Found Wanting

by Robert Goddard

  He was right. Eusden knew that. He also knew that once he started firing, Aksden would not hesitate to respond. He lowered the gun. ‘Wait,’ he shouted.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘There are things you need to know.’

  ‘True, my friend. But I doubt you can tell me any of them.’

  ‘What’s your brother doing in Helsinki?’

  ‘Lars isn’t in Helsinki.’

  ‘Yes, he is. I saw him there yesterday with my own eyes.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘No. He was there. He followed Koskinen and me to Matalainen’s office. Didn’t Lund mention that? I certainly told him. I’ll tell you what I think, shall I? I think Lars was doing what you accused Pernille of: trying to get his hands on the letters. You haven’t shared the secret with him, have you? Not all of it, anyway. You guard it jealously. Even from your own family. Why is that, Tolmar? Why can’t you bring yourself to trust them?’

  ‘My family is none of your concern, Eusden. Prying into our affairs is why you’re going to die here in the snow, a long way from home.’

  ‘Kill me and you’ll be making a big mistake.’

  ‘And you’re going to explain why, of course.’

  Yes. He was. He had to. His brain raced to fill the gaps between what he knew and what he needed to guess – correctly. ‘Do you really believe your father was the Tsarevich, Tolmar? I mean, really? I think you do. I think you’ve always wanted to believe it. That’s why you’re carving out a business empire in Russia. To make up for the real empire you reckon was your birthright. I imagine that information would come as an unpleasant surprise to your new friends over there. Of course, it could all be bullshit, couldn’t it? Who did Karl Wanting find in Siberia? A haemophiliac peasant with a passing resemblance to Alexei? A lie for him and Paavo Falenius to sell to your family so they could help themselves – and ultimately you – to the Tsar’s money? Or was your father the real thing – the one true Alexei? He must have told you.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘He didn’t, did he? That’s it. That’s your problem. He never said. You were too young when he died. Your grandfather didn’t let you into the family secret until years later. Maybe he waited until Paavo Falenius was dead too. Wanting was long gone, of course. But your grandfather only knew what they wanted him to know – and to believe. It’s not the same as certainty. Rock solid certainty. One way or the other. Well, I can give you that if you want it. If you have the guts to face it.’

  ‘You can give me that?’ Aksden’s question was an admission of weakness. Eusden had found a way under his defences.

  ‘Not everything was destroyed in the explosion. Brad kept back one item to sell later to the highest bidder. What else would you expect? The guy was a scumbag.’

  ‘What item?’

  ‘Two sets of fingerprints, taken by Clem Hewitson sixteen years apart. The first aboard the imperial yacht off Cowes in August 1909. The second at Aksdenhøj in October 1925. They prove – once and for all – whether your father was the Tsarevich. If he was, the two sets have to match. If not…’

  Aksden raised the rifle to his shoulder. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘One set’s in my pocket. The other’s in a safe at the Grand Marina Hotel in Helsinki, accessible only to me.’

  ‘Show me what you have.’

  Eusden took out the envelope and held it up. ‘You won’t be able to see the insignia from there, Tolmar, so I’ll tell you what it is: the double-headed eagle of the Romanovs. Want a closer look?’

  ‘Throw your gun away.’

  ‘OK.’ Eusden tossed the pistol into the snow a few feet from him. ‘Now what?’

  ‘Don’t move.’

  Aksden walked slowly towards him, the rifle held in front of him. The expression on his face was intent and watchful. But something else burned in his gaze. It was more than curiosity, more than desire for certainty. It was obsession.

  He stopped a yard or so short and levelled the rifle at Eusden. He looked at the double-headed eagle for a second, then said, ‘Show me what’s in the envelope.’

  Eusden fingered up the flap, slid out the sheet of paper and turned it for Aksden to see. There was an intake of breath. Aksden stared at the red-inked fingerprints and the writing beneath them: A.N. 4 viii ’09.

  ‘A.N.,’ he murmured. ‘Alexei Nikolaievich.’

