Found Wanting

THIRTY-FIVE

Helsinki was white from recent snowfall, the shoreline dividing the city from the snow-carpeted sea ice hard to discern. The sky was a featureless dome of bruised cloud. There were no shadows in the thin winter light. Even sounds were subdued in the Finnish winter morning. The Gabriella docked at ten. By 10.30 Eusden and Pernille Madsen had checked into the Grand Marina Hotel, a stylishly converted warehouse a short distance from the Viking Line terminal. Waiting for them there was Mjollnir’s man on the scene, Osmo Koskinen.

He was seventy or so, with a sad, drooping face and rheumy eyes offset by an eager smile. He had grey, slicked-down hair and a bowed air of lifelong dutifulness. His flapping brown suit appeared to date from a time when he had carried more weight. This, his pasty complexion and a faint tremor in his hands and voice implied he might not be in the best of health. Nevertheless, as a former senior employee of Mjollnir’s Finnish subsidiary, he was, Eusden assumed, deemed to be the perfect combination of detachment and reliability required for the job in hand.

Koskinen lightly acknowledged as much over coffee in Pernille’s harbour-facing suite. ‘Birgitte Grøn has asked me to look after you, Ms Madsen. And you also, Mr Eusden. I am retired now, but Mjollnir still use me for… special business… from time to time. I do not know what dealings they have had with the people you will meet later. I do not need to know. But I have made all the arrangements Birgitte asked me to make. First, though, my apologies. You should be staying at the Kämp. It is Helsinki’s finest and most historic hotel. And I should be showing you the sights of the city. I have lived here all my life. But they tell me we must be… discreet. A hotel near the ferry terminal and no unnecessary movement. Those were my instructions. So, I am sorry. But I fixed it like I was told.’

‘Don’t worry about it, Hr Koskinen,’ said Pernille, gazing past him through the window. ‘We’re not here to enjoy ourselves.’

‘No. It’s a pity. But I understand.’

‘What are the arrangements?’ asked Eusden.

‘Of course. The arrangements. The payment will be made in US dollar bearer bonds. I do not know the value. Again, I do not need to know. I will collect them from the bank Birgitte is using at two this afternoon. I will deliver them to you here at two thirty. They will be in a secure combination-locked case. The exchange will take place at three thirty at my house in Munkkiniemi. The address is Luumitie twenty-seven. I have marked it for you.’ Koskinen spread out a street map of Helsinki on the table between them. A red X marked the spot in a north-western suburb. ‘This is where we are now.’ He pointed to the location of the hotel, out on the Katajanokka peninsula, on the other side of the city. ‘Erik Lund is supplying security and a lawyer to supervise the exchange. His name is Juha Matalainen. He will travel with you. The combination of the case will be phoned through to him when you have inspected the material delivered by the other side, Mr Eusden. Ms Madsen will take charge of the material. The other side will take their money. The exchange will be complete. Everyone leaves.’ He smiled. ‘Then I will return home and cook my dinner.’

‘It’s kind of you to let your house be used for this,’ said Pernille.

‘Oh, I am pleased to help. It is really Mjollnir’s house, to tell the truth. I would probably be in a one-room apartment if they had not been so… generous to me. A good employer is as important as a good wife, they…’ Koskinen broke off, apparently reflecting on Pernille’s status as his former boss’s former spouse. He coughed awkwardly. ‘Well, there it is. Everything should be… very straightforward.’

‘Exactly what sort of security is… Erik Lund… laying on?’ asked Eusden, catching Pernille’s eye. She seemed amused by Koskinen’s discomfiture.

‘Enough, Mr Eusden, I assure you. You will be able to see for yourself when you arrive at the house.’

‘I’m sure it’ll be more than enough,’ said Pernille. ‘These people only want the money, after all.’

‘Yes.’ Koskinen smiled. ‘Exactly.’

‘And until two thirty?’

‘I have to ask you to stay here, Ms Madsen. Your husband – I mean, Hr Aksden – is in the city. Birgitte told me we must… be careful.’

‘Of course.’

‘But there is a trip for you to take, Mr Eusden.’

‘Really?’

‘Matalainen’s office. To sign a… confidentiality agreement. To say you will… never talk about the material you will see this afternoon.’

‘Is that necessary?’ asked Pernille. There was an edge of irritation in her voice.

Koskinen gestured helplessly with his hands. ‘It is not my decision. Do you… object, Mr Eusden?’

‘What if I do?’

‘Then we have… a problem.’

Eusden took a slow walk to the window and back to mull the point over. The reason Birgitte Grøn had said nothing about such a formality was obvious. The less warning he had, the less likely he was to argue. Once the material was in Mjollnir’s hands, nothing he said about it could be proven anyway, even supposing he gleaned anything at all from letters written in Danish, which was doubtful in the extreme. His signature on a piece of paper was more or less irrelevant. A refusal to supply it would only complicate matters that all concerned wanted to keep as uncomplicated as possible.

‘Do we have a problem, Mr Eusden?’

‘No, no. I’ll sign on the dotted line. When’s Matalainen expecting me?’

The answer was that Koskinen proposed to take Eusden to Matalainen’s office straight away. He said he would wait for him in reception and took his leave.

‘Birgitte should have told me about this,’ said Pernille as soon as the door had closed behind him.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Eusden, finishing his coffee. ‘What matters is that the handover goes smoothly. The set-up sounds good to me. What do you think?’

‘Yes. It sounds good.’

‘So, I’m the lucky one. I get a morning stroll while you stay cooped up here.’

‘Call me when you get back. I’m going to take a bath. It’ll help me stay calm.’ She sighed and ran her fingers down over her face. ‘I think I might need to get drunk tonight, Richard. Want to join me?’

Eusden smiled. ‘It’s a date.’

It was a short taxi-ride from the hotel into the city centre. Koskinen plied Eusden with a tourist commentary as they went. ‘Uspenski Orthodox Cathedral.’ (Eusden gazed up at snow-capped onion domes.) ‘The presidential palace.’ (They passed a colonnaded and pedimented mansion.) ‘Senate Square.’ (Another cathedral, Lutheran this time, loomed wedding-cake white above them.) ‘The Bank of Finland.’ (More colonnaded grandeur.) ‘Most of what you see was built when Finland was under Russian rule, Mr Eusden. In little more than a hundred years after taking over from the Swedes, they gave us a city to be proud of. What did we do to thank them? Revolt as soon as we could after they deposed the Tsar. Clever, no?’

‘Very. And I gather Saukko Bank have maintained the tradition.’

‘What… do you mean?’

‘Dealing cleverly with Russia.’

‘Ah, yes, I suppose… you could say that.’

‘Isn’t that why Tolmar Aksden bought them out? To acquire their Russian holdings?’

‘I… do not know. It-’ Koskinen looked round with grateful alacrity as the taxi drew to a halt. ‘Ah, we are here.’ He opened his door and climbed out.

Eusden exited on the offside, checking for traffic as he did so. There was none close behind. The nearest vehicle, another taxi, was still some way off, driving slowly. He glanced towards it as he slammed the door and rounded the boot. The passenger was sitting in the front. His eyes met Eusden’s in an instant of recognition. Then he looked away and said something to the driver, who flicked on his indicator and turned abruptly right.

Eusden heard Koskinen shout to him as he ran towards the side street. Pursuit was futile, he knew, but the knowledge did not stop him. What did was skidding on a patch of ice that had spread around a pipe draining a roof somewhere above him. He hit the pavement with a shoulder-jarring thump that set his head wound throbbing. By the time he had recovered his senses and picked himself up, the taxi was taking another right at the far end of the side street, its brake lamps blinking fuzzily red in the thin grey light.

‘Are you all right, Mr Eusden?’ Koskinen panted as he caught up.

‘Yes. I… thought I recognized the passenger in the taxi.’

‘What taxi?’

‘The one that just…’ Koskinen’s uncomprehending gaze did not encourage fuller explanation. What would he say, after all – what could he say – if Eusden put a name to the face he had glimpsed? The presence of Lars Aksden in Helsinki was disturbing enough. The fact that he had been following them moved beyond disturbing into downright sinister. But what did it mean? What did it portend? All Eusden was sure of in that instant was that Osmo Koskinen would be of no help in finding out. ‘Never mind. I must’ve been mistaken. Let’s go in.’

THIRTY-SIX

Juha Matalainen’s office was a shrine to Finnish minimalism, with a wide-windowed view of surrounding roofs and a narrow glimpse of the domes of the Lutheran Cathedral. Matalainen himself was kitted out in slim-lapelled chocolate-brown suit and collarless cream shirt. He was a lean, angular man with tight-cropped dark hair and a beard reduced to virtual pencil lines around his jaw and mouth. His gaze was steady and curious and had rested on Eusden for several minutes on end.

Eusden had supposedly spent those minutes perusing the tersely worded confidentiality agreement Matalainen had slid across the flawless surface of his desk for him to sign. The English version was flanked by one in Danish and one in Finnish. The agreement amounted to an undertaking never to disclose to any third party any information which he came into possession of at Luumitie 27, 00330 Helsinki, Finland, on this twelfth day of February, 2007. It had taken him only a few seconds to establish that much. His thoughts had then drifted to the host of questions raised by his sighting of Lars Aksden in the street below. And it was anxious contemplation of those that no doubt caused him to frown and shake his head.

‘Is there a problem, Mr Eusden?’ Matalainen asked.

‘What?’

‘A problem? With the agreement?’

‘No. I…’ Eusden raised an apologetic hand. ‘Sorry. I just…’ He exerted himself to focus his thoughts. ‘The agreement’s fine. I’m happy to sign it.’ Then some instinct told him not to be too cooperative. ‘I can’t read Danish, of course.’

‘I assure you they are exact translations.’ Matalainen’s gaze narrowed as the point struck home. ‘Surely you can’t read Finnish either, Mr Eusden.’

‘No. I can’t.’

‘But you specified Danish.’

‘I wasn’t talking about these documents. I meant the ones we’ll be collecting later. They’re all in Danish. So, how could I learn anything from them I might reveal later? The agreement caters for an impossible contingency.’

Matalainen smiled thinly. ‘In that case you lose nothing by signing it.’

Eusden returned the smile. ‘Quite so.’ He picked up the proffered pen and signed.

Koskinen added his signature as witness. Matalainen gathered up the trilingual versions of the documents, gave Eusden a copy and stood up, signalling that their meeting was at an end. ‘Näkemiin, Mr Eusden,’ he said, extending a hand and bowing faintly. ‘I’ll see you later.’

‘Matalainen reminds me of my dentist,’ said Koskinen as they descended in the lift.

‘You should change your dentist.’

‘Ah, no. He is very efficient. I just don’t want to go fishing with him. But I always need a drink after visiting him. You want one?’

‘I want several. But one will do.’

Koskinen took him to the Café Engel on Senate Square. Their window table kept the Lutheran cathedral in view, this time front-on across the snow-covered square. Trams rattled by in the street. Early lunchers maintained a jumble of conversation.

‘Kippis,’ said Koskinen, starting on his beer. ‘Your good health, Mr Eusden.’

‘Call me Richard. How long have you worked – did you work – for Mjollnir, Osmo?’

‘Not so long really. They bought me with VFG Timber. But they were good to me. Another company might have… moved me on.’

‘So, Tolmar Aksden’s a good man to work for?’

‘He asks for a lot. He gives a lot.’

‘You got to know him well?’

‘Not well, Richard, no. He has a saying: “Don’t bring your family to work.” He never brought his. Besides, he was most of the time in Copenhagen.’

‘Ever meet his brother Lars?’

‘No. I have heard about him. He paints, I think. But, no, I have never met him.’

‘Would you know him if you saw him?’

Koskinen frowned. Eusden’s line of questioning was beginning to puzzle him. ‘Probably not.’

‘Have you seen Tolmar during his latest visit to Helsinki?’

‘No. He has been very busy, according to the newspapers. That is all I know now I am retired: what I read in the papers.’

‘And what do you read about him?’

‘Oh, there are some messy politics now he has brought Saukko Bank. They are full of it.’

‘What do they say?’

Koskinen’s smile was more of a wince. He had been drawn into a subject he was clearly uncomfortable with. ‘It looks like not everybody is happy with the scale of Saukko’s Russian investments now the takeover has brought them to their attention. Commercially smart, but politically… sensitive.’ He shrugged and took a swig of beer, then glanced through the window, squinting as if focusing on something in the distance. ‘We Finns always worry about Russia. Either it is too strong or too weak. But always it is our neighbour.’ He looked back at Eusden. ‘Excuse me, Richard. This talk of weakness has gone to my bladder.’

Koskinen rose with a scraping of his chair, and ambled off to the loo, leaving Eusden to dwell once more on the mystery of Lars Aksden’s presence in Helsinki. Should he tell Pernille? The moment of decision was fast approaching. He was also aware he needed to phone in some fresh – or warmed-over – excuse for his no-show at the Foreign Office now a new working week had begun, though his life there felt more like a false memory of someone else’s. In search of distraction, he grabbed an abandoned newspaper from an adjacent table.

Helsingin Sanomat forecast minus temperatures in double figures and cloudy conditions for Helsinki. ‘Great,’ Eusden muttered to himself, leafing through page after page of impenetrable Finnish headlines. ‘Just great.’ Then he saw the magic word: Mjollnir. And then…

A photograph adjoining an article in the business section of the paper analysing, as far as he could tell, Mjollnir’s performance since its takeover of Saukko Bank, showed two smiling besuited captains of commerce in a wood-panelled conference room. The caption beneath identified them as Arto Falenius and…Tolmar Aksden.

Falenius was a debonair middle-aged figure in pinstripes, with a spotted tie and a matching handkerchief billowing from his breast pocket, greying hair worn daringly long, handsome face tanned enough to suggest he spent a sizeable chunk of the Nordic winter in sunnier climes. His status was unclear to Eusden. Saukko’s CEO, perhaps, celebrating a synergetic merger? The photograph might not be contemporary, of course. It could easily date from the previous autumn.

There was certainly no doubt, however, that Aksden was the dominant partner. He was taller than Falenius by several inches, older by a couple of decades and altogether more serious. His suit and tie were unpatterned, his smile cooler, his gaze harder. There was a bulk about him, of muscle and intellect. He looked a lot like his brother, but without as many visible ravages of self-indulgence. Instead, there was calmness and certainty in his face, confidence edged with something like defiance in his expression. Or was it contempt? Yes. There was a hint of that in his bearing and demeanour: an ingrained knowledge of his own superiority.

A movement at the door suddenly caught Eusden’s eye. He looked up just in time to see Koskinen exiting the café, shrugging on the overcoat he had retrieved from the hatstand as he went. He moved fast, without looking back.

‘Osmo!’ Eusden called. But he was too late. The door had already closed. He stood up, baffled and dismayed. What was the fellow playing at? He headed after him.

But the waiter intercepted, clutching the bill. There was a flurry of confusion and misunderstanding. Eusden wasted precious minutes offering Danish, then Swedish, kroner in payment before pulling out some euros. By the time he reached the street, Koskinen had vanished. He swore, loudly enough to offend a woman walking by, and asked himself again what Koskinen’s game could possibly be. His behaviour was inexplicable.

Then Eusden remembered him looking out of the window just before excusing himself. What had he been looking at? The cathedral was the obvious answer. It dominated the view across the square. Had someone on the steps leading up to it signalled to him? Had the time shown on its clock triggered his move?

In one sense, it did not matter. The fact was that he had gone. Eusden shivered, realizing as the chill bit into him that he had left his coat in the café. He turned back.

A man was standing directly in his path dressed in a black cap and dark casual clothes. He was tall and muscular and stony-faced. For a second, Eusden gaped at him. And the man stared expressionlessly back. Eusden heard a vehicle pull up at the kerb next to him, skidding in the ice-clogged gutter. Then the man kneed him in the groin with such force that he doubled up, his eyes misting with pain. He was seized about the shoulders. A heavy hand descended on to his neck. He was pushed and pulled backwards, his heels dragging on the pavement.

