THE ICE CAGE

By Olivier Nilsson-Julien

THE ICE CAGE

Copyright 2012 Olivier Nilsson-Julien

All Rights Reserved

First published in Great Britain in 2012

by Olivier Nilsson-Julien at KDP

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any other means without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for insertion in a magazine, newspaper, broadcast or other relevant publication.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Table of Contents

Map

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 10

Chapter 20

Chapter 30

Chapter 40

Chapter 50

Chapter 60

Chapter 70

Chapter 80

Chapter 90

Chapter 100

Acknowledgements

About the author

Feedback

Magnus series

To Lindsay, Estelle & Oscar

Men love their ideas more than their lives. And the more preposterous the idea, the more eager they are to die for it. And to kill for it.

Edward Abbey

Baltic Sea, Tuesday 28 February 2006

They say that when you die, you see your life in flashback. I didn’t. All I saw was what I hadn’t done, what I should and could have done. I tried to slam my elbow against the ice, but it came out as a caress, barely a movement, not even a touch. I had no power left and the ice was too close. It was perfect, strong, sealed. On top. There were shadows attacking the ice and the darkness came with unbearable noise. My lungs were imploding, trapped between the seabed and the ice.

1

On winter Sundays Lisa Forsman and her husband Mikael would lace up their skates and head out into the archipelago. This morning they’d discussed making a full day of it, but settled for a picnic in a local bay. They’d brought sandwiches and coffee in a thermos. Solviken was their regular summer beach. They enjoyed the contrast – imagining themselves in swimming trunks, as opposed to polar outfits.

They hit the ice a little after 7 a.m. It was a perfect morning with blue sky, no wind and black ice. The only sound was the crackling under their skates. They took their time – this was their only chance to talk properly. They had to decide whether to buy a new car and during the week they were too busy to make a decision. Their Clio had broken down and Mikael was against a replacement. Did they really need a car on a tiny island, where the longest road was 30 kilometres? Working as a teacher and a bank clerk, they had to watch their finances, especially as they were supporting their daughter’s biology studies. But Lisa still thought that wheels were handy, even an old banger would do. They were halfway to a compromise, when they arrived in the bay.

‘Look!’

At first Lisa couldn’t understand why Mikael was shouting. The bay was still, everything normal, but then she saw the man lying naked on the ice, staring at the sky. Mikael wanted to turn back immediately. This wasn’t the Med – there were enough coves not to have to share with a nudist.

‘Wait.’

The man wasn’t moving. It could have been an eccentric, but with the thermometer flirting with -30°C overnight and still hovering around -20°C, Lisa wanted to make sure he was OK. She skated closer, until she was about 10 meters away.

‘Hello?’

He still didn’t budge.

‘You OK?’

She looked around and saw a car parked behind the rocks. She skated over to the man, with Mikael in tow. The silence was total as they stopped. The man was lifeless and his hair had turned into an ice cap. There was a hole in the ice next to him. It was as if the sea had regurgitated him and left him stranded. His body was so deep-frozen and his whiteness so surreal that there was no question he was dead. Mikael stared with his mouth wide open, paralysed. Numbers were his forte, life wasn’t.

‘Give me your phone.’

Mikael reached for his mobile and handed it to Lisa, who dialled while he did the fainting. Now she had two men lying at her feet – one naked, one in full winter gear, both lifeless. Thankfully the ambulance was on its way.

2

He hated Finland.

Saab, Volvo, Björn Borg, ABBA, Henrik Larsson, ASEA, Absolut Vodka, Karolina Klüft, IKEA… The Swedish superiority was evident, as clear and sparkling as Ramlösa mineral water. Ask a foreigner to name a Finnish writer, or just a mineral water for that sake. He couldn’t. A composer? Sibelius might spring to mind, but he was a Swedish Finn. Their artists didn’t exactly top the music charts either. Nokia? Founded by another Swedish-speaking Finn. Without the oppressed Swedish minority, Finland wouldn’t even exist. It would be a bunch of scattered degenerates living in mosquito-infested forests. It was.

3

When my father’s solicitor called to tell me my father had drowned, I wasn’t sure what to do – I hadn’t seen the man for 20 years. But in the end I decided to go. I would regret it if I didn’t and Carrie agreed I should, if nothing else to get a clearer picture of my Scandinavian roots. I jumped on a flight from Stansted to Arlanda and after a quick train journey to Stockholm followed by a two-hour wait at the ferry terminal, I boarded the connection to Mariehamn.

Flying over Sweden, I’d seen hundreds of lakes scattered in the forests. Cruising towards the Åland archipelago, I saw equal numbers of tree-covered islands scattered in the sea. It looked like a photographic negative of the Swedish mainland.

Although Åland was officially Finnish, everyone saw the archipelago as Swedish. Not only was it nearer the Swedish mainland, but the islanders spoke Swedish and referred to mainland Finland as ‘actual Finland’, as if they were living in an ‘imaginary’ Finland, as if they were ‘imaginary Finns’ but real-life Swedes. Ultimately, they were just Ålanders.

Arriving in Mariehamn was familiar but unfamiliar. The feeling reminded me of my first trip to New York, with the difference that I knew Åland from memories, not from film or imagination. Mariehamn had changed and so had I. After 20 years of transformation everything except the ferries looked smaller. They were even larger than I remembered and it was odd having a Tate-sized ferry stopping only to drop me off.

In the summer there would be hundreds if not thousands of tourists coming off the ferry with me, but this was the low season. One thing hadn’t budged – the weather. The rain was pouring and the streets were icy. It was perfect weather for hip replacement surgeons. Not for me, I was soaked in minutes and definitely hadn’t missed this side of Mariehamn.

Although the ‘homecoming’ had triggered expectations in me, no one was waiting at the ferry terminal. This had been my home town, my birth island. I’d spent the first 10 years of my life here. So what? Clearly, no one cared. I was left to my own devices.

My father’s solicitor had told me to give him a ring as soon as I arrived, but the line was busy and Dahl had no voicemail. I’d been naïve to think that all Finns had a Nokia transplant at birth. It was still busy when I tried again. I decided to walk to his office. It couldn’t be far in a small place like Mariehamn. Thanks to well-meaning but clueless locals, it took me half an hour of slipping and sliding to find Dahl’s address. Although I spoke Swedish, I had the nagging feeling they’d put me through this icy schlep on purpose, only because of my English accent. Given half a chance, they would probably have blamed me for the weather too.

Dahl’s secretary was on the phone gossiping about Expedition Robinson, the Swedish format that had spawned Survivor and other remakes across the world. It must have been a very serious matter, because she was totally absorbed, just about managing to give my dripping clothes a disapproving glance before finally turning to me. Obviously there were more important matters at hand.

‘Yes?‘

‘I’m Magnus Sandberg, son of Henrik…’

‘Why didn’t you call?’

So much for heartfelt condolences. She did a quick aside to the phone.

‘Hang on, I’ll be quick.’

Glorious. I’d just lost my father, but she was going to fob me off.

‘I’m here to see Dahl.’

‘If you’d rung, you’d know he won’t be in for another couple of hours.’

‘I did.’

She ignored that.

‘There’s a café across the street with great sandwiches.’

I’d just stuffed myself with the ferry smörgåsbord, so I went straight to the point.

‘Do you have the keys?’

She told me where I could find them, which was probably the only bit of work she would do all afternoon.

4

As it turned out I didn’t even need the keys – my father’s front door stood ajar. I peeped in.

‘Hello?’

When there was no reply, I pushed the door and put my foot over the threshold.

‘Anyone here?’

The only response was the reassuring tick of a wall clock, the rest of the place was upside down: drawers emptied onto the rug, books pulled out of the shelves, pictures unhooked from the walls, DVDs scattered over the floor boards. Funnily enough, the stereo and the television were still standing, but that was the last thing I remembered; that and a movement out of the corner of my eye.

I came to with a thudding headache, not knowing where I was, until the orange cloud hovering above came into focus. I recognised the orange lamp that had hung over my head the first 10 years of my life. It was in plastic and shaped like a witch’s hat. My London friends would have killed for it, because to them it stood for the ultimate in design. My father had probably just seen it as a light-giving device that had lit his dinners for three decades, regardless of 1970s nostalgia. But I was losing my thread – I wasn’t here to study kitchen paraphernalia.

When I finally sat up, I felt like I’d been pummelled by an ice bear. Who the hell would do this in Mariehamn? A junkie? The worst thing was that he (I assumed it was a man, it didn’t seem like a female thing to do) must have known that my father had died. Why didn’t he take the telly? Maybe he’d been after the painkillers I couldn’t find in the bathroom cabinet. I hadn’t seen my father for over 20 years and the bloody vultures didn’t even have the decency to let me see his house the way he’d left it, let alone leave me a single Paracetamol.

I had no clue what was missing in the house, but there must be a way to see through the mess of the burglary and picture the house as my father had left it. I had to try to put the pieces back together, but first I needed to call the police. I didn’t have the number, so I rang Dahl without expecting him to be there. My head was pounding and I skipped the small talk – could he help me? He could. Within five minutes a squad car with a female police officer behind the wheel pulled up outside my father’s house. Dahl had promised to drop by later with some pain relief.

The police woman looked friendly enough from the top of the front door steps, but she pulled her gun as soon as she saw me. What happened to ask first and shoot later? Back in England the police didn’t even have guns. They tasered innocent people to death instead – a much more civilised approach.

‘Don’t move.’

‘I’m the victim here.’

She walked round the stairs, keeping her gun pointed at me through the metal banister.

‘This is my father’s house.’

‘Hands on the railing.’

I obliged – anything to stop her waving that death tool – and she cuffed my hand to the railing.

‘Other hand.’

When they were both attached, she finally dared to come up the stairs to frisk me.

‘ID?’

I couldn’t reach my passport.

‘Can you…?’

She pulled it out of my pocket and examined the photo. I had to look over my shoulder to see her.

‘OK.‘

She undid the handcuffs while having a good stare at my forehead. For a moment, I thought she was cross-eyed.

‘You should put some ice on that.’

‘On what?‘

I felt my head. The bump explained the pain.

‘Sorry about this, but I can’t take any risks, especially on my own. We get a lot of Eastern cowboys these days. They don’t ask, they shoot.’

‘Might account for my bump.’

She picked up a handful of snow and shaped it into a ball, but I really wasn’t in the mood for a snowball fight. Hopefully she wouldn’t mind.

‘Hold this against it.’

Of course, I should have guessed. I took the snow ball, put it against my forehead. I was shivering and the last thing I wanted was to catch a cold, but she was right. I needed to cool the bump. She took out a notepad and asked me what I’d seen.

‘Nothing.’

‘Try to remember.’

I paused, trying to think back.

‘I was standing looking at the mess, thinking it was strange they’d left the television and DVD player untouched.’

‘Then what?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Anything missing?’

‘I haven’t been here for 20 years.’

She made a last scribble before pocketing her notepad.

‘Give us a ring if you think of something.’

She handed me a business card: Eva Mikaelsson.

‘And put on some dry clothes.’

She’d aimed a gun at me, frisked me and cooled my bump. Now she was telling me to change clothes. I nodded. I could never tell anyone anything without feeling bossy, but it came naturally to her. Her orders made common sense.

5

Looking through the mess left by the burglary, it struck me how tidy my father had been. I found neither piles of dishes in the sink, nor mouldy food in the fridge. The kitchen table was clean and there was no knick-knackery in the house. It was as if he’d been expecting visitors or cleared up before dying. Even the orange kitchen lamp was dust free.

I seemed to have at least one thing in common with him – the Mexican film star. The huge poster of her on the wall was an immature choice for a man his age, but there was nothing unformed about her curves and look of determination. Maybe the voluptuous colour poster was meant as an ironic touch in a house dominated by what I assumed were my father’s black and white portraits. The contrast certainly reinforced the qualities of both the poster and the photos.

He had hundreds of photography books and Scandinavian films from the silent era, when Sweden and Denmark had been at forefront of cinema. There were old photos of me on the chest of drawers in the bedroom and I found a whole box covering my first 10 years. I’d seen some of the pictures my mother’s albums, but my father had always been snipped out.

Now I could see the whole picture and the fact that he’d kept them suggested he cared, so why hadn’t he contacted me? Why 20 years of silence? This was too close, too strange, too much, and not something I’d really thought about. I sat down on his bed, confused.

I lost myself staring at a photo of me and my father skating. My old skates were still hanging on the wall next to his – a pair of old school Dutch Vikings. Unlike the more common ice hockey and touring skates, speed skates have a low shoe and much longer blades, allowing longer strokes. Once you’ve built up speed, you can easily reach 40 to 50 km/h and even faster with a tailwind.

I tried his on. They were a tight fit and it was good to see that I’d overtaken his size, but it was scary at the same time. Now that he was dead and I had larger feet, there was nowhere to hide. I had to face the world alone.

Slipping – well cramming – my feet into the skates was a great feeling once they were in. It brought up memories of skating as a kid, as well as literally putting me in my father’s shoes. Doing the laces up with frozen fingers had always been a pain, but it was worth it, because the skating experience was a direct function of the tightness – the more painful the fit, the better the gliding.

My father never left the house without his flask of home-brewed aquavit. The distilling equipment was set up in a broom cupboard in the basement. As a kid I’d been terrified of the secret room – all that bubbling and glass work reminded me of witchcraft, but home-made aquavit was a well-established tradition outside the big cities in Scandinavia. Government campaigns alleging that homemade spirits could lead to blindness were of little discouragement. Everyone knew that they were only after tax benefits, as home-distilling meant lost income for the state’s alcohol monopoly – alcoholic drinks could only be bought in special state-owned shops.

Home-brewing was done by everyone and it was tolerated for personal consumption. It was the currency in an underground bartering economy. I poured myself a glass and downed it – a real throat-clearer. I couldn’t imagine my bosses at the BBC accountancy department paying my overtime in bottles of in-house aquavit. It was a shame, because there was an element of resistance in this custom that appealed to me. It wasn’t the heavy drinking. It was the grey zone, the tacit acceptance of relatively harmless illegal activities when they were a private matter. The depolarisation of right and wrong appealed to me. It seemed more pragmatic, in touch with reality.

An old-fashioned photo lab had been set up in one of the basement rooms. It looked like my father had been using a 35 millimetre film camera. There were still chemicals in the baths, but no trace of any photos.

I found a freezer crammed with large chunks of meat. At first I thought it looked like human flesh, but my father was neither a serial killer nor a cannibal. I remembered that he used to hunt. The meat must be moose.

By the time I’d changed into dry clothes and gave Carrie a ring, I was tipsy and emotional. I’d left her in our Holloway flat at the crack of dawn. I really didn’t like leaving her alone, especially as she was pregnant and due the following week. I didn’t tell her about the burglary or the bump on my head, because I knew she’d go bonkers and tell me I had to have a scan.

Of course she would be right, but I couldn’t face spending half a day in a hospital waiting room to end up being told to wait for the bulge to go. What bothered me more though was that by being in Mariehamn, I risked missing the birth. I really wanted to be there with her. We’d been through so much together, including three miscarriages before getting this far.

I’d been watching Carrie like a hawk for the past few months, checking everything she ate, every step she took. I’d kept her locked up in the flat for most of the pregnancy and we hadn’t spent a single night apart since I’d moved in. I had to control myself not to ask her what she’d eaten.

6

Dahl found me cuddling my old skates with glazed-over eyes. Once he spotted the bottle on the table, he gathered I was on a sentimental slide.

‘Time travelling are we?’

My father’s solicitor was tall with the look of someone on dairy, beer and aquavit – square with bloodshot eyes, bulky but not floppy. He nodded as he reached out for my hand.

‘My condolences.’

I shook his.

‘Aouch!’

He’d just seen my bump.

‘Here, this should do it.’

He handed me a pack of painkillers. I took two and flushed them down with the aquavit.

‘You need to identify the body before we can talk about the will. Are you ready to go now?’

The question caught me off-guard. Until then it had been as if my father didn’t exist. He’d been an imaginary character from a distant past. I wasn’t prepared to face his body. Subconsciously, I’d assumed I would be going straight to the funeral – that’s what usually happened in the movies. It simply hadn’t occurred to me to think about what would happen to it before. It was the first time I was dealing directly with a person’s death and I didn’t particularly want to see my deceased father. I would have preferred to hold on to what was left of his living memory, but Dahl was waiting patiently for my decision.

He stayed in the car while I went into the funeral home, where the receptionist had me sit in an armchair until the undertaker came to greet me. He led me down a long corridor and stopped at the last door. The place was dead silent and immaculately clean. Did I want to be left alone with my father? I did. A priest was available if I wished but although I didn’t, the man seemed to insist. I wasn’t sure who he felt sorrier for, the priest or me. I didn’t care. I wanted to go in on my own. I didn’t need a priest to tell me what to feel.

My father’s body was lying in the middle of the room. He was covered by a white sheet, except for his face and arms. There were three candles burning on a table along the wall. So this was what they called a show room – the last chance for mourners to see their loved one. The candles and the sheet reminded me of the Saint Lucia day celebrated in the Nordic countries, when a – usually blonde – girl in a white gown with a crown of candles on her head leads a procession through the winter darkness. But my father made for an unlikely Lucia – he was neither girl, nor blonde. Looking at his body from a distance felt surreal. It could have been anyone, but it was my father, stripped of everything that had surrounded him in life. Stepping closer, I could see his face. It was familiar, but I wouldn’t have recognised him in the street.

I hesitated before removing the sheet, possibly out of fear of being disgusted, or simply of death. There was also something more visceral, a feeling akin to remorse. I’d let him down by letting him die alone. Him, my father. The words felt odd together. ‘My’ and ‘father’ hadn’t been juxtaposed for a long time in my life. I carefully lifted the sheet to see the whole body. Seeing my procreator could be an indication of my own future, but looking at the body, the dominant feeling was emptiness. Coldness. His body didn’t reveal anything personal. It was strictly physical. There was nobody there, no one home. Nakedness is often associated with intimacy, but I could see nothing more impersonal than my father’s naked body in the funeral home. It was lying in the most sterile of places, deprived of its defining environment and isolated from my father’s belongings.

I remembered him as towering over me, but now I was looking down at him. Travelling to Mariehamn, I’d imagined my father the way I’d seen him as a 10-year old. He was still big, but there was a frailty about him which led me to review my image.

I stared at his shaved and swollen face. Mum always said there was a resemblance. Telling me I looked like my father had been her ultimate insult. She couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t see it though. Had it been in our smiles or facial expressions? In our movements? These signs of life were invisible on a dead man. I looked at his stomach, chest, shoulders. He was stouter than I remembered. Was it beer, a bad diet, a sedentary life style, or simply a matter of age? His hands were small for his size and didn’t look like the hands of a manual worker, but his legs were surprisingly long and muscular, which must have come from the skating. His feet were big like mine – Carrie would have called them barges. Different parts of the body told different stories and pointed to different facets of his personality.

The body did remind me of my father, but it wasn’t him. It was a body he’d inhabited – his skin. At first I’d regretted coming and I couldn’t see what it would bring, but standing there I realised that seeing his body would help me build a new image of him that wouldn’t be based on memories or second-hand accounts. It would be real. Mine.

I couldn’t help asking myself what I would have told him if he’d suddenly come alive. What did I want to know and what would he want to know? I imagined him asking why I hadn’t been in touch and me returning the question. Why hadn’t he contacted me? Would we have had anything to talk about? Seeing my dead father didn’t provide any answers, it only triggered new questions.

As I was leaving, the man in the dark suit said the funeral would be in two days time, unless I had any objections of course. He asked if I could drop off some clothes and about flower arrangements. I trusted he would do a better job than I in the floral department. Heading out after confirming my father’s identity at the reception, I nearly received a second bump on the head as a man flung open the door in my face. It hadn’t been deliberate and he excused himself profusely, but I couldn’t help thinking that luck wasn’t on my side since arriving on this island.

Driving back to the house with Dahl, I asked where my father had drowned.

‘In the sea…’

I knew that.

‘Where?’

‘Solviken. You must have skated there as a kid.’

He was probably right, but it didn’t ring any bells.

‘Is it far?’

‘A 20-minute drive. I also have the details of the couple who found him, in case you want to talk to them.’

Dahl’s words ebbed away as I stared out the window over the passing sea, with the sound of skates on ice automatically starting to echo in my head. It was the rhythm of my childhood, a constant alternation of sound and silence.

‘Why did he go for a dip in a remote bay in the freezing winter?’

The question had slipped out before I’d even thought about asking. I was thinking out loud. Dahl shrugged.

‘I’m from the mainland. We don’t do that either, but believe me, Henrik went for a swim because he had to, because it was in his genes. That’s what these crazy islanders do. Don’t try to read any metaphysics into it. Why does a duck quack?’

He was right. Living here meant being at the mercy of the elements and maybe that was something I couldn’t grasp as a Londoner. I’d spent my early years on Åland and had expected to be able to tap into my old self, but I seemed to have been irreversibly transformed by London. Maybe seeing the bay would help.

7

Driving out to Solviken in my father’s car, I called Carrie to check again that she was alright. She felt like the baby was about to drop out any minute. I told her to hang on – I was doing my best to get back in time for the birth. I wished she could have been with me in Mariehamn. Her level-headedness would have helped me make sense of the situation.

Solviken turned out to be a typical Scandinavian inlet surrounded by granite rocks. It narrowed as it reached the snow-covered shore. Dahl had claimed I would recognise it, but I didn’t, probably because I’d only been here in summer.

My father must have stood on the shore before walking onto the ice. This very spot was where he’d last put his feet on earth. I tried to imagine this being the last moments of my life.

I couldn’t quite pinpoint it at first, but something was bothering me. Then I realised what it was. Although he’d died only a few days ago, I couldn’t see any hole. I walked onto the ice to look around. My father driving this far for a dip simply didn’t make sense. There must have been pre-drilled holes nearer home. Even after searching the bay, I still couldn’t find where he’d jumped into the water. There had to be a logical explanation. I rummaged through the boot of his car to check if he’d even owned an ice drill. Ice fishers would usually have one, but there was none in the Skoda. I’d wanted to reconnect with my father, find the spot where he’d died. Instead I was losing him. His trace was fading. The accountant in me needed things to add up. He’d died. So much was clear, but I needed to know exactly where and how. I glanced at the bay a last time before getting back into the car. That’s when I saw it. How could I have missed it? It had been staring me in the face all the time.

I walked back onto the ice. The iced-over hole was near the rocks on the left side of the bay. It looked like a fishing hole – small for a grown man. Dahl had mentioned Solviken being popular with fishermen. Trying to imagine my father coming here, I looked back to the car from the fishing hole. I’d brought a recent photo of him from the house. I took it out, took it in.

He would have undressed by the car and rushed onto the ice, a good 50 metres from the shore. Then what? He plunged and drowned? If so, how did they find him? Thanks to the car? If he’d drowned, he would never have made it out of the water. He would have vanished under the ice and some splashing children would have discovered him next summer. Now that I’d seen the setting, I didn’t understand how he could have been found so quickly if he’d drowned. It just didn’t add up.

The wind was freezing cold, so I returned to the car. I couldn’t imagine anyone doing what my father had done. I tried to convince myself that Dahl was right, that it’s what Scandinavians do, but it still didn’t make sense. I needed to know more and hopefully the couple who’d found my father would be able to fill me in.

The Forsmans lived in a modest but comfortable apartment on the first floor of a small town house in the centre of Mariehamn. It was only 6 p.m., but I’d caught them at dinner time and they insisted I share their meal. Their living room could have been plucked directly from an IKEA catalogue, except their furniture was authentic and probably inherited or bought at local auctions. Where IKEA’s products would have been glossy, their tables and shelves were matt and showed discreet signs of vintage wear.

Food-wise, things had moved on since my childhood – when I grew up a potato-free meal had been unthinkable in Mariehamn, but the simple pasta with Parma ham and roasted vegetables served by the Forsmans could have been dished out anywhere in Europe. The only oddity was the milk. They’d kept that tradition and the Nordic habit of barely exchanging a syllable over dinner. I attempted several times to ask about my father, but they only nodded and chewed on as if they hadn’t eaten for days. One thing at a time seemed to be the motto. Only when their plates were empty did they finally look up. Lisa finished first, but didn’t talk until her husband Mikael had scraped every last trace of sauce off his plate. I’m sure he would have licked it clean if I hadn’t been there, as well as the knife and fork while he was at it.

When Lisa looked at me, I thought she was going to speak. She wasn’t, but I’d come to talk and really couldn’t wait any longer. I turned to Mikael. He was contemplating me in silence too.

‘Could you tell me about…?’

He interrupted me with a smile.

‘I’ll leave you with Lisa.’

He stood up, put his plate on the sink, went into the adjacent room and switched on the television, with Lisa following him with her eyes.

‘He cannot take it. He fainted out there.’

She spoke slowly without missing a single chance to pause in what was probably received Åland delivery, but I was a Londoner used to cutting to the chase. It took her so long to get going that I managed to pick up the news headlines from the other room while she was warming up. The Swedish King was coming to Mariehamn to open a multicultural festival and there were worries about an injured ski jumper. Surely, there must be more happening on the mainland – hadn’t a tree fallen in the forest? I never found out, because Lisa finally reached the moment of their Sunday skating when they’d found my father.

‘I hope you don’t mind me saying, but there was something peaceful about it. He died in a beautiful spot. It was like a painting, with his skin colour almost as white as the surrounding snow and ice, as if he’d been sprinkled with talc. It reminded me of my life drawing classes.’

I tried to picture what she’d seen.

‘What do you think happened?’

She looked up.

‘Is there something wrong?’

‘I’m just trying to understand.‘

Lisa paused to think before giving her impression.

‘There was something about the way he was lying next to the hole. It seemed so pointless to have died after getting out of the water, not making it to the car.’

She shook her head before continuing and I gave her all the time she needed, because this was the closest I would get to seeing my father’s death. Lisa was my eyes.

‘Although he had no pulse, I wrapped him in an emergency blanket and tried to resuscitate him. But the only result was water coming out of his lungs. There was no sign of life.’

‘My father’s solicitor said he drowned.’

‘I think the police concluded that he was killed by a combination of water in the lungs and hypothermia. Maybe his body was too numb to cough up the water. Hypothermia makes you lose control of your body, so he could have made it out of the hole, but been unable to move any further.’

It sounded like a horror scenario, a slow painful death.

‘I’m really sorry about your loss.’

I had to keep asking her questions. This would be my only chance.

‘Anything else?’

‘It was neat.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘As if he’d deliberately lain down next to the hole.’

‘Do you think he’d planned it?’

She looked at me in silence. It was something I’d have to work out for myself.

‘Did you know him?’

‘We know very few people. We’re new in town.’

So much for the received Åland accent.

‘Do most bays have swim holes?

‘When they’re in a bay, there’s usually a house in the vicinity, but we aren’t the only ones to like peace and quiet. The fishermen, your father… I’m really sorry I can’t tell you more. All I can say is that the image of your father on the ice is forever engraved in my memory.’

Whatever the true cause of death, he’d died – directly or indirectly – from a winter swim, but Lisa’s image of my whitened father lying next to the hole was disturbing. The bay had been his last living stop on earth. It was difficult imagining my father dying like that in the cold, and although it must have been terrible, I couldn’t help feeling emotionally detached. It felt so far removed from my life. I didn’t know him.

8

I took a hot bath as soon as I returned to the house. Only a few days earlier, my father would have sat in the same tub and being a cold water swimmer, my guess was he’d taken a scorching one, no lukewarm piss substitute for him. His swimming habits pointed to a man of extremes, but then quite a few Scandinavians were: silent as the grave and on milk in the week, but wasted on aquavit and shouting down the place in the weekends – the only time Scandinavians males dared approach the opposite sex. Along with female initiative, alcohol was the main reproduction fuel in the countries around the Baltic Sea.

I spent the evening picking up the pieces and trying to recreate some order in my father’s burgled house. I also gave Carrie another call, telling her I was sitting in the debris of my childhood with everything slipping, falling to pieces. I wanted a coherent story, for myself and to pass on to our child, but I was more confused than ever. The few memories and idyllic images I had were disintegrating. I couldn’t understand how I’d managed to combine the picturesque memories of skating with my father with my mother’s spiteful stories about him. I realised I’d treated my parents as totally separate entities. I’d kept the brightness and the darkness completely secluded. Whatever I’d imagined was evaporating and nothing about my father was clear, solid or durable any more.

9

He’d been a shooting club member for as long as he could remember, but this was different. This was the meaning of his life. Once he’d identified the right weapon, he’d started practising methodically on multiple targets with a silencer. Distance wasn’t an issue – they would be at 10 to 30 meters, but he had to be accurate, as he intended to terminate as many units as possible in a limited time. Every bullet must count.

10

Pastor Fredriksson was tall, sinewy, slightly bent over. There was something Dutch about his look. He could have been anything between 35 and 55. He wanted to know if I had any special requirements for the funeral. I had no idea what my father would have wanted and didn’t feel entitled to an opinion. Any of my father’s friends or colleagues from Mariehamn would know Henrik much better than I did, not that I’d met any of them yet.

All I could say was that he’d taught me to skate and to play chess. That was it. These were pretty much the only first-hand memories I had left. The rest of my associations with my father were poisoned by my mother’s backstabbing. Apparently, my father had helped Fredriksson with youth projects and given most of his spare time to the kids. He’d lived in the moment. I asked the pastor what he meant by that.

‘I think you need to talk to Thor.’

‘Thor?’

‘They led the yachting club together. He was probably Henrik’s closest friend.’

It was the first time I heard about Thor and the yachting club. I would go there immediately once I was done with Fredriksson.

It felt odd preparing to bury a father I didn’t know. He would be in the coffin, but I hadn’t spoken to him for 20 years. The nearest I’d come to a conversation was in the funeral home, imagining what we would have said to each other. The situation was confusing and I kept trying to get a grip. I still couldn’t digest my father coming back into my life as a dead man. Yes, he’d been absent from my life, but until now it hadn’t been definite.

Fredriksson stopped by the grave destined to host my father and asked if I’d discussed the headstone inscription with the undertaker. I hadn’t, but names and dates would do. As for the final words at the funeral, mentioning the skating with my father was more evocative than chess playing and – for what it was worth – I did have a recurrent dream of skating with my father. I’d been having it since leaving the island as a kid, but when I’d told my mother, she wasn’t interested, so from then on I’d kept it to myself.

Fredriksson wanted to make a brief but vivid speech and thought talking about the skating was an excellent idea. It was something I’d kept close to my heart and something Henrik had always loved. Unbeknownst to each other, we had kept a joint passion for skating in spite of our 20-year separation. And Fredriksson was right, the skating was a good metaphor for life – going against the wind, mixing blissful moments and blizzards, wide horizons and menacing skies.

There was something nagging at the back of my mind, something I wanted to ask the pastor, but couldn’t remember. The conversation stalled as we looked out over the icescape, which had been transformed overnight by the snowfall. The slush had been coated with fluffy white powder to make it one of those sparkling days that don’t exist in London, one of those days that almost make it worthwhile enduring months of boreal darkness. Meanwhile, the ringing of the church bells travelled across the silent ice. Even the Baltic wind was quiet. I’d forgotten how quickly the weather changed in the archipelago, how quickly it went from one season to another, and not necessarily the next. Winter always retained the capricious power to interrupt spring when least expected.

It was a perfect day for skating and – like a Pavlovian reflex – it triggered the scratching sound of skates against ice in my head. I gradually warmed up as I started rocking gently from side to side. Fredriksson left me to it and headed back into the church.

11

I never knew my father had been into yachting. I would have remembered, because this wasn’t yachting in the classical sense. Arriving at the club, I saw the ice yachts zipping over the ice like the wind. They looked like miniature catamarans on blades, sailing at over 100 km/h, their thin frames reminiscent of mechanical pond skaters as they shot past in a frictionless state. Once I managed to take my eyes off them, I asked a Viking with a leathery face for Thor.

‘That’s me. You must be Magnus.’

He gave me his paddle of a hand.

‘Sorry about your father. Henke was a great guy, the best mate you could imagine, always there when you needed him.’

I hadn’t seen much of my father’s generosity, but I could dwell on that later. I was there to gather information, not to judge or argue. Not yet. Thor was a gentle giant, a roughed up, Scandinavian version of Steve Redgrave. He took me to the back of the club house, where he’d shared an office with my father. This was my father’s den, stuffed with skating equipment and much messier than his house. In addition to the old Viking skates back home, he kept newer ones and high-tech clothing here for serious skating expeditions. Thor had something else to show me and took me back outside. Again, my eyes were immediately attracted to the nimble movements of the ice yachts.

‘Did my father go on those?’

‘He lived on the ice.’

I followed him into the boathouse, where he led me to my father’s yacht. It was totally black, sails and blades included.

‘The Black Pearl. Henke was mad. Once he even raced a ferry to Sweden and back.’

‘What, across the ice?’

‘A bet with a club mate. The ferry didn’t stand a chance.’

The way Thor became absorbed in the story made me think he’d really admired my father’s guts.

‘There was a strong tailwind and he was lucky to come out of it alive. Unfortunately, the ice isn’t what it used to be. When the winters were colder, people crossed the ice to the Swedish mainland on horseback or sleds. In the 1950s there was even a man who drove to Sweden across the ice in his car. Life Magazine wrote an article about it.’

It sounded incredible.

‘Today it’s trickier. The ferry traffic between Sweden and Finland is so intense that the ice barely freezes between ships. It’s impossible to get to the mainland without crossing a ferry route. And when it’s biting cold, the channels are kept open by icebreakers.’

‘How did he get to Sweden then?’

Thor looked at the yacht.

‘The cockpit works like a floating survival cell, not exactly ocean-going, but enough to paddle over the two channels he had to cross. You have to be a good paddler though. If you don’t keep moving, you sink.’

I knew my father had loved the outdoors, not that he’d been an adrenalin junkie.

‘There used to be a postal route between Sweden and Finland. In winter, they crossed the ice, but the rest of the year they rowed, which was much slower, and many men drowned trying to deliver the post. In the early 19th century, 400 Russian Cossacks even made it to Sweden on horseback, not to mention people escaping across the Baltic during the October Revolution.’

I was captivated. The ice had connected the Baltic populations and maybe even constituted a threat from possible invaders. It must have been crucial in Baltic war strategy and I could see how my father’s Black Pearl descended from a long history of winters joining up Sweden, Finland, the Baltic countries and the Åland archipelago. Had the ice been the secret behind Sweden’s 17th century greatness? Had climate change altered power relations around the Baltic? I was no historian – I was an accountant – but being half Scandinavian, I’d always been fascinated by the history of the region.

When we came out again, a ferry appeared, mirage-like, from behind a tree-covered island, while another ice yacht shot off towards the horizon at dazzling speed. The scene was surreal – the ice, the wind, the silence and the knowledge that in six months this winterscape would have melted and morphed into a glistening sea. When I looked up again, I saw the mechanical insect become a dot and vanish.

‘Want to have a go?‘

‘Maybe another time.’

My time was limited and I needed to keep clearing my father’s house.

‘There’s a yacht ready. Come on.’

In the end I couldn’t resist. When I’d first stood next to the ice yacht by the shore, it looked so fragile I thought it would collapse the moment I squeezed into it with Thor, especially as these crafts were designed for solo rides and he must have weighed well over 100 kilos. But these yachts were using the latest materials, combining strength and feather-light weight. I needn’t worry.

