Lindstrom Alone Read online

  “I don’t usually like sweet wines,” she observed.

  “Pourriture noble,” he enunciated in execrable French.

  “What on earth are you talking about?” She sat on the blue sofa with her legs tucked under her and grinned. She might have been twenty-two.

  “Noble rot,” he explained, adjusting an imaginary monocle in his best imitation of Lord Peter Wimsey. “Botrytis afflicts the grapes and they turn sweet. It’s like ice-wine, only each grape rots in its own time. At Château d’Yquem, they’re picked individually, grape by grape, at the height of decomposing perfection. There’s so much sugar left over when the alcohol kills off the fermenting process you get this! Nectar of the gods.”

  “To coin a cliché. It’s delicious.”

  “From rot comes perfection.”

  “From manure come mushrooms,” she said.

  “Have you ever read Lord of the Flies?”

  “Pardon? I’m not sure, maybe I did.”

  “What about The Bad Seed?”

  “Saw the movie,” she said.

  “Some day we should talk about evil. You know, the kind we’re born with.”

  “Okay.”

  “But not now,” he said. “Tell me about being a cop.”

  Now that’s a non sequitur, Harry.

  “It’s not a good time. I guess you know after Christmas we buried one of our own. The first in over a decade. Twelve thousand came to the funeral. Phalanxes of mourning cops from every part of the country, hundreds and hundreds up from the States, streaming into the Convention Centre. It was heartbreaking and it made you proud.”

  “Did you know the guy?”

  “No.”

  “Proud, to belong?”

  “Yeah. Let’s talk music, your favourite subject. John Lennon? A poet-philosopher.”

  “Aren’t they all,” he said.

  “The best ones.”

  “Have you ever seen Puccini’s Tosca?”

  She liked opera.

  Harry began to sing in his terrible nonmusical voice: “Nell’ora del dolore, perché, perché, Signor … dum dum … perché me ne rimuneri cosi?”

  “Which means?”

  “It doesn’t have to mean anything. ‘In my hour of grief and tribulation … why hast thou forsaken me?’”

  “Harry?”

  “It’s not about me. You might think there is no solace in knowing we’re all going to die, but there is. I feel cheated because death didn’t take me at the same time. Now I’m impatient.”

  “Harry, are you okay? You’re not going to do something stupid?”

  Working in homicide, she had watched parents bludgeoned by the imponderable shock of a child’s death. She had learned there was no consolation, not ever, only different ways of coping. Some parents were enraged, some were consumed by grief, some lost their minds. Some retreated into the delirium of religious cant. One thing survivors all had in common: a terrible and suffocating sense of guilt. It should have been them who died.

  She slid forward and perched on the edge of his ottoman. She reached out and let her fingers rest on the back of his hand.

  “Well?” he said.

  She squeezed his hand.

  He tried to smile.

  “Harry, it wasn’t your fault.”

  “I was warned about the rapids. I missed them. Did you ever paddle the Anishnabe?”

  “A lifetime ago. What about the fire? Were you trying to kill yourself, then?”

  “The house was too empty.” He paused. “I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to live.”

  “And now you do?”

  “Which?”

  “You need to be their witness. They deserve that.”

  Miranda drew in a deep breath.

  “Are you still having focused hallucinations?” She asked tentatively.

  “That’s an oxymoron,” he responded. “You’re referring to my occasional conversations with Karen. I wouldn’t call them hallucinations. We just like to talk.”

  “Do you see her, Harry?”

  “If I look away right now I see you. Not with my eyes but you’re here. My other senses, memory, imagination, the desire to know, all this assures me you’re here. That’s how it is with Karen, I know she’s around, when she is. We’re the sum of our experience, Miranda. Like Sartre said, and Camus. As long as I’m aware of myself, Karen is here.”

  “You think like a philosophy professor, Harry. I’m not sure that’s a good thing.”

  “No, it’s not a good thing, but it’s unavoidable. Six years at Cambridge and twelve teaching at Huron will do that.”

