Silhouette in Scarlet (11 page)

Karlsholm was off the beaten track, some miles northwest of the popular tourist centres around Lake Siljan. It had a lake of its own, though; on the large-scale map Lake Siljan looked
artificially symmetrical, like a small blue coin. The guidebook Gus had supplied didn’t mention it, or the town, but there were references to the delightful folk costumes and customs, the
crafts and the dances and the traditions of a past age lovingly preserved. Under the heading ‘Midsummer in Dalarna,’ the book waxed lyrical – cloudberries and cow horns, maypoles
decked with wild flowers and birch branches, dancing to the sound of fiddles through the bright night hours of Midsummer’s Eve. That date was less than a week away. Maybe, if I could clean up
the present mess, I would be able to celebrate the festival with Gus and the good villagers of Karlsholm. Footing it lightly around the maypole with a tall, handsome Swede . . .

If I could clean up the mess. With a sigh I closed the guidebook and turned my thoughts from cloudberries to crime. I had most of the information I needed now. The only question was what to do
with it.

Once upon a time – in 1889, to be precise – a hardworking farmer dug up a fabulous ancient treasure – the Karlsholm chalice. I’m not talking about Viking loot; the
chalice dates from the so-called Migration Period, three to four hundred years before the Vikings. It was an enormously wealthy era in Scandinavia. As one authority said, the whole period glitters
with gold – gold ingots and bars, gold coins, neck rings, and collars. Most of it was buried and never retrieved, possibly because its owners failed to return from their next raid on the
dying Roman Empire, whence much of the treasure had come in the form of loot or tribute or ransom. One estimate stuck in my mind – the amount of gold used in the famous
lurs
, or horns,
was worth about 1650 Roman solidi – the ransom of two hundred legionnaires.

The
lurs
came from Jutland, in Denmark, and the most interesting thing about them is that they were found, by accident, in the same field – a century apart.

I felt fairly sure I was dealing with a parallel case. The Karlsholm chalice was found in 1889. Almost a hundred years later someone unearthed another object in the same field – a field
belonging to Gustaf Jonsson. A farmer, less honest than the majority of his countrymen, or a professional archaeological thief, following up a clue – I might never know, and it wasn’t
important. What was important was that the finder tried to sell his discovery to John, who enjoyed a certain reputation in his own slimy world.

I had never checked John’s professional qualifications (it would have been a little difficult, since I didn’t know his real name), but apparently he knew his subject well enough to
have arrived at the same conclusion I had: Where there were two treasures, there might be more. Excavation of the site could produce a hoard like the one found in Södermanland, which contained
more than twelve kilos of gold. Naturally, the real value of ancient jewellery is considerably higher than the value of the gold itself – worth a little trouble on John’s part.

Investigating, he had learned that the site was owned by a wealthy, rigidly honest old gentleman who was disinclined to get matey with strangers. John’s reputed charm wouldn’t have
the slightest effect on Gus. He had had to find another means of access – me. Anyone of Scandinavian descent is likely to have an ancestor named Johnson, or one of its variants.

John obviously knew a lot more about me than I knew about him. Since I had nothing to hide, my family history and connections would be easy to discover. So ‘Aunt Ingeborg’ had
written to Gus, suggesting a meeting with her niece, and if I had gone to the hotel John selected for me, Gus would have called me. Except for the inconvenient demise of Aunt Ingeborg, I might have
believed the story. She had been my great-aunt, actually, and an interfering old busybody. It would have been just like her to make appointments for me without bothering to ask whether I wanted to
keep them. I had written to Mother about my intention of travelling to Sweden. There would have been time – barely enough time – for Ingeborg to notify Gus of my plans.

Once I was in residence at Gus’s home in Karlsholm, John would move in. I wondered how he had planned to do it. Surely not the hoary old car-breakdown trick; he was more inventive than
that. It was all rather chancy, but that was typical of John. No doubt he had several tentative approaches worked out.

However, his informant had crossed him up, peddling the information in several markets simultaneously. One such market was the one run by the silhouette cutter. It was strange how drastically
John’s disclosure had altered my impression of the little man, from that of a harmless eccentric to a figure of sinister villainy, snip-snipping away with his sharp-pointed scissors, reducing
a human face to a flat black outline.

