‘Come in.’
I carefully pushed the door open.
‘Watch the step.’
There was a high threshold, probably to keep the snow out, and without the man’s warning, I would have tripped and fallen flat on my face. It was pitch-dark inside and the first thing that hit me before I could see anything was a strong smell of fish.
‘There’s a bench on your left.’
I felt with my hand and sat down.
‘Shut the door.’
I did and waited. I didn’t know what for and was itching to fire away my questions, but this was the way with the locals. To understand them and my father, I had to be patient, try not to impose my urban rhythm. This time there was a reward as I gradually started to see light seeping through a hatch in the floor. Underneath it was a matching hole in the ice and thanks to the moonlight filtering through the ice around the cabin we could see the Baltic herring swimming below. And I could finally see the man.
‘Hungry?’
‘Starving.’
I’d been going for hours without eating and my stomach had spoken. The man fiddled over a woodstove in the corner before passing me a plate of fish. I didn’t know what it was, but it had a delicious smoky flavour. He handed me a glass that immediately made me cough as I drank it. I’d expected water, it was whiskey. I hadn’t seen the amber colour of the liquid. He laughed.
‘I worked in Ireland when I was your age and never looked back.’
I started to relax because there was no agenda. It was cosy and warm and he was in no rush to get me out, or to get me in for that sake. I was there, I was. That was it and that was enough. As a Londoner, I was so used to having a rationale behind everything, quantifiable objectives, accountability and a systematic approach, everything but life as it comes.
Once I’d finished my fish, I looked down into the Baltic again. It was spellbinding and I don’t know how long I sat there staring, but my impatience eventually seeped through.
‘Have you had any visitors recently?’
He ignored my question. It reminded me of the Swedish motto during the war: ‘A Swede keeps silent’. In Swedish, the verb ‘to keep silent’ is homonymous with ‘tiger’ and the motto was illustrated with a tiger. Shutting up was associated with a strong and brave animal, when in fact the Swedish ‘tiger’ was everything but brave or strong. Choosing a tiger to represent cowardice or what some, with a more cynical mindset, would call pragmatism, had always struck me as sinister. Whatever the designation, it meant looking the other way, bending over and allowing German troop trains through Sweden to invade less consenting neighbours.
Had the fisherman been silent during the war? Had all Swedes gone fishing? Technically, the man was a Finn, but in spirit he was a Swede. I’d grown up in Mariehamn and always felt closer to Sweden. Ultimately, we were neither nor – I was an Ålander and so was the man. He held up the bottle and I held up my glass for a top up.
‘Are you lost?’
‘Do I look it?’
‘Usually it’s the only reason people come here.’
‘I’m retracing the last days of my father.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Henrik Sandberg.’
‘Henke! How’s the old moose?’
‘In the morgue.’
He fell silent and held up his glass before emptying it in one go.
‘How did he die?’
‘He drowned. Or at least I think he did.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m not quite sure yet.’
He looked down at the swimming fish. What was he thinking? He cleared his throat.
‘Have you seen him recently?’
‘I’ve been fishing for the last couple of months.’
‘How did you know him?’
‘He worked with my nephew.’
‘The museum director?’
‘No, Thor Torstensson.’
Of course, the museum director was too old to be the fisherman’s nephew. He shook his head.
‘I can’t believe Henke’s gone.’
‘He was looking for a girl.’
I showed him the photo.
‘She disappeared.’
He looked up at me.
‘I’ll miss him. Really, I will.’
‘I’m here because he took a photo of your boat. Any idea why he would have done that?’
He looked up and I thought I’d caught a glimpse of surprise in his eyes.
‘He took photos of everything. My boat is part of everything.’
‘Any other reason?’
The man was staring down into the water.
‘Not that I can see.’
I left without knowing his name and wasn’t any wiser. He told me the best way to Thor’s. I was finally going to get the chance to confront him about Anna’s passport.
31
I was driving into the dark on the open ice with my light beams tunnelling 100 meters ahead. All I wanted was to get to Thor’s as quickly as possible.
I must have done something wrong, driven too fast or too close to the shore, because suddenly it was as if the floor collapsed under the snowmobile. I couldn’t believe I was going to crash through the ice. I did not want to end up in the freezing water again. My left foot came out of the stirrup, but I managed to stick it back in to balance the snowmobile and accelerated on impulse. The snowmobile made a jump forward and I escaped the crack in the ice, but landed with such a thud that it went through the ice again. The pain in my stump was excruciating after the violent acceleration and once I’d recovered enough to open the throttle for a second jump, it was too late. I tried to give full gas, but the track wasn’t engaging and the machine was definitely sinking. It was dragging me down and I had to let go. I tried to cling onto the ice.
If I’d felt a bit tipsy from the whiskey when leaving the cabin, I sobered up damn quickly, trying to remember what Thor had told me – the ice prods. They should have been round my neck. They weren’t. Flailing around in the water, I checked my coat pockets. Phew, I still had them. Damn lucky, because I’d been about to get rid of the coat, which was weighing me down. Thanks to the prods, I inched myself back on the ice. The GPS didn’t work any more and my supposedly waterproof mobile was dead. What was I going to do? Would I ever reach Thor to ask him about the photo? It was as if the Baltic gods were trying to stop me from getting to him. If I’d been superstitious, I would have seen it as a warning, but I wasn’t. I was frozen.