Suddenly, he was on the floor of a Transit van, the door sliding shut as it accelerated away. There were two men above and around him, lurching with the motion of the van. He heard the sound of tape being peeled from a roll. He tried to sit up, but was shoved back down. His hands were yanked round behind him. The tape was wound tightly round them and his ankles simultaneously. Within seconds, he was trussed and helpless.

‘For God’s sake,’ he gasped. ‘What do you-’ Then a strip of tape was slapped over his mouth as well.

‘Change of plan, Mr Eusden.’ Eusden twisted in the direction the voice had come from and saw Erik Lund smiling at him through the grille from the passenger seat. ‘For you.’ He felt something sharp jab into his left arm. ‘My advice is to stop struggling.’

Eusden had no intention of taking Lund’s advice. But within seconds he had no choice in the matter. The jolting of the van merged with waves of wooziness that swept into his brain. The figures around him blurred into monochrome – then merged into blackness.

THIRTY-SEVEN

For a second, when he woke, Eusden believed he was in bed at home in London, the pounding in his head and the stiffness in his limbs attributable to a serious hangover. But no. Reality pounced on his thoughts with the force of a nightmare. He was still in the van, alone now, alone and cold and enveloped in darkness.

A trace of light was seeping in from somewhere, however, enough to cast shadows within the van. He crawled on to his knees and looked about him as best he could. A shutter was rattling somewhere outside the vehicle, but no other sound reached him. How long he had been wherever he was he had no way of knowing. His wristwatch was out of sight. Why he had been left there was equally impenetrable. ‘Change of plan for you,’ Lund had said, as if this had always been the plan as far as Mjollnir were concerned. Koskinen’s behaviour confirmed as much. A trap had been laid for him. But why?

He had to break free. For the moment, that was all he could think of. A conjunction of shadows towards the front of the van revealed a tear of some kind in one corner of the grille sealing off the cab. He worked his way over for a closer look. The frame was dented and several wires had sprung out of their sockets. The loose ends were stiff and sharp. He turned round, stretched his arms up behind him and felt one of the wires against the heel of his hand. He manoeuvred so that it snagged on the tape, then sawed away until the tape split.

Within a couple of minutes, he had released his hands. He teased the strip off his mouth, sat down and peered at his watch. It was a few minutes past two. Koskinen should be in the process of collecting the caseload of bearer bonds around now. He must already have given Pernille some cooked-up explanation of Eusden’s disappearance. He felt in his pocket for his phone. But they had taken it. No surprise, really. He unwound the strips binding his ankles and prised at the handle of the side door. Locked. That was no surprise either. He stood up and moved to the rear doors. Also locked. There was no way out. He thumped pointlessly at the nearest door panel, then lowered himself to the floor, flexing fruitlessly at the handle as he sat there, staring glumly into the shadows. God, it was cold. Did Lund mean him to freeze to death?

As much to warm himself as with any realistic hope of getting out that way, he went back to the dented grille and tried to pull it further loose. No more wires budged. Apart from a gash to his finger, he achieved nothing. He slumped down on the floor, sucking the wound, cursing Lund and Birgitte Grøn – and Marty for dragging him into all this.

Unmeasured minutes passed while he contemplated the horrifying nature of his plight. The invisible shutter went on rattling. The cold began to gnaw at him. He started to shiver. ‘Fucking hell, Marty,’ he said aloud, ‘how could you-’

A sound deeper and farther away than the rattling shutter reached his ears. It was a car engine. It stopped and was succeeded by a burble of human voices. There was the creak of a door opening. The light strengthened marginally. Through the grille and the windscreen beyond, he could see shadows moving on a brick wall. A switch was flicked and a fluorescent lamp pulsed into life overhead. A key turned in the rear door of the van. One of them swung open. Then the other.

Eusden blinked as his eyes adjusted to the harshness of the light. A squat, bull-necked, shaven-headed man in jeans and windcheater stared in at him. Then another man appeared at his shoulder: taller and thinner, dressed in a dark overcoat with the collar pulled up. He had a round, soft-featured face, a mop of ginger hair shot with silver and matching stubble round his fleshy jaw. His small blue-green eyes studied Eusden through circular-lensed glasses.

‘You’re Eusden?’ His voice was pure west-coast American.

‘Yes.’

‘Let’s get the party going, then. Come on out.’ His squat companion took something from inside his windcheater and pointed it at Eusden: a gun. ‘We’re not about to take no for an answer.’

The two men stepped back as Eusden stood up slowly, moved to the end of the van and climbed out. They were in some kind of workshop, sealed by a ceiling-high shutter-door and a smaller wicket-door set within it. There were no windows, just three blank walls, along one of which ran a bare bench. A third man was leaning against the bench, staring, like his companions, at Eusden. He was tall and heavily built, with black hair and beard, a hawkish nose and dark, simmering gaze. He wore a long black leather coat and was chewing gum vigorously. Beside him, on the bench, stood Clem’s attaché case.

‘Who are you people?’ Eusden asked, looking straight at the chatty one and trying not to sound as frightened as he really was.

‘I’m Brad. The guy with the gun is Gennady. The guy with the gum – who also has a gun, by the way – is Vladimir. Sorry I couldn’t keep the alliteration going. They speak English when they need to, but they usually communicate in other ways.’

‘What do you want?’

‘You, sport. The guy who offed our very good buddies Ilya and Yuri a few nights back.’

‘That was an accident.’

‘You’re probably right. You don’t look capable of getting the better of them. And Yuri? He was always a hell-rider. But let’s not allow the facts to get in the way of a good grudge. There’s nothing Gennady would like better than putting a bullet in your brain – after kicking the shit out of you. A friend dies. A stranger pays. Old Ukrainian tradition. That’s where they’re from. They always like me to point out that they’re not actually Russian. They just look and sound as if they are. And get tetchy when they haven’t swallowed a gallon of vodka recently. For the record, they’re stone cold sober today. Draw your own conclusions. While you’re at it, tell me what your role is in Mjollnir’s organization.’

‘I don’t have one.’

‘Why’d you come to Helsinki, then?’

‘They blackmailed me.’

‘Ah, right. So, what did they say they wanted you to do? I’m assuming they didn’t mention they were planning to hand you over to us.’

‘I was to… authenticate the letters.’ Eusden nodded towards the attaché case.

‘Strictly non-essential, sport. We faxed them copies of the whole lot. But I guess it sounded plausible to you. Fact is, though, we stipulated your head on a platter plus the big fat pay-off right from the get-go. And they never batted an eyelid. I got the feeling they didn’t mind us rubbing you out one little bit. Now, why might that be?’

‘They seem to think I know too much.’

‘What about?’

‘Tolmar Aksden.’

‘Ah. The Invisible Man. Well, do you?’

‘I know he has a secret.’

‘Don’t we all?’

‘Mjollnir want his kept quiet at any cost.’

‘Of course they do. That’s why they’re buying it from us at a price that makes it well worth our trouble cutting out the original buyer and compensates us for leaving twenty million kroner blowing in the Copenhagen wind, not to mention Ilya and Yuri splattered across an unlovely stretch of highway. So, working on the basis that it might, just might, persuade us not to kill you, why don’t you tell us what that secret is?’

‘You must know if you have the letters.’

‘Well, there’s the weirdest thing. I never did learn Danish while I was growing up in California. Spanish, right on. French and Italian? I can get by. I’ve even picked up enough Russian to understand Vladimir’s jokes on those rare occasions when he cracks one. But Danish? Somehow I let it slip past me. Careless, I know. But that’s the way it is.’

‘We should have kept Olsen alive,’ Vladimir growled.

Brad grinned. ‘Don’t you just love an after-the-event wise guy? Bet you’re wondering who Olsen was, sport, so I’ll put you out of your misery. He was our original buyer’s very own Danish representative. We were hired for the hands-on side of things. When we decided to sound out Mjollnir as an alternate buyer, Olsen tried to phone his boss. We had to cut him off, if you know what I mean. Unfortunately, he hadn’t quite got round to telling us what the letters were all about when that happened, so we’re… looking to you to fill us in.’

Eusden swallowed hard. Making the little he knew about the contents of the letters sound tantalizing enough to persuade them to let him live was a next to impossible task. But it was his only hope. ‘They chronicle the early life of Tolmar Aksden’s father, Peder, on a farm in Jutland.’

‘A farm in Jutland, huh?’ sneered Brad. ‘Why isn’t my pulse racing at the thought?’

‘I can’t read Danish either. But I know Tolmar’s secret has something to do with… Anastasia.’

‘Really? You’re sure he’s not Elvis Presley in disguise? The age would be about right.’

‘I don’t pretend to understand it. But it’s true.’

‘You’re saying Tolmar Aksden is related somehow to the daughter of the last Tsar?’

‘Yes.’

‘The one some mad old bat made a small fortune out of claiming to be?’

‘Anna Anderson. Yes.’

‘Anna Anderson. That’s right. Didn’t I catch some crappy mini-series about her on cable a few years back? Jane Seymour in the title role, maybe?’

‘Jane Seymour,’ said Gennady, sounding cheered by the mention of the name. ‘Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman. I love her.’

Brad rolled his eyes. ‘You know what? We don’t have time for this, we really don’t. Anastasia doesn’t push any buttons for me, sport. I think we’ll bypass the kicking-the-shit-out-of-you phase and cut straight to the bullet in the brain.’ His affable features suddenly twisted into something tight and vicious. He pulled a gun out of his coat pocket, stepped forward and pointed it at Eusden’s head. ‘Now is the moment to give me one good reason not to pull this trigger. Believe me, there won’t be another.’

‘F-Fingerprints.’ Eusden heard the stammer in his voice from some strange detached place where death was imminent and imaginable and not quite the disabling horror he had always supposed it would seem in such a situation. ‘You should have… found a set amongst the letters.’

Brad shook his head slowly and emphatically. ‘No fingerprints.’

‘They must be there.’

‘But they’re not.’

‘Hidden in the case maybe.’

‘Check it out, Vlad.’ Vladimir opened the case and turned it over. The letters fell out on to the bench and slewed across it. ‘Whose fingerprints are we looking for, sport?’

‘Anastasia’s. Taken in 1909, when she was eight years old. I’m in contact with a genealogist from Virginia who’s bought a set of Anna Anderson’s prints, taken in 1938. If they match, it would prove she really was Anastasia.’

Vladimir was tapping the case and peering at it like a sceptical theatre-goer invited to inspect the conjurer’s top hat. ‘Nichivo,’ he muttered, which Eusden suspected meant Nothing in Russian or Ukrainian – or both.

‘The proof would be worth a lot of money,’ Eusden pressed on, willing Brad to listen to him – and to believe him. ‘It’d be a worldwide sensation. You could name your own price.’

‘Sounds great. Just a pity we don’t have that proof.’

‘It’s got to be there somewhere. Let me look.’

‘Stay where you are. Vlad?’

Vladimir had laid the case on the bench and was prodding at the insides of the lid and base. He shook his head ominously.

‘It’s looking bad for you, sport.’

‘For God’s sake, let me-’

‘Wait,’ said Vladimir. ‘I think, yes, I think there is something.’ He flicked a knife out of his pocket and cut a slit in the lining of the lid. A creamy white envelope slid out into the body of the case. He stared down at it in a mixture of awe and amazement. Then, slowly and deliberately, he crossed himself.

‘What the hell is it?’

‘Tsarski piriot.’

‘What?’

‘See.’ Vladimir held up the envelope. The front was blank. But when he turned it round, there, clearly visible, embossed on the flap, was the black double-headed eagle of the Romanovs.

THIRTY-EIGHT

The envelope was unsealed. Inside was a single sheet of vellum notepaper. At its top was the same black double-headed eagle clutching an orb and sceptre. Beneath, neatly arranged, was a full set of fingerprints in red ink, left hand, then right. Below the prints, in black ink, someone had written A.N. 4 viii ’09.

‘What exactly is this, sport?’ demanded Brad. He held the sheet of paper up. He had put his gun back in his pocket, but Gennady still had his trained on Eusden.

‘The fingerprints of the Grand Duchess Anastasia, taken aboard the imperial yacht off Cowes on the fourth of August 1909.’ It was true, then, though Eusden could scarcely believe it. The prints were clearly those of a child and the date was right. A.N. was Anastasia Nikolaievna. Nearly a hundred years had passed since Clem had entertained the Tsar’s precocious youngest daughter with a demonstration of the British police’s most recent advance in the science of detection. Eusden could almost see the sunlight sparkling on the wave-tops in Cowes Roads and hear the blue-blooded little girl’s gleeful laugh. Clem had always had a way with children. ‘This is how Scotland Yard keeps a track of those infernal anarchists, Your Highness. First one finger. Then the next.’ ‘They were there for the regatta. The Tsar, the Tsarina and all their children. The King and Queen came down to-’

‘Fuck the King and Queen. You’re serious about this?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘And you can get a set of Anna Anderson’s prints to match with these?’

‘Yes.’

‘How soon?’

‘Regina will already have them. She’s in Germany. It’s just a question of-’

‘Phone her.’ Brad tossed Eusden his mobile. ‘Phone her now and get her to come here.’

‘What about Mjollnir?’ asked Vladimir.

‘We agreed terms with them for the letters. This is something else. This, boys, is what’s known as a bonus. And, hell, haven’t we earned one? Make the call, sport.’

‘OK. I’ll try.’

‘Do more than try.’

‘The number’s in my wallet.’

‘Get it out.’

Eusden took his wallet from his jacket and found the piece of paper with Regina’s number written on it. It was unfair to involve her, of course, but he had no choice. This was his only chance of survival. He placed the call. And started praying she would answer.

She did. ‘Hello?’

‘Regina, this is Richard Eusden.’

‘Richard. Hi. I didn’t recognize the number. I tried to call you earlier.’

‘Sorry. Stupidly, I’ve mislaid my phone. I’ve had to borrow one. Where are you?’ There was a blur of sound in the background. He caught the ding-dong of a PA system.

‘Hanover airport. They should be calling my flight to Copenhagen any minute.’

‘You’ve got the 1938 fingerprint record?’

‘You bet. Any news for me your end?’

‘Yes. I have the matching record from 1909, Regina. I have it in front of me.’

‘You’re joshing me.’

‘No. It’s right here.’

‘But…how did you get it?’

‘I’ll explain when we meet. It’s… complicated.’

‘OK. Well, I should be able to make it to your hotel by around three thirty.’

‘Three thirty? That’s only…’ Belatedly, Eusden remembered that Finland was an hour ahead of Germany and Denmark. ‘Actually, Regina, I’m no longer in Copenhagen. I’m in Helsinki.’

‘Helsinki?’

‘Like I said, it’s complicated. Can you join me here?’

‘I… guess I could try to book a connecting flight before I leave.’

‘Meeting here’s much the safer bet. Werner’s sure to come looking for us in Copenhagen sooner or later.’

‘OK. Point taken. I’ll do it.’

‘Call me on this number when you know what time you’ll be arriving. I’ll meet you at the airport.’

‘Will do. Hey, Richard, have you been holding out on me? This has all happened very suddenly.’

‘I’ll tell you the whole story when you get here. See you soon. ’Bye.’

‘Nicely played, sport,’ said Brad as he retrieved his phone. ‘I guess you’ve negotiated yourself a stay of execution.’

‘We should kill him here,’ said Vladimir.

Brad sighed heavily. ‘We don’t know what the Virginian genealogist looks like, Vlad. And she’s expecting Eusden here to meet her. So, we’ll keep him on ice. Time?’

‘Less than an hour till we meet Mjollnir.’

‘OK. One more call, then we head out.’ Brad punched a number into his phone. While he waited for an answer, Eusden wondered queasily what ‘on ice’ actually meant. Then: ‘Bruno? Brad… Yuh… I have something for you. How are you with fingerprints?… Excellento. Haven’t I always said Orson Welles was way out of line with that crack about cuckoo clocks?…Talking of clocks, there’s one ticking on this job. We need you tonight… Helsinki…Yuh. Slip into your thermals before you leave. It’s the Ice Age here… Got you. ETA to follow. Understood… Of course, Bruno, of course. Standard fee. Standard percentage. When have I ever let you down?… OK. Ciao, good buddy.’ He ended the call and shot Eusden a smile. ‘Bruno will give us an authoritative yes or no on whether the prints match. If they do, we’re in business. If not…’ Brad’s smile remained in place just a little too long. Eusden knew they would keep him alive only as long as he was useful to them. And his usefulness was likely to expire once Regina had arrived with the other fingerprint sample. But airports were crowded, public places. There had to be a good chance he could escape once they were there, taking Regina with him. If all else failed, he could probably get himself arrested; Regina too. Until then, there was nothing for it but to do Brad’s bidding in every particular.