Once we’d shoe-horned ourselves into the cockpit and raised the sail, I expected us to speed up like an F1 car, but we barely moved and I felt ridiculous – like having my backside stuck in a bucket with another man. It was nothing like the yachts I’d seen whoosh past earlier and I was ready to give up, until we reached the end of the peninsula and the wind suddenly grabbed the sail. The acceleration was so fierce that I screamed as if on a roller-coaster. It was unbelievable, so much more intense and aggressive than skating, with the high speed and the need to anticipate the wind accurately keeping us on edge all the time. The lightness of the yacht meant that it reacted instantly to any change in wind direction or roughness in the ice.

How Thor could read the ice at that speed was a mystery, but it was second nature to him. There was no way anyone could react consciously at that speed, it had to be intuitive and based on years spent on the ice. Thor didn’t need to think, he was one with the wind and the yacht. The whistling of the wind and the blades rattling against the ice was so ear-deafening that we had to shout to make ourselves heard. When Thor finally let me steer, he warned me to be very gentle, but it was in vain – we immediately flipped over as I tried to avoid a bump in the ice. The right-hand blade lifted off the ice and we landed on the side. There was a slight rip in the sail and I banged my shoulder heavily, but Thor took over the steering again and headed for a quick spin around the islands. It was the most exhilarating thing I’d ever experienced. I could see why this was addictive.

‘How do you know the ice will hold?!’

Thor steered away from the wind and the yacht slowed down as he answered my question. Suddenly we were moving across the ice effortlessly and without a sound. The contrast was mind-blowing.

‘It’s so fast and the weight distribution so good that you can usually escape thin ice.’

It didn’t sound reassuring.

‘Usually?’

‘The kids use GPS to see who’s gone the furthest and every winter there are unofficial records in all directions. They speak in latitudes and longitudes. Some are even nicknamed after their most daring performance.’

‘That can’t be legal.’

Thor shrugged and I regretted my stupid comment.

‘There’s no law on the ice, only the laws of nature. That’s the whole point – when you drown you drown. There’s no law against breathing in polluted London air, is there?’

No, and he was right, there was no law against heading out in the deadly London traffic either.

‘Every year MPs petition for a limitation of the maritime traffic in wintertime. Imagine being able to race from the Arctic Circle to Poland, The Baltic Sea as a giant arena, Ben Hur on ice…’

‘Could there really be ice all the way?’

‘Rarely. All the more reason to cut the traffic when there is.’

The buzz of the yachting almost made me forget why I’d come to the club in the first place. This was living in the present, an escapade that put me in touch with my father. Being out here on the ice had given me a rush and I was starting to creep under his polar hide. I didn’t know if he’d been an adrenalin junkie or if cold water swimming even triggered any form of dopamine production, but my father certainly seemed to have been obsessed with physical sensations. Was it a need to feel alive? Was he compensating for an everyday numbness? I should have known these things about my father, but didn’t.

After the sailing we sat down at the club bar, where Thor insisted I try my father’s favourite brew – the Stallhagen lager from the local brewery. We finally got round to talking about Henrik’s death. Thor wasn’t surprised by the cold water swimming. Henrik had always liked physical challenges. Whatever the time of year, he wanted a dip. That was what he was about and every time he returned from a swim he’d have that gleam in his eye.

‘I just find it hard to grasp. Why swim in such a remote place?’

‘It tames the beast, stops you going berserk.

‘Are you saying my father was an animal?’

‘Aren’t we all?’

Thor smiled.

‘Henke was the sweetest man imaginable. He taught the kids ice yachting, but not in a traditional way. He pushed them, encouraged them to flirt with danger. They love him…’

He paused half-sentence, maybe wondering whether to say they loved him, but they still did.

‘… it led to some clashes with the parents and lately he wasn’t allowed to do any coaching. ‘

‘How come?’

‘A kid drowned last year and the parents blamed Henrik.

‘Were they right?’

Thor shrugged his shoulders.

‘Henrik saw yachting as a school for life and the kids were inspired by his exploits, but he was very clear about the risks. He couldn’t be held responsible for what the kids did on their own.’

‘So the drowned kid wasn’t under his supervision when it happened?’

‘No, but the problem is today’s parents demand a risk-free environment. The opposite of life. They want the image of danger, not the danger itself. In a computer game you can always get a second or third life, but in reality we only live once. Henke was always hammering on about this – don’t take any unnecessary risks when your life’s at stake. Never overestimate yourself.’

‘How was he as a person?’

‘We had great laughs together.’

Thor fell silent for a moment before continuing.

‘He wasn’t a happy man though.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘He avoided being alone.’

It surprised me. I’d been under the impression that my father was a loner.

‘But he was alone on the yacht.’

‘That’s different. You’re up against it, defying the odds, evading death. There’s an enemy and it defines you. You might be in bad company, but alone you’re not. You’re caught up in the intensity.’

‘But except for you and the kids there seems to have been no one in his life.’

‘He fled into activities, always busy, but doing alone is very different from being alone. When I say he was alone, I mean that he never stopped to reflect or to look himself in the mirror. His camera lens focused on trees and animals, never on himself.’

So my father didn’t take the time to think or feel. Hearing this, I had to ask the question that kept creeping up in the back of my mind:

‘Do you think he could have committed suicide?’

‘And then climbed out of the hole?’

‘I just can’t understand how he could climb out if he had water in his lungs. Lisa Forsman told me the police thought his death was caused by a combination of drowning and hypothermia. He would have been unable to cough up the water because of being so frozen.’

Thor frowned.

‘Could be. Once something goes wrong in the cold, the margins are very small. If for some reason he struggled to get out, he would have weakened very quickly. I don’t get why it would be so hard to get out though, unless his heart failed or something.’

I hated not having an answer, but Thor seemed to partly agree with Lisa’s explanation. My father’s death was still less straightforward than I’d hoped. I wanted a clear-cut answer, but that wasn’t going to happen.

‘Did he seem depressed lately?’

‘Not that I know. I didn’t see him though. He was too busy searching for Anna.’

‘Who?’

Thor explained that Anna was an Eastern European who’d been hanging out at the yachting club. He wasn’t sure where exactly she was from, but she was crazy about London and planned to go there, which had reminded Henke of his lost son. Thor went back into the office to fetch a photo of Anna. She smiled at the camera and oozed warmth – her cheekbones, the dimples.

‘Amazing eyes.’

‘Henke was a great photographer.’

‘Could he live from it?’

Thor nodded.

‘The nature magazines couldn’t get enough of him. He had to refuse work to keep time for yachting and swimming.’

From the look of the photo, Anna liked the photographer and it felt good to think that it had been my father. She had left without saying goodbye and he’d been convinced that something bad had happened to her, but Thor disagreed.

‘She was young. She probably left because she felt like it, because she could. In fact, she texted to say goodbye the day after he was found dead.’

‘Texted who?’

‘Me.’

‘Did she know about my father’s death?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Didn’t you tell her?’

‘I left a message but never heard back.’

She must have been upset. Keeping Anna’s photo, I walked away partly relieved. Maybe my father hadn’t been 100% happy, but so what, who is? At least he’d embraced life. He’d lived and tested his limits. What Thor told me about my father escaping into activities made sense and it also made the cold water swimming more understandable. The extremer the activity, the further removed my father would have been from his daily life. Anything to avoid facing himself.

The yachting confirmed this. At first I didn’t want to do it – I hadn’t come here to play around, but then I’d realised that if I didn’t slow down and switch to my father’s time, I’d never get him, especially as he’d practically lived on the Black Pearl according to Thor. Thanks to the yachting, I tasted something my father had loved and it felt like I’d made a first vital connection. I wanted more.

The lingering question was why he’d been looking for Anna, although Thor didn’t seem to think there was anything to it. She’d just happened to be on Henrik’s mind. On second thought, I found it odd that she’d sent Thor a text without even bothering to call or come round to say goodbye in person, even more so after he’d left a message about my father. I was disappointed that Anna had disappeared without a trace, because I would have liked to talk to her. If my father had looked for her, they must have had a special bond, but I would never know. I had to get back to Carrie.

12

I needed to do one last thing for my father to better understand him. It was the least I could do, a personal farewell before returning home. I simply couldn’t leave Carrie alone any longer. A couple of extra days in Mariehamn would never be enough to catch up with 20 lost years anyway. I felt bad about rushing things, but I had to get back. I rang Carrie to check how she was. She said the baby hadn’t dropped out yet, but it wouldn’t be long and she was getting really worried. I couldn’t wait to join her in London. I wanted to be there for her, protect her, help her through the pain. I wouldn’t be long now.

I didn’t tell her about my little plan, because I knew she wouldn’t have approved. She would have said I was mad, but I was determined to go through exactly what my father had gone through. I needed a ritual and this had been his.

I had a coffee back at the house before grabbing a towel and a bottle of aquavit. Darkness was falling quicker than expected as I drove off in my father’s car. It didn’t matter, because I wouldn’t be long. Or so I thought.

13

Eva was patrolling the late shift alone and had stopped for a break at the northern junction. As she was pouring the umpteenth refill from the thermos, she thought it was time to stop drinking so much coffee. It made her edgy. She didn’t mind working nights, especially as there was nothing else to do on this godforsaken island.

What she did mind was the lack of men. The few decent ones were taken and she wouldn’t touch a married man with a bargepole. Timo cheating on her was the reason she’d demanded to be transferred from Helsinki five years ago. Then there’d been Ernst, another mistake she had to cope with every day. She’d sworn to herself never to get involved with a colleague again. She hadn’t been with anyone for two years, but she was still glad she’d come to Mariehamn. It was a dream place for sailing and skating. Eva had brought her mother and at least she’d met a man in Mariehamn. Maybe Rudolf was a bit pompous, but unlike many older men he wasn’t chasing 20-year olds and, most importantly, Eva’s mother wasn’t alone any more.

A car looking like Sandberg’s Skoda shot past, but Sandberg was dead, unless it was his son – Magnus. Smiling to herself, she thought that she’d enjoyed frisking him – one of the few perks of being a police officer. But what was he doing driving in the middle of the night? Or was the car stolen? Too many questions, she needed to check it out. Eva quickly emptied her mug and set off. She’d have to guess at the next junction, but she’d find the car in the end. None of the roads went very far.

14

I parked the car facing the bay and sat staring at the headlight beams for a while before turning them off. Once my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, I could see thanks to the moonlight. Before getting out, I had a last sip of my father’s aquavit, not Scandinavia’s finest, but good enough for heating purposes. I walked over to the hole to have a look, but it was completely iced over and I’d forgotten to bring something to crack it with.

I took the warning triangle from the boot, walked back to the hole and bashed the newly-formed layer of ice. When I returned to the car, I stopped halfway to take in the surroundings, trying to imagine my father in the same spot.

The ice was a giant dance floor reflecting the moonlight, with the snow-covered pines wafting in the shadows, too shy to dance in the spotlight. They were the last living beings he’d seen before dying. They’d witnessed my father’s death and lived here night and day all year round without ever moving. I wished they could speak to me.

My conversations with Dahl and Thor had convinced me to do this. It was only by doing what my father had done – what he’d ‘had to do’ according to his friends – that I could truly understand him and override whatever cultural barriers there were between us. I wanted to experience what had been normal for him, his essence. Retracing his last moments would help bridge the gap. I knew I’d never be able to completely step into his shoes, but this would definitely bring me closer. The swimming had been something he’d cared so much about that it had killed him.

The silence was total except for the polar wind. I had another confidence-boosting sip of aquavit before undressing and leaving my clothes in the car boot. Once I’d shut it, I rushed to the hole with the towel as my only protection. It was freezing. Only a madman would do this and I was hoping that my father could see what his son was putting himself through.

When I touched the water it was absolutely glacial. This wasn’t a time to hesitate. Every second counted, but would I be able to get out? Didn’t I need ice prods? Every good Scandinavian knows that prods are for skaters who fall through thin ice that keeps breaking when they try to climb back up. I invoked the solidity of the ice to reassure myself. It was thick. I would be fine. At least that was the theory, now the practice.

I hesitated again. Why was I doing this? Why expose myself to the cold? Was I completely crazy? I could simply get back into the warmth of the car. No, it didn’t matter that it seemed stupid, because it wasn’t, not to me. My father had done it, so I was going to do it. I had to, I was about to. I was.

I took a deep breath before slipping into the water. At first, it felt like I was choking and I gasped for air, but I forced myself to stay in long enough to feel the cold compressing me. I was shrinking and couldn’t move. My limbs felt heavy. I had to get out. I would have preferred to scramble, but I was semi-paralysed and shaking. I tried to drag myself up but slipped back into the water just as I was getting a first knee on the ice. Now the water felt even icier. The first attempt had demanded a huge effort and I had to pull myself together for a new try. I needed to recover, but it was impossible in the icy water. I was trapped and started to panic. I should definitely have taken prods. Too late now. I tried pushing myself up with my palms. I gave everything – it was my last chance – and eventually managed to get both knees on the ice. I crawled away from the hole as carefully as I could, determined not to slip back in.

I dried myself as best I could, but my fingers were so stiff I could barely hold the towel. I’d never been so cold in my whole life. I had to rub the towel against my body with my palms. Somehow I was enjoying the ordeal, in the knowledge that the warmth of the car was only meters away. It was like an out of body experience. If only I’d had a sauna. The penny almost dropped, something almost clicked into place, but then it was lost. I was too cold, too rushed to remember. Maybe it would come back once I’d warmed up.

I hurried back to the car and pulled the door open. I didn’t. It was stuck. I tried again, to no avail. The front door wouldn’t budge either. I tried the other side, but all the doors were locked. The key must be in my trouser pocket – in the boot. I grabbed the handle. It was immovable too. I could see, almost touch, my trousers lying in the warmth of the Skoda. We were only separated by a thin sheet of glass. I ran around the car trying all the doors and the boot once more. They were definitely, firmly and unquestioningly locked. How could this have happened? How could the car lock itself? What had I done?! What the fuck was I going to do? There was no way I could walk back to the nearest village. I was naked at -15°C, not to mention the wind factor. I rubbed myself frantically with the towel, but it was encrusted with ice and my hair had already formed an icecap.

My only hope was to find a summer cottage and break into it. God knows where the nearest house was. I couldn’t remember seeing any on the way out. I would last an hour max at this temperature without clothes and I’d already wasted precious minutes. The countdown had started and my body temperature was dropping fast. How much would be left of me in an hour? Would my nose freeze off? My fingers, toes, feet? The prospects were grim and I was scared shitless. I was panicking, because I could see where this was going and I didn’t want to understand my father this well.

Eventually, I realised how dumb I was. All I had to do was smash the windscreen. I looked for a small rock, but it was harder than I thought. The snow was icy under the topcoat and it was impossible to penetrate the ice with my fingers. I tried hacking with the emergency triangle, but it broke. Meanwhile, my fingers were getting weaker by the second. I finally managed to get a grip on a large block of ice and hurled it at the side window. The ice split, not the window. The car remained immaculate, indifferent, and I was getting seriously cold. My limbs were numb and I couldn’t even feel my feet.

I kept scraping off the snow, then the ice, looking for a rock. I scrabbled with my nails until they broke. I tried to warm my frozen fingers by breathing on them, but even that wasn’t helping after a while, as they were completely dead. I scraped and scraped, without feeling my hands, fingers bleeding, my body shaking uncontrollably. I was becoming an animal. This was it, I wouldn’t make it.

I couldn’t give up. As long I was conscious I had to fight. There had to be a way out. There had to be – HAD TO – but I was so cold I couldn’t think clearly. Trying to ignore the pain, I made a last-ditch effort to look round. All I could see was pine trees, bushes, rocks and the damn car. The damn car. The car!

I should have thought of it earlier. I reached for the exhaust without thinking and – fucking pipe! – burnt myself. I cooled my hand in the snow. How could the damn thing still be so hot? Maybe it only felt hot because I was frozen, because I wanted to be burned. It occurred to me that I could use the car as a heater. I put my hands on the bonnet. It gave off some warmth and I lay down on it, but I was too far gone. I decided to give the exhaust another go. Using the towel to insulate my hands from the heat, I wriggled the pipe. When it came loose, a blast off heat blew through the towel and I burnt myself again. I didn’t care – I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel anything. I could only see the burn on my skin. I sat down in the snow.

Suddenly, I was feeling better. I was gradually overcome with a sense of well-being as the pain of the cold transformed into a warm wave swelling through my body. I knew I wasn’t warm, quite the opposite. I had to fight the feeling and force myself to dig again to find a rock that would break the windscreen, but the icy snow stood its ground. Although I was trying to be more aggressive, my scraping only became weaker. My energy was fading. I couldn’t control my hands any more. I thought of Carrie. I wouldn’t get the chance to say goodbye and to tell her how much I loved her. I’d never see our child. For the first time in my life I prayed.

15

Finland was supposedly a bilingual country, but the Swedish schools were being shut down and his parents had been forced to send him to a Finnish school. He’d suddenly found himself as the only Swedish-speaking Finn in his class. Swedish Finns were seen as arrogant imperialists and his classmates told him to go home to Sweden – a country he’d never even visited. He was being eradicated like the rest of the Swedish minority in Finland.

To block out the racist bullying, he escaped into his lead soldiers, which he moulded and painted to reconstruct The Battle of Narva from 1700, when Sweden had beaten Peter the Great’s Russian army. He’d started the soldier collection with his father before continuing with a Finnish-speaking classmate living in the same street. He thought he’d finally made a friend, but when their teacher asked the classmate to list his best friends, he omitted him. From then on, he avoided the neighbour and buried himself in his army display. It represented Sweden at its peak, when it had outdone Russia and been one of the great powers of the world. He focused on getting the colours of the uniforms just right – down to the smallest button and epaulette. He didn’t need any friends now that he’d created his own world where Sweden ruled. He kept his neighbour away, but he insisted on seeing the collection, and one day he finally let the classmate in with another friend. They crushed the soldiers by walking all over them. His Swedish army was slaughtered.

Following the massacre, he developed a protective shell reinforced by a determination to resist any more racist persecution. He wasn’t going to put up with what his parents had suffered. Sweden was one of the great nations of the world and always would be. As for Finland, it was just a footnote. This knowledge helped him through school and strengthened him in his resolve to turn the tide. He would show them.

16

I was skating through the archipelago’s stunning icescape. Weightless, gliding, free as a bird, until the ice abruptly gave way and I sank through it. I desperately tried to climb back up, but it kept breaking in front of me – an endless canal. When I looked round, desperate for help, all I could see was emptiness. The icescape merged with the sky at the horizon and there was absolutely no land in sight, nothing to reach for, no hope.

I’d landed inside a white void, a sphere of ice. I scraped and scraped and the scraping on the ice echoed, becoming scraping in the snow. I was naked, an animal digging for a rock and I finally found one, a giant stone the size of a medicine ball. I lifted it above my head and catapulted it against the car. When it bounced off, I tried again, but there still wasn’t a scratch on the car. It was so spotless and scornful that it seemed made out of armour plating. I was frozen numb. I was lost but couldn’t give in. I picked up the stone again and hurled it at the windscreen with a roar.

The female police officer and the nurse chatting at the end of my bed jumped out of their skin and if it weren’t for the police woman’s fast reflexes, they would have been hit. She’d spotted me lifting something out of the corner of her eye and shoved the nurse to the side as the jug crashed on the floor behind them.

I came to standing on the bed with two women staring at me and after a momentary confusion I quickly slipped back under the sheets. The nurse checked my temperature, which was normal, so I was left with the police officer – Eva Mikaelsson. She must have been about my age and her blue eyes looked familiar, but they were probably just stereotypically Nordic. Or maybe I remembered her for frisking me and holding me at gunpoint. She got straight to the point this time too.

‘Idiot!’

Now what had I done to her?

‘People like you don’t deserve to live.’

I noticed the bandage on my left hand and it slowly dawned on me what this might be about.

‘You could have lost much more...’

‘What?’

‘…than a pinkie and a toe.

I peered under the covers. My right foot was bandaged too.

‘That bloody car!’

‘Those clever little Skodas lock automatically after 30 seconds. You’re not the first one to be caught out.’

‘What a stupid invention.’

‘What did you think you were doing?’

‘I wanted to understand my father.’

‘By following him into the grave?!’

She was right, I should have told someone about my farewell swim, but if I’d told Carrie she would never have let me go.

‘Who found me?’

‘I did.’

‘How did you know I was there?’

‘I happened to drive past.’

‘Happened?’

‘Five minutes later and you’d have been dead.’

Eva had to go. I liked her way of cutting the crap. I suspected not much got by her and what did was viewed with quiet irony. It was my stupid fault that I’d almost died, but she’d been there to pick up the pieces. She was right, I needed to be more careful with my life.

‘Guess I should thank you.

‘Don’t do it again, not without a sauna.’

As she left, I finally realised what was odd about my father’s swim. I could suddenly recall him having a winter dip and running back to the sauna. I used to hate sitting in the sweat box, because I couldn’t breathe, but he would force me to stay, telling me to relax. I’d never been able to take it and used to gasp for air like a fish on dry land. He argued with mum about it every time we got home. She just couldn’t understand the obsession with physical sensations. What was the point of being freezing cold or over-heated? How could anyone prefer a cold swim to a nice cup of tea? I thought they made for a great combination (provided I didn’t get locked out again while swimming), but my mother couldn’t bear the Scandinavian obsession with nature. The poor woman hated camping, but had ended up in a culture that was happiest under the canvas and crapping in the woods.

Having been through a cold dip like my father, I found it very odd that he’d lain down afterwards. Surely, he would have rushed back to the car? He might have died on the way from heart failure, but he wouldn’t have lain down neatly next to the hole. It didn’t make any sense. Even if he was as stupid as me and locked himself out of the car, he wouldn’t have returned to the hole. It was the last place he’d want to be. I knew, because I’d been there, but maybe I was trying too 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 it must have been a pretty unusual scene for them to bump into during their skating. It must have been so unexpected and terrifying 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. Whatever 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 life 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 began 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 look 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, but a significant one – a 20-year landslide to fill. This would only require an extra day, two at the most.

The clincher 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, my father had cared about me. Sitting in the attic, over two decades later, my father’s house came alive around me. Mum and dad actually sounded like they were enjoying being together. Hearing the tape brought tears to my eyes. There had been love in spite of mum insisting she’d never loved him, only used him 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 father being something he wasn’t, mysterious, 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 in flashes. I hadn’t thought much about this in the last 20 years, but it felt good to hear us like this, because over the years, I’d developed 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. It suddenly came back to me, my father saying that the funnel-shaped, orange lamp hanging above the kitchen table eavesdropped on everything we said. If you leaned under it and remained completely still, you could hear echoes of our conversations. The lampshade 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, it 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 forgotten 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 father 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, because that’s what it sounded like. In Mariehamn, she’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 back 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 and 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. Part 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 thinking 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 scared of pulling the trigger in the beginning and his father had started by teaching him that it wasn’t to be pulled – it 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 undergrowth, the wind or a bird. It was never arbitrary, never noise for the sake of noise. To him these natural sounds were appeasing.

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

19

I returned to the yacht club, as it seemed to have been the centre of my father’s life. This was where he’d spent most of his time, whereas his house felt more like a relic from a previous life, a place he only passed through to eat and sleep. The room he shared with Thor at the club was my father’s den, the centre of his life.

His desk at the club was covered in papers, but nothing revealing at first sight. His computer was full of photos, only nature pics as far as I could see. There were some other documents, including a few ice yacht drawings and training programmes. Now that I’d decided to retrace his last few days, I needed something tangible. I’d start at the end. He’d died on a Tuesday night. I had to find out what he usually did on Tuesdays.

I’d hoped he would have a calendar, but when Thor found me digging around in my father’s desk and I asked him about it, he told me Henrik kept everything in his head. He made appointments with people and stuck to them. He didn’t like the flexi-culture brought by mobile phones, mainly because he thought a lot of time was wasted delaying decisions and commitments. According to Thor, Henrik believed that only when a deadline is fixed, do you truly start the mental preparation. In his eyes, contemporary culture was more about deciding when to do things than actually doing them. The technology turned procrastination into a life style. I could see what my father meant – how we become consumed by our tools, how they cease to be tools for us to become their slaves, forgetting why we wanted them in the first place. This take on new technology was apparent on his computer, which functioned more as a visual aid than as a communication hub. It was great hearing from Thor about my father, but all this didn’t bring me any closer to finding him.

What had he been up to? Seeing the yachts on the ice, I remembered Thor mentioning GPS logging and kids competing in longitudes and latitudes. Did Henrik keep a log of where he went? According to Thor he did, but I couldn’t find any log book, nor could I see any relevant documents on his PC, and neither could Thor.

‘How do you determine your position?’

‘Henrik had a GPS camera that tagged all his photos.’

We found an old 35mm Olympus OM-1 camera, but nothing digital and the photos on his PC didn’t cover the last month. It looked like he hadn’t had time to upload them, as the other photos on the computer covered every single month and went back a good four or five years. I found the photo of Anna in the previous month’s upload.

When I asked Thor how well he knew Anna, his answer was hesitant, as if he was hiding something. I often had that feeling with Scandinavians though, imagining their reticence was a sign of inner depth. It wasn’t necessarily the case. In fact, Viking sayings advised the stupid to shut up. Or maybe Thor simply wasn’t interested in Anna’s story, but how come he didn’t know her if she’d been a regular at the club? Thor finally admitted he’d been the last one to speak to her.

‘You?’

‘I should have told you.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘I… fucked up. We had a few drinks and I got a bit frisky. She slapped me before running out, upset. I didn’t tell Henrik at first, because I felt bad about it and assumed she’d gone to her boyfriend – Bengt. Henrik was furious when I told him. I didn’t know, but it had been over with the boyfriend for ages. Henrik had let her crash in the back of the club without telling me. It’s against our rules, so we had an argument and he went home. That’s the last I saw of him alive.’

Was he telling the truth or was it a cover up? I needed to find out where Anna went and what Henrik had done about her disappearance. Thor didn’t think my father had filed a missing person’s report, but I wanted to check anyway. It wouldn’t be his first lie. I also needed to talk to Anna’s boyfriend. If she hadn’t been able to return to the club, she might have gone to Bengt’s place.

20

The police station was as silent as a library, the heavy breathing of the man behind the desk the only sign of life. He looked like a pregnant walrus with his bushy moustache and ballooning belly. Where was everyone? Was hibernation the secret to surviving the Scandinavian winter? I showed the policeman Anna’s photo. He looked at it for a good 30 seconds without blinking. I thought he’d gone into a coma and was about to prompt him out of his torpor, when he finally emerged.

‘She’s beautiful.’

Yes, she was, but that wasn’t my question.

‘Have you seen her before?’

He looked up and stared at me in silence, still stuck in his 30-second mode.

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘Henrik Sandberg is my father and he…’

Without a word he came round the desk, walked up to me and put a hand on my shoulder. Had I said something wrong? Was he arresting me? He looked me in the eyes, shook his head and gave me a very long hug. It was probably just another of his 30 seconds, but it felt longer, much longer, long enough for his smell to start impregnating me. This was a man full of flavours and he was sharing them profusely. My nose was twitching right and left, not knowing where to turn, desperately trying to source some fresh air. I really didn’t know how to react when being hugged by a police officer, let alone a smelly specimen. He eventually let go, took a step back and – with both hands still firmly anchored on my shoulders – pushed out a deep sigh of relief.

‘That’s better... How do you feel?’

The Englishman in me was aghast with embarrassment and unable to respond. The adequate response to this man’s behaviour simply didn’t feature in my cultural heritage, nor was it what I’d come for. As for the Scandinavian in me, he wasn’t exactly in his comfort zone either. He was 10 years old and didn’t want to be embraced by anyone, especially not by men in uniform. I had no choice but to resort to my emergency tool box.

‘Thanks for that. I really appreciate it.’

Had I overdone it? For a moment it looked like he was going for a repeat embrace and I thought I’d never get any sensible information out of him, but I had to keep up the momentum. Given the opportunity, he seemed prepared to distribute free hugs all day, except I didn’t want them.

‘I’m in a bit of a rush.’

‘Oh. That’s not good.’

He looked deeply concerned, but I ignored that.

‘Does the photo ring any bells?’

The serial hugger adjusted his jumper over his stomach and went back behind the desk, where he picked up the photo and went silent for another 30 seconds. What was wrong with him?

‘Yes.’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes what?’

I was starting to realise that I had to be blunt if I wanted to get anything out of him.

‘Henrik Sandberg came in with this photo.’

‘What happened?’

‘He showed it to me.’

Extracting the information was painstakingly painful. He eventually revealed that the photo had been circulated in the office. No one had recognised the girl, but as far as I could see, the walrus was the only person working there, so circulation might be an overstatement.

‘How many people work here?’

He turned to a photo hanging behind him on the wall. There were four people on the photo, although with the time he took to count them it could have been a battalion.

‘Well, there’s Eva and… Ernst. And the chief, but he’s away. And me, but I’m not a policeman. I run the office.’

Ernst was big and bald, while the chief looked like a slick businessman and Eva was… Eva.

‘The force is tenfold in the summer.’

With such as small police force it wasn’t surprising no one had recognised Anna, but at least I knew my father hadn’t filed a missing person’s report. There was no record of anyone fitting her description in the computer system either, but I’d managed to trace one of my father’s last moves. He’d gone to the police, which confirmed that he’d been seriously worried about her.

21

Her cheekbones reminded him of Marja from secondary school in Helsinki. They’d been in the same swimming club. She’d been one of the few people who didn’t ignore him. He saw it as a sign that she might like him.

It had happened in the last year. They’d been occupying the school to protest against relocation out of the town centre. Marja had been among the leaders and he’d joined to be close to her. She must have noticed that he couldn’t stop staring at her during the two days and nights spent camping in the school gymnasium. He couldn’t wait any longer. He’d been building up to it for months and he’d finally dared to ask. After stopping her in the alleyway between the school yard and the street, he’d blurted it out. Would she go to the movies with him?

‘What?’

She’d sounded totally surprised; as if it was more likely the Finnish team would win the FIFA World Cup.

‘Would you like to go and see a film’?

She’d stared at him in silence before turning and going to her friends. Watching her bouncy walk, he’d felt her rhythm pulsing in his body. He pictured her walking down the poolside and making a perfect dive. He was lost in thought. When he looked up, they were all laughing – Marja and her mates. They were mocking him and she was just like the others. What had he done to her? He hated the stupid cow. Never again was he going to be embarrassed by a Finnish bitch, never ever. Who did she think she was?!

22

Anna’s ex Bengt ran a garage. When I arrived, he was showing a couple a VW Polo. They were already seated, ready to drive off for a test ride, but it was only when they nodded that I recognised the Forsmans. I tried making some small talk, but they treated me like a total stranger. Clearly, conversation didn’t happen spontaneously with them. They were diesels and needed warming up, maybe an injection of aquavit?

Watching Bengt wave them off, I noticed that he was short for a Scandinavian.

He hadn’t seen Anna for at least a month.

‘Where did you meet?’

‘Ukraine. A town called Kherson on the Black Sea. I was there for an ice hockey tournament and we met at the party held for the Mariehamn team. Anna’s family has worked for the local tractor factory for the last 30 years, but since independence things have changed. Private investors are trying to make a quick buck and the tractor company has run out of money. The new owners don’t invest and the business isn’t viable any more. Anna’s father and brothers have to go fishing to feed the family. And they’re not the only ones – the whole town is in depression. When I met Anna, her best friend had just committed suicide. The factory used to be the centre of their lives, the heartbeat of the town. People made a living from it and went holidaying in factory-owned summer camps on the Black Sea. Now that the safety net is gone people starve. Anna wanted to get away, go somewhere where she could work, where there would be more than one employer. Not stuff all the eggs in the same basket.’

Anna obviously had guts. I asked Bengt where she could be.

‘I don’t know. I’m done with her.’

‘What do you mean you’re done?’

He stared at me blankly and looked at his watch.

‘You must have some idea where she could have gone.’

‘She wanted to go to London.’

‘Did she know anyone in Mariehamn?’

‘She went to the yacht club a lot.’

He wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t know.

‘Anywhere else?’

‘Your father asked the same question.’

So my father had been round. At least I knew I was on his trail.

‘What did he say?’

‘Like you, he called me a liar, told me I must know where she is.’

‘Shouldn’t you?’

‘I’ve got enough on my hands without worrying about my ex girlfriends.’

‘Who dumped who?’

‘It wasn’t like that.’

‘Was there a particular moment?’

‘Not really, we just... drifted apart.’

‘What happened with my father?’

‘He was irritated. In the end I told him to check out my boathouse. Anna liked hanging out there when we were together, but I only go there in the summer.’

If there was the slightest chance my father and Anna had gone there, I needed to see it.

‘Where’s the boathouse?’

23

It was a good 15-minute walk. The small bay was on the outskirts of Mariehamn. Bengt had told me the key would be under a flowerpot on the window ledge. I did find pot fragments on the ground below the window, but no trace of the key. Turned out I didn’t need it. The door was open, not that it was a great omen after what had happened at my father’s house, but this was a smaller place and I couldn’t hear anything, so I went in.

Boathouse was a fancy name for an upgraded garden shed with a table, two chairs and a bed-cum-sofa. It was a single room with a freestanding wood stove but without running water. The view was breathtaking from the top of the wooden stairs at the back of the house and I followed them down to the jetty. A little further down the shore was what looked like a snow-covered beach. When I looked back up at the house perched on top of the rock, it wasn’t particularly impressive, but what a location! Who cares about size when the archipelago is your living room?

When I went back in, the only traces of recent human presence I could see were cigarette butts. I picked them up to check the brand. They were all the same – a name embodying the American West. Whose could they be? I had neither Thor’s nor Bengt’s number, so I rang my father’s solicitor Dahl to ask for Thor’s, but he was out on his yacht again – I could hear the wind whistling in the background. Yes, Anna smoked Marlboros, he thought. He wasn’t sure about Bengt and didn’t have his number, but Bengt had told me he never went to the boathouse in winter. Judging from the dust on the table, it certainly didn’t look like it had many visitors.

I followed the road behind the house and found a side road leading down to the beach. It was difficult to picture bodies frying in the sun in the same spot only a few months ago. My father lying on the ice sprung to mind. There were no body imprints in the snow, but there were other tracks, snow-covered but still discernible. A car had driven down to the shore and seemed to have stopped. There was a rectangle in the snow – a shadow cast by the car? It could be a melting effect triggered by its heat. What had it been doing here? It didn’t look like it had driven back up the hill, because the tracks continued down onto the ice. It would have stopped and then driven onto the ice, unless it had come from the ice and driven up the hill. In any case, it had come to standstill, but why? I looked around. There was nothing besides the boathouse, which was perfectly visible from the beach. Someone had driven here and someone had been in the house. It could be the same person, in which case he or she would have got out here, walked up to the house over the rocks, up the stairs, had a cigarette – there were several cigarette butts in the house. Or had someone been waiting in the house?

I couldn’t really tell from the cigarette butts if there had been more than one person in the house, but it felt like there had been only one. Did this mean that the smoker was also the driver? Had the smoking and the driving even happened on the same day? Thor should be able to determine if the tracks were made around the time of my father’s death. I gave him another ring and he said he’d be there in half an hour. I waited in the house, staring down at the spot where the car would have stood. I knew that Anna was a smoker, but had she also been the driver?

When Thor’s ice yacht zipped into the bay, I went down the stairs to show him the tracks. He thought they must have come after last week’s thaw, definitely before my father’s death; otherwise they’d be icier and shallower. He added that anyone driving down here must know the area well.