  The rifle was still pointing at Eusden, but Aksden’s attention was fixed on the letter, held out to one side. It was the opportunity Eusden had gambled on getting. It was, in truth, his only chance. He slid forward, swivelled on his hip and lashed out with his uninjured foot. The Dane cried out and fell backwards as his leg was whipped from under him. The rifle went off, but the shot flew harmlessly skywards. As Aksden landed on his back with a thump, Eusden rolled the other way and lunged for the gun. The pain in his ankle counted for nothing now. He grabbed the gun, pushed himself up and turned in the same instant.

  But Aksden was already sitting up himself, his eyes blazing, his mouth twisted in fury. He swung the rifle towards Eusden. His finger curled around the trigger. Eusden brought his arm down straight, in line with Aksden’s face. And there was a roar as both weapons fired.

  FIFTY

  The sky, stared at long enough, seemed to turn from grey to palest blue. And the silence, once the ears had adjusted, gave way to tiny stirrings of wind and the distant cawing of crows somewhere in the forest. Only the gnawing chill of the air above and the snow beneath stirred Eusden from his reverie, which could have lasted several seconds or many minutes – he had no way of knowing. When he tried to sit up, the pain in his right side was sharp and deep. Blood had soaked through his jacket. He could not tell how serious this second wound was. But he was certainly alive. At least, he thought he was.

  He propped himself up on his elbows and saw Tolmar Aksden’s body lying a few feet away, the rifle across his chest, one hand still clutching the butt. His expression was a frozen mixture of anger and surprise. There was a sickeningly neat bullet-hole above his left eyebrow and blood on the snow behind his head.

  Eusden felt weak, light-headed and curiously contented. Nothing he saw or felt was entirely real to him. He assumed this was some kind of trick being played on him by his brain, a defence mechanism designed to ease the onset of death. It did not dull the pain he was in, but somehow divorced it from him, as if he was watching himself from a place of warmth and safety and disinterested ease. It made the idea of lying back down and continuing to stare at the sky very appealing.

  ‘Don’t lie down, Coningsby,’ said Marty.

  The voice seemed to come from behind him. When he turned his head, there was no one there. Yet he had the sense that someone had been. It was like the quivering of a leaf after a creature has fled into undergrowth: a sign without a sighting.

  ‘This is all your fault,’ Eusden said aloud. ‘You know that, Marty, don’t you?’ There was no rancour in his tone. It was more in the way of a friendly reproach. ‘Thanks for landing me in it. One last time.’

  ‘Don’t lie down, Coningsby.’

  ‘What do you expect me to do?’

  ‘Deliver a touching eulogy at my funeral.’

  ‘And for that I need to be there, of course.’

  ‘It’s customary.’

  ‘Yeah. So it is.’

  Eusden tried to sit up. There was a jab of pain in his side. The bullet had probably smashed a rib. What other damage it might have done he did not care to consider. Certainly standing up did not seem to be an option. He could not phone for help. He was closer to the jammer now than when he had failed to get a signal on the veranda. Theoretically, he could drive to where help might be found if he could make it to the Bentley. He had the key in his pocket. But theory was a long way from practice. Moving presented itself to his mind as a task best deferred, while another part of his mind insisted that deferral would be fatal.

  He straightened his arms. It was like plunging into an ice-cold bath
. He began to shiver and noticed the sheet of paper with the fingerprints on it lying close to his hand, beside the fallen gun. There they were: the unique traces of a human’s existence on this planet. A.N. Anastasia Nikolaievna. Or Alexei Nikolaievich. ‘Or A.N. bloody Other, Clem, eh?’

  ‘You’ve been checking up on me, boy? Well, we’ll make a detective of you yet.’

  ‘Seems you’ve succeeded. Much good that it’s done me.’

  Eusden remembered asking Clem once how he had survived four years in the trenches without being killed or injured. And now he heard again the answer the old man had given him. ‘You had to think ahead to survive, boy. If you didn’t, you were finished.’ (Pause for puff on pipe.) ‘’Course, if you thought too far ahead, you were finished as well.’ (Another puff.) ‘I used to reckon five minutes was just about right.’

