Silhouette in Scarlet - Elizabeth Peters [34]
John’s consternation had unquestionably affected me. I have said John was a coward, who backed away from trouble with celerity and without hysterics. If the silhouette cutter scared him that much, I was scared too. And that was why I was on my way to Karlsholm. A man of Gus’s wealth and prestige would be able to protect himself; he probably knew the King personally. But first he had to be convinced of the danger, and it wasn’t the sort of danger one can explain over the telephone to a comparative stranger.
We stopped for lunch at a pretty inn on a blue lake. Having eaten a dozen smoked salmon sandwiches (they were small sandwiches), I protested, but Tomas indicated, with sidelong looks and some hemming and hawing, that he had been directed to make periodic stops. I guess both he and his employer thought ‘bathroom’ a vulgar word.
As the afternoon wore on, our deliberate pace began to get on my nerves. I didn’t suggest that Tomas drive faster; I assumed Gus had ordered him not to joggle the merchandise. Under different circumstances I would have enjoyed the leisurely drive. The scenery was lovely – blue lakes set like jewels amid wooded hills, forest of birch and pine, red farmhouses with hand-carved gables, stretches of beach with healthy-looking brown bodies lying in rows like herring – doing just what I had planned to do on my holiday. Replete with sandwiches and wine, I dozed off. It had been a hard night.
When I woke up the sun had disappeared, and the skies were a depressing grey. We stopped again at a restaurant outside Mora, on Lake Siljan. I tactfully had tea, in order to give Tomas time to do whatever he wanted to do. It was after five. Gus had optimistically underestimated the length of time the drive would take. A fast driver could have done it in five or six hours, but we had been chugging along at a steady fifty – far less than that superb automobile was capable of doing. A glance at my map reminded me that Dalama is a good-sized region, stretching all the way to the Norwegian border. Karlsholm was in the far northwest corner. We still had a way to go.
It may have been the change in the weather that induced a vague apprehension, formless as the clouds that hung overhead. I began to regret that I had not gone to the police before I left Stockholm. At the time it had not seemed the most practical solution. It is difficult to convince a stolid bureaucracy to take one seriously, especially with a story as wild as mine. I’d have done it in time; my credentials are impeccable, and I could have dragged in Schmidt and my buddies in the Munich police force. But it takes most men, including policemen, quite a while to get past my physical characteristics. Thirty eight, twenty-six, thirty-six, if you want to know. I’m not proud of them; they have been a distinct handicap to me throughout my life. I’m a historian, not a centrefold.
As I was saying, I had decided it would be easier to convince Cousin Gus and let him argue with the cops, especially since I wasn’t absolutely certain I was right. My reasoning made good sense to me, but I had very little solid evidence with which to back it up. All the same, as I sipped my tea and stared at the shadowy outlines of the high hills ahead, I regretted my decision. Too late now.
Shortly after leaving the restaurant we turned off the modern highway onto a side road that twisted across the hills. It got narrower and more winding, dipping and rising again between aisles of birches whose black-striped trunks resembled processional pillars