by Moss, John
Harry was stunned. “Why didn’t she say?”
“Because that is not how she is. She is great policeperson. Very unusual, yes, but in National Criminal Police she has good results, so that is okay. We are partners, yes. It is okay. You must hit me now, so I will bleed.”
Harry understood.
He took a deep breath and punched the other man square in the face with enough force that he thought he could hear the cartilage in his nose crack. It was hard to separate hearing from feeling; his sense responses flowed together in the ongoing rush of adrenalin. Blood spurted from Sverdrup’s nostrils as he staggered back against the table.
“Very good,” the man sniffled. “Now you take these, and you go.” He handed Harry his gloves and hat, then reached into a pocket and took out his wallet. After removing his police identification, he handed the wallet to Harry. There is money but do not use credit cards or we will find you too soon. You must go quickly now, away from Visby.”
Harry reached out and grasped the man’s hand.
“Thank you, Constable Horatio Sverdrup. You know I am innocent?”
Sverdrup turned and spat into the open door of the wood stove. “It does not matter.”
AT THE HIGHWAY, Harry turned north, away from Visby. He had only the vaguest sense of Gotland geography but he knew there was a ferry to the island of Fårö at the far end, and he was certain that’s where Bernd would be, taking sanctuary on Fårö with his maiden aunts, finding perverse redemption for killing his mother—he would have convinced himself that her death was a family obligation.
The family that slays together stays together.
Not if they’re killing each other.
When Hannah finds out you’re missing, there’ll be hell to pay. She’ll call in the Gotland Police.
I doubt it. If she suspects her shadow set me free and I think she will, despite the bloodied nose, she’ll be pissed off but not inclined to go legit. She’s a rogue cop; she likes it that way. And she’ll know Sverdrup did it for her. They’ll come after me on their own.
Either way, she wins. This is a vendetta, Harry. Whether Bernd kills you or she does, she’ll have avenged her half sister—and at the same time enhanced her reputation as an eccentric cop. I wouldn’t want to be in your boots, Harry.
He thought he could hear the sounds of her laughter drifting over the moonlit snow.
When he reached an intersection, he hunkered down at the side of the road, drawing his long sheepskin coat close around him, finding an odd comfort in the smoky emanations it gave off as he settled into its warmth. It was light when a bus came along. Harry clambered aboard, nearly frozen. He used Sverdrup’s money to pay and settled back on a seat directly over a heater. When he woke up, they were at the ferry terminus.
He bought a ticket in the tiny kiosk and walked on board, but he didn’t relax until the ferry pulled away from the wharf. He watched through the layers of ice on the cabin window as Gotland slipped from view and Fårö loomed in the offing. And then, once again, he felt an unsettling happiness.
A man in one of the small shops at the Fårö terminus agreed to drive Harry to the Sviar farm.
Harry wasn’t trying to cover his tracks. The authorities would arrive and either he or Bernd would be charged with murder, or Hannah and her shadow would turn up, and Bernd’s presence would protect him. He gazed out the car window. His head throbbed and he tried to focus on the scenery.
Fårö was flat and snow covered but not at all bleak. From Bergman movies, Harry had anticipated a featureless and forbidding landscape, with weatherworn trees, windblown grasses, and haunting old houses clinging to the rocky shoreline. It was all this, but they also passed cheerful roadside cafés, a few gift shops, and low-slung cottages here and there between pale farmhouses with bright painted doors, conjoined by an endless lacework of stone walls, some revealed only as ridges in the drifts and others blown clean. If churches and wind turbines dominated the little he had seen of Gotland, their absence characterized what he could see of Fårö. He was enthralled with the emptiness, possibly the way Bergman had been when he first came to the island sixty years ago. It was a place that invited him to pour out his soul, knowing it would never be fully depleted.
Although they had not said a word to each other for the entire forty minutes it took to drive the length of the island on snowy roads, when the driver pulled up at the Sviar farmhouse, he smiled, shook Harry’s hand, and refused the offer of money.
