rang and an awed voice announced that Herr Jonsson’s car was waiting. Three bellboys arrived to carry my two suitcases. The third tried to take my purse, which was admittedly large enough to warrant his interest, but I insisted on carrying it myself. In stately procession, amid ranks of bowing officialdom, we passed through the lobby. I loved it, especially when I caught a glimpse of Leif hiding behind a pillar, bent almost double in his attempt to look shorter. He rose to his full height, gaping, when he saw my entourage. I waved. A few discreet inquiries would tell him where I was going, but I figured it would take him a while to get on the trail. It was unlikely that he had a car, or he would have used it before this.
The chauffeur, a solemn middle-aged man, swept off his cap and handed me an envelope. I started to stuff it into my pocket. He frowned anxiously and said, ‘Please – read . . .’ So I did. The minuscule script covered the entire page; the text consisted solely of repetitive statements as to the reliability of Tomas and the happiness of Gus at my condescending to visit him.
The car lacked ostentatious gadgetry – TV sets, bars, and the like – but every appointment was of the best quality, and a pair of large baskets on the back seat showed that Gus had attempted to supply any missing amenities. As the car glided smoothly along the waterfront and across the bridge, I investigated the baskets. One was full of food – salads, sandwiches, and thermoses of various liquids from white wine to mineral water – enough to feed a dozen people. The other basket contained a mirror, several magazines in three languages, a jug of water with rose leaves floating in it (presumably for washing, since a towel was wrapped around it), a supply of hand cream and cold cream, a miniature tape player with a selection of tapes (Bach and Vivaldi), a book of crossword puzzles and a freshly sharpened pencil, and a guidebook entitled
By the time I had explored the baskets we were in the suburbs, heading northwest. I waited till the car stopped at a traffic signal before I banged on the glass. Tomas glanced back. I waved a sandwich at him. He smiled and shook his head. ‘Thank you. I have eaten.’ His voice came from over my head. As I might have expected, there was a speaker system between front and back seat.
I leaned back against the grey velvet upholstery and poured myself a glass of wine. The ride was so smooth that the pale gold liquid scarcely rippled when I placed the glass on the small table (rosewood, what else?) that unfolded from the armrest. I began to hope that Gus really was a cousin. Or that I could persuade him to adopt me. If I hadn’t already been in love with him, the contents of those baskets would have won my heart.
The guidebook told me little that I didn’t already know. I had looked up Karlsholm on a large-scale map at the museum that morning. It was too small to appear on the tourist map I had brought from Munich. It was in the country of Dalarna – Dalecarlia, Jambaraland of the sagas – haunting, musical names, like something out of Tolkien. After all, northern history and legendry had inspired much of
Karlsholm was off the beaten track, some miles northwest of the popular tourist centres around Lake Siljan. It had a lake of its own, though; on the large-scale map Lake Siljan looked artificially symmetrical, like a small blue coin. The guidebook Gus had supplied didn’t mention it, or the town, but there were references to the delightful folk costumes and customs, the crafts and the dances and the traditions of a past age lovingly preserved. Under the heading ‘Midsummer in Dalarna,’ the book waxed lyrical – cloudberries and cow horns, maypoles decked with wild flowers and birch branches, dancing to the sound of fiddles through the bright night hours of Midsummer’s Eve. That date was less than a week away. Maybe, if I could clean up the present mess, I would be able to celebrate the festival with Gus and the good villagers of Karlsholm. Footing it lightly around the maypole with a tall, handsome Swede . . .
If I could clean up the mess. With a sigh I closed the guidebook and turned my thoughts from cloudberries to crime. I had most of the information I needed now. The only question was what to do with it.