‘Which means it could be pretty much any local?’

‘It’s a small cove between two larger bays and most people don’t even know about it. The turning is pretty much invisible from the road.’

‘So two people showing up here at the same time would be quite a coincidence?’

‘Unless they had a date?’

‘What do you think of Bengt?’

‘Not a great yachter.’

‘Is he reliable?’

‘What are you getting at?’

‘I don’t know. Could he be hiding something about Anna? She’s gone and he used to be the boyfriend – the reason she came here. He claims she didn’t even contact him before leaving.’

‘So ask him.’

‘Does he have a car?’

‘He runs a garage.’

‘Can you see what type of car it was?’

Thor glanced at the tracks again.

‘Wide and heavy.’

I looked around at the house, the bay, the house again, the side road, the bay again, but it didn’t make me any wiser.

‘Maybe it was just kids driving around, having a fag and a shag, but not necessarily in that order.’

I wasn’t convinced by his scenario. Anna being here – as suggested by the cigarettes, and then disappearing, made the whole thing odd. I couldn’t help thinking that Anna and the car were related. If this was my reaction and my wiring was anything like my father’s, he may have had the same thought. Who had driven the car? Thor didn’t know if Anna could drive and looking at the tracks, he could tell from the braking pattern that the car had driven down to the beach and not come up from the ice. He didn’t think it was Henrik’s car. He couldn’t guarantee anything, but his gut instinct told him the car was larger than my father’s Skoda.

‘Look.’

‘What?’

I couldn’t see anything.

‘Footprints. They’re melted and unsharp. It looks like at least three people got into the car – two big-footed and one smaller person walking up to the boathouse.’

He was right. When I looked properly, I could see what he meant. There were several of the larger prints and only one line of the small ones, which seemed to indicate that the big people went up to the house to pick up the lighter person. Had it been Anna waiting for a lift? Or were these tracks completely unrelated? I wasn’t quite sure where this left my attempt to retrace my father’s last movements, except that he’d probably been here too.

Could he be one of the people who’d climbed into the car? I still had a lot to learn before I could read the snow, something he’d probably been able to do. Maybe he’d seen something I couldn’t see. What would he have done in my situation? I was pretty convinced Anna had been in the boathouse. The question was where she was now.

24

We were deep frozen from stomping around in the snow by the boathouse and returning to the yacht club in Thor’s ice yacht didn’t help. I was chilled to the bone by the time we sat down by the fire place with our brandy-boosted hot chocolates, but I couldn’t sit still for long.

Thor had a yacht lesson to give and I needed to figure out what my father had been up to. I’d seen his map during my previous visits and it was time for another look. I fetched it and sat down by the fire place again, still chilled to the bone. It took me a while to find the boathouse bay, because there were literally thousands of islands. How anyone could find their way in this labyrinth was a mystery to me. Staring at the water maze without a clue only increased my frustration. According to Thor, my father didn’t have any favourite spots – he went with the wind and the weather. Finding my father’s GPS camera was more crucial than ever, but there was still no trace of it at the yacht club, nor could we dig up any recent photos on his PC.

Thor remembered Henrik losing a batch of important photos once and that he’d been using some backup system since. He didn’t know the exact set-up though. Where was that bloody camera?

25

I called Carrie from the house to update her on my latest expedition. She was getting impatient, wondering what the hell I was doing. When I tried to explain that I was looking for a girl my father had known, she said I needed to get my priorities right. Yes, my father was dead, but she was about to give birth! I said I was really sorry and that I would come home as soon as everything was sorted. Carrie burst out crying. She didn’t mean to rush me, but she was really stressed and hormonal. She needed me there with her, especially to protect her from her all-invasive mother. When she’d pulled herself together again, Carrie asked what I thought had happened to Anna.

‘Probably gone to London as Thor originally said.’

‘You really think so?’

‘I don’t think my father thought she’d left.’

I couldn’t quite believe she’d left either. Why would she have gone to the boathouse if she was leaving? To wait, but for what? A meeting? Was it because she had nowhere else to go after being thrown out of the yacht club? If she’d left Mariehamn, the question was how. Anna leaving on a private boat was unlikely in winter – small boats couldn’t handle the ice.

I went down to the ferry port to check if she’d taken a ferry. Again, I found myself with an exceptionally friendly but supernaturally slow clerk. To her credit, she didn’t attempt to hug me, but she did go into random 30-second silences just like the walrus back at the police station. For a moment, it occurred to me that they might be siblings or husband and wife. There was such an eerie synchronicity. Some locals might describe her as laid-back, but I’d say semi-comatose and I fought not to share my vision as she read through the names on the ferry passenger lists syl-la-ble by syl-la-ble. I’d probably made her day.

Nothing ever happened here, so when it did she bloody well made sure she milked every single vowel out of it, and I suffered for it. I couldn’t tell her that reading the first syllable of the names might be enough, or – let’s go mad – doing a search on the computer. I would have upset her, hopefully without provoking tears, but inevitably the question would have been who I thought I was, walking in there bossing her around. I would have been forced to apologise profusely. She would have lost her thread and started from the beginning again. At her pace. So when in Mariehamn it was best to do as the…

My self-control paid off when she did find Anna’s name in a passenger list on the day following my father’s death. She looked at me with the smile of a woman carrying her passenger records with pride.

‘On the Stockholm ferry?’

Caught out, she double-checked on her screen again and nodded. Did I detect a hint of excitement? Maybe I’d underestimated her. Maybe she did have a second gear after all. I guess I should have been reassured, but I wasn’t, because Anna had left right after my father’s death and he’d been looking for her. Was there a connection between his death and her departure? Had he found her or had she been running away from him? Now I really needed to talk to her, but she’d left the island and would be even harder to find. When I thanked the woman behind the counter, I realised that her smile hadn’t budged while I’d had all these thoughts about Anna. She was obviously recovering from the achievement of a lifetime.

As I was leaving she looked at her computer screen again and – hey presto – there was a sign of life.

‘Excuse me!’

I was halfway through the door when I turned.

‘She never boarded.’

‘She didn’t take the ferry?!’

‘That’s right.’

‘How do you know?’

‘All the passengers have to put their boarding passes through the check-in machine before getting on.’

She’d intended to take the ferry but hadn’t made it. Had she missed it, changed her mind or been held back? If so, by whom?

26

I searched my father’s house for his camera and finally dug up a prehistoric Agfa, but nothing remotely digital or GPS-inclined. The place had just been burgled, so that might explain that. Looking through his papers, I eventually found the camera manual with a receipt from a local camera shop.

Sven’s Camera Shop was closed, but it was unclear if it was for the day or for good, as there was no open/closed sign and the window looked like it hadn’t been dressed since the 1970s. A layer of period dust was there to testify that this was completely unrelated to the ongoing revival. Time had simply stopped in that window 30 years ago. I couldn’t remember, but it was probably still exactly as it had been when I lived in Mariehamn as a kid. That shop window lived in a time warp.

I banged on the door but there was no answer. When I asked in the bike shop next door, the manager immediately gave Sven a ring. All I could hear at the other end of the line was shouting, which made the cycle man smile.

‘He was having his nap. He’ll be down in a sec. Sven thinks he lives in Spain. It’s all mañana with him.’

I waited outside the camera shop for a good 10 minutes before there was any movement. The bike shop owner stood in his doorway watching me the entire time. Sven obviously hadn’t moved onto digital processing yet. I was about to give up, when I heard the faint sound of someone coming down a set of stairs. The next thing I knew, a man riddled with sleep wrinkles materialised in the door.

‘What do you want?’

And grumpy at that.

‘My father bought a camera from you.’

‘Not the first father to do so.’

‘A GPS camera.’

‘Fathers buy all different kinds of cameras.’

The more I looked at him, the more familiar he seemed. Where had I seen him? At the yacht club?

‘I’m looking for my father’s camera.’

‘Ask your father then.’

‘He’s dead.’

‘I need my sleep too.’

He pulled the door to, but I blocked it with my foot and held up the receipt.

‘Henrik Sandberg. I’m his son.’

The wrinkles went and his face opened up.

‘Henke! Why didn’t you say so?!’

Suddenly energised, he opened the door and dragged me in. He’d finally snapped out of his siesta setting.

‘You must be Magnus! Last time I saw you, you were…’

He tried to show me with the palm of his hand but couldn’t quite decide on a height. From the look of it I must have been small for a 10-year old.

‘It’s been a while.’

‘You can say that. Henke missed you.’

Did he really? I still couldn’t understand my father’s passiveness. Look where it had got us. It seemed such a waste that we’d never met again and never would.

‘What will you have?’

‘Oh… a glass of water.’

‘I’ve got some of Henke’s home-distilled. Top notch.’

I couldn’t refuse. He took out a bottle and filled the glasses to the brim. Was he trying to blind me?

‘To Henke.’

He emptied his glass in one go and refilled it before emptying it again and looking at me. I tried to refocus the conversation.

‘Do you know where my father kept his camera?’

He lifted his glass.

‘Skål.’

I downed half the glass. I saw another hug coming, but really didn’t want it. Something about him reminded me of the hugging policeman and the ferry terminal lady. Maybe it was a cultural thing. If it was, I certainly hadn’t inherited it.

‘Bottoms up. Say omelette!’

‘Omelette’ was the Swedish photographers’ version of ‘cheese’ and he probably had the magic Finnish word lined up for me too. I barely had time to slurp the rest before he gave me a refill. This was Scandinavia, where protests were in vain as long as there was still aquavit in the bottle. Once opened, it had to be emptied.

‘Like father like son.’

Not sure what he meant – my father was dead. He gave me a slap on the shoulder, making me spill half of my glass. At least I wouldn’t have to drink that.

‘How can I help?’

‘I can’t find his camera. Thought it might be in for a service.’

‘Nope. It’s a work of art. Unbreakable. The death of the camera servicing industry.’

‘I can’t find any recent photos on his PC and the camera has vanished.’

‘I might be able to help.’

‘You know where the camera is?’

‘I can’t help you with the camera, but Henke was using an online backup system. I suggested it after he’d lost all the photos from one of his yachting trips. The GPS tagging was ideal. He only needed to add some notes and he had an illustrated logbook. The uploading is wireless and can be done from almost anywhere on the planet.’

Sven logged into Henrik’s account.

‘How do you know his password?’

‘I set it up for him. Henke didn’t believe in building fences. He said real-life fences become rabbit hutches in our heads. They’re against nature. We think they make things easier, but end up spending our lives trying to untangle them.’

‘Wasn’t he worried about his work being stolen?’

‘He would have loved people to steal his photos and see what he’d seen, because then he wouldn’t have needed a camera. He had it all in his head. The camera was only there to share.’

There were thousands of photos, mainly nature pics. I didn’t know what exactly I was looking for. I just wanted to see the last things my father had seen by focusing on the last few days from the moment of Anna’s disappearance. It was hard to tell my father’s mood from the photos or if they had any significance in relation to Anna. He practically lived in the archipelago and its manifestations probably had other meanings to him. The most banal things can be special to lovers, whereas they look like rubbish to outsiders. What was it that the photos didn’t show? What had he seen that I couldn’t spot? Even when limiting myself to his last couple of days, the number of photos was endless.

I asked Sven for a map and most of the photos appeared to have been taken in a five-kilometre radius around the boathouse bay. I didn’t know for sure, but I assumed he’d been searching for Anna. These were his last movements and they were all I had to go on for the moment. I needed to take a systematic approach. Working my way backwards, starting from the last photos seemed to make most sense. Sven offered to lend me a GPS camera with a direct link to the backup system to facilitate my search.

27

Knowing that she always stayed on for some extra laps, he’d waited in the girls’ changing room. The benches along the walls were empty except for her clothes. Her leather boots were standing neatly under her spot and her puffer was hanging on the hook. He picked up her blouse and was inhaling her scent as she came in. She snatched it from him.

‘Get out!’

‘I just...’

‘Piss off.’

‘Give me a chance to finish my…’

‘PISS OFF!’

He walked up to her and pleaded.

‘Marja.’

She slapped him.

‘Bloody perv.’

He realised she would never let him near and this made him even more determined to have her. She was a better swimmer, but he was stronger and he’d brought a hunting knife. He held it against her throat, determined to own her, but she’d glared at him with the same contempt as the others. She knew he’d never dare to use it. She made him feel self-conscious and childlike. She despised him and he was unable to change that. He’d had no choice but to suffocate her with her own towel. He pulled her down on the floor and sat on top of her until she stopped moving.

He’d acted on an impulse and dumped her in the steaming sauna. Afterwards his whole body was shaking, terrified but also excited. It empowered him and made him feel stronger. He’d snipped off some of her hair to add to his hunting trophies. He’d turned on the cold shower and left it running. No one was surprised when the police concluded it was a case of heart attack. These were frequent in Finland with its tradition of combining steaming saunas and freezing water.

28

I returned to the yacht club to ask Thor for the best way to travel between the different GPS points. He suggested I use his snowmobile. He talked me through the routes likely to have the best ice and taught me how to drive it, encouraging me to read the terrain and work the throttle rather than the brakes in the bends. I should see the snow as water on a river – use it and let it carry me like a kayak; otherwise it would only drag me down.

The throttle was a lever on the right-hand side of the handlebar controlled with the thumb. In soft snow the braking was done by letting off the throttle. In case of hard-packed snow, I simply had to pump the brakes – a lever on the other side of the handlebar. Apart from these points, balance was the main issue. I would be fine as long as kept my feet well tucked under the stirrups and leaned into the turns. Thor made it all pretty clear. My only problem was the throttle, as the pain in the stump left after my pinkie became unbearable whenever I pushed the acceleration. I would just have to take it easy.

I spun round on the ice for a good half hour until I got the hang of it. He was right, it was about reading and feeling the terrain, and the snow was my best ally as long as I went with it. If not, I wouldn’t stand a chance. When Thor finally let me go, he told me to be careful with the snowmobile. He’d had it for over 15 years and was attached to it, especially as they didn’t make them like this any more. On newer models everything was electronic and you needed a space lab to fix them. Thor’s machine was straightforward mechanics without nerdy input. Leaving him behind, I drove in slow-motion for the first half hour, but soon started relaxing in the never-ending icescape. The missing finger was still hurting but the excitement of the driving outweighed the pain.

I spent the whole day checking out locations, but they didn’t reveal anything that wasn’t on the photos. They showed trees, rocks and ice and that’s what I found. There were no off-screen surprises or enlightening visions and I didn’t see what role these places could have played in my father’s death or Anna’s disappearance. Considering these were his last, the photos seemed so pointless, unless it was me, my inability to see what he’d seen when he took them.

Only at the end of the afternoon did I find something I could get a grip on and take further. It was at the location of one of the last two photos, which I must have missed at first, because my intention had been to start with the last and I hadn’t seen these. I’d probably pressed the wrong button on the camera, but hopefully I hadn’t lost any other photos.

The first of the two had been taken in the vicinity of a house. Again, I struggled to track down the location and when I arrived, it took me a while to work out the angles, as the photo had been taken from a concealed position. It was as if my father had been spying on the house. If the inhabitants were home they must have heard the snowmobile, so I decided to be blunt and tell them why I was there. I had nothing to lose, but when I knocked on the door there was no one home. I peeped through the window without seeing anything out of the ordinary. It was when I jumped back on the snowmobile that I noticed the post box. It was one of those long metallic American ones, but what caught my eye was the hammer. It was decorated with a Troll-like figure holding a giant hammer. I got off the snowmobile, looked inside the box and pulled out a couple of envelopes addressed to a Thor Torstensson. I didn’t know Thor’s last name, but one of the letters was from the Finnish Ice Yachting Society. It must be my Thor.

The second photo was different. It showed a window and according to the GPS on the camera it had been taken in downtown Mariehamn. I had the GPS location and thanks to the architecture I recognised the street. When I went there to look for the window, it was impossible to find. The photo was too blurred. I stood right outside a café and I went in for a coffee. As soon as I sat down, my eyes fell on Sven’s camera shop diagonally across the street. I hadn’t looked at the shop fronts, only at the first floor windows, because the photo was of a room window and not a shop. Then I saw the curtain’s being drawn in Sven’s first floor window. That was it. The curtains were closed on the photo too and they were the same colour. Had my father been spying on Sven too?

Apparently my father had been watching two of his friends. Maybe it had nothing to do with Anna and maybe he was just a peeping Tom who liked to spy on his mates, but it did seem strange. I went into the shop to ask Sven about the photo. This time he’d had his siesta and was in a better mood. I tried resisting his aquavit but inevitably ended up having a glass. He had no idea why Henrik would have taken the photo. Besides, it looked accidental – he didn’t do blurred photos. Henrik wasn’t the arty farty type. He documented reality as it was. His reality was never out of focus.

‘Did he use to come to the café?’

I eyed the café across the street.

‘We’d usually have our coffee in the shop, but maybe he went on his own.’

‘Do you know Thor Torstensson?

‘I know who he is.’

‘Henrik took a photo of his house too.’

‘Thor is a bit of an odd fish.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He keeps to himself.’

Didn’t they all in Mariehamn? As for being odd, both Thor and Sven had lied to me about Anna’s disappearance. I wasn’t sure who was the least trustworthy of the two.

When Sven got the photos up on the PC, he confirmed that they didn’t look like Henrik’s usual work. Although they’d been taken with his camera, the low angle and use of long lens in the photo of Thor’s house were atypical. Henrik preferred a standard lens and never tried to dramatise the composition of his photos, which the suggestion of concealment did. And night photography wasn’t his thing either. He was up at the crack of dawn with the bulk of his work done before lunch time. In the afternoon he’d go to the yacht club and then fiddle with the photo files back home at night, except when he stayed on at the yacht club for a pizza and a game of chess. He had a routine and that last just night didn’t fit into it.

Sven was adamant he hadn’t seen my father on the day he died. I already thought the swimming at night was peculiar and now Sven claimed my father was a morning person, not a night photographer.

‘Then why hasn’t anyone reacted to the night swimming?’

‘Maybe the cold dip was his way of thinking. If he was using his camera to record his search for Anna, it could explain the difference in style. It was an unusual situation.’

Sven could be right about my father being driven by concern, something slightly outside his usual mindset. Even if the photo of Sven’s window had been accidental, it meant that my father had been standing across the street with his camera. What was there to do here at night? Maybe he’d been forced to take a furtive photo. Unless someone else took it.

‘Did he know anyone in the neighbourhood? Was there a pub or restaurant he used to go to?’

‘Henke only went to the yacht club.’

Was Sven telling the truth? I didn’t know what to think. I’d showed him the photo of Anna during our first encounter and he’d said he’d never seen her. He’d also said he didn’t like sports and never went to the yacht club, but I was sure I’d seen him somewhere before. My father taking photos of both his mates’ places on his last night was too much of a coincidence. There must be something to it.

I was going to do another day of location checking and then I’d give up if I didn’t find anything. I couldn’t leave Carrie alone any longer. I’d already kept her waiting too long. I still had to ask Thor about the photo of his house. He hadn’t mentioned anything about my father visiting him on his last day. Or should I have gone to the police? What would have been the point of telling them that my father had taken a photo of his friend’s house? I still had no idea what was going on. I was fumbling in a blizzard.

29

Thor was out when I arrived at the yacht club. I phoned him, telling him I needed to speak to him, but he wanted to talk over the phone. When I insisted on meeting face to face, he said he’d be at least another hour.

While waiting, I looked through my father’s desk. Above it hung a photo of Thor and my father squeezed in together on an ice yacht. It looked like they’d been great friends, but I couldn’t resist snooping in Thor’s desk. Although father had taken a photo of his house, Thor hadn’t mentioned anything about my father visiting. He even claimed he hadn’t seen much of my father during his last days. Had it been a secret visit? Did my father suspect Thor of anything? And why had Sven called him an odd fish? The top drawer was a morass of ice yachting photos. The second one was an equal mess but crammed with stationery. I’d almost shut it, when something at the back caught my eye.

A passport, a Ukrainian passport in Anna’s name. What was it doing in Thor’s desk? If her passport was here, she definitely hadn’t left the archipelago and Thor had known all along. It wasn’t the first time he’d lied to me. He hadn’t told me about upsetting Anna or the ensuing argument with my father, and now it turned out he had her passport all along. I spent two hours waiting at the yacht club without any sign of Thor. When I rang him again, he said he couldn’t make it. He was getting a part for his broken boiler and then he had to go home to fit it. He suggested meeting at the club the following morning.

It was late but I couldn’t wait. I needed to speak to Thor now and in person. I didn’t tell him I decided to drive out to his place. I could squeeze in two location checks on the way to his place. One of them was a detour, but it would give Thor the time to get home. I wanted to see if there really was a problem with his boiler.

Even with the GPS tag, the first location was almost impossible to find. It was hidden between islands and peninsulas. I couldn’t make sense of the map and ended up driving into several coves to find a passage. Anna’s passport being on my mind did nothing to improve my orientation. I had to control myself not to go straight to Thor’s.

Eventually, I pinned down the GPS location. It was an isolated bay with a timber church built on the waterfront. Further down the bay was a boathouse sticking out over the ice and behind the church was what must have been the vicarage. A man with a video camera was filming an old craftsman sitting on the church steps carving a wooden figure. I went up to them. The craftsman nodded at me before getting on with the carving – not the type to waste time on superfluous chit-chat. I could see he was born and bred in the area and quite different from the cameraman, who was tall, wearing a smart cashmere coat and minimalist rectangular glasses. His long grey hair was swaying in the wind and the wildness of the beard contrasted with his immaculate clothes and hair. His clothes and ZZ Top tribute seemed to belong to two different people, but the overall impression was of elegance. How did anyone manage to remain so smart in these harsh conditions? He took off his glove and gave me a hand.

‘Boeck, Rudolf Boeck.’

‘Magnus Sandberg.’

‘Henrik’s son?’

I nodded.

‘Sorry about your father.’

If a handshake was any indication of character, Boeck’s was solid.

‘You knew him?’

‘He was a friend.’

‘How did you know him?’

‘He worked for me at the museum. A superb photographer.’

I looked at him questioningly.

‘The National History Museum. He was one of the talents behind the exhibition.’

‘What exhibition?’

‘Isn’t that why you’re here?’

‘I’m trying to retrace my father’s last days. Get a grip on his life.’

‘What a lovely idea. Are you an artist?’

I wasn’t sure if he was serious or taking the piss, so I replied with a straight face.

‘An accountant.’

‘The greatest artists of our time.’

I smiled – Boeck clearly wasn’t a man of understatements.

‘So what’s going on here?’

‘We’re working on the final bits of material for our exhibition for the Marikulti Fest – Mariehamn Multicultural Festival. It’s the most ambitious project we’ve ever undertaken. People are coming to the festival from all over Scandinavia, so we want to get it right.’

‘Do you know when my father last came here?’

I knew from the GPS tag but wanted confirmation.

‘Why are you asking?’

‘Just trying to backtrack his last couple of days.’

Boeck laughed.

‘Ever the accountant… let me think…’

He looked out over the infinite icescape, squinting because of the sun.

‘It must have been Tuesday… yes, the day before he was found.’

Boeck stared into the darkness for a moment.

‘A great loss.’

I wasn’t here to get sentimental. The last thing I wanted was another manly hug.

‘What did he want?’

‘We discussed the photos he took for the project – photographic vignettes of the archipelago.’

‘Would it be possible to see them?’

I could probably find them on the backup site, but I wouldn’t know what to look for.

‘Of course. Just drop in at the museum in Mariehamn.’

‘Great.’

I didn’t quite know what else to say and wasn’t English enough to start on the weather.

‘I just wanted to ask if you’ve seen this woman by any chance.’

I handed him the photo of Anna.

‘Charming.’

‘Her name is Anna.’

‘I would have remembered.’

This had been yet another dead end. Before driving ahead on his snowmobile to show me the way back through the labyrinth of islands, Boeck told me the interview location had been chosen for its isolation, because too many visitors stopped the workflow. He also believed the serenity of the setting would rub off on the interview. Even if he hadn’t given me any real answers, Boeck had surprised me. I really hadn’t expected to encounter such sophistication in the middle of nowhere. Without his guidance, I would never have found the main island again.

30

The last GPS tag on the way to Thor’s was a flat barge moored in a rocky cove. I went on board and called out but there was no reply, so I climbed through the unlocked hatch.

‘Hello?’

There was still no response. The main living space looked like it hadn’t been inhabited for quite some time. The kitchen corner and the bunk were covered in dust. I wasn’t sure how long it had been empty, but I couldn’t believe dust accumulated that quickly around here. When I climbed back up on deck, I couldn’t see anything at first, but once my eyes adjusted to the dark again, I spotted a white spiral mounting through the night sky. It was rising smoke reflecting the moonlight.

I jumped back on the snowmobile to check it out. As I got closer, I could distinguish the outlines of a little cabin standing in the middle of the ice, pumping out smoke. In London, I would have called it a shed, but I couldn’t remember the local name. What was burning inside?

I turned off the engine as I arrived at the windowless shed. An old moped trike with skis strapped to the front wheels stood parked outside. I listened but there was no sound except for a faint crackling. A fire? A stove? I could also hear something akin to hollow gurgling. Just as I was about to knock at the door, a deep voice spoke from inside:

‘Come in.’

I carefully pushed the door open.

‘Watch the step.’

There was a high threshold, probably to keep the snow out, and without the man’s warning, I would have tripped and fallen flat on my face. It was pitch-dark inside and the first thing that hit me before I could see anything was a strong smell of fish.

‘There’s a bench on your left.’

I felt with my hand and sat down.

‘Shut the door.’

I did and waited. I didn’t know what for and was itching to fire away my questions, but this was the way with the locals. To understand them and my father, I had to be patient, try not to impose my urban rhythm. This time there was a reward as I gradually started to see light seeping through a hatch in the floor. Underneath it was a matching hole in the ice and thanks to the moonlight filtering through the ice around the cabin we could see the Baltic herring swimming below. And I could finally see the man.

‘Hungry?’

‘Starving.’

I’d been going for hours without eating and my stomach had spoken. The man fiddled over a woodstove in the corner before passing me a plate of fish. I didn’t know what it was, but it had a delicious smoky flavour. He handed me a glass that immediately made me cough as I drank it. I’d expected water, it was whiskey. I hadn’t seen the amber colour of the liquid. He laughed.

‘I worked in Ireland when I was your age and never looked back.’

I started to relax because there was no agenda. It was cosy and warm and he was in no rush to get me out, or to get me in for that sake. I was there, I was. That was it and that was enough. As a Londoner, I was so used to having a rationale behind everything, quantifiable objectives, accountability and a systematic approach, everything but life as it comes.

Once I’d finished my fish, I looked down into the Baltic again. It was spellbinding and I don’t know how long I sat there staring, but my impatience eventually seeped through.

‘Have you had any visitors recently?’

He ignored my question. It reminded me of the Swedish motto during the war: ‘A Swede keeps silent’. In Swedish, the verb ‘to keep silent’ is homonymous with ‘tiger’ and the motto was illustrated with a tiger. Shutting up was associated with a strong and brave animal, when in fact the Swedish ‘tiger’ was everything but brave or strong. Choosing a tiger to represent cowardice or what some, with a more cynical mindset, would call pragmatism, had always struck me as sinister. Whatever the designation, it meant looking the other way, bending over and allowing German troop trains through Sweden to invade less consenting neighbours.

Had the fisherman been silent during the war? Had all Swedes gone fishing? Technically, the man was a Finn, but in spirit he was a Swede. I’d grown up in Mariehamn and always felt closer to Sweden. Ultimately, we were neither nor – I was an Ålander and so was the man. He held up the bottle and I held up my glass for a top up.

‘Are you lost?’

‘Do I look it?’

‘Usually it’s the only reason people come here.’

‘I’m retracing the last days of my father.’

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

‘Have you seen 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.’

‘He 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. My 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 my light beams tunnelling 100 meters ahead. All I wanted was to get to Thor’s as quickly as possible.

I must have done something wrong, driven too fast or too close to the shore, because suddenly 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. The snowmobile made a jump forward and I escaped the crack in the ice, but landed with such 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 late. I tried to give full gas, but the track wasn’t engaging and the machine was definitely sinking. It was dragging me down and I had to let go. I tried to cling onto the ice.

If I’d felt a bit tipsy from the whiskey when leaving the cabin, I sobered up damn quickly, trying to remember what Thor had told me – the ice prods. They should have been round my neck. They 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 would have seen it as a warning, but I wasn’t. I was frozen.

I didn’t know how long it had been since I’d left Thor’s uncle, but the knowledge that he was fishing in the warmth of his cabin at the beginning of my snowmobile 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 clothes 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 iced-up clothes, focusing on reading the tracks. It’s impossible to tell for how long I walked. All I know is that I was lucky it wasn’t snowing, because it would have covered the tracks. When I finally reached the cabin, I was so focused on following the tracks that I didn’t see it coming. Hearing me stumble straight into the cabin, the 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 her leg trapped under a snowmobile. She looked up to the light while pulling in vain to free herself. A man came swimming to her rescue – my father. He freed her by lifting the snowmobile and together they swum towards the light, but they couldn’t surface. The ice was too thick, the 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 bed, picked up a rock and swam back up to bang it against the ice. Cracks appeared, but Anna’s lungs were imploding and she was panicking. Once he’d made a hole, I watched with my heart pounding as he tried to push Anna through it. He couldn’t do it. Something was stopping her, holding her down. I finally managed to free myself from the seaweed and sprinted to my father’s help. Together we pushed Anna, but we still couldn’t do it. There was a shadow above, a hand. Distorted by the water, I saw Thor holding his hand on top of her head, pushing her down. She was desperate, freaking out, eyes bulging. Above, Thor remained calm, the daylight forming a halo of serenity around his head. I tried to climb up and scraped 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, ripping 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 scratching was from the old man chiselling away at the hole in the ice. He 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, or as the Ålanders say: cotton kills.

He drove me back to my father’s house on his old moped trike with skis under the front 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 location of my accident, he told me a warmer current must have kept the ice thin. There were local variations every year and nothing was constant. I shouldn’t trust the ice, because although water can be trusted to freeze at a certain temperature, temperatures fluctuate year in year out. That’s why it was so important to keep talking to nature, to listen. At least that’s what the fisherman said. I think I caught the gist of his philosophy, not that 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 an acute sense of what he hated and what 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 – he was lighter on his skates. When he heard Ola scream, he stopped. Ola had ice prods, but the thin ice kept breaking and he didn’t get anywhere. He eventually pulled out the lifeline and threw it to Ola.

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, his 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, floating 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 tangible 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 precious 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 being born it’s merely a figure of speech. It has already been alive for months and its constituting life forms for centuries, millennia and longer. A birth is only a continuation or extension of life. Death is death and humus the next life form. At first Ola called for help, pleaded. He was confused, panicking and didn’t understand why his friend wasn’t helping him. Then he realised that he really wasn’t going to help, that he was a spectator eyeing a show – the live death of a friend. That’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. It only meant serving nature, being a mindless slave obeying the reproduction cycle. Death was different. It was something humans could control and he’d never forget Ola’s gut-wrenching expression, the pain followed by the silence, the final relief and the absence of pain. The contrast was extraordinary. He’d never witnessed anything so beautiful.

34

I sat in the hot bath for a good two hours while continuously topping it up with boiling water. 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 he was about to go skating. I told him to hold on. The vision of him pushing him Anna under the 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 he 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 alert 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? You expected me to go through your drawer?’

‘Why would I?’

‘So it was a good hiding place then?’

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

‘I don’t like your tone.’

‘Why would Henrik 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. How 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. He 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 would 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 drawer 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 website and looked at the photos over and over again. I lost track of time and was about to give up when I eventually discovered that my father went twice to the old church where I’d met the eccentric museum director. Once in the afternoon, then at 2am the same night. I’d been so focused 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 returned in the middle of the night? Was it to take photos of a night phenomenon or to check something out? I couldn’t believe there was a purely photographic motivation, but I was thinking backwards. 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 late-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 head 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, but this was on a larger scale, plus it was public and there was to be no doubt that the intervention was intentional.

He couldn’t let the water do the work this time; he had to do it himself. He wasn’t going to use remote 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 questions 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, he didn’t mean the passport.

‘I lost it.’

‘You what?’

I explained what happened 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, especially 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, but 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 living 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.

‘I’m really sorry. Obviously I’ll cover all the costs.’

Thor didn’t even blink. He was definitely done talking about the snowmobile now that the facts had been established. I had to stop apologising and move on.

‘Henrik went to Boeck’s church twice. Any idea why he would have returned in the middle of the night?’

Thor shook his head.

‘What do you know about Boeck?’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘What was his relation to my father?’

‘Henke took photos for him. Go to the museum and you’ll see what Boeck’s about.’

‘What do you think?’

‘A mainlander full of fancy ideas.’

‘Do you like him?’

‘I don’t care as long as I don’t have to visit any museums.’

Thor’s sulking wasn’t getting me anywhere. I had to return to the church, but how? I wasn’t going to ask Thor to lend me another snowmobile.

38

I decided to skate. At least I’d be discreeter. My father’s blades were a tight fit – like a second skin, which was ideal for skating. It would take a good hour to reach the church bay, but I knew the way now and I was taking a dry change of clothes, well wrapped in a sealed plastic bag, in case I went through the ice again. And no cotton! I borrowed a couple of base layers from my father’s expedition wardrobe. I wasn’t going to get caught out. I also took a head torch, only to be used in an emergency. I’m not quite sure what I was worrying about, as there was no tangible threat, but Anna’s disappearance didn’t reassure me.

Setting off in the moonlight, it took me a good 20 minutes to find my skating rhythm, after which I was committed to the movement and the skating totally absorbed me, until I heard the screams.

They echoed through the night and guided me to the church. It sounded like a woman. The silence carried her pain through the darkness and my instinctive reaction was to rush to her help, but I didn’t know what was ahead. So when I was around the corner from the bay, I hung the skates on a tree and cut through the peninsula on foot. I’d be too exposed skating into the bay.

As I was walking through the pines, the screaming stopped and I could hear my footsteps crackling through the night on the hardened snow. I was hoping the snow and the trees were absorbing most of the noise and that it couldn’t be heard from a distance. It was wishful thinking, because suddenly a beam of light shone through the trunks and I threw myself flat on the ground. A second beam moved past above my head, its reach constantly changing as it was cut short by the tree trunks. The beams playing the trunks reminded me of a silent string instrument, but there we no musicians. All I could hear was two men muttering to each other, then a snowmobile driving off. I lay still and didn’t dare move until long after they’d gone.

When I finally did, I walked on to the bay, hiding behind the trees as I went. Having reached the frozen water’s edge, I could see the church further down the shore, maybe 75 metres away. There was light in the windows. The easiest way to approach it would have been via the ice, but again I would be too exposed, so I took my time and continued along the shore, stopping at regular intervals to watch and listen. The two men had nearly found me, but had they heard me or had it simply been a routine check?

Without realising it, I almost walked straight into their arms again. The snow really did absorb all the sounds and I hadn’t heard a thing until I saw them smoking on the other side of a tree. I was alerted by the cigarette glow. Without it, I would have been caught. They stamped out their fags and disappeared to the back of the church, where a huge chimney was sticking up behind the little church tower. I hadn’t noticed it the first time I came to the bay.

