Silhouette in Scarlet - Elizabeth Peters [32]
By the time I had explored the baskets we were in the suburbs, heading northwest. I waited till the car stopped at a traffic signal before I banged on the glass. Tomas glanced back. I waved a sandwich at him. He smiled and shook his head. ‘Thank you. I have eaten.’ His voice came from over my head. As I might have expected, there was a speaker system between front and back seat.
I leaned back against the grey velvet upholstery and poured myself a glass of wine. The ride was so smooth that the pale gold liquid scarcely rippled when I placed the glass on the small table (rosewood, what else?) that unfolded from the armrest. I began to hope that Gus really was a cousin. Or that I could persuade him to adopt me. If I hadn’t already been in love with him, the contents of those baskets would have won my heart.
The guidebook told me little that I didn’t already know. I had looked up Karlsholm on a large-scale map at the museum that morning. It was too small to appear on the tourist map I had brought from Munich. It was in the country of Dalarna – Dalecarlia, Jämbäraland of the sagas – haunting, musical names, like something out of Tolkien. After all, northern history and legendry had inspired much of The Lord of the Rings. Dalecarlia might have been the hobbit name for the Elvish Dalarna, and it sounded like the sort of place hobbits would favour – a land of fertile farmland and green forest, of hills and rivers and deep-blue lakes. In the days of my innocence, before hordes of sinister characters started following me, I had planned to visit Dalarna. It is one of the few places in the world that is almost as charming as the guidebooks say it is.
Karlsholm was off the beaten track, some miles northwest of the popular tourist centres around Lake Siljan. It had a lake of its own, though; on the large-scale map Lake Siljan looked artificially symmetrical, like a small blue coin. The guidebook Gus had supplied didn’t mention it, or the town, but there were references to the delightful folk costumes and customs, the crafts and the dances and the traditions of a past age lovingly preserved. Under the heading ‘Midsummer in Dalarna,’ the book waxed lyrical – cloudberries and cow horns, maypoles decked with wild flowers and birch branches, dancing to the sound of fiddles through the bright night hours of Midsummer’s Eve. That date was less than a week away. Maybe, if I could clean up the present mess, I would be able to celebrate the festival with Gus and the good villagers of Karlsholm. Footing it lightly around the maypole with a tall, handsome Swede . . .
If I could clean up the mess. With a sigh I closed the guidebook and turned my thoughts from cloudberries to crime. I had most of the information I needed now. The only question was what to do with it.
Once upon a time – in 1889, to be precise – a hardworking farmer dug up a fabulous ancient treasure – the Karlsholm chalice. I’m not talking about Viking loot; the chalice dates from the so-called Migration Period, three to four hundred years before the Vikings. It was an enormously wealthy era in Scandinavia. As one authority said, the whole period glitters with gold – gold ingots and bars, gold coins, neck rings, and collars. Most of it was buried and never retrieved, possibly because its owners failed to return from their