by Moss, John
They scrambled back to the far end of the shed, closest to the sea. The true horror of their situation registered in their eyes as Bernd turned to Harry and announced in a strained voice, “Angry litigants locked in a burning cage.”
Is he quoting?
I think it’s his way of summarizing, without confessing.
Death confers guilt on the guilty, honour on the innocent.
Thanks for that, but it doesn’t help.
The two men dropped to their knees. Bernd choked, wheezing as he tried to replenish air expended from his last observation.
Harry struggled to think rationally. He looked around with mounting desperation. “If we both die,” he said, as much to himself as to Bernd, “Hannah has avenged her sister. No matter which of us she thinks it is, the killer is dead.”
He fell forward onto his hands, finding breathable air closer to the floor.
Bernd gasped, coughing and spitting, determined, like Harry, to remain rational to the end. These were men whose academic training had instilled in them the primacy of thought, above all, until the moment of death.
Harry, get us out of here.
Yeah.
Harry, when there’s no retreat, you attack. We can do this.
Behind them were the barred doors made of thick boards. Harry crouched low and peered under the layers of swirling smoke that descended almost to floor level. The blaze roared gold and vermilion, licking the side walls in giant tongues of flame, like a monstrous beast of fire was about to consume them.
At the far end, he thought he saw shards of daylight above the workbench as it collapsed into fiery embers. It must have had generations of motor oil and paint soaked into the wood, and it burnt faster than the surrounding walls.
Suddenly, Harry stood up, grabbing both coats from the pegs by the door. He hauled Bernd to his feet. The other man staggered, Harry braced him, wrapped his coat around him, wrapped his own coat over their heads.
He shouted unintelligibly into Bernd’s ear. They started to move. The other man stumbled and fell to the floor. Harry lifted him, struggled to hoist him over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry, got him up, winced from the searing pain in his sprained forearm, choked, resisted coughing by holding his breath, grasped his coat which had slipped down to expose their heads, and lunged directly into the flames, leaning, almost falling, so their combined weight carried them forward. He scrambled to maintain momentum, and reaching the fiery wall over the workbench, he sprang upward and plunged directly into it. They crashed through the weakened wood and rolled out onto the snow. Coughing, gasping for air, deafened by the roar of the fire as the entire inside of the shed burst into an inferno from the influx of oxygen and flames shot through the roof where the onshore wind swept them into smokeless shreds of pure heat. Harry’s bespoke sheepskin smouldered on the snow beside them.
Crawling away from their funeral pyre, hauling Bernd over rocks and snow, Harry reached a small haven formed by iced-over shrubbery where they were safe from the searing flames and protected from the lashing ice-laden wind. Sitting sprawled on the frozen ground and slouched against a boulder, cradling Bernd across his legs, Harry’s mind was swarming with the physical sensation of being in the present moment. With no thoughts at all.
The stench of singed hair assailed his nostrils. His face felt like it was on fire, and he scooped up snow to cool the flames, but the snow was crystalline and lacerated his skin. Gently he held a handful of snow against Bernd’s livid cheeks. They weren’t blistered but he was peeling, so Harry assumed his were the same.
How much are we the same? he wondered, rocking the man gently, realizing he was thinking again.
You’re not a killer, Harry.
I don’t think he is, either.
He crushed his mother’s skull with a rock from a church wall.
Is that different from other rocks?
Harry. You’ve survived an ordeal together. That doesn’t make you alike.
In some people’s eyes, I am a killer.
Don’t you believe it! (She was thinking about the Devil’s Cauldron.)
I don’t, I don’t. But I could be. Birgitta arranged the facts, didn’t she?
Facts aren’t truth, Harry. (Was she thinking about their current relationship?)
I’m glad we survived.
I’m glad too, Harry. I love you.
“I love you too,” he mumbled into the wind-chilled air.
Bernd squirmed around, trying to sit up. Harry gave him a gentle push and he settled back against the gnarled trunk of an ancient shrub. Bernd squinted to bring Harry into focus.
“Harry,” he mumbled, “You didn’t say—”
“I love you? No.”
“Thank you.” Bernd’s breathing was laboured.
“Once they find out we’re alive, Hannah and her accomplice have no choice but to finish the job.”
“It’s us or them, Harry. We fight back.”
Bernd and Harry as unlikely allies. Bernd started coughing and rolled across Harry’s legs onto his stomach, retched, rolled back. And seemed to pass out.
Yup. Harry summoned his interior John Wayne. We’ll fight ’em to the death, partner.
Harry, for God’s sake. Your new best friend is a monster.
Right now, that’s a good thing. I need a killer on my side.
Our side, Harry. I suppose the mark of a successful serial killer is he doesn’t seem like a serial killer. But this guy is deadly.
He’s likeable.
He’s unconscious.
Harry reached up, trying to scrape a crisp fragment of skin from the bridge of his nose. His fingers were too numb for the job, and his face was burning, too tender to touch.
In Norse mythology, Midgard or Middle Earth was created from fire and ice. Harry felt like he was caught up in the moment of creation.
Movement along the shore caught his attention. At first he thought it was ground cover whipped up by the growing storm, working itself into a frenzy. A figure slowly came into focus, moving in their direction. She was pushing against the wind with her head tilted away from them, taking the force of the icy squalls full in the face. She stopped close to the fire, by the upturned yellow boat, and stared into the flames.
Beside her were two red fuel containers, one lying empty on its side, and what looked like an open box of signal flares.
The shanty shimmered against the sea. The roar had died to a whimper, punctuated by the slumping noise of burning boards as they crashed inward, sending up spirals of sparks that the wind swept away.
There was enough of the back wall standing that Harry could make out the unnatural gap where he and Bernd had burst through.
The woman gazed at the hole, then glanced down and noticed Harry’s sheepskin coat. She picked it up and shook out the wisps of smoke. She suddenly turned in their direction as if she had had a revelation. When she pulled back the hood of her parka, he saw it wasn’t the beautiful and treacherous Hannah Arnason. It was Skadi, standing perfectly still.
21 ANGELS
THE YOUNG WOMAN STOOD RESOLUTE. THE WIND BLEW her hair wildly forward into a luminous halo framing her face. In contrast, her bland features in the glare from a turbulent sky caught her stillness like a black and white photograph. She was beautiful, haunted, haunting, inscrutable. Ingrid Bergman. Birgitta Ghiberti. Angel of mercy, angel of death?
Harry stared at her, waiting to see which way her appearance would go when she stepped out of her freeze-frame posture.
Suddenly she scrambled toward them, her face filled with concern.
“My goodness,” she exclaimed, speaking her perfect version of English. “Were you in there? Bernd, Professor Lindstrom!” She repeated their names several times, as if doing an inventory. “Come, we will get you into the house. Please, let me.” She ran her bare hands tenderly over Bernd’s injured face. He opened his eyes and squinted in recognition. She touched the back of one hand to Harry’s cheek. “Come, please. We must go inside.”
Why is she speaking English, Harry? It’s an odd time for courtesy. And where’d the “professor” thing come from?
She wrapped their coats over their shoulders. With Bernd supported between the two of them, they made their way through the swirling snow to the house. When they got inside, the aunts looked up. Annie smiled briefly, Lenke nodded.
Skadi led them directly into the kitchen and tossed their coats out the back door onto the floor of a summer porch.
“They’re scorched,” she explained. “They smell. You smell, both of you.” She directed Harry to a kitchen chair. “Sit down here, please.” She guided Bernd to the settee against the wall by the back window. Harry got up and helped stretch him out. The man was conscious but passive, recovering from oxygen deprivation or in shock. He had been briefly coherent before Skadi arrived to help them but seemed to have collapsed into himself. His breathing was coarse but steady; his deeply creased eyes were open. He watched them but made no effort to communicate.
Skadi took a plastic tub of yoghurt from the refrigerator. Turning to Bernd, she dabbed yoghurt directly onto his face, over the grime of smoke and the peeling surface layers of skin. He winced but did not protest. Next, she applied her home remedy to Harry. The yoghurt felt cool. Then as he sat quietly watching her brew up a pot of coffee, it began to sting. That must be the therapeutic effect, he thought.
Who the hell ever heard of putting yoghurt on a burn? If it hurts, rinse it off. We need to work on our strategy, Harry.
He excused himself to go to the bathroom off the room he had been in before, with the familiar driftwood sculpture and several generations of amateur paintings on the walls. Bernd’s room. And whose, before that? It was a room curiously free of gender or personality. Skadi’s room must be on the second floor, with the small gabled window overlooking the sea.
He leaned across the sink and tamped handfuls of cool water onto his face until the drying yoghurt was washed away.
Standing straight, he squinted, trying to come to terms with the image of himself in the mirror. He looked like a stranger. His grey hair was seared at the front. He touched it and strands crumbled beneath his fingers. His eyes seemed darker under a furrowed brow that was scorched with livid streaks and his aquiline nose was creased with patches of peeling and exposed raw skin. His jaw, which he liked to think of as strong, was embedded with soot.
Not bad, Bogie. You find yourself quite handsome, don’t you, battered and burnt? Whoever said, “Vanity, thy name is woman”?
Nobody, actually. Hamlet said, “Frailty, thy name is woman.” He was talking about his mother.
An appropriate allusion in the present circumstances.
Birgitta was the polar opposite.
To Gertrude? Possibly.
If anything, she was Claudius. Murder is an instrument, not an end.
Think about that, Harry.
The way the ceiling light refracted from the mirror into his eyes and gleamed out from his reflection sent shivers racing down his spine. Karen was standing so close he could feel her breath on the back of his neck.
Murder is an instrument, not an end.
Sometimes and sometimes not. The deaths accumulating around the Ghibertis over the last decade could be divided that way. The serial killings that Birgitta researched and catalogued could have been ends in themselves. Death was the intended outcome fulfilling the desires of a psychopath, someone who functioned normally in the world because of the release available through murder. By contrast, Birgitta’s death was instrumental. Barbaric as it was, it was meant to serve a purpose beyond itself.
Throwing the blame on you, Harry.
Possibly. Or Bernd.
What about the others?
The girls in Toronto and Hagaparken? Their deaths certainly weren’t ends in themselves.
They were for the women who died, Harry. And all to blame you. That’s a loathsome responsibility.
I wasn’t being framed for murders committed; the murders were committed to frame me. Loathsome barely begins to cover it.
Harry shuddered and looked past his image in the mirror, into the bedroom behind him. To one side of the window there was a large picture he’d hardly noticed before because it was so much a romantic cliché. A castle with drawbridge down set on a small mountain in a dense forest under a vast blue sky. What drew his attention, now, were not the hackneyed graphics but the fact that it was an incredibly intricate jigsaw puzzle and someone had varnished and framed it. Someone determinedly proud of the work and indifferent to good taste or the judgment of others.
That last bit could describe your Inspector Arnason and her demonic familiar.
Harry nodded assent to himself in the mirror.
She’s determined, Harry. When she turned up and nothing was resolved, she tried to cremate you alive. You had already got away from her once. She wasn’t going to let it happen again.
Immolate, not cremate. I wasn’t dead yet.
Have it your way. One way or another, she’d get her man. And where is she now?
Good question. Maybe she couldn’t stand to hear the sizzling and popping of burning cadavers. Like Sam McGee, she didn’t want to risk peering into the furnace roar. Her job was done. She packed up and went home.
She’ll be back.
Harry walked out into the kitchen. For the briefest moment, he thought he saw Birgitta Ghiberti slouched elegantly over her coffee. Skadi gazed up at him through a veil of long blonde hair and the illusion was reinforced. Yet when she sat back and shook her hair away from her face, she looked so young and bland and innocent, with her pale blue eyes and crinkled smile, the connection collapsed.
Before he sat down to savour the proffered coffee, Harry glanced over at Bernd lying inert on the settee. “So Skadi,” he said, “when did Inspector Arnason get here?”
The young woman looked startled. It was as if Harry had asked her a question so unexpected she had to struggle to get her bearings before answering. “I sent her away. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? You couldn’t have known.”
“That I, that she—”
“Skadi, did she light the fire?” It had not occurred to Harry she hadn’t. He had suspected Skadi of locking them in, but not of trying to burn them alive.
“She must have. Unless it was Constable Sverdrup.”
“You know his name?”
“I asked to see their identification.”
Really? That seemed uncharacteristically assertive. Bernd moved on the settee as if pain was rising from deep within, then subsided into silence, listening.
The wind raked against the shingles, and the rafters and joists groaned overhead. The windows rattled and the lights flickered. Skadi dug out some candles from a drawer but the power didn’t go out.
“We’re in the midst of a storm,” Harry said, stating the obvious.
“Yes, we are,” she answered cheerfully, apparently back on solid ground. “I love winter storms, don’t you?”
Storms in southern Ontario were seldom raging. Violent weather in Toronto, from his snug vantage high over the harbour, was a spectator sport.
He could taste the salt in the sea-laden air seeping through the farmhouse imperfections, through little cracks in the ancient framing, creases in the mortar between stucco and stone, tiny gaps in the eaves. He could feel the entire building wrapped in a fury of snow and sleet. And he felt strangely comfortable.
Skadi did not seem at all perturbed. The aunts in the front room had turned up the volume to hear over the storm, the serial killer who had bashed in his mother’s skull slept noisily on the settee, and Harry’s principal adversary had departed with her accomplice, having failed in her efforts to burn him alive, although she probably didn’t know that she’d failed. The coffee was good, and he detected no malevolence in the howling winter surrounding them.
Life was interesting, but their brief interlude of illusory innocence wouldn’t last. He hoped Hannah Arnason would not make an appearance, but he needed to know where she was.
“Did Inspector Arnason say what she wanted?” He wondered if Skadi knew her mother was dead. Surely Hannah had told her. Could she have torched the shed in retribution? “Where did you say we were?”
“I didn’t. I told her you had gone out. I didn’t say where.”
“Bernd’s car is parked in front.”
“I told her you’d gone for a walk.”
“With a storm gathering offshore? Didn’t that strike her as unlikely?”
“It didn’t seem unlikely to me, so why her? You and my brother had things to attend to.”
“What sort of things?”
“Why ask me, Professor Lindstrom? That was between you and my brother, things Bernd didn’t want me to hear. You had secrets, so you went out. For a walk to the old boatshed, to the barn, to the Olafsson cottage.”
She had become quite animated as she explained herself, gesturing with a sweep of her open hand across the front of the house to indicate their possible walk as the storm closed in. She pointed in the direction of the shed then to the small barn out back, which Harry could just make out in the gusting snow through the kitchen window over Bernd’s settee, and then toward the east, in the direction of the ferry, to indicate their neighbour’s deserted cottage.
“So she just left?”
“They both did. I don’t think they wanted to get caught out by the weather.”
“But you had quite a chat, didn’t you?”
“Not really. Just at the door. We did not have a lot to chat about.”
“Weren’t you curious why she was here?”
“I am not a curious person, Professor Lindstrom.”
She’s writing a doctoral dissertation on aesthetic expression and the conditions of winter in Scandinavia, Harry.
Nordic, not Scandinavian. She includes Finland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, possibly Greenland. With side trips to Italy, Greece, and Canada.
You’re a pedant. She’s curious.
Skadi seemed to connect with Harry as a professor. Just how much information had she exchanged with Arnason and Sverdrup?
“Were other police with them?” he asked. “Police from Gotland?”