My colleague says—”
“Your colleague looks like he should retire before he gets buried alive by mistake.”
Shut up, Harry.
“He is only fifty. He smokes.”
“I noticed that.”
“No, you could not notice. Not in a restaurant, not in Sweden.”
The man exudes nicotine. As for being fifty, who knew.
“And what does your colleague say about my case.”
“Perhaps if I ask the questions, it would be better.”
She waved to a waiter and signalled for two more brandies. Cognac, good quality. Neither of them spoke until it came, and it was almost as if her smoke-drenched cohort had never intruded. Swirling the amber liquid in her glass, she gazed into its depths.
Then, without looking up she asked him, “What did you say is your wife’s name?”
“I didn’t,” Harry responded.
“It is Karen, I believe. You said she is dead. It was Karen.” She was not chatting, she was conducting an inquiry by candlelight.
“Yes, it is Karen. I’m not sure what business that is of the National Criminal Police.”
“You wear a wedding band, yes?” She gestured toward his left hand. “There is a mark on your finger, but no ring.”
Harry waited.
She unclenched her fist and the small white envelope slipped onto the table.
“Would you open it, please?”
Harry reached out with his left hand and picked up the folded envelope. He turned its contents into the palm of his right hand. He flinched, as if the ring were white hot. He closed his fist around it, defiantly, then opened it slowly.
“And where did you get this?” he asked, keeping his voice at an even timbre.
She reached out to take it. “May I?”
He held his palm open and she took the silver band and held it up, aslant to the closest candle, as if she were admiring the lustre of a fine wine in its flickering light.
“You, of course, have no idea where we found it?” she said.
“I’m afraid to guess.”
“It was under the dead girl at Hagaparken. Embedded in the frozen snow-water that had melted from her body heat and re-froze after she died.”
She toyed with the ring in her fingers.
“What about prints?” he asked with inane logic.
“Yours and mine, Dr. Lindstrom. It was wiped absolutely clean.”
“What about chain of evidence?”
“It has not been out of our possession since morning.” She turned the silver band in the flickering light. “A few dints. A jeweller’s mark. A sterling hallmark. And a message, h and k forever.”
“My wife died in an accident,” said Harry, his voice indicating no emotion.
“Yes?”
“The ring was found at the scene, her body was never recovered.”
“I am sorry.”
“Yes,” Harry said.
“It is difficult to bury the past under such circumstances.”
Was that mordant wit or careless cruelty?
“I have no desire to bury the past.”
“I imagine you do.”
“Perhaps. This whole dinner was a set-up. Your weasel friend, he was part of it.”
“But it was very enjoyable.”
“It seems to have taken an unpleasant turn.”
“Murder is unpleasant, Harry.” She offered this as a truism, not likely to be disputed.
“But why on earth? You already had the ring. You knew it belonged to me. Did you think I’d confess over dessert?”
“You seemed a man more responsive to congenial company than intimidation, given all you’ve been through.”
“And how do you know what I’ve been through?”
“We have been very busy today.”
“You and the weasel.”
“Yes.”
“Jesus.” Harry couldn’t think of anything else to say.
A prayer and a curse, Karen whispered.
It’s neither if you don’t believe.
“And how do you think I managed to get the victim under my power, take her out to Hagaparken, kill her, and get back for a good night’s sleep. The poor girl deserved better.”
“Deserves better, that is interesting. And did you get a good night’s sleep? And how do you know she died at the Haga Park, not before? How could you know that, Professor Lindstrom?”
She set the ring down on the table between them.
Harry squinted, trying to see into her eyes. She was unnervingly pleasant and deadly serious.
He grimaced. “Don’t be bloody ridiculous, Inspector. The abrasions on her feet and ankles, they were minor. Just enough damage to show she’d been walking barefoot in fresh snow, breaking through the crusty layer every few steps. She couldn’t have walked very far. If you check the heels of her palms, I’m sure you’ll find shallow lacerations from where she occasionally fell. She was forced, probably at gunpoint, into a death march. When she was sufficiently weakened by the cold, the killer left her to die, which she curled up and did. The killer’s footprints filled in with new-fallen snow. I imagine you found evidence of frozen tears on the girl’s cheeks. Her upper eyelashes were heavy with unmelted snow but her lower lashes were frozen clear, from weeping as she died an unspeakably pitiable death.”
“That could almost be taken as a confession,” Hannah Arnason observed, swirling her cognac and inhaling the aroma.
“Or what I like to call ‘thinking out loud.’”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Lindstrom, Harry, but there’s also the rental car.”
“The what!”
“A car was rented in your name. Picked up after closing hours.”
“Not by me. Check the credit card.”
“Prepayment by cash. Actually, you have a rebate coming to you.”
