The Ice Cage — A Scandinavian Crime Thriller set in the Nordic Winter (The Baltic Trilogy)

by Nilsson-Julien, Olivier

  My only hesitation about going home on the next ferry was what Thor had said about Anna. My father had been worried about her disappearance. He’d been searching for her until the very last day of his life. I couldn’t leave the island without knowing for sure what had happened to her. I realised that I owed it to my father to find out. Maybe Anna had nothing to do with his death, but she’d been what he last cared about. I had to locate her and talk to her. From the look of the photo he’d taken of her, she liked him and should be able to tell me more about him. I just needed to retrace his last days, find out who he’d seen and where he’d been.

  Or should I simply go back to Carrie? I couldn’t really justify lingering in Mariehamn, but at the same time something was holding me back on Åland. My argument for staying was only a vague feeling of unfinished business, but a significant one – a 20-year landslide to fill. This would only require an extra day, two at the most.

  The clincher was finding some of my old belongings in the attic. Among them was the cassette recorder I’d been given for my eighth birthday with an ABBA tape and a pack of blanks. When I played one, I was surprised to hear my own voice and how carefree I sounded. I was laughing with my father, not a situation my mother had ever admitted. Clearly, my father had cared about me. Sitting in the attic, over two decades later, my father’s house came alive around me. Mum and dad actually sounded like they were enjoying being together. Hearing the tape brought tears to my eyes. There had been love in spite of mum insisting she’d never loved him, only used him to have a child. When I asked why she’d moved to Mariehamn if she didn’t like him, she said it was because she didn’t speak the language yet and didn’t know better. She’d imagined my father being something he wasn’t, mysterious, deep and fashionably Bergmanesque. Once she learned Swedish, she realised he was no different to English men – a ‘spineless creep’. Her argument wasn’t totally coherent, but that’s what I’d been told as a child and until now her incoherence had been my family truth. I was getting different vibes from this tape.

  Now I could see things as I’d seen them as a kid. It all came back to me in flashes. I hadn’t thought much about this in the last 20 years, but it felt good to hear us like this, because over the years, I’d developed a negative image of my life in Mariehamn. Supposedly, I’d had a ‘difficult childhood’, but on the tape it sounded fine, even happy.

  There was a sequence of me singing an ABBA song with my parents laughing in the background. I listened to the recording again and again in disbelief, before sitting in silence in my father’s kitchen. It suddenly came back to me, my father saying that the funnel-shaped, orange lamp hanging above the kitchen table eavesdropped on everything we said. If you leaned under it and remained completely still, you could hear echoes of our conversations. The lampshade was like a sea shell that would have kept fragments of our voices.

  Part of me had wanted to believe it and now I wished it was true. I really wished the lamp could whisper. Maybe in the future scientists would be able to extract such information from everyday knick-knacks, kitchen sinks and pedal bins. The cassette recorder had brought me back to my childhood, it had made the house come alive again. The voice of the house was on the tape like a melody from the past. I was listening to a forgotten me surrounded by our family.

  What surprised me most was how different my mother sounded. I recognised her voice, but it wasn’t the voice I’d grown up with in London. She was usually bitter and negative, spending much of her time muttering to herself. Here the tone was lighter and it was obvious I’d seen her happy in Mariehamn, but she’d chosen to repress it. She’d spent the last two decades denying anything good had ever happened with my father and convincing me that it was the truth. It was sad to think that she’d wasted so much energy on criticising the best time of her life, because that’s what it sounded like. In Mariehamn, she’d been a happy young woman full of hope and after the separation she’d turned bitter. She’d seen my father’s desire to leave as a betrayal and had never come to terms with it. The only way I’d been able to cope with her inability to adapt was to shut down everything to do with my father.

  I rang Carrie to tell her about the tape and that I needed some more time. Of course, I would come back immediately if she needed me, but she really didn’t want me to return until I was done. I should do whatever I had to do now. Once the baby arrived, she wanted everything to be sorted and certainly wouldn’t want me to leave again. I realised that this was also about me becoming a father. I needed to know who my father had been and where I was coming from. My children would ask about their granddad. It was the right decision and it was confirmed when I made another discovery in the attic, a shocking one – a box of letters sent to me in London by my father.

  My mother had returned them unopened. I recognised her handwriting on the envelopes – ‘unknown at this address’. In the letters, my father told me how much he missed me as well as about his skating and fishing adventures, always with warmth and humour. He loved his life, but failed to hide that there was a big void. I sensed that the separation from me and my mother had distanced him from life, made him more emotionally detached. Part of his heart had been ripped out. That’s what I read between the lines, but of course these were letters intended for a 10-year old and probably written thinking that my mother would examine them first. In any case, the letters reinforced my urge to understand my father’s life and feelings in his last days.

  18

  Apart from the soldiers, hunting with his father was the only thing he enjoyed as a kid. He’d been scared of pulling the trigger in the beginning and his father had started by teaching him that it wasn’t to be pulled – it was pressed in a smooth gesture that he would acquire with experience.