Harry surveyed the weathered old house. Despite a steep tile roof and small gabled window on the second story, it hunkered stolidly into the landscape. The pale stucco walls and frameless mullioned windows gave it a ghostly appearance against the low foliage and snow-scaled fields. A turquoise door set over a low stoop was the only concession to joy.
Harry pushed through the gate in the stone wall. The walkway hadn’t been shovelled since the last snowfall. There were echoes of footprints where snow had drifted into the depressions.
Before knocking at the door, he turned to gaze out over the open sea, which seemed wind-whipped into sullen submission, the waves choppy but small, with veils of blown spume sweeping away from their ragged crests. The clouds were sullen and low, threatening with squalls of driving sleet. It was breathtakingly beautiful, like a Blackwood etching, a vital blend of silvers and pewter grey, blue-black, and the infinite colours of white.
Between the sea and the house, beyond the wall and the road, a ramshackle wooden shed stood off to the side, perched among boulders on the shore. The shed was coated on its weather side with layers of ice from the spray of the sea beating against the rocks.
He wondered if the stone walls of Fårö were continuous segments of a single long and intricate thread stitched deliberately over the island, holding the land and the people together. Off in the distance, a towering lighthouse rose out of the whiteness, piercing the sullen grey sky like a needle. Was that where the stone walls converged?
As soon as he had clambered from the car into the morning cold, Harry had pulled the fur flaps of Sverdrup’s hat down over his ears. He was effectively deaf, although his other senses had sorted themselves out over the last couple of hours. Images of his captivity seemed strangely a blur. He reached a gloved hand to his right temple. It was sore, but the throbbing ache had faded away. The pain in his arm had subsided to a tolerable level, and the excruciating tenderness of his toes had dispersed into the general mélange of discomfort.
As he stared out over the seascape, he became aware that stale warm odours of uncirculated air had begun to wrap around him from behind. His muscles tightened defensively as he turned to face an open door. Standing in the doorway was a diminutive blonde, a young woman with an upturned nose and pale blue eyes. Not what he had expected.
“Mr. Harry Lindstrom?” said the woman, and in those three words he could tell her English was nearly perfect. Of course, it was the girl in the courtyard, Birgitta’s intended next victim, the blonde messenger who arranged for Birgitta’s deadly assignation among the ruins of St. Clemens.
“Please come in.” She surveyed the weather horizon. A storm was building offshore.
He stepped into the warmth. She took his sheepskin and Sverdrup’s gloves and hat and arranged them on pegs on the hallway wall. He tucked his black toque and his own gloves into his coat pocket.
Sitting across the living room, side by side on a deeply stuffed sofa, two elderly ladies looked up from watching television and nodded in his direction. One was lean and severe, the other was portly. The lines on their faces had taken different directions as they had aged, but they had obviously originated in the same genetic pool.
Annie and Lenke, the maiden aunts, did not smile.
The young woman introduced Harry. They seemed to have been expecting him, or at least were not surprised by his visit. Annie, the thin one, looked vaguely interested. The heftier one seemed annoyed by the intrusion. They were both nibbling on biscuits and drinking tea. Farmer Hulda’s blandning from Kränku, Ha
rry imagined. They might have been Hulda’s blood relatives.
“I am Skadi,” the young woman explained, as she motioned Harry to follow her through to the kitchen. “Bernd told me you were coming.”
Harry recalled there was no telephone in the farmhouse.
He stared into her eyes and saw his own distorted reflection in their bland cheerfulness. There was no indication she knew anything about Birgitta’s death.
She poured Harry a cup of tea and slid a plate of dry biscuits across the table, taking one for herself. She did not offer him milk. Was it because she didn’t take it herself? What on earth had Bernd told her, to make her so guileless? He sipped and smiled when she slurped. She was very young. If she was a student at the university in Visby as Bernd had suggested, she must be in her first year. She was quietly affable.
“When did you get here?” he asked.
“We came on the first ferry, this morning. It was still dark. You must have arrived on the next.”
