by Moss, John
They had taken his sheepskin coat and his gloves. His toque was in the coat pocket. Where were his boots? His scarf was in Toronto. I can’t escape without being properly dressed for the occasion, he thought. Damn, damn, damn. I’m damned.
He wondered if they were alright out in the cold. He felt a strange sympathy for his captors. They seemed as confused as he was. Captain Oates, he’s not coming back.
The Stockholm syndrome, Harry. Get it together. Forget it. Not in Sweden, okay?
Harry was worried Karen would begin speaking out loud, and he’d have to answer. And then there’d be no possibility of a rational outcome.
You don’t really think there is one, now?
Harry grimaced. He realized that absolute candour might be the only way to force Inspector Arnason to sort out what she was up to. If he could only be rational, perhaps she would respond in kind.
He felt Karen’s pity. For his naiveté. Before he could protest, Hannah Arnason burst back into the room with her henchman close behind. Whatever the topic of their confab, within minutes they had turned the deserted farmhouse kitchen into an interrogation room, rearranging the chairs and moving a floor lamp with a moth-eaten shade closer to the table before turning out the overhead lights.
Harry was illuminated, the inspector was in shadow, and Sverdrup faded into the darkness at the musky edge of the room.
Harry was apprehensive. He didn’t know where that fell, between fear and being afraid, but it was unpleasant.
“Now then, Mr. Lindstrom.” She spoke in a businesslike tone that utterly denied the sinister absurdity of their situation. “Let us suppose you are not telling me lies.”
“Fair enough.”
“Your friend the superintendent thinks you murdered the girl in Canada; Chief Constable Arnason suspects you did not kill my cousin Judith in Iceland, which leaves open the possibility that you did; there was evidence at the death scene in Hagaparken that you were there when that girl died in the snow; and Constable Sverdrup found the corpse of Birgitta Ghiberti and you were there in the shadows before the blood had stopped flowing from the hole in her skull. Yes?”
“No.”
Suddenly Harry’s neck snapped to the side and his vision shattered into coronas of dazzling light. Sverdrup had walloped him on the back of his head.
“Yes,” Harry murmured.
He waited until the room resolved into coherent images.
“What you have said is correct, as far as it goes.” He shook his head slowly. “May I speak without your goon giving me another concussion?”
“Of course,” she said, leaning forward into the cone of light, so that the glare shimmered in her eyes with an amiable glow. “Now that we agree on the facts.”
“But there are other ways of reading them.” He braced himself for a blow from the darkness behind him, but she looked up with a flickering change in expression, and Harry could sense that Sverdrup had backed deeper into the shadows.
“Please, you explain everything. I will listen.”
“There’s no point in asking about procedural abnormalities, I suppose?” He could feel Sverdrup looming behind him, but Hannah Arnason leaned even closer, the way she had that first evening at dinner, when he saw the night sky in the depths of her eyes. She nodded her permission for him to continue.
She shifted back from the light again, leaving Harry ominously on his own.
He tried to gather his thoughts.
Hannah Arnason spoke from the shadows, “Please, you may talk. Think of me as the judge, my colleague the jury.”
He wasn’t sure if the slight stilted nuances in her speech were because she was speaking an unfamiliar language or if they were somehow an affectation to make herself more dangerously alluring.
Oh for God’s sake, Harry.
Inhaling deeply, he proceeded to explain how Birgitta Ghiberti had probably doubled back to Canada from Iceland at Christmas, travelling under her Swedish passport, and with a pathological deference to irony had murdered an Icelandic-Canadian girl in a sub-zero sauna in Ontario. Leaving the evidence of Harry’s scarf to prove the villain was a man she had recruited to prove her own son a serial killer.
“Why?” asked the woman in shadows.
“Why did she tell me all this, or why did she try to frame me? I don’t know. I do not know. But she seems to have abandoned irony in Stockholm. She simply force-marched a naked girl through the snow in the Haga Park until the girl dropped from exposure.”
