Lindstrom Alone Read online

  She glanced at him with scathing contempt, then gazed at the tangle of nails.

  “A rather unusual game, Mr. Lindstrom.”

  “Did you ask him about them directly? Maybe he has an explanation.”

  “I did. He stormed out and I haven’t seen him since.”

  “When was that?”

  “After the worst of the snow. We were housebound for a few hours. He waited until the airport was cleared this morning, and then he left.”

  “But you found them last summer?”

  “I did.”

  No further explanation. He continued, “No one noticed an accumulation of bodies.”

  “My son is not stupid,” she snapped.

  An odd reaction, Harry.

  Easy, Sailor. Let’s not rush to judgment.

  “From this pile, I’d say there must be quite a few,” said Harry. “What do the victims have in common, apart from clipped fingernails.”

  “They’re dead.”

  “Yes?”

  “They’re mostly blondes. Swedish, a few from Norway. Girls and young women, one or two a year, maybe three, frozen in the snow; not enough to attract much interest in a northern climate, not unusual enough to suggest a pattern.”

  “But you see a pattern.”

  “After I found this tin, I researched. I knew what I was looking for. I have a file. Mostly sad little stories culled from the Internet.”

  “There must have been autopsies, investigations?”

  “Cursory, at best. Deaths by misadventure, Mr. Lindstrom. No indication of laws being broken or criminal negligence, apart from stupidity on the part of the deceased for being caught out in bad weather.”

  “Maybe that’s all it was, they were caught out in bad weather.”

  She gave him a withering stare. He continued, struggling for clarity.

  “Surely discolouration on the fingers would have attracted attention.”

  “Look closely at those nails, Mr. Lindstrom. That is what you are paid to do.”

  Presumptuously bitchy, isn’t she?

  It wasn’t worth quibbling about.

  He poked at the nails, then picked up a small cluster again and pushed them around on his palm, examining them in the glare of a reading lamp. The sheared edges showed evidence of blackening. They had been painted after they had been cut. The corpses would have shown nothing more unusual than a recent manicure, which might or might not have been post mortem, there was no way of telling. Nothing to flag suspicion. And at the same time, as Harry observed these sad bits of bodily detritus that had been so meticulously altered, he felt a surge of nausea. What sort of demented artisan would pursue such ghoulish fastidious compulsive behaviour? If not evidence of homicide, the nails painted one by one, ten at a time, indicated a sickeningly disturbed psyche.

  “You found a tin of fingernails, and then you researched murder?”

  “It is not as strange as you seem to think, Professor. There was a death in Visby some years ago. The corpse had black smudges on her fingertips. A grisly detail that attracted little attention but it stayed in my mind.”

  “Visby?”

  “On Gotland, Mr. Lindstrom. The large island near Fårö. Visby is a medieval Swedish town with modern amenities. No one was ever caught for that first murder, but it was like the others that followed.”

  “But the others didn’t have blackened fingers.”

  “No.”

  “Causes of death the same?”

  “In each case, the girl was not dressed properly for the cold.”

  Murder by design, so to speak!

  “Were they sexually assaulted?” Karen was flippant; he, dead serious.

  “Oh, no. Not hurt in any way.”

  “Apart from being dead.”

  “Of course.”

  Harry gazed out at the fading winter scene framed by the grey folds of his open drapes. He wondered how many died of exposure each winter in Canada, not counting snowmobilers who seemed to have a fatal attraction for testing the limits of thin ice and live avalanches, and how many of those were young women?

  He picked up the tea box and held it so that light from the window illuminated the inside. There were still a few nails adhering to the metal. He tapped them loose on the table.

  “How do you know this macabre collection belongs to your son?”

  “It does.”

  “Mother’s intuition?”

  “My son has a history, Mr. Lindstrom.”

  “As do we all.”

  “Mr. Lindstrom?”

  Harry could hear Karen rumbling like static.

  “Are you suggesting he’s killed before?”