‘Let’s get moving.’ Brad pulled out his gun again. ‘Fetch the car, Gennady. Reverse it up to the door and pop the trunk.’ Gennady nodded and lumbered out through the wicket-door, leaving it open behind him. ‘Put the letters back in the case, Vlad.’ As Vladimir started on that, a car engine coughed into life outside. The rear of a silver Mercedes saloon eased into view. The boot sprang open. ‘You’re travelling in the trunk, sport. Can’t risk your Mjollnir buddies spotting you. Climb aboard.’

Eusden had only the briefest glimpse of the industrial wasteland Lund had dumped him in before the pressure of Vladimir’s hand on the back of his head told him to clamber into the boot of the thrumbling Mercedes.

‘Carpet and loads of leg room,’ said Brad, meeting his backward gaze with a smirk. ‘Gennady grew up in Kiev with four brothers in less comfortable and capacious surroundings.’

‘When do I get out of here?’

‘When we need you. Don’t worry. We’ll know where to find you.’ He reached up to close the boot, then stopped. His phone was ringing. He pulled it out of his pocket and read out the number of the caller. ‘Means nothing to me. You, sport?’

‘Regina.’

‘You’d better take it.’ He handed Eusden the phone.

‘Regina?’

‘Hi, Richard.’ She sounded breathless. ‘I’ve got to make this quick. I’m on my way to the gate. I’m booked on a flight from Copenhagen to Helsinki that gets in at seven twenty. Finnair six six four.’

‘Six six four at seven twenty. Got it. I’ll see you then.’

‘Likewise. ’Bye.’

Eusden passed the phone meekly back to Brad. ‘Would it do any good to tell you I suffer from claustrophobia?’

‘Not a bit. But, hey, it’s not like we’re going to forget about you. We’ll be checking on you regularly.’ Brad frowned thoughtfully, as if reviewing his tactics for the pending encounter at Koskinen’s house. He drummed his fingers on the boot lid, then plucked the envelope containing the fingerprints out of his pocket and slid it inside the lapel of Eusden’s crumpled jacket. ‘Look after that for me, sport. Like your life depends on it.’ Then he slammed the lid shut. And Eusden was plunged into darkness.

THIRTY-NINE

The boot smelt nine parts of carpet fibre and one of diesel. There was no light of any kind. Eusden spent some minutes trying to find a manual switch for the internal lamp before giving up. Gennady drove like a chauffeur for a wealthy old widow: smoothly and slowly. The car accelerated and decelerated, turned and straightened. Beyond the steady hum of the engine, sound was muffled and distant: horns, air brakes, tram bells and pneumatic drills drifting in and fading away as the Mercedes threaded through the Helsinki traffic towards its destination.

Eusden could not stop himself wondering – and doubting – whether his plan to escape his captors’ clutches at the airport would work. Brad would surely anticipate such an attempt and seek to forestall it. He had to pin his hopes on Brad’s greed skewing his judgement and he did not know the man well enough to assess how likely that was.

The consoling fact remained, however, that he had talked them into sparing his life so far and stood a good chance of outwitting them if he held his nerve. He would be outwitting Mjollnir into the bargain, since Lund no doubt assumed he was already dead. What had Koskinen told Pernille? he wondered. How had they accounted for his sudden disappearance? Whatever lie they had concocted, he intended to ram it down their throats once he was free. Pernille must think he had deserted her. He would make it his business to ensure she did not go on thinking that. She would be at Koskinen’s house now, with Matalainen, waiting and worrying. There was nothing he could do to help her or to explain his absence. But he promised himself she would know the truth – and others would be held accountable for that truth – before he was finished.

He smiled at the irony that Brad had given the envelope containing the fingerprints to him for safekeeping. He tried to retreat into a fanciful recreation of events aboard the imperial yacht that August day in 1909 as a means of distracting himself from the grimness of his situation. But Clem in his Isle of Wight constable’s uniform and the Grand Duchesses in their white, lace-fringed dresses were figures from a dream. The sunshine he imagined had no warmth, the voices no strength, the smiles no permanence. He was where he was. And they were far away and long ago.

The car stopped, as it had several times. Then the engine stopped. This was different. They had arrived at Luumitie 27. The exchange was about to take place.

A minute or so passed. Then a door slammed. And then another. Brad and Vladimir had left the car. Something whirred and clicked close to the boot. The aerial, he guessed. Gennady had switched on the radio. He wanted music while he waited, though he evidently thought he should play it low. No sound reached Eusden. The silence of the suburban residential side street was total.

More minutes passed. Five. Ten. Fifteen. The preliminaries must be over by now. Matalainen would be comparing the letters with the faxed copies. Soon, he would express his satisfaction. Then the combination of the case Koskinen had delivered to Pernille would be phoned through. Brad would open it up, check the bearer bonds and express his satisfaction. And then-

The noise hit him in a shock wave of air. His dark, cramped, silent world was split open by sound and light. The car rose and crashed back down as if struck by an earthquake. Something large and heavy crunched into the lid of the boot, driving in a deep dent to within an inch of Eusden’s face. As it did so, the lid jolted open. He was dazzled and deafened simultaneously and could only cower from the violent, roaring force of an event he could not comprehend.

Then sight and hearing and understanding rushed in on him. Fragments of masonry were raining down, hitting other parked cars as they fell, bouncing from roofs, chipping windows, sinking into the snow piled in the gutters. And smoke was billowing across the street in dust-laden clouds. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket to shield his nose and mouth as he scrambled out over the sill of the boot.

The house that had once stood on the other side of the street was a wreck of flame and smoke, of sundered walls and splintered glass. The roof had caved in and between the surviving gables was a chaos of rubble. Pernille’s BMW stood in the driveway piled with debris, its windows smashed, and a toppled chunk of gatepost, with the number 27 screwed to it, lay on the pavement. Smaller pieces of debris were still pattering down as Eusden stared at the scene in horror. The smoke began to clog his lungs. He retreated.

As he did so, the driver’s door of the Mercedes opened and Gennady fell out on to the snow-covered verge, blood streaming from a gash across his head. A windowful of shattered glass fell with him. He looked up at Eusden and moaned. His eyes rolled up under his lids. Then he went limp.

In the next instant one of the gables gave way and crashed down into the wreckage. Smoke and dust mushroomed into the air. Eusden was forced back still further. A middle-aged woman appeared in the front yard of a house behind him. She shouted something to him in Finnish.

‘Phone for an ambulance,’ he shouted back. ‘There are people in there.’

‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know. Some kind of explosion.’

She gaped past him, her mouth slack with shock. She started to cough.

‘Phone for help. Now.’

‘OK. Yes.’ She ran back into the house.

Eusden stood where he was, squinting through the spreading haze of smoke. Luumitie 27 looked as if it had been hit by a bomb. And that, he knew, was precisely what had happened: a bomb. No one inside could have survived such an explosion. It had demolished the entire building, shattering walls and floors, crushing flesh and bone. Brad, Vladimir, Matalainen and Pernille must all be dead.

Eusden suddenly realized how badly he wanted to believe Pernille could still be alive, despite all evidence to the contrary. In simple truth, there was no hope. But he could not accept that. He would not accept that. He started across the street.

He was stopped in his tracks by the blare of a horn and a squeal of brakes. A pick-up truck juddered to a halt a few yards from him and two men in overalls jumped out. They shouted at him in Finnish.

‘There are people trapped in there.’ He gestured towards the wrecked house. ‘Help me check if they’re still alive.’

The two men stared at him incredulously. Then the older of the two said, ‘Too dangerous. Anyone inside’s dead for sure.’

‘We’ve got to try.’

‘Don’t do it. There could be-’

A loud bang triggered a gout of flame from somewhere in the wreckage. Fragments of rubble flew into the air. One smashed into the windscreen of the pick-up. The two men turned and fled.

‘Get back,’ the older one shouted to Eusden over his shoulder.

Then the second gable gave way. And with it went the last of Eusden’s defences against reality. He retreated, his eyes stinging, his lungs straining. Dust and smoke rose and rolled in the air. Fire crackled behind him.

He reached the Mercedes, his thoughts focusing now on a single resolve: someone must be made to suffer for this. He knelt by Gennady’s motionless body and felt inside his coat for the gun. Suddenly it was in his hand: an automatic of the kind he had seen many, many times in films but never in the world he had inhabited until a week ago. It was too large and heavy to carry in his jacket. He tugged Gennady’s woollen scarf from around his neck, wrapped the gun in it, stood up and set off along the street.

Other residents were out by now, gaping at the devastation that had once been Osmo Koskinen’s house. They paid Eusden no attention, their gazes fixed on the burning, smoking ruin of number 27. He upped his pace.

As he neared the end of the street, he saw a big black Saab SUV pull over as it passed the junction. Its driver stared keenly along Luumitie towards the plume of smoke and a faint smile crossed his face.

The driver was Erik Lund. He was alone in the car and he seemed wholly unaware of Eusden’s presence. He looked straight past him, seeing nothing but what he expected to see. The pedestrian crossing the road in front of him was a mere shadow.

All that changed when Eusden yanked open the passenger door and jumped in the car.

‘Hov! Hvad-’ Lund’s expression froze. He clearly could not believe what he saw: a man he confidently supposed dead sitting right next to him – and holding a gun.

FORTY

Several long, silent seconds passed as they stared at each other. Then Lund swallowed hard and said, ‘Don’t shoot. Please.’

‘Why shouldn’t I? You set me up, you bastard. You expected them to kill me, didn’t you?’

‘I was… following orders.’

‘Go on doing that and you might live. Drive.’

They started moving. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Head for the airport.’

‘Listen, Eusden, I-’

‘You listen. Just answer my questions. OK?’

‘OK.’

‘Did Tolmar Aksden know this was going to happen?’

Lund nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘He knew everything from the start?’

‘Yes.’

‘What were his instructions?’

‘Destroy the case. Force the Opposition to back off with a show of overwhelming strength. And get rid of you.’

‘As well as Pernille?’

‘Yes.’ They turned on to the main shopping street of Munkkiniemi. A fire engine was speeding towards them, light flashing, siren wailing. Another siren was wailing further in the distance. ‘He always says…a problem is an opportunity.’

‘You killed Burgaard as well, didn’t you?’

‘We’ve killed no one. Everything is… contracted out.’

‘How very businesslike.’ The fire engine roared past. ‘Hold on. What about the security you were supposed to supply?’

‘I had two men in the house. They were there to reassure Pernille she’d be safe.’

‘And you just… sacrificed them?’

‘I did what had to be done. I don’t know how you got away, Eusden, but I promise I won’t tell Tolmar you did.’ A rivulet of sweat was trickling down Lund’s temple. ‘The airport is a good choice. You can fly to England tonight. No one will find out.’

‘Of course they will, Lund. You’ll tell them.’

‘No.’

‘Just keep driving. And go on answering my questions. Did Koskinen know what was going to happen as well?’

‘Not the details. But he does as he’s told. Like me.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘He’s gone to stay with his brother.’

‘Address?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Don’t give me that.’

‘I swear I don’t. I could make something up, couldn’t I? How could you tell? Truthfully, I don’t know.’

A police car swept past them. Then another.

‘What about Tolmar? Where’s he?’

‘Out of town.’

‘When will he be back?’

‘Tonight. Tomorrow. I’m not sure.’

‘Where’s his apartment?’

‘Mäkinkatu six. But you won’t get to him there. It has state-of-the-art security.’

‘Was Birgitte Grøn in on all this?’

‘No. She wouldn’t have cooperated if she’d realized what Tolmar had decided to do. She thought he was going to pay as agreed.’

‘So, there is someone in Mjollnir with a conscience, is there?’

They were leaving the centre of Munkkiniemi now and approaching a big interchange. Lund joined the queue at the lights for a left turn on to the main road heading north.

‘You have no idea how it works, Eusden. You can’t imagine. The money. The luxuries. The things he sees you want and gives to you… in exchange for other things. You’re in too deep to get out before you know it.’

‘Is that your excuse?’

‘I just do what I’m told to do.’

‘In this case, help Tolmar murder his ex-wife.’

‘There’s been no murder. The explosion was caused by a gas leak.’

‘I know better.’

‘I’m only saying what I think the Finnish police will say in the end. A terrible accident. Why Pernille was there… Who knows?’ Lund accelerated on to the main road. The light was beginning to fail, the sullen sky filling in from the east. The afternoon was fading fast. ‘You can get away clean, Eusden. Tonight. I won’t tell Tolmar. Truthfully. It would look bad for me if I admitted you got away.’

‘You really are a heartless bastard, aren’t you?’

‘I’m a realist. Pernille’s dead. You’re alive. You should do everything you can to stay that way.’

‘What will Birgitte do when she finds out you deceived her?’

‘Nothing. She’s a realist also.’

‘Where does Lars Aksden come into this?’

‘He doesn’t.’

‘But he’s here in Helsinki. Why?’

Lund shook his head. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Lars isn’t here.’

‘I saw him with my own eyes. Near Matalainen’s office. This morning.’

‘Koskinen didn’t say anything about that.’

‘He didn’t see him. I did.’

‘Maybe you were… mistaken.’

‘No. It was him.’

‘Then, I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense. He shouldn’t be here.’

‘Maybe he wants to find out what the family secret is.’

‘He never will.’

‘But you could enlighten him, couldn’t you? You and Birgitte read the faxed copies of the letters.’

‘No. The number they were faxed to was Tolmar’s. Only he read them. Everything we told you and Pernille… he instructed us to tell you.’

‘Because we’d have refused to go through with it if we’d known Tolmar was in charge. So, we had to be suckered into believing you were going behind his back.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Throwing me to the wolves was one thing, Lund, but Pernille? How could you do that to her?’

‘It was stupid of her to think she could just walk away from Tolmar. She should have known he wouldn’t let her treat him like that.’

‘And that’s your rationale, is it? Do what he wants or suffer the consequences.’

‘It’s how it is.’

‘My God.’

Silence fell between them. Eusden had no questions left to ask and no words to describe the disbelief he felt that any man could live by such pitiless rules. They had joined a dual carriageway by now, tracking north and east. The airport symbol had appeared on signs beside the road. There were only seven kilometres to go. Eusden’s thoughts drifted to how it must have been at Koskinen’s house, less than an hour ago: Pernille, Matalainen, Brad and Vladimir seated round a table, with Lund’s two security men in the background; the wary discussions; the telephone call; the rotation of the combination cylinder on the case Pernille had brought with her; the release of the-

Eusden was flung forward as Lund slammed on the brakes. He had forgotten to fasten his seat belt. He got his hands up just in time to prevent his head hitting the windscreen, but the gun slipped from his grasp and clunked to the floor. The car swerved to the side of the road and skidded to a halt a few inches from a crash barrier. Lund made a dive for the gun and had his fingers on the butt when Eusden’s reactions caught up with him. He stamped on the Dane’s outstretched hand. Lund cried out in pain. Then Eusden grabbed him by the nape hair, yanked his head up and punched him hard on the nose. As Lund fell back, Eusden bent forward and retrieved the gun.

Blood was welling from the Dane’s nostrils. He was breathing heavily through his mouth and clutching his nose with one hand while he shook the other to ease the pain in his fingers. He cowered away from the gun as Eusden pointed it at him. ‘I’m sorry,’ he panted. ‘Sorry.’

‘Get out of the car.’

‘What?’

‘Give me your phone and your wallet and get out of the car.’

‘Look, I’ll drive you to the airport. It’s OK. I won’t-’

‘Get out!’ Eusden edged the barrel of the gun closer to Lund’s face. ‘Or I swear to God I’ll do the human race a big favour and put an end to your miserable, morally bankrupt life here and now.’