Simply!
“Again, framing you.”
“Yes.”
“Why naked?”
“I have no idea.”
“And what about the blackened fingers, Dr. Lindstrom? Why would she imitate the primary marker of the killings she ascribed to her son, if she was trying to blame you? Doesn’t it seem far more likely that you would do that, yourself, trying to shift the blame to him?”
“It does seem more likely. But that’s the beauty of it. That’s exactly what she assumed you would think.”
“You realize, Harry, you have just provided motivation for murdering this woman, including the rage you must have felt to end her life with such brutality.”
Deep breath, Harry.
“Not rage, revulsion. She horrified me.”
“By being so calm about murder?”
“We had dinner together at a place called the Lindgarden. In spite of her grisly confessions, we had an absurdly sociable time. Lamb, salmon, followed by Xante, two of them, it tastes like pears and cognac.”
“I know what it tastes like. So you had dinner together. Is that not an odd thing to do with a person you suspect of murder?”
“You also had dinner with me! Several times.”
Her smile from the shadows broadened, then collapsed as Harry continued, “I’m not sure bashing someone’s brains out isn’t kinder than killing them slowly in the natural conditions of a northern winter.”
Murder by geography! Harry, you’re not a witness for the prosecution.
But he was convinced the best way through was to expose the truth, not matter how compromising it seemed.
Let the chips fall where they may, eh.
“Let’s suppose for a minute that I’m not a monster. Who else might fit the description? The victim’s son, right? Let’s suppose he actually is a serial killer, let’s suppose he was legitimately implicated in the deaths of his sisters, and let’s not forget that he tried to enlist me to prevent him from killing his mother, something I dutifully reported back to you over sauerkraut and sausages. By candlelight. Obviously, in the case of Birgitta, he was emotionally involved. It stands to reason, if he felt compelled to kill her, he would need to do it in a fit of passion, using the only weapon at hand, a boulder among the ruins.”
“Harry, you are from a winter country?”
“Yes.”
Mon pays c’est l’hiver.
“Then, tell me. How do you pick up a boulder from the frozen ground? It is almost impossible. It would be iced into place.”
She has a point, Harry. You should have anticipated this.
“Perhaps it was from one of the walls.”
“In Sweden our ruins are not crumbling.”
Harry didn’t need Karen to tell him to take another tack.
“The blonde girl who met Birgitta at the Hotel St. Clemens can vouch for me.”
“Really, you talked to her.”
“No, I followed her from the shop where she works.”
You can see how that looks, Harry.
“In a souvenir shop off the Strandgatan. I wanted to make sure she got home okay. But strangely enough, she went right to our hotel. I watched her meet with Birgitta.”
“You were spying?”
This isn’t getting any better.
“I did. I was. She went away, apparently to arrange some sort of meeting between Birgitta and someone else, presumably Bernd.”
“You don’t know for sure?”
“No, I was inside, watching through my
window.”
“How convenient. And neither of them saw you?”
Good point, Harry. Either of them might have.
“Birgitta left and went down the passageway into the ruins.”
“And the girl?”
“She disappeared.”
“Again, how convenient for you. And what does this prove?”
“Birgitta had implied the girl would be her next victim.”
“Implied? Over dinner and a Xante cordial?”
“Two of them.”
“Just like her son told you he was going to kill Birgitta. Harry, for a man who is troubled by patterns, you seem to be trapped in quite a few.”
Harry didn’t respond.
“And Birgitta announced that she would blame the girl’s death on you. But instead she met with this same girl, where? In the courtyard of the St. Clemens Hotel, where she was a registered guest. Not a clandestine plot, I think. No. But it is a lovely hotel. I have stayed there myself. We will look for this girl. We will also check you out of the hotel. The concierge might become worried.”
That’s ominous, Harry. You’d better start seriously thinking about an exit strategy.