  “I am, Mr. Lindstrom. When he was a child.”

  “Ah,” said Harry. “Who did he kill the first time around?”

  “His three sisters.”

  Harry swallowed, and then he coughed and swallowed again.

  “At the same time?”

  “Separately.”

  “Do the police know?”

  “Your friend Superintendent Quin has a report. They decided not to lay charges.”

  She seemed clinically detached, which seemed monstrous. But what could possibly be appropriate?

  “Because they had no evidence,” he offered.

  “Because Bernd was very young and I was a grief-stricken single mother.”

  Harry was thrown by how she had displaced sorrow for the deaths of three children with bitterness toward their survivor. He was fascinated by the human need to make sense of the senseless, no matter what the cost. He wanted nothing to do with unnatural suspicions of murder and the deaths of children.

  Harry, don’t.

  Children should not die. And yet the ambiguity of evil attracted him. Birgitta Ghiberti was not in doubt about the guilt of her son but seemed as indifferent to his motives as she was to her own in wanting to find him culpable. The real mystery, he suspected, was not in her daughters’ deaths but in how their passing had shaped the lives of those left behind.

  This was too close to home. As Nietzsche had cautioned, when you look too closely into the abyss, the abyss looks into you. Harry took in a deep breath. “It’s all very haunting,” he said, “but I’m afraid I’ll have to decline. I hope you will convey my disinterest to your son.”

  He sat back in his chair. Karen sighed in relief.

  Birgitta Ghiberti taunted. “You are afraid?”

  “Not at all.”

  She seemed about to get up. Instead, she turned and reached deep into her handbag, pulling out a small zippered leather case. Harry reached over and took it when she handed it to him.

  “You asked me why I delayed confronting Bernd until now. Perhaps this will explain. My research was driven by curiosity until I found this. I couldn’t be sure. Now I am.”

  He turned the small case over in his hands, as if expecting it to be heavier. He recognized the Icelandic coat of arms emblazoned on the leather, loquacious with detail. Harry had holidayed in Iceland the previous summer.

  “Open it carefully,” she whispered imperiously. He caught the urgency and excitement in her voice.

  It was a manicure kit and lodged among the scissors and tweezers and file were ten more nails painted black on the inside curves. The colourless sheen on their outer contours made them seem alarmingly fresh, as if they had just been cut.

  Suddenly, the murders were as real as blood.

  His gut tightened; he felt sick and his breathing constricted. This is what drew Harry to murder; the horror, the thrill, the surprise. In a flash of fresh evidence, a mother’s grotesque suspicions had turned to fact. Old nails take on an opacity over the years but these were translucent. With no polish, offset by narrow bands of white, backed by black enamel, they seemed almost radiant. When he touched one, it was pliable. He could imagine the girl with the pared nails. Blonde, robust. And very dead.

  But why were these ones not polished when the others were? Why were they in a manicure case from Iceland, not the old tea box? Was the
killer shifting from Sweden to an equally cold and deadly venue?

  Iceland? Toronto?

  Harry had plunged into the story. He was suddenly caught up in the seductive ambiguities, the repulsive perversities, the nearness of death as an adversary, caught up in the challenges of an old-fashioned mystery with the horrific dimensions of a classical tragedy.

  “Mr. Lindstrom?” Birgitta intruded. “You’ll take the case?”

  “Was Bernd in Iceland recently?” Bernd was no longer the creation of his mother’s ghoulish obsession, he was real and a menace.

  “He was.”

  “I take it he was in each place where a body was found.”

  “He was. He visits Sweden two or three times each winter. We have relatives there.”

  “On Fårö?”

  “Yes. And of course he has friends in Stockholm.”

  “Friends?”

  “He is not a rampaging fiend, Mr. Lindstrom, striding through the land wreaking havoc. He is an educated man, quite gentle and good, for the most part, but he is on an insidious quest. We must stop him by making a case for the police—or by force. To do either, we must survive. Your friend Ms. Quin said you are a survivor. She suggested you can do things and go places the authorities can’t.”