“How much?”
“I, I’m really not sure.”
You’ve got her, Harry. Her case just collapsed. It was built on conviction and you raised the element of doubt by being a smartass. Well done. Really.
He reached into his pocket, awkwardly slithering around on his chair to get to the bottom. Damned Tilley pants, he thought with af
fection, as he slipped open the hidden Velcro pocket and fished out a silver band, which he placed on the table, side by side with the one from the crime scene.
“I never wear it when I fly,” he said. “Observe, they’re a pair, but mine is bigger. My fingers swell. Your smaller one is Karen’s. And I have no idea.” He stopped.
“You have no idea, what?”
“How it got under the body, how it even got to Sweden. I’d hardly carry it around with me, but if I did, you don’t think I’d drop it! If you like I’ll take off my pants right here and show you the damned secret pocket. It’s the apex of Canadian ingenuity. Nothing falls out; I guarantee it. And presumably so do the Tilleys.”
“The Tilleys?”
“They make the pants.”
“You have a relationship with your pantmaker?”
“No, with the pants.”
He picked up Karen’s ring. It felt cool and then warm from his reflected heat. “Actually, I think I do know how it got here without me.” He set it down again. “There was an incident in my apartment.”
“An incident?”
“Someone broke into my home. I was there but I didn’t see who it was. The intruder locked me out in the bitter cold. On the balcony. Sounds funny. It wasn’t. This person must have taken a scarf my wife made for me and, apparently, the ring. The scarf ended up beside a girl’s frozen corpse in Toronto. She was murdered while I was in hospital recovering from exposure after the balcony scene.” (This wasn’t strictly true, but he was not about to risk being accused of murdering that girl, too.)
“And you didn’t notice?”
“What, that my things were missing?”
“The ring. I will look into the incriminating scarf,” she said. “Would you say incriminating or compromising?”
“Neither. And no, I didn’t notice the ring was missing. I miss my wife, I grieve, but I don’t do a regular inventory, I don’t celebrate anniversaries, I do not obsess about tokens and talismans kept in her jewellery box.”
“And the person who locked you out of your home killed the girl in Hagaparken?”
“Apparently, yes.”
“Do you know who that person would be?”
Harry was sure of nothing, but the appearance of Karen’s ring suggested Morgan’s cynicism about how he had been locked out was unfounded. There had without question been someone there.
Hannah Arnason looked puzzled for a moment, then leaned forward across the table, careful not to incinerate the contours of her cashmere sweater in the candle flame that flickered between them. Her eyes were a deep blue, the colour of night. She smiled. She picked up the larger ring and delicately slipped it on his finger. She took the other ring from him and returned to the envelope, which she refolded carefully before tucking it into her purse.
She took his hand again, with the silver band gleaming in the candlelight, and held it palm up in both of hers.
“That is all I will need for now,” she said. “You see, in Sweden we are not so unsophisticated. Our methods are perhaps designed for the personality under scrutiny. Thank you for a lovely and enlightening dinner. And yes, the state will pay for us both.”
“I’m free?”
“As much as anyone is.”
He sighed, audibly relieved. It had been more of a strain than he wanted to admit but an excellent dinner.
“May I ask you one last question, Harry? Why silver? Usually wedding bands are gold.”
“We liked silver.”
“Ah,” she said. “The moon, not the sun.”
“Something like that.”
11 BEER AND FIRELIGHT
IN THE MORNING, HARRY TRUDGED THROUGH THE NEW snow, avoiding icy patches, until he reached a small residential hotel farther north in the city, the address Hannah had given him for Birgitta Ghiberti. The proprietor had never heard of her. Harry described the beautiful woman who looked like Ingrid Bergman with pure white hair. The proprietor giggled. He had no idea who Ingrid Bergman was, but the woman with white hair was probably Birgitta Shtoonk. The proprietor giggled again. Shtoonk was an unusual name, apparently in Sweden as well. Yes, she had left that morning. With a young couple, he thought. They didn’t come in. No, she didn’t leave under duress.
By midday, the air had turned bone chilling and the snow squeaked under his boots as he walked. His toes were so cold he hardly felt them. He wrapped his sheepskin coat tightly around his body, cursed the intruder for stealing his scarf, and pulled his toque down over his ears. He had no desire to take a taxi or bus, and a subway under a city of islands left Harry cold, although he had heard it was a tourist attraction.
He eventually reached the office of the NGO that Bernd Ghiberti worked with, loitering in the tiny lobby long enough to warm up after they told him Dr. Ghiberti wasn’t due back for another week. If he had been seen in Stockholm, he was there on personal matters.