I understood that the guards had to keep moving – it was too cold to stand still. Whatever you’re wearing at -25°C, if you don’t keep moving you’ll freeze to the bone. What I couldn’t understand was why they were there. What could they be guarding? I could hear moaning and sneaked up to a window. When I peered in I saw a man in a soldier’s uniform trying to kiss a young woman who looked like Anna. When she wouldn’t kiss him, he slapped her and a second soldier went through the same scenario, but this time he ripped her dress off and pushed her onto a table. The girl screamed with terror. I couldn’t identify the uniforms or see their faces, but one of them had a ponytail. It was difficult to tell if it was really Anna. I was too shocked to think clearly and I’d only seen her in a photo – a happy snap. I heard another male voice from the corner of the room, but couldn’t see him.

For a moment, I thought Anna had spotted me and felt her pleading look. I had to do something, but what? I stood no chance against them. I couldn’t come up with a rational solution and acted intuitively. I just wanted it to stop. I banged at the window and dived under the church. It was built on rounded rocks with gaps underneath and I crawled as far in as I could while there was still noise and agitation from inside. It didn’t take long for the torches and shouts to come out. My vision was limited to a gap the size of a small television screen alternating between darkness and flashes of torch light. The male voice barking out orders to the guards was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. When one of the guards suggested it might have been a bird, his response was immediate.

‘My grandma used to say that when a bird hits a window, someone you know is about to die. You wouldn’t want that to be you, would you? You’d better find that ‘bird’ very quickly.’

I recognised Boeck’s voice. He was in on it. He’d fooled me with his smart appearance. I had to get help. I couldn’t crawl backwards, so I continued to the other side of the church and peered out. Everything seemed to have gone quiet, but I couldn’t take any risks. I rolled over to the shadow of a pine tree a good 20 metres from the church and waited. There was still no sign of anyone having spotted me, so I carried on to the next tree and kept going, stopping behind every trunk to check I wasn’t being followed. I got all the way to my skates hanging on the tree. As I was taking them down, I heard something behind me and turned to face the two guards stepping out from behind another tree. Their faces were covered. All I could see was their eyes locked on me. They looked like wolves ready to jump. I froze, terrified after what I’d witnessed in the church.

‘Come with us.’

The guard had spoken with what I guessed was a Russian accent, but he could have been from any former Soviet republic.

‘I have to get back.’

A dumb reply, but I wasn’t sure how to handle the situation. I suspected their intentions were unfriendly and there were two of them. The second man pulled a gun or was about to. It was difficult to distinguish in the dark, but he reached for what looked like a holster. I acted impulsively with the only weapon I had – the laced-together skates. Holding one skate, I swung the other at the man with the gun. The blade hit him right in the eye, causing him to howl with pain. The other man fumbled for his gun, a major challenge with mittens and frozen fingers. I had no time to lose and did my best ever Olympian hammer thrower impression as I swung the skate for the second time. It hit his body but his thick winter coat took the bulk of the shock. I started running through the woods.

I didn’t look back. If he was destined to catch me, he would, but he didn’t need my help to do it. I could hear him running in the snow behind me. All I could do was to keep going, pulsing through the snow in the hope that I’d be faster than him. I was running for my life. At least I was lighter. He looked like he must have been at least 100 kilos. I was just above 80 and tried to choose the toughest terrain to work to my advantage.

I waded through a dark pine forest, ploughing my way up hills and through deep snow, miles away from any rescue, let alone a police station. Every step I sank deeper into the snow, not to mention the twigs and branches poking my eyes out, with the pain of my lost toe adding to the agony. I was pouring with sweat, my heart beating at double speed. Had my father been through this? Had he seen what I’d seen? I was exhausted and didn’t know how long I’d been running, but I couldn’t stop. I didn’t, because that would mean giving up. If I listened to my body, I wouldn’t get anywhere.

This was about taking the pain, suffering through it, but I really thought I’d never make it. I wasn’t even sure I was going in the right direction – away from the church. For all I knew, I might be going in circles. After a while, everything started looking the same – forest, ice, forest, ice… in eternity. I was running from island to island, forest to forest. I kept telling myself that I was doing it for my father and for Anna. If it was her I’d seen she needed all the support she could get. Eventually I dared look over my shoulder, but I couldn’t see my follower any more. Where was he? I doubted he’d given up and gone for a pint.

I tried to figure out where I was, but didn’t have a clue. I was completely lost. The night sky was clear and I knew how to locate the polar star, but not how to navigate with it.

39

Knowing where I was likely to end up, he must have taken a short cut and hidden in the shadow of the large pine tree. He shoved me violently in the back as I passed, making me land face first in the snow. When he approached me gun in hand, it was desperate measures. There was no time to think. I just scooped up as much snow as I could and threw it at him, which forced him to shoot blindly into the snow screen.

I had gained a second to figure out a way to delay my death. He’d missed with his first shot because I’d rolled away, but he wouldn’t miss a second time. I had an idea and quickly crawled under the pine tree as he fired again. He came after me through the low-hanging branches covered in snow, chasing me around the tree, but I was faster and he couldn’t get a clear shot. He had to stop to catch his breath. It was a small victory – I couldn’t hide behind the tree forever.

When he set after me again, I decided to take him by surprise and attack him. I sprinted to catch up with him from behind, lunging to catch his legs in a rugby tackle. I made him trip over and jumped onto his back, kicking the gun out of his hand. I was frantic, terrified, this was life or death, him or me, no prisoners. When I picked up the gun, he turned to punch me, but I held onto the gun and as he pulled me down and rolled over me, I squeezed the trigger and shot him in the stomach, again and again until I ran out of bullets. I stared at his body in the ensuing silence – I’d killed a man, before stumbling off in the snow. It couldn’t be me covered in blood splatter, but this was no time for dithering. I had to keep going for my father. I walked on like a zombie without looking back.

40

I finally arrived at a main road, soaking wet, bedraggled and covered in blood. I was a total mess with too much going on in my head, unable to shake the image of the man lying in the snow holding his stomach. All I could see was blood – everything was red. I had to get to the police, but there were no cars, so I walked and walked. The wounds from my missing finger and toe were hurting and I fell over several times, bruising my knees. I was a wreck.

The police station was closed. I’d been lucky the first time. They were only open two hours a day in wintertime. All I had now was a mobile number. Brilliant! I didn’t even have a bloody phone and the main street was deserted, the café closed. I ran back to my father’s house.

When I got through on the phone, I recognised the voice of the police woman who’d saved my life, Eva Mikaelsson. She seemed to be the only police officer on the island. She must have been watching telly – I could hear a laughter track in the background.

‘This is the police?’

‘Yes. How can I help?’

‘It’s Magnus Sandberg. I saw a woman being molested.’

‘Can you say that again?’

‘They were going to rape her!’

‘Calm down, what exactly did you see?’

‘It was at the wooden church. She was being attacked by two men.’

‘Did they see you?’

‘I was peeping through a window.’

‘You saw this through a window?’

‘I think it was Anna, the woman my father was looking for. They’ll kill her.’

‘They’re making a film.’

‘It was for real!’

‘It’s meant to look real. They re-enact historical scenes for the exhibition. Didn’t you see the camera?’

‘There was no camera.’

‘Did you see lighting?’

I started to doubt. I’d heard a voice from a corner, but I hadn’t been able to see anyone. Boeck had come out when they were looking for me, so he must have been standing there.

‘Boeck was there.’

‘It’s his job.’

‘There were armed guards. Why would there be guards?’

‘Maybe the insurance company demands it.’

I hadn’t seen much worth stealing and not many suspicious passers-by either for that sake – except me. I almost told her I’d killed one of the men in self-defence, but decided to wait – she was making me doubt. Maybe she was right about the guards being legit. That would mean I’d killed a man who was just trying to do his job. How would I have reacted if I’d been a guard and found someone snooping around? What about someone swinging a pair of skates at me when I asked him to follow me? Looking back, I realised I’d actually been the first to resort to violence. Could it have been an ordinary film shoot? Had I killed out of misplaced paranoia? This was insane.

‘We can’t intervene every time there is violence on a film shoot... Your reaction tells me they’re doing a good job. You’ve lost your father and you’re emotional. You shouldn’t spend your nights roaming the ice.’

I was lost. All my instincts had been on red alert, but maybe I’d been fooled by the circumstances. My fears were creating a reality that wasn’t there and I needed reassurance.

‘Do you know Boeck?’

‘Everyone knows him. He’s not the type to organise gang rapes. Everyone would know.’

‘I heard him barking orders, threatening to kill a man if he didn’t find me.’

‘I find that hard to believe.’

‘I heard him.’

‘Sure you couldn’t have misheard him?’

‘I recognised his voice.’

‘He would never…’

‘But I swear…’

‘You really need to go to bed.’

There was absolutely no way I was going to sleep, let alone sit still, after what I’d seen, or thought I’d seen Anna subjected to and after what I’d done to those two guards. I was terrified, in a state of complete shock and expected Boeck to turn up any second to make me pay for the deaths of his men. Everything kept going round in my head. Although Boeck had denied it, he knew Anna. Plus the church was one of the last places my father visited and revisited. It must mean something, but did it mean it was related to his death?

Looking at the GPS, it seemed to be the last place he’d gone, except for the odd photos of Sven’s and Thor’s places. Boeck had said my father worked for him and I needed to check out the museum to see if I could find out more about their connection. The museum was the only significant location in my father’s life that I still hadn’t visited. I wanted to know for sure that Eva was right – that I was definitely overreacting. I grabbed a torch, but before going I remembered to give Carrie a ring. I didn’t want to tell her what was going on, only that I missed her. My caIl woke her up.

‘I love you.’

She mumbled something back. I could hear the warmth in the bed and wished I could crawl through the phone cable to join her. Her voice triggered her smell and all my senses simulated her presence. I felt her.

‘Sorry.’

‘Mmmmmm.’

I wasn’t sure if I was sorry for waking her up, for not being with her or for not telling her what was happening. Probably all three.

41

I didn’t know what to expect from a ‘national’ museum on a Finnish island that wanted to be Swedish. The museum was housed in a stunning and seemingly modest-sized building on the waterfront. On that night, the moonlight accentuated the art deco-inspired wood architecture. The entrance was discreet, but the interior much larger, with a gigantic hall expanding into the rock as far as I could see through the closed glass doors.

This was outside regular opening hours. I couldn’t imagine a museum in the middle of the Baltic Sea bristling with alarms, but why was I even considering a break-in? I reminded myself that I had to do this, because the police wouldn’t listen to me and because I had to know. I simply couldn’t accept murdering a man for no good reason. I could have slept on it and come back the next morning to ask Boeck face to face. That’s what I should have done, but this was too urgent.

I used one of the recycling bins standing outside the museum to break a small window behind the reception desk. I stopped to listen for any reaction, but there wasn’t the faintest of squeaks in the night. I cleared out all the glass before opening the window and climbing in. I put the curtain back neatly in the hope that the break wouldn’t be noticed at first sight, but with temperatures around -20°C the draft was likely to make itself felt.

When I turned, I had the biggest fright in my life. There was a man, no, a giant, standing in the dark next to reception. I immediately scrambled back out, but he didn’t follow. There was something wrong, an eerie silence, and I peered in again. He was still standing in the same position. He hadn’t even moved an inch and still wasn’t budging.

‘Hello?’

No reply.

‘Who are you?’

There was still no sign of life, so I climbed back in and walked up to him, expecting him to lash out any second. When I came up to him, I discovered that he was just a concrete statue – a huge one, at least two meters tall and solid-looking at that. Being faceless, his only distinguishing trait was a beard. Even if he was only a statue, he gave me the shivers.

The museum was a fusion of art, design, folklore and history. Wax figures of ABBA, Hep Stars and Björn Borg mingled with a real JAS Gripen fighter plane, a Husqvarna speedway motorbike with two-inch spikes to race on ice, a Swedish Air Force helicopter, a tracked army SUSV (small unit support vehicle) and a Bofors canon. Karl XII beating Peter the Great at The Battle of Narva cohabited with SAAB cars and Volvo trucks, Carl Larsson paintings, a screening room showing Bergman clips, Pippi Longstocking’s fairy-tale kitchen, Nils Holgersson on his goose…

Concrete statues identical to the one I’d seen by the reception were scattered throughout the museum. Some right in front of exhibited works, as if contemplating them, others huddled together, conspiring. This was a museum with built-in visitors and they seemed to be a way of encouraging people to reflect on their viewing. They were anonymous co-visitors onto which they could project their feelings, emotional amplifiers as it were.

The space was so vast that it must have been a military installation originally. And when I say vast I mean it – a Viking ship was moored in a giant boathouse built into the museum; next to it a Swedish stealth cruiser and a Russian submarine with its name in Cyrillic letters. An accompanying video explained how Swedish territorial waters in the Baltic had been terrorised by Russian subs and mini-subs in the 1980s, but Sweden had fiercely resisted the intrusions. It surprised me, I thought that, apart from the Russian Whiskey-class U137 stranded on Swedish rocks, the intruders had been unmasked as a NATO PSYOP operation designed to undermine the alleged pro-Moscow policy of Palme’s social-democratic government. It had been automatically assumed that the subs were Russian, especially as NATO denied any presence. Years later and faced with the suspicion, the U.S. Defence Secretary had admitted to intrusions by US subs, but said they’d only been testing Swedish defences, supposedly in collusion with Palme’s government. More embarrassingly for Sweden, a scientific study had shown that sounds made by seals and otters had also been mistaken for Russian submarines. The nationality of these aquatic intruders was yet to be determined.

I passed half a dozen mini-subs, ranging from SAS, Navy Seals and Spetsnaz models to a deep-sea cabin and lightweight underwater scooters. The latter were basically handheld fans that looked more like scuba-diving equipment than military gear, but easy to conceal in a bag.

A large metal cage was hanging above the Russian sub. At first I thought I saw a statue standing inside it, but it was a diving suit with bottles hanging from the top of the cage. I wasn’t quite sure what it was doing there – a shark cage in the Baltic Sea? Were there really that many aggressive sharks in these waters? The cage was connected to a ceiling rail covering the entire museum hall. It was probably a transportation device for carrying objects from ships delivering items for the exhibitions. Although the different sections of the museum hall were separated by panels and exhibited objects, the cage could access all areas from above.

The exhibition also included photos of world leaders and foreign celebrities visiting Sweden – signs of international recognition. Photos of Swedish world class athletes boasted 17th century gilt frames, putting the athletes on a par with the classical paintings included in the exhibition. There were huge speakers on the walls and I could imagine the museum soundtrack combining jet engines, crowds cheering Carolina Klüft, Ingemar Stenmark, Stefan Edberg or the Swedish ice hockey team, with Abba, Björn ‘Hooked on a feeling’ Skifs and The Cranberries. All this was set against the backdrop of Swedish nature in paintings, photos and films. The museum was a blatant advertisement for Sweden. It surprised me in a ‘national’ institution located in Finland. Admittedly, there was a Finnish wing to the exhibition – offering a more balanced view of an archipelago torn between two countries – but this part was low key and backwards, not to say boring, compared to the Swedish fireworks. It can’t have been a coincidence that the few statues that had made it to the Finnish part all had their backs turned to the art displays.

It was unfair and irritated me, because Finland is exciting. Unlike Swedes, Finns don’t take themselves so bloody seriously. Swedes are conventional whereas Finns are passionate, extreme and out of control, full of guts and pathos. They’re the Latinos of the North – they tango. They have sisu, a word that defines what Finland is about, a spirit that keeps Finns fighting when most people quit. Finns have the persistence to stand up time after time, not for glory, but out of inner drive and sense of pride. They have a moral urge not to give up. It’s a national mindset. Give me Jari Litmanen in his Ajax years over any Swedish football player – no doubt where the genius is. Swedes are cushy, spoilt and excruciatingly reasonable. In one word: boring. Being the son of a Swedish Finn who’d moved to Åland, I was hoping I’d inherited some of that sisu. I could certainly use it. Swedes were in no position to claim the high ground on anybody, certainly not on their eastern neighbours.

I was absorbed by the museum that wasn’t a museum. I hadn’t come for a visit – I was here to get a grip on Boeck, but if he was the director, this peculiar collection must reveal something about him. It was a showcase for Sweden and there was even a giant map displaying IKEA shops all around the world, with an up to date showroom. There were photos of Boeck shaking hands with prominent sponsors posing with their latest gifts to the museum. Fictional characters from film and literature gave an additional opportunity for visitors to identify with the exhibition. It was a museum conceived to fascinate people of all ages and backgrounds by playing on nostalgia and collective memory. A dose of mid-visit tragedy added to the national pathos, as separate mourning spaces were dedicated to the assassinations of King Gustav III and Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, public representatives who’d fallen victim to ‘anti-Swedish forces’. There were piles of flowers on the floor accompanied by cards written by mourning Swedes.

I wasn’t sure if they were authentic or recreated, but I didn’t like the reconstruction of intimate acts of mourning. It was a form of extreme cynicism. Again, a silent crowd of concrete statues was standing by to reinforce the emotion. They were identical but their mood seemed to change depending on what they were contemplating, going from lightness and optimism to deep trauma and consternation.

Why was Palme excluded? His assassination in 1986 had taken Sweden’s innocence and foreshadowed the ideological meltdown of the late 1980s. Chernobyl – another sign of system failure – had followed only two months after his death. Finland and Sweden had been hit by the radioactive fallout. The longest-serving Finnish president, Uhro Kekkonnen, had died in August of the same year. Like Palme, he’d spent his Cold War life walking a tightrope between NATO and the Soviet Union. They’d been the leaders of my childhood and it was highly unlikely that Palme’s was an accidental omission. This museum milked every emotion to the max and his death had been the national trauma par excellence. If he wasn’t there, it was for a reason. It said something about Boeck, but what? That he disliked Palme? So what? That could be said about half of the Swedish population.

The Estonia ferry disaster had a memorial room with the names of all the Swedish victims. The combination of highs and lows was gripping and would leave no visitor indifferent. It was a museum curated in the spirit of an end-of-year highlights television show – purely based on images and emotions, avoiding any form of analysis or rationalisation. It simply flaunted Swedish greatness.

I was so caught up in the visit that I nearly forgot that I’d come to investigate what was going on behind the scenes. I was wondering how the violence I’d seen at the church fitted in with this. Looking at the museum, it was difficult to imagine Boeck being involved in what I’d seen at the church. I was just thinking that the exhibition was like a giant postcard from Sweden, when I was interrupted by light beams shining into the museum – a car parking outside.

I hid in the men’s toilet. It was a terrible choice and I almost fainted when I saw a man washing his hands by one of the wash basins, but I’d been fooled again. It wasn’t a man, it was another statue. My heartbeat was in overdrive as I saw a guard heading straight for the toilet. I quickly slipped into a cubicle, convinced that he’d heard me. He hadn’t. He pissed like a horse and I thought he’d never end. I watched through the tiny gap between the door and its frame as he rinsed his bald head with water. He concluded by checking his teeth. For a moment, it looked like he was neighing.

When I came out there was a strong smell of aftershave, nothing subtle, real horse perfume. I rinsed my face with cold water. It was the first time since I’d arrived on the island that I looked at myself in a mirror. I had bags under my eyes and was in bad need of a shave.

Leaving the men’s room, I was aware of the omnipresent eyes of the CCTV cameras. It would be difficult to explore the museum unseen, but considering that no one had caught me yet, it was unlikely anyone was watching the security monitors at this time.

Heading to the back of the museum housing the ‘private’ part, I tried to avoid the eyes of the cameras. I passed the wax work of Karl XII crossing swords with Peter the Great, watched by yet another concrete statue. I did a double-take on the sword. I thought I’d seen a flash of blood on the Swede’s sword, but when I looked again it was gone. It was just me seeing blood everywhere after shooting the guard in the forest.

I stopped by the JAS fighter jet, which, deprived of movement and space, was nothing but a lifeless design symbolising Swedish neutrality. The production of its own fighter planes and other weapons had been one of the foundations of this policy. The Swedish Air Force was only marginally smaller than its British counterpart, bearing in mind that in spite of the enormous difference in population, Sweden is almost double the size of the UK and next door to the Russian bear. The hitch with this ambitious defence approach was that weapons had to be sold to dubious regimes to pay for the so-called independence and neutrality. Unsurprisingly, investigators had linked Palme’s assassination to the illegal arms trade. My mother always claimed that Swedes were puritan hypocrites presenting themselves as the conscience of the world, while flogging weapons to the highest bidder. Of course, all weapons manufacturers across the world had to sell unethically, but most didn’t pretend to be morally superior while doing it. The Swedish arrogance rubbed people up the wrong way.

I wasn’t sure what I was hoping to find, but I knew something was wrong. I’d told the police officer about my suspicions and she’d dismissed them. Now I was snooping around to understand the circumstances of my father’s death, be it against my better judgement. Reason told me to catch the next ferry to London, but my guts suggested the situation wasn’t that clear-cut.

42

He’d been right about Magnus. The half-blood was more devious than he’d first appeared. He was no fool and the burglary of Henrik’s house to pick up the camera had been clumsy. They should have cleared it out before his arrival, but there had been other priorities. A crew member had wanted to pull out and there could be no resignations at this point. Traitors were executed and their executions incorporated into the project. This specimen had delivered a highly convincing performance. No human lives were wasted and it was all in the name of the cause.

Fortunately, the museum couldn’t be approached undetected and once inside, it was even harder to escape. In fact, the museum had a fail-proof system that locked down all entry points. He preferred not to use it, partly because it was ugly, but mainly because he enjoyed watching a rat in a cage. If he kept intruders out, he could never play with them. Using the exterior security barrier to keep people in gave him control. He loved impromptu visitors and when security had alerted him about the intrusion he’d jumped on a snowmobile and raced to the museum.

His right-hand man joined him by the monitor just as Magnus was leaving the toilet. Magnus scrutinised the jet fighter and looked around. He eyed a CCTV camera, but the man was following him from a secret camera positioned on the landing gear of the Swedish Air Force helicopter. The visible cameras were only decoys. When Magnus avoided them, he walked into the field of vision of the real surveillance eyes. It meant that most of the watching was actually done by the people being watched. They didn’t need to be followed – they moved into frame of their own will.

He should have eliminated Magnus then and there, but he wanted to make sure he hadn’t spoken to anyone. There was also an element of vanity – he wanted to know if Magnus was clever enough to unravel his plan. He was intrigued to find a challenger. Of course, it was stupid and could jeopardise his life’s work, but it was also addictive. Being obeyed and having people killed at the blink of an eye had given him and still gave him a sense of empowerment, but he also felt a growing need for resistance. He needed a measure. Otherwise it was too easy. He was bored with people doing what they were told. It was depressing and the opposite of life. The people in his team lived in fear and didn’t dare to be frank. Being surrounded by yes-men drove him mad. It made him lose his bearings. The only thing that kept him sane was the enemy, the idea of fighting evil and of rescuing Sweden from the dark forces, from communists and impure blood.

He believed that all interesting people had a self-destructive streak, a death instinct that gave them an inclination to do what they shouldn’t but had to because of an inner conviction. In spite of initial appearances, Magnus was turning out to be one of these people whose determination could outdo plain reason. Was it English bloody-mindedness – Magnus not wanting to do what he was told and having a mind of his own? In any case, it was highly un-Swedish. Most Swedes were bloody sheep.

He’d always admired the Old England of knights and real men, the total opposite of today’s multicultural poofters. He was disgusted by the invasion of the cockroaches from Asia and the Middle East. King Arthur’s realm had become as weak and soiled as Sweden. In fact, the whole West was under threat.

He was hoping that Magnus would put up a good fight, that he’d finally found an adversary cast in his mould. He wanted to be tested, confident in the knowledge that he’d be controlling the challenge.

Bypassing one of the cameras, Magnus slipped into the back of a Scania truck, immediately appearing on one of the monitors. The man behind the monitor was pleased. Everything was going according to plan.

‘Welcome to the cast, Magnus.’

43

I opened a door at the back of the museum, leading to a corridor with a series of doors. Peering into one of them, I discovered an editing room with state of the art equipment. My first reaction was to wonder why a museum would need cutting-edge facilities, but on second thought it wasn’t that strange – the exhibition contained multimedia installations. And if the authorities supporting the museum were prepared to pay… why not? But what was on these machines? I tried to start one up. It had two large monitors and a big rack that looked like a car grille – probably the memory. The fan made a terrible racket when it came on.

I eventually managed to get something on the screens, but only found endless files with animal and plant names – fox, otter, birch, moose, lynx, wolf… – and when I opened them that’s what I found. No surprises, except that the photography was amazing, demonstrating exceptional patience, perceptiveness and attention to detail. It made me connect with the animals on a deeper plane. There was something almost metaphysical about their movements, as if each of them embodied all living beings. They were deeply engaging, almost touching. Could this be my father’s work? It must be – Thor had told me all the nature magazines wanted his photos. No wonder, I’d never seen anything like these. If they were my father’s, I was impressed. No, I was proud. How come I didn’t have an iota of artistic genes?

All I could find when I walked deeper into the backstage universe of the museum was more corridors and stairs. Every single door was locked. I decided to give up and return to the main hall, but steel shutters had come down to block my retreat. I was trapped. The bare corridors were the complete opposite of the rather baroque exhibition of the main hall. Here, there were only walls and floors, vertical and horizontal lines, straight lines and never-ending flatness, coldness, with the steel shutters coming down one after the other, in front of me, behind me, making me turn, closing me down and playing me like a rat.

I’d looked for another way out, but the building was watertight, fire alarm buttons the only decoration. I wasn’t going to escape unless someone let me. I’d lost control and when I pushed the double doors at the end of yet another corridor, I expected to be apprehended by a security guard any moment.

I looked back through the porthole, but there was no way out. I was completely locked in. Were these automatic security measures or could they be fire doors? I didn’t know what to believe. I banged and kicked the steel shutters as hard as I could, again and again.

I’d anticipated trouble and thought I was prepared for the worst, but I wasn’t. When the metal curtain opened, I was picked up by two men. They dragged me down a corridor without a word. Their grip was painful, their determination a bad omen. The reasonable option was to wait and see, in the hope that I could talk my way out of this, but I didn’t trust the situation – they were treating me like a convict, a chunk of meat.

After the initial fear-induced panic, I opened up and started to see. I needed to take control, because the longer I waited to act, the unlikelier I was to escape. The net was tightening and I had to do something. I did. Using the two men as leverage, I swung my leg up to kick a fire alarm button. I only had one chance and of course I blew it. One of the guards held down my leg and stood in front of the button. In a last desperate attempt, I threw myself into him, banging him into the button and unleashing the ear-splitting alarm.

44

There was only one police officer waiting outside the museum. No SWAT team, just the female police officer who’d saved my life – agent Eva Mikaelsson. I couldn’t help seeing it as a Kafkaesque loop. Whatever I did in this godforsaken place, I bumped into the same police officer. The guilt of shooting the man in the woods hit me again when I saw her. I’d managed to repress it while in the museum, but it wouldn’t go away.

I’d feared the worst from Boeck when the steel shutters went down, especially after what I’d been through in the church bay, but when the guards took me to him, he was very understanding. He said that it must be very hard for me to come back to Mariehamn, coping with my father’s death. The museum wouldn’t even press charges. I seriously started to doubt about what I’d seen at the church. The footage and stills taken by my father pointed to the utmost integrity. I wasn’t an expert, but these were images I could relate to. Although they weren’t of humans, they suggested exceptional humanity. Could the man commissioning these images really be involved in abduction and molestation? Maybe Eva had been right. Maybe being away from London and having to process so many new impressions put me in a state of emotional overload. Why hadn’t I listened to her when she’d said it was just a film shoot?

She needed to establish what I was doing at the museum and we could have gone back to the police station, but she had to make a stop and suggested I accompany her. It would save her time. The contrast between the men dragging me down the corridor and this friendly police officer didn’t make sense. It all seemed too easy. If I’d been found in a London museum, I would have been treated less informally. Here, being picked up by the police felt like a relief, almost a reward. Once again I was thrown by the informality of a culture I thought I knew.

The headlights opened a tunnel onto the winding winter lane.

‘Where are we going?’

‘To the end of the road.’

I liked to think that her answer had some deeper signification, but my experience of Scandinavians told me she meant what she said, nothing more nothing less. I still held on to the first option though – the idea of going to the end of the road appealed to me. If only I’d known then that we would be doing exactly that.

‘Coffee?’

Surely, everything was closed at this time of night.

‘The thermos is on the backseat.’

I reached for what turned out to be an enormous pump thermos.

‘You must drink a lot of coffee.’

‘What were you doing in the museum?’

She obviously didn’t do small talk – another local trait.

‘I lost track of time.’

‘The truth please.’

She’d spoken without looking at me as she kept her eyes locked on the road, handling the car like a rally driver. Her driving was fast but firm. She slid and counter-steered through the bends, barely touching the brakes, obviously enjoying the control. I would have spun out at the first turn and couldn’t help admiring her skill. Her touch was so light that it felt like the car was dancing.

She wanted the truth. All I had was a hunch.

‘There’s something wrong with my father’s death.’

‘You have to stop making allegations.’

‘The burglary, the absence of an ice drill, Anna... and I haven’t even told you about her passport.’

I showed it.

‘I found it in Thor’s desk. She wouldn’t have left without it.’

Eva glimpsed at it, suddenly interested.

‘Did you ask him?’

‘He didn’t put it there. I believe him. It makes no sense.’

‘Don’t jump to conclusions too quickly.’

‘Are you saying he’s lying?’

‘All I’m saying is that you never know what’s going on in people’s minds.

Can I keep it?’

She pocketed it.

‘Do you believe me now?’

‘I’ll look into it.’

‘Good, because something’s wrong.’

‘Of course – your father is dead.’

She wasn’t listening, but I wasn’t giving up.

‘Who do you think drilled the hole?’

‘A fisherman?’

‘It looked staged, as if someone had laid him there.’

‘It was a combination of hypothermia and heart failure. He just happened to fall like that.’

‘It still doesn’t add up. Why would he go to an isolated bay for a cold dip when he was searching for Anna?’

‘What’s this got to do with the museum?’

‘I think it’s linked to Boeck. My father must have discovered something.’

She went silent and I saw it as an invitation to continue. My eyes lingered a few seconds too long on her. There was something intriguing about her.

‘I’ve never seen anything so real. Acted fear and real fear are totally different.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I watch a lot of bad movies.’

She almost smiled, or so I liked to think.

‘What do you think happened to your father?’

‘He returned to the church bay at night.’

‘And?’

‘I don’t know, but it doesn’t make sense.’

‘Death rarely does. He died a natural death, a stupid death. The same would have happened to you if I hadn’t found you.’

It wasn’t the same because I’d had a clear motivation. I’d gone to the bay to follow in my father’s footsteps, to look for communion, and I certainly hadn’t been found sunbathing next to the hole. That wasn’t the point though. I sensed there was something dodgy about Boeck and I had to convince her.

‘Then why did Boeck say he didn’t know Anna?’

‘He’s a busy man. Maybe he didn’t recognise her on the photo, or maybe he had other reasons for not telling you. There could be lots of explanations.’

‘He knew I was desperate to find her.’

‘He’s a respected citizen. He may be a nationalist, but that doesn’t make him a rapist.’

‘It’s not the kind of thing people tend to boast about…’

She obviously didn’t like Boeck being criticised. I’d forgotten that everyone knew each other in Mariehamn.

‘Look, I did call Boeck after your call last night to check what he was filming and he confirmed they were working on a period re-enactment. He said there were some hints of sexual violence, but nothing graphic.’

I wasn’t surprised – he wasn’t going to tell a policewoman that he was filming a woman being abused by his men.

‘Did you ask him about Anna?’

‘He’s never heard of any Anna.’

‘He’s lying, she was there. I saw her.’

’You’ve never met her.’

‘Who was it then?’

‘Make sure you keep away from the museum.’

‘I’m just trying to understand my father’s death.’

‘Doesn’t justify breaking in. Don’t do it again.’

She stopped the car by a remote farm house to check on an old lady while I waited in the car. One of the lady’s dogs had a tumour the size of a tennis ball hanging from its hindquarters and needed to be put down. Eva had been trying to convince the woman for months, but she wouldn’t listen. Her three dogs were everything, only they understood her and – most importantly – didn’t contradict her. Her children lived in Stockholm and always stayed in a bed and breakfast when they visited, in spite of their mother having a huge house. She simply couldn’t handle people, only her dogs. The old lady considered Eva almost on a par with the dogs. She was an honorary Labrador.

When we passed the funeral home on the way back, I finally remembered where I’d seen Sven. He was the man who’d slammed the door in my face as I was leaving. He must have gone to see my father’s body. Did this mean he was off the hook? Not necessarily, he could have gone to see my father out of guilt, but guilt for what? I didn’t even know what – if anything – had happened and whether Sven had anything to do with it. I still didn’t know why my father had taken a photo of his shop.

I tried picking up the conversation about Boeck.

‘Maybe he let me go because he doesn’t want my suspicions to become public.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘He’s hiding something.’

It was snowing when she dropped me off outside my father’s house. I didn’t look back, but I felt her sharp eyes on my back as I walked into the house.

45

He sat in Henrik’s empty tub with his clothes on, remembering why he liked the man, or why he didn’t dislike him – he didn’t really like anyone. It was because Henrik was one of the few people who’d never shown him any contempt. Henrik had been an observer. They’d connected, partly thanks to Henrik’s capacity to see through him, to see the hidden frailty of his youth. He saw the open wounds but never judged. His photography had been like him – full of integrity, empathy and an ability to see beyond appearances. They revealed a truth and he’d ended up focusing on nature because his portraits had become too overwhelming. Henrik hadn’t been able to carry other people’s suffering any longer.

In the end it was the empathy that killed Henrik. When he’d helped a few Eastern refugees to Mariehamn on his ice yacht, all he asked from the cockroaches was to let him take their portrait. Henrik used an old-fashioned 35mm Olympus OM-1 camera and developed the photos in his basement. He would make one large print of each person and throw away the film. It made each photo unique, like the person it represented. He’d glued them into a scrap book and spent his evenings looking at the faces, reading the lines in their faces, the depth in their eyes, recalling their voices and their shivering in the Baltic wind. They became his friends, his people, his family.

Sitting in the kitchen one evening, Henrik had pulled out the scrap book, told the refugees’ stories and shared their hopes and fears over a bottle of aquavit. It was too good an opportunity and he’d offered Henrik his help – maybe he could give them work. This was his chance to combine cultural cleansing and training for the cause. He knew that it would inevitably lead to a clash and that Henrik would try to stop him if he ever found out, but he’d had no choice. It was fate. When Henrik eventually discovered how he ‘helped’ the cockroaches, there had been no choice. He had to sacrifice the photographer even if it meant losing the closest thing he had to a friend. He was prepared to lose everything and more to complete his mission. This wasn’t about him. He was only a facilitator. Sweden’s future was at stake.

46

Although I was convinced I’d locked up, the front door was open when I returned. After calling out to check there was no one there, I walked through the house scanning the rooms for any signs of a repeat burglary. Maybe I’d simply left the door open after all. I found it hard to believe, but nobody’s perfect. I’d been in a rush after what I’d witnessed in the church, upset after killing a man and wanting to get to the museum as quickly as possible. There was no visible change in the house. The Mexican film star was still staring at me from the living room wall. What had she seen? Her face looked scratched, but I couldn’t recall if the scratches had been there before. Was she trying to tell me something? I wasn’t sure, because my fear put everything in a different light.

I took a glass of water from the tap. As I was glugging it down, there was a sound from the living room and I went in to check. The television had turned itself on. The first images were abstract and I couldn’t distinguish any body parts yet. I couldn’t understand what it was. I noticed that the DVD player was on, so it wasn’t a television programme. Once the images became clearer, they hit me like an iceberg. Of course, I should have known. I should have learnt from my Åland nightmare so far. None of it had been comical or light-hearted. It wasn’t meant to be.