  “Did she also suggest you should threaten me with death as an incentive.”

  “That was my own idea.”

  She’s good with the unexpected answers, Harry.

  Miranda described me as a survivor. As if surviving were an achievement.

  The ghost of Margaret Atwood haunts us both.

  “I’ll need to see your file,” he said. “I need more to go on than fingernail parings and a mother’s fear.”

  “A mother’s regret, Mr. Lindstrom. You cannot possibly know.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Good. That’s very good. Then you must see what I have gathered together, of course. How much for your retainer?”

  “Nothing. You pay me when you’re satisfied.”

  “Satisfied, Mr. Lindstrom?”

  “When we’re done, you pay what you think it’s been worth. Plus expenses.”

  “What it’s been worth, yes of course.”

  The woman’s face seemed devoid of emotion. He wondered what feelings were suppressed and what had died with the deaths of her children, with the conviction that her son was a killer.

  Harry rose to his feet. Birgitta Ghiberti leaned forward and scooped the fingernails back into her tea box. She placed it and the black leather kit back in her purse as if they were priceless artifacts. Harry felt strangely embarrassed for her as he reached across the table to help her up, then he led her toward the door. She gave him a card with her home address in the affluent Rosedale neighbourhood.

  They arranged to meet the next day at her place. Harry wanted to check in with Miranda first and take a look at the police dossier on the deaths of the three sisters.

  He handed Birgitta a card of his own from the foyer table. She held it to the light. “Lindstrom and Malone, Detective Agency.” She hesitated, as if trying to decipher an underlying message. Then her eyes widened and she smiled. “Lindstromalone.com. Your life in an email address. Malone was your wife, she is gone. You are alone.”

  It wasn’t a question. Harry didn’t respond.

  “Do not be too sad, Mr. Lindstrom.”

  Speak for yourself, lady.

  “Call me Harry,” he said.

  “Birgitta.”

  Harry could feel Karen glowering.

  “I’m glad you will help me, Harry.” Birgitta Ghiberti tilted her head like a young woman. “You need to understand I am genuinely afraid of my son.”

  Because you’ve spawned a monster?

  Because you’ve uncovered his ghoulish secrets?

  Because you’ve betrayed him?

  Because you’ve brought Harry on-board to scuttle him?

  Harry could hear Karen’s words like a protracted death rattle. He found them curiously reassuring.

  “Noon, then,” he said.

  “Noon,” she repeated. “That’s fine.”

  He ushered her out the door and closed it. He didn’t wait for the elevator. The condo was his home, not the building. He listened as a soft shuddering reverberated through the walls, and then he settled onto the sofa where she had been sitting and gazed out at the evening sky.

  She knows I won’t ever be back, you know.

  I don’t imagine she cares.

  He turned on the CBC. He’d given up his boycott over Barbara Budd being taken off As It Happens because his absence went unnoticed. Even though he was tuned to Radio One, it was only music. He turned it off.

  He needed to go for the walk he’d been planning when Birgitta Ghiberti intruded. He liked walking in the dark. He and Karen used to take night-walks along the Sanctuary Line when the kids were small, towing them asleep in their sleds over furls of snow. Sometimes on his walks along the Toronto waterfront, where the city lights were obscured by the city itself, he could see the stars over Lake Ontario. He could feel himself out among them, he could see so much farther than in the daylight, he could see out to the beginnings of the universe and stroll disembodied through a provisional version of eternity.

  He stopped in front of the hall mirror. His reflection glowered back at him, contemplating the deep brown eyes that stared fixedly into his own. Like cracked amber, Karen had described them. Her eyes were green and brown and golden.

  Birgitta’s were blue, like cornflowers.

  She’s very beautiful, Harry. She makes me think of the other Bergman. Ingmar, not Ingrid. Windswept islands, windswept soul. Go for a walk, I’m staying by the fire.

  There was no fireplace.