Once upon a time – in 1889, to be precise – a hardworking farmer dug up a fabulous ancient treasure – the Karlsholm chalice. I’m not talking about Viking loot; the chalice dates from the so-called Migration Period, three to four hundred years before the Vikings. It was an enormously wealthy era in Scandinavia. As one authority said, the whole period glitters with gold – gold ingots and bars, gold coins, neck rings, and collars. Most of it was buried and never retrieved, possibly because its owners failed to return from their next raid on the dying Roman Empire, whence much of the treasure had come in the form of loot or tribute or ransom. One estimate stuck in my mind – the amount of gold used in the famous
The
I felt fairly sure I was dealing with a parallel case. The Karlsholm chalice was found in 1889. Almost a hundred years later someone unearthed another object in the same field – a field belonging to Gustaf Jonsson. A farmer, less honest than the majority of his countrymen, or a professional archaeological thief, following up a clue – I might never know, and it wasn’t important. What was important was that the finder tried to sell his discovery to John, who enjoyed a certain reputation in his own slimy world.
I had never checked John’s professional qualifications (it would have been a little difficult, since I didn’t know his real name), but apparently he knew his subject well enough to have arrived at the same conclusion I had: Where there were two treasures, there might be more. Excavation of the site could produce a hoard like the one found in Sodermanland, which contained more than twelve kilos of gold. Naturally, the real value of ancient jewellery is considerably higher than the value of the gold itself – worth a little trouble on John’s part.
Investigating, he had learned that the site was owned by a wealthy, rigidly honest old gentleman who was disinclined to get matey with strangers. John’s reputed charm wouldn’t have the slightest effect on Gus. He had had to find another means of access – me. Anyone of Scandinavian descent is likely to have an ancestor named Johnson, or one of its variants.
John obviously knew a lot more about me than I knew about him. Since I had nothing to hide, my family history and connections would be easy to discover. So ‘Aunt Ingeborg’ had written to Gus, suggesting a meeting with her niece, and if I had gone to the hotel John selected for me, Gus would have called me. Except for the inconvenient demise of Aunt Ingeborg, I might have believed the story. She had been my great-aunt, actually, and an interfering old busybody. It would have been just like her to make appointments for me without bothering to ask whether I wanted to keep them. I had written to Mother about my intention of travelling to Sweden. There would have been time – barely enough time – for Ingeborg to notify Gus of my plans.
Once I was in residence at Gus’s home in Karlsholm, John would move in. I wondered how he had planned to do it. Surely not the hoary old car-breakdown trick; he was more inventive than that. It was all rather chancy, but that was typical of John. No doubt he had several tentative approaches worked out.
However, his informant had crossed him up, peddling the information in several markets simultaneously. One such market was the one run by the silhouette cutter. It was strange how drastically John’s disclosure had altered my impression of the little man, from that of a harmless eccentric to a figure of sinister villainy, snip-snipping away with his sharp-pointed scissors, reducing a human face to a flat black outline.
I wondered if it had occurred to John, as it had most certainly occurred to me, that the silhouette cutter might not be the only other source the informant had approached. The man who had socked John on the jaw, the mysterious person with the brown beard and hornrimmed glasses, might be another treasure hunter. John didn’t seem desperately worried about this character. I had never caught so much as a glimpse of him.
Then there was Leif. He seemed too naive and bumbling to be a professional criminal or a policeman. But he definitely wanted John, and not to buy him a schnapps. And what about the fat man with the whiskers, whom Leif claimed to have seen the previous night? For all I knew, every crook in Europe might be on my trail.
The others were more or less extraneous, at this point; one villain is one too many, and there was no question but that the silhouette cutter had spotted me. I remembered him sitting at the restaurant table, his grey head bent humbly over his work, his bright blades glinting. He had kept a copy of my portrait for himself. Perhaps one day it would adorn the wall in his private office, along with other black outlines commemorating victims. The silhouette he had given me might have an equally eerie significance – an omen, a warning to those who understood its dark meaning.
John’s consternation had unquestionably affected me. I have said John was a coward, who backed away from trouble with celerity and without hysterics. If the silhouette cutter scared him that much, I was scared too. And