FORTY-ONE

Night was falling by the time Eusden reached Vantaa airport. He left the Saab in one of the car parks, with Lund’s wallet locked inside. He had only taken it to slow the man down. He had no faith in Lund’s promise to say nothing to Tolmar Aksden. He tossed the key into some bushes next to the car park. Using the Saab again would be too risky.

Not that he had any clear idea of what he was going to do from this moment on. How much to tell Regina Celeste was the first problem he had to confront. She would soon realize all was not well with him. He cleaned himself up as best he could in the airport toilets, but his reflection in the mirror told its own story. He looked haggard and distraught. He looked like a man whose resources were failing him.

They undeniably were. The grief he felt for Pernille Madsen, a woman he scarcely knew by all logical criteria, had shocked as well as sapped him. Her death cut off a future he had just begun to dare to imagine. It had stripped him of hope. What remained was an urge to avenge her. He had come closer to killing Lund than the Dane probably imagined and certainly closer than he himself would ever have expected. If Tolmar Aksden had been in the car instead of Lund, Eusden would have pulled the trigger. He had no doubt of that. And he still had the gun.

He used a wad of euros from Lund’s wallet to buy a warm coat from one of the airport shops. It had pockets large enough to conceal the gun and made him look rather less like a man who has recently been roughed up by gangsters. He checked the arrivals board for news of Regina’s flight. It was expected in on schedule. Then he noticed another flight due in a quarter of an hour earlier, from Zürich. He remembered Brad’s reference to the Orson Welles jibe about cuckoo clocks and wondered if Bruno the fingerprint expert would be on board. If so, there would be no one waiting to meet him. Unless Eusden did the honours.

There were several limo-drivers holding up name cards when the first of the Zürich passengers made it to the arrivals hall. Eusden loitered among them, with BRUNO blazoned on the lid of a box he had cadged from a fast-food kiosk.

The man who approached him was short and tubby, clad in well-cut tweed and a python of cashmere scarf. Groomed dark-brown hair, clipped moustache and tortoiseshell-framed glasses gave him the appearance of a vain and fussy professor.

‘Who are you?’ he demanded in Italian-accented English.

‘A friend of Brad’s.’

‘Name?’

‘Marty Hewitson.’ Recourse to Marty’s identity as a pseudonym was so instinctive that Eusden was surprised when he heard himself say it.

‘Brad’s never mentioned you. Why isn’t he here?’

‘Unforeseen circumstances.’

‘I should have had a message if there was a change of plan.’

Eusden shrugged. ‘Sorry.’

Bruno pulled out his phone with a put-upon harrumph and stabbed in a number with a cocktail-sausage forefinger. The response did not please him. He tried again, with the same result. ‘There’s something wrong. Brad’s phone is dead.’

‘Look, Bruno, I-’

‘My name is Stammati. I am Bruno to my friends. You I have never met.’

‘OK, Mr Stammati. Sorry, I’m sure. Now, as you know, Brad wants you to confirm a match between two sets of fingerprints. I have one set with me. The other’s arriving with a Mrs Celeste on a flight from Copenhagen due in very shortly. Any objection to casting your eye over them while we wait for word from Brad?’

Stammati looked as if he did object, but was constrained by his obligation to Brad. His moustache twitched querulously, then he said, ‘I will wait in that café’ – he pointed to a coffee-bean logo in the middle distance – ‘for one half-hour.’ And with that he bustled off.

Eusden decided against following Stammati. He suspected attempts to charm the man would prove disastrous and was not equal to making the effort anyway. He did not have to stick it out long in the arrivals hall, although Regina was not among the first clutch of Copenhagen passengers to emerge from Customs. Delayed by collection and trolleying of a gigantic suitcase, she finally appeared with only five minutes of Stammati’s allotted half-hour remaining.

‘I expected a triumphant greeting, Richard,’ she said, looking him up and down. ‘What in the world’s happened to you?’

‘It’s been a stressful day.’

‘So I see.’

‘I have a not-so-tame fingerprint expert parked nearby, Regina. He’s liable to walk out on us if we don’t step on it.’

‘Who needs an expert? You and I are perfectly capable of judging whether two sets of fingerprints match. And match I’m confident they will.’

‘Me too. But we may as well get a neutral opinion while it’s available.’

‘All right, all right. Just let me catch my breath. And steer this for me, would you?’ She swung the handle of the trolley towards him. ‘Then we’ll go see this so-called expert. Where’d you find him?’

‘It’s a long story.’

‘Can I at least take a peek at what you have before we meet him?’

Eusden took the envelope from his pocket and showed it to her. At the sight of the double-headed eagle of the Romanovs, her eyes rolled.

‘Be still, my beating heart,’ she gasped.

The pastelly plasticated decor of the Café Quick appeared to have done nothing to soften Stammati’s temper. He broke off from glaring grumpily at his pseudo-espresso to announce, ‘Brad has not phoned me.’

Eusden synthesized a smile. ‘Mr Stammati, this is Regina Celeste.’

‘Pleased to meet you, I’m sure,’ trilled Regina, extending a hand.

Stammati’s Italian genes belatedly kicked in. He rose and clasped her hand in both of his. ‘Buonasera, signora.’

‘Which part of Italy are you from, Mr Stammati?’ Regina asked as they settled at his table.

‘The Swiss part, signora.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘How, may I ask, do you know Brad?’

‘Who’s Brad?’

‘A mutual acquaintance,’ Eusden cut in. ‘Why don’t we look at what we’ve got?’

‘This is an exciting moment for me, Mr Stammati,’ Regina enthused, opening her handbag and pulling out a square brown board-backed envelope.

‘Please, signora, call me Bruno.’ The southern belle was evidently chiming with him. ‘Two sets of fingerprints require matching, I believe.’

‘Oh, they match, Bruno. You can rely on that.’ She opened the envelope and slid the contents out on to the table: two record cards, yellowing at the edges, one headed RECHTE HAND and the other LINKE HAND. There were squares filled with the prints of each finger and thumb and a larger square below where the palm and fingers had been pressed down together.

Stammati peered at the details typed at the base of the cards. ‘Prints of a Frau Tschaikovsky, taken in Hanover, ninth July 1938. A long time ago. Is this lady still living?’

‘Sadly, no. She passed away more than twenty years ago. But we’re about to restore her to life in a sense, aren’t we, Richard?’

‘Richard?’ Stammati frowned suspiciously at Eusden. ‘I thought your name was Marty.’

‘Marty’s a nickname,’ said Eusden, pressing his knee against Regina’s under the table.

‘And a silly one too,’ Regina laughed, casting him an intrigued sidelong glance. ‘I never use it.’

‘The other set of prints,’ Eusden hurried on, taking the sheet of paper out of the double-headed-eagle envelope and placing it next to the two cards.

Stammati looked at it closely. ‘Fourth of August 1909,’ he murmured. ‘Even longer ago.’

‘When she was a child.’ Regina’s tone suggested she had a vision of the child in her mind’s eye as she spoke.

‘That does not matter,’ said Stammati, his gaze switching from the sheet of paper to the cards and back again. ‘The prints acquire their uniqueness in the womb. They never change.’

‘Is that so?’

‘Yes. It is. Now…’ Stammati glanced reproachfully at the ceiling. ‘The light is not good. Tuttavia…’ He opened the briefcase that appeared to be his only luggage and removed a small leather pouch, from which he slid a magnifying glass. He squinted through it at the fingerprints and a couple of minutes slowly elapsed. Then he sighed and laid the magnifying glass down on the table. ‘Who is A.N., may I ask?’

‘They’re Frau Tschaikovsky’s maiden initials,’ Regina replied.

‘I think not, signora.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I mean that these are not matching prints. A full ridge count is unnecessary. One set is looped, the other whorled. They are, obviously and undoubtedly, the fingerprints of two different people.’

FORTY-TWO

Regina had been forced to accept Stammati’s verdict after examining the contrasting loops and whorls of the two sets of prints through his magnifying glass for herself. Eusden needed less convincing. Even to his naked eye the differences were clear once they had been pointed out to him. He replaced the sheet of paper in the envelope and put it back in his pocket while Stammati made further futile efforts to contact Brad by phone and Regina sat staring into space with an expression of undisguised stupefaction on her face.

‘I am sorry if I have disappointed you, signora,’ said Stammati, when he had given up again. ‘I assure you I also am disappointed to travel so far for so little.’ He glared at Eusden. ‘Since no one is able or willing to explain this… fiasco…I shall check into whatever the Finns have supplied in the way of an airport hotel after booking a seat on the first flight back to Zürich tomorrow morning.’ He closed his briefcase and rose to his feet with a grunt. ‘Buonanotte to you both.’

‘How in the name of sweet reason can this be?’ Regina asked after Stammati had bustled off.

‘Anna Anderson wasn’t Anastasia,’ Eusden listlessly replied. ‘It’s as simple as that.’

‘But she was. I know she was.’

‘The fingerprints say otherwise.’

‘There’s got to be some mistake.’

That was a considerable understatement. If Anastasia’s survival of the Ekaterinburg massacre was not part of Tolmar Aksden’s secret, then what had Hakon Nydahl’s letters been about? And why had Clem stored Anastasia’s fingerprints with them? Marty must have discovered the envelope when he first examined the attaché case. Otherwise how could Straub have known it contained prints that could be compared with the Hanover set? Why had Marty never told Eusden about them? Why had he kept the secret back? What game had he really been playing when death interrupted him? Eusden’s thoughts reeled as the unanswered questions swirled in his mind.

‘We’re both tired, I guess,’ Regina continued. ‘I need to think this through when I’m properly rested. You look bushed yourself.’

‘That I am.’

‘Let’s get out of this place. Where are you staying?’

‘The Grand Marina.’

‘I booked myself into the Kämp. They tell me it’s Helsinki’s finest. And I need all the comfort I can get after the day I’ve had. Shall we share a taxi? You promised me a full explanation of how you came by those fingerprints, remember. Well, you can deliver over a drink in the hotel bar.’

Regina was silent for the first mile or so of the taxi ride, immersed in her own dejected thoughts. Then, suddenly, she declared, ‘I believe I’ve seen through it,’ and grasped Eusden’s forearm. ‘They aren’t Anastasia’s fingerprints, Richard. Don’t you see? Grenscher tricked me.’

‘I’m not sure I do see,’ Eusden responded wearily.

‘Werner must have guessed I’d try to deal direct with Grenscher and primed the grotesque little man to sell me a forgery. It was the date that convinced me the record cards were genuine. July ninth 1938 was the day Anastasia was summoned to police headquarters in Hanover to meet the brother and sisters of Franziska Schanzkowska. Typically, they disagreed among themselves about whether she might be their missing sister. But it’s still much the likeliest occasion for the police to have fingerprinted her.’

‘Are you saying you doubt now they ever did?’

‘No. I’m saying Grenscher still has the real record cards. He denied receiving a deposit from Werner, you know. A deposit I paid. But the more I think about it the more certain I become he had been paid. It’s just that sending me off with a smile on my face and a set of fake prints in my purse is what he’d been paid to do.’

‘Well, I suppose-’

‘But Werner’s slipped on his own trail of slime, hasn’t he? Because now we have the 1909 record. Which means he’s going to have to do business with us whether he likes it or not. And I can personally assure you that the first item in our negotiations will be reimbursement of the substantial sum of money I paid over to his counterfeiting co-conspirator in Hanover. With interest – at a punitive rate.’

Regina had convinced herself Anna Anderson’s fingerprints did not match Anastasia’s because they were not her fingerprints. Eusden remained sceptical, though he did not bother saying so. He believed Straub had used Regina’s deposit to bribe Marty. Grenscher, grotesque or not, was probably a genuine dealer. The fingerprints were a dead end.

For clues to what the truth really was – and a way to strike back at Tolmar Aksden – he had to look elsewhere. When they reached the quietly opulent Hotel Kämp, Regina headed up to her room to ‘unpack a few things and shower away three airports’ worth of grime’ before they met for a council of war in the bar. And Eusden did not propose to waste the hour or more this sounded as if it would take.

The man on the desk readily lent him a copy of the Helsinki phone book. He sat in reception and started ringing his way through all the Koskinens listed, using Lund’s mobile. It was a laborious exercise. Koskinen was not an uncommon name. Only with the thirteenth who actually answered did he strike lucky.

‘Hei?’

‘Can I speak to Osmo Koskinen, please?’

‘Who’s calling?’

‘Are you his brother?’

‘Yes. I am Timo Koskinen. Who-’

Eusden pressed the red button and scribbled down the address, then went back to the desk. ‘Thanks,’ he said, returning the phone book. ‘Can you tell me where this is?’ He held out the note.

‘Certainly, sir.’ A map of the city was produced and the index consulted. Then: ‘Here it is. In Kulosaari.’ It was clearly a taxi ride away.

‘Thanks again.’

Eusden wandered off towards the bar, then stopped and looked at his watch. It was nearly ten o’clock. Time, as Marty would have reminded him, was of the essence. And there was one sure way to solve the problem of what to tell Regina. He turned and headed for the door to the street.

FORTY-THREE

The temperature had plummeted with nightfall. The cold was an invisible and hostile presence surrounding Eusden in the stillness and silence of the Kulosaari side street. He pressed the button beside the name KOSKINEN on the panel in the entrance porch of the anonymous apartment block where the taxi had delivered him and stamped his feet for warmth as he waited for a response.

A minute or so passed. Then there was a click from the entryphone grille. And a voice: ‘Hei?’

‘Timo Koskinen?’

‘Kyllä.’

‘We spoke earlier. My name’s Richard Eusden. Your brother knows me. We need to talk.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I’m sure Osmo’s told you all about me. So, why don’t you let me in? If you don’t, I’ll have no choice but to go to the police.’

There was a laden pause. Then: ‘Wait, please.’

Another, longer pause followed. Eusden imagined an anxious conference between the two brothers. It ended in a loud buzz abruptly signalling the release of the entrance lock.

The apartment was a functionally furnished and faintly dowdy bachelor residence. Timo Koskinen was a thinner, older, grimmer version of his brother, guardedly inexpressive. Osmo himself had imploded from affable ease into anguished distraction, his hair awry, his clothes crumpled, the tremor in his hands more pronounced. There was a sheen of sweat on his upper lip and a slack-mouthed, blank-eyed look of helplessness about him. A bottle of vodka stood prominently on the coffee table in the cheerless lounge, with just the one tumbler beside it, cloudy with finger smears.

‘Got anything to say to me, Osmo?’ Eusden asked, taking off his coat and hanging it up carefully in the hall before entering the lounge. Timo followed him in.

Osmo squirmed in his armchair and avoided Eusden’s gaze. ‘I… didn’t know… what they were going to do.’

‘But you knew Pernille and I were being set up.’

‘Yes. But… killing people? I never… imagined…’

‘Did you think I was dead too?’

Osmo rubbed his face, as if trying to force some clarity into his thoughts. ‘Yes.’

‘And maybe you reckoned that was best. No one left to come after you. Well, here I am. And I want answers.’

‘There’s nothing…I can tell you.’

‘You’re going to have to come up with something. I won’t be leaving until you do.’

‘Please, Richard, I…’ Osmo looked at him for the first time. ‘You have to understand… He can destroy any of us… if he wants to.’

‘Or if you let him. He’s gone too far. I mean to stop him. And I need your help.’

‘I can’t-’

‘Go and make some coffee, Osmo,’ Timo cut in, stepping between them. ‘We’ll talk to this man. We have to. You know we do.’

Osmo struggled to his feet. ‘Timo,’ he began, ‘we should…’ He switched suddenly to Finnish, lowering his voice as he did so.

Timo’s response was a decisive shake of the head. ‘The coffee,’ he repeated.

With a defeated shrug, Osmo headed unsteadily for the kitchen.

Timo watched him go, then gestured for Eusden to sit down on the sofa. He took the other armchair, opposite him. ‘He really didn’t know what they planned, Mr Eusden. He didn’t ask. He will tell you that’s the way to do well at Mjollnir: ask no questions. Have you met Erik Lund?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘Lund gave Osmo the case. It was already locked. It was supposed to contain bearer bonds, yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, Osmo took the case to Ms Madsen at the Grand Marina Hotel. Then she and the lawyer, Matalainen, drove away, heading for Osmo’s house. He came here, as instructed. About an hour after he arrived, he got a call from the police. They told him about the explosion. They wanted to know who was in the house when it happened. He said Ms Madsen had asked him if she could use it for a meeting. Who with and what about… he didn’t know.’