  ‘Five minutes? OK, Clem. I’ll try it.’ Eusden grabbed the sheet of paper, folded it as best he could and thrust it into his trouser pocket. The gun he left where it was. He rolled on to his hip and began to work his way towards the Bentley, sawing at the snow with his functioning leg. His shivering became a wild juddering, his breathing a panting wheeze. Pain ballooned inside him. But he did not stop. He felt suddenly and preposterously hot. Sweat started out of him. But still he did not stop.

  He reached the car and rewarded himself with a few moments’ rest. The pain ebbed. Then he stretched up to open the door. He managed to do so by about an inch. Pulling it fully open seemed impossible. It felt immensely heavy. He pressed himself close to the side of the car, forced his arm inside the door and pushed with all his failing strength. It was just enough.

  An unmeasurable segment of time passed while he rested his chin on the soft leather of the driver’s seat and contemplated, as if it were some abstruse problem he had no personal stake in, the difficulty of levering himself into the car. In the end, no easy answer presented itself. He counted down from ten to one and, after two false starts, simply hauled himself in, gripping the steering-wheel like grim death, an expression he felt in a moment of startling clarity he fully understood for the first time.

  He lifted his injured leg in after him, and then nearly fell back out of the car as he pulled the door shut. The warmth that had built up during the drive from Helsinki folded itself round him like a duvet. It would have been easy, so very easy, to surrender to it and fall asleep. But he knew, if he did, he would never wake. He pushed the key into the ignition and turned it. The engine responded with well-tuned vigour. He shifted the stick into drive and eased down the accelerator. The car started moving. He steered it in a slow, wide circle past the body of Arto Falenius, out over the meadow and back on to the track they had arrived by. Every ridge of compacted snow, every minor undulation, sent pain stabbing through his body. But the Bentley rolled softly with the bumps. He knew it could be a great deal worse. And he began to think that he really was going to get through this. He drove slowly along the track, away from the mökki and the bodies lying nearby, into the forest, towards the main road – and survival.

  The Bentley essentially drove itself. All Eusden had to do was steer it. His concentration began to falter, his vision to blur. He wondered if dusk was setting in. There was a vagueness to the world beyond the windscreen, a fuzzying at the edges of his vision. The track wound ahead through the snow-stacked trees. He kept his foot on the accelerator, his hands on the wheel. He just needed to keep going. He just-

  There was a jolt, a violent lurch. Suddenly, the Bentley was heading down a short slope straight into a mass of trees. He must have mistaken the line of the track somehow. He stamped down on the brake. The car skidded and slewed to the left. But there were as many trees waiting there as dead ahead. And the car slammed straight into one.

  Eusden had forgotten to fasten his seat belt. It was far from a high-speed impact, but still he was thrown against the wheel, setting the horn blaring. He lay across it, watched with detached curiosity the steam rising from the crumpled radiator and the shower of snow and pine needles pattering down on to the bonnet.

  Eventually, he pushed himself back into the seat. The horn fell silent. All the breath seemed to have been knocked out of him. He found it difficult to organize his thoughts into initiating any kind of action at all. He wondered how much blood he had lost. And how much more he could afford to lose. Then he stopped wondering. He would find out soon enough, after all. Until then…

  He forced himself to focus. He engaged reverse and pressed down the accelerator. The tyres spun, but did not grip. The Bentley was going nowhere. And neither was Eusden. He turned off the engine.

  Tranquillity descended. And a shaft of sunlight, the first he had seen in Finland, turned the surrounding curtain of snow from greyish white to granular pink. He sat back and savoured the beauty of it. The forest felt holy in that instant. And he would be warm inside the car for a while yet. He could always turn the engine back on.

  ‘I’m offering you the chance to change your life,’ Pernille had said to him on the ferry from Sweden. Eusden smiled gently at what struck him now less as a tragedy than an irony. If only they had known. In truth, neither of them had had any future to shape or alter. They had both been voyaging to their deaths.

  ‘Pull yourself together, Coningsby. You should’ve let me drive. I was always better than you. Now, for God’s sake phone for help and get us out of the mess you’ve got us into.’

