A Darker Shade of Sweden (33 page)

Ragnhild turned her eyes upward to the cliffs.

“Up on the cliffs we met the people who were tormenting the birds. They were two young men, not much older than Kristoffer. Immature idiots. They had collected stones and broken branches and were throwing them at the black guillemots that were flying in flocks around them, terrified. The birds they hit fell with broken wings on the beach and in the water . . . I was heartbroken when I saw it. So I forgot to be scared, I just ran up to them and screamed that I would call the police. Which of course was a stupid thing to say out here. They just laughed, and one of them grabbed me.”

She lit a cigarette and continued.

“Kristoffer yelled at them and then they caught sight of him as well. When they heard him they forgot about me for just a moment. So I tore myself loose and began running back down to the water, with Kristoffer beside me. They came after us and threw rocks at us, but we knew the terrain and were faster. Down at the beach we pushed their boat out, then jumped into our own. And then we rowed back to Öland, ducking the stones those guys on the shore were throwing at us. The last we saw of them was that they were standing like fools at the water, staring at their boat, which was drifting away from the island.”

Ragnhild blew out smoke.

“We rowed back home to Öland,” she went on, “and even before we got back a storm was rising in the strait. I remember thinking that the angry wind came from the Virgin, that it was the island that had called it up to take revenge on the bird haters. The storm increased almost to a hurricane during the evening and lasted for more than a week, nine or ten days. The Virgin was invisible in the mist, nobody could go there or get away from there. Kristoffer and I stayed inside, and we didn't dare tell anyone that there were people on the Virgin.”

She lowered her eyes.

“Finally the wind in the strait slackened, and then we rowed back here. Kristoffer had brought one of our grandfather's old ­rifles. But the guillemots were calm and silent and there was nothing threatening left on the Virgin any more.”

Ragnhild was silent for a few seconds.

“We found the two men almost at the top of the island. One of them lay sheltered by a large fir and the other one nearby, close to a boulder. The birds had pecked them . . . they no longer had any faces.”

She was silent again.

“Do you know how they died?” Gerlof said.

She shook her head.

“I don't know if they had starved or froze to death, but dead they were. And then we panicked, I and Kristoffer. We felt like killers who had to cover up our crime. So we pulled their bodies down into a deep crevice and put a lot of beach stones on top of them. We carried stones for hours to fill that crevice. Then we rowed back home again . . . and a couple of days later we heard that two young men from the mainland were missing since the storm. They had taken their boat out, and police believed that it had gone down in the strait.”

She sighed again.

“We tried to forget what had happened, but of course that was impossible, and I've been thinking about it for almost twenty years. And nowadays there are just more and more tourists coming to the Virgin every summer . . . sooner or later they would be found. So I and my brother decided to get the bodies today and sink them out in the strait in a tarpaulin weighted with stone. That's what we planned to do. But I was delayed on the mainland this morning, so I guess Kristoffer began without me. He must have fallen from his boat, or . . .”

Ragnhild fell silent and looked sadly at the empty rowboat. She had nothing more to tell.

But Gerlof did. He felt a smell in the air and looked up at the top of the Virgin.

“There is someone else on the island.”

“How do you know?” John said.

Gerlof pointed to the middle of the island.

“There's a fire burning up there, and earlier someone shot at us.”

“Shot at you?” Ragnhild said.

“Someone shot to warn us off.”

“He said he would bring the rifle,” Ragnhild said in a low voice. “Kristoffer, I mean. Just as a precaution.”

Gerlof nodded.

“In that case your brother might still be here,” he said, “if the sea pulled his boat out without him. I think we should take a look at the top of the island.”

Ragnhild nodded quickly and stood up.

“But carefully,” Gerlof added. “Make sure he knows who you are before he starts shooting again.”

John and the cousins stayed down by the water and let him and Ragnhild start climbing to the top of the island.

As much as he could, Gerlof kept in the shelter of thickets and trees while he led the way up to the largest of the caves on the island. He had been there on earlier visits; it was called the Virgin's Chamber and lay on the east side of the island's highest cliff. The chamber was like a small church room hollowed out of the mountain and gave good protection against the winds.

Silently and carefully, Gerlof drew close to the opening. He hid behind a boulder to look into the chamber. It was dark inside, but the floor of the cave rose slightly and inside the narrow opening he saw a flickering light.

He stayed on behind his boulder, irresolute and still remembering the shots by the beach, but Ragnhild slipped closer and called out.

“Hello? Is anyone there? Hello?”

For a few seconds, all was quiet. Then an echoing reply came from the vault, a tired male voice.

“Hello yourself.”

Ragnhild flew up and hurried into the chamber.

“Kristoffer?”

Fifteen minutes later Gerlof returned to the edge of the water, alone. Torsten, Erik and John stood smoking between their boats. They looked hard at the Mauser rifle Gerlof was holding, its barrel pointing to the ground.