‘Did they buy that?’

‘Probably. Why not? They’ve no reason to suspect he was lying. My brother is a respectable man.’

‘Yeah. Like all the other people I’ve met who do Tolmar Aksden’s bidding.’

‘He doesn’t like what’s happened, Mr Eusden. And not just because his house has been destroyed. Mjollnir will compensate him for that. They’ll probably buy him a bigger and better one. No, the problem is Osmo’s conscience. He’s tried to drown it.’ Timo nodded towards the vodka bottle. ‘But it keeps coming to the surface.’

‘Then, he should go to the police and tell them the truth.’

‘Would you be willing to go with him?’

‘Of course I would.’

‘You’d be making a big mistake. It’s probably just what Tolmar Aksden wants you to do.’

‘We can’t go to the police, Richard,’ Osmo said as he shuffled back into the room, carrying a large cafetière and three mugs on a tray. He set the tray down on the table and subsided into his armchair. ‘It would be our word against Aksden’s. There’s no proof of anything. We would end up as the suspects, not Tolmar. I was seen at the hotel. We were both seen at Matalainen’s office. You signed the confidentiality agreement. I witnessed it. It would look like we did the setting up, not Mjollnir.’

‘Sounds to me as if you’re just making excuses for keeping out of it,’ snapped Eusden.

‘I guess I would say the same in your position.’ Osmo stretched forward and pushed down the plunger on the cafetière. ‘I am sorry, Richard. Lund said they wouldn’t harm you. And Pernille? I never thought for a second she was in danger.’

‘How did you explain my disappearance to her?’

‘I said you had gone when I came back from the toilet at the Café Engel. There was no time for her to ask me any questions. She and Matalainen had to leave right away.’

‘Christ.’ Eusden had to look away for a moment. Confirmation that Pernille must have concluded he had run out on her was even harder to bear than he had expected.

Timo leant across the table and poured their coffees. There was silence for a minute or two as they each contemplated the awfulness of what had occurred that day. Then Osmo said, ‘When the police spoke to me, they had no idea what caused the explosion or even how many people were killed. There’s a man in hospital who they think might be involved, but he has a serious brain injury. They’re not sure he’s going to survive. There’s also a man they’re looking for who they think was in the street when the explosion happened. The neighbours said he left in a hurry.’

‘Me,’ said Eusden dolefully.

‘If I was you, I think I would fly home to England and pretend you were never here.’

‘I can’t do that.’

‘But what can you do if you stay?’

‘Make Tolmar Aksden pay for what he’s done.’

‘You’ll fail,’ said Timo, sipping his coffee.

‘Maybe. But that’s better than not trying. That’s better than… living with his heel on your neck.’

The two brothers exchanged an eloquent glance. Timo cleared his throat. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘Tolmar Aksden’s secret.’

‘We don’t know it,’ said Osmo. ‘No one does.’

‘Not quite no one,’ Timo corrected him. ‘Arto Falenius knows, I’m sure.’

‘Falenius? Head of Saukko Bank?’

‘Yes. Grandson of the founder, Paavo Falenius.’

‘Timo used to work for Saukko,’ said Osmo.

‘You did?’

‘Forty-two years, Mr Eusden. Eighteen to sixty. Paavo Falenius was still alive when I started there in 1949. It’s a long time ago. Some of the senior staff had been there from the beginning.’

‘And when was the beginning?’

‘1899. But it was just called the Falenius Bank then. The name Saukko wasn’t used until the nineteen twenties. In English, saukko is an otter.’

‘Why the change?’

‘Paavo never explained. He had a reputation for not explaining things. But it wasn’t the only change. The bank expanded greatly at that time. It was quite a small business until about 1920. Then, suddenly, it was big, rivalling Union Bank, Finland’s oldest joint-stock bank. That took capital. A lot of capital. And no one really knows where Paavo got it from. But everyone who worked for him benefited from how profitably he used it, so…’

‘Is that the secret? Paavo Falenius’s money?’ Eusden remembered the cache of pre-war Finnish currency at Nydahl’s apartment in Copenhagen. ‘Ever heard of Hakon Nydahl?’

‘Yes.’ Timo looked surprised. ‘I have. He was one of our customers. A very special customer.’

‘In what way?’

‘His account was managed personally by the chairman, Eino, Paavo’s son, Arto’s father. Everything relating to it had to be referred to Eino. The only other customer who ever got treated like that…was Tolmar Aksden.’

‘So, they’re all tied together in some way. Hakon Nydahl, Tolmar Aksden and the Faleniuses.’

‘Yes.’

‘And what is the connection?’

‘Like Osmo said, we don’t know. But…’

‘But what?’

Osmo interrupted in Finnish before Timo could reply. There was a flurry of exchanges between the two brothers. Though Eusden could not understand a word, he had the impression that an argument they had had several times before was being repeated. Eventually, it petered out. And Osmo made a gesture with his hands that looked like a concession of kinds.

‘There is a man I know, Mr Eusden,’ Timo said, slowly and carefully. ‘His name is Pekka Tallgren. Twenty years ago he was a history lecturer at Helsinki University. He planned a book on revolutionaries active in Finland before the First World War. Lenin, obviously, but there were many others, mostly Russian. Tallgren came to us – to Saukko – for information about Paavo’s links with these people. Paavo had been dead many years by then, of course. Tallgren said he had evidence that Paavo had provided several revolutionary groups with funds. He asked if we had records of these dealings. We referred his request to the chairman. Arto had only recently taken over the chairmanship from his father. He was… embarrassed, it seemed to me. He told us Tallgren was to be given no information of any kind. Tallgren soon realized he was getting nowhere. He stopped asking his questions.’

‘What happened to his book?’

‘It was never published. Several years later, after I retired, I met Tallgren in Observatory Park. He was not in a good state. He told me his publisher cancelled his book contract soon after he approached us. Then one of his female students complained he had molested her. He denied it, of course. He was suspended. He started to drink heavily. He never went back to the university. In the end, even though the student later withdrew her complaint, he was dismissed.’

‘Arto Falenius arranged all that?’

‘Or Eino did. He was still a powerful man even after he handed the chairmanship over to Arto. Tallgren told me it was when he asked Arto about one revolutionary in particular that his troubles began.’

‘Who was that?’

‘I can’t remember the name. But Tallgren will remember for sure.’

‘You know how I can contact him?’

‘I felt sorry for him, Mr Eusden. So, I gave him a little money and helped him find somewhere decent to live. He sobered up, I’m glad to say. Later, I…recommended him for a job. Do you know Suomenlinna?’

‘No. What is it?’

‘A small group of islands out in the harbour. The Swedes constructed a fortress called Sveaborg on them in the mid-eighteenth century to defend their eastern frontier against the Russians. Later, the Russians took it over. And, later again, we Finns. It’s a tourist attraction now. It includes a museum where you can learn about the history of the fortress. That’s where I helped Tallgren get his job. He works as a curator in the Suomenlinna Museum. And he lives out there, in an apartment block on one of the islands. I think… if I asked him… he would speak to you. Yes, I think he would.’

‘Then, ask him.’

‘You’re sure you want me to?’

Eusden nodded. ‘I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.’

FORTY-FOUR

It was gone midnight when Eusden reached the Market Square pontoon, but a couple more ferry crossings to Suomenlinna were still to be made. The cold had become more intense than he had ever experienced. The sea ice moaned and creaked. His breaths were plumes of frost in the still, deeply sub-zero air.

The few passengers, Suomenlinna residents bound for home, huddled in the cabin as the ferry chugged out through the broken skin of ice on its channel across the harbour. Eusden sat staring at their reflections in the windows, including his own – gaunt, drained and hollow-eyed. He spun Lund’s phone in slow circles on the table, wondering if he should call Gemma and tell her… But since he did not know what he should or could tell her, he made no call.

He scrolled idly through Lund’s contacts list. Tolmar Aksden was there; so, too, was Arto Falenius. He was tempted to call one of them – or both. He wanted them to know, even though he was well aware it was better they did not, that he was coming after them. They had overreached themselves. This time, he willed them to understand, there would be a reckoning.

The tower above the main gate of the fortress loomed through the chill mist that hung over Suomenlinna as Eusden stepped ashore. A single figure was waiting on the quay, wrapped in a parka with a huge Arctic-standard hood. ‘Richard Eusden?’ he enquired, pulling off a mitt to offer his hand. ‘I’m Pekka Tallgren.’ They shook. ‘Cold night for a boat trip, no?’

‘Thanks for agreeing to talk to me, Mr Tallgren.’

‘Call me Pekka, Richard. OK?’

‘OK.’

‘I bet you’re thinking: why does the crazy man live out here on this frozen island?’

‘Timo said you work here.’

‘I do. But sometimes… it feels a bit like Alcatraz, with San Francisco across the bay. Anyway, let’s not stand here, freezing our balls off. I brought the car with me.’ Tallgren turned and led the way towards a tiny old Fiat. ‘It’s not far to my place. But everywhere’s a long way on a night like this.’

‘Sorry it’s so late.’

‘Don’t worry. I don’t sleep so good.’ They clambered into the car. Tallgren threw back his hood, revealing a bearded, heavy-featured face. He started the engine and skidded away along a sparsely gritted strip through the surrounding blanket of snow and ice. ‘I’ve got interested in astronomy since I came here. You can see so much more this far from the lights of the city. Not when it’s like this, of course. You’re not keeping me from my telescope, that’s for sure.’

They rumbled over a narrow bridge to an adjoining island and turned left past a high stone wall. ‘How long have you lived here, Pekka?’ Eusden asked.

‘Nine years. Some exile, hey? But, truthfully, I like it. I’m near Helsinki but not in it. That suits me. It keeps my memories at just the right distance. Timo told you all about my… troubles, no?’

‘Yes. He did.’

‘He helped me a lot. More than he needed to. So, I owe him. Which is lucky for you. I don’t normally talk to anyone about Saukko.’

‘I know. I’m grateful.’

‘Maybe you shouldn’t be. Knowing this stuff… can be unhealthy.’

They crossed a second bridge to a further island and slewed to a halt in a courtyard flanked by barrack blocks converted into apartments. Most of the windows were in darkness and a profound silence closed about them as they climbed from the car.

‘Welcome to my world, Richard,’ said Tallgren.

The apartment was small and felt smaller still thanks to the crammed bookshelves lining every spare wall and the piles of books and papers that had overflowed on to the floors beside them.

Stripped of his mitts and parka, Tallgren looked just what the domestic disorder might have led Eusden to expect: untidily dressed, grey hair overdue for a trim – a middle-aged academic content in his own shambolic environment. Except that he was an academic no longer.

‘I set some coffee going before I left,’ Tallgren said as Eusden hung up his coat in the tiny hallway. ‘You want some?’

‘Fine.’ Eusden would have preferred a stiff drink, but he knew better than to ask for one.

‘Come into the kitchen. It’s the warmest room.’

An aroma of coffee had filled the kitchen in Tallgren’s absence. An electric percolator stood ready on the crumb-strewn worktop. He grabbed a couple of mugs and waved Eusden to the table opposite, where a crumpled copy of Helsingin Sanomat lay, folded open at the page in the business section Eusden had seen earlier, with the photograph of Tolmar Aksden and Arto Falenius. Tallgren pushed it aside as he delivered their coffees.

‘Black OK? I’m out of milk.’

‘No problem.’

‘And cream.’ Tallgren nodded down at the newspaper. ‘Looks like they got it all.’

‘Do you regret tangling with them?’

‘You bet.’ Tallgren took a reflective sip of coffee, then sat down and folded the paper back on itself. The faces of Aksden and Falenius obligingly vanished. He smiled. ‘I’ve seen enough of that pair.’

‘What can you-’

‘Hold on.’ Tallgren raised his hand. ‘This is how it’s going to work, Richard. You give me the full story of what brought you here. The whole thing. Then, if I’m convinced you’re not… some kind of spy for those bastards… I’ll tell you everything I know. You’re sitting here with me because of Timo. No other reason. I don’t know you. He says I can trust you. OK. But that’s a two-way street. And you’ve got to trust me first. Do we have a deal?’

It was a relief in many ways to have no choice but to share everything he knew with somebody else. Tallgren sipped his coffee and smoked his way through a couple of roll-ups while Eusden recounted the events that had brought him to Suomenlinna. He took out the double-headed-eagle envelope and showed Tallgren the piece of paper with the fingerprints on it. He talked about Marty and Clem and all the people he had met in the course of one desperate week. He held nothing back. He laid it all on the line.

When he had finished, Tallgren topped up their coffees and said, simply, ‘It’s worse than I thought.’

FORTY-FIVE

‘I’ll assume you know as much Finnish history as the average non-Finn, Richard, which is zero,’ said Tallgren. ‘So, I’ll try to keep it simple. Sweden surrendered Finland to Russia in 1809, but Tsar Alexander the First granted the Finns self-government. He knew he’d have too much trouble with us otherwise. The Grand Duchy of Finland, as it was called, was part of the Russian Empire, but not part of Russia. It ran its own affairs. That made it a haven for anti-Tsarist revolutionaries – Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, anarchists, nihilists – in the years before the First World War. It became Lenin’s second home. He and Stalin met for the first time at a Bolshevik conference in Tampere in 1905.

‘I set out to write a full study of the revolutionaries active in Finland during that period. It was a fascinating subject. I never thought it was dangerous as well. The Falenius Bank, as Saukko was called back then, was mentioned in a lot of correspondence as a source of loans to such people. Well, Arto Falenius was willing to admit his grandfather lent money to revolutionaries, though he denied they were gifts in effect, never repaid. He also denied Paavo sheltered mutineers who took part in a short-lived Red uprising here on Suomenlinna in 1906. It was odd. The evidence was clear and I couldn’t see a problem. Paavo Falenius was a socialist sympathizer. Good publicity, I’d have thought.

‘Then I came across some other information that confused the picture. Lots of new stuff was leaking out of the Soviet Union around then thanks to glasnost. It turned out from some of it that Lenin suspected Paavo Falenius was a double agent, feeding information about the revolutionary groups to the Tsarist government in St Petersburg. True? I never found out for sure, because that was when I really got Arto’s attention, by probing his grandfather’s relationship with a shadowy character called Karl Vanting.

‘Vanting was Danish, born in Copenhagen in 1884. He moved to Helsinki in 1905 specially to offer his services to Lenin as an active revolutionary. He played a big part in organizing the 1906 mutiny and a general strike the same year. The story was that he was a bitter enemy of the Romanovs because he was an illegitimate son of Tsar Alexander the Third. It could be true. There was supposed to be a resemblance. And my researches showed his mother worked as a maid in the Danish royal palace of Fredensborg. She was dismissed in December 1883. Karl was born five months later. Pregnancy was probably the reason for her dismissal. The Tsar and the Tsarina, Dagmar, went to Fredensborg with their children every summer to visit their Danish relatives. So, the timing fits. Karl’s mother married a Copenhagen shopkeeper called Vanting in 1885 and the boy took his stepfather’s name.

‘The same material that quoted Lenin as suspecting Paavo Falenius of working for the other side mentioned Vanting as his alleged confederate. This is where it gets murky. Vanting left Helsinki in 1909, destination unknown. It took a lot of work to follow his tracks. He dropped out of revolutionary politics altogether and turned up on the Caribbean island of St Thomas, working as a clerk for the aide-de-camp to the Governor of the Danish Virgin Islands. The aide-de-camp’s name was Hakon Nydahl. Denmark sold their Virgin Islands colony to the United States in 1917 and Nydahl went home. Vanting didn’t go with him. He stayed on, working for the new American administration. Then, in the spring of 1918, he got himself attached to a US regiment sent to intervene in the Russian Civil War. He spoke quite good Russian and they were short of interpreters.