  Eusden did not bother to point out that the jammer had travelled with them. There would still be no signal. Even if it had been conveniently knocked off, the closely packed trees would probably do as good a job. He pulled Lund’s phone out of his pocket and pressed the green button. It was as he had expected. No signal. ‘Sorry, Marty,’ he murmured.

  It was a relief in some ways. There was nothing more he could do now. He could stop struggling. He did not need to think, even five minutes ahead. He closed his eyes. And the darkness received him like a loyal friend.

  JYVÄSKYLÄ

  FIFTY-ONE

  Forty-eight hours had vanished into a black hole. They existed as a memory, but one too dark and dense for Eusden to access: a singularity in more ways than one, since being alive confounded his last recollected expectation.

  He had been lucky, according to the quietly spoken doctor who succeeded the nurses who were the first to greet him when he resumed meaningful engagement with the world. He had lost consciousness in the car and, thanks to the angle it was resting at, had slumped forward across the steering-wheel, setting off the horn again. The noise had failed to rouse him, but, in the absence of much other noise, had attracted the attention of an engineer repairing a power line half a kilometre away, who had recognized it for what it was. Eusden had been brought to the Central Hospital in Jyväskylä, the regional capital, where he now was, with smashed ankle reset and broken ribs realigned, wounds cleaned and stitched, lost blood replaced, vital organs checked. Neither of the bullets had lodged in his body or caused irreparable damage. And the tube in his chest denoted nothing more sinister than a minor pneumothorax in his right lung, caused by one of the fractured ribs. The doctor’s prognosis was that he should make a full recovery, though not necessarily a speedy one. ‘Your body has been through a lot, Mr Eusden. It will tell you how long it needs to get over it.’

  The doctor’s tone altered when he went on to inform him of the police’s interest in his condition. There was an officer sitting outside the room whose superior was anxious to talk to Eusden at the earliest opportunity. ‘I will have to inform him that in my opinion you are now well enough to be questioned.’

  That seemed undeniable, though Eusden soon had cause to doubt it. ‘We have the media in the car park,’ the doctor added. ‘The death of Tolmar Aksden…in these circumstances… is very big news.’ Then he said something which Eusden had to ask him to repeat and even then could not quite believe he had heard, something so joyously unexpected and wholly astounding that he thought it must be a delusion on his part, until the doctor assured him it was not. �
�It has been difficult for Ms Madsen to come to the hospital. The reporters and photographers will not leave her alone.’

  Pernille was not dead. The doctor, of course, did not know why Eusden was so overwhelmed by his reference to her. Nor was he able to answer the seemingly obtuse question, ‘How can she be alive?’ The simple fact, self-evident to him, was that she was. And she was just as anxious to see Eusden as Inspector Ahlroos.

  It was Ahlroos, however, who arrived first. A slightly built, dark-haired man with a professionally guarded expression and the apparent ability never to blink, he was accompanied by a burly junior who prowled round the room and did a lot of gum-chewing and window-gazing while his boss asked the questions. And he had a lot of questions to ask.

  The inspector might have anticipated caution or evasion from his interviewee. It was clear to Eusden that he must be an actual or potential murder suspect. He supposed the most prudent course of action would be to say nothing at all until he had taken legal advice. As it was, however, he was so euphoric at the news that Pernille was not dead that he told Ahlroos everything he wanted to know and probably more, which even so was less than the whole and multi-faceted truth. All he sought in return was an answer to the question he had put to the doctor in vain: ‘How can she be alive?’

  His persistence eventually won him an explanation of sorts. ‘Ms Madsen was never at the house in Munkkiniemi, Mr Eusden. She told us she let Lars Aksden take her place. He was killed in the explosion. For why they swapped, you must ask her.’

  Eusden’s chance to do that came a couple of hours later. When Pernille entered the room, she stopped in the doorway and they smiled disbelievingly at each other. Then she walked across and kissed him on the cheek and sat down on the chair beside the bed. She was dressed in the same black outfit she had worn when they first met in Stockholm. She looked tired and stressed – and wonderfully alive.