“Where is he now?”
“Bernd? At the Olafsson cottage. Our friends, Inge and Bjorn, he saw them in Stockholm and said he would drop in to check on winter-damage. I told him it was okay, I was there last week. But he insisted, so we stopped and I walked on by foot. It is not so far, just down the road. Then I made my aunties some tea.”
Her aunties. She’s family.
Harry noticed there was another cup and saucer set out, in expectation of Bernd’s arrival.
Should he tell her Birgitta was murdered? Might the knowledge put her and her aunts in jeopardy? He said nothing.
Bernd appeared in the kitchen doorway. They had not heard him come in and apparently his aunties had only nodded, the same way as they had greeted Harry.
Bernd was flushed from the cold but quite cheerful.
“Harry,” he said, ignoring Skadi, “you look like hell.”
“With good reason,” said Harry. He offered nothing more. It was up to the other man to clarify the situation. Not because he had the power, but Harry felt comfortable, with witnesses present and his adversary out in the open where he could see him.
Bernd did not look like someone who only hours before had smashed in his mother’s skull with a rock. If there had been any doubt in Harry’s mind about this man’s capacity for evil, it was dispelled by Bernd’s preternatural composure. Harry was certain now of the possibility.
Circular argument, Harry.
“Perhaps we should talk,” Harry suggested without urgency, trying not to alarm Skadi, but indicating they needed privacy.
“Yes, of course,” said Bernd. “After you have rested. Skadi will show you the guest room. There’s a new traveller’s toilet kit on the dresser, courtesy of Air Iceland. You can shave, brush your teeth, wash up, and have a nap, then we’ll talk.”
“Very civilized,” said Harry.
Skadi got up and walked over to Bernd, kissing him in a perfunctory way on both cheeks.
“You’re cold,” she said.
After Skadi led Harry to the room, he noticed the door locked on the inside. Wallpaper from the 1950s above thickly varnished wainscoting. Amateur oil paintings had been hung during the past few generations without deference to aesthetics, and several pieces of driftwood affixed to the walls cast skeletal shadows from the overhead light. The flesh-toned curtains looked like they hadn’t been opened in years, but they were sufficiently sheer that a diffuse natural light filtered through, struggling vainly to enliven the pallor that spread out from the incandescent bulb in the ceiling fixture.
There was a cramped en suite bathroom.
Harry locked the door quietly, then performed his ablutions and collapsed on the bed. He could hear Skadi and Bernd talking in low voices in the kitchen. Neither had commented about the wound on the side of Harry’s head nor inquired as to why he was there. The television mumbled to the aunts in the living room and Harry fell into a restless sleep.
ACCORDING TO THE old man what made the Anishnabe so good for a family trip was, paradoxically, the rapids were too dangerous to shoot. There was a lovely swift current but a lot of big water crashing through gorges that you had no choice but to portage around. With proper respect, the river was safe and exciting, even this early in the season, and the terrifying beauty its violence had worked on the terrain was sublime—in Schopenhauer’s sense, awesome and turbulent with the power to destroy.
“You’ll have a straightforward paddle, the first three-four hours. You can’t get lost, you know, it’s all downhill.” The old man chuckled at his own joke. “When you get to Roll-Away Rapids you keep hard right. Then real soon after that you cross to river-left and take the portage around Devil’s Cauldron. You’ll want your feet on the solid for that one. Hang on to your kids, so’s they don’t get too close to the edge. After that, it’s flat-water all the way. If there’s whitecaps on Long Pine, sit tight, there’s a campsite just down from the falls. I’ll come up by motor and get yez.”
He described Roll-Away Rapids as a riffling on the surface and easy to run. Virgil knew the country so well he could not imagine misreading the signs, the vast slopes gathering into tumultuous crags, the twisting gorge, pines giving way to tenacious cedars on the battered shore. Virgil would decipher all this at a visceral level, knowing exactly where the rapids would be, even this early in the season when they were not really visible, so deep was the melt-water flooding.
