Grendel's Curse

His hands moved frantically, but he couldn’t get the car moving again.

“I asked you not to,” the goon said. There was a gun in the guy’s hand and it was pointing straight at Lars’s face. They were no more than three feet apart. There was no way he could miss. “I’m done asking.”

6

The café was nice enough, hand-painted forest scenes on one wall, a rather Rubenesque nude reclining on another. It took Annja a while to recognize the full-figured beauty was actually the woman behind the counter. She smiled as she ordered her latte, admiring anyone who could put themselves out there like that. There were other pictures and hand-painted signage promising forty blends of coffee and a vast array of unhealthy eating options. She refused to give in to temptation, no matter how good the pastries looked. It was too early for anything apart from toast.

There were three other couples in the place, and one lone diner. Lars had not arrived yet.

Some sort of soft jazz hummed in the background, perfectly in keeping with the boho-chic furniture.

Annja checked her watch. Not much time had passed since Lars’s call. She took a seat by the window to wait.

And wait.

She didn’t know any of the tunes, and couldn’t read the newspaper on the counter, so all she could do was people watch as customers came and went, ordering their nonfat skinny lattes and caramel mochaccinos to go.

She could have stayed in bed for another hour, she realized, polishing off the ice-cold dregs in her cup. She wasn’t impatient, but it didn’t take that long to get from the dig site to town. Forty minutes tops. And he’d already been on the road. Of course she was assuming he’d been at the site when she’d called him. It had been ninety now, if the clock on the wall was anything to go by.

She decided on a refill and a cake, and promised herself she’d give Lars another half hour, and then she was off to the site to see what what was going on.

Annja finally decided she should call him, just to be sure she hadn’t gone to the wrong café. The city was full of them, after all. Though surely he would have called her....

She punched in his number.

“What is this, treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen, Lars? I’m here. Where are you? Call me, okay?” she told his voice mail. “I’m on my second cup of coffee and I’m about to gorge myself on cake. This isn’t good. There’s only so much temptation I can resist. If I put on twenty pounds, you’ll pay—just remember that.”

She hung up and put the phone on the table in front of her.

“Boyfriend trouble?” the owner asked, offering a sympathetic smile.

“Nothing that a slice of carrot cake won’t fix,” she said.

“That’s lucky, then, considering,” the owner said, putting a hefty slice of carrot cake on the table in front of her.

Annja jammed her fork into the middle of the carrot cake and pulled it apart.

“That’s the spirit,” the woman said, and left her to it.

Annja smiled. If it had been a date she’d have been out of there an hour ago. Work was different. So she waited, concentrating on the carrot cake, which had just the right amount of sweet to take her mind off being stood up.

The pleasure was interrupted when her phone began to vibrate against the tabletop. The screen lit up with Lars’s number in the middle of the display.

Annja picked it up and, without missing a beat, said, “You get lost?”

There was a long silence before a slightly accented male voice spoke. “Who is this, please?”

Annja gave her name without thinking. “Who is this?”

“This is the police, Miss Creed. Are you a friend of Mr. Mortensen’s?”

“Not really,” she said. “I’m doing a segment about the dig that Lars...Mr. Mortensen is working on.”

“Dig?”

“Yes, the archaeological dig at Skalunda. You might have seen it on the news last night? Karl Thorssen broke the ground? I was due to meet Lars this morning.”

“Where are you at the moment?”

“I’m in a coffee shop in Gothenburg, down by the station. Why?” She struggled to remember what it was called, then spotted the name of the place on top of the printed menu that stood upright in front of her. She had been staring at it for the past half an hour but it had not registered.

“Café Skalunda,” she said. Even when she had been making her way there she had not realized that it bore the same name as the barrow. She smiled despite herself. She really was in a world of her own.

And then alarm bells started to ring inside her head. Why did the police want to know where she was? She was about to ask the officer why he was ringing her on Lars’s phone when he hung up.

She stared at the phone, trying to understand what had just happened.

Was someone pranking her?

Had something happened to Lars?

She redialed the number. It went straight to voice mail.

That made even less sense, unless the caller was going through his call log to reach out to people, but why would he do that?

As she stared out through the window she saw a car drive past; it was moving much slower than was necessary. Maybe they were lost, or maybe they were looking for something. Or someone. And maybe she was overreacting, but she knew to trust her instincts and her instincts screamed that something was off about the whole thing. She needed to get out of there.

Annja pulled some cash from her pocket, held it up for the woman behind the counter to see, then left it on the table. She took one more bite of carrot cake as she stood up, and mimed that it was good. The woman behind the counter smiled.

She thought about heading back to the hotel room, but it wasn’t as if she’d find any answers there. Walking out of the door, she sent a text through to Roux, telling the old man she thought things were about to get interesting. When that was away into the ether, she called Micke’s cameraman.

“Johan,” she said as a sleep-thick voice grumbled, “Hello?”

So much for being wide awake and ready to rumble.

“Time to get your groove on, sunshine. Action stations. I’ll get the car and meet you at the front of the hotel in twenty minutes.”

“Twenty minutes?”

“There’s an echo.”

“It’s unholy o’clock—where on earth are we going this early?”

“The dig.”

“The dig?”

“Yep. Might be good to get a few shots in the early-morning light.”