“Her brother had this,” he said. “I thought it better to take care of it.”

“So her brother is here?” John said.

Gerlof nodded.

“He took shelter from the storm up in the Virgin's Chamber. He had loaded the stones and the skeletons in the morning, but his rowboat had drifted off in the storm. When he saw us on the beach he shot a couple of warning shots. He was upset, wanted to scare us off . . . I guess we'll have to try to understand.”

The others nodded, not very willingly.

“And what are they doing now, those siblings?” John asked.

“They'll be leaving soon.” Gerlof nodded to himself and looked at the two skeletons on the cliff. “My thinking is we bring these back with us to Öland and tell the police that we happened to see some bones sticking out of a deep crevice here on the Virgin. That way maybe we can solve an old disappearance without getting anyone else involved. Is that all right by you?”

The other three nodded again.

“You can hardly accuse an entire island of murder if someone happens to die there,” John said. “Not even the Virgin.”

The other fishermen dragged thoughtfully on their cigarettes.

“It's just one thing I don't understand, Gerlof,” Erik said. “How you could be so sure there were others here on the island. Do you have second sight?”

Gerlof thought of praising his intuition or perhaps blaming the movements of vipers, but told them the truth.

“It was the smells.”

“The smells?”

“I didn't notice any smells at all,” John said, dropping his butt between the stones.

“You should have,” Gerlof said. “I caught the smell of Ragnhild's cigarette smoke from the very beginning, down on the beach . . . and then the smell of her brother's fire up in the Virgin's Chamber.”

“You did?”

“Oh yes, very clearly.”

The three fishermen silently regarded Gerlof, but he just pointed at their glowing cigarettes.

“I told you to stop that . . . The tobacco is ruining your noses.”

Johan Theorin was born 1963 in Gothenburg, Sweden's second-largest city and its traditionally largest seaport, but spent his summers on the island of Öland. As a student, he lived for two years in Michigan and Vermont. After working as a journalist for many years, he published his first novel,
Skumtimmen (Echoes from the Dead),
in 2007; it received the best first novel award from the Swedish Crime Fiction Academy and the Crime Writers' Association John Creasey Dagger in Britain. His second novel,
Nattfåk
(The Darkest Room, 2008)
,
won the bestnNovel of the year award in Sweden and in Britain the CWA International Dagger award. He has published a further three novels, the latest, Sommarboken, in 2013. Theorin describes his work as “a combination of dark crime stories and Scandinavian folklore and ghost stories.” Theorin's stylish, dark, and intensely personal novels have gained him a huge Swedish and international following; he is one of the most highly regarded Swedish crime writers.

MAITREYA

V
ERONICA
VON
S
CHENCK

Veronica von Schenck is almost an atavism among current Swedish crime writers: her favorite character in fiction is Sherlock Holmes; her favorite crime author, Arthur Conan Doyle; and she is fascinated by the intricacies of plotting—planting leads in her work, letting her readers try to outguess her protagonists, and tying together the threads of the story. She came to crime writing after a number of other pursuits: she has been a live gamer, a computer game reviewer, editor of a computer magazine and of a Stockholm events magazine, and a recruitment consultant. She remains the last, part time, while writing; she lives with her husband and two children in a Stockholm suburb.

The protagonist of her first two novels was Althea Molin, a criminal profiler of half-Swedish, half-Korean parentage. She has also written three juvenile crime novels, all based on historical events, since the study of history fascinates her; in her juveniles, the reader is invited to explore both a historical period and a crime in the company of her two young sleuths, Milo and Vendela.

In her story for this book, Veronica von Schenck introduces a new protagonist who will be featured in her next novel. Stella Rodin reflects the author's fascination with history, artifacts, and solving problems.

STELLA RODIN SIPPED THE CHAMPAGNE IN HER GLASS AND LOOKED AROUND
at the exhibition room. The slate-gray walls showed off the colorful modern art covering them like an old quilt. The dark suits of the male guests showed off the colorful dresses of the female guests. The overall effect was attractive and the room was filled. At the center of the show was Stella's father, Emmanuel Rodin. His glow competed with both his guests and his exhibits; he wore a light tweed suit with a burgundy vest, matching bowtie and pocket handkerchief. This was his favorite moment. To rule absolutely but with mild joviality one of the year's most important showings and auction afterwards. To introduce with flattery and generosity his experts to interested and inquisitive customers possessing extremely well-stuffed wallets. To personally extol the quality of paper used in Warhol's serigraphies. As for Stella, she loved art as passionately as did her father, but she hated this world. She had always been a black sheep, ever since day care. A girl as pretty as a doll and with a searing intelligence, who neither in day care nor since had had the sense of hiding her brain's capacity and hunger for knowledge and truth. Definitely unattractive. She had a way of shaming, irritating or frightening most of the people she met. Mainly because she had never quite learned to keep her big mouth shut when someone stated an obvious lie. Her school years had been understandably painful, but had provided her with a hard shell. Instead of working in the family company atmosphere of flattery and hypocrisy (
We do this just because of our passion for art, not at all to make money, of course not
!
) she had chosen to become a police forgery expert. It had made it possible for her to work with the art she loved, but in an environment a bit more tolerant of her abrupt personality and in her view at least slightly less hypocritical. But since her parents and her older brother, to whom she was close, still ran the auction house, here she was, reluctantly moonlighting as a poster girl for the family business. Her father had resolutely bribed her to do it. A beautiful, burgundy vintage dress with a tight waist, a boat neck and a flowing skirt with several petticoat layers. From the fifties. Dior. She stroked its crisp fabric. It was a bribe she had simply been unable to resist.

