by Moss, John
“Poison, maybe. Fire. Drowning. Random, unrelated and cruel but not brutal killings. She preferred more amiable murder. She needed to watch them die after sharing a few drinks with their new friend in the Nordic winter; girls who looked like her sisters, like her mother when she was young, venturing out for, for what, a good laugh, a long walk, removing their coats on some pretext or another, taking the girl’s coat, settling into the snow, getting cold herself, watching the other girl lose control, watching her die; that was her story, again and again. They died and she didn’t. Each incident proved she was a survivor.”
And reinforced her sorry existence.
Karen, who knew something about ephemeral existence, was not going to be left out of this.
“I wonder if it started with an accident?” Harry said. “Perhaps she was rescued and a companion perished.”
Killing for the first time is an overwhelming transition, Harry. She didn’t tumble into an abyss, she was pushed. By her mother. And she caught an updraft, she liked soaring through darkness. It made her feel truly alive.
“It would be easy to check the records if there was an accident,” said Hannah. “But I think each time she murdered a young woman, she killed her mother.”
“Perhaps. Or she killed on her mother’s behalf.”
“No.”
“Suppose the victims in Skadi’s mind were seen as her mother’s rivals. Young, attractive, female, most of them unmistakably Swedish. As Birgitta grew older, Skadi tried to exterminate them for being what her mother had lost.”
“Her other daughters?”
“Her youth, her sense of immortality.”
“How very banal,” said Hannah.
No, Karen whispered. Evil is never banal.
“As a beautiful woman, I am not comfortable with that,” said Hannah. “Age wouldn’t drive me to Botox, never mind murder.”
Isn’t she smug.
Is she?
No, Harry, not really. She’s been horribly isolated all her life. Boys wouldn’t have dared ask her out, men wouldn’t risk it. And women, well, who needs reminders of their own imperfections. Horatio Sverdrup is her only friend, Harry. No wonder they’re renegades together.
Hannah flicked on the flames for a moment and gazed at Harry’s highlighted profile. She reached into a pocket in her coat and pulled out a folded envelope furred at the edges, opened it and took out Karen’s silver wedding band. She ran a finger over the dents and scratches, then handed it to Harry, who clutched it in the palm of his hand.
She turned off the fire again and the darkness of their dank crypt closed around them again, but Harry hardly noticed. He was distracted by the recurrent image in his mind of the bland young woman he had seen standing behind Bernd, talking to Birgitta that morning in Rosedale when Bernd had turned him away. She had seemed familiar, walking in the snow outside the restaurant, but only as a generic exemplar for what Birgitta might once have been.
He could not envision what Skadi and Bernd might now be saying to each other. She, shrouded in benighted innocence, and he, stricken by misplaced guilt. Was there anything they could say to each other now that Birgitta was gone?
“Harry,” said Hannah, interjecting in his reverie. “We still need to sort out who killed Birgitta. It’s more likely to have been Bernd.”
“No,” Harry responded. “Skadi killed her mother. She would have done anything to protect her brother. She loves him with absolute conviction. When she understood her mother’s plot to expose Bernd, using me, she tried to save him the only way she knew how. Then when you came after him over here, on Fårö, she felt her mother had won. The best she could offer Bernd was a suitable death. The burning shed. And by getting rid of me at the same time, she saw him dying with his reputation for good works intact.”
“But it could have been him. He admitted as much.”
“It could have been. To protect his beloved sister. His mother’s power over him was always the threat to expose Skadi, paradoxically, for the crimes for which she held him accountable. But I think there’s a good chance Bernd only knew about Birgitta’s death when you turned up at his hotel in the middle of the night, like he says. He would have known right off that it was his sister’s work.”
“How so?” She was letting Harry take the lead. “She hadn’t been violent before.”
“By a process of elimination it had to be Skadi—he is a logical man, trapped in an irrational world.”
Aren’t we all, Harry.
“You find him a tragic figure?”
“He’s more victim than villain. But tragic? No, I think Birgitta is tragic.”
“Birgitta?”