The first images were of a dart hitting a moose.

Cut to the moose running and lying down, sedated, having lost its ability to fight.

Cut to my father in his bath tub. This is a handheld shot and he speaks to the camera. The film is silent but he is clearly protesting about something, until his attitude changes and the camera becomes static, accentuating the fear in his eyes.

Cut to a dart pistol being loaded and pointed.

Cut to my father, agitated, screaming in silence.

Cut to the moose slashed open.

Cut to a close-up of my father lying in a metal cage. At first he appears to be dead, but then he slowly comes to and raises his hand.

The camera pulls back to reveal that the cage is hanging mid-air. It looks like a shark cage – the cage I’d seen in the museum.

Cut to the cage being lowered.

Cut to my father’s panicking eyes.

Cut to the cage being submerged.

Cut to my father caged underwater.

He climbs the cage to stay out of the water, but it continues to sink, until the only part of my father above water is his face squeezed against the top of the bars. His body is trapped in the freezing water, the suffering is endless and the silent screams louder than ever. There isn’t a single cut in the footage until his death.

A 20-minute static shot of a man dying of hypothermia – my father. I watched it with the chilling thought that all that time – every unbearable second – someone had held the camera and chosen not to stop filming; someone had edited this. I’d been right all along. My father didn’t commit suicide. He’d been tortured to death and a twisted mind had recorded him dying without intervening – a murderer, a monster.

It was a shock, the first time in 20 years that I saw my father alive, and not being able to hear his voice made the horror of watching his death even more painful. His voice, his warmth, his life, his spark, they’d all been taken away, stolen. I picked up the DVD player and threw it against the wall. I was destroyed, unable to understand why anyone would do this. What could be so important it demanded an innocent man’s execution?

‘Happy now?’

I jumped and looked round to face Boeck sitting in the armchair in the corner holding the remote. He must have been sitting there since I came in, a peeping Boeck delighting in my reaction. I was speechless. Only a sick man could do this, show it and flaunt it. Boeck was more insane than I’d ever imagined.

‘WHY?’

He didn’t reply. I stood up, shot over and went for a punch in the face, but he blocked me with his longer arms before standing up, calmly.

‘I thought you wanted to know.’

Briefly, I was paralysed by his detachment, but then I went ballistic, kneeing him in the crotch and adding a punch to the head when he leaned over to hold his groin. Controlling the pain, he took a deep breath and looked me in the eye.

‘Sit down.’

‘Where’s Anna?’

I threw another punch and another kick. Boeck was furious.

‘SIT DOWN!’

When I didn’t, Boeck picked me up like a doll and dumped me on a chair that immediately crashed under my weight. Sitting on the floor amidst chair debris, I scrabbled to my feet. I had to do something. My father had been murdered and Anna was in danger – if she was still alive. I picked up a chair leg and threw it at him but missed and smashed the window instead. When Boeck pushed me back down again, I exploded.

‘DON’T TOUCH ME!!’

I tried to push him but landed on the broken chair again.

‘WHAT DO YOU WANT??!!’

I got up but he pushed me over again, more violently this time, making me bang my nose against the floor. It started bleeding.

‘Who have you talked to?’

I couldn’t speak.

‘Who have you told about the film?’

I wiped the blood with my sleeve. In my mind, images of my father clinging to the cage mixed with visions of me murdering a man in the snow. Everything was fucked up. As Boeck pulled me up by the hair, I looked up, re-emerging from my visions.

‘ANSWER THE QUESTION!’

I was apathetic, numb, but Boeck kept going.

‘Who have you talked to?’

This had gone too far and there was no safe way out. He was mad, capable of anything. What did he want? Was Anna still alive? I had to find out.

‘What have you done to Anna?’

‘Who is Carrie?’

I froze and Boeck grinned at my reaction.

‘When you use a phone, you leave a trace.’

How could he track my phone calls? I’d used the landline. Was he really that resourceful? Or was he bluffing? Had he simply found Carrie’s name? I regretted not telling her about my suspicions. I’d thought about asking her to go and stay with her mother. I hadn’t because she would have told me to go to the police. She would have been right of course, but at that stage, it had only been speculation. I was a fantasist and usually, my fantasies remained figments of the imagination. For once, they turned out to be life-threatening, not just to me, but also to the woman I loved. And to Anna. Whatever I said, Boeck wouldn’t believe me. Carrie was far away, but considering his ruthlessness and resourcefulness, geographical distance wasn’t much of a reassurance. How could I protect her?

‘I didn’t tell her.’

‘You’re lying. You rang her after coming to the film set the second time.’

He was dangerous and prepared to kill in the name of his project. The only way to protect Carrie was to tell the truth.

‘I wasn’t sure if it was real or acted. Besides, she’s pregnant and I didn’t want to worry her.’

Boeck looked amused, but that didn’t mean I’d convinced him. He was unlikely to take any risks and Carrie would be in danger until he was neutralised. How could I warn her?

47

Still under the shock of Boeck’s revelations, I was shoved into the backseat of a Volvo SUV, while Boeck chucked the smashed DVD player with the footage of my father’s into the boot. Sitting next to the ponytailed henchman with my hands tied under my legs, my head was thrown against the cold window as the car spun onto the ice and into the dark. All I could see was the icescape illuminated by the headlights and the speedometer hitting 140 km/h. When I asked where we were going, Boeck turned on the car stereo – Bach blaring.

Having seen my father’s fate, I knew that Boeck could have killed me then and there, but he didn’t want to. Not yet. First he wanted to milk my reaction to his atrocities. He thrived on it and I was sure he had plans for me. This wasn’t your run-of-the-mill sightseeing tour of the archipelago.

There must have been more to him than sadism. It was clear from the museum that he was an educated man with a sharp sense of aesthetics. So what had triggered the evil in him? Why would he risk everything for the sake of torturing people? Was it a death wish? I didn’t think so. There was a touch of megalomania, but there was more, something else. He really believed in what he did. It went beyond personal ambition and he was prepared to sacrifice everything, possibly even himself. It was the fact that he was a believer that made him so terrifying. Unfortunately, there was nothing insincere about his belief.

The car slowed down before driving into the church bay and stopping in front of the timber church. I was led in through the double doors and dumped into a cloakroom. There was nothing except for a chair and a table with a wooden figure, possibly the one the craftsman had been carving when I first came to the church bay. The detail and precision of the woodwork was amazing, but what did Boeck see in it? More importantly, what was he planning to do with me?

48

She dropped the keys as she was getting out of the car at the end of her shift. It was when she reached down to pick them up that she found it – Magnus’ passport. It must have slipped out when he gave her Anna’s.

She looked at his photo again. There was something cheeky about his eyes. A no-brainer really – definitely tastier than any of the local produce. She took out Anna’s passport and opened it too. She looked old for her age and Eva couldn’t help thinking about Magnus’ allegations. Come to think of it, there had been a few unexplained disappearances in the last couple of years. She knew because her colleague Ernst had been in charge of the investigations, but he hadn’t uncovered anything suspicious. He’d concluded that they’d left for the Swedish mainland and it was true that with its geographic location in the Baltic, Mariehamn had a lot of passing trade. As for Boeck, she couldn’t believe he would be involved in anything dodgy. Her mother would have told her.

She couldn’t figure out what Boeck’s car had been doing parked around the corner from Magnus when she’d dropped him off, but he was probably just visiting a neighbour. Magnus was starting to make her paranoid. She understood why he was overreacting. It must be emotional rediscovering Mariehamn after 20 years, not to mention losing his father, walking into a burglary and being attacked on arrival. She knew how it felt to lose a father. She’d been 10 at the time. A policeman like her, her father had been shot by a Serbian bank robber collecting funds for ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. Was this globalisation? A Helsinki cop killed in the Yugoslavian war. Her mother hadn’t been with anyone for almost 20 years when she met Boeck on a visit to Mariehamn.

Eva drove over to drop off Magnus’ passport, but the house was dark and she slipped it through the letter box. That’s when she noticed the smashed window. It could have been from the burglary, but she didn’t remember it being there earlier. She would have noticed. There was a piece of wood on the ground that looked like a chair leg. She knocked at the door and waited. And again, harder this time, but there was still no reaction, so she felt the door. It was open. She pulled out her gun and went in.

49

I’d been playing my father’s death over and over again in my head while waiting locked-up in the church cloakroom. The whole thing was beyond my grasp. Why would anyone do that? Why?

When Boeck finally arrived I wanted to explode, but I couldn’t. I had to buy time, let him do his spiel, because he was a perceptive madman and a murderer. If he sensed that I was trying to manipulate him in any way, he would be merciless. I had to keep him talking whilst working out an escape route.

‘What do you see when you look at him?’

He nodded at the wooden figure on the table.

‘An old man?’

‘It’s a peasant, but his beard is reminiscent of the Norse god Thor. When you meet a peasant with a beard like this, it’s like looking at Thor. It conveys his divine power, keeps him alive. When beards disappeared because of continental fashion, Sweden lost one of its transcendental links to the past, to our customs, our roots.’

‘So your power is in your beard?’

‘I’m afraid British cynicism doesn’t cut it with me.’

I had to change tack – he was serious about his beard.

‘What did my father have to do with this?’

‘He introduced me to Rudbeck’s Atlantica.’

‘Rudbeck?’

‘A 17th century genius from Uppsala. An architect, a musician, the discoverer of the lymphatic organ, you name it, Olof Rudbeck did it. He makes Da Vinci look like a half-wit. He proved that most of what is considered classical culture today originally stemmed from Sweden. The months, the zodiac, the seasons…‘

Boeck was unstoppable. What was he on about?

‘Applying interdisciplinary methods, his magnum opus Atlantica demonstrated – in 3000 pages, the result of 30 years of research – that Sweden was, is Plato’s real-life Atlantis. Everything worthwhile about western civilisation originated in Sweden.’

‘So what did my father do?’

‘No photographer could catch the soul of people like he Henrik.’

‘Why did you kill him if he was so brilliant?’

‘He tried to unmask my project. He didn’t understand the cause.’

‘What cause? What could justify killing a man?’

‘I had to kill him or risk everything being wasted. When I wouldn’t listen, he contacted the police and they told me. It was Henrik or Sweden’s future.’

This meant Boeck had support in the local police, unless he was bluffing. Was that how he’d found out about Carrie? Was it Eva? Had he used her to hear me out? I didn’t want to believe it, but it was a small police force and Boeck had demonstrated that he would do anything to achieve his goal, whatever the human cost. I hoped that Anna was still alive. I needed to win time.

‘Where’s Anna?’

Boeck didn’t answer.

‘Why are you doing this?’

‘Sweden has lost its way.’

‘How will your ‘cause’…’

‘Everyone knows about the great history of Sweden, but we strayed. We need to eliminate the foreign influence, the infestation, the Bernadottes.’

‘What, the Swedish royal family?’

‘They’re usurpers. Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, one of Napoleon’s marshals, was adopted by Charles XIII of Sweden in 1810 to become King and founder of today’s Royal house. Imagine Queen Elizabeth ignoring Prince Charles and adopting some French general to make him her heir. How do you think that would go down at Lord’s – a French general moving into Buckingham Palace? It’s hardly cricket, is it? And Bernadotte wasn’t even a good general. He was useless in the battlefield and couldn’t even be bothered to fight to keep Finland – typical surrender-monkey. Like all the French, he was all appearances and no substance. He started the decline of Swedish manhood. Today we’re run by a bunch of effeminate poofters.’

‘It’s hard to find anyone without foreign blood. You’ll have to get rid of half the Swedish population.’

‘We have to protect Swedish values, stop their dissolution. Why do you think Palme was killed?’

‘I don’t think you can…’

‘Why was the only assassinated Swedish Prime Minister an immigrant’s son? Do you really think it was a coincidence? It wasn’t. I know what I’m talking about. Sweden is reacting. We’re fighting back.’

‘And what are you going to do when the King is dead?’

‘Change never comes easy.’

‘But what will you do!?’

‘It will be chaos, healthy chaos. I’m not going to try to seize power if that’s what you think. That’s not what this is about. It’s about making Sweden realise that there’s something fundamentally wrong. It will be a turning point. No one would give the throne to an immigrant today. The question is legitimate, especially as there was a true heir when Bernadotte was adopted. Illegitimate then, but legitimate by modern standards.’

‘So what? History can’t be changed.’

‘History needs to be set right. The King had a son – Carl Löwenhielm. His descendants lay no claim to the throne, but if anyone should be there, it’s them. I understand marriages with foreign royal houses, but there has to be some principle. A spine, a Swedish line. Otherwise all meaning is lost and there’s no grounding in national reality, no legitimacy. All we have now is a royal charade combined with the socialist sissies destroying the country in the name of multiculturalism. People have had it with immigrants taking the piss, using Scandinavia as a training camp for Marxist terrorism. Fundamentalism is funded by our tax money. We even pay for the cockroaches to have their own mosques. It has to stop before it’s too late, before the infestation becomes permanent. They openly attack our culture and we still give them money. They breed like rabbits and suck our welfare system dry. It needs to stop. They have to go, or the Swedish decline will be terminal.’

Boeck was caught up in his poisonous rant, his rifle pointed to the ground. This was my chance. I’d managed to distract him from the task at hand. I took a deep breath and leapt at him, trying to kick the rifle out of his hand, but Boeck simply took a step back and watched me land on the floor. When I turned, I was looking straight up the barrel of his rifle.

‘Get up!’

I stood reluctantly and he immediately jabbed the rifle into my side, holding it there. It was an antique, which didn’t lessen my fear as it was yet another sign of his obsession with an imaginary past.

‘Go to the door.’

I looked blankly at him, trying to win time.

‘You don’t argue with a Swedish Mauser. This one’s from 1936, made in Germany with Swedish steel. Nothing beats pulling the trigger on one of these.’

Surely, it wasn’t consistent using a German gun to support his argument. Made in Germany? Shouldn’t it have been made in Sweden? I didn’t think it was worth bringing up. He was savouring the moment and his eyes were gleaming at the idea of killing me. He took out his phone and dialled.

‘Time.’

I feared the worst and this time I did not want to follow in my father’s footsteps.

‘Walk.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Walk!’

I walked through the aisle of the church with empty benches on both sides – no witnesses. We arrived at the doors.

‘Where are…’

Boeck thumped me on the temple with the rifle before I could finish my sentence. I shouted with pain as the barrel hit me on the head again.

‘Do what you’re told.’

‘You fucking c…’

He hit me harder the third time and it made me stumble. I was about to scream but held back when I saw Boeck’s expectant eyes, relishing the idea of to striking again.

‘Move!’

He jabbed me towards the door with the rifle. My head was pounding when I spotted the chair. I had to take advantage of the situation, hang onto whatever hopes I had. I grabbed it and swung it at him, but it crashed against the door. He’d been on his guard again and charged at me, the barrel bearing into my stomach, pinning me against the wall.

50

Coming out, I was blinded by the sunlight shining straight into the bay. We’d arrived in the dark but now there was an endless vista. The ceiling was blue, not a single cloud in sight. If it hadn’t been for Boeck, I would have said the church was in a magic location.

Boeck looked to the side of the church, where a woman was being dragged towards the boathouse. She must have been transported on one of the snowmobiles parked nearby. She was resisting, but the guard was too strong. It was the man with the ponytail again. Her protests were silent – she was gagged. It was only when she’d almost reached the boathouse that I recognised her. It can’t have been a coincidence. Boeck was too calculating not to have planned the encounter. He was a sadist and knew I’d been looking for her – the woman he’d claimed he didn’t know. He was perfectly aware of the potential pain.

‘Anna!’

When I took a step towards her, Boeck thumped the barrel into my back and made me lie down on my stomach. I watched from the ground as Anna was shoved into the boathouse.

‘Get up!’

I stumbled into the boathouse. At first, I couldn’t see anything, only hear Anna’s moaning. Once my eyes got used to the dark I saw that it consisted of a two meter wide wooden decking along the three walls, with an opening to the sea on the fourth. In the middle was water. The first floor balcony followed the same floor plan as the decking. Anna was locked up in a cage hanging mid-air like at the museum. She was kicking and screaming, shaking the cage, which was swinging back and forth. The henchman with the ponytail was standing by a winch, waiting for Boeck’s signal. Boeck nodded and he started lowering the cage.

It was a nightmare seeing Anna go through exactly what I’d seen my father submitted to in the film and her ‘noooooooo’ still echoes in my head to this very day. I roared in anger and tried to reach the man with the ponytail to stop him, but Boeck kicked me down, again and again. I was forced to watch Anna looking me in the eyes, her face an open wound as the cage took her down into the water, leaving only her head above the surface, so that I could watch her suffer, clasping onto life.

She became weaker by the second. I crawled nearer the winch, desperate to get Anna out. She was only meters away, but she was in the cage – so near yet so far. I wanted to help, pull her out, but I couldn’t, as Boeck kept beating me with the rifle and kicking me back. Watching Anna die without being able to save her, was the most horrible moment of my life. I was totally powerless as I watched her become one with my father. To me, her death became his. I saw him die again.

After 25 minutes she stopped fighting, her movements became sparse and she eventually lost control of her body. She couldn’t speak or shout, let alone open her mouth. She was so paralysed that her only sounds were moans. After a long struggle, she swallowed water, spluttered and drowned. It was the slowest death imaginable, a lifetime of pain.

I looked at Boeck and wanted to say something but couldn’t. No word could express the disgust and hatred I felt. He was a sick freak and so delighted, so utterly pleased with himself that I exploded and attacked him. He whacked the rifle at me, but I didn’t feel a thing. I punched, kicked and stabbed my heel into his knee as hard as I could.

‘MURDERER!’

His knee must have been injured, but he pulled himself together and whacked me on the side of the head with the rifle. He hit me full on like a tennis player giving it all and following through. I tried to punch him again, but he pushed me back, aiming the rifle at my head. Any normal thug would have finished me off then and there, but not him, not this sophisticated monstrosity. He kept his focus and sublimated his personal suffering into a higher purpose. In hindsight, I’m sure that’s how he would have put it.

I tried to get up, but he kicked me in the head and I landed on my stomach, tasting the ice. I was shaking with fear as the end was closing in on me. Anna had gone silent, given in, died, while I was caught up in Boeck’s dream – my nightmare.

I realised that he didn’t only take pleasure in murder and watching the pain of the victim, but that he also delighted in seeing the pain of the witness, observing the spectator. That’s why he’d brought me in – for a pain feast. Boeck wasn’t one of us, he looked coldly at life. His evil went beyond the imaginable. He was seriously fucked up.

He wasn’t done. He ordered Andri – I finally heard the ponytail man’s name – to pull Anna out, which he did. She was completely lifeless as he winched her back to the jetty, but he changed her into dry clothes with a skull cap and wrapped her in a survival. What were they doing? They’d killed her and now they were trying to save her? Andri fetched a defibrillator and Boeck applied its pads to Anna’s chest. Who did he think he was toying with people’s lives like this?

‘She’s dead. Leave her alone.’

‘She’s in the metabolic ice box.’

In the metabolic what? How could he be so indifferent, so coldly analytical, in the face of someone’s destiny? Could he really be completely deprived of humanity? I’d always believed – or liked to believe – that even the worst of monsters had a core of empathy, a heart fragment ticking away somewhere. Boeck clearly hadn’t, he was a complete robot, devoid of any humanity.

‘In case of hypothermia the body shuts down the metabolic functions. The circulation stops and the brain and other crucial organs are temporarily put on hold, thus minimising their need for oxygen and nutrition.’

Temporarily on hold? It sounded ominously close to death and the last place I wanted to be, but Boeck had another surprise in store. Anna’s body shook when he activated the defibrillator pads. When he tried again, he got a heartbeat, Andri took over, wrapping her in the blanket again and giving her mouth to mouth. The whole thing was surreal and I really couldn’t understand Boeck. When Anna finally came to, Andri gave her a hot drink. I couldn’t believe she was alive again after what she’d gone through.

‘I told Carrie. If she doesn’t hear from me she’ll call Eva Mikaelsson.’

Boeck paused for a moment, but it was a futile attempt to call him back to reality. I had to do something to break his bubble, not that I had any high hopes. I’d damaged his body, scratched the surface, even made him limp, but that was it. He hadn’t flinched, his fanaticism outdid the pain by far. There was no limit to what his ideas could drive him to. He was so manic, on such adrenalin, or whatever it was that kicked in, that it was as if his body ceased to exist. He didn’t care about the physical world, about us, only about stimulating his own fantasies. He was deranged, disconnected, and I had nothing to lose. Telling him the truth might be the only way to make him engage.

‘I don’t buy your pseudo-political drivel. Your Swedish greatness talk is only an excuse to kill people. You need to take a good look at yourself. What you need is a head doctor. It’s so bad you have to jerk off at people dying in cages.’

Boeck gave me a glacial stare. I may have been wrong, but I’m sure some of it hit home, because for the first time he’d fallen silent. He didn’t lose his focus though. He nodded at Andri, who grabbed my arms and dragged me towards the cage, but I wasn’t finished with Boeck.

‘You talk about being a man. Killing people is never going to make you a man. It’s never going to get you out of this backwater. What are you really trying to prove?’

‘NO!’

Anna had come to and could see me approaching the hole. There was a terrified, empty look in her eyes – shock. Boeck’s scenario of pain had been planned to the minute and now it was my turn to be the bait. Anna was going to watch me die. I’d almost reached the cage and if I didn’t stop Andri, everything would be over for me. Boeck would be wetting himself with excitement. Andri was my last hope.

‘How do you know you won’t be next?’

Andri ignored me, his eyes locked on the cage.

‘Hey! I’m talking to you! You’ll end up in prison. You…’

Andri still didn’t react, even though I kicked away at his legs and lashed out trying to free my arms. When I bit his arm and pulled his ponytail, he finally reacted by giving me an elbow in the head. I was out.

51

She entered the hall holding her gun.

‘Magnus!’

When there was no response to her calls, she walked into the living room to look around. Magnus should be in. She’d seen the car parked outside and didn’t think he would have gone swimming again. He’d learnt his lesson and didn’t come over as the suicidal type.

She kicked against something on the floor. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she could distinguish a broken chair. It wasn’t just broken, it was trashed. She checked the bedroom, but it was impossible to tell when Magnus last slept in the bed – no one ever made their beds properly any more. She went back to the hall, where his coat was hanging on the hook. Where was he? Had he gone back to the museum? It seemed insane, but she decided to check.

52

I was still out, but the faint sound of voices was starting to get through to me and when Andri lowered the cage into the cold water I came to immediately, staring straight into Anna’s panicking eyes while screaming in horror. I was completely numb; crushed by the cold, gasping for air, imploding. My limbs felt thick; my feet were gone; my hands too stiff to move. I kept trying to cling onto the cage, or I imagined I did, because my movements were futile compared to the effort I felt I was making.

Locking eyes with Anna’s pain, I saw my father and the images of my father’s death mixed in with my own. It was as if I was dying with him. I fought, clung, slipped, and climbed, frantically, in vain. Boeck wasn’t even looking at me. He was staring at Anna. My death had no purpose. Not for me, but of course to Boeck it was loaded with meaning. I was dying to provoke the atrocious emotions reflected in Anna’s expression. He had revived her, but would he bother to revive me? Would there be a point? I didn’t know but it gave me some hope. It was false hope – I had to die to live, to find out whether Boeck would resuscitate me. If he did, what new experiment did he have in store? I was wasting my last few seconds of consciousness on speculation. I had to let go and soon lost track of time, quickly feeling warmer, calmer.

53

The window behind the museum reception had been boarded up and there weren’t any traces of new a break-in by Magnus, so Eva decided to drive by Boeck’s and her mother Riita’s place. Although she had seen Boeck’s car around the corner from the Sandberg house, she still found Magnus’ suspicions against Boeck hard to believe.

Her mother’s house was completely dark. Eva knew that her mother was visiting her sister in Helsinki – Boeck had said she’d be back in a couple of days. He should be there though, but Eva couldn’t see his car. Where could he be at this time? Did he have someone on the side?

She returned to the Sandberg house, but Magnus still wasn’t back. Where was everyone? There was definitely something wrong, but what should she do? Where could Magnus have gone?

54

This was it. My life was over and there was nothing I could do. My visit had been shorter than expected, but at least I was dying where I was born, not that I was convinced that it was necessarily a sign of fulfilment. My home was in London now. I was leaving without seeing my unborn child, unable to say goodbye to the woman of my life – Carrie.

I didn’t want to die, especially as I’d never felt more alive than in the last 24 hours. It had been a horrible experience, but coming so close to death also made me feel much stronger about everything I had and about the people I cared for.

I simply couldn’t accept that this was happening. I wasn’t ready to go this way. I’d expected to die of prostate cancer, possibly killed by a terrorist bomb or a super bug, but most likely in a bike accident on Euston Road. That would have been a predictable death, a coherent statistic. This wasn’t.

I’d given up, because I was determined not to die in anger, not to give Boeck my last moments. Maybe I should have prayed like when I locked myself out of the car, but this was different. There was no escape, no miracle to expect. I couldn’t rely on Boeck resuscitating me like he did with Anna. I had no choice – I accepted that I was dying and did my utmost to focus on the people I loved, trying to detach myself from the pain.

I was numb, hovering in a blizzard. The whiteness was blinding, with voices echoing in the distance, Carrie appearing and disappearing. When I reached out, she did too, but the snow storm separated us again. I was left alone in the turbulence, until Anna appeared with my father. They were close, pointing at me reproachfully. I tried to move, but I was stuck on a trajectory. We were on unalterable orbits, kicking our legs, flapping our arms. The storm intensified and I tried to push Anna and my father away, but they kept pointing at me. The wind became violent, almost piercing. Carrie shot past with her pregnant belly while Anna and my father blew away. I couldn’t see them anywhere. I was alone in the over-bearing whistling of the storm. It all became a blur.

Everything slowed down, almost coming to a standstill. I felt even warmer and could see Carrie smiling at me. So did my father and Anna. The storm was over and they were on orbit in the blue sky against the blinding sun. I felt relieved with my loved ones around me. I wasn’t fighting any more. I was just being – being happy.

55

I could see myself lying on my back staring at a glass ceiling. My thoughts were confused, my body boiling and freezing at the same time. I was torn, watching my body from above, but also feeling it from the inside, its coldness. I must have been out, dead. Was this it?

Suddenly there was crackling and sparkles. I turned my head as far as I could and was able to distinguish something from the corner of my eye – a fire glowing in a huge kiln. A man-sized mould was wheeled out of it and next to it I recognised grey statues like the ones from the museum. I tried turning my head more but couldn’t. Looking at my reflection in the glass ceiling, I could see that I was lying in a mould too. Suddenly I heard Boeck’s voice.

‘I watched you at the museum. You were scared by the statues. Now you know why. They’re petrified human beings. They have souls.’

He was the devil personified. I should have known that he would resuscitate me. Watching him walk over to the mould that had just been taken out of the kiln, I thought that I simply wanted this nightmare to end, but it had only just been rebooted.

‘I developed a mix that enters in symbiosis with the body. When heated, it penetrates the pores.’

Boeck erected the mould with the help of a tipping mechanism and once it was standing on the floor, he opened it and pulled out a new statue with Andri’s help.

‘Meet the eternal Anna.’

The workings of his twisted mind were beyond my comprehension. It felt as if he’d pulled a filleting knife through my guts, through my brain, and then patched it up again as if nothing had happened. I was shattered. There really was no point arguing with him.

‘The statues are the people, you and me, the grey visitors. As they accompany you through your visit, they absorb your emotions. You project your feelings onto them and see them differently. They become loaded with emotions and reinforce your experience.’

He was right about the identification with the statues, but his victims’ remains had nothing to do with it. It was a madman’s justification for unimaginable atrocities. He had no scruples and I was powerless. The only way to stop him was to kill him, to exterminate every single cell in his body, to give him a dose of his own medicine. Nothing else would do, and I’d never felt such fury, such a desire to kill. But first I needed to know why my father had been found on the ice.

‘Why didn’t you put my father in a statue?’

‘He wasn’t an illegal immigrant. No one cares when a nobody dies, but if someone like Henrik disappears people will start asking questions. His death had to seem natural.’

‘It didn’t though. Everyone says it looked staged.’

‘I can’t bear things to be messy, but it made for quite a tableau, if I may say so myself.

I tried to stand up to pull his eyes out, to stop the beat of the heart he didn’t have, but I’d lost all energy and barely managed to sit up, or I thought I did. The movement was purely mental. My body didn’t budge. I was still locked in a horizontal position as Boeck came over to me with a needle, grabbed my arm and injected me. I was too weak to resist.

‘A top up. We have to anaesthetise before the maceration. It opens up the pores.’

This wasn’t happening. I wanted out. I was caught in the mind game of a lunatic, a fanatic. Although I was drowsy and starting to lose consciousness, I could still see myself lying in the mould. It was like watching someone else’s body. The unidentifiable brown soup that was poured onto me reminded me of the sewers. I was gone. Fearing that he might resuscitate me for yet another experiment, I’d lost the ability to distinguish life and death. I wanted to live or die, not be sentenced to this numbing limbo. I wanted to die once and for all. I wanted to know. My last thought as I sunk into the darkness of the grey muck was that this had to stop.

56

I couldn’t see because of the brown liquid covering my eyes, but I heard a faint voice coming through. It sounded familiar. At the same time, I was still hovering above, watching myself macerating in the mould, desperately gasping for air, spluttering and spitting out the sticky muck being topped up by Andri. I felt cold, wet and couldn’t breathe.

She must have been an angel, standing at the end of the tunnel – Eva, gun in hand. She was aiming at Andri, who looked questioningly at Boeck. Thinking he could keep control, the museum director responded with an appeasing hand movement.

‘Don’t do this.’

Ignoring him, Eva walked up to Andri.

‘Lift his head. He can’t breathe.’

She’d nodded in my direction. It was a direct order, but Andri hesitated and Boeck tried to discourage her again.

‘Eva, you can’t…’

Boeck took a step towards her, but she wasn’t having any of it and shot Andri in the foot. He screamed with pain.

‘Stand over there.’

She waved Andri over to a spot next to the kiln.

‘Sit down.’

He was hopping around, unable to stand still because of the pain in his foot.

‘SIT DOWN.’

Andri did and Eva pointed the gun at Boeck.

‘Now get Magnus out.’

He looked her in the eyes – a face-off. They stared at each other for a long time, but she didn’t flinch. Her fierceness became intenser by the second. Her jaws were tense, every muscle ready to leap. Boeck finally obliged, slowly turning to me, pulling me out of the mould and putting me down on the floor. The liquid had started to set, forming a jelly-like layer around my body.

‘Back off.’

When Boeck stepped back, Eva came over to wipe my face. She turned me on my side to clear my airways. I was totally soaked and didn’t have a clue where I was. I felt dopey, inside and outside my body at the same time.

‘Take his clothes off.’

She looked sharply at Andri.

‘You help him.’

Andri hopped over and they stripped me. I was weak and moaning, trying to push them off. Why couldn’t they leave me alone? Eva threw them her coat.

‘Put that on and carry him out to the SUV.’

The men looked at each other, then at Eva. She aimed the gun at Boeck’s knee.

‘NOW.’

Boeck and Andri stopped outside, but Eva wasn’t wasting any time.

‘Keep moving.’

She opened the back door and they laid me on the backseat of the SUV. Meanwhile, she took the ignition keys from the snowmobiles and was about to drop them in the hole in the ice, but changed her mind and chucked them in the car. She must have thought Boeck capable of picking them up at the bottom of the bay, or of having Andri do it. She turned the engine on and the heating to the max before looking at Boeck.

‘Phones on the ground.’

‘It’s in the car.’

She didn’t believe Boeck and shot at the ice in front of him.

‘Phones.’

The men took out their mobiles and carefully put them down on the ice.

‘Kick them to me.’

They did.

‘Back off.’

They took one step back.

‘Further.’

They continued slowly backwards, while Eva took out the sim cards before crushing the phones with her boot.

‘Eva. Give me a chance to expl…’

Boeck’s attempts were vain.

‘Turn round.’

‘What are you doing? I’m your father for godssake!’

‘No you’re not.’

Furious, she fired the gun into the air. They did as she asked and turned around.

‘Walk.’

Boeck looked back to see Eva’s gun pointed at him. She hated him. He was a murderer and she wanted to kill him so much it made her shake. All her senses were on red alert. She did shoot, but in the air. I was groaning in the car as she watched them go. Once the men were far enough, she jumped into the SUV and we skidded off. Eva put all her anger into the acceleration.

57

As Eva drove me to the dog lady’s house, I thanked her for saving me once more. She was sorry she hadn’t believed me from the start.

‘Why didn’t you tell me Boeck was your father?’

‘I couldn’t imagine him being involved in anything like that.’

‘How can you not know about your own father’s activities?’

‘He’s my stepdad, if even that.’

‘Your mother must have known.’

‘She’s never told me anything. Maybe she’s afraid, maybe she doesn’t want to put me at risk, or maybe she just doesn’t know. She can’t possibly keep tabs on everything he does.’

‘We have to talk to her. She must know more.’

When we arrived at the dog lady’s house, I had a hot shower and put on some dry clothes, while Eva tried to get hold of her mother, who was visiting her sister in Helsinki. There was no answer, so she would have to try later. Once I was dressed, I sat down at the kitchen table and the old woman brought me a bowl of soup and a sandwich. I had three dogs staring at me from the floor and they immediately made me sneeze. It wouldn’t be long before I started wheezing as well. When I told the woman that dogs gave me asthma, she suggested taking them out of the room.

Why do people never understand that taking animals out makes no difference whatsoever? The house would have to be disinfected for me to spend time in it without having an asthma attack. It reeked of dog. The air and the furnishings were impregnated with canine essence. Gasping for air, I stood up and stumbled to the front door holding the plate with the bowl of soup. I had to get out or the mongrels would suffocate me. I didn’t need this. I’d already died and resurfaced in extremis.

‘Wait.’

Eva held me back, but I couldn’t hold back the tears when I spoke. It was all too much.

‘I need air. You really won’t like me if I have an asthma attack. I become extremely irritable.’

‘It’s too cold outside. Let’s go to the attic. It’s not exactly tropical either, but at least the dogs never go there.’

Once in the attic, we agreed that we needed to escape from the island as soon as possible. There was no time to lose. If caught, Boeck would show us no mercy. Murder was his panacea and unless we moved quickly, we would end up in his cage.

I insisted on contacting the police first, but Eva was adamant there was no colleague she could trust. Boeck was best buddies with the chief of police and very resourceful when it came to digging up information. Eva usually did the rounds on her own. It was a small police force and the chief of police was always away at conferences. The only other colleagues were Jacob and Ernst. Jacob was the cuddling policeman, more of an administrator than a policeman really. And extremely slow at that. Even if the chief wasn’t involved, he was still friends with Boeck and likely to pass on any seemingly absurd allegations. This applied to the two others too.

The risk was simply too great. Boeck would have put all his contacts on red alert, so asking her colleagues for help really wasn’t an option. Under normal circumstances, Eva would have taken the risk, but Boeck was a different kettle of fish – he wouldn’t hesitate to kill. As they’d seen, he didn’t do fair trials, only proper executions. I suggested calling Dahl, but my father’s solicitor was also Boeck’s. Even if Dahl might help, it would take too long to convince him.

‘Why can’t we call the mainland police?’