  He slipped on his sheepskin coat and put on the cashmere scarf that Karen had stitched into a Möbius loop and closed the front door behind him without locking it. She would have to make do with a hot bath and he would return to the lingering scent of lilacs.

  He felt curiously content. He felt in no danger at all.

  2 POLICE HEADQUARTERS

  DURING THE NIGHT THE AIR TURNED COLD AND THE SNOW didn’t melt. Harry woke up reluctantly and let his arm fall across the other side of the bed where the comforter lay undisturbed. He struggled for a moment to orient himself in the present and his dreams crumbled, leaving him anxious and confused.

  He had stayed awake almost until dawn, conjuring with Birgitta Ghiberti’s story, trying to turn it into a coherent narrative. Harry liked things to be coherent. As he stared out over the harbour, Aristotle and Oedipus shouldered their way into his mind. Neither was very good company. But if Aristotle could conduct a rational exploration of murder and sexuality, of suffering, revelation, betrayal and retribution, then Harry could, as well.

  The difference was that Harry lived in an ironic world not an iconic one. He wasn’t a dead Greek nor obsessed with illusions of objectivity. He yearned for cleansing on a personal level, an expunging of pity and fear that would purify his own damaged soul.

  He was attracted to the Ghibertis to salve his wounds. Karen felt sorry for him. That made him angry.

  By the first glimmer of morning, he had decided if Birgitta Ghiberti were truly in danger since confronting her son, he was ethically obliged to help her. If he were in danger himself, he was reluctantly obliged to evade being collateral damage. If young women were dying, he was morally obliged to stop a serial killer. And amidst all the depravity of the dysfunctional Ghibertis, he might find something redeeming, ennobling, cathartic.

  How very Aristotelian.

  We’re all Greeks in the end.

  Philosophers invariably take refuge from life in ancient Greece, dear Harry, among the market stalls and naked wrestlers of Athens.

  Harry had never considered himself a philosopher. He had been a teacher and a thinker—philosophy was something he did, not something he was.

  As Wittgenstein explained it, philosophy was an activity, a fact in itself. It was a movement toward clarity not a state
of affairs to be studied.

  Forget the intellectual stuff, Harry. A tea box of meticulously blackened fingernails reduces classical tragedy and high thoughts of redemption to the sordidly squalid and irreducibly ordinary.

  While he was dressing, Harry paused for a moment to contemplate a box of a different sort on top of the dresser. It was a fine piece of antique Japanese lacquerware they had picked up in a flea market in England. During the dry winter before the accident, as police defined it, a fine crack had appeared on the surface and they sent it out for expert repair. The elderly man who fixed the box, a refugee from Southeast Asia, did such a good job it appeared flawless. He brought it to Harry in the hospital and refused payment. Now it held only one item, Karen’s battered silver wedding band, returned to him from the mortuary.

  Harry took the subway to police headquarters on College Street. He detested subways. There was something unnatural about hurtling through tunnels gouged out of the darkness that separated places they were intended to join. Whole neighbourhoods were erased from public consciousness because people travelled under them, and the shudder and screech of the rolling stock made people forget where they were. He preferred Toronto’s lumbering streetcars, especially after a heavy snowfall when the world looked new and pedestrians had finally succumbed to bundling up for the season. But the lines were laid out on a lateral bias, mostly parallel to the lake, and he was going north.

  Harry emerged into the cold and trudged through uncleared snow that squeaked under his boots. He gazed up at the pink granite and blue glass exterior of the police building, captivated by its monumental display of angles and planes.

  The police headquarters had curb appeal; it played to the emotions with a fake flowing stream and a fractured façade. Not, perhaps, so extravagant in personality as the new extension to the Royal Ontario Museum, with the wondrous absurdity of its helter-skelter angles and vertiginous planes of glass jutting out over the pavement, but an estimable renegade, nonetheless.

  “Liberating, isn’t it?” He had spoken out loud.

  Harry, Karen hissed.

  He could hear the exasperation.