Lindstrom Alone

by Moss, John

  Rendered invisible by the reflection, Harry turned down the passageway and walked back along Strandgatan until he heard Birgitta’s car start up and pull away. Then he returned to stand in the shadows just down from the little shop, close enough he could observe the girl inside making preparations to close for the night.

  She moved around purposefully in a cozy sphere of light, oblivious to monsters waiting in the darkness. She thinks she can be pretty and young with impunity, Harry thought, but these are a killer’s invitation to murder. He wanted to warn her, but how and of what. He slunk back farther into the shadows as the shop lights went out, and he watched her exit into the lane, wearing a long coat and a fur hat much like Birgitta’s. She bent to lock the door before turning casually to enter the gloom of snow-streaked streets without another soul in sight.

  He followed her at a distance as she turned up onto Mellangatan and passed under a low arch that spanned the street, making it seem even narrower than it was. She seemed almost to glide through the sinister web of shadows and light that draped along walls of stucco and stone and drooped across piles of snow and cobbled pavement. As they moved through the night he caught brief glimpses down side streets of ramparts and battlements illuminated by the waxing moon in an eerie piecemeal tableau. Suddenly she veered off and he thought he had lost her, but she had taken a short cut and appeared back in the open around the corner. She passed a small group of people laughing and singing, and Harry instinctively averted his head when they crowded by him.

  Not until she had turned in through a gateway and Harry caught up did he realize they had approached Smedjegatan from below and he was in front of the Hotel St. Clemens. He retreated back down the street to the separate entrance that led to his room. At the far end of the short corridor, he was able to peer into the courtyard. The girl was at the main entrance. She hesitated, then entered, and Harry lost sight of her.

  By moving into his own room, which overlooked the courtyard, he had a better view of the reception area. The blonde girl was asking something at the desk. Then Birgitta appeared. From where Harry was, they looked the same age, with the same colouring. They might have been sisters. They talked off to the side so the concierge couldn’t hear, and then they kissed perfunctorily on both cheeks and the younger woman went out the door and stood within the pale walls of the courtyard, looking directly at Harry’s window.

  He trusted she could see only the reflection of the ruined medieval church behind her. Still, he flinched and moved back into the darkness.

  When he looked out again, she was gone.

  Harry still had on his sheepskin coat over the nubuck jacket. He hurried out the door and along the corridor into the street. She was nowhere in sight. Good, that was a good thing. She was safe for the time being.

  He went back to his window, holding the curtains back to give him a broader view. The girl was there again, she had only slipped into the shadows beside an outbuilding. He couldn’t tell if she was looking in his direction.

  Eventually Birgitta came out. She was dressed in the same long coat and fur hat she had worn when she left the Lindgarden. She squinted through the glare of the exterior light, then walked directly over to the girl.

  The two women leaned close and conversed with an urgency conveyed in the silence of Harry’s room by their postures, before again kissing on both cheeks and stepping back from each other. The blonde girl turned and hurried away and Birgitta arranged herself, poised in the shadows, close by the little blue Fiesta she had been driving earlier in the evening, and waited.

  Harry watched for about ten minutes. Birgitta was obviously getting cold. She stamped her feet and wrapped her arms around herself and took off her gloves and blew warm air onto her fingertips.

  The blonde girl reappeared. Harry perked up, leaning close to the glass as if he might be able to hear what they said. The window fogged from his breath, blinding him and threatening to betray his hidden location. He didn’t dare clear it off. The two women were now ghostly spectres. When he changed his position to a clearer portion of the window they were out of his sightline. Shifting a little, he could see they had moved around while they talked and he couldn’t tell one from the other.

  Then, one of them left and the other walked right by Harry’s window, glancing in his direction. For a moment, she was less than a body’s-length away. It was Birgitta. She moved on, around the opposite side of the main building, and disappeared down a passageway that led directly into the church ruins.

  Harry was sweating from being overdressed in his room. He took off his coat and jacket.

  That’s it then, is it? Aren’t you curious?