‘Who do you think they’ll listen to? Boeck is best buddies with our chief of police. We don’t have the time to lose. We need to get out. Every minute counts.

‘I still think we should call. If we’re caught no one will even know we’re in danger.’

Eva gave in and rang Helsinki. She told a police inspector about the ice cage, the resuscitations and the kiln, but he was sceptical. I followed the conversation on speaker phone.

‘We have to talk to your local police.’

‘I am the local police and I’m telling you, you can’t trust the local police.’

‘Can you give me your location?’

‘I’ve told you, I’m on Åland.’

‘Can you be more precise?’

‘Why are you wasting time when I say it’s urgent?’

‘These are serious allegations. We can’t override normal procedures and send manpower without confirmation that something is actually happening.’

‘The man’s my stepfather. He’s a mass murderer for godssake! He’s tried to kill me, what more proof do you want?’

‘Just stay put. We’ll call the local police station and get back to you.’

The man hung up. Eva was furious.

‘They don’t believe me.’

It wasn’t surprising. She hadn’t believed me either. It was a lot to take in, even for the most imaginative of police officers. It all seemed so pointless. My father had died for nothing and now Anna. I wanted to give up and go home but couldn’t, not if I wanted to live. We knew too much. Eva said we had to keep going, because my father’s death would be completely in vain if we couldn’t make the truth come out. The only way we were going to do that was by getting to the mainland before Boeck got hold of us. There was no time to lose.

58

First we had to find a discreet way to the safety of the Swedish mainland. The ferry was out of the question, as boarding incognito was impossible. The same went for the airport and with the Baltic covered in ice, a small boat wasn’t an option either. The safest bet would be a combination of skating and boating, but we couldn’t drag a boat along while skating.

We may be able to skate all the way to Sweden – Eva knew of a passage that was frozen most winters, although she’d never used it. It was hearsay and would depend on the prevailing winds. If it didn’t work, our chances of survival would be minimal and we would freeze to death in a hole in the ice. If successful, it was the perfect way to disappear from Åland without a trace.

We could borrow skates at the yacht club. We also needed provisions, waterproof clothing and navigation equipment. We couldn’t return to Eva’s place, but Boeck’s car was full of winter gear. She’d unloaded it before dumping the car in a forest far away from the house. I’d also asked her to retrieve the DVD with my father’s death from the broken DVD player in the car, as it was a tangible proof of Boeck’s activities.

We would pick up additional bits and bobs for the crossing at the yacht club. On second thought, Eva said it might be better to use an ice yacht than skates. The Black Pearl would be faster. I asked again if she was sure there wasn’t anyone we could trust on the island. Maybe Thor, but she really didn’t want to take any risks. Boeck simply had too many friends. Although I told her Thor didn’t seem to like Boeck, she preferred to contact people once we were safe. How could I be so sure Thor didn’t pretend to dislike Boeck? It wouldn’t be his first lie. No one was beyond suspicion and Åland was too small for hiding. Besides, Eva wasn’t sure how Thor could help. Involving him might endanger him more than anything else and she didn’t want more innocent people to get killed. Before leaving, Eva wanted to talk to her mother to make sure she was OK and to ask if she knew anything about Boeck’s plans. If not, she needed to be warned and it might be safer for her to stay in Helsinki. Eva rang Riita again, but the phone went automatically to voicemail, she tried Aunt Lena, who told her that her mum wasn’t there and wasn’t expected. Lena wondered why Eva was asking.

‘Is there a problem?’

‘No, a misunderstanding.’

Eva hung up. There was a problem, but she didn’t think telling her aunt would be a good idea. Boeck had lied. Riita hadn’t visited her sister in Helsinki. Eva was tormented. What had Boeck done to her mother? We needed to find Riita.

59

Boeck’s villa was the last place we should go, but we had no choice, as we needed to make sure Riita was safe. After what Boeck had done to my father and Anna, he was likely to hurt her too if she’d found out about his cause. We would head straight to the yacht club afterwards. It was early and if we left within the next couple of hours, we could make the crossing before darkness. We arrived there on two kicksleds – that pan-Scandinavian winter vehicle. Most Londoners would probably have called them dog sleds, except that the kicksleds were propelled by us, not dogs. They were slower than snowmobiles, but more silent.

We’d been watching the house for a good 20 minutes and there hadn’t been a single sign of life. Boeck must be out looking for us, unless it was a trap, but we couldn’t wait any longer. Eva knew where they kept the spare key. I followed her as she went in gun in hand.

‘Mum?’

No reply.

‘MUM!’

We heard banging from the basement. The stairs were immediately on the right as we came in through the hall and we rushed down to find Riita chained to a radiator. Eva got a spanner and used it to disconnect the pipe and free Riita. I heard a car and ran back upstairs to look out the window. By the time I got to a window, Boeck was already marching towards the front door. There was no time to warn Eva. I had to hide in the wardrobe in the hall. After what seemed like an eternity, he appeared in front of it in profile, gun in hand, taking cautious steps and briefly looking down the stairs to his right before stopping and – sensing my presence – turning to face the wardrobe.

I don’t know where it came from, but I acted on impulse, flung the door open and lunged to push him down the basement stairs before he could react. He crash-landed on the landing halfway down the stairs and I threw myself after him before he got up. In spite of being paralysed with fear, I’d never moved so fast. It must have been primeval instinct, or the Viking in me taking control. Boeck had dropped his gun and was reaching for it, but Eva beat him to it as she shot up from the basement, whacking his hand with the spanner. It sounded like she broke it and he screamed in agony as she snatched his gun.

‘Don’t hurt him!’

Riita was in tears. I couldn’t understand how she could live with a freak without realising it. Eva kept her head clear.

‘Get up. Do as say or I’ll kill you.’

Boeck looked at the gun aimed at his head and slowly stood up to face Eva.

‘We can sort this out.’

Eva pushed him down the stairs and into the room where we’d found her mother. I took over the gun while she cuffed him to the radiator, making sure the pipe was properly tightened. Boeck grabbed her wrist and yanked her until they stood face to face. He was shaking with anger.

‘Don’t do this.’

‘Let go!’

‘I’m warning you.’

When he squeezed harder, she hit him on the temple with the spanner, making him let go of her wrist. She raised the spanner again, ready to strike.

‘I should…’

Riita grabbed Eva’s arm from behind, holding back a second strike.

‘I’ll kill you if you go near my mother again.’

She meant it.

‘You can’t leave me here.’

‘Why did you lock her up?’

‘Riita called the police about Henrik’s death.’

Eva turned to her mother.

‘You knew!’

‘I overheard a phone conversation about Henrik being killed. I had to do something.’

‘Why didn’t you call me?’

‘I told Ernst.’

Eva’s heart sank. It meant that he was one of Boeck’s men.

‘Not Ernst…’

‘Listen, Eva. The radiator was a temporary solution to stop her from doing anything stupid. It was to protect her from herself. Please Eva... This is important.’

Eva roared. She swung the spanner with all her might to evacuate the anger. Boeck ducked, holding up his free arm to protect himself. The spanner made a big dent in the wall where his head had been. Eva was about to hit again and not miss this time.

I helped Riita to drag Eva out of the basement. We took the pliers and the spanner with us, while Boeck was left simmering by the radiator. Once she’d calmed down, Eva went back in to snatch his new mobile and crushed it with her boot. This was the second of his phones she destroyed. She searched his pockets to make sure there wasn’t a third one.

We had to move fast – Boeck’s men would be looking for him. We separated outside the house. Riita went to the dog lady on one of the kicksleds. No one knew of Eva’s connection with the lady and Riita would be safer and draw less attention without us. Besides, she couldn’t possibly cross the ice to Sweden. Eva and I took the other kicksled. As we were leaving, Riita held Eva in her arms for a long time before turning to me to take my hands and look me in the eye.

‘Henrik was a good man.’

It wasn’t much, but a few good words I could use, another piece in the puzzle that was my father. I watched Riita leave on her sled, wondering what she’d endured with Boeck.

60

Eva didn’t worry because there was no point – the situation was so hopeless there was nothing to worry about. Of course, she was afraid too, but her way of dealing with the fear was to face it. Worrying wouldn’t achieve anything. In this we were different and I admired her guts. Was it because of the circumstances, because I wouldn’t have survived without her, or would I have been a fan regardless?

We worked away on the kicksled. It was a matter of rhythm. I was standing right behind her, my left foot on the thin metal blade and the right leg kicking away. Our movements had to be perfectly synchronized or our legs would crash and the sled would come to a halt. It was the ultimate in team effort and a good feeling to work together so well, considering where we were going. If escaping Boeck was difficult, crossing the ice would be hell. I hoped that Boeck was definitely history and that we would be able to focus on the physical challenge ahead, but I wouldn’t feel safe from him until the island was out of sight. I expected one of his men to appear on a snowmobile around every bend, a clear sign that it wasn’t over yet, although I suspected that even in the unlikely event that we did get out of this alive, Boeck’s men would still be haunting me for a long time. We kicked and kicked, going faster and faster.

By now, Eva was definitely sure the ice yacht was a better bet than the skates. On skates, we would be caught in no time if they found our trail, whereas with favourable winds, an ice yacht could outrun a snowmobile. I thought she made sense, especially as I hadn’t done much endurance skating in recent years. But what if Boeck’s gang used ice yachts as well? It was time to stop thinking, time for action. When we arrived at the yacht club, every second counted – Boeck’s men wouldn’t be far behind.

61

Boeck was furious with himself for letting them catch him in his own house, but nothing was lost as long as they were still on the island. He started kicking the radiator, yanking it with the full weight of his 100 kilos, but it wouldn’t budge, which made him go even more berserk. He shook and kicked it until it started loosening, eventually breaking off and crashing onto the floor with him on top.

He screamed in pain as boiling water gushed out from the broken pipe onto his cuffed hand. He tried to break the pipe by stamping wildly on it. It bent, but wouldn’t break and when it eventually did, the pipe cut his burnt hand. He rushed to the kitchen tap to cool the burn and rinse the cut. He knew they couldn’t be far. There was no doubt he would catch them. He’d underestimated Magnus once more, but it wouldn’t happen again. They’d been too soft – bloody communists. Eva and Magnus should have killed him when they had the chance, because now he was going to terminate them – the English bastard and the Finnish bitch.

62

I’d never worked so fast. It was one of those moments when supernatural powers appear. We carried the Black Pearl out as if it was a rubber dinghy. Our only objective was survival, nothing else mattered. Eva sat down in the cockpit first and I squeezed in between her legs. She was a tall woman, but sharing a bucket with her was a lot more pleasant than with Thor’s humongous backside.

She did the steering as we shot off from the yacht club in the nick of time, with Boeck’s Volvo SUV monster roaring onto the ice behind us. It hadn’t taken him long to escape. I seriously doubted we would ever shake him. If only Eva had killed him with the spanner, it could have saved our lives, but we were no assassins.

The car was approaching fast and we were about to be mauled. One of Boeck’s men – Andri again – aimed a moose rifle at us and pulled the trigger. The first bullet went straight through the sail, the second through the mast. The Volvo was only yards away now, threatening to run us over any moment. They were so close that I could see Boeck’s determined expression. I was panicking.

‘We’ll never lose them.’

Eva gave me a defiant you-just-watch-me look as another bullet ripped the left side of the yacht. We suddenly changed direction and were catapulted to the right with the ice yacht balancing on one blade, leaning against the wind, with the other blade hanging in mid-air. I thought this was it, the yacht was finished – Boeck had killed it, us. But when I looked at Eva, she was in total control and the yacht still racing ahead. If there was such a thing as stunt yachting this must be it. I looked back, but there was no trace of the SUV. It had vanished from the icescape. I looked at Eva again.

‘Where are they?’

She nodded, and I finally spotted the car spinning in the distance, way ahead of us. It had skidded almost a hundred meters and was totally out of control. Eva had out-manoeuvred Boeck. I turned to give her a dry but spontaneous kiss on the mouth, which was all I had to offer with the wind factor and the associated cracked lips. My mother had always called them Baltic lips. Was it the speed, the ice, the infinite whiteness or just an adrenalin injection? I wasn’t sure, but I felt relief, liberated.

We’d finally lost Boeck thanks to Eva using a favourable gust of wind to sneak through a narrow passage between islands. I felt very much alive, but also guilty for almost enjoying the excitement of the moment, while Carrie was on the point of giving birth back in London, not to mention Anna being brutally murdered and my father tortured to death. I’d even killed a man but still managed to feel detached. It must be survival instinct – it was all too much and there was no room for thinking. I was caught in a parallel universe, disconnected, apathetic, as if watching myself in a movie. The infinity of the ice gave me inner peace. The crispness, the sparkle and the closeness of ice and sky reminded me of a Dutch painting. In spite of the flatness, there was height, a subtle transition to the sky as the ice morphed into towering clouds at the horizon. The blades of the ice yacht crackled against the ice floor and there was a sweet murmur – the voice of the wind caressing the ice on its way from St. Petersburg to Stockholm.

We passed the fisherman’s cabin in the distance. It looked peaceful with the smoke still coming out of the chimney pipe. He was sitting in there unaware of what was going on in the outside world. Maybe he was right, maybe looking down was the right thing to do – peering inwards at the origins of life.

The peace didn’t last, because it never did and I never learnt. I’d gone with the moment again and suddenly it was as if a storm blew up. There was an ear-deafening noise, but we couldn’t place it, until the chopper shot up from behind an island and I recognised the air force helicopter from the museum. It skimmed the ice above us, peppering us with bullets and I automatically ducked, pulling Eva down with me. This time we were definitely out of our depth. A man holding a megaphone waved for us to stop, but Eva ignored him.

‘THIS IS THE LAST WARNING.’

The yacht came to a standstill as she pulled up against the wind.

‘What are you doing? We’re sitting ducks. They’ll kill us!’

A bullet hit the ice right next to the yacht, while Eva took out a rifle and aimed.

‘Where did you get that from?’

She answered with her eyes firmly on her target – the tail rotor.

‘Your father’s.’

My father the hunter, the cannibal, I thought, as a bullet hit me in the foot, signalling that this was a bad time for reminiscing.

‘AAAaaaaaouch!’

Blood was pouring out of the hole in my shoe, but Eva didn’t flinch, her eyes still locked on target. Couldn’t she fucking see I’d been shot in the foot?! This was a matter of life and death. We were being slaughtered.

Eva’s action seemed to happen in s l o w - m o t i o n and time stopped. The pain in my foot was so excruciating that I’d blocked out all sounds. Eva gave me a determined glance, before aiming at the tail rotor again and squeezing the trigger. This was it, all or nothing.

I thought she’d missed, but then, abruptly, the helicopter lost its composure and started swinging ominously like a drunken bee. For a moment, it looked like it was going to crash on top of us, and we ran for our lives, but the pilot made a miraculous recovery. Not for long though – the machine crashed 75 meters from the Black Pearl, exploding into a blinding fireball. The noise was ear-splitting and I put my arm around Eva, holding her firmly. She’d saved my life for the third time. We stood holding each other, watching the fire until it was almost extinct. All that was left was a flaming hot black carcass slowly sinking through the melting ice.

63

The silence returned and so did the agony in my foot after the distraction of the helicopter. Eva saw my face screwed up in pain.

‘Let’s check it out. Quick!’

I sat down on the yacht and she yanked off my boot. It was torture – the sock was drenched in blood.

‘You’re lucky. It’s gone through the foot.’

‘Lucky?’

‘It could have stayed in.’

She took out a first aid box from a storage compartment and disinfected the wound methodically.

‘Easy!’

‘Pain won’t kill you. It’s a sign of life.’

I didn’t know there were stoics in Scandinavia, but maybe Boeck’s Rudbeck had a point after all. Maybe there was something Greek about the Swedes. Tying a compress around my foot, she looked up and smiled as I watched her work in concentration. I had to ask her.

‘Think we’ll get out of this alive?’

‘Thinking won’t get us anywhere.’

She moved to stand up – my wound was dressed, but I held her back and looked her in the eyes.

‘Thank you.’

‘We need to keep moving.’

‘How can I th…’

‘Let’s go.’

As she pulled my hat down over my eyes, I became aware of a sound, an aggressive buzz that wouldn’t go away. It soon turned into a thundering racket and I took the hat off my eyes.

‘Shit!’

Eva looked as well.

‘Fuck! Told you they wouldn’t be far.’

250 meters behind us were two fast-approaching snowmobiles. And a motorbike, another Swedish icon: the Husqvarna speedway machine with the spiked tyres. 210… 180… My foot started pounding again. Back to reality, a reality that was only 150 meters from catching us.

64

Eva sprang into action and ran next to the yacht, shoving it into the wind, sprinting like a bobsleigh rider. Sitting in the cockpit, I felt inappropriate, useless. I was.

‘Starboard!’

I hesitated and guessed left.

‘Right!!’

She jumped back into the ice yacht. The snowmobiles and the motorbike were onto us, with bullets whizzing left and right. It looked like we’d finally run out of luck. The ice yacht was accelerating, but the snowmobiles were still catching up. We lay down in the yacht to form as small a target as possible.

‘Why don’t you shoot!?’

I had to shout to make myself heard.

‘You steer. Don’t let the sail slack!’

The pursuers were only 50 metres behind when Eva loaded the rifle. She waited for them to close in even more. I was nervous, but the steering kept me busy. The ice yacht was going fast, probably around 100 km/h, but snowmobiles could go up to 120 km/h and the Husqvarna speedway bike even faster. We needed to generate more speed and I tried to optimise the sail but couldn’t squeeze much more out of it. We were already going flat out.

Eva took out the first snowmobile driver with sniper-like precision. I was glad I wasn’t in her bad books – Mariehamn cops clearly weren’t to be messed with. This was definitely a woman with sisu. The engines of the remaining snowmobile and motorbike made an unbearable racket as they reconfigured, splitting up and attacking the Black Pearl from left and right simultaneously. Eva pulled me down. I looked at her.

‘Shoot!’

‘You take it. We’re losing speed.’

She handed me the rifle and took over the steering.

‘I can’t shoot.’

Another bullet hit the Black Pearl – another ventilation hole. Terrified, I grabbed the rifle and shot like a madman. I was out of control, but Eva gave step by step instructions to calm me down.

‘Take your time. Put the rifle against your shoulder. Aim. Breathe out, take a deep breath. Hold it. And squeeze.’

I did, but the recoil surprised me. When I tried again, I hit the biker in the arm and he dropped his gun.

‘Yes!’

‘FAAAAaaack!’

‘You OK?’

She was hurt and wrenched the ice yacht round, making it come to a halt. Suddenly they were in front of us. In a rage, she snatched the rifle from me and aimed at the snowmobile driver. She hit him dead in the head and then turned to aim at the disarmed biker. Seeing the rifle pointed at him, he made a U-turn. Eva immediately dropped the rifle and held her gut. This was bad. I had to have her examined.

‘We have to go back.’

‘There’s only one way – forward.’

‘You’re bleeding.’

‘Do they care?’

She nodded at the dead snowmobile driver on the ice.

‘You want to live?!’

‘There must be somewhere on Åland…’

‘We’ve been through this. There’s no turning back. Åland’s too small. They won’t give up until we’re dead.’

I took the first aid box and pulled up her clothes. Her stomach was a mess. She was badly wounded and the bullet was still inside her.

‘We need to get you to a hospital.’

‘Get a move on then!’

I was bandaging the wound, when another shot rung through the air. The Husqvarna had returned accompanied by another snowmobile – Boeck with a machine gun. The bullets were whizzing past again.

65

The Black Pearl raced off as I pulled up into the wind. Eva was sitting between my legs and I could feel her tightening up. She wouldn’t say it, but I could see that the pain in her stomach was excruciating. She couldn’t protect us any longer. I had to do it on my own now and when I looked back, the snowmobiles were approaching again. The odds were stacking up against us. I was frantic with fear and I didn’t want to die.

‘If we can get to the snow…’

I saw what she meant – a snow storm was raging a few hundred meters on. Everything was so white that I hadn’t noticed it at first, but Eva was right, it could be our chance. If only we could reach the storm, we might be able to lose the snowmobiles and become invisible to Boeck and his men.

In a superhuman effort, Eva grabbed the rifle again and started shooting wildly at the pursuers. She didn’t have the strength to aim, but it might delay them catching up, buy us the time to enter the storm. When I looked back, they were still gaining and we didn’t seem to get any nearer safety. It was as if we were standing still, with the snow looking like a receding mirage. Meanwhile, the snowmobiles moved at the speed of light. I was terrified. Eva was taking deep breaths to contain her pain as I looked at her. I felt guilty.

‘Sorry I got you into this…’

‘Shut up and get us into that bloody blizzard!’

A surge of bullets tore another hole in the sail and made the yacht slow down. Boeck was only 50 metres behind now, so near that I could distinguish the determination behind his ski mask. He kept shooting until the bullets nearly cut the mast in two. When I looked ahead again, I felt the first snow crystals on my face. We were going to make it.

‘Keep going!!’

Without realising, I’d relaxed and slowed down. We were still visible and another bullet hit the mast. I picked up speed again, cutting into the whiteness, but I couldn’t see a thing as The Black Pearl was blanketed in white in seconds. We were one with the environment, totally absorbed. Behind us, our tracks disappeared the moment they appeared. The wind slackened and became unpredictable. We weren’t moving. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I pulled the sail down. As I did, the mast definitely broke in two, but I kept pushing the craft to make sure we stayed well inside the storm.

Eva was right, they could still find us if they followed the same direction, or if the storm suddenly blew away. Stopping wasn’t an option. While I pushed on, Eva was trying to cope with her pain, with every movement hurting. Where were we? The snow whirling and the wind blowing in all directions didn’t give any clues. I could barely distinguish the front of the yacht, although it was only a few meters ahead of me. Seeing my state of confusion, Eva managed to tell me to keep going west.

‘West? Where’s that?’

I looked at the compass. It had a crack and was dead – hit by a bullet.

‘The wind… The wind…’

I couldn’t stand seeing a force of nature like Eva in this condition. She was the last person I could imagine as a victim. Her critical state made her even more focused than usual and she certainly had no energy to waste on sentimental self-pity.

‘Look at the ice.’

I pulled myself together and looked, but the ice floor was covered with snow. Eva tried to be as clear as possible, taking deep breaths between words, but she was still struggling to finish her sentences.

‘The Baltic winds are mostly easterly… They shape the… ice… On warmer days… the wind blows across…and creates miniature, wave-like formations…end…ing with a little… ridge. … westerly.’

I wasn’t convinced, but knelt on the ice, sweeping the snow away with my hands. What was she talking about?

‘I can’t see a thing. It’s flat as a pancake.’

‘Look, feel. Don’t think! Be one with the ice.’

I wasn’t sure about being one with the ice, but I took my glove off and felt the ice and she was right, it wasn’t totally smooth. There were microscopic ridges. I put the glove on the ice and rested my cheek on it to get as close as possible. There was no visible order and the ridges were all over the place, with the whirling snow flakes from the storm constantly interfering with my observation. I was about to give up, when I looked at Eva. She was a white, lifeless shape on a snow-covered ice yacht. The Black Pearl was white, everything was white – one big whiteness. I had to hang on if I wanted to see Carrie again. I did. I really did. Our life together had barely started. Besides, Eva’s life was in my hands and I owed it to her to keep going. I would never forgive myself if I didn’t give everything I could to save her. I took off the glove again and felt with my hand, trying to tune into the ice.

66

He’d been excited at the idea of reading history at Uppsala University, but once he started his illusions had soon been shattered. Traditionally, history was a nationalist pursuit supposed to strengthen a nation.

The only thing Boeck learnt in Uppsala was that today’s Swedish historians were hell-bent on destroying the slightest hint of national pride. His passion for Sweden’s historical greatness was dismissed as naive and un-academic, while his patriotism was labelled as reactionary and symptomatic of a Swedish Finn.

His Swedishness had already been rejected in Helsinki and now the Swedes were dismissing him as stereotypically Finnish. He was labelled as neither nor, whereas he saw both as part of the same history – they were one. Finland belonged to Sweden. If it hadn’t been for some cowardly Swedish officers and a useless King, Åland and Finland would never have been lost in 1809. Helsinki lost its guide – Sweden, while Stockholm strayed and has neglected its greatness ever since. A strong nation has to harness collective memory through rituals, customs and historiography. Boeck didn’t understand how tax payers’ money could be used to pay academics to pull apart centuries of Swedish culture. History was about making the nation coherent, not about deconstructing it according to so-called post-colonial or multicultural theories and other neo-Marxist propaganda. In spite of the disappointment, Boeck stuck to historical studies, more determined than ever in his resolve for revenge. This went beyond the personal. It was a matter of national interest.

67

Eventually, I thought I could distinguish a pattern. The ridges went in different directions, but not in all four. The missing direction must be east, because Eva had said that the wind generally came from the east – from St. Petersburg, so west must be in the opposite direction. Looking at the ice, I wasn’t sure I’d really seen it or if it was wishful thinking. I looked again and it was true. It must be true. It had to be. I tried to estimate the average orientation of the ridges, which should give me a westerly direction, but I didn’t know how to keep it. I would have to trust my mental navigation skills. They’d never been my strength, but they were our only rescue now, as we had no A to Z for finding the way out of this Baltic blizzard.

68

Lying in the yacht, Eva forced a smile when I gave her a hot drink from the thermos. Coming from her, it was a sign of resignation, a definite sign that her polar clothes had lost their function. The cold had free reign and it wouldn’t be long before she was deep-frozen. I had to find help.

Before pushing on with the yacht, I checked the direction by reading the ice again. It was difficult and I double and triple-checked. When I thought I’d found the west, I immediately started moving. We couldn’t be far from the outer islands of the Swedish archipelago. If we’d gone in the right direction...

The wind was too erratic for sailing, so I had to take turns pushing and pulling the ice yacht. When I pushed, it kept getting stuck on snowdrifts, but pulling was even harder. There was no easy way. The storm was louder than a Pink Floyd concert, like standing under a revving Boeing 747. I considered leaving the yacht, but how else could I transport Eva? She’d dozed off again and I kept struggling through the storm, making regular stops to check the ice. I don’t know how long this went on. I lost track of time as I walked and walked in a semi-conscious trance. It took long enough for the pain in my injured foot to return. We were still surrounded by whiteness and I didn’t know where we were. In fact, no one knew and no one would look for us, or no friends at least. Only foes.

Eva was buried in snow and I was dragging a pile of snow through a snow storm. She was a ghost, her presence only suggested by what was left of the mast. The only reality was tactile, aural and temperature-related. I was blind and invisible at the same time – a white man in the snow.

After what have must have been three or four hours, I spotted a break in the clouds. The flash of blue sky gave me renewed energy and I pushed on faster, but it disappeared as quickly as it had appeared and didn’t reappear until what felt like an hour, possibly two. It was impossible to tell. But this time it was larger and I started running. I don’t know why, because being lost with or without a blue sky didn’t make any difference. Maybe it was because I’d rather be lost in visible surroundings. It was concrete, as opposed to the abstract condition created by the blizzard. It was about having something to hold on to. I ran as fast as I could.

69

It was the last thing I’d expected, especially as I’d completely forgotten that I was walking on ice. It had been unbroken and solid for so long that I walked straight into the ferry channel with my eyes firmly set on the blue sky. The yacht slid into the water behind me. I panicked at first, but it seemed to be floating and I managed to climb back in. I knew that it was built for short crossings in calm waters, but also that it had been generously peppered with holes by Boeck and his men.

I was soaked, freezing, but there was no time to lose and I paddled as best I could with the rifle. It was all I had, and we hardly moved as the yacht filled with water seeping in through the holes. We were sinking and Boeck wouldn’t be there to resuscitate us this time. I was born in the Baltic. I’d been a Baltic baby and the Baltic was reclaiming me, trying to keep me at ‘home’. Over my dead body.

70

The ice yacht definitely wasn’t going to get us across. It was taking in too much water and I had to pull Eva into the freezing water to cross the ferry channel before we sank. This was insane. She was verging on hypothermia and I had to expose her to ice-cold water, but abandoning her wasn’t an option. Our destinies had been locked since the moment she’d saved my life the first time and I was committed to going all the way. I needed something to drag Eva once we made it to the ice on the other side. The only thing I could think of was the sail. I rolled it into a tight bundle and attached it to the life line. I put the bundle between Eva’s legs, something to hang on to – like a drag lift. When I pulled her into the water with me the shock made her come to.

‘HEY! What the…’

‘We’re sinking. We have to swim.’

Her only reply was a faint moan. Holding her under her arms, I half swam, half dragged her the 50 metres across the channel. I don’t know how we did it, but this certainly made up for my 20 lost years of winter swimming. I had to work out how to get her out of the water. She had ice prods round her neck and I had a rope. When we reached the ice on the other side of the channel, she had to help because I’d never be able to lift her onto it on my own.

‘Can you cling to my back?’

She grunted while I took her ice prods and used them to carefully climb onto the ice, but she was too weak to hold on and slipped down, with the ice breaking in the process. We were too heavy, so I changed strategy, tying the lifeline around her body and under her arms and climbing up on my own holding the other end of the line. With less weight, I was more likely to make it to stronger ice. Meanwhile, Eva had to try to keep afloat. Once up, I started pulling at the lifeline, but just as she reached the critical moment when I started pulling her out of the water, I lost my grip on the ice and slipped. She fell back into the water.

I ended up tying the lifeline round my waist and using the ice prods to continue ‘climbing’ on the ice until I had pulled her up completely. When I finally managed to drag Eva out she must have been in the water for over half an hour. I’d heard about skaters surviving after 40 minutes, but Eva had already been frozen when she went in. I kept telling myself that she was fit and not too skinny, which must give her a chance. She had to survive.

She was sodden, whiter than snow, and I had nothing to warm her up with. I was freezing too, but there was no time to lose. I was determined to fight to the bitter end, desperate to live. There was no way I was giving up.

I wrapped her in the sail like a cocoon and tied it up with the life line. I dragged her over the ice on the sail, but I was slow and my heart was pounding, my whole body drained. I walked like a zombie, drifting in and out of consciousness. I had visions of myself pulling Eva at the bottom of a dark ocean, walking on a sea floor covered in ice, under it yet another sea, layer after layer of ice floors and ceilings... A ship passed above, breaking the ice ceiling, but the ice closed up immediately behind it. I tried to call, reach out to the ship, but I was paralysed, frozen. The only way to move was to break ice. I pulled Eva and tried to follow the ship, but everything thickened to ice. I couldn’t move. I was iced in like a mammoth, an ice fossil. Behind me on the sail, Eva was frozen too. I fought and picked away at the ice to reach her but my efforts barely scratched the ice. It was too hard. I kept hacking, but the ice only seemed to spread, to grow, to take hold.

71

They’d wasted his time. Magnus and Eva had spoilt the build-up to his greatest moment. Although it was unlikely they would make the crossing, he wasn’t taking any chances. He’d already lost too many men. And worse – a helicopter.

He’d sent Andri, assisted by a local who knew the archipelago inside out. Andri knew what was at stake. He was confident Andri would complete the job if Eva and Magnus did make it to Sweden. Enough time had been lost on them. He needed to focus on his finale. He was about to take the first step in the march towards change.

72

Suddenly we’d come through the storm and reached snow-free ice. Everything was completely still. All I could hear was my heart beating and the ice cracking. First I thought it was someone coming and I turned to check in all directions, but the ice was empty as far as I could see. It wasn’t reassuring, but it was just the sound of the ice settling.

No, there was something else, something strange, another sound creeping up on us. There were several, but were they real or in my head – caused by exhaustion? I didn’t know. I simply lay down on the ice to listen. Once I’d tuned in, I could hear electronic hissing and squeaking. It sounded like sonar signals or experimental music. Later I was told it was seals. They sounded like synthesisers stuck in a time warp, a mix of Pink Floyd and Jean-Michel Jarre. At the time, I thought I was going mad. Could I really be hearing this? The longer I listened, the more it overwhelmed me. It had beat and melody. It was relaxing, even beautiful, but I had to keep moving and not settle into any illusions of comfort. I looked at the lifeless Eva on the sail, wiped the snow off her and pushed on.

I finally spotted land in the distance. Reaching it took at least another hour and it was only an island, but there were houses and maybe someone could help. I knocked at several snowed-in summer cottages without anyone opening the door. This was winter, which meant that the holidaymakers were safe and warm on the mainland.

I smashed a window, climbed into a house and dragged Eva through the door after opening it from the inside. There was a small fire place, a kitchenette with a disconnected fridge containing a couple of Pripps beers, some stale Swedish crackers and a can of meatballs. I covered up the broken window with cardboard, before undressing Eva and examining her wound. She’d stopped bleeding. Was it because of the cold? Would it start again once she warmed up? The only dry piece of clothing I could find was a boiler suit. I knew now that ‘cotton kills’, but it would have to do for the night. I pushed the bed to the fire place and tucked her in it with as many blankets as I could find. There was a box of matches and I lit the fire, but the cooker didn’t work and there was no power. The tap didn’t work either. The pipes were probably frozen, or maybe the water was simply turned off at the mains over the winter. It was impossible to tell. I couldn’t locate the stopcock.

I considered checking the other cottages to see if they were any better but didn’t have any time to lose. The priority was to raise Eva’s temperature. I gave her some lukewarm beer heated over the fire and tried opening the can of meatballs by pricking holes with a knife. It was blunt and I cut myself when it slipped. I put the can on the fire too. Everything was a struggle, every little movement required a superhuman effort and I was completely exhausted. I tried to feed Eva, but she was motionless, non-responsive and couldn’t eat. Her body was shutting down and I didn’t know what to do.

Worrying about Eva, I’d forgotten to take off my soaking clothes. I was numb with cold and hung everything in front of the fire. Hopefully they would dry overnight. The thumping pain in my foot came in waves. The hardest part was taking off my shoe. The sock on the injured foot was drenched in blood. I couldn’t pull it off. It was glued to the foot. After soaking the sock in beer, I managed to pull it off, re-opening the wound in the process. The blood was gushing out and I had to improvise a bandage with a piece of tablecloth. The wound was bad, but it was nothing compared to Eva’s condition. I huddled up against her on the bed, two freezing bodies unable to generate any heat.

I couldn’t believe we’d made it to a house. Had I really read the ice? I’d heard about Inuits reading the waves, but the ice? I doubted it. Maybe I’d just been lucky. It would all depend on whether I could save Eva, otherwise it would all have been in vain anyway.

‘Leave me.’

She must have warmed up a bit, because she had a momentary recovery.

‘Forget it.’

‘You have to get help.’

‘I can’t.’

‘We’ll both die if you don’t.’

‘I’m staying with you.

She looked me in the eye.

‘Don’t be daft.’

‘We’re in this together.’

‘Sentimental crap.’

‘It’s not.’

‘You can save us.’

Hearing Eva speak made me realise how serious the situation was. She was tough, but even she was cracking and she could see I was pondering her words.

‘Any regrets?’

I shook my head before returning the question.

‘Would you do it again?’

‘We did the right thing.’

‘Are you sure you don’t know anything about Boeck’s plan?’

She flinched from a sudden twinge of pain in her stomach and soon drifted off, losing consciousness again. I couldn’t sleep. Looking back, my insomnia might well have saved our lives, because in the middle of the night, I realised I was wasting time and that Eva was right – I wasn’t thinking clearly. Every minute counted, especially as she was critical. I got dressed in my wet clothes and went out looking for something better than the sail to drag her on. I found a kicksled. Back in the cottage, I lit a match and examined the map on the wall to locate our whereabouts. There was a larger island beyond the peninsula which would hopefully have permanent residents. I was dressing Eva to leave, when I heard a roaring sound in the night and rushed outside.