  “Do you ever think of going back?”

  “To professoring! Never. To thinking rationally? Possibly.”

  “What about the children, Harry?”

  “What about them?”

  “Are they ever with Karen?”

  “They’re dead. Of course they are.”

  “When she visits?”

  “She doesn’t visit, Miranda.”

  Tremors of pain crossed his face. The cost of his guilt was the banishment of his children, their memory driven out of his mind. He wanted to try and explain but swallowed the words and remained silent.

  Miranda Quin’s eyes watered as she peered at him. She dabbed at her face with the backs of her fingers. Then she took a deep, steadying breath. “Goddammit, Harry.”

  He looked at her sympathetically. He knew that genetics, John Calvin, and years of confronting atrocity kept her from openly weeping. They had known each other since he was a child. He understood only too well the constrained sensibility at the heart of her reticence. He struggled to change the subject. “Karen used to teach mysteries, you know. As a theorist, she could justify anything. She came up with a course on the murder mystery, where the authors are Canadians who use Canadian settings and express a Canadian sensibility. Louise Penny, Giles Blunt, John Moss, people like that.”

  “I didn’t know there was such a thing as a Canadian mystery,” said Miranda.

  “That’s part of the Canadian sensibility, not knowing.”

  “I thought you were going to say, ‘the biggest mystery is that we have a Conservative government!’”

  He gazed at her with confused affection.

  “Sometimes I tell her I love her.”

  “And what does she tell you?”

  “She says, ‘I love you.’”

  “Of course she does, Harry.”

  “She never says ‘I love you, too.’”

  AFTER MIRANDA LEFT and feeling emotionally reckless from sharing fine wine with a genuine friend, Harry let his mind wander unfettered. Before long it took him where he never wanted to go and held him transfixed. For a while, the past became more real than the present.

  The red canoe on the grey cedar trestle glistened with morning dew. It was not red like the sun-bleached canoes of childhood but the colour of flowing blood when it hits open air, the colour of life or of life slipping away. Harry grimaced, then smiled. He and the old man hoisted the canoe onto the roof of his Volvo wagon. His memory was vivid. The blood-red colour was already congealing to crimson as the white light of dawn turned azure and the sky opened with the promise of a perfect day.

  It was spring. They wanted to get into the bush after the worst of the blackflies and before the tourists. At eight and five, the kids were old enough for a wilderness adventure. The family had their own gear but Karen tracked down Virgil’s Outfitting Emporium on the phone, and Virgil assured her he could rent them a brand new canoe, then pick them up Sunday afternoon at the foot of Long Pine Lake, and shuttle them back to their car.

  For a few days he could leave behind Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, and Kant; he could forget about fate and irony and the will to power. He didn’t pay much attention to Virgil’s rambling description of the river.

  8 TO STOCKHOLM

  HARRY OPENED HIS LAPTOP AND RE-READ MORGAN’S NOTE. A stewardess brushed against him and he instinctively made himself smaller, drawing his arm in and tightening hi
s shoulders. She apparently didn’t notice and he slowly relaxed. He had not touched a woman’s body in over three years. He returned his attention to his email.

  The bad news: Scandinavian Airlines had no record of Birgitta Ghiberti on any flight from Reykjavik to Stockholm. The good news: Morgan’s contact in the NCP, the Swedish National Criminal Police, reported Birgitta having been seen at a New Year’s Eve party celebrating the opening of the Hotel Skeppsholmen, an event made prominent because the building itself dated from 1699. The Stockholm County Police, who checked the guest list supplied by the hotel, confirmed this sighting. The intriguing confusion: Bernd had insisted no one had seen her in Sweden, yet there she was, at a public reception.

  When the SAS Airbus landed in Keflavik, Harry disembarked. He had chosen to follow Birgitta’s route and was planning on spending a couple of days in Iceland. By breaking the journey, according to the doctors at TGH, he lowered his risk of embolisms from his injuries.