Harry reluctantly spent the rest of the day exploring the Tunnelbana. Overcoming his aversion to subways, he retreated from the weather into Stockholm’s buried labyrinth and was so awestruck that he simply wandered, getting off trains at will and back on when he wished. For a few hours, he was utterly distracted from murder.
Underground stations carved into the solid rock astonished him. Escalators at Radhuset descended among billowing red walls through the substrata into a vast cavern with a polished stone floor. Rising from it, penetrating the rock overhead, was the lower portion of a huge column. Harry slouched down on the floor and conjured a vision of a fiery flood of molten lava burying the column from the top down, hardening to leave a bubble around its base that allowed passersby a hint of its former grandeur.
He had been in constructed ruins before, most notably at the summer home of a Canadian prime minister, now open so the public could marvel at the man’s ghoulish obsessions. But this was neither defiant nor macabre. It was a celebration of the improbable.
Harry could relate to that. An existential confrontation with the absurdities that define us. Time and consciousness, logic and imagination, deconstructionism at work.
It’s time to move on, Harry. You’ll get hemorrhoids sitting on marble.
In other stations, as he moved through the afternoon, he discovered rock that was carved and painted to look like an overhead lily pond, a flaming sky at sunset, a waterfall, an excavation site, providing complementary backdrops for paintings and sculpture from classic to abstract, awesome to droll. But at the same time, it was always rock, deep under the surface of the earth. It thrilled him that all this was done for the people of Stockholm themselves.
When he finally emerged from the T-Centralen onto Vasagaten in the lingering twilight, a gentle snowfall had warmed the air and he walked over to Bentleys in a very good mood. He picked up a sweet bun and a decaf along the way to tide him over until breakfast. He didn’t feel like dining alone.
Inside the front door of the hotel, a small foyer opened onto the staircase leading up to the reception desk. On the stairs, wrapped in a thick coat to ward off drafts as arriving guests pushed through the doors, Bernd Ghiberti sat hunched over, with his knees together, waiting for Harry. He seemed to be dozing and didn’t look up.
It wasn’t until Harry was inside the doors that he saw another man slouched in the shadows close to the elevator, out of the concierge’s line of vision. The second man sucked on a lit cigarette and was blowing pale clouds of spent smoke up into the open elevator shaft. It was a futile gesture to avoid compliance with the laws he was paid to enforce. Flicking his cigarette in a flurry of sparks onto the marble floor, he stepped out into the light. His face was creased and cross-hatched like a weather-beaten satchel. He nodded toward the man sitting between them, then nodded at Harry and grinned.
“Your friend, Mr. Lindstrom, I have brought him to you.” His yellow teeth made his grin look feral, his eye teeth glinted like fangs.
Bernd slowly rose to his feet and moved down a step to avoid putting Harry at a disadvantage.
“It is good to see you, Ha
rry,” said Bernd Ghiberti, holding out his hand. “Do you like Stockholm in winter? I hope so; it is the Scandinavian version of a hot fudge sundae, cold as ice cream and deliciously warm.”
“Very poetic. I was looking for you.”
“And for my mother. I take it she is not hiding, except from me.”
“I’m here in spite of certain untoward obstacles.”
“Ah, the balcony incident.”
“You’ve heard?”
“From Superintendent Quin.”
The stench of stale tobacco swirled around them as the elevator descended and opened to disgorge a couple chattering in English and dressed in polar exploration gear. Americans, probably. Canadians take winter more casually. No accent. Probably from southern California.
When the weasel came down to the same level, Harry was surprised he was roughly his own height. The man gave the impression of being diminutive.
“I will leave, now,” he said. “Inspector Arnason sent me to bring him to the Bentleys Hotel. He is here. Good night.”
As an afterthought, he addressed Harry directly, “I am Sverdrup. We did not meet at the restaurant.” He turned away and took out a fresh cigarette from a crumpled pack, scraped a wooden match on the wall and lit up before stepping out into the night. Surprising a man like that didn’t carry a lighter.
“Well, then,” said Harry. “We’d better go for a drink. Aquavit?”
“Akvavit,” said Bernd, amending the proposal. “Fermented potatoes and herbs at 40 percent. Perhaps we will have something more subtle.”
Harry set his decaf and the bag with his sweet bun off to the side on a step. Together, like old friends, the two men pushed through the snow-filled night air to the closest bar.
Harry ordered a beer and Bernd Ghiberti ordered cognac.
“So,” said Harry, as they settled in close to a roaring grate fire. “I’m guessing you had an alibi.”
“An alibi? For which occasion?”
“The night before last.”
“God, that woman is amazing. She and the old guy with the bad dye job came to my hotel an hour ago. We had drinks in the bar, we talked, then she left. Somehow her associate ended up escorting me to your hotel. I knew where Bentleys was, but he tagged along just in case.”