  I’m curious about a lot of things.

  About Birgitta Ghiberti, aka Shtoonk, aka Sviar, aka Ilsa Lund.

  Come again?

  Ilsa, Ingrid Bergman, Casablanca. Come on, Bogie, get with it. Where did she go? It’s a little creepy to be touring ruins by moonlight. Let’s check it out.

  Harry knew that sometimes there was no point in arguing. He put his coat back on and stepped out into the cold on the street end of the corridor. He had decided to approach the remains of the church by stealth, assuming Birgitta hadn’t simply cut through to another destination. He was less likely to be observed if the girl from the convenience store had arranged an assignation.

  He walked briskly around the irregular block to the north side of the ruins and moved out from the shadows of buildings and trees into the nearly full moonlight, which exposed him completely. The walkway to the main entrance had not been shovelled and his boots crunched with each step. He had the sense of himself as a silvered apparition making enough racket to wake the dead. When he stopped, he could hear himself breathe.

  Passing between buttresses that shouldered what remained of the outer walls, he surveyed the interior. There was no sign of Birgitta. At first he saw only emptiness, but when he stepped inside, the gleaming columns and intersecting arcs, the curves of crumbling vaults, the finely carved tracery of Gothic windows, and the stolid Romanesque arches left over from an earlier age, all moved him to distraction. For a moment he forgot why he was there.

  The very notion of death seemed obscured by the awesome beauties of destruction. Harry took off a glove and touched the back of an index finger to his eyes, to press away the moisture and clear his vision.

  Among the mysteries evoked by the ruins, he sensed the absence of music. He could almost hear the drone of a medieval choir lifting above the silvered snow in the nave. He stood motionless, listening, but he could only hear the hush of the night in the dark centre of an ancient city.

  A faint rustling stirred the air. Harry lowered his hood. By turning slowly he determined the sounds came from the farthest end of the nave, where an interior wall had crumbled into a rough and menacing hollow among the shadows. He approached slowly until he could see a human figure hunched over, kneeling with head bowed. He stopped to catch his breath and then moved closer, and he could see that what he had taken as devotional posture was an expression of ghoulish engagement.

  The indelible image of Nosferatu, toying with a victim, turned into Sverdrup. With his jet-black hair and demonic pose, the man seemed more like one of the damned than film could ever imagine. In front of him, the body of Birgitta Ghiberti lay sprawled across snowy rubble with her head split open. Blood from the wound formed a black pool on the ice that reflected Sverdrup’s distorted figure in shimmering layers of moonlight.

  Harry trembled with an overwhelming sense of remorse. Her death diminished him, as all deaths do, but more so, it was a judgment. She had come to him for protection from her son, her son had urged him to protect his mother from him, and Harry had let them both down. Deep inside he heard voices declare his failure, voices quivering with sorrow and fear, small voices scratching on the inside of his skull.

  Sverdrup shifted his position, and from Harry’s perspective his ghastly complexion flared into a leathery sheen as he lit a cigarette, then subsided into a putrescent glow, pulsing br
ighter when he inhaled. Sverdrup finally stood up; his fingers gleamed black in the moonlight from blood still warm on his hands. He turned and nodded at Harry, who until that moment was not sure if his presence had been detected or if he had been nothing more than the flutter of a moving thing in the dappled night.

  “She’s dead,” said Sverdrup.

  Harry backed away a little. Death must have taken her by surprise. He wondered if she had time to recognize her assailant. Sverdrup seemed an unlikely killer. In spite of the matte black hair, his sickly pallor, and the squinty eyes sunk deep into his head, he was a constable in the National Criminal Police.

  Sverdrup must have followed her through from the hotel courtyard. He moved closer to Harry and blew smoke into the air between them. Even turning his head to the side, Harry could not avoid the sweet warm tobacco aroma that enveloped them both. Harry stood his ground.