  Harry had been to Iceland the previous summer for no reason at all. He had wanted a change, to go where he wouldn’t meet anyone he knew but still felt a familial connection. The Lindstrom side of his family was originally from central Sweden, but a brief stint in Iceland played to his affinity for the Nordic, and the place was cool and serene with warm and affable people who wouldn’t press him too closely. After a week he had gone home, not rejuvenated, but no worse for the wear. Given his general state of mind, this seemed the mark of a successful break from the ordinary.

  Getting onto the bus for Reykjavik under brilliant airport floodlights, he hardly noticed that it was dark at midafternoon, and he dozed fitfully until a frozen pothole sent him lurching against the seat. He buckled sideways to relieve the pain in his ribs, he blinked, trying to get oriented, and leaning down to see through the front window, he gasped. The horizon was on fire with the lights of the town, which glared into a dark blue sky flecked with pinpoints of starlight, and across the whole blue vista was a swirl of dazzling green, as if the spirit of van Gogh had drawn a light wand through the firmament in an abstract expression of pure intense breathtaking beauty.

  Looking out to the side, Harry could only see glimmering shadows blotched with patches of darkness. He had expected more snow, but what little there was lay in frozen sheets, skimming the rocky ground like a cover tossed casually to keep the land safe through the long winter.

  As he stepped off the bus to the side of the Icelandic Parliament House—the oldest democratic institution in the world, with the vaguely allusive name, the Althingi—Harry felt comforted. The salt-sea air on his face was crisp, but not as cold as Toronto. There was a village quality to the surrounding buildings, an eeriness to the streetlights glowing against the midday darkness. Trying to get his bearings before making his way to his hotel, Harry rotated slowly around to take in the entire scene when he suddenly found a large bearded man who had not been there a moment before blocking his view.

  The man grasped his bag, with Harry resisting, until the man smiled.

  “Mr. Lindstrom.”

  And he knows my name. Harry relinquished his bag.

  “Would you come with me?”

  “You are?”

  “Rikislögreglan, the Iceland Police. David Arnason. Chief Constable.”

  “I’d be honoured,” said Harry as they removed their gloves and shook hands. He was not sure if he was about to be fêted or placed under arrest.

  Instead of going to the police station, they walked to his hotel, the same one he had stayed in the previous summer, a flat-faced three-storey building sheathed in narrow clapboard painted off-white, its small-paned windows beckoning with the promise of congenial warmth inside. Chief Constable Arnason dropped Harry’s bag at reception but insisted they go straight to the bar, where he ordered two pints of Guinness Extra Stout.

  “Now then,” said Harry’s host, once they had settled into chairs at a small table close to the fire. “You do not have a cell phone, I believe?”

  “How would you know that?”

  The other man smiled.

  “I left it at home,” said Harry. “I abhor the damned thing.”

  “You are what they call a Luddite, perhaps.”

  “Simply a man who does not offer the world easy access. And who would I call?”

  “For business? Your wife?”

  “I work alone, Chief Constable.” Harry paused. He was probably the only Canadian in his early forties who did not drive a car. He had a licence but he never drove; there was no need, living in downtown Toronto. And while he owned a cell phone, he did not treat it as a bodily appendage. “My wife and I stay in touch, she knows how to reach me.”

  In fact, his original cell phone was lost with Karen’s in the fire. They used to text each other through the day from adjoining offices at Huron College and while sitting side by side in their living room on the Sanctuary Line, indulging in word play, role play, even foreplay. And now, while having a replacement had been low on Harry’s priority list, Miranda insisted he buy one. He usually left it in the string drawer among elastic bands and used corks in his kitchen.

  “Well then,” said the other man affably as he presented Harry with his own phone. “You will use mine. We received an important call for you from Canada. You are to call back.”

  An important call. But only after they had their drinks in hand. In front of an open fire.

  We could like it here, Harry. They have their priorities right.

