The Ice Cage — A Scandinavian Crime Thriller set in the Nordic Winter (The Baltic Trilogy) (13 page)

‘
So a
sk him.
’

‘
Does he have a car?
’

‘
He runs a garage
.
’

‘
Can you see what type of car it was?
’

Thor glanced at the tracks again.

‘
Wide and heavy
.
’

I looked around at the
house, the bay, the house again
, the side road,
the bay again,
but
it didn’t make me any wiser.

‘
Maybe it was just kids
driving around, h
aving a fag and a shag, but not necessarily in that order.
’

I wasn’t convinced
by his scenario
. Anna being here
–
as suggested by the cigarettes, and then disappearing, made the whole thing odd. I couldn’t help thinking that Anna and the car were related. If this was my reaction
and
my wiring was anything like my father’s
, he
may have had the same thought.
Who had driven the car
? Thor
didn’t know if
Anna
could
drive and l
ooking at the tracks, he
could tell from the braking pattern that the car had driven down to the beach and not come
up
from the ice. He didn’t think it
was
Henrik’s
car.
He couldn’t guarantee anything, but his gut instinct told him
the car was
larger
than
my father’s
Skoda.

‘
Look.
’

‘
What?
’

I couldn’t see anything.

‘
Footprints. They’re melted and unsharp
. I
t looks like at least
three
people
got into the car
–
t
wo big
-
footed and one smaller
person
walking up to the boathouse.
’

He was right. When I looked properly, I could see what he meant.
There were
several
of the larger prints and only one line of the
small ones, which seemed to indicate that the
big people
went up to the house to pick up the lighter
person
.
Had it been Anna waiting for a lift? Or were these tracks completely unrelated? I wasn’t quite sure where this left my atte
mpt to retrace my father’s last movements
, except th
at he’d probably been here too.

Could he be one of the people who’d climbed into the car? I still had a lot to learn before I could read the snow, something
he’d probably been able to do.
Maybe he’d seen something I couldn’t see.
What would he have done in my situation?
I was pretty convinced
Anna had been in the boathouse
. The question was where she was now.

24

We were deep frozen from s
tomping around in the snow by the boathouse and r
eturning to the yacht club in Thor’s ice yacht didn’t help. I was chilled to the bone
by the time w
e sat down by the fire place with
our
brandy
-
boosted hot chocolate
s, b
ut
I couldn’t sit still for long.

Thor had a yacht lesson to give and I needed to figure out what my father had been up to. I’d seen
his map during my previous visits
and it
was time for another look. I fetched it and sat down
by the fire place again,
still chilled to the bone. It took me a while to find
the
boathouse
bay, because t
here wer
e literally thousands of island
s
. How anyone could find their
way in this labyrinth was a mystery to me. Staring at the water maze without a clue only increased my frustration. According to Thor, my father didn’t h
ave any favourite spots
–
h
e went with the
wind and the weather. F
inding my father’s GPS cam
era was more crucial than ever, but t
here was still no trace of it at the yacht club, nor could we dig up any recent photos on his PC.

Thor remembered Henrik losing a batch of
i
mpor
tant photos once and that he’d been using
some backup system since. He didn’t know the exact set
-
up
though. Where was that bloody
camera?

25

I called
Carrie
from the house to update her on my latest
expeditio
n. She was getting impatient,
wondering
w
hat the hell I was
doing. When I t
ried to explain
that I was looking
for a girl my father had known
, she said I needed to get my priorities right.
Yes, m
y father was dead, but she was
about to give birth
! I said I was really sorry and that I would come home as soo
n as everything was sorted. Carrie
burst out crying. She didn’t mean to rush me, but she was really stressed and hormonal. She needed me there with her, especially to protect her from her all
-
invasive mother.
When she’d pul
led herself together again, Carrie
asked
what I thought had happened to Anna.

