The Ice Cage — A Scandinavian Crime Thriller set in the Nordic Winter (The Baltic Trilogy) (17 page)

‘
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 l
ooked down at the swimming fish. What was he thinking?
He cleared his throat.

‘
Have you s
een 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.
’

‘
H
e 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. M
y 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
m
y light beams tunnelling
100 meters ahead.
All I wanted was to get to Thor’s as quickly as possible.

I m
ust have done something wrong, d
riven too
fast or too
close to the shore
, because
s
uddenly
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. T
he snowmobile made
a
jump forward and
I escaped the crack in the ice
,
but landed with
su
ch 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 lat
e. I tried to give full gas
, but
the track wasn’t engaging and
t
he
machine
was
definitely
sinking. It was
dragging me down and I had to let go. I tried to
cling onto the ice.

I
f I’d felt a bit tipsy from the whiskey when leaving the cabin, I
sobered up damn quick
ly
, t
rying to remember what Thor had told me
–
the ice prods. They sh
ould have been round my neck. T
hey 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 w
ould have seen it as a warning, but
I wasn’t. I was frozen.

I didn’t know how long it had bee
n since I’d left Thor’s uncle, but t
he know
ledge that he was fishing
in the warmth of his cabin at the beginning of my snow
mobile 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 cloth
es 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 ice
d
-
up clothes
, focusing on reading the tracks.
It’s impossible to tell for how long I walked. All I know
is
that
I w
as lucky it wasn’t snowing
,
because i
t would have covered the tracks.
When I finally reached the cabin,
I was so focused on following the tr
acks
that I
didn’t see it coming. Hearing me stumble straight into the cabin, t
he 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
h
er
leg trapped under
a sno
wmobile
.
She
looked up to the light
while
pulling
in vain
to free herself
. A man came
swimming to her rescue
–
m
y father. He
freed her by lifting the snowmobile and together they swum
t
owards the light
, but they couldn’t surface. The ice was too thick, t
he 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 be
d
,
picked
up a rock and swam back up
to bang
it against the ice. Cracks appeared
, but
Anna’s
lungs were imploding and
s
he was p
anicking. Once he’
d made a hole
, I watched with m
y heart pounding
as
he tried
to push Anna
through it
. He couldn’t
do it.
S
omething was stopping her, h
olding her down. I
finally managed to free myself from the seaweed and s
printed to my fath
er’s help. Together we
push
ed Anna
,
but w
e
still
couldn’t
do it
.
T
here was a shadow above, a hand. D
istorted by the water, I saw Thor
holding his hand on top of her head
,
pushing he
r down. She was desperate, freaking out, e
yes bulging. Above, Thor remained calm, the daylight forming a halo
of serenity
around
his head. I tried to climb up and s
craped 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, r
ipping 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 scratch
ing was
from
the old man chiselling
away at the
hole
in the ice. H
e 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, o
r as the Ålanders say:
cotton kills.

He drove me back to my father’s house
on his
old moped trike with
skis
under
the f
ront 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 l
ocation of my accident, he
told me a warm
er current must have
kept the ice thin. There w
ere local variations every year and n
othing was const
ant. I shouldn’t trust the ice, because although w
ater can be trusted to fr
eeze at a certain temperature,
temperatures fluctuate year in year out.
That’s why it was so impor
tant to keep talking to nature, t
o listen
. At least that’s what the fisherman said. I think I ca
ught the gist of his philosophy, not t
hat 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 a
n acute
sense of what
he hated
and w
hat 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
–
h
e was
lighter on his skates
.
When he heard Ol
a scream
,
he stopped
. Ola had ice prods,
but the
thin
ice kept breaking and h
e didn’t get anywhere. He
eventually
pulled out the lifeline and
threw
it to Ola.