Where Ravens Roost

by Karin Nordin

  Part of the hill levelled out and Kjeld stopped to take the surveyor’s map out of his pocket, nearly dropping the folded pages of the contract he’d found at the bank onto the snow-covered ground. He held the torch near the paper, estimating the distance he’d already travelled from the house. Still within the boundaries of his father’s land. He stuffed the map back into his pocket, used a nearby spruce trunk to brace himself as he climbed over a large rock, and continued along the slope.

  The moon’s glow from the oncoming clearing of trees covered the untouched snow in a glaze of bluish-grey. Kjeld stepped through the final line of forest and onto the small ridge of naked ground that separated the woods from the vast mining cavern he’d fallen into days before. Even with the light of the moon stretching over the distance, the bottom of the pit was hidden from sight, obscured by the shadow of night.

  Damn. That was deep.

  Kjeld took out the map and used a gloved pinkie finger to judge the distance from the house to where he was now. He counted it three times and compared it to the distance scale at the bottom of the map, but the result was the same. According to the border survey the boundary of his father’s property must have been somewhere in the middle of that cavern.

  It was true. Norrmalm – no, the Lindqvists – were digging on Nygaard land.

  A dull gleam flickered in the corner of his eye and Kjeld turned just as a knife penetrated the thick corduroy of his father’s coat. Kjeld reached out instinctively and grabbed onto the sleeve of the lunging arm, but the forward rush of the attacker set him off balance. He lost his footing and fell to the ground, head dangling over the edge of the ridge. The attacker fell with him, landing atop Kjeld in a full-weighted collapse against his diaphragm.

  The wind was knocked out of him. Kjeld choked out that last breath of air before his lungs emptied. He looked up at the face of the man atop him, but it was shielded by a dark-coloured balaclava. The man’s eyes looked like two black stones in the darkness. Kjeld struggled to catch his breath. Then the attacker shifted his weight and Kjeld’s chest heaved.

  The attacker scrambled to get to his feet, knee jabbing into Kjeld’s hip. Bone to bone. It sent a sharp pain up Kjeld’s side and he tugged on the sleeve his fingers were still clenched around to keep the other man on the ground. The knife glimmered in the moonlight and Kjeld threw up his free arm to block the blade from being plunged into his chest. The knife cut through the jacket and slashed his forearm. Kjeld didn’t feel anything at first. Then a sharp searing pain rushed through his arm. The wound wasn’t deep, but Kjeld could feel a wetness begin to pool between his skin and the fabric.

  The attacker jerked his arm out of Kjeld’s grip. Kjeld kicked at the man’s shin – hard – sending him stumbling into the snow.

  Kjeld rolled over onto his side away from the edge of the cavern and crawled to his feet. His attacker limped toward the tree line. Kjeld rushed him, bearing all of his weight against the man’s back until they were both on the ground again, grappling between birch trunks. The knife swung at him again just barely missing Kjeld’s face. He caught the attacker’s knife hand by the wrist and shoved it into the snow. Kjeld thought he heard a crack.

  The attacker groaned and clawed at Kjeld’s face with his free hand. He was wild but unsteady. Kjeld had the sudden impression that the man wasn’t accustomed to close-contact fighting. He was strong, but his breathing was erratic. And not just from the brawl.

  A knee jabbed between Kjeld’s legs and he immediately felt a rush of stomach contents threaten to surge upwards. He lost his grip on the attacker’s knife hand and the blade sliced across his cheek. The attacker squirmed beneath him, trying to loosen himself beneath Kjeld’s weight. Kjeld struggled to maintain his position, legs locking around the other man’s in a mount. The knife came at him again. Kjeld caught the attacker’s wrist and twisted it. The knife fell into the snow.

  It was a flurry of arms and fists as they hit and pulled at each other. When the other man opened up enough to give Kjeld free range of his torso, Kjeld threw a punch. He was on top. Gravity was on his side. But when his fist collided with the man’s chest it was like hitting a brick. His arm stiffened as the pain against his knuckles reverberated up to his shoulder. The attacker didn’t hesitate to take advantage of Kjeld’s confusion. He jolted upward and knocked his head against the bridge of Kjeld’s nose.