I wondered if it had occurred to John, as it had most certainly occurred to me, that the silhouette cutter might not be the only other source the informant had approached. The man who had socked
John on the jaw, the mysterious person with the brown beard and hornrimmed glasses, might be another treasure hunter. John didn’t seem desperately worried about this character. I had never
caught so much as a glimpse of him.

Then there was Leif. He seemed too naive and bumbling to be a professional criminal or a policeman. But he definitely wanted John, and not to buy him a schnapps. And what about the fat man with
the whiskers, whom Leif claimed to have seen the previous night? For all I knew, every crook in Europe might be on my trail.

The others were more or less extraneous, at this point; one villain is one too many, and there was no question but that the silhouette cutter had spotted me. I remembered him sitting at the
restaurant table, his grey head bent humbly over his work, his bright blades glinting. He had kept a copy of my portrait for himself. Perhaps one day it would adorn the wall in his private office,
along with other black outlines commemorating victims. The silhouette he had given me might have an equally eerie significance – an omen, a warning to those who understood its dark
meaning.

John’s consternation had unquestionably affected me. I have said John was a coward, who backed away from trouble with celerity and without hysterics. If the silhouette cutter scared him
that much, I was scared too. And that was why I was on my way to Karlsholm. A man of Gus’s wealth and prestige would be able to protect himself; he probably knew the King personally. But
first he had to be convinced of the danger, and it wasn’t the sort of danger one can explain over the telephone to a comparative stranger.

We stopped for lunch at a pretty inn on a blue lake. Having eaten a dozen smoked salmon sandwiches (they were small sandwiches), I protested, but Tomas indicated, with sidelong looks and some
hemming and hawing, that he had been directed to make periodic stops. I guess both he and his employer thought ‘bathroom’ a vulgar word.

As the afternoon wore on, our deliberate pace began to get on my nerves. I didn’t suggest that Tomas drive faster; I assumed Gus had ordered him not to joggle the merchandise. Under
different circumstances I would have enjoyed the leisurely drive. The scenery was lovely – blue lakes set like jewels amid wooded hills, forest of birch and pine, red farmhouses with
hand-carved gables, stretches of beach with healthy-looking brown bodies lying in rows like herring – doing just what I had planned to do on my holiday. Replete with sandwiches and wine, I
dozed off. It had been a hard night.

When I woke up the sun had disappeared, and the skies were a depressing grey. We stopped again at a restaurant outside Mora, on Lake Siljan. I tactfully had tea, in order to give Tomas time to
do whatever he wanted to do. It was after five. Gus had optimistically underestimated the length of time the drive would take. A fast driver could have done it in five or six hours, but we had been
chugging along at a steady fifty – far less than that superb automobile was capable of doing. A glance at my map reminded me that Dalama is a good-sized region, stretching all the way to the
Norwegian border. Karlsholm was in the far northwest corner. We still had a way to go.

It may have been the change in the weather that induced a vague apprehension, formless as the clouds that hung overhead. I began to regret that I had not gone to the police before I left
Stockholm. At the time it had not seemed the most practical solution. It is difficult to convince a stolid bureaucracy to take one seriously, especially with a story as wild as mine. I’d have
done it in time; my credentials are impeccable, and I could have dragged in Schmidt and my buddies in the Munich police force. But it takes most men, including policemen, quite a while to get past
my physical characteristics. Thirty eight, twenty-six, thirty-six, if you want to know. I’m not proud of them; they have been a distinct handicap to me throughout my life. I’m a
historian, not a centrefold.

As I was saying, I had decided it would be easier to convince Cousin Gus and let him argue with the cops, especially since I wasn’t absolutely certain I was right. My reasoning made good
sense to me, but I had very little solid evidence with which to back it up. All the same, as I sipped my tea and stared at the shadowy outlines of the high hills ahead, I regretted my decision. Too
late now.

