Fear Of Broken Glass: The Elements: Prologue

by Mark, David

‘My friend.’

  He looked around to Ulrika. ‘Are you all right?’

  Ulrika nodded, looking at him with concern written all over her beautiful, dirty face.

  ‘How many?’

  ‘There were two of them,’ Ulrika said. ‘They tied me up in the back of their truck.’ Ulrika appeared to recollect something, burying it. She looked at Ash. ‘One of them had a bandaged hand. Three fingers.’

  He looked up in surprise.

  ‘The other a bandaged arm...’

  ‘Conrad cut him. Did they touch you?’ Ash pressed.

  She shook her head, tears in her eyes.

  ‘Three fingers?’ Bok asked.

  ‘Ash cut off two of his fingers with an axe.’ Ulrika said.

  That seemed to make a difference, even to Fabian who looked at Ash with interest while Bok as still as a statue.

  ‘So who killed Justin?’ Ash was addressing Fabian.

  ‘Who gave you that lump on the side o’ you head?’

  Chivers. ‘Not the person who killed Justin.’ Then Ash turned to Bok, eyes set. ‘So who are you and why are we here?’

  The video tape was missing.

  Hasse interviewing Ash. She had looked everywhere she could think of in his office, operations room, all to no avail.

  She was alone in the Department. In her hand she held a crystal tumbler she knew Hasse kept for late nights together with a bottle of Scotch. Inside the alcoholic amber liquid revitalized her, thawing the nightmare.

  One dead in the road: Justin. Two dead on the hill. Two more in the woods, one with a cut arm, one missing two fingers. And Hasse. Five in one day. She took another sip.

  This was no murder investigation.

  Men had already arrived from Gothenburg, going systematically through the pass, by night; the homestead, the land. She thought of what Hasse had said, his voice echoing the words in her head. He knew he was going to be replaced. She crossed the ops room into Hasse’s office and stared at the white board, at the horizontal line and small vertical ones that had been his timeline. Their timeline, here, together.

  How long ago had that been? Today?

  She took the glass with her and sat down in his chair, staring at the board. She stayed there for a while, taking in his desk, the remains of a carrot and a half-drunk cup of cold coffee. Tomorrow, they would continue by daylight then start here, going through his things. She sipped the whiskey and placed the tumbler on the table, then reached forwards and picked up a pen, then the small notepad he always had at the side of his desk. On it he had written one word; Bok. She moved the tip of the pen to the paper. The burn of alcohol gave her cause to think, to take stock. Look at things from anew...

  Passwords. Today the password to his work PC was still valid. Tomorrow it could be too late. She circled Bok’s name and threw the pen to the side, turning his computer on.

  Sebastian Chivers; Almquist had been excited about something before he left. He had taken Chivers with him. The mobile investigations team would politely ask her to let them take care of the situation. They would spend the evening briefing them, the failed detective Hasse Almquist making way for the experts. They would ask, expecting to know everything they did had been done in as short a span of time as possible. She would have to provide first hand accounts of everything that Hasse had been involved in, compiling a list of his activities in the week leading up to his death. She would be late home and exhausted and none of it would have anything to do with preserving his memory.

  Then they would pass sentence, tainting his name.

  Hasse’s notes were kept in his expanding file under the desk.

  He’d been trying to tell her something...

  He’d asked her to backup everything.

  What about his own case-notes on file? She wondered. She made an on-the-spur-of-the-moment decision and entered his case files, using his password. Hasse had always shared his password, in case I’m late to the office, he used to say.

  It was the sort of feeling she had occasionally at the beginning of a bad virus, when the mind feels dismembered from the body, removed from reality. A virus that multiplies, spreading misery. Troubled, she turned on her computer, entering the password. Access granted.

  She accessed the central server and requested a list of recently opened files for today. There was only one file.

  She opened it and read. When she was finished, she placed her head in her hands. Shit Hasse.