Stella walked up to her father and lightly kissed his cheek.

“Hi, Dad. An hour and a half, okay?”

“And what's so important for you to do then? Do you have a date?” he asked in a kindly but irritated voice. This was a discussion they had had innumerable times. It usually started with some disparaging comment about her choice of profession—working in a police laboratory wasn't her father's idea of a successful career for his daughter.

“Yeah. With a good book and my bathtub.”

He sighed.

“Do you even understand how condescending that sounds to me? Don't you know how hard I—all of us are working for all this? The least you could do is to smile and act a little friendly, at least this one evening. It can't be all that hard.”

Stella sighed.

“Okay, okay, I'll stay on.”

After a full hour's worth of kissing cheeks and smiling, Stella was dead beat. She wasn't made to stand this much uninteresting human contact in a single day. She turned to the paintings to escape further platitudes, at least for a moment. She stood for a long while watching a Picasso all in shades of gray, for one of his pieces a strange but surprisingly anatomically correct portrait of a young woman named Françoise, if the title was to be believed. If she had happened to have an extra 50,000 dollars she would happily have made a bid for it, but considering her police salary she ought to be happy if she managed to put that much aside during her entire working life. She straightened the frame minutely; it had slipped slightly to one side. Earlier in the day she had helped her brother Nicholas hang the pictures. Even if she didn't work here she enjoyed helping him create the exhibitions, and he enjoyed having her there. It had almost become a tradition. She loved art intensely. Loved the craft of it. Was fascinated by the hours of single-minded energy and pure love given by artists and artisans to their work, by the combination of deep sorrow and exultant joy coexisting in a truly successful work of art.

Nicholas came up to her and put a hand on her shoulder.

“Someone named Carl Andreasen wants to talk to you. He's at the entrance. Isn't he your boss?”

With a worried frown, Stella looked searchingly towards the door. Yes, that was Carl, all right. A tall, gray-haired man with a crew cut and a lined face wrapped in a gigantic scarf he was trying to untangle himself from.

“Yes, it's him. What the hell is he doing here?”

She wove through the throng of visitors and reached him.

“Carl. What are you doing here?”

“I've got a job for you.”

Stella caught her father's disapproving glance from the opposite end of the room.

“Okay. Come along,” she said, pushing him ahead of her, away from the nosy, curious glances of the guests. Carl looked more like an aging soldier turned homeless than as a guest slightly late for the party.

Stella turned, snatched a second glass of champagne and brought Carl up to the library before he had time to object. She gave him the new glass and pointed to a chair. Carl sat down and Stella took the chair beside his.

“I never knew you were playing daddy's girl during weekends.” His voice was scornful and he put his glass down without touching it.

“So now you know.” Stella smiled, amused at his lame attempt at provoking her. He usually did better. She and Carl were joined by a love-hate relationship to each other. She thought his thinking too traditional and formalistic, though despite that a good policeman. And he, as far as Stella could tell, considered her a troublesome pain in the ass who ought to keep her mouth shut, do as she was told and not stick her nose where it had no business to be—but despite that a good forgery expert. “Now tell me what you need my help with that's panicky enough for you come looking for me yourself even in a place that's so obviously uncomfortable to you.”

“I want you to go to another cocktail party tomorrow. I hope that's not overtaxing your talents.”

Stella raised her eyebrows but said nothing. He sighed and went on.

“We have a guy who's worked undercover for a long time in a smuggling ring. He's finally been invited to a party given by the head of the organization, an informal auction of what we believe to be illegally imported works of art. Our guy needs a girlfriend.”

“Doesn't sound too hard. Don't you have lots of boobsy police officers who could help you out? It's been a long time since I did any police work outside the lab, as you very well know.”

“It isn't your police field experiences I'm interested in. I want you to do what you do in the lab. Take a look at the art and tell us what it is and whether it's genuine. So simple even an academic like you ought to manage.”