Shortly after leaving the restaurant we turned off the modern highway onto a side road that twisted across the hills. It got narrower and more winding, dipping and rising again between aisles of
birches whose black-striped trunks resembled processional pillars set up by a modern architect. Now and then the trees thinned out, giving views of upland meadows and barns like those of Austria
and Switzerland, with steeply pitched roofs and solid, windowless walls. We were high in the hills now, in the
sater
country – the upland farms, where the cattle graze from Midsummer
to Michaelmas. Huts and farmhouses, the heavy logs of their walls faded to a soft grey, clung tenaciously to the slopes.

Once Tomas had to pull far to the right to let a truck get past. We met little traffic; occasionally we passed hikers striding along with their backpacks jouncing. One turned and hoisted a
hopeful thumb. Tomas didn’t stop. The hitch-hiker had brown hair and a beard. So did the male half of the next pair we overtook. The girl’s bowed shoulders looked tired as she trudged
along behind her companion. I leaned forward, then remembered the car was wired for sound. ‘I don’t mind if you want to pick someone up, Tomas.’

The peaked cap didn’t turn. ‘No, miss. Not when you are here.’

Gus’s orders, no doubt. He must picture me as a fragile flower too. He was due for a shock when he saw me.

It was difficult to carry on a conversation with a disembodied voice and the back of a head. I was dying to pump Tomas about his employer, but doubted that he would indulge me. He didn’t
appear to be the gossipy type. I remembered a story I had once read that typified the sturdy independence of the people of this region. Some years back, when the crown prince was vacationing at
Lake Siljan, he recognized a farmer who had been part of a delegation that had come to the palace. Thinking to make a gracious gesture, he sent an equerry to command the farmer to an audience. The
farmer sent word back – he was sorry, but he had to go to town to lay in his winter supply of liquor. If His Highness was still around, he might be able to get over to see him Thursday or
Friday.

Between dense walls of fir and alder the road slipped down into a little clearing. A cluster of roofs and a bulbous wooden spire appeared, and Tomas said, ‘Karlsholm, miss. We are soon
home.’

I wondered where Gus’s house could be. There was no sign of a mansion pretentious enough to match the Mercedes. The village was small – thirty or forty houses, a church, and a few
larger structures that might have been public buildings. We passed through Karlsholm in about a minute and a half, even at a decorous pace, and climbed again. The car crested a low ridge.

Below lay the lake, almost as symmetrical in reality as it had been on the map – a steel-grey coin, dropped carelessly from an Ice Giant’s pocket, encircled by sombre groves and
backed by the misty shapes of high mountains. But the map had not shown the island. It was shaped like a lopsided triangle, and at one end of it rose the black metal roof and white walls of a large
house. Like the kings of Sweden, Gus had built his castle on his own private island.

Tomas stopped the car by a building near a small quay. It appeared to be a combination garage and boathouse, with a gas pump and shop. Sheltered by the overhang of the shop roof stood a row of
chairs occupied by four or five elderly men looking as stiff and wooden as their seats. It made me feel right at home; there were always a few retired men with nothing better to do hanging around
the gas station in Meadowbanks, Minnesota.

They were all tall and lean, with long, tanned faces and hair that could have been grey or bleached blond. A row of keen blue eyes studied me without blinking. Not a muscle cracked until I
smiled and lifted a hand in greeting. Then five heads nodded in unison, but nobody smiled back.

A younger man wearing overalls came out of the shop, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. He was tall and blond and blue-eyed – it was getting monotonous, but that kind of monotony I can
endure.

Tomas said, ‘My son, Erik.’ Apparently everybody was supposed to know who I was, but I said, ‘Hi, I’m Vicky Bliss,’ and held out my hand. Erik grinned and shrugged
apologetically, indicating his grimy fingers. The old men watched stonily as Erik helped his dad unload a number of parcels from the car and stow them away in a neat little cabin cruiser. She was a
beauty, and I’d love to have handled her, but I wasn’t even allowed to stay up above. The minuscule cabin was as shipshape as the exterior; brass gleamed, mahogany shone, and a
Formica-topped table held more magazines, bottles of beer, and mineral water, and a tray of open-faced sandwiches – caviar, this time.

Needless to say, the caviar and the beer were still intact when we docked. The trip took only about ten minutes.