  Arnason tapped in a number on his phone with his thumb, listened, then handed it over to Harry. It could only be one person trying to reach him from Toronto, from anywhere, and using the police to make contact. And who knew he wouldn’t be carrying his cell.

  “Harry,” she started right in. “Morgan told me you were back on the case.”

  “Apparently I am.”

  “Good. Be careful. You could have let me know.”

  “I could have. But I’m really not certain what my case is, apart from unravelling the sordid complexities of a very strange family.”

  “You could have let someone know where you were staying?”

  “It’s where I stayed last summer. I’m there now.”

  “I had to lean on the good graces of Detective Arnason.”

  “Chief Constable.”

  “There’s been a murder that might interest you.”

  Harry’s mind raced, anticipating what Miranda would say.

  “Are you there, Harry?”

  “I’m listening.”

  Arnason was talking in loud whispers to the couple at the next table. He had shifted around so that his back was toward Harry, creating a barrier of relative privacy. An expressionless man from reception had walked over and set Harry’s registration form down in front of the chief constable for his signature. He laughed and slid it around to Harry, who signed it and slid it back.

  “We found the body of a young woman, a blonde. She was frozen to death in the snow. Naked, but wrapped up. No sign of sexual assault. Sound vaguely familiar? Can you give us any leads, Harry? Morgan says your Birgitta Ghiberti is in Sweden. And her son is on his way, today or tomorrow. We called on him after we found the girl and he offered to come down to the station. He acknowledged that his mother had given us cause for concern. He was very co-operative, but of course he knew nothing to help our inquiry. He seemed worried about Birgitta. When we told him she had turned up at a party in Stockholm, he didn’t seem relieved. That was the strange thing. Then when I told him you were already on your way, he did. Seem relieved.”

  “Sounds like my job’s redundant. They can connect without me.”

  “Too late, Harry. You’re in the middle. If he is a killer, she’s gravely at risk and so are you. You need to stop the killing. If he’s not a killer, you’re still vulnerable—did it ever occur to you she may take revenge on you for proving him innocent. Her consolation for being wrong. And remember, his concern for her may be genuine, even if he is—”

  “The killer.”

  “Aft
er all, she’s his mother. And if it is someone else, not him, that person may also decide to eliminate you for jeopardizing his criminous enterprise. Or if Bernd killed his sisters, but someone else killed—”

  “Enough, Miranda! It may seem Grand-Guignol from the cheap seats, but I’m part of the horror show on stage.”

  “Do the characters know they’re in a play?”

  “Not the play they’re in. Oh, for God’s sake, Miranda. We’re on long distance.”

  “Nobody calls it that anymore. So who are you working for, exactly?”

  “Depends on what I find.”

  “No conflict there, Harry.”

  “When did the girl die? You called me about a murder.”

  “You called me.”

  “When did you find her?”

  “January’s been a very cold month, even for January. No thaws. That would have helped. She was discovered under the snow in a cedar maze. A bunch of kids were digging a fort in the drifts. They didn’t call us until they’d recruited a few of their friends to help dig her out.”

  “So much for a pristine crime scene.”

  “Well, they churned up the snow quite a lot but …” For a moment he thought the line went dead.

  Lines don’t go dead any more, Harry.

  Miranda continued. “They found something very disturbing beside the corpse.” She paused again. “Your Möbius loop, Harry. They found your cashmere scarf.”

  “They what?”

  “They did.”

  Harry, that was careless.

  To lose it, yes. Not to leave it there. I didn’t.

  Convince your buddy, not me.

  “I didn’t notice it was missing, Miranda. I hadn’t been going out for the last few weeks.”

  “So, you think the person who tumbled you over the balcony planted the scarf?”

  “I tumbled myself, but yes, whoever shut me out in blizzard conditions took the bloody scarf, killed your girl, and wants to set me up, or at least force a connection between me and the crime.”

  “You believe it was Bernd?”

  “I do.”

  “He’ll come back to us, then. He doesn’t think we suspect him.”