The Ice Cage — A Scandinavian Crime Thriller set in the Nordic Winter (The Baltic Trilogy) (10 page)

Having
been thr
ough a cold dip like my father
, I found it very odd
th
at he’d lain down afterwards
. Surely, he wou
ld have rushed back to the car? H
e might have died on the w
ay from
heart failure, but he wouldn’t have
lain down neatly next
to
the hole.
It di
dn’t make any sense
. E
ven if he was
as stupid as me and
locked himself
out of the car
, he wouldn’t have returned to the hole.
I
t was the last place he
’d want to be. I knew,
because I’d been there, b
ut maybe I was trying to
o
hard to make it all add up. Having a heart attack in those conditions wouldn’t be entirely surprising
.
The
Forsmans
did think
it looked like a display when they discovered him
, but i
t must have been a pretty unusual scene for them to
bump into during their skating. It
must have been so unexpected and t
errifyin
g that the only way to cope
with it was to see it as surreal or
staged.
It seemed a natural reaction and if I’d been in their skates, I would probably have been under the same impression.
W
hatever
the
logical considerations,
the
question marks around my father
’s death were still bugging me.
I had to keep going.

17

I went straight from the hospital to my father’s house.
The bandages on my hand and foot had to stay on for a while
, not that the lost finger and toe would ever grow back. The cold dip had marked me for lif
e because of a stupid car lock.

My father going for a cold dip in the middle of the night still didn’t add up. It wasn’t something
I wanted to repeat
. Maybe, like me, he’d had a couple
of
drinks
and done it on a whim, out of existential despair
,
or
just
to feel he was alive. I did that
back home
–
cycled up hills like a lunatic to
feel the pain
. The release was always orgasmic
, but did that mean
my
father
had
been driven by a similar
sensation
? I bega
n
to realise I’d never find out.

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 l
ook 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, b
ut a significant one
–
a 20
-
year landslide to fill.
T
his would only require an extra day, two at the most.

The clinc
her 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, m
y father had cared
about me.
Sitting in the attic,
over two decades later, my father’s house came alive around me. Mu
m and dad actually sounded like they were enjoying being
together. Hearing the tape
brought tears to my eyes
. Th
ere had been love in spite of mu
m
insisting
she’d never
loved him,
only used h
im 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 fa
ther being something he wasn’t, m
ysterious, 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 i
n f
lashes
.
I hadn’t thought much about this in the last 20 years
,
but it felt good to hear us like this, because o
ver the years, I’d develo
ped 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.
I
t suddenly came back to me,
my father saying that the funnel
-
shaped
,
orange lamp hanging above the kitchen table eavesdropped on everything we said
. I
f you leaned under it and remained completely still, you could hear echoes of our conversations.
The lamp
shade
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,
i
t 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 forgott
en 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 fat
her 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, beca
use that’s
what it sounded like.
In Mariehamn, s
he’
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 bac
k 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
a
nd 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. P
art 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 th
inking 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
scare
d
of pulling the trigger in the
beginning
and his father had started by teaching
him
that it wasn’
t to be pulled
–
i
t 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 u
nderg
rowth, the wind or a bird. I
t wa
s never arbitrary, never noise for the sake of noise
.
To him these natural
sounds were
appeasi
ng.

But it was shooting his first moose
that had impressed him the most. T
he
feeling of taking down such
a
massive
animal had made him
all shaky and excited.
It gave him
a sense of eup
horia. It wasn’t
his father
’s admiration
;
it was something else
, a more primitive sensation.
In prehistoric times y
oung 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 t
otal 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.