  He loved the silence of the forest. There were sounds, but no unnecessary words. Every single crack or tweet had a meaning, whether a fox in the undergrowth, the wind or a bird. It was never arbitrary, never noise for the sake of noise. To him these natural sounds were appeasing.

  But it was shooting his first moose that had impressed him the most. The feeling of taking down such a massive animal had made him all shaky and excited. It gave him a sense of euphoria. It wasn’t his father’s admiration; it was something else, a more primitive sensation. In prehistoric times young hunters used to kill animals all the time for survival. Nowadays, we avoid talking about animals being slaughtered every day in abattoirs. We eat them in total denial of how they reach our plates. Only hunters, soldiers and murderers still experience the act of ending a life. His father was right when he said that you can only call yourself a man once you’ve taken a life. What his father forgot to add, was that to remain a man you need to keep killing.

  19

  I returned to the yacht club, as it seemed to have been the centre of my father’s life. This was where he’d spent most of his time, whereas his house felt more like a relic from a previous life, a place he only passed through to eat and sleep. The room he shared with Thor at the club was my father’s den, the centre of his life.

  His desk at the club was covered in papers, but nothing revealing at first sight. His computer was full of photos, only nature pics as far as I could see. There were some other documents, including a few ice yacht drawings and training programmes. Now that I’d decided to retrace his last few days, I needed something tangible. I’d start at the end. He’d died on a Tuesday night. I had to find out what he usually did on Tuesdays.

  I’d hoped he would have a calendar, but when Thor found me digging around in my father’s desk and I asked him about it, he told me Henrik kept everything in his head. He made appointments with people and stuck to them. He didn’t like the flexi-culture brought by mobile phones, mainly because he thought a lot of time was wasted delaying decisions and commitments. According to Thor, Henrik believed that only when a deadline is fixed, do you truly start the mental preparation. In his eyes, contemporary culture was more about deciding when to do things than actually doing them. The technology turned procra
stination into a life style. I could see what my father meant – how we become consumed by our tools, how they cease to be tools for us to become their slaves, forgetting why we wanted them in the first place. This take on new technology was apparent on his computer, which functioned more as a visual aid than as a communication hub. It was great hearing from Thor about my father, but all this didn’t bring me any closer to finding him.

  What had he been up to? Seeing the yachts on the ice, I remembered Thor mentioning GPS logging and kids competing in longitudes and latitudes. Did Henrik keep a log of where he went? According to Thor he did, but I couldn’t find any log book, nor could I see any relevant documents on his PC, and neither could Thor.

  ‘How do you determine your position?’

  ‘Henrik had a GPS camera that tagged all his photos.’

  We found an old 35mm Olympus OM-1 camera, but nothing digital and the photos on his PC didn’t cover the last month. It looked like he hadn’t had time to upload them, as the other photos on the computer covered every single month and went back a good four or five years. I found the photo of Anna in the previous month’s upload.

  When I asked Thor how well he knew Anna, his answer was hesitant, as if he was hiding something. I often had that feeling with Scandinavians though, imagining their reticence was a sign of inner depth. It wasn’t necessarily the case. In fact, Viking sayings advised the stupid to shut up. Or maybe Thor simply wasn’t interested in Anna’s story, but how come he didn’t know her if she’d been a regular at the club? Thor finally admitted he’d been the last one to speak to her.

  ‘You?’

  ‘I should have told you.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘I… fucked up. We had a few drinks and I got a bit frisky. She slapped me before running out, upset. I didn’t tell Henrik at first, because I felt bad about it and assumed she’d gone to her boyfriend – Bengt. Henrik was furious when I told him. I didn’t know, but it had been over with the boyfriend for ages. Henrik had let her crash in the back of the club without telling me. It’s against our rules, so we had an argument and he went home. That’s the last I saw of him alive.’

  Was he telling the truth or was it a cover up? I needed to find out where Anna went and what Henrik had done about her disappearance. Thor didn’t think my father had filed a missing person’s report, but I wanted to check anyway. It wouldn’t be his first lie. I also needed to talk to Anna’s boyfriend. If she hadn’t been able to return to the club, she might have gone to Bengt’s place.

  20

  The police station was as silent as a library, the heavy breathing of the man behind the desk the only sign of life. He looked like a pregnant walrus with his bushy moustache and ballooning belly. Where was everyone? Was hibernation the secret to surviving the Scandinavian winter? I showed the policeman Anna’s photo. He looked at it for a good 30 seconds without blinking. I thought he’d gone into a coma and was about to prompt him out of his torpor, when he finally emerged.

  ‘She’s beautiful.’

  Yes, she was, but that wasn’t my question.

  ‘Have you seen her before?’

  He looked up and stared at me in silence, still stuck in his 30-second mode.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Henrik Sandberg is my father and he…’

  Without a word he came round the desk, walked up to me and put a hand on my shoulder. Had I said something wrong? Was he arresting me? He looked me in the eyes, shook his head and gave me a very long hug. It was probably just another of his 30 seconds, but it felt longer, much longer, long enough for his smell to start impregnating me. This was a man full of flavours and he was sharing them profusely. My nose was twitching right and left, not knowing where to turn, desperately trying to source some fresh air. I really didn’t know how to react when being hugged by a police officer, let alone a smelly specimen. He eventually let go, took a step back and – with both hands still firmly anchored on my shoulders – pushed out a deep sigh of relief.