‘
Probably gone to
London
as Thor originally said.
’

‘
Y
ou really think so?
’

‘
I don’t think my father thought she’d left.
’

I couldn’t quite believe she’d left either. Why would she have gone to the boathouse if she was leaving
? To wait, but f
or what? A meeting? Was it because she
had nowhere else to go after being thrown out of the yacht club? If she’d left
Mariehamn
, the question was how. Anna leaving on a privat
e boat was unlikely in winter –
small
boats couldn’t handle the ice.

I went down to the ferry port to check if she’d taken a ferry. Again, I found myself with an exceptionally friendly but supernaturally slow clerk.
To her
credit
, she didn’t
attempt to hug me, but she did go
into random
30
-
second silences just
like the walrus
back
at the police station
.
For a moment, it occurred to me that they might be
siblings or husband and wife. There was
such
an eerie synchronicity.
Some locals might describe her as laid
-
back, but
I’d say
semi
-
comatose and I fought not to share my vision as she read through the names
on
the ferry passenger lists
syl
-
la
-
ble by syl
-
la
-
ble. I’d probably made her day.

N
othing ever happened here, so when it did she bloody well made sure she milked every
single
vowel out of it, and I suffered for it. I couldn’t tell her that reading the first syllable
of the names
might be enough, or
–
let’s go mad
–
doing a search
on the computer
. I would have upset her, hopefully without provoking tears, but inevitably the question would have been who
I thought
I was
,
walking in
t
here
boss
ing
her around. I would have
been forced to a
pologise
profusely
. She would have lost her
thread and started from the beginning
again. A
t her pace.
So w
hen in
Mariehamn
it was best to
do as the…

My self
-
control paid off when she did
find Anna’s name in a passenger list
on the day following my father’s death.
She looked at me with
the smile of a woman carrying her passenger records with pride.

‘
On the
Stockholm
ferry?
’

Caught out, she double
-
checked on her screen again and nodded.
Did I detect a hint of excitemen
t? Maybe I’d underestimated her. M
aybe she did have a second gear after all. I guess I should have been reassured, but I wasn’t
,
because Anna had left right after my father’s death and he’d bee
n looking for her. Was there a
connection between his death and her departure
? Had he found her or h
ad she been running away from him?
Now
I
really needed to talk to her, but
she’d left the island
and would
be even harder to find.
When
I thanked the woman behind the
counter
,
I realised that h
er smile hadn’t budged while I’d had all these thoughts about Anna. She was
obviously
recovering from the achievement of a lifetime.

As I was leaving
she looked at her computer screen again and
–
hey presto
–
there was a sign of life.

‘
Excuse me
!
’

I was
halfway through the door
when I turned
.

‘
She never boarded.
’

‘
She didn’t take the ferry?
!
’

‘
That’s right.
’

‘
How do you know?
’

‘
All
the
passengers
have to
put
their boarding passes through the check
-
in machine
before getting on
.
’

She’d
intended to tak
e the
ferry but hadn’t made it. H
ad she missed it, changed her mind or been held back
? If so, by whom?

26

I searched my father’s
house
for
his
camera
and finally dug up a prehistoric Agfa, but nothing remotely digital or GPS
-
inclined.
The place had just been burgled, so
t
hat might explain
that
. Looking through
his
papers, I
eventually found
the camera manual with a re
ceipt from a local camera shop.

S
ven’s Camera Shop was closed, but
it was unclear if
it was for the day or for good
,
as there was
no open/closed sign and t
he window looked like it had
n’t been dressed since the 1970s
. A layer of period dust was there to testify that this was completely unrelated to the ongoing revival. Time had simply stopped in that window 30 years ago. I couldn’t remember, but it was probably still exactly as it had been when I lived in
Mariehamn
as a kid. That shop window lived in a time warp.

I banged on the door but there was no answer.
When I asked
in th
e bike shop next door
, the manager
immediately
gave Sven a ring. All I could hear at the other
end of the line was shouting, which made t
he cycle man smile.