‘The Russian Civil War was the Whites against the Reds – crudely speaking, Tsarists versus Bolsheviks – in the aftermath of the Revolution, complicated by parts of the old Empire trying to break away and British, French, German and American forces trying to grab territory and/or stop the Reds winning. Plus rescue the Tsar – if they could. Finland declared independence from Russia at the end of 1917 and then had its own Reds against Whites Civil War. Unlike in Russia, the Whites won, with a little help from the Germans. It was all over by May 1918. Thousands had died. And thousands of Reds had been taken prisoner. This is where they were held. Here on Suomenlinna. The fortress became a prison.

‘What’s this got to do with Karl Vanting? Well, one day in October 1918, two people arrived in Suomenlinna in a small boat they said they’d rowed across the Gulf of Finland from Russia. One of them was Vanting. The other was a lad in his early teens. Vanting didn’t say anything about serving in the American army and he claimed he didn’t know what had been happening in Finland. Unfortunately for him, the prison commandant remembered him as a Red revolutionary. He and the lad – whose name wasn’t recorded – were locked up.

‘Conditions here in 1918 were terrible. Overcrowding. Disease. Famine. Vanting couldn’t have chosen a worse place to land. But he wasn’t here for long. After a few weeks, he and his companion were released on the recognizance of Paavo Falenius. And then… they dropped out of sight.

‘It gets even murkier now. Like Timo told you, the big unanswered question about Saukko Bank is where their influx of capital in the early nineteen twenties came from. Well, what you’ve found out fills in the gaps in a theory I thought was really off-the-wall when I first developed it, but now… fits together like Lego. A Danish invention, no? Lege godt. To play well. And they did play it well.

‘Paavo Falenius was a double agent. Not much doubt about it. Maybe the best kind. The kind both sides trust so completely you have to ask: which side was he really on? He was born in 1869. Studied law at St Petersburg University. One of his fellow students was Peter Lvovich Bark, who also went into banking and was the Russian Minister of Finance from 1914 until the Revolution. He fled to England afterwards, where he became Sir Peter Bark, a director of the Bank of England. Strange, no? But consider. Bark acted as executor for the Tsar’s estate after his presumed death. Only he knew how much money there was and where it was. Falenius was an old friend of his. I found photographs of them together in a university rowing team and later at banking dinners in Helsinki and St Petersburg.

‘I think I know what it all adds up to. The assassin your friend’s grandfather saved the Grand Duchesses Olga and Tatiana from in Cowes in August 1909 was Karl Vanting. It was hushed up because Tsar Nicholas the Second knew he was his illegitimate half-brother. Vanting was banished to the Danish Virgin Islands in the hope he could be reformed. It sort of worked, at least for a while. But in 1918 he went to Russia with the American army – and vanished. Then he turned up in Finland with a young companion who was never officially identified. Well, I think that companion was – or became – Peder Aksden. I think Sir Peter Bark used some of the Tsar’s money to buy the young man a new life in Denmark and to buy the silence of those people who thought they knew who he really was.

‘And who were those people? Falenius gave us a clue when he changed the name of his bank. Saukko. Otter. Tolmar Aksden went to Norse mythology for the name of his company. Mjollnir. Thor’s magic hammer. I think he followed the example of the man who gave him the capital to start Mjollnir. But what’s the mythical significance of an otter? In Finnish myth, Tuonela is the land of the dead, from which no traveller returns. The only exception was the hero Vainomoinen. He crossed the river marking the boundary of Tuonela and was greeted by Tuonetar, goddess of the dead. She offered him some of the wondrous ale of Tuonela. He drank his fill. Then, while he slept it off, Tuonetar’s son built an iron net across the river, so that Vainomoinen couldn’t leave and would be trapped for ever. But, when he woke and saw what had been done, Vainomoinen changed himself into an otter and swam through the net back to the land of the living.

‘In 1918, Russia was the land of the dead. Vanting’s young companion escaped by changing himself into someone else. Hakon Nydahl persuaded his sister to take the young man in as a kind of replacement for the child she’d lost, supplied false records of his birth in Jutland and money for his new family. The money came through Falenius Bank, later Saukko, from the Tsar’s secret accounts controlled by Sir Peter Bark. Paavo Falenius skimmed off some for his own use. Some of the rest ended up in Mjollnir. And some in Nydahl’s safe at his apartment in Copenhagen. The markkaa his housekeeper stole were 1939 issue, right? Well, the signs were growing all through 1939 that Stalin would invade Finland. Falenius probably sent a large chunk of money to Nydahl because he was afraid the Soviets would overrun the country and close him down. He must have thought they’d send him to a gulag if his double dealing was found out.

‘As it happened, the Soviets were never able to conquer Finland. The Germans got involved again. And Field Marshal Mannerheim saved the country, as every Finnish schoolboy knows. So, Paavo Falenius lived on. And so did his bank. He died in 1957. He has a very fine tomb in Hietaniemi Cemetery. Poor Peder Aksden was dead by then, of course. An accident with a sickle, his daughter said? I can believe it. Sharp blades are dangerous things for haemophiliacs to handle.

‘You see now, Richard? The Tsar’s money. The nameless young man from Russia. The change of identity to slip through the net. Hakon Nydahl’s sister thought she was adopting the Tsar’s haemophiliac son, Alexei. Crazy, no? But they were crazy times. No one knew for sure what had happened to the family. Rumour, rumour, rumour. But nothing certain. Vanting told some tale of rescuing the boy to atone for trying to kill his sisters. Did Falenius believe him? Maybe. More likely he reckoned he could persuade others to believe him. Was that how he extracted the money from Bark? By threatening him with a convincing impostor? Or by convincing him the young man wasn’t an impostor? Dagmar, the Dowager Empress, was still in the Crimea at the time. She didn’t leave until spring 1919. So, Bark had to act without consulting her. And he had to stick by his actions. Maybe, if he believed Vanting’s story, he thought it was better to let the Tsarevich heal his body and mind in the seclusion of the Danish countryside and to keep his survival secret – even from his grandmother – in case the Soviets sent assassins after him. The young man may have had no clear memory of who he was or what had happened to him. If he was Alexei, he’d been through a traumatic experience. But, then again, maybe Bark never believed the story for a moment. Maybe he paid up to avoid the damage a false Alexei, manipulated by Falenius, could do. The same goes for Nydahl. He knew Vanting from his days in the West Indies. What did he think he was getting himself involved in? Or was he just following orders from Dagmar’s nephew, King Christian the Tenth of Denmark, to bury the problem before the old lady came home? The possibilities are endless. We’ll never know now.

‘Whatever the truth behind it was, the plan worked well. But then a young woman showed up in Germany claiming to be Alexei’s sister, Anastasia. And many people believed her, including several members of the Romanov family. If she was formally acknowledged, she’d get control of her father’s estate and find out where a lot of his money had gone. So, she had to be stopped. And what better way could there be of doing that than supplying a set of fingerprints that proved she couldn’t be Anastasia? Bark had made powerful friends since arriving in London. I think he arranged through them to send Clem Hewitson to Copenhagen at some point in 1925, probably the autumn, with the fake prints he was instructed to claim he’d taken on board the imperial yacht in August 1909. He and Nydahl were going to travel to Berlin, where Anna Anderson was in hospital, fingerprint her and expose her as a fraud.

‘But something went wrong. Maybe Hewitson started to think Anna was genuine and wasn’t willing to cheat her out of her inheritance. Or maybe he found out from Nydahl what was really going on. Bark’s friends in the British Establishment wouldn’t have known about his arrangement with Falenius. If Hewitson exposed that, there’d have been a big rethink. In the end, though, it would still have been hushed up. The fingerprint plot against Anna Anderson would have been abandoned, but Bark’s other deal would have been quietly overlooked. The Tsar’s unclaimed deposits at the Bank of England, which Bark controlled, bought a lot of silence. Anyway, Anna Anderson never did win acknowledgement as Anastasia, did she? They wore her down over the years.

‘Clem Hewitson, the English policeman, and Hakon Nydahl, the Danish courtier, must have trusted each other after that more than they did their superiors. I think they decided to keep a record of everything that happened, which they could use to defend themselves if they ever needed to. I think that’s what the letters were all about: insurance. I doubt Nydahl ever told his relatives he’d written them. It was a clever idea: documents in Danish, stored in England; as good as a secret code. If you could read them, you’d know whether Nydahl believed Peder Aksden truly was the Tsarevich. If he didn’t, then you’d also know some of the Tsar’s money, intended for his children, was stolen by a Finnish banker and used by a Danish businessman to create his own empire. Tolmar Aksden: Tsar of all the enterprises. If I’m right, he badly needed to destroy those letters. And now he has. All that’s left are the fake fingerprints. On their own, they prove nothing.

‘I’m sorry, Richard. But that’s how I see it. It all ends in nothing.’

FORTY-SIX

‘I’m not going to let them get away with it,’ said Eusden, breaking the silence that had followed Tallgren’s bleak conclusion.

‘Brave words, Richard.’ Tallgren smiled at him. ‘I would have spoken them myself once.’

‘But it’s worse than theft and fraud, Pekka. They’ve killed people, including Tolmar’s ex-wife. Pernille was actually trying to help him, for God’s sake.’

‘She should have known better.’

‘Is that all you can say?’

Tallgren looked surprised by the flare of anger in Eusden’s voice. ‘Anteeksi. I forgot you knew her. What was she like?’

‘A fine and brave person.’

Tallgren sighed. ‘I am sorry. But… they’ve always been ruthless. Consider what happened to Karl Vanting in the end.’

‘What did happen?’

‘He was found shot dead at his lodgings in Hakaniemi on New Year’s Eve, 1925. It was a poor area of the city then. Whatever money Paavo Falenius gave him, he must have lost it. Then, perhaps, he asked for more. The police decided it was suicide. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t. I saw the television news this evening. They interviewed the officer in charge of investigating the explosion at Osmo’s house. He talked about a gas leak as the likeliest explanation.’

‘They’ll find traces of explosive.’

‘Will they? I guess that depends how thorough they are. Even if they do, what evidence do you think they’ll find that Tolmar Aksden had anything to do with it?’

‘None,’ Eusden admitted.

‘Let me show you something.’ Tallgren rose stiffly to his feet and left the room, patting Eusden consolingly on the shoulder as he passed.

There was the sound of a filing-cabinet drawer being slid open and of papers being shuffled. Then Tallgren was back in the kitchen, carrying a bulging file. He placed it carefully on the table. On the cover was a single word written in felt-tip capitals: WANTING.

‘The fruit of my research. Not very sweet, I’m afraid.’

‘Wanting is… Vanting?’

‘Ah. The spelling. Yes. The name’s probably German originally. The W is pronounced like a V, of course. In English, it makes a sick kind of joke, doesn’t it? He wanted a lot. Revenge. Wealth. Success. He didn’t get any of it.’ Tallgren flicked the file open. ‘My notes are all in Finnish. There are some documents in Danish and Russian also. So, nothing for you to read. But something for you to see.’ He slid out an A5-sized photograph, glossily printed, though the picture itself was grainy and indistinct, a black-and-white shot of a crowd of people on some steps. In one of the margins was written Helsingin Sanomat 11 Huhtikuu 1957. ‘This shows some of the mourners leaving Helsinki Cathedral after Paavo Falenius’s funeral. Take a look at those three particularly.’

Tallgren pointed to a short, middle-aged man near the top of the steps, who seemed to be conversing with two other men, one older, one much younger. All three were dressed in dark overcoats. The youngest man was bare-headed, but the other two wore dark Homburgs, the brims pulled down so that only the lower halves of their faces could be seen.

‘Eino Falenius, Hakon Nydahl and Tolmar Aksden. There they are, Richard. Caught together, for once. They say Eino looked a lot like his father. He was in his forties then. Nydahl was in his seventies. And Aksden was… just eighteen.’

Eino Falenius was a sleek, elegantly tailored businessman running to fat, with a smudge of moustache and a confidential air. He had his hand on Hakon Nydahl’s shoulder. The elderly Dane was thin and straight as a pencil, a walking cane clutched in front of him, his gaze fixed inscrutably on Falenius. Tolmar Aksden, meanwhile, was barely recognizable as the bulky, assertive figure he was to appear in the pages of the very same newspaper forty years on. He was tall and slim, a boyish lock of hair falling over his unlined brow, his face clear and open, yet also watchful, studying Falenius with the faintest of frowns, concentrating on something that was being said – or something he had noticed.

‘What was a teenager from a farm in Jutland doing at an eminent Finnish banker’s funeral, eh? And not just in the congregation, but conversing afterwards with the banker’s son? This was long before he set up Mjollnir or did business with Saukko. The official version of Tolmar Aksden’s life has him pulling sheep out of ditches in 1957, not fraternizing with Helsinki money men. So, what’s it all about? I asked Arto Falenius that. I asked him how he explained it. Do you know what he said? “I don’t have to explain it to someone like you.” And he smiled when he said it. Such a smile. I wish now I’d punched him in his smiling face. Well, it couldn’t have gone any worse for me if I had, could it? Someone like me, Richard. Someone like you. They don’t have to account to us.’

‘We’ll see about that.’

‘What do you intend to do?’

It was a good question. And the answer was only just beginning to form in Eusden’s mind. Run away? Give up? Write it all off as Marty’s folly that he had no stake in? He could not do it. The rest of his life would diminish into an apologetic murmur if he did not at least try to bring Pernille’s murderers to justice. ‘Do you have a tape recorder?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can I borrow it?’

‘Sure, but-’

‘Do you know where Arto Falenius lives?’

‘Yes. He owns a villa near Kaivopuisto Park. The embassy district. Very smart. His father and grandfather lived there before him. The Villa Norsonluu, in Itäinen Puistotie. You’re thinking of going there?’

‘Tolmar Aksden’s out of town. So, it has to be Falenius. He’s probably the easier of the two to crack anyway.’

‘Crack?’

‘I’ll make him explain to someone like me. On tape.’

‘He’ll never agree to do that.’

‘I don’t propose to give him a choice in the matter. Do you know anything about firearms?’

‘Well, I did my eight months in the army. They made me fire a rifle. Plus take it apart and put it back together again.’

‘That’s more than I’ve ever done. I’ve got a gun, you see. An automatic pistol. In my coat. I’ve no intention of using it. But I need to look as if I know how to. And I don’t want any accidents.’

‘You’re going to force a confession out of Falenius at gunpoint?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Are you crazy?’

‘Probably.’

‘Even if you could, it wouldn’t… prove anything legally.’

‘I don’t care about that. I’ll have it. And I’ll make what use of it I can.’

‘You are crazy.’

‘I’m not asking you to go with me, Pekka. Just give me the tape recorder and show me how the gun works. Then wish me luck.’

Eusden slept for a few hours on the sofa in Tallgren’s lounge, his sleep the dreamless unconsciousness of utter exhaustion. He woke before dawn, reluctantly ate some porridge and less reluctantly drank a mug of strong black coffee. Then Tallgren drove him over the bridges of Suomenlinna through the frozen twilight to the quay in time for the first ferry of the day. Tallgren had done his best to explain the mechanics of the gun and the intricacies of his tape recorder. Beyond that he only ventured the opinion that what Eusden was doing was madness. An admirable kind of madness, perhaps, but madness nonetheless.

‘I fear you’re about to make the biggest mistake of your life, Richard,’ he said as Eusden climbed out of the car.

‘I don’t think so,’ Eusden replied with a wry smile. ‘A bigger mistake would be to do nothing.’

FORTY-SEVEN

The cream gables of the Villa Norsonluu would have glowed warmly in summer sunshine, bowered in greenery, doves cooing peacefully. Late winter dawn revealed a different place. Snow obscured most of the roof, coated the branches of the leafless trees and blanketed the garden in white. There was no sound or movement from the dovecot that Eusden had seen through the boundary hedge, nor from the house behind it.

Now that he was standing there, alone, surrounded by silence, Eusden began to wonder if what he had embarked on was indeed an act of madness. He looked down the road and saw in the distance the Tricolour and the Union Jack flying over the French and British Embassies. Of all the places in all the world for him to do what he was about to do, this had to be potentially one of the most scandalous, the most ruinous, most irresponsible of all.

And what, when it came down to it, was he going to do? He had forgotten to ask Tallgren if Falenius lived alone. The size of the house suggested not. Was he married? Did he have children? Did Eusden seriously intend to force his way into some scene of domestic normality, brandishing a gun, issuing demands, crossing a line he could never step back over?