“She loved her daughters for what she saw of herself in each of them. They were meant to be her; she would never grow old. But three of them died. And the one who survived, the bastard outsider much like herself was despicable, because she stayed young, and she was monstrous, a killer. And serene, that was the worst part. In the midst of the maelstrom, Skadi remained untouched by the horrors around her.”
“But it was you who turned their story from sordid to tragic, Harry.”
Now that’s a disturbing thought.
“In tragedy, the protagonist dies,” Hannah continued. “It was you, stirring the devil’s cauldron, who made Birgitta’s death necessary.”
“Necessary for whom?”
“All three of them, if you think about it. You were driven by righteous rage.”
He waited. He could tell she had turned to face him in the darkness, but she was no more a physical presence than Karen. Perhaps less.
“I know more about you than you think, Harry. You know about rage. You know about fury and anger and shame.” She paused, as if he might need time to catch up. “My own story is also about rage. In Scandinavia, we are not all blonde and blue-eyed, you know that. But I am. And these girls, they were chosen for death because we are alike.”
Harry was moved by the resonance in her voice.
“My sisters, Harry. I did not even notice their death because as reports crossed my desk at random they all seemed the same. The same to me, as much as they had been to Skadi when she killed them. Can you imagine? When Birgitta first presented her list it seemed an affront. And then you came to Sweden as a catalyst.”
She hesitated, she seemed uncertain how much she needed to explain, then proceeded.
“My story, Harry? I am those women. I am enraged by their deaths. I endure the pain and humiliation of their deaths. I am consumed by guilt for their deaths. Because? Because I am a woman, I am blonde, I am fiercely a Swede. I am the police. I can tell you in Swedish, Jag är Sverige. It does not sound so awkward. I cannot say the same words to a Swede, except perhaps in English, ‘I am Sweden.’ I mean it in all humility, Harry.”
In the profound darkness, he heard a catch in her throat like she was stifling emotion. At the horror, at the loss. A crack in the armour through which the light of her hidden self radiated. But only for an instant. She turned away and he could feel the air move between them. Almost as a footnote, she added, “There are so many victims, so many killers, there is so much death. It is difficult to know who I am.”
Harry stared into the darkness. He could hear their breathing. Images coalesced into memories. The woman beside him stirred but remained silent. Death seemed alluring, impersonal, deferential. He was fully awake and aware as he felt death as a companion transform into something terrible and the past once again was more real than the present.
AFTER A FLOATING LUNCH while they drifted down the centre channel through a broad marshy stretch, the Anishnabe narrowed. They approached a sweeping bend on river right. The soft shoreline gathered abruptly and rose up on either side into walls of broken rock impaled with cedars. A low rumbling rolled over them as they slid across the taut smooth surface with increasing speed. Looming shadows surging over beds of gravel flashed in the depths beneath them. Karen looked back to see if Matt and Lucy were secure. Harry slapped the gunnels with his paddle; she glanced
up, he grinned. She grinned.
“Listen,” he said.
He feathered his paddle to urge the stern away from the rocks. It seemed they were being drawn against the shore on river right, which meant Roll-Away was coming up. There was not a ripple on the fast-moving water, no sign of rapids.
Around the bend, the river’s breathing turned to a sudden roar and the landscape tumbled into an abyss. Ten canoe-lengths ahead the water bent, broke, spewed turbulent clouds of spray above a maelstrom of sound and fury.
Having missed Roll-Away, they were on the wrong side of the river. Harry tried to force the canoe into the rocky shore. He yelled at Karen to pry, but the power of the current, which a moment before held the canoe too close, now thrust them away.
“River left,” he shouted. “Pry right!”
As they swung out toward the portage sign on the far shore, the river caught the canoe full on the beam and swirled it around. It lurched precariously but did not capsize. They were now stern downriver, forcing against the current. With every fibre of his being bent to the paddle, Harry churned. Karen frantically thrashed at the flow, but the portage sign slipped gradually upstream.
Again and again, his left hand lifted high and plunged with each stroke, and the sun glinting off his silver wedding band flashed in his eyes, and once, as Karen strained to pry on his side against the force of the river, the sun caught her band as well, and the sunlight turned silver.