  Sverdrup had blood on his hands. If “Ockham’s razor”—the principle held sacred by philosophers that the simplest explanation was best—then Sverdrup had just murdered Birgitta Ghiberti. But Harry knew he had not; sometimes gut feelings trumped logic. Sverdrup and his boss were strange but surely not deadly. They thrived on complexity. Whatever had brought Sverdrup to Visby, Ockham and his razor didn’t apply.

  Whomever the dead woman had been intending to meet had bashed in her skull and fled only seconds before Sverdrup and Harry arrived.

  Harry shuffled a bit to the side, so that he was standing directly over the corpse. As he did so, Sverdrup moved back a little to give him room. They were being polite with each other in that stilted way enemies have when they are forced by circumstances to be congenial. Sverdrup coughed and spat but said nothing. Harry hunkered down and Sverdrup dropped to his haunches beside him.

  Very limber, Harry, but too close.

  Birgitta Ghiberti’s fur hat lay on the frozen snow, just outside the shadowy crypt that was formed by shade from the moon. The fur riffled in the slight breeze. Beside it a boulder the size of a pineapple, its jagged contours streaked with cerebral tissue and blood, left no doubt it was the instrument of her brutal demise. There was no blood on the hat. She had removed it before she was struck. Or someone else had.

  As Harry stood up, a hand clutched him firmly through his sheepskin from behind, sinking long fingers into his shoulder. He was startled; he had not sensed her arrival.

  He tried to shrug free as he turned slowly to face Hannah Arnason, but the more he struggled, the more firm and unwavering her grip. He was not prepared to make a scene, so he assumed a relaxed posture, close enough to her that he could feel her warm breath breach the dark cold between them.

  “Inspector Arnason, it’s Harry Lindstrom.”

  “Yes, Mr. Lindstrom, I know it’s you. And you have found Mrs. Ghiberti, I see.”

  “I’m afraid she’s dead.”

  “You have a gift for stating the obvious, Mr. Lindstrom.” She released her talon-like grip from his shoulder and brushed the outside of his coat to smooth out the indentations left by her fingers. “We seem to have got here a little too late.”

  “Apparently we did,” said Harry.

  She doesn’t mean you.

  “Inspector Arnason,” he said. “I saw this woman ten minutes ago. She came through the passageway from the hotel. I followed her the long way around.”

  “I’m sure you did, Mr. Lindstrom.”

  “She was dead when I got here. Your man, Sverdrup, was already with her. I didn’t see anyone leave.”

  “Perhaps we’ll find footprints in the snow.”

  Harry looked at her quizzically. The ground surface inside the ruins was icy or crusted over. There wouldn’t be any footprints.

  “You don’t imagine I killed her, for God’s sake?”

  As he spoke, she manoeuvred him to the side, and Sverdrup slipped on the cuffs over Harry’s gloved wrists.

  Sverdrup wiped his bloodied hands on his pants, then took out a cell phone from his coat pocket and poked in a number. He said something in Swedish, surprisingly brief, then snapped the phone shut and put his gloves on.

  “You see, Harry,” said Hannah Arnason. “It’s pretty straightforward. The constable came one way and I came another, and there you were in the middle. You and the corpse of Birgitta Ghiberti.”

  “But Sverdrup got here before me.”

  “Apparently not. Too bad, really. It is unfortunate.”

  “Yes, it is,” said Harry. He was incredulous. Why would Sverdrup lie?

  “We will have an opportunity now to talk about the other murders.”

  “The other what?” Harry was alarmed.

  “We have much to discuss,” said the woman who in her high boots towered over him.

  The three of them moved like ghostly shades out through the open space past the entry, where the breeze was beginning to build, and headed up the deserted street to a parked car. As they climbed in, it occurred to Harry he would be relieved when they got to the Gotland County police station. This weird woman, like a Valkyrie and her shadow, gave all the appearance of leading a slain warrior to his final resting place. The police station would be infinitely preferable.

  But when the car pulled forward to an intersection, it turned down a small side street and cut across several more, before plunging through the shadows of the Norderport and speeding off into the darkness. Twisting his head, Harry watched through the back window as the lights of the town were swallowed up in the night.