The entrance to the villa was sealed by a high locked gate. There was no camera in sight, though there might of course be one on the house, ready to record any incursion he made. He stood in the lee of the hedge, willing himself to act, facing down the doubts and fears that swarmed in his brain. The railing-topped wall behind him was scaleable, the hedge penetrable. It was the only way to get in. He had to attempt it. And soon. The longer he delayed, the likelier he was to be spotted.

Suddenly, there was a sound, breaking the silence. A door was opening, electronically operated. Eusden peered through the hedge, but could see nothing. Then a car engine started in a throaty growl. And in the same instant the gates at the entrance whirred into operation, swinging back on their expensively automated hinges. There was a rumble of fat tyre on gritted snow. A shape, low, pale and metallic, moved somewhere beyond the hedge.

Falenius was leaving. And Eusden had to stop him. He ran to the gate and reached into his pocket for the gun. The driveway curved out of sight towards the house. He stood waiting for the car to come into view, waiting and wondering what he should do. Then it appeared: a Bentley, silver-grey and sleekly profiled, nosing round the corner. A glimpse of the driver was enough. It was Arto Falenius.

If Eusden drew the gun, what, he asked himself, would Falenius do? Stop? Or accelerate towards him? Could that raked and tinted windscreen possibly be bullet-proof? There had to be another way, one that was safer for both of them. He dropped to his knees and sprawled across the pavement, blocking the entrance.

The Bentley came to a halt in the gateway. Falenius gave the horn two short blasts. Eusden did not move. All he could see of the car from where he lay was the headlamp array, the number plate and the radiator grille, with the distinctive Bentley B above it. He heard the engine cooler roar, then the driver’s door slam. Arto Falenius, pinstripe-suited as in his newspaper photograph, strode towards him, gleaming brogues crunching on grit and ice. He said something in Finnish that sounded impatient. Eusden made a show of struggling to his feet.

‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘I must’ve slipped.’

‘Are you OK?’ Falenius asked, with little obvious concern.

‘Yes. Fine, thanks. But you aren’t.’ Eusden pulled the gun from his pocket and pointed it at Falenius’s midriff. ‘Do exactly as I say.’

‘What is this?’ Falenius looked shocked and angry and alarmed in equal measure.

‘What do you think?’

‘You want… money?’

‘No. I want a ride. And a talk.’ Eusden kept the gun trained on Falenius as he walked to the passenger door of the Bentley and opened it. ‘Get in. We’re leaving.’

‘You can’t do this.’

‘But I am doing it. Get in. Now.’

Falenius was breathing rapidly as he moved to the car. Eusden lowered himself carefully into the passenger seat as Falenius settled behind the wheel. The doors clunked shut, sealing off the chill of the morning.

‘Drive to the seafront.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Richard Eusden.’

‘I’ve… never heard of you.’

‘Really? Well, your good friend Tolmar Aksden has heard of me. And it’s him we’re going to talk about. Start moving.’

Traffic on the seafront road was light and none of it was stopping to admire the view of the frozen harbour, covered with snow and differing in appearance from Kaivopuisto Park on the other side of the road only by being flatter. When Falenius turned off the engine of the Bentley, his shallow breathing became audible in the muffled interior of the car. He did not look directly at Eusden, staring out instead through the windscreen at the grey hummocks of islands scattered across the white-carpeted sea. He moistened his lips and asked hoarsely, ‘What do you want to know?’

‘The truth.’ Eusden propped the recorder on the dashboard between them and switched it on. ‘In your very own words.’

‘The truth… about what?’

‘Your relationship with Tolmar Aksden.’

‘He’s the new owner of Saukko Bank. We’re business associates. And friends. That’s it.’

‘Listen to me, Arto. I already know what you’re going to tell me. But I need to hear you say it. On the record. So, don’t lie to me. The consequences could be fatal. You understand?’

Falenius swallowed hard. ‘I understand.’

‘Good. Now, I’ll ask you some questions. All you have to do is give me honest answers. Are we clear?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re Arto Falenius, son of Eino Falenius, grandson of Paavo Falenius, the founder of Saukko Bank. Correct?’

‘Correct.’

‘Where did Paavo get all his money from – the huge influx of cash in the early nineteen twenties that no one seems able to account for?’

‘He… attracted some big investors.’

‘Was one of them Sir Peter Bark, investing on behalf of Tsar Nicholas the Second?’

Falenius sighed and bowed his head, as if oppressed by the fulfilment of his worst fears. ‘Kristus! Not this. Please not this.’

‘Did Bark pump the Tsar’s money into Saukko Bank?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘It’s true. My father never trusted me enough to tell me the whole story. And Tolmar always says I’m better off not knowing. The Tsar’s money? That could be it. If you say it was, then, OK, it was. Is that good enough for you?’

‘No.’

‘I didn’t think it would be. So, go ahead. Ask about my grandfather, this man Bark, Hakon Nydahl, Karl Wanting. Ask me and tell me what I’m supposed to say. Then I’ll say it. I’m too young to have met any of them. But apparently I have to live with their ghosts.’

‘You must know your grandfather channelled money to the Aksden family through Nydahl.’

‘Yes. I know that. But not why. Not really. You don’t keep Tolmar as a friend by poking your nose into his affairs. Or as a boss. He owns Saukko now. I’m just one of his employees.’

‘Why did you sell?’

‘The sale was planned years ago. Tolmar’s basically owned us ever since I became chairman. He struck a deal with my father. I was part of it.’

‘And what did the deal require you to do?’

‘Build up stakes in a range of key Russian businesses so that Tolmar could move into the Russian market without anyone noticing.’

‘They’ve noticed now.’

‘They were bound to eventually. Anyway, that’s Tolmar’s problem. I just do what he tells me.’

‘Why do I keep hearing that phrase?’

Falenius managed a wintry smile. ‘Because he’s good at persuading people to obey him.’

‘What do you know about the explosion yesterday at Osmo Koskinen’s house?’

‘What I hear on the news. Gas leak, maybe?’

‘You are aware Pernille Madsen, Tolmar’s ex-wife, was among those killed, aren’t you?’

‘Truly?’ Falenius’s expression was authentically shocked and baffled. It seemed he genuinely had not known. ‘Pernille?’

‘Yes.’

‘I never thought he’d…’ Falenius shook his head. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘He’s made you a party to murder, Arto. How does that make you feel?’

‘Sick. To my stomach. But you must understand. I knew nothing about it.’

‘Because you didn’t want to know.’

‘OK. You can say that. But still…’ Falenius stared pleadingly at Eusden. ‘You’ve got the wrong man. I’m not to blame. You should ask Tolmar your questions. Not me.’

‘I would if I could.’

‘I can tell you where he is.’

‘Oh, yes?’

‘He’s hiding. Now I know what from. We’ve… done some dirty things over the years, but…never murder.’

‘Where is he hiding?’

‘We have a kesämökki – a summer-house – up on Lake Päijänne. He’s gone there. He often goes there. To relax. To think.’ Falenius appeared to believe he was winning Eusden over. ‘I can tell you… exactly where it is. He’ll be alone. At this time of the year, very alone.’

‘You don’t need to tell me where it is, Arto. You just need to take me there.’

‘No. I can’t leave Helsinki. I’ll be missed. It’s a… two-hundred-kilometre drive.’

‘We’d better get going, then, hadn’t we?’ Eusden stretched forward and retrieved the recorder. ‘You’re right. There’s nothing more to be said. We’ll leave Tolmar to do all the talking.’

PÄIJÄNNE
FORTY-EIGHT

It was early afternoon when they came within sight of the Falenius family’s mökki on one of the many inlets along the shore of Lake Päijänne. The first half of the journey had been a fast motorway cruise, constrained only by Eusden’s insistence that Falenius keep within the speed limit; he could not risk attracting the attention of the police. Since leaving the main road, however, the going had been slowed by snow and ice. Forests had closed around them. Traffic had thinned and vanished. They were alone, in a wintry world of stillness and grey light and blanketing white. The bumpy track they had followed off the last surfaced road emerged from snow-heavy pine and spruce into a stretch of skeletal ash and maple as the frozen surface of the lake, dead flat and matt white, appeared before them. And there, beside a snow-covered meadow, was the mökki – a simple wooden chalet, with smoke rising from its chimney and a Range Rover parked behind it, next to a log-store.

Falenius pulled up next to the Range Rover and turned off the engine. He looked drained and desperate. The long drive, during which Eusden had said little, leaving him to imagine the worst, had taken its toll.

‘He must have heard us,’ the Finn said hoarsely. ‘Why doesn’t he come out?’

‘Let’s go and see. But, first, give me the key to this thing.’

Falenius pulled it out of the ignition and handed it over. ‘What are you going to do to us?’

‘I told you. I want the whole story on the record. If you give me that, we’ll all leave here alive and well.’

‘I’m cooperating, OK? Remember that. Any problems you have with Tolmar, they’re not with me.’

‘I’ll remember. Let’s go.’

They climbed out of the car. The stark reality of the place they had come to disclosed itself in the cold, misty air. If Tolmar Aksden had wanted to hide, he had chosen the right place. No one would come looking for him here unless they badly needed to find him.

Eusden gestured for Falenius to lead the way. They walked slowly round to the front of the chalet. The roof extended down to cover a planked veranda. Between the chalet and the shore was the snowhummocked shape of a rowing boat. A landing stage jutted out beyond it into the lake. Falenius called out Aksden’s name as he approached the door. There was no response.

‘Look inside,’ said Eusden.

Falenius opened the door and stepped in, calling out again. Eusden stood behind him in the doorway. Warmth from a stove wafted out to meet him. There was a large table and some chairs, a sofa, armchairs and a rug in front of the stove. To his right was a well-equipped kitchen area. A couple of doors led off to other rooms out of his sight. There were books, papers and a laptop on the table, as well as a coffeepot and mug. Falenius touched the pot and looked back at Eusden. ‘Still warm.’

‘He can’t be far, then. We’ll-’

Two short blasts on the Bentley’s horn burst through the silence. Eusden retreated from the veranda and strode to the corner of the chalet. A tall, bulky figure in a quilted parka and flapped cap was standing by the open driver’s door of the car. He slammed it, revealing as he did so the rifle he was carrying, and stood where he was, staring at Eusden with cool curiosity.

‘Where’s Arto?’ The voice was gruff, the tone peremptory. He must have been able to see the gun in Eusden’s hand, but he paid it no attention.

‘Here,’ Eusden replied, stepping back to let Falenius pass.

‘I told you not to come here, Arto,’ said Aksden.

‘This guy gave me no choice, Tolmar.’ Falenius hurried eagerly towards his friend, as if he would give him the protection he needed. ‘He says-’

‘Let him speak for himself.’

Eusden followed Falenius at a cautious pace. Aksden held the rifle loosely and unthreateningly. Yet still it was a weapon. Eusden’s advantage had been cancelled out. ‘Do you know who I am, Tolmar?’

Aksden nodded. ‘Oh yes. Lund told me you were still alive. Why have you come here?’

‘I want the truth.’

‘That’s a large thing to want, my friend.’

‘And a dangerous one, it appears.’

Aksden looked at Falenius with an expression of weary disappointment. ‘You shouldn’t have brought him here, Arto. It was a stupid thing to do.’

‘He threatened me with a gun.’

‘An empty threat, you fool. He’s no killer. Are you, Eusden?’

‘Maybe you’ve turned me into one.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Are you going to put it to the test?’ Eusden challenged Aksden with his gaze, but saw no hint of weakness in the Dane’s steely blue eyes.

‘If I have to.’

‘Surely we can sort this out,’ pleaded Falenius.

‘I doubt it. It’s not as simple as either of you think. Were you followed, Arto?’

‘Followed? No. Of course not.’

‘We weren’t followed,’ Eusden declared. He was confident on the point, though curious as to who Aksden thought might have done the following. ‘Police on your tail, Tolmar?’

‘Not that I know.’ Aksden gave him a tight, ironical little smile. ‘Check under the car, Arto.’

‘Check for what?’

‘Anything that looks different.’

Falenius knelt and peered under the Bentley. Something caught his attention. He bent lower. ‘Kristus, what’s that?’

‘What does it look like?’

‘A box. With a… flashing red light.’

Aksden tossed back his head and sighed. ‘Satans også.’

‘What is it?’ demanded Eusden.

‘A tracking device, I expect. Probably attached some time yesterday. You only had to look, Arto, and you’d have seen it. But you never see anything, do you?’ Aksden glanced suspiciously towards the trees. ‘We should go indoors.’

‘Who’s tracking me?’ asked Falenius as he stood up. ‘What-’

The bullet took him in the back. It knocked all the breath out of him. He looked first surprised, then mildly pained. He fell to his knees, swayed for a moment, and slumped forward on to the ground.

‘Run,’ shouted Aksden.

Eusden was already running, making for the shelter of the chalet. A bullet pinged off the bodywork of the Range Rover. Then another shattered one of its windows. Eusden made it to the veranda, blind-sided from the direction of the shots. Aksden lunged after him. The firing stopped.

‘This is your fault, Eusden,’ Aksden gasped. ‘You ought to understand that, you piece of…’ He broke off and shook his head. ‘I only needed another twenty-four hours. That’s all. Just twenty-four hours.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Who’s shooting at us?’

‘You think I know his name? He’s a hunter. And I’m his prey. He’d probably have got me if Arto hadn’t stood up when he did.’ Aksden engaged the bolt on his rifle, craned round the corner of the chalet and let off a shot, then jumped back.

‘Can you see him?’

‘No. He’s hiding in the trees. That was just to keep him there.’

‘Who sent him?’

‘Did the American tell you about Olsen?’

‘The American? If you mean Brad, yes. He killed Olsen, right?’

‘Right. The Opposition didn’t like that. They lost a man they trusted and the dirt on me they expected him to deliver. Also they thought I’d arranged it. So, they took out a contract on me to force me to negotiate with them. Clever tactic. We talked. They agreed to cancel the contract if I killed Brad as a demonstration of my good faith, with a commercial partnership to follow. A better deal for me than I’d have got any other way, but it only takes effect when they get confirmation that Brad and his crew are dead. All I had to do was stay out of their hit man’s reach until then. Which I would have done, but for you and Arto leading him right to me.’

‘Who are these people – the Opposition?’

‘Businessmen, Eusden. The Russian kind. I’m beginning to win their respect for standing up to them. Pokkers også, now it looks like it might be too late.’

‘You think I’d care if this man killed you?’

‘No. But you should care about yourself. He’ll kill you too just for being here.’ Aksden pulled off his cap and blinked several times as if trying to clear his sight, then stepped to the corner of the chalet and fired another shot. ‘I saw something this time,’ he said as he moved back. ‘I think he’s edging closer.’

‘Can we phone for help?’

‘It would take hours to arrive. But go ahead – try.’ Aksden pulled a phone from inside his parka and tossed it to Eusden. ‘Dial one one two.’

‘There’s no signal.’

‘As I expected. The tracker incorporates a jammer. He’s a professional, Eusden. Don’t you understand? He knows we’re trapped. He’ll wait for us to make a run for the car. Then he’ll take us both. For Guds skyld, why did you come here? Why didn’t you just thank your stars when you escaped from the American and go home to England?’

‘I couldn’t let you get away with killing Pernille. You’ll burn in hell for that, Tolmar.’

‘You and Pernille?’ Aksden frowned at him, as if considering a point that had only now crossed his mind. ‘I should have guessed.’

‘You murdered her.’

‘I didn’t force her to go to Helsinki. She went because she thought she’d get her hands on the letters. She’s always wanted to know my secrets.’

‘She went for Michael’s sake.’

‘Hah!’ Aksden reached out as if to grasp Eusden by the throat, his size and bulk suddenly intimidatingly apparent. But Eusden had the gun up between them pointing at his chest. Aksden stopped and took half a step back. ‘Listen to me,’ he said, running his hand across his mouth. ‘While that sniper’s out there in the trees, we have to help each other. Together, we stand a chance. It’s the only one we’re going to get. Do you want to live or die, Eusden? It’s that simple.’