  She copied the file and delated it, unsure what to do next. Then she remembered what he had said about his notebook and proceeded to back up his computer onto diskette. When she was done she rolled back his chair, placing the discs in her pocket, then opened the desk drawer and removed his expanding file. A large bulge in the middle revealed his spiral-bound notebook, with the rounded corners and coffee stains. She looked inside, twenty different pockets contained photographs, notes and photocopies in an order she failed to understand. She knew it had to be here, somewhere. Order. That was just the way Hasse worked, ordering things in his own way that only he himself ever understood, never feeling the need or compulsion to explain to others or even to himself. Trying to reform him had been a waste of time, so she had learned to adapt herself to his ways; learned to adapt herself to him. With time, she had learned to respect him for his methods and had seen the wisdom in his thinking.

  He was gone.

  Chapter 18

  NO DISCERNABLE PATTERN

  Within the gates ere a man shall go,

  (Full warily let him watch,)

  Full long let him look about him;

  For little he knows, where a foe may lurk,

  And sit in the seats within.

  Stanza 1, Hávamál

  Such simple words: ‘I am here to help you.’

  Bok was an even greater mystery to him than the Hangman. Ash stood on the far side of the room, sitting down on the sheepskin-covered bench, the last of the rain dripping off Fabian’s poncho onto the floorboards.

  ‘That is all you can know; for now.’ Bok said firmly. ‘Here no one will harm you.’

  ‘Not so quick mister,’ Fabian said, looking at Bok. ‘How do I know we’re safe? They will not hesitate to kill either of us.’

  ‘Do you two know each other?’

  Fabian looked at Ash. ‘I was told to take you here, away from back there.’ She looked over her shoulder, back in the direction of where they had come from, then over at Bok. ‘This just a point on a map. Never met him before.’

  ‘You don’t know each other?’ Ash looked at one, then the other.

  Neither spoke.

  ‘So who’s doing the shooting?’

  ‘I don’t know who they are,’ she said, still looking at Bok.

  Was he one of them?

  He looked at Bok, at the dark, thick bushy beard flecked with gray, heavy brow and scars under one ear, wondering what his story was. Who he was; why he was here. He could ask him of course. Or he could play along and see how far it went. Asking would be a waste of time anyway; he knew Bok’s type. He had seen it before.

  ‘You will be safer here than at the homestead.’

  Ash watched Fabian turn to Ulrika, face closed. They exchanged a look, some understanding passing between them. Perhaps it was the knowledge that people they had known were no more, or were no more, through the actions of other unknown people. Words were never enough, thoughts everything. ‘What happened to them? The men who took Ulrika?’ Ash noticed again how Fabian only used part of her face when she spoke, one half death-like, like a leather-overlaid skull, inanimate, the other side alive.

  Fabian looked away.

  He never asked twice.

  Bok lifted a heavy head and turned it wearily to look at his three guests, resting first upon Ulrika, then Ash. ‘I am sorry about your friend. You are lucky to be alive. What happened to the man who collected the keys?’

  ‘Conrad? He left with Daniel in the other car.’

  ‘And he got away?’

  Ash nodded.
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br />   ‘What happened?’

  ‘Almquist... the detective, he must have been shot. By them. We left, dividing into two cars. Conrad got away, we were going to follow him, then there was this pickup, we went in the other direction. It was the pickup that boxed us in.’

  ‘The Pass?’

  Ash nodded. ‘They blocked the road, stones, debris.’

  Bok looked at Fabian. She nodded. ‘Well, that evens the odds at least. The bodies won’t lie still for long. Your vehicle?’

  ‘A good walk, in daylight with a compass.’ Fabian replied.

  ‘Chivers has it.’ Ash said, meeting Ulrika’s gaze.

  ‘Has what?’ Bok said quietly, face staring once again at the surface of the table, lit from below by the candles upon it.

  ‘The painting.’ Ash replied. ‘The Hangman.’

  ‘The painting,’ Bok echoed quietly, as he looked Fabian up and down as if for the first time. ‘Always the painting. The police will be looking for you.’

  ‘Listen – Almquist is dead.’

  The light left Bok’s body, shoulder’s sagging. ‘Where?’

  ‘Just outside the Homestead.’ Ash frowned. ‘You didn’t know...’ he turned to Ulrika.

  Bok stared at his feet for a moment, then seemed to make his mind up about something. He pushed his chair back and stood up, then walked over to a cupboard in the corner of the room and threw her an apple. ‘Here, you can have this. I’ll make something to eat after we all get these clothes off to dry. Tonight you stay with me.’ He turned to look at Ash and Ulrika. ‘You need to change out of these clothes.’ He took his soiled hunter’s jacket off. Underneath he wore a long red wool lumberjack style shirt.