  Kjeld fell against the trunk of a nearby birch tree, tried to catch his balance, and stumbled face first into the snow. The attacker clamoured to his feet, panting heavily as he regained his balance. Kjeld flattened his palms out on the ground to push himself up, but a blunt blow to the back of the head sent him sprawling into the snow. Then everything went black.

  Chapter 44

  Despite two scarves bundled around her neck, a double-layered down coat and a knit cap, Esme felt the stinging chill of the night as easily as if she were in the nude. The cold saturated everything. And even when she crossed into the woodlands, where the spruce bridled the wind, the freezing air permeated her jeans and stuck to her skin in thin icy tiers. Within minutes she could barely feel her legs. And this was still considered autumn for Jämtland.

  She wouldn’t be caught dead out here in the real winter.

  Damn Kjeld and his bullheadedness.

  Five minutes after her partner stormed off into the dark, torch and obstinacy in hand, Esme threw on her coat, grateful she at least had the good sense to check the forecast before making the long drive to the middle of nowhere, and went out after him. Four years ago when she first met Kjeld she never would have risked hypothermia for his sake, but things changed. If it hadn’t been for Kjeld she would have died three weeks ago at the hands of the Kattegat Killer. She lit the way with the light function on her phone and was careful to step into Kjeld’s footprints to avoid sinking down to her ankles where the snow was fresh.

  Kjeld struggled to ask people for help. Which was why when Esme made the decision to get in her car and drive across the country, she hadn’t been thinking about whether her presence would actually alleviate the situation. She only thought it was her obligation as his friend and his colleague to be there. To help. But she didn’t feel like much help. Kjeld had been different since the shooting at the APM Terminals port. He was more distant. More agitated. And Esme was concerned that the addition of unresolved family troubles, compounded by the recent drama in Gothenburg, would be too much for him.

  She worried about him because she cared about him. More than she ought to have. More than he would ever realise.

  For a man so adept at getting into the minds of criminals and killers, he was astonishingly dense when it came to reading the people closest to him. But that was probably for the best.

  Esme tucked her chin and mouth into her scarf. A distant howl halted her approach. Shit. She hadn’t been thinking about wild animals. That wasn’t an instinct she’d acquired growing up in the suburbs of Malmö. She quickened her pace. Her legs dragged heavier as she breached the crest of the hill.

  The beam of Kjeld’s torch, partially entombed in the snow, spread out a mellow gleam against the two wrestling figures.

  Esme shoved her phone into her pocket and reached inside her coat for the service pistol she kept holstered against her side. The gloves were too thin and her fingers were tense. Rigid from the cold.

  One of the figures got the upper hand, bashing a rock against the skull of the other. Esme caught a glimpse of Kjeld’s ruddy hair, darkened by blood, before he fell limp against the ground.

  ‘Stop! Police!’ she called out. She raised her weapon.

  Kjeld’s attacker barrelled at her. She aimed for his left thigh and pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  Misfire.

  The man charged her, knocking her hard in the shoulder. She stumbled backward, sliding on the snow. A pointed tingling shot up through her arm and the gun fell from her hand. The attacker scrambled towards the weapon. The heavy pant of his breath startled her. It was wheezing. Uneven. She kicke
d out her leg and caught the toe of her boot in his knee. He twisted off-kilter on his ankle and cried out in pain. Then she dived for the gun.

  Her fingers, still wooden and senseless from the cold, fumbled to get a good grasp on the grip, which was now slick with snow. And by the time she raised her arms to take aim, the man was rushing her again. Like a freight train careening brakeless downhill.

  She pulled the trigger.

  Jammed again.

  Fuck.

  He rammed her head on, propelling them over the crest of the hill she’d just climbed. Esme grabbed on to the attacker’s jacket as they rolled, using him to brace against the jagged rocks and shrubs that lay hidden beneath the snow, until her boot caught in between a fallen log, jolting them apart. The man continued to slide downward a few feet before regaining his footing. Esme searched the ground for something she could use to defend herself, but when she glanced in the direction of the attacker she saw him running off into the darkness.