FORTY-NINE

There could be only one answer to Tolmar Aksden’s question. ‘What do you suggest we do?’ asked Eusden. He eyed the older man doubtfully. His strength, of mind and body, counted for nothing in the cross hairs of a telescopic rifle sight. But in Aksden’s steady gaze and braced posture there was no hint that he was about to admit as much.

‘I can take him, Eusden. How far is he away? A hundred metres or so? I’ve taken elk at further. I need glasses to read. But at distance… I don’t miss. I have to see him first, though. I have to have a clear shot.’

‘You think you’ll get one?’

‘Not unless we draw him out. You have to do that, my friend. It’s the only way.’

‘I’m not your friend, Tolmar.’

‘Until that sniper’s dead, you are. And I’m yours. It’s about survival, Eusden. Him or us. You’ve got to make him show himself.’

‘How?’

‘Go to the other end of the veranda and run to the wood-store. The cars will cover you most of the way and there are trees behind you. He’ll take a shot at you. He’s bound to. But at that range with you moving fast and plenty of cover, he’ll miss. I won’t, though. Not a chance. We’ll have him.’

‘You expect me to go out there and get shot at?’

‘Yes. Unless you’re better with a rifle than I am.’

Eusden struggled to calculate the odds on being hit. He suspected they were much less favourable than Aksden claimed. But there was no alternative. Doing nothing was not an option. That at least was certain.

‘We need to do this now, Eusden. He’ll work his way closer and closer. He’ll cut down the margin of error until there isn’t any. We have to make our move.’

Eusden looked round the corner of the chalet at his route. It was as Aksden had said. He really should be able to make it. But he was aware that the judgement hinged on the hit man’s accuracy and alertness. All he could do was trust to luck. It had to be done. There was no way round it. And the longer he hesitated, the slenderer his luck would grow. He looked over his shoulder at Aksden and nodded. Aksden nodded back. It was time to go.

He stepped off the veranda, jogged alongside the wall of the chalet, then put his head down and ran for it, focusing on the log-store and the shelter he would find behind it. It was not far. It was close, in fact, very close. He heard a shot and the whine of a bullet somewhere behind him. He was going to get away with it, no question. When would Aksden fire? When-

The bullet struck his leading foot. He fell as if tripped, pain slashing up through his leg. He hit the snow and, glancing down, saw blood welling from his ankle. He heard another shot. There was a distant cry, at once cut off. He tried to rise. The side wall of the log-store was only a few feet away. But the ankle would bear no weight. His shriek of agony was so immediate that it seemed to come from someone else. He fell again and started crawling forward.

‘He’s down,’ Aksden shouted from the far side of the chalet. ‘Stay where you are while I check.’

Eusden reached the corner of the log-store and propped himself up against it. He was panting for breath. His lower leg felt hot from the blood leaking out of him. There was a trail of it in the snow behind him. He saw Aksden striding across the meadow towards the trees, clutching the rifle in front to him. There was a slumped figure by one of the maples. Aksden had got his man.

Aksden slowed as he approached his victim and stopped a few yards from him. He raised the rifle to his shoulder, took steady aim and fired. The figure jerked from the impact. Then Aksden stepped forward, pushed the sniper’s rifle clear of him with his foot and stooped to pick it up.

He started walking slowly towards Eusden. A minute or so passed. Then he called out. ‘Did he hit you?’

‘Yes,’ Eusden shouted back. ‘My ankle.’

‘Too bad. I guess you won’t be able to walk.’ Aksden was moving more slowly with every stride. ‘Or run.’ He stopped, laid his rifle carefully on the ground and grasped the sniper’s weapon in both hands.

‘What are you doing?’

‘What I have to, Eusden. This way it will look like he finished you before I finished him.’

‘Don’t come any closer.’ Eusden pulled the gun from his pocket and pointed it. He wondered if the tremor in his hand was caused by fear or weakness – and whether Aksden could see it from where he was.

‘I don’t need to be closer. I can kill you from here.’

‘Drop the rifle or I’ll shoot.’

‘Fine. Shoot. You’ll miss. But go ahead anyway. Prove me right.’

He was right. Eusden knew that. He also knew that once he started firing, Aksden would not hesitate to respond. He lowered the gun. ‘Wait,’ he shouted.

‘What for?’

‘There are things you need to know.’

‘True, my friend. But I doubt you can tell me any of them.’

‘What’s your brother doing in Helsinki?’

‘Lars isn’t in Helsinki.’

‘Yes, he is. I saw him there yesterday with my own eyes.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘No. He was there. He followed Koskinen and me to Matalainen’s office. Didn’t Lund mention that? I certainly told him. I’ll tell you what I think, shall I? I think Lars was doing what you accused Pernille of: trying to get his hands on the letters. You haven’t shared the secret with him, have you? Not all of it, anyway. You guard it jealously. Even from your own family. Why is that, Tolmar? Why can’t you bring yourself to trust them?’

‘My family is none of your concern, Eusden. Prying into our affairs is why you’re going to die here in the snow, a long way from home.’

‘Kill me and you’ll be making a big mistake.’

‘And you’re going to explain why, of course.’

Yes. He was. He had to. His brain raced to fill the gaps between what he knew and what he needed to guess – correctly. ‘Do you really believe your father was the Tsarevich, Tolmar? I mean, really? I think you do. I think you’ve always wanted to believe it. That’s why you’re carving out a business empire in Russia. To make up for the real empire you reckon was your birthright. I imagine that information would come as an unpleasant surprise to your new friends over there. Of course, it could all be bullshit, couldn’t it? Who did Karl Wanting find in Siberia? A haemophiliac peasant with a passing resemblance to Alexei? A lie for him and Paavo Falenius to sell to your family so they could help themselves – and ultimately you – to the Tsar’s money? Or was your father the real thing – the one true Alexei? He must have told you.’

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

‘He didn’t, did he? That’s it. That’s your problem. He never said. You were too young when he died. Your grandfather didn’t let you into the family secret until years later. Maybe he waited until Paavo Falenius was dead too. Wanting was long gone, of course. But your grandfather only knew what they wanted him to know – and to believe. It’s not the same as certainty. Rock solid certainty. One way or the other. Well, I can give you that if you want it. If you have the guts to face it.’

‘You can give me that?’ Aksden’s question was an admission of weakness. Eusden had found a way under his defences.

‘Not everything was destroyed in the explosion. Brad kept back one item to sell later to the highest bidder. What else would you expect? The guy was a scumbag.’

‘What item?’

‘Two sets of fingerprints, taken by Clem Hewitson sixteen years apart. The first aboard the imperial yacht off Cowes in August 1909. The second at Aksdenhøj in October 1925. They prove – once and for all – whether your father was the Tsarevich. If he was, the two sets have to match. If not…’

Aksden raised the rifle to his shoulder. ‘Where are they?’

‘One set’s in my pocket. The other’s in a safe at the Grand Marina Hotel in Helsinki, accessible only to me.’

‘Show me what you have.’

Eusden took out the envelope and held it up. ‘You won’t be able to see the insignia from there, Tolmar, so I’ll tell you what it is: the double-headed eagle of the Romanovs. Want a closer look?’

‘Throw your gun away.’

‘OK.’ Eusden tossed the pistol into the snow a few feet from him. ‘Now what?’

‘Don’t move.’

Aksden walked slowly towards him, the rifle held in front of him. The expression on his face was intent and watchful. But something else burned in his gaze. It was more than curiosity, more than desire for certainty. It was obsession.

He stopped a yard or so short and levelled the rifle at Eusden. He looked at the double-headed eagle for a second, then said, ‘Show me what’s in the envelope.’

Eusden fingered up the flap, slid out the sheet of paper and turned it for Aksden to see. There was an intake of breath. Aksden stared at the red-inked fingerprints and the writing beneath them: A.N. 4 viii ’09.

‘A.N.,’ he murmured. ‘Alexei Nikolaievich.’

The rifle was still pointing at Eusden, but Aksden’s attention was fixed on the letter, held out to one side. It was the opportunity Eusden had gambled on getting. It was, in truth, his only chance. He slid forward, swivelled on his hip and lashed out with his uninjured foot. The Dane cried out and fell backwards as his leg was whipped from under him. The rifle went off, but the shot flew harmlessly skywards. As Aksden landed on his back with a thump, Eusden rolled the other way and lunged for the gun. The pain in his ankle counted for nothing now. He grabbed the gun, pushed himself up and turned in the same instant.

But Aksden was already sitting up himself, his eyes blazing, his mouth twisted in fury. He swung the rifle towards Eusden. His finger curled around the trigger. Eusden brought his arm down straight, in line with Aksden’s face. And there was a roar as both weapons fired.

FIFTY

The sky, stared at long enough, seemed to turn from grey to palest blue. And the silence, once the ears had adjusted, gave way to tiny stirrings of wind and the distant cawing of crows somewhere in the forest. Only the gnawing chill of the air above and the snow beneath stirred Eusden from his reverie, which could have lasted several seconds or many minutes – he had no way of knowing. When he tried to sit up, the pain in his right side was sharp and deep. Blood had soaked through his jacket. He could not tell how serious this second wound was. But he was certainly alive. At least, he thought he was.

He propped himself up on his elbows and saw Tolmar Aksden’s body lying a few feet away, the rifle across his chest, one hand still clutching the butt. His expression was a frozen mixture of anger and surprise. There was a sickeningly neat bullet-hole above his left eyebrow and blood on the snow behind his head.

Eusden felt weak, light-headed and curiously contented. Nothing he saw or felt was entirely real to him. He assumed this was some kind of trick being played on him by his brain, a defence mechanism designed to ease the onset of death. It did not dull the pain he was in, but somehow divorced it from him, as if he was watching himself from a place of warmth and safety and disinterested ease. It made the idea of lying back down and continuing to stare at the sky very appealing.

‘Don’t lie down, Coningsby,’ said Marty.

The voice seemed to come from behind him. When he turned his head, there was no one there. Yet he had the sense that someone had been. It was like the quivering of a leaf after a creature has fled into undergrowth: a sign without a sighting.

‘This is all your fault,’ Eusden said aloud. ‘You know that, Marty, don’t you?’ There was no rancour in his tone. It was more in the way of a friendly reproach. ‘Thanks for landing me in it. One last time.’

‘Don’t lie down, Coningsby.’

‘What do you expect me to do?’

‘Deliver a touching eulogy at my funeral.’

‘And for that I need to be there, of course.’

‘It’s customary.’

‘Yeah. So it is.’

Eusden tried to sit up. There was a jab of pain in his side. The bullet had probably smashed a rib. What other damage it might have done he did not care to consider. Certainly standing up did not seem to be an option. He could not phone for help. He was closer to the jammer now than when he had failed to get a signal on the veranda. Theoretically, he could drive to where help might be found if he could make it to the Bentley. He had the key in his pocket. But theory was a long way from practice. Moving presented itself to his mind as a task best deferred, while another part of his mind insisted that deferral would be fatal.

He straightened his arms. It was like plunging into an ice-cold bath. He began to shiver and noticed the sheet of paper with the fingerprints on it lying close to his hand, beside the fallen gun. There they were: the unique traces of a human’s existence on this planet. A.N. Anastasia Nikolaievna. Or Alexei Nikolaievich. ‘Or A.N. bloody Other, Clem, eh?’

‘You’ve been checking up on me, boy? Well, we’ll make a detective of you yet.’

‘Seems you’ve succeeded. Much good that it’s done me.’

Eusden remembered asking Clem once how he had survived four years in the trenches without being killed or injured. And now he heard again the answer the old man had given him. ‘You had to think ahead to survive, boy. If you didn’t, you were finished.’ (Pause for puff on pipe.) ‘’Course, if you thought too far ahead, you were finished as well.’ (Another puff.) ‘I used to reckon five minutes was just about right.’

‘Five minutes? OK, Clem. I’ll try it.’ Eusden grabbed the sheet of paper, folded it as best he could and thrust it into his trouser pocket. The gun he left where it was. He rolled on to his hip and began to work his way towards the Bentley, sawing at the snow with his functioning leg. His shivering became a wild juddering, his breathing a panting wheeze. Pain ballooned inside him. But he did not stop. He felt suddenly and preposterously hot. Sweat started out of him. But still he did not stop.

He reached the car and rewarded himself with a few moments’ rest. The pain ebbed. Then he stretched up to open the door. He managed to do so by about an inch. Pulling it fully open seemed impossible. It felt immensely heavy. He pressed himself close to the side of the car, forced his arm inside the door and pushed with all his failing strength. It was just enough.

An unmeasurable segment of time passed while he rested his chin on the soft leather of the driver’s seat and contemplated, as if it were some abstruse problem he had no personal stake in, the difficulty of levering himself into the car. In the end, no easy answer presented itself. He counted down from ten to one and, after two false starts, simply hauled himself in, gripping the steering-wheel like grim death, an expression he felt in a moment of startling clarity he fully understood for the first time.

He lifted his injured leg in after him, and then nearly fell back out of the car as he pulled the door shut. The warmth that had built up during the drive from Helsinki folded itself round him like a duvet. It would have been easy, so very easy, to surrender to it and fall asleep. But he knew, if he did, he would never wake. He pushed the key into the ignition and turned it. The engine responded with well-tuned vigour. He shifted the stick into drive and eased down the accelerator. The car started moving. He steered it in a slow, wide circle past the body of Arto Falenius, out over the meadow and back on to the track they had arrived by. Every ridge of compacted snow, every minor undulation, sent pain stabbing through his body. But the Bentley rolled softly with the bumps. He knew it could be a great deal worse. And he began to think that he really was going to get through this. He drove slowly along the track, away from the mökki and the bodies lying nearby, into the forest, towards the main road – and survival.

The Bentley essentially drove itself. All Eusden had to do was steer it. His concentration began to falter, his vision to blur. He wondered if dusk was setting in. There was a vagueness to the world beyond the windscreen, a fuzzying at the edges of his vision. The track wound ahead through the snow-stacked trees. He kept his foot on the accelerator, his hands on the wheel. He just needed to keep going. He just-

There was a jolt, a violent lurch. Suddenly, the Bentley was heading down a short slope straight into a mass of trees. He must have mistaken the line of the track somehow. He stamped down on the brake. The car skidded and slewed to the left. But there were as many trees waiting there as dead ahead. And the car slammed straight into one.

Eusden had forgotten to fasten his seat belt. It was far from a high-speed impact, but still he was thrown against the wheel, setting the horn blaring. He lay across it, watched with detached curiosity the steam rising from the crumpled radiator and the shower of snow and pine needles pattering down on to the bonnet.

Eventually, he pushed himself back into the seat. The horn fell silent. All the breath seemed to have been knocked out of him. He found it difficult to organize his thoughts into initiating any kind of action at all. He wondered how much blood he had lost. And how much more he could afford to lose. Then he stopped wondering. He would find out soon enough, after all. Until then…

He forced himself to focus. He engaged reverse and pressed down the accelerator. The tyres spun, but did not grip. The Bentley was going nowhere. And neither was Eusden. He turned off the engine.

Tranquillity descended. And a shaft of sunlight, the first he had seen in Finland, turned the surrounding curtain of snow from greyish white to granular pink. He sat back and savoured the beauty of it. The forest felt holy in that instant. And he would be warm inside the car for a while yet. He could always turn the engine back on.

‘I’m offering you the chance to change your life,’ Pernille had said to him on the ferry from Sweden. Eusden smiled gently at what struck him now less as a tragedy than an irony. If only they had known. In truth, neither of them had had any future to shape or alter. They had both been voyaging to their deaths.

‘Pull yourself together, Coningsby. You should’ve let me drive. I was always better than you. Now, for God’s sake phone for help and get us out of the mess you’ve got us into.’

Eusden did not bother to point out that the jammer had travelled with them. There would still be no signal. Even if it had been conveniently knocked off, the closely packed trees would probably do as good a job. He pulled Lund’s phone out of his pocket and pressed the green button. It was as he had expected. No signal. ‘Sorry, Marty,’ he murmured.

It was a relief in some ways. There was nothing more he could do now. He could stop struggling. He did not need to think, even five minutes ahead. He closed his eyes. And the darkness received him like a loyal friend.