73

He’d found the perfect launch pad in the museum. The word museum meant ‘seat of the muses’ and as such they ought to be sources of inspiration and celebration. They’d lost their place in the amnesic and future-obsessed society of today. He believed they should be at the centre of social life and not just sit there collecting dust.

A historical museum was a gateway to the past, a laboratory for historical experiments. Controlling the traces of the past meant mastering the present. Google had understood and were copying artefacts like there’s no tomorrow. History was the future.

It had taken time, but he’d eventually landed the Mariehamn posting. Åland was ideal – a Swedish reserve, a micro culture protected from polluting multicultural and Marxist influences. Its population wanted to be Swedish, but their wish had been rejected by the League of Nations who had given the archipelago to Finland in 1921 out of misplaced guilt. There was no doubt Åland belonged to Sweden. The decision to give it to Finland had made the Ålanders more Swedish than the Swedes. They were the last outpost of the great 17th century Sweden. Their Swedishness was a desire, a longing, even an ideal. It wasn’t as lazy and watered down as constitutional Sweden. It was alive. The island mentality preserved Swedish culture in a way that wasn’t possible on the mainland. Åland had the innocence and freshness of 1960s Sweden. And he’d met Riita here – the perfect woman: dedicated, traditional and with a daughter in the police force. Of course, he’d never told her about his extreme ideas, not until the business with Henrik. He’d been too weak. He’d hoped to be able to talk sense into Riita, but he couldn’t. He should have dealt with her immediately. He wouldn’t repeat the mistake.

His museum suggested a story told through carefully orchestrated artefacts, myths and documents. The museum showed how Åland was a victim of Finland, whereas Sweden was its faithfully supportive neighbour, its soul mate. Åland was Swedish at heart. It was quintessential Sweden. The Sweden he represented didn’t exist any more. It was an ideal Sweden and rebuilding it required sacrifices, which he was making. This was his calling and his cause went beyond national borders. It was an anti-communist crusade to stop the bastardisation of culture. Men all around the Baltic shared his ideas, men who were proud of their nations, but feared the dissolution of local communities and cultures.

A great admirer of Putin, he saw Russia as one of the last bastions of European manhood. That’s where he’d followed special forces training with former Spetsnaz officers now sharing their sabotage and assassination expertise with anyone willing to pay. He couldn’t have used his holiday time better. Not only did the intensive training hugely improve his assassination and covert operation skills, but the General running the business had adhered to his cause and generously delegated a couple of officers to Mariehamn. Without the men sent by his backer, Boeck would have had a hard time completing the project. They were discreet, efficient and knew how to deal with trouble makers. They did what they were told and had made sure his preparation was the best. The General was planning to extend his training activities to the West and Boeck’s operation would automatically lead to increased demand for cutting-edge security expertise. Like him, the General disapproved of the ongoing emasculation of the European man. Muslim extremists were slowly taking over the World thanks to Western tolerance and multiculturalism. This was deplorable and the Russian understood the fundamental incompatibility of multiculturalism and national greatness. Whatever means deemed necessary would justify the cause.

74

I looked down towards the ice. It was dark, but I recognised the roar of a snowmobile and saw its light beam. It must be someone local, because it couldn’t have crossed the ferry canal. Did this mean that Boeck had helpers on the Swedish side? The man stepped off the snowmobile and looked at the snow lit by the beam. He was clearly looking for something. It hadn’t occurred to me to erase my footprints. I’d simply been too exhausted to think straight and I never believed we’d be followed to the island.

The man must have known the island was deserted in winter, so if he spotted tracks, he knew they were likely to be ours. He looked up towards the house. He couldn’t see me in the dark, but it wouldn’t be long as Eva’s sail had left a wide trail. I needed a plan. The man made a quick call, before climbing back onto the snowmobile and driving through the trees towards the cottage. I grabbed a rusty spade and hid behind a tree. When he drove past, I whacked him with all my might, making him fall off the snowmobile, but he was still conscious and reached for his inside pocket. His gun went off, but too late, as I’d rushed onto him and crushed his face with the spade. I was furious, boiling with fear and anger. He was screaming in pain while holding his ravaged face.

What gave these people the right to kill and to turn me into a killer? He reached for his gun again. He wasn’t giving up and I forced myself to smash him on the head with the spade again. I was disgusted with myself, but this was a question of survival. He was still alive but agonising.

Trying not to think, I snatched the gun and shot him in the chest. I kept shooting until he stopped groaning and then chucked the gun down the well. I was shaking. This wasn’t me. I couldn’t believe this was happening, but I had to keep going. I took the spade and tried to dig a hole away from the path. It was impossible in the frozen ground and I worked myself into a frenzy, hacking away in vain. I couldn’t do it, but kept going anyway, numb and in shock after killing yet another man. Was it possible to take lives and remain unchanged, unaffected? I’d killed again and this didn’t feel any better than the previous time. If anything, the disgust was magnified. I couldn’t breathe, because of the asthma which was triggered by extreme stress. I had to calm down, try not to think about what I’d done. I must breathe, be methodical. I quickly checked on Eva before fleeing back into the physicality of the digging, but I wasn’t getting anywhere. It was a dead end and I had to find another solution. I dragged the body away and dumped it in a shed behind the cottage. He didn’t deserve a proper burial.

He would be found, but that was the last of my worries. I’d killed in self-defence, hadn’t I? I couldn’t have spared his life. I’d had no choice. If someone had told me a week earlier that I’d be killing people within a few days, I would have laughed it off. I wasn’t now. I blocked out all feelings. I wasn’t the killer type, or so I’d believed, but had it been a self-delusion? Wouldn’t everyone kill if they had to? I didn’t have the answer. All I knew was that driven by instinct, I’d done what I had to do. I fetched Eva once I was done with the man.

75

The welfare system had made the Swedes untrustworthy and disloyal. They were independent in the worst possible sense. They never had to commit to anything or take any risks. They were devoid of any form of family structure, be it professional or private, which meant that they also lacked any sense of honour, respect or responsibility. They’d ceased to be men. They didn’t need friends or neighbours, or so they thought.

He was convinced that the total lack of moral principles and solidarity induced by social-democracy was one of the main reasons of the contemporary decline. Swedes thought they acted in the interest of well-being, but individual well-being required community and commitment, attachment, not detachment, interdependence, not independence. He was about to reignite the sense of community by stirring up people’s emotions.

76

Eva was too weak to hold on to me, so I carried her out of the house, put her in front on the snowmobile and held my arms around her to steer. Before driving off, I listened out for other vehicles, but couldn’t hear anything. Eva kept telling me to leave her. I acted mechanically, ignoring her and shutting down any emotions that hadn’t yet been deep-frozen. Eva was still cold and lifeless as we drove off, but at least she had dry clothes on now. She was blocking my view on the snowmobile, so that I constantly had to lean sideways to see ahead.

The peninsula was longer than it had seemed on the map and I thought it would never end. When we finally rounded it, a larger island appeared. The sun was rising and in the distance I could distinguish a small harbour with a dozen houses. By the time we reached it, Eva had stopped responding. There were boats in the wharf, but the place was dead silent. What if it was the snowmobile driver’s village? I’d been too busy trying to escape to think of searching his pockets.

If this was his village, I should probably be careful about talking to locals, but this was no time for dithering. Eva wouldn’t last another night if she didn’t receive treatment soon. I knocked at all the doors and peered in, but there was no sign of life. I started again, knocking harder this time – there must be someone. The houses were low wooden buildings with lace curtains in the windows. The paintwork was immaculate as was the iconic red paint with white corners. Without maintenance, houses would never last in this climate, nor would their inhabitants. Eventually, an old woman opened her door. She came over as strong and weather-beaten. She was probably 10 years younger than she looked. I asked her for a doctor.

‘We don’t have one.’

I nodded towards Eva, who was slumped over the snowmobile handlebars.

‘She went through the ice.’

The woman followed me to the snowmobile. When she saw Eva’s state, she got her mobile out immediately and dialled. I grabbed Eva under her arms.

‘Leave her!’

I jumped. She’d shouted, and she explained why:

‘When you have hypothermia, the slightest change in the bloodstream can be fatal. The last thing you want is cold blood going to the heart. It’s essential to rise the core temperature slowly to avoid temperature shock.’

‘Core temperature’, ‘temperature shock’? Rattling off the explanation like that, she certainly sounded like a doctor to me. She talked on the phone, while looking at Eva’s apathetic eyes

‘It’s Margit on Norrsten. We need a chopper. A young woman… she’s gone through the ice. Semi-conscious.’

There was a moment of silence. The person at the other end of the line was obviously giving Margit instructions. She was trying to find Eva’s pulse.

‘Feeble.’

She paused to listen.

‘I’ll do my best.’

She hung up and carefully laid Eva on her back on the snowmobile, then rushed back into the house. I’d never been so frightened in my whole life. Did she really know what she was doing? Eva’s life depended on a BBC accountant and an old lady lost in an unforgiving icescape. There was no way Eva could survive without professional help. Margit returned with two tent mats, a sleeping bag and a couple of blankets. She put the mats on the ground with the blankets and sleeping bags on top.

‘Give me a hand.’

We slowly lifted Eva onto the sleeping bag, zipped it up and wrapped the blankets around her.

‘We call it a wrap, keeps her from getting any colder.’

‘Are you a nurse?’

‘As near as it gets in this godforsaken place. Out here you need to learn to take care of yourself. There’s no backup.’

‘Will she be OK?’

Margit didn’t answer. She gave Eva a gentle mouth to mouth, looking up at me between breaths, but keeping her mouth close to Eva’s.

‘Why are you doing that? She’s already breathing.’

‘To warm her up from the inside.’

I nodded.

‘What’s her name?’

‘Eva.’

‘Your wife?’

‘No.’

‘Girlfriend?’

I shook my head.

‘What then?’

I wasn’t sure what to say, especially as our relationship was the least of our worries at that point. The priority was to save her life. I looked at her as Margit resumed the mouth to mouth. Eva was motionless and whiter than a sheet.

‘She’s wounded.’

The woman looked up.

‘What do you mean?’

‘In the stomach.’

‘Is it bleeding?’

‘I think it has stopped.’

‘Let’s wait for the chopper.’

‘I don’t want to lose her.’

‘She’s very cold.’

‘She’s alive.’

‘Barely.’

‘Why don’t we take her in? It’s warmer.’

She’d already told me, but instinctively I still wanted to get her inside.

‘The helicopter shouldn’t be long. I just hope the weather holds up.’

‘She looks dead.’

I was paralysed by panic. One second I said she was alive, the next that she was dead. She was on the cusp and I’d dragged her into this.

‘Where did it happen?’

‘What?’

‘Going through the ice.’

‘Coming over from Åland.’

‘You crossed on a snowmobile?’

‘On an ice yacht.’

‘Whose snowmobile is this then?’

She was becoming nosy. I’d been too honest, too exhausted to lie.

‘A man lent it to us.’

‘Who?’

She was still looking at the machine.

‘Don’t know. When he saw Eva’s state, he just told us to leave it here. We’d never have got here without him.’

At least the last bit was true. The woman scrutinised me and I could tell she didn’t believe me, but saying I’d terminated the man with a rusty spade certainly wouldn’t have earned me any brownie points.

Eva barely reacted when I rearranged the wrap. I wanted to make sure the least possible heat was lost. Her eyes were hardly moving and I wasn’t sure if the minute life signs were real or my imagination. I couldn’t bear having to wait passively for the chopper. I’d fought like never before to save her, like a tiger, not a Swedish tiger, a real tiger, a Siberian tiger. I wasn’t going to lose her now.

77

The helicopter landed on the ice after the longest 20 minutes in my life. Eva was transported to the chopper on a stretcher. When her temperature was taken in her ear it was only 28°C and she was immediately hooked up to a warm air inhalation unit. I pointed to her wound and the doctor turned to me while examining it. I couldn’t hear a word of what he was saying, because of the ear-splitting engine noise. He had to shout.

‘WHEN DID IT HAPPEN?’

‘Yesterday!’

He instructed his assistants and barked something into the cockpit, but I couldn’t hear what the medical team were saying. The events were surreal. How had I ended up in this? I was in a daze, with the deafening noise of the military helicopter distancing me even more from the situation. I bit my lip very hard, until there was blood.

The iced-in archipelago unfolded beneath us as the giant mechanical dragonfly lifted over the trees into the brightness of this perfect day. As far as the eye could see there was an infinite icescape dotted with islands. The blue sky was immaculate, the sunshine flawless, but I was blind to the scenery. I didn’t see that the Swedish mainland had been hit by bad weather and that the helicopter was being diverted. I was locked in a dark tunnel, staring at Eva being treated by the doctor. It could have been a dream trip, a happy ending, but it was a nightmare. I was so focused on Eva that I completely forgot where I was. All I could do was hold her hand and look into her eyes. I was clinging on to her as if my own life depended on it.

The flight to the hospital only took about 20 minutes and she should have been fine. Her temperature was taken every five minutes and although the warm air inhalation gave her violent, back-arching convulsions, she relaxed as her temperature went up. Attempting to connect the IV fluid, the doctor couldn’t push the needle into her cold, collapsed veins, but the warm air briefly brought her back to consciousness and she opened her eyes without speaking. The doctor had predicted that a basic recovery could take up to an hour and her temperature had already gone up from 30 to 35°C. She was critical but on the mend, even having the odd sip of blueberry soup.

I smiled for the first time in two days – she was going to make it. I was relieved, my body invaded by pain. The physical agony had been blocked out by my survival mode, but I didn’t care about the pain returning, because it was nothing compared to what I’d felt at the idea of losing her. I would never have forgiven myself for leading her to her death. I didn’t care if I lost a foot in the process. I’d been prepared to give anything to keep her alive. I’d done it.

78

I hadn’t. Halfway through the helicopter journey, she lapsed back into unconsciousness. Her temperature sank back to 29°C and the doctor’s spontaneous diagnosis was that the increased flow of cold blood from the limbs to the heart had caused a heart problem. Too late did he realise that the relapse was due to the warm air inhalation unit’s battery going flat. Its air temperature and flux had fallen, which meant that there had been insufficient warm air to keep Eva stable. She would have been fine – if the charger hadn’t been taken in for repair the previous night, and if the back-up battery hadn’t been flat. If only…

Without the warm air, Eva deteriorated rapidly and didn’t regain consciousness. The doctor kept applying mouth to mouth and we were only minutes away from the hospital, so there was still hope. Hypothermic patients weren’t considered dead until back to normal body temperature, and they often regained consciousness as the temperature went up.

The helicopter landed on the hospital roof and Eva was rushed into the building on a stretcher. I followed, never taking my eyes off her, but I was stopped as we reached the doors of the operating theatre. I’d watched ER on television and this was nothing like it. This was a Swedish emergency unit in a provincial hospital. Their purpose was not to create added dramatic tension in people’s lives. They remained calm and considered life and death natural phenomena that didn’t require additional dramatisation.

The television set in the waiting room was turned onto a Swedish regional channel. Being a Londoner, Swedish life seemed to happen in slow-motion. The presenter announced that a new motorway was being built. Where to? What for? Sweden was vacant. There were reports of an unidentified smell of broccoli in a town. Or was it cauliflower? The interviewed locals weren’t sure. Another town protested against EasyJet opening up a new route. The concern seemed to be noise pollution. Who would hear it? The moose? I couldn’t help thinking that it was to do with the cauliflower. English bullies smell blood, Swedes cauliflower. When the smell of cauliflower is a menace to society, it might have become too safe.

Someone switched channels to news about the King coming to Mariehamn to open the multicultural festival. Once again, I was amazed by the Scandinavians’ splendid isolation. Another bomb had probably exploded in Baghdad, a bus disintegrated in Tel-Aviv, a Palestinian village had been bombed flat in retaliation, but Scandinavia remained in Pippi-Longstocking-mode. That’s why I cherished the expression ‘Meanwhile in Sweden’. It suggested that whatever crises erupted on the rest of the planet, Swedes were unperturbed in their skinny dipping and moose riding. But my image of Sweden was changing. In spite of the Swedish fairy tale of King’s and Queens and the innocence displayed on television, I’d landed in a Swedish nightmare, a parallel Sweden, which seemed to have lost its cloud-cuckoo dimension. It was a Sweden questioning the idyll, a Sweden where I had to wait over an hour before hearing from the doctors about Eva.

79

Andri was only supposed to ring if there was a problem, and there was – they were alive. The local guy had tracked them down, but Andri found him with his head bashed in.

Driving inland, Andri talked to an old lady who’d seen them too. Eva had been rushed to hospital in a helicopter and definitely wouldn’t interfere any more, but Magnus was still alive. Andri was closing in on him and promised to eliminate him once for all, which was all Boeck needed to know.

He would rather have taken care of it personally, but Boeck had no choice. Priorities were priorities, and he had an important termination to attend to. Essential change couldn’t be achieved democratically. Violence was a necessity and his exhibition would guarantee it wouldn’t be a gratuitous act. History would be Boeck’s judge – he knew he acted in the best interest of the nation. Most people were ants working away in their limited realities, without any grasp of the wider or longer term picture, whereas he’d spent his life developing his national sense. He knew what he was doing. And Sweden was going to benefit.

Although he hated the Bernadottes, this wasn’t really about them. They were only the symptom. He’d come to realise that the monarchy was fundamentally flawed. By definition the only eligible bride for a Swedish King was foreign, as marrying Swedish commoners watered down the royal blood. However, to marry royalty, Kings had to marry overseas. This was understandable in the past – for diplomatic and strategic reasons – but monarchy in its present incarnation was past its sell-by date and needed to be re-evaluated. Did it still have a function? Boeck thought it did, but quintessential Swedish values had to be brought back to the fore. When the Frenchman Bernadotte was made King, all basic principles were ignored. Being the Swedish King became a joke, a job, not the symbol of a great nation. History was soiled.

80

I couldn’t believe I was going to lose Eva and that our hellish journey had been for nothing. The female doctor who came out to tell me looked like she’d barely passed her A-levels, not a day over 18.

‘How is she?’

The doctor paused to look me into the eyes. Was she really there or was she thinking about her next patient? Maybe I was unfair, but I felt she was only going through the motions. Why did she even pretend to care? Next.

‘It’s too early to say. We’re doing our best, but it’s not looking good.’

I didn’t know what to do or where to go. It was if I’d suddenly been emptied of everything. I didn’t know what to say.

‘We need to be able to notify the family and would appreciate if you could give us their details – just in case.’

Not the most reassuring line and I ignored it. Eva was critical, but she wasn’t dead yet, was she? Besides, I didn’t know how to get hold of Riita and I certainly wasn’t going to give her Boeck’s number.

‘How bad is she? Tell me.’

‘She’s still extremely cold and hypothermia puts everything on hold. We’ll know once she warms up.’

‘Can I see her?’

I’d asked automatically, but did I really want to see her? Of course, it reflected my desire to see her, to be with her, the living Eva, not the dead. Although she wasn’t dead, the doctor had given me little room for hope and I was afraid of what I would see. I was dazed and confused. If she died it would be the fifth dead person I faced in a couple of days. They were falling like dominos. After my father, the church guard, Anna and the snowmobile driver, Eva’s turn was approaching ominously. It wasn’t right.

The young doctor guided me to Eva, who was lying on a bed surrounded by equipment – warm air inhalator was attached to her face, a warm air blanket covered her body. At first I thought I could hear her breathing, but it wasn’t Eva. It was the blanket puffing warm air onto her skin. Blood was also being taken from her arm and circulated through a heat-exchanger before being returned to her body. The display on the heat-exchanger showed 30°C and I knew by now that this meant she was in deep hypothermia. The ECG curve was flat, except for some irregular glitches that seemed due to more to defective equipment than any real signs of life. I put my head next to hers, listening out, feeling for any breathing and suddenly I thought I heard wheezing, but the next second it was gone. I must have imagined it. She was looking at peace as I caressed her cheek.

‘I’m sorry.’

Speaking the words, I realised that although the doctors hadn’t declared Eva dead yet, she was already slipping away. What we’d been through together was so different from my daily life that it would soon seem unreal. There wouldn’t be any tangible traces, which made me even more determined to remember her always. I mustn’t lose her, but I wasn’t sure how to do it.

While the doctor was standing by the door, awaiting my farewell, I stood still, looking at Eva, or not looking at all, simply staring into space. I felt empty, lost, torn, panicked, angry, everything and nothing at the same time. There was a storm raging inside, but I was calm on the surface, almost apathetic, as if resigned to accepting fate. I could have stayed there forever: days, weeks, months, centuries. I felt no urge to leave, because everything seemed so pointless after the struggle to escape the killers and to save Eva.

I’d killed her.

All I’d been through since arriving on Åland flickered past in my head – Anna and now Eva on the cusp, locking myself out of the car, the helicopter exploding, killing the snowmobile driver with a spade... More had happened in the last 48 hours than in my whole life previously. I was completely drained and just wanted to sit down, do nothing.

‘Your foot!’

I’d completely forgotten the doctor. A puddle of blood surrounded my injured foot. The wound had opened again and I was reminded of the pain. It was as if the shock of Eva’s death had opened the wound again.

‘We need to have a look at that.’

As the doctor cleaned my wound – her name was Kerstin Larsson, I can still see the name on her badge – she tried to reassure me, telling me that of course she couldn’t promise anything, but every year there were miraculous recoveries. A child had even survived after spending 40 minutes under the ice. There was still a slight chance Eva could make it. She was in that infamous ‘metabolic ice box’ Boeck had talked about, with the main organs temporarily on hold.

‘Nobody is dead until they’re warm and dead.’

I didn’t really care whether she was warm, cold or in the box. Dead was dead and I wasn’t sure what Dr Larsson thought she was doing giving me false hope when it was obvious the only life going on in that room was the beat of the life support machines. When Boeck had resuscitated Anna he’d done it immediately, whereas Eva had been cold for almost 24 hours. And she was injured. The odds were stacked against her and I didn’t believe in miracles.

My wound was finally dressed, but Dr Larsson told me that as it was on the ankle and in constant movement, the healing would take a long time, unless I kept still, which was unlikely. I thanked her and promised to be more careful next time a gun was aimed at me. She didn’t flinch when I mentioned the gun, which should have alerted me, as no one had asked about the bullet wound, but all I could think of was Eva. And Boeck – my main and only priority was to deal with him, the man who’d killed his own stepdaughter. There was nothing more I could do at the hospital. I had to stop him. But Dr Larsson asked me to wait.

‘For what?’

‘Formalities, won’t take long.’

I didn’t want to wait. Cleaning the wound had taken long enough; first Dr Larsson couldn’t find the right disinfectant (was there such a thing as a ‘wrong’ disinfectant?); then she’d had to fetch bandage from another ward. Were they trying to keep me in the hospital? Had they called the police? It wouldn’t have surprised me, considering Eva’s gun shot wound. If that was the case it was fine – I would tell the police what happened. It was probably the best solution anyway. I wasn’t cut out for this. I’d just been about to go after Boeck again, but I wasn’t an action hero and it would be irresponsible, verging on stupid to pretend I was, especially with Carrie waiting back in London. We had a life, a family for which I had to do the right thing. Only the police could stop Boeck. Only they knew how to deal with a murderer of his ilk. I decided to sit down and wait for the hospital to finish whatever they wanted from me. My action hero days were over.

81

My name was called just as I’d sat down in the waiting room. That was quick at least.

‘Magnus Sandberg?’

I looked up. It was a different doctor.

‘Please follow me.’

He addressed me without even bothering to look at me. I only saw him from behind, which confirmed my impression that Swedes weren’t always the most graceful of social beings, but judging from his voice this one seemed old enough to have a medical degree at least. I followed him to an examination room, where he leafed through some papers with his back to me.

‘If you can just lie down.’

I was about to follow instructions, when I realised there must be a misunderstanding, as my wound had already been dressed.

‘But I’m fine.’

‘We just need to check your blood pressure, a routine procedure.’

I lay down reluctantly on the examination bed, and as soon as my feet were off the ground, he turned to me, silenced gun in hand. I hadn’t seen his face properly before and he must have tucked in his ponytail, but now that I recognised Andri, I quickly slid onto the floor, shoving the bed over my head in the process. I evaded the first bullet and a second shot went off as the bed smashed onto his legs. He fell over, but managed to plug a bullet into the door post as I raced out of the room.

82

A police car came screeching to a halt outside the hospital as I came running out. Looking back, I could see Andri charging down the main corridor. I grabbed the police officer getting out of the squad car and pointed at Andri.

‘He has a gun.’

When the police officer looked at me, I recognised the bald policeman – Ernst – and looked at him a fragment too long before making a run for it.

‘Hey!’

I didn’t look back. What the fuck was he doing here?! As I was sprinting away, I realised that something was wrong – I wasn’t on the Swedish mainland as I’d expected. I was back in bloody Mariehamn where we’d started. How did that happen? In the hospital, I’d been too focused on Eva to look out the window. Same in the helicopter – I’d missed the bad weather forcing the machine to divert to Mariehamn.

One thing was for sure. I wasn’t going to the Mariehamn police, forget that. I was knackered and wounded plus I didn’t know who to trust. All I wanted was to get back to London. As I was running, I spotted a postman on a yellow bicycle and stopped him. I grabbed the handlebars, but he held on.

‘LET GO!’

I’d roared and seeing my animal eyes, he dismounted. I set off, legs pumping like pistons, totally ignoring my injured foot. I could hear police sirens approaching and needed to find a solution quickly – a hiding place. If only I could find the dog lady’s house. Maybe I would recognise the road once I got out of the town. I cycled through a pedestrian precinct, desperately scanning the surroundings for a way out. I briefly lost my pursuers, but where could I go? Watching my back, I cycled straight into a group of teenagers and fell. Letters and packages flew out of the post bags and – lo and behold – one of the kids’ white sneakers had a mark. He was aghast and about to beat me up.

I heard the police arriving and ran like mad, skidding around the corner on the icy pavement and dashing across the street. Shrieking brakes – a car stopping in the nick of time. I had my hands on the bonnet, looking at the driver, a woman with a plaster on her nose. I’d never find out why. There was no time, as I saw the police coming rushing around the corner. The moment was frozen in time, the woman looking at me, me at her, and then I did it – I rushed to the passenger side, pulled the door open and threw myself in next to her. I really had to get out of this place. I was done with Mariehamn. All I wanted was to get out of there alive, even if it meant swimming back to London.

‘Drive!’

She barked back.

‘Get out!’

She pushed me and put her hand on the horn to attract the attention of passers-by. Following my eyes, she looked back and spotted the police running towards us. I had to convince her.

‘Help me. Trust me. Please...’

She looked at me as if I was mad before grabbing her handbag, but I held onto it out of impulse.

‘Wait.’

She pulled at her bag.

‘Give me your phone.’

‘No!’

I snatched the bag, searched it and dug up a mobile, while she jumped out of the car. I was left sitting in the passenger seat, paralysed by the unreality of the situation. I had to pull myself together. I really needed to ring Carrie, but first I needed to get away. I locked the doors, shoved over to the driver’s seat and hit the gas just as Ernst and Andri caught up with me, bashing the back windows.

83

I drove off with Andri and Ernst banging on the car, shouting with their faces glued to the window. I couldn’t shake them, not that they were particularly fast, but I couldn’t find the gears on the bloody car, a prehistoric, toad-like Saab with the gearstick on the steering column. I kept switching back and forth between first and third, with the car hiccupping along in the process. They were shouting at me to stop, but I finally hit second gear and took off, leaving them in a cloud of exhaust fumes.

I focused on getting out of Mariehamn as fast as possible. But why was that truck coming straight at me? I dodged it, leaving havoc behind. I mustn’t forget to drive on the right side of the road, or I wouldn’t drive far unnoticed. I wouldn’t drive far full stop. I looked for a place to dump the car, but the whole town had been blocked off with crowd control barriers, so I couldn’t turn anywhere. What the hell was going on? What was there to control? In a small town like Mariehamn, it meant I was quickly out in the countryside, but I still didn’t know how to get to the dog lady’s house. I’d been admiring Eva’s driving and ignoring the road when we drove out there. And it had been dark. I wasn’t ready for another ice crossing yet; I needed to lay low and work out a new escape route first. Boeck knew I was back on Åland and would have men checking all ports including the airport.

Hearing police sirens behind me again, I turned off into the woods. A police car zipped past followed by a black Jeep Cherokee. I had to keep driving even though everything hurt – the injured foot, the bruises from the beatings, the missing toe, the absent finger, the cold, the lack of sleep, the mental torture... It was all too much and I couldn’t think straight. Driving deeper into the forest, I rang Carrie on the Saab woman’s mobile. I missed her and it felt like I hadn’t talked to her in weeks. I should have called earlier, but I hadn’t had time, which was partly an excuse, as part of me felt guilty for the time spent with Eva – I felt a powerful bond with her after what we’d been through together. It had been such an intense experience and Carrie hadn’t been with me to share it. What would Carrie think if she heard about me being wanted by the Swedish police?

There was no reply, so I left a message telling her I was done, but that I wasn’t sure yet when I’d be home. It all depended on if I could find a safe way to get off the island, but I didn’t think she needed to know that. I had to shout to make myself heard over the rattling two-stroke engine. Listening to me blaring down the phone, she would think I’d gone bonkers. I had to tell her what was going on before I wound up dead, but I couldn’t tell her I was in danger without a plan. I didn’t get the chance to finish the message.

‘What the..?!’

I piled on the brakes, my head pressed against the ceiling.

84

There was an effing moose posted in the middle of the forest track. A crash would have killed us both, but I managed to stop the Saab only inches from its front legs. I was shaking, staring at him in shock, the full-grown moose at me. Moose were solitary beings and difficult to tame, but I remembered a man in Mariehamn who’d had one when I was a kid. He even let me ride it once and I hadn’t seen one since. This specimen had spectacular antlers. Their span must have been over two meters and it must have weighed a least a ton. Sitting there face to face with such a beast was intimidating.

Should I see it as a sign? A reproach? I’d been shot at and thought it extraordinary, while this moose and his mates were hunted down every year without anyone worrying about their stress levels. I couldn’t help seeing my father staring at me – those brown eyes. Hadn’t the fisherman called him an ‘old moose’?

The moose broke my apathy and I exploded in anger. What was I thinking? Of course, I couldn’t let Boeck get away with it. Eva had died saving my life. Escaping away wasn’t an option. I was furious with myself for even considering giving up after what she’d done for me. I had to finish what I’d started, in the name of Eva, my father and Anna. It was more important than ever that I did everything I could to stop Boeck. Otherwise, I would always regret it and Boeck’s victims would have died for nothing. It would all have been in vain. It was the least I could do for my father – finish the job he started.

I don’t know how long we stared at each other, but the moose never moved. I had to drive round him and in hindsight I wonder if it really happened, because when I looked back in the mirror there was no trace of him. I did a double-take, but he was gone for good.

85

Looking for a different way back to Mariehamn, I continued through the forest until I hit a gravel road. I tried to recall Eva’s smooth driving, as mine was more akin to survival mode, mainly about avoiding the ditch, but I had a good excuse – I rarely drove in London. In fact, I rarely drove full stop. And it didn’t help that the Saab was underpowered, with the non-assisted steering killing my arms, not to mention my injured foot suffering from the constant braking. I was too tense, my driving too stiff. Suddenly there was a shock, but this time it wasn’t my driving. When I looked in the mirror, I saw the black Cherokee up my arse, barging into me. It was so close that I could see the driver’s silhouette as we came through a bend – the ponytail. Why wasn’t I surprised to see Andri? I tried to control my panic and focus on the driving.

I pushed the old toad to the max, but the Jeep was way more powerful and 40 years younger. I kept blocking Andri’s attempts to overtake, so he nudged me from behind again, trying frantically to force me off the road, but the old Saab’s reliable front wheel drive saved me. Realising he wouldn’t be able to out-drive me, he started shooting and I was nearly hit several times, but the twists and turns made it difficult to aim. He couldn’t find a good angle to get at me or the tyres and tried bashing me again, but the Saab stayed glued to the narrow road and my confidence grew. Maybe I’d be able to hold him off until Mariehamn. It would certainly be harder for him to shoot at me in a busy street, not that I was convinced that there was such a thing in Mariehamn. Saying that, the town had actually been blocked off when I drove out. Something was up. It must be the multicultural festival mentioned on television, the festival opened by the King… and held at Boeck’s museum, in spite of Boeck hating everything multicultural, or maybe precisely for that reason.

That must be it – Boeck’s ultimate opportunity. Killing the King would be mad, but Boeck was completely insane. It made perfect sense after what he’d said about Bernadotte being at the root of the Swedish decline. Besides, it was all I had to go on and if I was wrong, the best place to find him would still be the museum. I couldn’t believe this was a coincidence. In fact, it wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d initiated the multicultural festival. As a host, he was in an ideal position to prepare an attack. He’d talked to me about hitting Sweden at the top of the establishment and the head of state was the ultimate symbol of Swedish power. I put the local radio on in case they’d say something about the festival opening.

I needed to keep Andri behind me and ended up overdoing it when I saw the oncoming truck. I spotted it too late, because I was so focused on covering my back and too distracted by thoughts about the multicultural festival. Trying to avoid the collision, I rolled out of the bend and closed my eyes as the Saab flew into the ditch. Praying was becoming a habit.

86

The last announcement on the radio as the car crashed was that the King would be opening the multicultural festival at 12 noon – in half an hour. It was unlikely I would get there in time with the Saab wedged upside down in a ditch with all doors blocked. I could open the windows, but there was nowhere to go, only ditch walls on both sides. I would have to tunnel into the frozen snow and I knew how hard that would be after trying to dig into the snow when I’d locked myself out of the car, not to mention attempting to bury the snowmobile driver. And this time I didn’t even have a spade, nor did I have the time or space to build a bonfire to thaw the soil. If only the car-lighter had been a blow-torch. Like when I’d locked myself out of the car, the only solution was to smash the windscreen – in the knowledge that Andri would be waiting outside to finish me off.

I unclipped my seat belt and immediately crashed onto my head. I hated this bloody car. I turned around in the small space to sit on the ceiling. It was difficult to see clearly – hardly any daylight trickled through. I got into position to kick in the windscreen, but didn’t have anything to push off from, as the seats were hanging upside down and ending halfway down my back. I tried kicking, but all I achieved was shoe prints on the glass. I needed a tool, something sharp to make the first dent. I removed a headrest and tried using the metal pins, but the head cushion made it impossible to hack with any power. In the end, I kicked off the gear stick, wedged its sharp end between the glass and the frame. Once I’d managed to get the gear stick through a corner, I bent the frame and chipped away at the glass before finally kicking the windscreen to smithereens.

87

The first thing I saw when I crawled out was Andri talking on his mobile. I scrambled back as his first bullet shattered what was left of the windscreen. I was cornered, but not ready to give up. While Andri kept firing at the car, I started digging frantically into the side wall, hacking with the gear stick. Tunnelling seemed the only possible escape, until I heard something above. It must have been Andri standing on the car. It rocked and there was a trickling sound, followed by a sharp smell – petrol dripping down from the carpet above my head. He was pouring it onto the car and I did everything I could to dodge it.