“Assuming this girl exists and is still alive,” Hannah continued, “just what can she tell us?”
“I’m not sure, but whoever she arranged to have Birgitta meet, that’s your killer.”
“Of course.” Hannah stifled a yawn. “I’m afraid this girl is one blonde too many, Harry. A dead end.”
So to speak.
“Before we conclude,” Hannah Arnason said, leaning again into the light, “let us return to the matter of why Birgitta Ghiberti would go to such monstrous extremes as you have described? Maybe you have a theory, Professor.”
“Perhaps, and this may sound strange …”
Are you sure about this?
“Perhaps,” he continued, after a long pause, “it was all about love.”
“For you? My goodness.”
“For her son.”
As soon as he said it, Harry knew he was on the right track, as grotesque as it seemed. Sometimes murder is a family affair.
“Once she became absolutely convinced he was a serial killer, it was a way to get closer to him. Having betrayed him, she could make amends by emulating his crimes, with variations to suggest I was the culprit.”
Harry, even I’m not convinced.
“And do you think the son murdered his mother as an act of love, as well.”
“Quite possibly, yes.”
My God, Harry.
There’s no use trying to explain this one, Harry thought. It has to do with the perversity of the bond between them, rooted in horrific violations of natural affection. They were compelled by so much death to protect and punish each other.
Explain that to the jury. Give it your best shot, Harry.
But Harry said nothing. He was contemplating the horrific relationship between love and death that defined the Ghibertis. It was as easy to imagine one of them killing for love as dying for it. Bernd’s desperate need for his mother’s affection could have led to unspeakable acts.
Hannah Arnason stood up and walked around the room, circling Harry who tried to follow her with his eyes but kept losing her in the shadows. She sat down again and with a small cough offered Harry what seemed a throw-away question, “Before we conclude, do you have anything to add about the murder of Judith Arnason?”
“In the glacier? What more can I say? Perhaps she slipped in.”
“After painting the inside edges of her fingernails with black polish?”
Which doesn’t prove anything except the murders are connected. It doesn’t even prove the same person did them.
Suddenly he understood why Birgitta Ghiberti had chosen the Iceland route back to Sweden. To get Harry there. To implicate him in this murder, too.
Miranda Quin must have mentioned to Birgitta that he’d been to Iceland the previous August. It was the kind of gossip people offer, when they’re trying to anticipate a bond between strangers.
In that innocuous moment, Birgitta’s plot was born.
Harry had been in Iceland at roughly the same time as Bernd must have been there, a visit that coincided with the disappearance of a young woman whose body turned up in a glacial crevasse.
Lure Harry back to Iceland, force a connection in the minds of police between Harry and the frozen corpse.
Why bother, Harry? They can’t make it stick.
I don’t know. I do not know.
Perhaps Birgitta knew how Hannah Arnason thinks.
Meaning what?
She seems willing to proceed with the prosecution with insufficient evidence.
Yeah.
They had met, you know that. Birgitta could be tapping into the pathology of a rogue cop.
I don’t think Birgitta could have anticipated all that’s happened.
You have doubts?
I always have doubts. It’s called critical thinking.
Then how about this? Your being in Iceland was just a coincidence.
Part of Harry wanted to retreat into a corner of his mind where he could debate the absurdities of free will, but he knew Karen would block him.
“Try checking on Bernd Ghiberti’s exact whereabouts when your cousin was murdered,” he said. As an afterthought, he added, “And his mother’s, as well.”
Hannah Arnason slid her chair away from the cone of light and stood up, looming over him. Her movement stirred the odours of wood smoke and mildew and stale tobacco, mixed with the fresh winter scent of her body and his own salt-sweet smell from the strain of confinement.
The overhead lights flashed on. Evidently, the trial was over.
Sverdrup moved around into Harry’s line of vision. He was squinting and fidgety, shuffling as if his feet were frozen, although several times over the past few hours he had stoked up the woodstove and the room was warm.