  Esme rolled onto her side. Her ankle was wedged within a rotted crevice of the log, twisted at an acute angle. It wasn’t broken or sprained, but it hurt. She knew it would be bruised in the morning.

  She had to get up in case the man came back to finish what he’d started on the ridge. She had to get back to Kjeld.

  She tugged her foot out of its hold and crawled to her knees.

  The gunky sound of a wad of chew being spat in the snow stopped her in her tracks. Esme turned her gaze upwards and saw the hefty shadow of someone else standing above her. She caught a glimpse of the animal pelt over his shoulders and imagined it was a bear. Then her eyes focused and she saw the camouflage hunting gear. Only a man. A man brandishing her pistol.

  Chapter 45

  The cold burned his face, numbing it of all feeling aside from the sharp tingling where the nerve endings near the top layer of his skin began to freeze. Someone called his name, but they sounded far away. Like they were yelling at him from underwater. He thought of the Doppler effect. Was the sound coming towards him or away from him? He couldn’t tell. The back of his head throbbed, pounded. The din in his head made it impossible to focus on anything else.

  Someone placed their hands on his shoulder and he remembered his attacker. He tried to shake them away, but ended up rolling into the base of a spruce tree. He mumbled something. It sounded more coherent in his mind than it did when it came out of his mouth. Someone tugged at him. The sound of his name on the air was closer now. It was coming towards him, he presumed, and he lay there with his face in the snow, waiting to hear if the wave echoed away. It didn’t.

  Another tug. Kjeld thought about fighting against them, but he didn’t move. His limbs were stiff and his head ached. He opened his eyes for a second and thought he saw the person he chased away from the barn standing over him. Then he felt his upper body being lifted into the air. He heard his name again. It was a question this time. He tried to reach out towards the figure, but his arms clung to his torso. It was cold. So damn cold.

  Then he closed his eyes and everything went dark again.

  * * *

  The pungent odour of raw fermented fish caused the hair in his nostrils to stand on end. Kjeld rolled over onto his side and vomited on the hardwood floor, just barely missing the carpet. Then he gagged up the acidic taste, which couldn’t compare with the smell of putrefied fish, and spat up the rest of the stomach contents that caught in his oesophagus. When he looked up he saw an unfamiliar man kneeling beside him. His skin was thick and leathery as though it had seen too many high summers and just as many hard winters. Thick furrows indented his face along his eyes, disappearing into a grizzled beard that stretched halfway down his chest, curling at the end. What caught Kjeld’s attention most, however, was the large port-wine stain on the right side of his forehead in the shape of a bear.

  Valle Dahl. The Drunken Bear.

  ‘What the hell?’ Kjeld wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

  ‘Surströmming,’ Valle replied. His tone was gravelly and his words spoken as though he had a mouth full of potatoes. He held out a can towards Kjeld.

  The odour made him wince.

  ‘What?’ Kjeld’s head was still hurting and his thoughts confused. He must have misheard the man, but it was difficult to think over the odour of rotten fish and body odour coming from the man before him.

  ‘Nature’s smelling salts, they are. If surströmming ain’t strong enough to wake a man then nothing is.’

  Esme hurried in from the kitchen. ‘Kjeld! Thank God, you’re awake!’

  She knelt down beside him and Valle moved away to the sofa where Stenar sat, watching on with quiet concern.

  ‘I was about to drag you into the car and take you to the hospital. You should probably still go. You’ve been out for almost an hour.’ She shoved him gently in the shoulder. ‘You scared me to death.’

  ‘I don’t need to go to the hospital,’ he insisted. The last thing he wanted was to be poked and prodded at by doctors.

  Kjeld sat up on the floor, using the record cabinet to support his back. He placed a hand on his head and flinched. He could feel a gash surrounded by a crusty layer of dried blood. Then he remembered the slice to his hand. He glanced down at his palm. It was bandaged up. The tips of his fingers were pale, but not frozen.