I didn’t know how long it had been since I’d left Thor’s uncle, but the knowledge that he was fishing in the warmth of his cabin at the beginning of my snowmobile tracks kept me going. If I followed them, I’d find him. If I followed, I’d find him. I would. I repeated it like a mantra as I backtracked through the night. I’d kept my wet clothes on. I’m not sure it was the right decision, but undressing outdoors in the middle of the Nordic winter simply didn’t appeal. It hadn’t done me any good last time. I walked and walked in the iced-up clothes, focusing on reading the tracks. It’s impossible to tell for how long I walked. All I know is that I was lucky it wasn’t snowing, because it would have covered the tracks. When I finally reached the cabin, I was so focused on following the tracks that I didn’t see it coming. Hearing me stumble straight into the cabin, the old man came out almost immediately to drag me inside. Without a word, he took my clothes off and wrapped me in a blanket by the stove. The amber liquor tasted much better this time.
32
I was trapped underwater, trying to find a hole in the ice to escape. I was interrupted by a muffled scream – Anna, stuck at the bottom of the sea, with her leg trapped under a snowmobile. She looked up to the light while pulling in vain to free herself. A man came swimming to her rescue – my father. He freed her by lifting the snowmobile and together they swum towards the light, but they couldn’t surface. The ice was too thick, the ceiling wouldn’t give. Their banging was dull. I tried to swim to them but couldn’t. I was wrapped up in seaweed, a prisoner
of the sea watched by a shoal of herrings.
My father came down to the sea bed, picked up a rock and swam back up to bang it against the ice. Cracks appeared, but Anna’s lungs were imploding and she was panicking. Once he’d made a hole, I watched with my heart pounding as he tried to push Anna through it. He couldn’t do it. Something was stopping her, holding her down. I finally managed to free myself from the seaweed and sprinted to my father’s help. Together we pushed Anna, but we still couldn’t do it. There was a shadow above, a hand. Distorted by the water, I saw Thor holding his hand on top of her head, pushing her down. She was desperate, freaking out, eyes bulging. Above, Thor remained calm, the daylight forming a halo of serenity around his head. I tried to climb up and scraped the ice with my nails. I scratched Thor’s hand, but he didn’t react, even though he was bleeding and his blood mixing with the sea water in front of Anna’s face. I kept trying to remove his hand, ripping his flesh to the bone in the process, but he still didn’t flinch. My heartbeat slowed down, but the scratching kept going at a steady rhythm.
The scratching was from the old man chiselling away at the hole in the ice. He needed to keep working on it to make sure it didn’t freeze over. I’d dozed off. I was starving and he gave me the most amazing fish I’d ever eaten. It felt like it had been created specially for me – just what I needed. He gave me a change of clothes and his first words were a rollicking for wearing a cotton t-shirt. I learned the hard way that cotton has no insulating quality whatsoever. If anything, it cools the body even more, or as the Ålanders say: cotton kills.
He drove me back to my father’s house on his old moped trike with skis under the front wheels and a spiked tyre at the back. It wasn’t as smooth as Thor’s snowmobile, but at least this one was above the ice. When we passed the location of my accident, he told me a warmer current must have kept the ice thin. There were local variations every year and nothing was constant. I shouldn’t trust the ice, because although water can be trusted to freeze at a certain temperature, temperatures fluctuate year in year out. That’s why it was so important to keep talking to nature, to listen. At least that’s what the fisherman said. I think I caught the gist of his philosophy, not that he would have called it that. I was relieved to arrive at my father’s house and knew exactly the first thing I was going to do.
33
He made his greatest discovery while skating with a fellow student. It was more powerful than anything he’d seen before and made killing Marja look dull in comparison. He’d developed an acute sense of what he hated and what made him tick, but until then he hadn’t found a safe method or a controlled environment. This was his epiphany.
The ice had cracked as he’d skated over it and behind him Ola had gone through. He’d been lucky but it wasn’t just a fluke – he was lighter on his skates. When he heard Ola scream, he stopped. Ola had ice prods, but the thin ice kept breaking and he didn’t get anywhere. He eventually pulled out the lifeline and threw it to Ola.
All it would have taken to save Ola was to pull on the rope. He’d started but Ola was heavy. The screams became moans and Ola’s face contorted in pain, his eyes radiating pure horror. He was so gripped by the spectacle of his drowning fellow student that he dropped the rope. Meanwhile, Ola yanked until the full length of the rope had joined him in the water, floating around him. He watched Ola die a slow death, a real-time transition. He was completely absorbed by Ola’s passage from life to death. It was so much slower and more tangible than when shooting a moose and with Marja he hadn’t been able to see her expression, as he’d suffocated her with a towel. Here, he had a close-up of the pain of dying. Life is so precious to us, yet so vulnerable that we can snap out of it instantly. Other living beings can kill, but only humans can truly appreciate the significance of departing. When people talk about a baby being born it’s merely a figure of speech. It has already been alive for months and its constituting life forms for centuries, millennia and longer. A birth is only a continuation or extension of life. Death is death and humus the next life form. At first Ola called for help, pleaded. He was confused, panicking and didn’t understand why his friend wasn’t helping him. Then he realised that he really wasn’t going to help, that he was a spectator eyeing a show – the live death of a friend. That’s when Ola exploded.