  ‘If they killed one police officer they can kill more...’ Ash stood undecided, waiting for a response. Then, too exhausted to think of anything else than heat and shelter, he did the same. He walked to the center of the cabin and took off his jacket, peppered as it was with a mixture of earth, blood and other filth he didn’t want to even think about. He could even smell himself, the reek of the unwashed.

  ‘I have something you can wear.’ Bok took a step back, examining him, looking over towards Ulrika. ‘Here you will stay until tomorrow.’

  Ash undressed facing them, looking at Fabian for the first time, looking at her in her entirety as he took off his wet clothes and she did the same, long sinewy arms and legs without anything that could be called fat. He leaned forwards, his face emerging out of the shadows and stood up straight to raise the hem of his wet shirt, taking it off. Fabian frowned. Bok creased his brow. Ulrika put a hand to her mouth.

  Bok shrugged, nodding as if in understanding, and gathered the wet clothes. Fabian hardly batted an eyelid at his tattoo; a giant cobra winding its way up his leg ending at his buttocks. Or the scars covering his back from top to bottom.

  Outside the wind was forgotten, reduced to a shifting ebb and flow barely heard through the thick timber logs of the hunting lodge. The question kept running around inside his head, tireless. Incessant, like a headache that would never go away. Ulrika looked at him differently he noticed. Comfortable for the first time in days, Ash sat down at the small table in a small cabin with a big man in a place he knew not, preparing himself for whatever it was that lay on the unseen path now set before him. And still the same question burned his conscience like a red hot poker: Why did they want the Hangman?

  Conrad always knew more than he told. Did he know Ash’s little secret? Ash kept his secret thoughts to himself as the smell of bacon and eggs overpowered him in the glory of a hot meal. It was consumed in hungry silence, the food crude and fatty filling the cabin with memories of childhood. Alvar Bok and Fabian sat on one side of the small table on the bench nearest the wall, Ash and Ulrika on the other in chairs. It tasted as good as any dinner they had ever eaten.

  ‘Did you know that English and Norse are very close languages?’ Bok said, trying to make conversation.

  Fabian looked up as she chewed, looking bewildered.

  ‘Very close.’ He said as he finished, wiping the bowl with his finger, sucking it. He pushed his bowl away. ‘Månendag, moonday. Tuesday, Tír’s day after the god Tír. Wednesday after Odin, as Woden, Woden’s day. Thursday after Thor, Thor’s day. Friday after Freyr, the God of growing, from the earth, Freyr’s day.’

  ‘Saturday?’ Ulrika asked.

  ‘Saturn’s day is for you Roman English. We Norse keep to Lothur’s day, after the God of creation. Sunday, after sunnan, the sun, Sunnan’s day.’

  Ash was the next to finish, repeating Bok’s trick with his finger until it was finger-licked clean.

  ‘There is much to learn before we leave.’ Bok pushed his plate away and stared at Ash. ‘Why did you English come here?’

  Ash shrugged, glancing across at Ulrika. ‘Justin inherited some money to take a painting back to somebody called Anna Kron.’

  Bok was looking at him. Ash noticed his pale blue eyes contract briefly, then relax again. ‘Tell me.’

  He had nothing left to lose, their pathetic secrets suddenly unimportant. ‘There was a letter, one he received from some lawyer, and the money left to him by his old neighbor.’ Ash studied the large man’s face. If he knew anything he gave no sign.

  Bok sat back folding his arms, his face falling slowly into a crumpled frown. ‘Did he say anything else, about this neighbor?’

  Ash thought about it, shaking his head. ‘If he did I can’t remember. Justin was an artist. The neighbor was an old man. He died, or was killed... he fell down the basement stairs.’ Just like Thomas. ‘He made a will asking Justin to deliver it.’

  ‘A will and a letter,’ Bok nodded again, brooding. ‘It was this lawyer’s letter that was the reason he came here?’

  ‘I don’t know. Yes, I suppose so. Almquist made a deal of it. Yes, if it wasn’t for the letter, none of this would have happened.’