  ‘I don’t remember walking back to the house.’

  ‘You didn’t. Valle and I carried you. You’re lucky you don’t have frostbite,’ Esme said. ‘I’m going to get a bucket and clean this up.’

  She stood, disappearing around the corner into the kitchen.

  An electric heater blared enthusiastically at his face and Kjeld scooted a few inches away from it.

  Oskar sniffed at the vomit and then followed Esme into the kitchen, hoping for food.

  Kjeld turned his focus on Valle. The man looked like he’d been living rough. Not homeless, but wild. He was bundled up in at least three layers of clothing and had what looked to be a fox pelt wrapped around his neck like a scarf. He wasn’t the town drunk Kjeld remembered. Kjeld remembered a man afraid to look people in the eye. A man who sat crouched beside the entrance to the supermarket, holding out a used coffee cup for loose change. This man stood straight, aside from that natural hunch in his shoulders from labouring in the mines as a young man, and his eyes were clear. Sober. Or, at least, temporarily sober. There was still a lingering scent of booze that wafted from his breath. He reminded Kjeld of the frontier men in American westerns. The kind who went up into the mountains for gold and never came out.

  ‘A lot of people have been looking for you,’ Kjeld said.

  ‘That so?’

  ‘They thought you were dead. Or worse.’

  Valle took off his knit cap and scratched the top of his head. His hair was a matted mess of yellow-grey, thin and unwashed. ‘What’s worse than dead?’

  ‘Did you kill a man and bury him in my father’s barn?’ Kjeld watched him for some kind of guilty reaction. He didn’t get one.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did you kill Peter Lindqvist?’

  Valle laughed, stopping only when the laugh turned into a thick wet cough. ‘Son, if I was going to kill Peter Lindqvist, I would have done it decades ago. And I would have started with that bastard brother of his.’

  ‘Roland?’

  ‘He’s the son of a bitch who ratted me out to the foreman. Said I was drunk on the job. Drinking on the job? Sure. Everyone had a little bit of something in their coffee to get them through those morning shifts in the winter. But drunk? I ain’t never worked a day drunk in my life.’

  ‘What about the accident?’

  Valle rested his hands on his belt. Kjeld couldn’t tell how big he was under the multiple layers of clothing, but he thought the man might have a bit of a gut. Compliments of the same malady that gave him that red nose.

  ‘Do you know who was supervising that day?’ Valle asked, but Kjeld had the impression it wasn’t really a question.

  ‘The records say you were.’

&
nbsp; ‘O’course they do. Because Roland changed them. Roland was the one working as shift supervisor the day that section of the mine caved in. He’s the reason those three men died. But a Lindqvist can’t be responsible for anything like that because that wouldn’t look good on the company, now would it?’ Valle reached into his pocket and took out a can of snus, sticking a piece up under his top lip near the gums, making his speech even more difficult to understand. ‘So they laid that on the feet of the only other guy who was there.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘I’m saying that if I was gonna kill a Lindqvist, I wouldn’t have started with Peter. I never had no problem with him. He was a good guy. Poor fool probably didn’t even know what his brother did. I’m sure he got his father to cover for him. Probably part of what led him to an early grave, too. Old man Lindqvist, that is. I don’t know nothing about what happened to Peter.’

  ‘And the drinking?’

  ‘That started after I lost my position at Norrmalm. And I’ve paid the price for that, too, mind you. Wife upped and took the kids not long after.’ Valle glanced at Stenar. ‘Your dad was the only one who tried to help me. Gave me some money to start up my own roofing business. Went well for a few years, but …’

  He trailed off and Kjeld didn’t need to hear the rest of the sentence to know what Valle meant. It wasn’t hard to imagine that Valle wouldn’t have been able to keep it together after losing everything. From the moment Roland placed the blame for those deaths on him Valle was doomed to become the laughing stock of teenagers around Varsund. The Drunken Bear who spent his days digging through the bins behind restaurants for scraps and spending what little cash he had on spirits. It was a harsh reminder of how quickly a person’s life could turn upside down.