18 THE SHED BY THE SEA
HARRY WOKE UP WITH A START FROM THE STABBING PAIN in his toes. As soon as it had his attention, the pain subsided. His thoughts shifted to a gut-wrenching ache in the pit of his stomach. He took a few deep breaths. His ribs hurt. He tried to relax, tried to erase tumultuous images of water. He thought he had been dreaming about his brother, about Bobby’s drowning in Trois Rivières. He could hear rattling of dishes in the kitchen and the television still rumbled from the living room. It might have been a pleasant domestic scene, but for the causes of death that converged in this farmhouse on the edge of the world.
Harry the philosopher had earlier been considering the various implications of his predicament as an intellectual exercise. But when he woke up fully, he was in the suffocating grip of powerful, if jumbled, emotions. His gut responded to his being only a partition away from a serial killer sipping tea in the adjoining room, but even more because the congenial killer’s mother had planned it that way.
Harry walked into the bathroom and splashed water on his face. He was still half asleep. The pipes shuddered when he turned off the taps. They knew he was up.
He glanced over at himself in the dresser mirror. He wasn’t there. The brief sense of shock that ran through him set off an alarm. Just because the world doesn’t make sense, that didn’t mean he couldn’t make sense of the world. He reached out and tilted the mirror downward and watched the ceiling swing back and his own image rise into view.
So, what was Birgitta’s motive, getting you mired in the muck?
It’s not like I haven’t been trying to figure that out.
Getting bitchy won’t help. You’re not going to find answers in a mirror.
Only by proclaiming her guilt for murdering those girls and promising to kill another could she be sure I’d follow her back to the hotel.
And that is important why?
I’m not sure, but it is. I think she saw me watching her in the courtyard from my window.
When she was with Skadi.
Yeah.
Harry gazed into the depths of his eyes. It was the same as when he was a child, searching for his soul, for some revelation that would let him know who he was. He couldn’t believe he was nothing more than a boy looking into a mirror. He had trouble now believing he was the man the boy had become.
Don’t get maudlin, Harry. Stay focused.
Harry turned his back to the mirror. He waited for Karen to continue.
She was after your innocence, Harry.
Harry’s lips formed a thin smile. He waited.
It’s about innocence, Harry, not gu
ilt.
Harry waited.
It’s a powerful motive.
Innocence?
She had enough confidence in you to believe you’d fight, and fight fiercely, to prove your innocence. She knew, backed into a corner, you’d be driven to expose Bernd for the killer he is. At whatever the cost. She counted on that. And here you are.
Fiercely, eh. With my hosts rattling dishes in the next room.
You’re not a guest, Harry. You’re a prisoner.
Harry did not think he was fierce. He envisioned himself a gentle contemplative man.
We’ll see about that. You’ll do what it takes to get us out of here.
There was knock on the door, followed by Skadi’s small voice inviting him to join them for lunch.
The table was set for three.
The aunties apparently ate in the living room in front of the TV. No phone but satellite television. They obviously wanted to limit communication to an inward flow. He wondered if they ever watched the news.
Harry and Bernd dug into healthy portions of cold lamb and boiled potatoes, sautéed in butter and garlic, garnished with a sprig of parsley. Skadi ate more modestly. Harry wondered where the food had come from? How far were they from a store that sold fresh produce? Driving out, he had been absorbed in the austere beauties of the Fårö landscape. And in suppressing pain from his head, his forearm, his wrist, and of course, his toes. Even parsley could help get his bearings. He needed to start paying attention.
He hadn’t heard sounds of traffic, but vehicles move quietly on packed snow. There must be mail delivery. Not necessarily. There must be neighbours. There were only six hundred residents spread across the entire island. Tourists, not likely. Friends? Aunts Annie and Lenke, ensconced on their plush sofa, appeared to be socially self-sufficient.
Coffee was offered to finish things off.
They drank quietly. Harry tried to read the relationship between Bernd and Skadi, but it was impenetrable. They both seemed to belong there, but somehow not at the same time, not together.