Free The Ice Cage — A Scandinavian Crime Thriller set in the Nordic Winter (The Baltic Trilogy) by Olivier Nilsson-Julien

place with our brandy - boosted hot chocolate s, b ut 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 t here wer e literally thousands of island s . 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 h ave any favourite spots – h e went with the wind and the weather. F inding my father’s GPS cam era was more crucial than ever, but t here 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 i mpor tant 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?

 
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    I called Carrie from the house to update her on my latest expeditio n. She was getting impatient, wondering w hat the hell I was doing. When I t ried to explain that I was looking for a girl my father had known , she said I needed to get my priorities right. Yes, m y father was dead, but she was about to give birth ! I said I was really sorry and that I would come home as soo n 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 pul led herself together again, Carrie asked what I thought had happened to Anna.
    ‘ Probably gone to London as Thor originally said. ’
    ‘ Y ou 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 f or 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 privat e 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.
    N othing 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 t here boss ing her around. I would have been forced to a pologise profusely . She would have lost her thread and started from the beginning again. A t her pace. So w hen 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 excitemen t? Maybe I’d underestimated her. M aybe she did have a second gear after all. I guess I should have been