There definitely wouldn’t be enough time for digging now, unless I wanted to be carbonised. It was him or me and I knew I was taking a big risk, but if I didn’t I would be dead within seconds. I had to act before him, take him by surprise. I took the car lighter and pressed it against the petrol-soaked carpet above, which lit up with a WOOF as I scrambled out of the car while the fire followed the petrol to the source – Andri. I’ve never crawled so quickly, and when I came out, he was in flames, rolling in the snow, trying to put out the fire – a taste of his own medicine. He’d ditched the petrol can, but the Jeep was still standing.

88

He’d considered using a hit man, but he had to do it himself. It was a matter of principle and demanded total personal commitment. Although he was tense, he was savouring every second building up to it, soaking up the atmosphere while running through everything in his mind for the umpteenth time; visualising, doing the countdown in his head, anticipating the reactions and finally… completing the mission.

It wasn’t the first time he took on a challenge at this level. Exactly two decades earlier he’d executed a similar operation to perfection. The police had never identified the real perpetrator and never would, unless he decided to tell them. But he would only do so when the time was ripe, when it was to his full advantage. He’d done that operation on his own and it had been a more intimate affair, but it had confirmed that he could do whatever he set out to do. The repercussions had forever affected the course of the nation and given him the confidence to move on to a more complex target.

All that remained was the finishing touch. He had to look the part. Everything had been washed, ironed and polished to perfection. His was a uniform with a 21st century upgrade – bullet-proof fabric. The Russian tailors had done an immaculate job with the fitting. Based in St. Petersburg, they’d made uniforms for the Russian military since the time of Peter the Great. It was the ultimate reference on that side of the Baltic, where a sloppy cut would usually cost a tailor his life.

89

Driving Andri’s car helped me re-focus on my mission – stopping the assassination of the King. I had to be prepared for the worst and assume that this was the threat. I did my utmost to block out the images of Andri’s flaming figure rolling in the snow and tried to think about nice things instead, like what I would do when I returned to London. But it was impossible. But all I could see was a dying Eva on life support and Andri who’d been burning alive when I’d put my foot on the gas and left him behind. Every time my eyes strayed back to the mirror, he reappeared. It felt as if I was being made to pay for what I’d done.

I’d killed again. I was drained, finished, shaking, in tears, hysterical – everything, but I had to keep going. I’ve never driven so fast. I didn’t care about danger. I was terrorised. I’d escaped Andri, but felt more persecuted than ever. Now the fear and the cold came from the inside – I was a zombie, a wreck with eyes locked on the horizon. I kept checking my watch. It was something to hang onto and it still worked, in spite of everything I’d been through. It was a present from Carrie, a macho watch with more functions than I would need in a lifetime, but it did what it said on the tin. It had been exposed to extreme conditions, Baltic water, even been nicked by a bullet. It must have been Boeck and his men when they chased us across the ice, but I hadn’t realised in the tumult of the action. It still ticked and looking at the watch properly for the first time in days, I understood where the soreness in my wrist had come from. The watch had saved me from injury and reminded me of what Carrie meant to me. I tried ringing her again, but there was no answer. I kept trying and eventually a woman picked up – the midwife.

When I finally got Carrie on the line she was in labour, panting. She hadn’t received my message and had been frantically calling my mobile, which was swimming with the herrings at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. When was I coming home? I told her I was sorry, I missed her and wouldn’t be long. Then the fucking phone ran out of battery. I was missing the birth of our child. What for? I’d rather be with Carrie, that’s where I belonged, but I had to do this for the people killed by Boeck – for my father, Anna, Eva, for our child’s grandfather. I owed it to them all. There was no point feeling sorry for myself. I was lucky to have Carrie and she was with me all the time. I hadn’t chosen this. It had attacked me, viciously, like a lethal virus. I was only trying to get out of it, exterminate it.

Once in Mariehamn, I dumped the Jeep at the edge of town and continued on foot, rushing through the crowd towards the museum. Twelve noon was only minutes away.

90

There were police everywhere and a helicopter hovering above, but considering that the local police force only had 2.5 officers, I should be able to avoid them. I suspected they wouldn’t give up that easily though, and it didn’t take long before I spotted Ernst scanning the crowd. I quickly slipped into a massive hedge. I’d noticed that everyone was looking at me – I was a wreck and covered in dirt. I quickly scrubbed my face with some snow to clean the blood off my hands and face, but the splatter stains on the clothes wouldn’t shift.

Pretending to zip up my trousers, I came out of the greenery on the other side of the hedge to join a group of pensioners getting off a coach, waving Swedish flags. I slipped into the coach and borrowed a long coat from an old geezer dozing at the back, obviously a man who knew to dodge a crowd when he saw one. Going out again, I picked an old lady in need of assistance and held her arm, while taking in the surroundings. She tried to shake me off, but I insisted on helping her to the museum.

We joined the stream of people walking along the road to the festival centre. I watched out for Ernst, but it was practically impossible to distinguish anyone in the blur of faces, bodies and colours. I gathered from the crowd movement that the King was approaching and I even caught a glimpse of Carl XVI Gustav as he walked down the middle of the road towards the museum. While he was taking his time shaking hands with the Ålanders, I dashed to the museum. I might still have a chance to beat him to it. I did, but the museum was surrounded by police. Fortunately, they were almost exclusively reinforcements from the Finnish mainland or from Sweden for the King’s security detail, which meant they were unlikely to be Boeck’s henchmen.

There was a security check 15 meters from the museum entrance. I’d had enough action antics for one day and needed to get in unnoticed. I had to play myself this time. I took out my wallet with my laminated BBC staff card, which had survived the Baltic crossing. It must be the best quality staff card on the planet and hopefully good old ‘Auntie’ would help me through the check. I was an accountant, but my job was unspecified and I was relying on the BBC reputation doing the trick.

‘BBC.’

The policeman scrutinised the card before looking me in the eye and frowning. I wasn’t exactly smart-looking, but I could pass for a shabby – not chic – reporter.

‘We’re doing er… a documentary on the popularity of the Swedish Royal family. We’ve been having trouble since Princess Diana. King Carl Gustav is so much more human… closer to the people.’

The police officer pulled a face. I was convinced my bluff had gone pear-shaped. I should have figured Finnish police wouldn’t fancy Swedish Royalty.

‘Closer….? You definitely need a proper look.’

I was in, the gamble had worked, but I didn’t know what or who to look for. The only certainty was that Boeck would be looking to maximise the pain. The question was how. He was a conscientious man who wouldn’t have left anything to chance.

91

I’d been too optimistic. There was a second police check before the doors and I had to get it right, because once they caught me, they wouldn’t let go. Meanwhile, the King was slowly making his way to the museum entrance surrounded by an army of bodyguards. Since the Palme murder, Scandinavian public figures took security seriously, but they were still more lax than most continental police forces, or so I kept telling myself to boost my confidence.

The security was watertight and I really needed the BBC card to work its magic a second time. To avoid surprise visitors, the Royal Couple would enter last and the doors would shut behind them. They’d passed the first police check and were waiting for the police officers by the museum doors to scrutinise me. I showed my BBC card to a relaxed-looking policeman with an old-fashioned handlebar moustache.

‘You need an invite.’

‘I’m here to prepare…’

‘Not without an invite.’

Unfortunately his charm didn’t stretch further than his facial hair. He shoved me through a side gate and pushed it to behind me. Another police officer took over and led me to a second gate. Meanwhile, the King and Queen arrived at the last check-point. They were a dozen meters away, only separated by the side gate. I could have shouted to warn them about the impending threat, but I would have been apprehended and the King would probably still have gone in. If I wanted to stop Boeck, I had to be as bold as he was ruthless. I had to forget my Scandinavian inhibitions and display English rudeness and bravura to the full. I had to be a lion, a British lion of the Baltic.

When the King reached my level, I nearly blurted out that there was an assassin waiting inside, but I didn’t, as I would only be considered a madman. The moment passed and the Royal couple entered the museum.

92

He sighed with relief as he saw the King coming into the museum. This was it. Everything was under control, quadruple and quintuple-checked. He was so near that nothing could go wrong. The doors closing behind the King signalled that the stage was set. He followed the Royal Couple with his eyes as they walked through the aisle, stopping to greet people, exchanging a few friendly words. He’d anticipated every movement to perfection. He was tense with excitement. Now it was only a matter of timing and execution – four minutes left.

93

Watching the royal couple disappear into the museum, I seized my last chance and – pushing open the side gate – dashed back to the closing doors. The moustached police officer was taken by surprise as I barged past him.

‘Stop!’

A police officer and a body guard blocked me, but I tackled them like a rugby player going for a touch. Thanks to the surprise momentum, I managed to squeeze through the doors at the last second. This was one occasion where my London tube experience really came into its own. But once inside, I was immediately caught by a plain clothes policeman. I could smell him before seeing him – Ernst. His aftershave was even more disgusting in close-up, reminiscent of a mix of piss and sweetened chlorine. Why anyone wanted to walk around reeking like a toilet deodorant was beyond me. He held my arm behind my back.

‘If you try anything I’ll kill you.’

He pulled my arm up, making me shriek with pain. Once it ebbed away, I scanned the museum for Boeck. There must have been 200-300 people gathered in the main exhibition hall. Seats had been set up between the exhibited items with a lectern at the front by the submarine and the Viking ship. The huge hall was crawling with police.

94

I didn’t know Boeck’s plan, but I hadn’t done all this running and barging to remain idle. Ernst held my arm in a firm grip and kept pushing it upwards at regular intervals, making me cringe. All I could do was use the means I had left – my voice. The King was walking up the aisle and I’d already waited too long.

‘THERE’S A KILLER! BOECK IS GOING TO KILL THE KING! THE MUSEUM DIR…’

Ernst muffled me with his hand, but I kept looking everywhere for Boeck. My shouting caused a commotion in the crowd and people were looking around in confusion. The King was instantly shoved behind a pillar in a corner of the hall and covered with a bullet proof blanket by his security men, while the head of the King’s security came over to Ernst, who promptly reassured him.

‘I’ve got him.’

He did – I was muffled with my arm wedged up my back. After short exchanges via earpiece and visual contact with security men placed around the hall, the head of security gave an all clear to his men. The blanket was removed from the King and his security men started moving him towards the exit, but the monarch refused to leave the opening – the premises had been thoroughly checked, hadn’t they? He wasn’t going to quit because of some lunatic. The show must go on. The guards remained on edge and the audience was looking around restlessly. The King smiled at the guests, trying to reassure them, before taking his place in the front row as the Swedish national anthem started playing and the lights faded out. The combination of the music and the darkness seemed to have a calming effect on the audience. They were in familiar territory – ‘Du gamla, Du fria’ (Thou Ancient, Thou free) was associated with official ceremonies and most frequently heard at international ice hockey tournaments. But I still wasn’t reassured.

95

His vantage point was ideal. Everyone would be blown away by his appearance. It would defuse any worries or unrest in the sheep who’d come to see the King. In the past, Carl XVI had been accused of running away at the slightest hint of a threat. It hadn’t done anything to improve his public image, which was why he’d started acting more boldly in recent times. Unfortunately the Bernadotte boldness was too little too late – it should have come 200 years ago when Finland was let down by the newly-adopted Swedish monarch. The Bernadottes’ time was up. The King had better enjoy the anthem, because it was the last time he’d hear it:

“You rest upon memories of great olden days

When all around the world your name was honoured

I know that you are and will be the way you were

Yes, I want to live, I want to die in my Nordic land

Yes, I want to live, I want to die in my Nordic land”

Written in 1844, the lyrics conveyed a pan-Scandinavian spirit still yearning for the greatness betrayed by the Bernadottes. The Nordic countries belonged together and Sweden was their spine. The King had let his nation down and yes, he had lived and he was about to die in his Nordic land. Two minutes.

96

Hearing the national anthem in the museum gave me the creeps. I’d always felt uncomfortable with the quasi-religious reaction it triggered in people. It was probably to do with the blind faith Swedes seemed to have in their national symbols from the cradle to the grave.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Shut up!’

Again, Ernst pulled up my arm against my back, harder this time. It felt as if it was going to break. He only loosened his grip as the hall went silent and spotlights suddenly revealed a grand-looking Boeck standing in the cage hanging above the lectern. The museum director was wearing what must have been a 17th century military uniform covered in medals. A Swedish flag unfurled from the cage as he appeared, but none of this put my mind at rest, because I knew what Boeck was about and opening exhibitions it was not. This must be a rather more sinister ritual. The audience was transfixed and all my systems were on red alert as he spoke.

‘Welcome everyone. Welcome to the multicultural festival. Perhaps you’ve had time to glance at the exhibition, in which case you know the territory.’

He paused to look at the crowd and the exhibited objects before continuing.

‘As you also know, the Swedish Kingdom was once a great country. It rests upon memories of great olden days / when all around the world its name was honoured / I know that it is and will be the way it was.’

I was petrified by Boeck’s pronunciation of the lyrics. There was poise, rhythm and great emphasis on the last words of each line quoted from the national anthem. It was as if his voice suddenly moved into another dimension. He paused to stare at the King before resuming his speech.

‘Pockets of greatness still remain, but they are mainly memories and the decline has been continuous for the last 200 years. It’s time to turn the tide, to return Sweden to the Swedes. I’d like to thank you all beforehand for your contribution. I should add that of course this opening is streamed to the internet through the museum’s night vision CCTV, the objective being to ensure maximum attention from our Nordic land. If you wonder why we have night vision CCTV, it’s because burglars tend not to switch on the lights. Our Nordic land must always prepare to fight the darkness.’

Boeck fiddled with something in his hand and the lights started to fade.

‘Let battle commence.’

The hall went pitch-black, the darkness lasting ominously, while everyone was waiting, anticipating another spectacular contribution, but nothing happened. I tried to slip out of Ernst’s grip, but he reacted instantly, pressing my arm up my back again. This time, it really felt like it was going to snap.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’

He grabbed my throat with his other hand and squeezed.

‘I’m going to kill you.’

At first I didn’t believe he was going to strangle me on the spot, but as his double grip on my back and throat tightened, I was convinced he would and kicked like mad to free myself. In vain, I was trapped and there would be no witnesses to my impromptu send-off. I would die in the dark. He didn’t let go and my only chance was to play dead. I did, trying to relax as much as possible to become a dead weight in his arms. Holding my breath, I let my head drop, hoping the dark would help me pull it off, but he was a thorough thug and I thought he’d never let go. I couldn’t hold my breath much longer. Eventually he dumped me on the floor and rushed off, leaving me for dead. I couldn’t see where he’d gone, but assumed he was joining Boeck.

Meanwhile, the volume of the national anthem was mounting. People were agitated, panicking. I could hear the security men communicating frantically, their radios crackling. A man shouted that the lights didn’t work. I knew something was about to happen and a few people had looked worried before the lights went out, but I couldn’t figure out what Boeck was up to. It had thrown me that he was in the cage this time.

What was he waiting for? As the darkness persisted, I could hear the Royal Couple being herded towards the exit and it soon became clear that all exits had been blocked by metal shutters. There was no way out – Boeck had us all locked up in a gigantic cage. We were trapped in the hall and all communication seemed to have been jammed too, because none of the body guards or police officers could get through to the outside. I crept in the direction of the ice cage.

By now, everyone in the museum knew something was seriously wrong. People were banging on the metal shutters that had come down all around the building or desperately trying to get through on their mobiles. Police officers shouted for everyone to stay calm, while systematically testing all exits and trying to access Boeck’s cage. By now, the national anthem was blaring and reinforcing the general panic. People had to scream to make themselves heard. I was convinced that Boeck was watching us all the time. The darkness wasn’t accidental. He’d mentioned night vision CCTV. I had to find him, stop him. The delay, the wait for something horrible – that’s all I expected from Boeck – was surreal. He wanted us to be in the dark, grasping for clues, fearing the worst. He loved being in control. He’d already played me like a rat when I’d broken into the museum. I wasn’t going to sit passively and let him get away with it this time. Feeling my way in the general direction of the cage, I passed the King and his men. I know, because one of them blinded me with a torch, checking who I was.

I tried to explain that the King was in real danger, that Boeck had told me personally that he hated him and wanted him eliminated. The bodyguard wouldn’t listen to me and when the head of security recognised me as the lunatic who’d shouted earlier, I was immediately frisked and held down on the floor.

97

He could see Magnus’ searching eyes trying to distinguish the cage in the dark. Magnus’ doggedness was impressive, but the plan was foolproof now. Once again, it had been confirmed that no one could be entrusted with crucial elements of the cause. Ernst had let him down with his sloppiness. Boeck would deal with him afterwards.

The shutters had secured the set and he was about to stage a turning point in Swedish history. The Nordic Land was going to rise again. He adjusted the medals on his bullet-proof jacket, pulled the visor down on his helmet and saluted before finally grabbing his rifle. The time had come.

98

I almost jumped out of my skin as the first shot rung through the air. Like most people in the museum, I didn’t realise what it was. It was followed by a moan. Because of the darkness it took a while to understand what was going on, but when one of the body guards shouted that the King was down, everyone knew we’d landed in a nightmare. The security men were in total panic, with torch beams criss-crossing anxiously around the body of Carl XVI Gustaf, which was lying on the floor covered by the blanket. It all appeared to happen in slow-motion, the blood, the searching torches, the fear.

Then everything accelerated as people started screaming and the bodyguards shot back at Boeck’s cage. They tried focusing the torches on him. Someone even managed to switch on the searchlight on the tracked army support vehicle standing in the middle of the hall, but the bullets kept coming and Boeck immediately took out any light that was directed at him. He was a killing machine. Nothing was going to stop him until he was done. The security detail stood no chance and had to retreat as more and more men fell to prey to Boeck’s hatred. Not that there was anywhere to hide – we were all stuck in the hall. People were desperately squeezing behind screens, vehicles and other exhibited objects. The concrete statues probably offered the best protection.

The bodyguard holding me down was shot and fell on top of me. I could hear blood splattering onto the floor all around and felt blood on my face, even tasting the salt on my lips as the blood gushed from his wound and onto me. I felt his whole body convulsing when he was hit again, probably taking a bullet destined for me. Using the dead security guard’s torch – sparingly, because every time I switched it on a bullet followed – I took cover under the JAS Gripen fighter Jet.

At first, I thought – hoped – that Boeck’s shots were random, defensive bullets in the dark, that his main and sole objective had been the King, but when they kept coming at regular intervals, killing and injuring people, it became increasingly clear that he must have some kind of night goggles, which gave him a bird’s eye view of the entire hall. I thought I could feel his eyes on me. I kept moving, dodging his bullets, creeping under the cars, hiding behind the concrete statues, under IKEA furniture, behind displays, anything to try and reach a position under the cage, an angle where he couldn’t see me.

People were running around bumping into each other, hiding in or under the exhibited items, pulling at doors, trying to escape. I could hear a couple attacking a police officer, demanding that he do something. Meanwhile, Boeck took his time to aim, to make every bullet count, which made the whole thing even more terrifying. Although the police couldn’t see in the dark, they could see the sparks from his gun and kept returning fire. The metal platform of the cage must have protected Boeck, because bullets could be heard ricocheting off the metal while he continued shooting like clockwork.

As long as he was shooting, I knew that Boeck was still in the cage. I also tried to locate Ernst, but it was impossible with all the noise – the gunfire and everyone in shock, screaming. After the fate of Olof Palme and Anna Lindh, I’d expected Scandinavians to be prepared for the worst, but even though the bubble had burst again, the museum seemed filled with disbelief.

The Ålanders were hoping that their bit of Scandinavia was intact. They still lived in denial. They couldn’t any longer. The fairy tale was over. This nightmare was real and happening in Mariehamn, at the heart of the Åland archipelago, one of the most idyllic of places in the Nordic countries. The realisation was terrifying and the initial disbelief emblematic of the Nordic disillusion. It could happen to them, us – I was an Ålander too.

I’d failed. I’d set out to stop an assassination, but ended up witnessing a massacre. I was disgusted – all the previous deaths, my killings, running and chasing had been in vain.

99

The shooting stopped, but I wasn’t sure why. Had Boeck been hit? I would believe it when I saw it with my own eyes. He’d planned this mass execution – because that’s what it was – down to the very last detail and wouldn’t have left anything to chance. Besides, he was on his home turf, so he was bound to have an escape route.

Suddenly, I thought I could hear a faint buzzing sound, an electric engine? It must be Boeck moving the cage. Was he looking for a better shooting angle or preparing to run away? I was desperate to grab him, stop him – kill him. He wasn’t going to get out of this, not if I could help it.

I followed the faint sound of what I thought was the moving cage. Fumbling in the dark, I could hear it descending, because the engine emitted a deeper sound after a brief stop – as if changing into a lower gear. But where were the police? Had Boeck really managed to kill them all?

As I approached, the engine noise became louder and there was even some very faint daylight. It looked like it was coming from the water behind the submarine, but I couldn’t quite work out the source. The buzzing sound had stopped and I still couldn’t see the cage. When I paused to listen, I finally saw the cage being lowered into the water. It went so smoothly that I wouldn’t have seen it if it weren’t for the light from the water. It was almost ghost-like and I didn’t hear it submerging because of all the running and panicking in the museum. But the cage was there and I was sure it wasn’t a figment of my imagination. Inside it, I’d seen the silhouette of a man in full diving gear. That was it – Boeck’s escape route. He was going to swim out of the museum. I should have known. I’d seen a diving suit hanging in the cage when I first came to museum. I had to stop him.

100

I shouted at the top of my lungs.

‘OVER HERE! HE’S…’

Before I could finish my sentence, a rubber arm came round my throat and locked into a death grip. I was suffocating. All that was left of my shouting was a fading gargle. I couldn’t see who it was, only distinguish an oxygen bottle and some kind of fan being dumped on the floor next to me, but in spite of the strong smell of rubber there was no mistaking the sickly pong – Ernst. He put his head against mine as he squeezed my throat and whispered into my ear.

‘Sleep tight, Magnus.’

He was going to kill me and then take the same way out as Boeck. Although I was doing my utmost to get out of his grip, my flapping and kicking made no difference. I gave it my all, but he wasn’t going to give me a second chance. This time he wasn’t going to leave me for dead until I’d truly taken my last breath. He was rock solid and I was about to pass out if I didn’t get any air soon. I tried kneeing him in the crotch but couldn’t reach. His lock was too tight and his body held firmly against mine. I tried knocking my head against his, but he only headbutted me back even harder. I couldn’t bear the idea of ending in a cloud of cheap aftershave. In a last desperate attempt at survival, I turned and bit his nose as hard as I could. I couldn’t see in the dark, but felt a piece coming off and spat it out. He groaned with pain and had to let go of me. I immediately picked up the oxygen bottle and whacked him on the head. I kept hitting him until I was sure he wouldn’t come after me again.

101

It was the last thing I wanted to do after what I’d been through on this godforsaken island, but I was way past the point of no return. I had to get Boeck – it was him or me. I squeezed into Ernst’s diving suit and put on the aqualung. The fan he’d dropped on the floor was one of the portable underwater propellers from the mini-sub display. It was enclosed in a cage with a handle on each side. I grabbed it, walked across the sub and jumped into the water without thinking.

Although I was prepared for the worst and wearing a wetsuit, the cold water was just as much of a shock as the first time. As soon as my eyes got used to faint the light, I started looking for Boeck but couldn’t see any trace of him under the water. He’d had a head start must already have swum under the gates leading out to sea. After a couple of failed attempts, I finally managed to turn on the propeller. Following the light coming from the water, I glided under the gates and out under the open ice, where I switched off the propeller and looked around for Boeck.

I still couldn’t see him, but I could hear a high-pitched noise and I knew it must be him – my propeller sounded the same. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from though. It was omnipresent. I kept looking around, but still couldn’t see Boeck. It didn’t help that the water was shallow – I couldn’t stand up because of the ice ceiling. Only once my eyes adjusted to the light, did I see movement in the distance, a light reflection. I turned on the mobile propeller again and headed after him.

I had to stop him before he got out of the water and jumped into a car or onto a snowmobile, but even with the diving suit, the cold water’s grip on my body felt tighter every second. It squeezed and suffocated me, compressing every part of me. I put the underwater scooter on max speed and worked the flippers as hard as I could. I was frozen to the bone, but there was no turning back. I managed to get closer to Boeck, but I had to remain alert and constantly try to swim behind the few available rocks. If he spotted me, any surprise momentum would be lost. He would either accelerate or attack me. I thought I’d never catch up.

When I finally did, I was so numb and weak that everything was becoming a blur. I fumbled for his mouthpiece and Boeck was totally taken by surprise as I pulled it off. For a moment, he seemed to think that his aqualung had got caught on something. Clearly, he never believed anyone could stop him at this point, but once he realised it was me, he pulled a diving knife and tried to stab me.

He missed my upper body, but cut into my thigh. Blood surged out of the hole in my wetsuit and my leg felt even colder. He’d missed because we were still in shallow water and he’d banged his head against the ice. When he tried to stab me again, I grabbed the wrist of his knife hand with my left hand and pressed it down against the seabed, forcing him to bend over to hold onto the knife. At the same time, I picked up a rock from the seabed with my other hand and whacked him with it. I thought the blow would never reach his head, because underwater all the movements were so slow, so slow that although Boeck saw the rock coming, he was unable to avoid it.

By now, he was reaching desperately for his aqualung. It was as if everything happened in slow-motion – the rock crushing his mask, him struggling to pull it off, me hitting him until he stopped moving. But the rock hadn’t finished him off. He suddenly leaped and hung onto my aqualung, yanking it and opening the valve on my bottle, letting the air out. I tried to stop him, but it was too late. By the time I got hold of the valve, all my oxygen was gone. Boeck was even further gone – gasping for air that wasn’t there, swallowing water, drowning, hovering in the ice cold Baltic surrounded by blood. The lid was on and staying on – we were definitely trapped under the ice.

My hands were so frozen and numb that I couldn’t switch on the propeller again, let alone pick it up from the seabed. I couldn’t even bend my fingers. I’d lost my grip. I tried to swim back to the museum, but my arms and legs wouldn’t respond any more. It was as if all my joints were locked, paralysed by the arctic waters. They say that when you die, you see your life in flashback. I didn’t. All I saw was what I hadn’t done, what I should, what I could have done. My lungs were imploding, trapped between the seabed and the ice, between the rock and a hard place.

102

I was lucky, very lucky, although after what had happened, with all the pain and grief, I wasn’t sure lucky was the right word. But I survived, I lived to tell the tale. It had to be remembered. As a warning, to remind people that we need to keep our feet firmly on the ground. Atrocities keep happening, but we never learn – they reoccur, the fanaticism grows like the plague. We must never forget. We mustn’t let victims die in vain.

It wasn’t the Finnish mainland cops, the ones who’d refused to listen to Eva when she’d tried to warn them about Boeck. They’d only rung Mariehamn and talked to the walrus, who’d confirmed that everything was fine – Boeck was a pillar of the community and wouldn’t hurt a fly.

Nor was it the police brought in for the festival. Yes, they helped rescue me in the end, but it was Thor who found me in the nick of time. He’d wondered where I’d disappeared and noticed that my father’s Black Pearl was gone too. Failing to find me on the ice, he’d searched Henrik’s backup photos again overnight with Sven, trying to make sense of my father’s last footsteps – the ones I’d followed.

Thor had gone to the church bay to discover the kiln and the ice cage. He’d found the concrete moulds and ended up breaking one of the statues to find a body inside – Anna. By now, he knew something was wrong – seriously wrong – and that I may have been right suspecting Boeck. In Mariehamn the police were too busy with the festival opening to listen to his mad allegations. He arrived too late at the museum – all the metal shutters had gone down, but while the police were calling Helsinki and Stockholm for backup, Thor had borrowed a fire engine and driven through the metal shutters and into the museum hall. He couldn’t have anticipated the carnage and it was a horrific sight, but he kept his focus. On hearing what Boeck had done, Thor had made his way to the submarine to track him down. He must have missed me by seconds, because he’d found Ernst on the floor and twisted what was left of his nose until he cracked.

Once Ernst had told him where I’d gone, Thor grabbed one of the portable mini-subs and went after me. He didn’t expect to find me alive and risked his life by going after me without a diving suit, but Thor was the type of man who did what he had to, no questions asked. He had few friends, but the ones he had were as dear to him as his own flesh and blood – he’d do anything for them. Physical pain was the last of his worries when their life was at stake. I’d made a friend, a real one.

The King survived. Because of the dark and thanks to the general panic, his wounds had looked fatal, especially as he’d been hit in the head, but the injury turned out to be superficial. He’d been paralysed by fear and fainted because of the shock. He was probably saved by his immobility, as Boeck saw him go down, lying there lifeless on the floor covered by the blanket. The museum director must have thought he’d done it – curtains for the King.

I wished I’d hit Boeck harder. I wished I could say he’d died underwater, but he survived the cold, the lack of oxygen. Evil never dies. I did inflict some permanent damage though – the blows to Boeck’s head caused paralysis down the left side of his body and I was the main witness as he was sentenced to life. He swore to take revenge – this was personal now. Unfortunately for me, Finland didn’t have the death penalty. Boeck was in for a cushy life sentence and with the softness of the system, he would probably be released early for good behaviour – not something I was looking forward to.

The only known survivors among Boeck’s henchmen were Ernst and the guard I’d half-blinded with my father’s skate. They were sentenced to 25 years each. I was convinced Boeck had support from someone more powerful and resourceful, but the police investigation never uncovered his network or where he’d recruited his Eastern European mercenaries. As for my own killings, no charges were brought against me. I was deemed to have acted in self-defence and in the interest of the Finnish and Swedish nations.

The Swedish King even went so far as to award me H.M. the King’s Medal for services to the nation. I didn’t deserve it. Yes, I’d contributed to saving him by alerting his security detail, but I’d failed to pre-empt Boeck’s massacre.

Thor told me that foxes were the only animals that killed for pleasure. That would make Boeck a human fox. When he’d killed all those innocent Ålanders, he’d been like a fox in a henhouse. And considering the glint in his eyes when he’d watched Anna drown and the film of my father dying, he must have been ecstatic during the shooting. Just thinking about it made me sick. For all his talk about greatness, it had only been an excuse to kill. It was the worst moment in Nordic history since the assassinations of Olof Palme and Anna Lindh.

The massacre triggered a public debate in Sweden about monarchy and democracy and the Royal family even put their position on the line in a referendum, where 90% of the population rallied behind the King. There was sympathy for the Bernadottes, none for the devil.

Boeck’s statues were all taken apart. Half a dozen of them contained bodies. The authorities did their best to contact the families. 45 people died in the museum and nine were critically injured. A State funeral was held in Mariehamn for the victims with families and dignitaries from around the world.

103

When I finally resurfaced after the showdown with Boeck, I felt gutted, raw, and missed the polluted London air. I was desperate to get back to Carrie and our baby –girl, boy? I’d come as close to understanding my father as I could. I’d gone all the way and my heart had even stopped beating when Thor had dragged me out of the water. I too had been in the metabolic ice box. I was on extra time. I was an atheist, but thank God. And Thor.

It took me days to recover and I can barely remember my father’s funeral. I was still too weak, but Thor and Sven were there to support me along with Father Fredriksson. After what had happened at the museum, no one felt inclined to speak. It was a totally silent ceremony and the Mariehamn air had never been so heavy. In hindsight, I realised that my father had been one of the first victims of the massacre. His death had brought us closer and changed my life forever. I turned a page.

It was difficult coming back to London after those horrific days fighting for survival, but fortunately our baby daughter Maria sucked up most of my time, leaving little space for thinking. The greatest relief was to hear that Eva hadn’t died. She hadn’t regained consciousness since I’d abandoned her at the hospital chased by Andri, but she wasn’t dead either. She was in a coma. All her main organs except the brain had kicked in again once she’d reached normal core temperature. So there was still hope. It was important for me, as she was the person I’d shared most of the suffering with. Part of me would die if she died.

I think Eva’s coma contributed to our decision to move to Mariehamn. I didn’t tell Carrie with so many words, but felt I needed to be near Eva. It was the least I could do after what she’d done for me. It was as if I felt owed her something, and sometimes I wondered where it would take me, us. But it wasn’t just Eva, I’d made a deep connection with Åland and it was the ideal place for Maria to grow up.

The nightmare experience had given me the urge to do something more meaningful. I quit my BBC accountancy job to begin something completely different. Writing this story was a step in that direction. It confirmed the confrontation with Boeck as a turning point in my life. It also brought me closer to my father and I learned to look differently at people and nature. I learned to appreciate life.

But I soon realised the stupidity of giving up something I was good at, something that could support my family. So I became a freelance accountant, working remotely for British clients while learning the local tax system. It meant that I could still spend lots of quality time with Carrie and Maria.

I promised Carrie not to get involved in any more life-threatening investigations, but I never told her in detail about the crossing with Eva. It was too painful. I felt guilty about the closeness. I kept having nightmares and should have told Carrie. Not telling only made it worse. She would have understood and it had to come out at some point, but I just didn’t know how to put it. I thought telling Carrie would destroy something we had. I was wrong. By not speaking I started the erosion. This was something I would come to regret. I felt close to Eva, I cared for her, whereas Carrie didn’t feel anything for her, especially as I wouldn’t tell her why I cared. I didn’t share my feelings and as a consequence Carrie thought I wasted too much time visiting Eva. She said that instead of sitting there in the hospital an hour a day staring at a vegetable, I should spend more time with Maria. Even if she was still in a coma, Eva was already starting to drive a wedge between us.

I should have sensed that it was unhealthy for my relationship with Carrie. If Eva ever came out of the coma, a reaction would be inevitable. New tensions and attractions would develop. Carrie was right – I acted as if Eva was a close friend or relative, when in fact I’d only met her for a couple of days. Was I turning her into more than she was? I couldn’t help thinking that Eva had activated a side of me that thrived on danger and that risked emerging again if she came out of the coma.

I thought I’d done it. I thought I’d resumed a normal life, but I hadn’t. Finding my father’s book of portraits at the yacht club reminded me again of what had happened. I couldn’t stop looking at the faces of the refugees. I would stare apathetically for hours. Was it the knowledge that most of them had suffered a horrible death in Boeck’s ice cage? Was it because they reminded me of the men I’d killed? Was it their smiles, the wrinkles? Was it my father’s eye? The way they’d looked into his? They all looked so alive – so real – and I couldn’t stop going back to them, not until Thor and I made a trip to visit Anna’s parents on the Black Sea. They told us about her dreams. We told them about my father. It helped.

Acknowledgements

First of all, apologies to the Ålanders for inflicting such fictional violence upon your gorgeous archipelago. I have also taken some liberties with the geography and the facts of local life. Let’s call it poetic license. But I hope that the book still shows why no one should miss a chance to visit the wonderful world of Åland.

A special tack to the Mariehamn tourist office and to Peter at the youth hostel in Eckerö for their anecdotes and advice. I’ll be back for more.

Infinite thanks to the people who read the manuscript and gave me feedback – Rosalind Mendel, Mark Hayhurst, Sue Jones, Rebecca Servadio and especially my agent Sonia Land for all the constructive comments.

And to Lindsay for your ultra stimulation. I couldn’t have completed the journey without your support and sharp sense of character.

About the author

Olivier Nilsson-Julien is a film and television writer, cycling journalist, film lecturer and translator. The Ice Cage is his first novel. He loves skating on Dutch canals, swimming in Swedish lakes and grinding up French mountain roads. A member of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, he lives in North London with his wife and children.

Feedback

Comments are always welcome. Please use the contact form at the following address: http://www.onilssonjulien.com/agent.html

Magnus Series

The Ice Cage is the first book in a series. The second instalment will be published in 2013.

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Acknowledgements

About the author

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