The Annals of Fear

Matt was waiting in the kitchen, as Mello charged through the back door. The smell of chicken cooking in the oven filled his nostrils. The blond appeared in high spirits, his breezy tone belying his words, "There was an accident in Köping, fucking tailbacks for miles." Mello dropped his bag and helmet onto the table and engulfed Matt in a tight embrace. A long snog ensued, before Mello stepped back smiling. "Thanks for cooking. I could have got something at the airport."



"No problem."



Mello beamed at him. "It\'s definitely a case." His excitement was infectious. "Did you do the research?" Mello dashed away to the oven and peered at the pot pie inside it. "Is this almost done?"



"It is done. I\'m just keeping it warm." Matt wandered across to set out plates and cutlery, but Mello was already extracting the dish from the oven. "I\'ll do that. You sit down and chill."



"Oh! This is warming my hands." Mello set it on the worktop. "Names, Matty, did you look them up? Jan Pettersson, Rasmus Lindgren, Maja Gustafsson, Ioan Prothero and Michael Adda. Is this pie to share or just for me?"



Matt looked at the size of the pie, then shifted to take in the discarded pizza box by the bin. "It\'s just for you."



"There\'s way too much here for just me." Mello took over the serving up. "Have some with me."



"I\'m full."



Mello surveyed him warily. "Have you eaten?" He followed the second gaze towards the pizza box. "Oh. Ok." Then sat down with his meal. "Spill."



Matt smiled. It was nice to see Mello so animated. He seemed to have put aside his reservations about this case, along with the sorrow that it had evidently dredged up before. "It would be far easier if you just told me your story, then I filled in the parts that I\'ve been able to verify." Matt didn\'t add that this would ensure that he actually got the details of the case. Mello had been better about sharing such things recently, but he could still be cagey at times.



Tonight, though, Mello appeared perfectly at ease speaking through mouthfuls of kvrgusa. "Sounds to me like a bunch of kids really. All aged 19-20 and half in love with horror and death." Mello patently didn\'t extend this opinion in order consider that his own collection of skulls and Gothicism rendered him at all juvenile at twenty-one years old. "All musicians, three Swedes, two not. Janne, that\'s Jan Pettersson, met Ioan Prothero at the University of Edinburgh. Both classically trained, but Janne was more interested in Death Metal and his electric guitar than his studies, from what I\'ve heard. He was nearly kicked out several times. This is good food."



"Yay."



Mello glanced at Matt and smiled. "You did it to my recipe?"



"No, I just randomly knew a Croatian dish that makes you smile with every bite."



"Yugoslavian."



Matt chewed on a finger of his glove. "Janne met Ioan. Were they lovers?"



Mello shook his head. "Janne\'s girlfriend was at the Operahögskolan, in Stolkholm, training soprano. She came back after a term, hating every second of it. It seems that Maja was a bit of a wild child." He grinned, that counted as a plus point in his estimation. "They met through a series of mutual friends and she did visit him in Scotland, but the band wasn\'t formed then. That came later." Mello finished his kvrgusa, scraping up every last drop of the juice. "In fact, let\'s skip to that. Unremarkable academic career. They passed. Fast forward to the summer after their finals. Janne was on the \'phone, persuading Ioan to forego getting a proper job, in order to give their Death Metal band a chance. Ioan\'s all for that. Janne introduced Rasmus, a childhood friend, on drums, while Ioan brought along Michael on bass. Maja apparently saw herself as the new Tarja Turunen."



"Who?"



"Nightwish."



Matt recognised the name. Mello had all of the albums. Matt decided to interject with details of his own. "Prothero is British, did you know that?"



Mello nodded. "I suspected as much. It was Prothero who found them the location in which to record. A manor house, which belonged to his family. I figured that he had to be at least partially British."



"Landed gentry, though not nobility, as far as I could find." Matt opened his laptop, which was already networked to the computer upstairs. He showed Mello an image of two smiling, grey-haired men, both in expensive suits. He tapped the monitor at one of them. "This is daddy. He owns a lot of land, but is listed as being a \'gentleman of independent means\'. Old money, from what I can gather, well invested over the generations."



"Right. And Adda?"



"Mum\'s a surgeon. Dad\'s a lawyer." Matt shrugged. "New money."



"Schoolfriends?"



"Yes." Matt grinned. "Are you working all of this out or were you already told?" He loved watching Mello\'s brain work at lightning speed.



Mello stood, looking pleased with himself, as he raided the fridge for a chocolate bar as dessert. "Working it out."



"Thought you might be."



Mello sat down again, smirking, "So this just leaves Rasmus Lindgren. He was in an orchestra with Jan Pettersson, when they were young teenagers. They were looking for somewhere ambient to record the songs that Janne and Ioan were writing. Ioan\'s family owned a manor house that was apparently haunted. It was the perfect location." He unwrapped his chocolate. "The Swedes flew over and they all congregated on this manor. That\'s when it all goes a bit..."



"Scooby-Doo."



Mello took a bite, looking a little uneasy. "I believe them. At least, I believe that Jörgen and Ebba believe this. The jury is out in my head, obviously. I want the evidence." He wriggled his shoulders slightly and Matt smiled. If his observations were correct, then Mello was already more than half convinced of the truth of this. "During the recording, they were attacked by something. Rasmus reported a hideous woman and a pack of dogs..."



"Actually inside the recording studio?"



Mello shook his head. "It wasn\'t a recording studio. It was a room in the manor house. I don\'t know if they even had a mixing desk, let alone a producer and engineer. It would explain the dodgy quality of the music. As for where the entity was, Rasmus didn\'t say."



"Was the hideous woman the supernatural thing?"



"Yes." Mello grimaced.



"Was she, like, a zombie or something?"



Mello shook his head. "We don\'t know. That\'s all he said."



"He didn\'t say much, this Rasmus."



"No." Mello concurred. "He was pretty traumatised. Jan and Maja were both dead by then."



Matt sat up. "Hold on, my time has come. I have the death reports." He took his laptop back and maximised another set of windows. "Jan Pettersson was found dead at the edge of the river. Covered in lacerations. Cause of death?"



"How deep were the lacerations?" Mello peered in to read, but Matt had the information covered up by his hand. "Come on, Mail, stop messing around. I don\'t know. Shock from the cold of the river."



Matt shook his head. "Heart attack." He watched the absolute dread wash over Mello\'s features. "No, no, not like that. The heart attack was caused by a rush of adrenaline from the nervous system. The heart was overwhelmed by calcium ions."



Mello blinked. "He was frightened to death."



"Yes."



"Jörgen implied that he was murdered." Mello stated, slowly.



Matt lit a cigarette. "Well something caused the lacerations and fear."



"What was the coroner\'s verdict?"



"Open. Death by misadventure."



Mello nodded. "So the coroner didn\'t have a clue either then. What about Maja?"



Matt clicked to the next report. "Found three weeks later, twenty miles away down the river. Very little left of her by then. The certificate reads death by drowning. Before that though, you have Ioan." Matt brought up the next window. "He jumped off the roof of the manor the night that Jan died. Head smashed right open, neck broken, back broken, body covered in lacerations and heart swamped with calcium ions. Death by misadventure, both of them."



"That coroner wasn\'t very imaginative, was he?" Mello frowned. "So the other two were brought in for questioning and...?"



"No, they weren\'t." Matt smirked. "Oops, Mello got it wrong."



Mello glared at him, but it had no power behind it. "Tell me."



"Adda gets in his car and Lindgren with him. They drove the Hell out of there, not even stopping to pack. The house was left unsecured with the doors wide open."



"They knew everyone was dead."



"Presumably." Matt opened his penultimate window. "We can also assume that Lindgren is the sort of person who keeps his passport on him, because he got on a flight at Bristol to Amsterdam, then from there to Stockholm. We\'ll come back to him in a minute, because we\'ve got to deal with Adda first."



"Why didn\'t Adda go with Lindgren? If they\'re fleeing a potential murder scene, then it made sense for him to leave the country too."



Matt knew that Mello was thinking aloud and had probably already reached the same conclusion. He answered the question anyway. "Maybe he didn\'t have a passport." Beside him, Mello nodded, looking pensive. "Adda drove back up the motorway, parked up at a service station, then threw himself off the bridge into the Severn Estuary."



Mello was shaking his head. "This is making no sense at all."



"Traumatised as fuck."



"He didn\'t speak with anyone? Adda, I mean?"



Matt stubbed out his cigarette into the ashtray. "Not as far as I\'ve managed to ascertain so far. I\'ve only been on this for a few hours."



Mello nodded, finally taking another bite of his chocolate bar. "Lindgren made it home. He spoke with Jörgen. He said that they were attacked by a hideous woman and a pack of dogs. He made it clear that this was supernatural in origin. I don\'t know, Mail. It\'s sounding more and more like some kind of appalling, but very human tragedy. Maybe drugs involved. Something got out of hand and people were killed. Lindgren or Adda, maybe both, were the murderers."



"Why would Lindgren have got in the car with Adda, if he was the murderer?"



"True." Mello moved the strip of chocolate to the other side of his mouth. "Lindgren was deeply shocked. He raised the alarm from Mullhyttan, but then went missing himself. He was found dead near a derelict sawmill there."



Matt waited. This was the only death that he hadn\'t been asked to investigate. Mello, however, was lost in thought, as he already had this fact. "What did he die of?"



"Myocardial infarction." Mello muttered.



"Heart attack." Matt exhaled. "Why is it always heart attacks? I hate fucking heart attacks." He quickly rolled himself another cigarette and lit it. "At least no-one\'s mentioned a fucking shinigami."



"Matt." Mello breathed and shuddered. There was a silence, as they both assimilated the facts and tried to find the leads inside them. It was Mello who eventually broke it. "One more thing. Rasmus told Jörgen that the being had been captured on tape. She\'s heard on the album."



"The one that\'s all over the internet purportedly killing people who hear it?"



Mello snapped off a strip of chocolate with his teeth. Tiny pieces of it fell all over his chest. "Yes."