‘Do something, I’m dying!!!’
The young man still didn’t budge. He contemplated the process in admiration. Procreation was insignificant. It only meant serving nature, being a mindless slave obeying the reproduction cycle. Death was different. It was something humans could control and he’d never forget Ola’s gut-wrenching expression, the pain followed by the silence, the final relief and the absence of pain. The contrast was extraordinary. He’d never witnessed anything so beautiful.
34
I sat in the hot bath for a good two hours while continuously topping it up with boiling water. I should have gone to bed, but I really needed to talk to Thor. I’d lost too much time already. When I rang him he was at the yacht club. His boiler was sorted and he was about to go skating. I told him to hold on. The vision of him pushing him Anna under the ice was still gnawing at me.
I chucked Anna’s passport onto his desk as soon as I arrived at the club. He flicked it open and looked at her photo.
‘Where did you find it?’
Wanting him to tell me, I stared at him in silence.
‘Why are you looking at me like that?’
I tried to figure out if his question had been sincere, but it soon became clear that he wasn’t going to confess unless I spelt it out.
‘It was in your desk.’
I opened the drawer to show him where.
‘Can you explain how it got there?’
‘I didn’t put it there. Maybe Anna did.‘
‘And left it behind when she went to the UK?’
‘I don’t know.’
Suddenly, Thor became more alert and looked me into the eyes.
‘Are you trying to accuse me of something?!’
‘Should I?’
‘Why would I leave her passport in my drawer if I had something to hide? I might not be a London whizz-kid, but I’m not totally brain-dead either.’
I didn’t buy it.
‘What? You expected me to go through your drawer?’
‘Why would I?’
‘So it was a good hiding place then?’
He took a step closer. He was looking down at me, a head taller and wider.
‘I don’t like your tone.’
‘Why would Henrik take a photo of your house?’
‘What photo? What are you on about?’
‘You have to admit it’s strange. He takes a photo of your house and then he disappears.’
I held it up to him.
‘How the fuck should I know?!! It’s the first time I see this bloody photo. How do I even know Henrik took it?’
‘That doesn’t explain the passport.’
‘Fuck you!’
Thor stormed out and I wasn’t any wiser. I wasn’t sure what to make of his reaction or if he knew more than he claimed. He may be right about the photos having been taken by someone else. Sven had also said that the two last photos didn’t look like Henrik’s. If Thor had done something to Anna, he would have dumped the evidence, and if Anna had hidden the passport in the drawer, she definitely hadn’t left Åland. She’d walked away upset, but without her passport. What if someone put it in the drawer to throw suspicion on Thor? No, it would only draw attention to her vanishing by making it more suspicious. Anna must have left it there for safekeeping, in which case her goodbye call was a fake and something must have happened to her.
35
Backtracking the photos was taking too long and I wasn’t even sure I’d find anything, but there had to be something. I logged back onto my father’s backup website and looked at the photos over and over again. I lost track of time and was about to give up when I eventually discovered that my father went twice to the old church where I’d met
the eccentric museum director. Once in the afternoon, then at 2am the same night. I’d been so focused on location that I hadn’t paid attention to the time difference, only seen that the photos were consecutive and from the same place. I should have noticed the different light, but I hadn’t looked close enough at all the pics.
Why had he returned in the middle of the night? Was it to take photos of a night phenomenon or to check something out? I couldn’t believe there was a purely photographic motivation, but I was thinking backwards. My father couldn’t have known that he was going to die the next day, unless it was suicide, but if that had been the case it was unlikely he would have undertaken a late-night photographic expedition. The after-dark expedition pointed to initiative and action, not to pessimism and suicide. Could revisiting the church bay be connected to Anna?
36
Every morning he went over everything in his head during his 10-kilometer run around the island. He was training to be as fit as possible for when it mattered. He had to adopt a faster and more clinical method. The drowning was intimate and worked well for individual targets, but this was on a larger scale, plus it was public and there was to be no doubt that the intervention was intentional.
He couldn’t let the water do the work this time; he had to do it himself. He wasn’t going to use remote devices or any other cowardly tactics. He was a knight of the nation with nothing to hide. His crusade was in defence of values that were being destroyed by the communists in power. He was trying to save the country before it was too late.
37
I was hoping Thor could tell me more about Boeck when he returned from skating, but first I needed to clear the air and break the bad news. I hadn’t got round to it during our last encounter, as he’d stormed out after my questions about Anna’s passport. This time, he beat me to it by getting straight to the point as he came in.
The Ice Cage — A Scandinavian Crime Thriller set in the Nordic Winter (The Baltic Trilogy) Page 8