Harry tried to make eye contact but the man was nervous and glanced away. Hannah Arnason turned to look down at her cohort. She said something Harry couldn’t make out and Sverdrup stiffened. She cast a fleeting look at Harry then back at Sverdrup, then retrieving her coat, she walked out into the night, closing the door behind her with a decisive thud.
Harry had the horrible feeling Sverdrup had been given the job of executioner. From the anguished look on his weaselly face he wasn’t too happy about it. Harry started to get up but Sverdrup pushed him back, catching him off balance. Harry was in no shape to fight.
The man leaned down close to Harry and whispered, “Horatio. My name is Horatio Sverdrup.”
Nothing more.
The car outside coughed and turned over. The engine revved and then slowly faded until it was out of range.
Harry looked up into the other man’s face, which still reminded him of a worn leather satchel, and Horatio Sverdrup had tears in his eyes.
Oh God, Harry, this doesn’t look good.
Sverdrup reached into the depths of his coat pocket. Harry realized the man had never taken it off, even when the kitchen warmed to a comfortable temperature. He eyed his own coat on the peg by the door, doubting he’d ever wear it again.
Was Sverdrup digging around for a knife or a gun? Whatever, it seemed reluctant to leave the confines of his pocket.
Harry decided to flail out, try to take the man down. It would be a desperation move, since although the other man gave the appearance of being decrepit, he was not suffering from a possible concussion, or gouges cut into his wrist and a sprained arm, or fractured ribs and wounded toes. But as Harry began to ease his chair stealthily away from the table, ready to spring, Sverdrup’s hand emerged with a jerk from his pocket.
Clutched in his fist was a squashed chocolate bar, furred at the edges of the torn wrapper with lint and whatever detritus had been nesting in the man’s pocket. Triumphant, Sverdrup held his prize up and blew on it vigorously, under the misapprehension that it had now been sanitized. He then plunked it down on the table in front of Har
ry.
“You eat,” he grunted.
“I’m not really hungry.”
“You take it.”
Harry’s expression of bewilderment seemed to amuse the other man, who almost smiled.
“You will go away. Please, it is better.”
Harry stood up tentatively. He placed the weird token of civility into his pocket, but lurched as he moved forward and had to grasp the edge of the table to stabilize.
“Please, Inspector Arnason, she has gone to Visby. She will ask questions about Mrs. Ghiberti, and about the blonde woman in the hotel courtyard, and about you. She will return in two hours, maybe not so long.”
“Then, perhaps this will be over once she checks out my story.”
“Yes,” he responded with a doleful countenance. “When she comes back, she will kill you.”
17 WINTER LANDSCAPE
HARRY TRUDGED THROUGH THE RUTS OF SNOW ALONG the laneway. He was surprised how far the farmhouse was set back from the main road. The wind had died in the stillness before dawn and the air was bitterly cold. The night sky was swathed by the magical brightness of a parhelion, formed by the refraction of moonlight through ice crystals high in the atmosphere. The snow glistened with a billion points of light, and Harry felt an unsettling happiness seep through before slipping away.
He was wearing Sverdrup’s fur-lined hat over his toque and Sverdrup’s thick sheepskin gloves over his own. The man had insisted he take them.
Sverdrup had practically pushed him out of the door, having tried to explain the situation in brief while Harry laced up his boots.
“You must understand,” he said. “Inspector Arnason is very good police. It is in my honour to work by her. But she is not herself. That is a good expression, I think. Not herself, but she is not someone else. You need to know, please hurry, it is for her I want you to go, so she will not do some very bad thing.”
Harry had risen to his feet and donned his heavy coat but stood resolute, making it clear he needed further clarification. Sverdrup shrugged, as if giving up something under duress.
“The dead girl on Sólheimajökull Glacier, you know, that was Inspector Hannah’s half sister, yes.” He paused to let Harry assimilate the implications. “They were very close, yes. The father was the same, but not the mother.”