The Ice Cage — A Scandinavian Crime Thriller set in the Nordic Winter (The Baltic Trilogy) (18 page)

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, h
is 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, f
loating 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
tangi
ble 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 prec
ious 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 b
eing born it’s merely
a figure of speech
. I
t has already been al
ive for months and its constituting lif
e forms f
or centuries, millennia and longer
. A birth i
s only a continuation
or extension
of life
. Death is death and humus
the ne
xt life form. At first Ola
called for hel
p, pleaded. He was confused
, panicking
and
didn’t understand why his friend wasn’t
help
ing him. Then he realised
that
he
re
a
lly wasn’t going to help, that he
was a spectator eyeing a show
–
the live death of a friend. Tha
t’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
. I
t
only
meant
serving nature, being a
mindless slave
obeying
the reproduction cycle
. Death was different
. It was
s
omething humans could control and h
e’d never forget Ola’s gut
-
wrenching expression,
t
he
pain followed by the silence
, the
final
relief and
t
he absence of pain.
The contrast
was extraordinary. H
e’d never
witnessed anything so beautiful
.

34

I sat
in the
hot
bath fo
r a good two hours while continuously
topping it up with boiling wa
ter.
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 h
e was about to go
skating. I told him to
hold on. The vision of him pushing him Anna under t
he 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 h
e 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 ale
rt 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? Y
ou expected me to go through your drawer?
’

‘
Why would I?
’

‘
So it was a good hiding place then?
’

He took a step closer. H
e was looking down at me, a head taller and wider.

‘
I don’t like your tone.
’

‘
Why would Hen
rik 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
. Ho
w 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.
H
e 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 woul
d 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 dr
awer 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 websit
e
and looked at the photos over and over again. I lost track of time
and was about to give up when I e
ventually discovered that my father w
ent twice to the old church
where I’d met
the eccentric museum director
. Once in the afternoon, then at 2am t
he same night. I’d been so focu
sed 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
return
ed
in the middle of the night?
Was it t
o tak
e photos of a night phenomenon o
r t
o check something out? I couldn’t believe there was a pur
ely photographic motivation, b
ut I was thinking backwar
ds. 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 lat
e
-
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 h
ead 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
,
bu
t this was on a larger scale
,
p
lus i
t was public and
t
here was to be no doubt th
at the intervention
was intentional.

H
e cou
ldn’t let the water do the work
this time
;
he had to do it
himself
.
He wasn’t
going to use remot
e 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 qu
estions about Anna’s passport. This time, he
beat me to it by getting
straight to the point
as
he came in
.

‘
How did it go with the snowmobile?
’

‘
Look,
I’m sorry
about the passport. I
didn’t mean to…
’

‘
Where did you leave it?
’

Unfortunately, h
e didn’t mean the passport.

‘
I lost it.
’

‘
You what
?
’

I explained what h
appened and how
his uncle had saved me.

‘
Do you know the location?
’

‘
He does.
’

‘
Good.
’

I wasn’t sure what difference it
made and
I wasn’t
going to ask.
I’d expected to be
punched,
shouted at and
thoroughly
insulted, e
specially after my insinuations regarding Anna’s passport
.
I couldn’t help wondering how many more blows he could take before exploding in anger. I certainly hadn’t been prepared for the silent treatment
, b
ut
of course it wouldn’t
have changed
anything if he’
d
shouted.
The snowmobile would still have been
under the ice
.
It was just that l
iving in
London
, I was used to being on my guard, half expecting what I said or did to be used against me.
I wasn’t very good at silence. I had to say something.