  ‘And your involvement?’

  Ash felt he was I the middle of a new investigation, ‘I was helping the Baron; Conrad Baron, not the Red Baron. Conrad Baron was the one who found the accommodation. You must have spoken with him?’

  ‘I spoke with someone wanting to rent the house.’

  ‘Is it your house?’

  Bok didn’t answer.

  Ash looked over to the sheepskin and the bench, open at one end made from a single sheet of oak, hacked and marked by knife and axe.

  ‘Who is Conrad Baron?’

  ‘He works for.., well, I don’t know who he is, to be honest,’ Ash lied.

  Bok got up from the table and walked to the end of the room, reaching under the bench and removing a small three-legged stool with a low backrest, one of three, each stool with holes cut in the shapes of hearts. He placed the stool in front of one of the beds and sat down, looking across to the table with Ash and Ulrika, eyes as clear as a swimming pool, even in candle light.

  ‘Your friend who died. Why did he get involved, really?’

  Had he known Anna Kron?

  ‘Justin wanted some help translating runic inscriptions on the frame of the painting.’

  ‘So he knew about it?’

  Ash nodded.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I needed the money. Conrad told me about Justin. I agreed to help.’ Ash nodded as Ulrika and Fabian listened in silence. Then Bok rested his chin in his immense hands, looking down at the planks of the floor. He sat there, brooding, his eyes never moving from an imaginary spot in front of him. He spoke in a low, quiet voice. ‘This Conrad Baron called to make the reservation. He mentioned nothing about Anna Kron.’

  ‘Or a painting?’ Ulrika asked.

  He looked up at her, slowly. ‘Or a painting.’ He returned his attention to Ash. ‘You met him where, this Conrad?’

  ‘Someone introduced us.’ Ash looked up into Bok’s steady gaze. ‘So you know her, then... Anna?’

  ‘Who made the contact?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘Did the detective, did Almquist say anything to you about
who he thought killed the man in the park?’

  ‘No.’

  He looked up at Fabian. She shook her head.

  ‘What happened to Almquist?’ he asked quietly.

  Ash told him as it was, how they had seen it happen from the window. ‘We heard a shot and saw Almquist’s car hit a tree. There was a hole in his windshield. We ran. Their pickup blocked the road, so we turned right, taking the road into the pass... to where,’ Ash paused. ‘They were waiting.’

  Instead of going home Elin Vikland had decided to go to their café. Inside it was warm and smelled of roasted coffee, the familiar and comforting murmur of people engaged in intimate conversation.

  It felt strange being here knowing he was gone, needing time to come to terms with the day she knew had changed her for ever.

  She looked out of the to curtains of rain illuminated by a solitary streetlamp that reflected her mood, the mast bowed back and forth, pulled hither and thither, the wind tearing at it, light shifting to the beat of its motion. Next to her empty coffee cup was Hasse Almquist’s expandable file. It lay open, various documents lying around her. She read a stapled sheaf of old handwritten notes, chewing her lip, lost in possibilities. A doubt appeared, planted itself and grew. Crimes needed solving, to bring clarity to solving crimes they had to operate in the fog of constant doubt. That was something Hasse said once.

  She shuddered, thinking how the figure slumped forward in the car could be Hasse. The remains, yes, physical leftovers, no more. That was how Vikland still felt five hours after watching them remove his body from the car.

  She turned back to the expandable file and removed a photocopy of an old newspaper article. That caused her to place hand in her bomber jacket, removing the clipping she’d found at the homestead. It was old, showing five archaeologists. She scanned the clipping for any sign of age. That was when she noticed the faint line of a pencil mark. It had been made under the name Karl Oskar Eklund. Eklund? She’d never heard the name before and returned her attention to the photocopy. It covered an incident upon which Hasse had written in his unmistakable hand. Cause unknown. Then the word, Kron. The next sheet had the name Gustav Kron at the top, followed by the words, The Doctor. The rest of the pages seemed to cover random events. Hasse had ringed 1975. On the 15th of October, labelled ‘Events of 1975’. Replacing the note amongst other scraps of papers she took up his battered notebook, opening it. A piece of paper fell out, folded in half. It had her name on it: