Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(43)
Rudi felt his shoulders slump. It had been an eventful day; if he had ever been unsure of what the word infodump meant, he wasn’t now.
“Anyway,” Juhan said. “Let’s finish this bottle and then I’ll get a cab back to my B&B and we can go our separate ways. Okay?”
AS IT TURNED out, it took them – Juhan, really – somewhat longer to finish the second bottle than it had the first. The years seemed to finally be catching up on the old musician. By the time Rudi started to try and find Juhan a ride back to his lodgings on the other side of the island, it was past midnight and Muhu’s only taxi service had gone to bed and so had the family who owned the farm.
“Well I’m not walking back,” said Juhan, who finally seemed to be getting a little tipsy.
“Oh, for f*ck’s sake,” said Rudi, who was not particularly drunk – he was too angry about too many things for that – but really, really tired. “You can have the sofa.”
Juhan looked across the sitting room at the old-fashioned and somewhat overstuffed sofa and sniffed. “With my back?”
Rudi looked at him. “You old sod,” he said.
Juhan blinked innocently at him. “One day you’ll be my age,” he warned sagely.
“I f*cking hope not. Okay. You have the bed.”
AFTER JUHAN HAD spent half an hour in the bathroom – and rendered it uninhabitable probably for the next century or so following what must have been a spectacularly catastrophic bowel movement – and gone to bed, Rudi sat in the living room staring into space, trying to fit bits and pieces of half a dozen things together. Juhan’s story about the Frenchmen – assuming it was true; he didn’t entirely trust any of Toomas’s friends – cast a new light on his father’s tenacious interest in Lahemaa. Had Toomas actually killed them for some reason? Once upon a time he would have said murder was about the one thing his father wasn’t capable of, but now he wasn’t sure. He was almost certain he was going to have to tell the authorities about this somehow.
He sighed and waved up the entertainment set’s browser, pulled down a menu and did a search for Mundt and the Sakha Republic, was none the wiser after half an hour’s surfing. Pointless. He was too tired to make sense of any of it. He sat for a while thinking of the short woman he had seen at the graveside and wondered why she wasn’t crying. At around two, he rearranged the cushions on the sofa, curled up, and fell asleep.
HE WASN’T SURE, at first, what woke him. Or even, for a few moments, where he was. His mouth tasted awful, his head throbbed, his eyes were all gummy, and his neck ached because he had slept awkwardly. He spent so long dwelling on these things that it took him a while to notice that the room smelled of smoke.
He sat up on the sofa and his head spun a little. He waved a hand at the floor lamp in the corner and it came on, filling the room with a foggy nimbus of illumination. Smoke was drifting through the living room in slow billowing panes.
“Juhan!” Rudi stood up and went over to the bedroom door. “Juhan, we’re on fire!” He put his hand on the door handle, snatched it away again. The handle was red hot. He put the fingers of his other hand on the door experimentally, then the flat of his hand. The door was hot too. Looking down, he saw smoke pouring out from under the door and around his feet. “Juhan!”
Rudi ran over to the front door, threw it open, and immediately tripped and fell headlong over something lying just outside. On his hands and knees, he took his phone out of his pocket and switched it on, and by the light of the screen he found himself looking at the body of a young woman lying almost on the threshold of the cottage. She was wearing black combat fatigues and a webbing harness festooned with knives and guns and grenades and other, more inscrutable, devices. She had been shot in the chest at least twice, maybe several more times, it was hard to tell.
Okay. Rudi looked left and right. Across the farmyard, the main building was burning fiercely, as was the only other occupied cottage. From behind the buildings, he could hear the panicked noises of the animals in the children’s zoo.
He searched through the woman’s webbing harness, came up with a small torch, switched it on. Checked the body quickly for ID and comms devices, came up empty. He took one of her pistols – something ludicrously light and ceramic – and got up and limped around to the back of the cottage.
The bedroom window was shattered; flames were roaring out of the hole. The room itself was full of flame; even the walls appeared to be alight. Rudi swore and ran back to the front, went back inside, grabbed his jacket and cane, and turned to leave again. Halfway to the door, he stopped and turned back, scooped the package from the table.
Near the junction of the track and the road, the beam of the torch caught something poking out from under a bush. When he looked closer he saw that it was a booted foot. He pushed the bush aside and saw that the foot belonged to a man’s body, sprawled bonelessly face-down. The man was dressed and equipped identically to the woman. The back of his head shone wetly in the torchlight.
Rudi stood up and looked around him. The cottages were completely alight, the main house ablaze. He started to run as best he could.
IT TOOK HIM almost two hours to hike to P?daste, staying in the rough country off to one side of the road. By the time he got there the sky was starting to lighten and his leg was in agony. He dithered at the end of the lane leading to the Manor, trying to decide what to do, then he turned away and loped down to the shore a kilometre or so away. He remembered a boathouse from his last visit, part of the Manor’s facilities, but he had to walk along the shoreline for a little while before he found it.