  He cleared his throat to speak, but he could find no words adequate to protest his apparent abduction. He was alone in the back seat. No one had bothered to do up his seat belt, although theirs were secured. He leaned forward.

  In a firm but conciliatory tone, he said, “Inspector Arnason?” He offered his words as a litmus test, trying to read the forces at play.

  There was a brief pause before Sverdrup shifted slowly around from the passenger seat to stare at him, eye to eye, and suddenly his gloved hand flashed through the air and crashed against the side of Harry’s skull. Harry saw it coming, and then the world disappeared.

  15 IN A KITCHEN SOMEWHERE

  HARRY LAY SPRAWLED ACROSS THE BACK SEAT AS HE slipped in and out of consciousness. He couldn’t distinguish between muffled sounds of the road jangling in his head and shards of light that lacerated the swarming darkness or the penetrating throbbing in his right temple. It all seemed a jumble of painful sensations.

  He knew he was on the island of Gotland. He knew he was a prisoner in the back of a police car, driving north from Visby. He suspected he had a concussion; he must have smashed against the side window from the force of the blow. He assumed that he was in grave danger, but what bothered him more was the feeling that he was misunderstood.

  Only you, Harry! You’d rather be tortured to death than not be “understood.” Karen whispered the word with a vehemence that he thought was funny as he slipped into oblivion. When he returned, she was still there, whispering. You don’t give a damn if you die, Harry. You think that gives you an advantage but it doesn’t. Because I don’t want you dead. You’ve got to live with that.

  He felt the car wheel onto a rough side road and after a few minutes come to a stop. He was aware of being hoisted onto his feet but his mind was disengaged from his body. He observed himself stumbling with his arms around his captors’ shoulders. It was someone else, someone he didn’t know, and he was having trouble sustaining his interest in the whole scenario.

  They entered a room through a side porch and when the lights flared he saw they were in a kitchen, probably in a deserted farmhouse. It seemed almost as cold inside as out, but it was warm enough that the dank smell of mildew penetrated his hazy awareness with a restorative pungency, and he was suddenly and painfully alert.

  Sverdrup lit a fire in the woodstove, and Hannah Arnason, after cuffing Harry to a chair, brought together the makings for tea. Sverdrup kneeled almost solicitously and removed Harry’s boots.

  “No cream or milk,” she announced. Since she w
as speaking English, Harry assumed she was directing her congenial observation at him.

  “That’s okay,” he said. “I take it black.”

  She filled a kettle from the kitchen faucet and placed it on the stove, and then she dampened a tea towel and proceeded to dab blood from Harry’s forehead. She offered no apology. Sverdrup observed the proceedings with casual indifference. The room began to warm up. The central heating must have been turned down but was sufficient to stop the pipes from freezing. By the time the tea was ready, the room was almost cozy, although tinged with the aroma of stale tobacco emanating from Sverdrup’s clothes. Clearly, though, he did not smoke in his superior’s presence.

  “Sugar?” It was Sverdrup who asked.

  “Sure,” said Harry, who seldom drank tea and never with sugar, but felt he might need the sustenance for whatever lay ahead.

  Sverdrup removed Harry’s cuffs long enough to help him off with his coat, which he hung with the other two on pegs by the door. Then they sat down at the kitchen table and sipped their tea in silence. If one of them had not been in handcuffs, with a trickle of blood seeping from a slit in his right temple, while another picked absently at flecks of dried blood on his hands, and the third seemed ominously serene, they might have been old friends so at ease with each other; language was superfluous.

  Harry could hear Karen whispering, but he couldn’t make out what she said. He looked around the room. It was pleasantly nondescript. He looked down at the little tea canister on the table. For a brief interlude, Harry was amused by its familiarity. The label read: Farmer Hulda’s blandning, Kränku, Visby Gotland. He thought immediately of Birgitta. It was the same kind of tea box in which Bernd stored his cache of fingernail parings.