  ‘That’s better... How do you feel?’

  The Englishman in me was aghast with embarrassment and unable to respond. The adequate response to this man’s behaviour simply didn’t feature in my cultural heritage, nor was it what I’d come for. As for the Scandinavian in me, he wasn’t exactly in his comfort zone either. He was 10 years old and didn’t want to be embraced by anyone, especially not by men in uniform. I had no choice but to resort to my emergency tool box.

  ‘Thanks for that. I really appreciate it.’

  Had I overdone it? For a moment it looked like he was going for a repeat embrace and I thought I’d never get any sensible information out of him, but I had to keep up the momentum. Given the opportunity, he seemed prepared to distribute free hugs all day, except I didn’t want them.

  ‘I’m in a bit of a rush.’

  ‘Oh. That’s not good.’

  He looked deeply concerned, but I ignored that.

  ‘Does the photo ring any bells?’

  The serial hugger adjusted his jumper over his stomach and went back behind the desk, where he picked up the photo and went silent for another 30 seconds. What was wrong with him?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes what?’

  I was starting to realise that I had to be blunt if I wanted to get anything out of him.

  ‘Henrik Sandberg came in with this photo.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He showed it to me.’

  Extracting the information was painstakingly painful. He eventually revealed that the photo had been circulated in the office. No one had recognised the girl, but as far as I could see, the walrus was the only person working there, so circulation might be an overstatement.

  ‘How many people work here?’

  He turned to a photo hanging behind him on the wall. There were four people on the photo, although with the time he took to count them it could have been a battalion.

  ‘Well, there’s Eva and… Ernst. And the chief, but he’s away. And me, but I’m not a policeman. I run the office.’

  Ernst was big and bald, while the chief looked like a slick businessman and Eva was… Eva.

  ‘The force is tenfold in the summer.’

  With such as small police force it wasn’t surprising no one had recognised Anna, but at least I knew my father hadn’t filed a missing person’s report. There was no record of anyone fitting her description in the computer system either, but I’d managed to trace one of my father’s last moves. He’d gone to the police, which confirmed that he’d been seriously worried about her.

  21

  Her cheekbones reminded him of Marja from secondary school in Helsinki. They’d been in the same swimming club. She’d been one of the few people who didn’t ignore him. He saw it as a sign that she might like him.

  It had happened in the last year. They’d been occupying the school to protest against relocation out of the town centre. Marja had been among the leaders and he’d joined to be close to her. She must have noticed that he couldn’t stop staring at her during the two days and nights spent camping in the school gymnasium. He couldn’t wait any longer. He’d been building up to it for months and he’d finally dared to ask. After stopping her in the alleyway between the school yard and the street, he’d blurted it out. Would she go to the movies with him?

  ‘What?’

  She’d sounded totally surprised; as if it was more likely the Finnish team would win the FIFA World Cup.

  ‘Would you like to go and see a film’?

  She’d stared at him in silence before turning and going to her friends. Watching her bouncy walk, he’d felt her rhythm pulsing in his body. He pictured her walking down the poolside and making a perfect dive. He was lost in thought. When he looked up, they were all laughing – Marja and her mates. They were mocking him and she was just like the others. What had he done to her? He hated the stupid cow. Never again was he going to be embarrassed by a Finnis
h bitch, never ever. Who did she think she was?!

  22

  Anna’s ex Bengt ran a garage. When I arrived, he was showing a couple a VW Polo. They were already seated, ready to drive off for a test ride, but it was only when they nodded that I recognised the Forsmans. I tried making some small talk, but they treated me like a total stranger. Clearly, conversation didn’t happen spontaneously with them. They were diesels and needed warming up, maybe an injection of aquavit?

  Watching Bengt wave them off, I noticed that he was short for a Scandinavian.

  He hadn’t seen Anna for at least a month.

  ‘Where did you meet?’

  ‘Ukraine. A town called Kherson on the Black Sea. I was there for an ice hockey tournament and we met at the party held for the Mariehamn team. Anna’s family has worked for the local tractor factory for the last 30 years, but since independence things have changed. Private investors are trying to make a quick buck and the tractor company has run out of money. The new owners don’t invest and the business isn’t viable any more. Anna’s father and brothers have to go fishing to feed the family. And they’re not the only ones – the whole town is in depression. When I met Anna, her best friend had just committed suicide. The factory used to be the centre of their lives, the heartbeat of the town. People made a living from it and went holidaying in factory-owned summer camps on the Black Sea. Now that the safety net is gone people starve. Anna wanted to get away, go somewhere where she could work, where there would be more than one employer. Not stuff all the eggs in the same basket.’

  Anna obviously had guts. I asked Bengt where she could be.