Karen suddenly stopped paddling and twisted around. Looking downriver past her husband, her straight nose and high cheekbones caught the light, and her eyes registered holy terror. Lucy and Matt were screaming. In Karen’s eyes, the flicker of a smile. Her eyes gathered the family together, the four of them. The canoe shuddered. The noise was deafening; it was almost sublime, almost like silence. The water gave way and the river opened to receive them into its fury.
Plunging through air, through the shattered water, twisting over and over in the roiling depths, Harry somehow got hold of the kids. For a moment he dreamed everything would be all right. Karen’s tortured body flailing above them swirled around and around. Matt twisted toward him, his eyes wide. He could see his father, the water streaked with blood between them, his eight-year-old face tormented with fear. He screamed water, his head exploded against rock. Lucy under her father’s arm, his five-year-old feminist. Her body shattered inside her skin, her life jacket holding her together, her face for a moment thrust against his, cool and serene, then wrenched away. Shadows and all the colours of creation contorted and eddied into absolute blackness. Then life left him and he was rolled over and over inside the belly of the tumultuous backwash and suddenly disgorged, spewed forth gasping for breath, looking crazily around for his loved ones, losing awareness, tumbling downriver, crashing against remnants of their small expedition, clinging and bobbing, drifting, legs smashing rock, feet touching gravel, touching sand, hands on wet cedar, dry cedar, body crawling like a monstrous primeval mistake onto the shore.
Nothing, no light, no sound, not even pain, not even time.
Then a voice. “It’s Virgil,” said the voice. “We was worried so the wife and I come up in the kicker. You’re the only one left, my son. The others is gone.”
Karen. Matthew. Lucy.
In Karen’s final vision, the three of them together.
Harry was missing.
26 FIRESTORM
RELIVING THE PAST WAS NOT LIKE REMEMBERING. THERE was no interval to protect from the raw immediacy of experience. Harry retreated into the present. Bernd was there, in his mind, waiting. Was it possible to feel anything but disgust for a serial killer? For a man who tolerated murder and was driven by the horrors of his family to protect his sister who spawned them. Spawned, an animalistic word. Reptilian. To drop offspring into the world without conscience, to reproduce with indifference to outcome.
Harry, you’re maundering.
But Harry was listening. He could hear groaning and shuffling outside the door, then a clanking as the shovel that must have been used as a brace was kicked away.
The door burst open and their cramped catacomb flooded with silver light. The storm had swept the clouds away. When they stepped out into the night, the full moon shone brightly through the gnarled branches of the old oak, which, dead or dormant, stood proud against the sky. The moonlight cast blue shadows over the windswept landscape. Drifts curled like waves into deep blue furrows and patches of autumn stubble poked through where the ground had been stripped bare by the blizzard.
Sverdrup had backed out of the passageway and was leaning against a boulder slide. He was holding his head with the apparent conviction that if he removed his hands it might split in two. Evidently he had been floored from behind with the flat of the shovel. A trickle of blood had drained across his forehead and shimmered like a bolt of black lightening. He tried to smile and his yellowed teeth glistened.
Hannah squatted to retrieve Sverdrup’s fur cap. She handed it to him and stood up, without offering further acknowledgement of his wounded condition.
The air was so still, when he lit a cigarette he didn’t need to shield the match-flame.
“I did not expect him to hit so hard,” he said in English, to include Harry.
Hannah said something abruptly in Swedish.
“You planned to let him go?” Harry was both incredulous and struck with admiration for the unlikely extent of their devious procedures.
“It was an option we had considered,” she said. “Another was how to die with dignity. Mr. Sverdrup, ever the gentleman, decided he would allow me to go first.”
Sverdrup coughed phlegmatically.
He’s nearly dead, already. The poor bugger wanted Hannah Arnason to die in his arms. That’s quite romantic, Harry.
“We’d better get moving,” said Harry. “The temperature’s falling.”
“Yes, I suppose we should,” Hannah agreed.
Harry was filled with begrudging respect. These two cops were renegades, the ice queen and the walking inferno puffing himself to oblivion. Their strategy had been to let Bernd get to Skadi before they did. Their moral imperative was to end the murders, no matter what.
Harry and Hannah and Horatio Sverdrup kicked their way through the drifted snow, past the ancient oak, which Harry envisioned with seventy-two cadavers draped from its branches in the light of the midwinter moon. He looked back at the mound.
In the clear still air it seemed diminished, simply a rock pile. Had it ever been a pagan burial site filled with the bones of warrior kings? Did the Sviar children play there for generations, embraced by the ghosts of their ancestors? Was this where Bernd discovered his calling to track down the dead? Was this where Skadi discovered her calling to become a serial killer?
So many questions, Harry.
And too many answers.
Harry still had Karen’s ring clutched in his palm. He thrust his hand deep into his pants pocket and released the ring for safekeeping. He felt it rub against the silver band on his finger. It was only a twist of metal but it was good to have it back.
Once they reached the road, the walking was surprisingly easy. The final fury of the onshore wind before it died had swept the road nearly bare.
They could see the lighthouse at the very tip of the island, and halfway along, they could see the farmhouse. There were no lights in the windows.
Hannah nudged against Harry. She slowed her pace and reached out to him with an ungloved hand. He took his own gloves off and closed his fingers around hers. They resumed walking, catching up with Sverdrup who had stopped and was listening to the darkness.
Amidst the dissonant slapping of the sea against ice chunks and boulders along the shore, they heard a scraping of wood. Between the muted thunder of rolling waves and the splashing as they curled over on themselves, they heard voices.
Through a break in the shrubbery, they could see the heat signature of embers collapsed around the belly of the iron stove, all that remained of the wooden shed. And beyond that, they
could make out the figures of Bernd and Skadi dragging the upturned dory into the surf.
Harry and Hannah and Sverdrup watched, silhouetted against the sky. The midwinter moon illuminated the boat as it surged into the deep while its occupants clambered over the gunwales and set the oars. They began rowing, side by side, like seafarers in an ancient saga.
There was a penetrating clatter when something metallic crashed against the floorboards as they crested the final big wave before breaking into the open water.
They stopped rowing and shipped the oars. They rose to their feet.
The moonlight glistened on the dark sea, highlighting floating chunks of ice that had broken from the shore in the storm, and magnified the scene so that the boat seemed closer than it was in reality.
One of the figures stooped, then stood upright, and slowly waved the gasoline container through the air. It was impossible to tell who it was. Planes of fuel arced against the night sky and stained the darkness. Emptied, the can clattered again to the bottom of the dory.
Time stopped, like heaven’s held breath.
A red flare burst into flame in Bernd’s hands. He held it high, casting a dazzling nimbus over the boat, illuminating Skadi’s features and his own in a fiery glow as they balanced precariously, standing so close there was nothing between them.
Suddenly the air cracked open in billowing flames. A swirling inferno soared into the sky, briefly erasing the light of the moon. The two figures flickered dark and then dazzled bright, before flashing into pure luminescence as they turned into fire.
A roar of silence filled the air. There were no screams from the funeral pyre. The three on the shore were mute with horror. The ribs and the planks of the boat turned blistering red, then slowly subsided into the dark of the restless sea. After a while the moon emerged from the flames and the smoke in its fullest glory. The night chill settled into the bones of the survivors on shore.
MIRANDA QUIN MET Harry at Pearson Airport. She seemed distracted by the burnt skin and bruises on his face, the gash on his forehead, and his arm in a sling. She grinned when he took her father’s black toque from his sheepskin pocket and pulled it on. She accepted with a strained smile his unwrapped gift from Arlanda Airport of a canister of tea that displayed a disgruntled woman on the label. She asked whether he planned in the future to work with no contract and no retainer. He mumbled something about filing a claim against the Ghiberti estate. She passed on the news that Horatio Sverdrup had been admitted to hospital in Stockholm. Hannah Arnason was under investigation by the Swedish authorities; she sent her warmest best wishes.