“But—if the guy you're after is in the antiques business, he might know who I am. I might blow your whole operation.”

“I grant you your daddy is pretty famous. But I don't think my guy has gotten his stuff from your auctions.”

She drank some champagne and gave him a searching look. He was far from as biting as usual. He must be really desperate. She was far from certain that it was quite as simple as he made it out to be, but the idea of doing something outside of the lab for once sounded like fun. She gave him a brief nod.

“But what has your undercover guy been doing? I don't believe it's mainly about antiques. In that case you'd either have talked to me about it before, or your guy would know enough about it for you not to need me.”

Carl looked vexed, leaned back in his chair and swung his foot.

“Mostly it's about drugs. And weapons. The antiques are just a sideline.”

Stella watched him carefully for a moment. What he'd just said wasn't the whole truth either. She shrugged her shoulders.

“Okay, I'll do it.”

“Good girl.”

Stella followed him to the door—she didn't want to risk his starting to talk to any of the guests. A cold gust of wind, full of dancing snowflakes, sneaked in when she opened the door for him. Stella shivered and looked thoughtfully at her boss when he crouched down against the wind and slowly disappeared into the darkness.

“So what did your boss want on a Saturday? I imagined police forgery experts only worked weekdays.” It was Nicholas.

“He wants me to play cop for real—do an undercover job. There's a private auction of illegal antiques of some kind tomorrow night,” Stella said, her eyes still fixed somewhere far off in the wintry night.

“Cool.”

Ali opened the limousine door for her. His black suit was a perfect fit and his smile was broad. He looked just as disgustingly healthy as always, Stella noted, with black curls, slim hips and broad shoulders. Those hips she remembered particularly vividly. They were very attractive when covered only by briefs. Without briefs as well, in fact.

“You look great, as usual.”

“Hi, Ali. Long time. Good to see you.”

Many years ago they had belonged to the same class at the police academy and been a couple during their years of study. But when she decided to go for forensics while he went for investigative work, they separated. Though whom did she think she was fooling? The simple fact was that she had never been able to make any relationship work in the long run. He had been no exception.

“Jump in. I'll tell you about the party while we go there.” He made an exaggerated bow, helped her into the back of the car and stepped in beside her. Another cop in civilian dress had been given the honorable job of driving them.

“Great. Where are we going?”

“Djursholm. The stronghold of snobbery and wealth.”

“And here I was thinking we were bound for one of the dangerous hoods, given the badly concealed gun you're carrying under your tux.” She snaked a hand in behind the small of his back to adjust his leather holster.

“Thanks,” he said with an apologetic grin. “Did you see my mike as well?”

She studied him carefully but caught nothing suspicious.

“Nope, all fine—you're as handsome as ever.”

“Thanks.”

The sky was inky black when they stopped outside an enormous yellow mansion on a low hill. Stella walked carefully up the sanded path in her stilettos, holding Ali's arm. She savored the cold air, which brought her the scent of his warm body. He smelled of spice and recently showered skin. She snuck her arm deeper under his. He smiled, but she was very aware that his body revealed apprehension rather than any other emotion. She knew that he was not given to worry. On the contrary, he had a definitely exaggerated belief in his own abilities. Like most males, for that matter. Again, she was convinced that this assignment was far from as simple and harmless as Carl had wanted her to believe. Thick walls of chalk-white snow rose on both sides of the path. Lit torches were stuck in the drifts, their softly flickering light casting dancing shadows on the snow. It had stopped snowing only an hour ago.

“It'll work out fine,” Stella said in a clumsy attempt at sounding calm.

Ali gave her an amused glance.

“Sure. But be careful with Peter. Don't irritate him. He's fucking unstable.”

“Don't irritate him? How would I do that? I don't even know the guy.”

“Please, just don't be yourself. You see . . .”

“Shut up and smile, you mean?” She was amused. A little put off deep down, but she certainly wouldn't let him see that.

“Right. And show him that magnificent chest.”

“Got it. Smile. Flash tits. Almost makes you wonder why I spent seven years in college to get where I am now . . .”

“Seven!”

“Sure. Police academy, art, a few courses in England—”

He gave her a weak smile, shook his head and raised a hand to make her stop. “Sorry for asking.”

Stella punched his arm.

“Hey. That hurt.”

They had arrived at the house and a grave doorman let them in. They left their overcoats with another strict and unsmiling man. Stella heard a murmur of voices. On their way to the living room they passed a pedestal with a cracked and badly worn urn. Mediterranean. Roughly two thousand years old, she couldn't be more specific without inspecting it more closely. There were still traces of sand left on it. Beautiful and dignified in its pale patina.

“I understand why I'm here,” Stella whispered to Ali and kissed his neck to make her whisper seem less suspicious. Or actually just because she felt like it. He shivered slightly.