Red Wolf

42

In front of Annika lay an endless chalk-white landscape with roaring clouds of snow and deep-blue sky. She stood naked with both feet frozen solid in a block of ice, sharp wind howling round her and cutting small wounds in her skin. Her attention was entirely focused on the horizon, someone was heading towards her but she couldn’t see him yet; she could feel his presence as a bass note in her stomach as she peered into the sharp wind.

And then he came, a blurred grey silhouette against the velvet background, his coat swaying slowly from side to side as he walked, and she recognized him. He was one of the presenters from Studio Six. She tried to free her feet from the block of ice that had now turned to stone, the man came closer and his hands were visible and she saw the hunting knife in his hand and it was Sven, there was blood on the knife and she knew it was cat’s blood, he was walking towards her and the wind was blowing and she looked up at his face and it was Thomas, and he stopped right in front of her and said: ‘It was your turn to collect the children.’

She stretched her neck and back and looked past him and saw Ellen and Kalle hanging from meat hooks on a steel beam with their stomachs cut open and their guts dangling down towards the ground.

Annika stared up at the ceiling for a moment before realizing that she had woken up. Her pulse was throbbing hard in her throat, there was a shrieking sound in her left ear and the covers had slid off her. She twisted her head and in the dark she saw Thomas’s back heave in dreamless sleep. She sat up carefully. Her neck was aching and she had been crying in her sleep.

She crept through the hall on shaky legs, and into the children’s room and their living warmth.

Ellen had put her thumb in her mouth, even though they had cajoled, threatened and bribed her to stop. Annika took the little hand and pulled out her thumb, saw the girl’s mouth searching for what it had lost for a few seconds before sleep forgot it. She watched the sleeping child, marvelling at her complete unawareness of how precious and beautiful she was, feeling a great loss for the sense of the clarity of life that her daughter still possessed. She stroked her soft hair, feeling its warmth through the palm of her hand.

Little girl, little girl, nothing is ever going to happen to you.

She went over to her son, lying on his back in his Batman pyjamas, his hands above his head, just as she used to sleep as a child. Thomas’s blond hair, and already his broad shoulders, he was so like them both.

She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. The child took a deep breath and blinked up at her.

‘Is it morning?’

‘Soon,’ Annika whispered. ‘Sleep a bit longer.’

‘I was having a nasty dream,’ he said and turned onto his side.

‘Me too,’ Annika said quietly, stroking the back of his head with her hand.

She looked at the luminous face of her watch; it was about an hour before the alarm would go off.

She knew she wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep.

She walked like a lost soul out into the living room. The draught from the window was moving the curtains. She went over and peered through the gap, Hantverkargatan was slowly coming to life below, the yellow streetlamp swinging in eternal isolation between the buildings. She warmed one foot against the radiator, then the other.

She went out into the kitchen, lit the stove and filled the pan with water, measured four spoonfuls into the coffee-pot, and looked out on to the frozen desert of the courtyard as the water came to the boil, the thermometer outside the window showed minus twenty-two degrees. She poured the water on the coffee and stirred, turned on P1 at low volume and sat down at the kitchen table. The burble from the radio drove out the demons from the corners. She sat quietly with frozen feet as the coffee slowly cooled.

Without her hearing or sensing him, Thomas came into the kitchen, bleary-eyed, hair all over the place.

‘What are you doing up so early?’ he said, taking a glass from the draining-board and filling it with water, drinking in deep gulps.

She turned her face away and stared at the radio without replying.

‘Okay, don’t then,’ he said, and went back into the bedroom.

She covered her eyes with a hand and breathed through her mouth until her stomach had calmed down and she could move again. She poured the coffee down the sink and went into the bathroom. She showered under scalding water and dried herself quickly. She dressed in her skiing outfit, thermal long-johns and vest, two layers of wool jumpers, thick jeans and a fleece top. She dug out the keys to the cellar and went out onto the empty street and through to the courtyard, down the steps, and undid the lock on their storeroom in the cellar.

Her ski-boots were in a Co-op bag next to Thomas’s old college textbooks. Her polar jacket was dusty and dirty. It had been hanging abandoned here since Sven died. She hadn’t needed it – those endless evenings standing round freezing ice hockey rinks were over for good.

She took the boots and jacket outside and brushed them off, then carried them up to the flat. She hung the jacket up and studied it critically. It was really hideous, but it was going to be even colder in Piteå than it was in Stockholm.

‘When will you be home?’

She turned and saw Thomas standing in the bedroom door pulling on his underwear.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Do you want to know when to have dinner ready?’

He turned away and walked into the kitchen.

She suddenly felt that she couldn’t stay a moment longer. She pulled on the polar jacket, laced the ski-boots and checked that she had her keys, purse, gloves and hat in her bag. She closed the door soundlessly and flew down the stairs, away from the children, leaving them behind her in the warmth, her whole chest thick with loss.

Little darlings, I shall always be with you, nothing bad will get to you.

She walked along newly woken streets towards the Arlanda Express, and took a packed train out to the airport.

There were still two hours before the plane took off. She tried drinking coffee and reading yesterday’s evening papers, but restlessness tore at her stomach until the words and the caffeine felt like they were suffocating her. She gave up and watched the wings being de-iced. She’d made up her mind not to think about the Federation of County Council middle-managers planning the day’s work, and preparing to deal with a rapidly developing crisis involving one of their employees.

As the plane moved away from the ground, her sense of being lost gradually faded. It wasn’t quite full; she had an empty seat next to her, and picked up a copy of the Norrland News that had been left by a previous passenger.

She watched the ground glistening, frozen and rock-hard beneath them, further away with every passing second.

She turned her attention to the paper and forced herself to look through it.

The inhabitants of Karlsvik were demanding more evening buses. A missing three-year-old had been found in the forest outside Risvik with the help of a helicopter with thermal imaging equipment, and everyone was happy and grateful and the police had done a wonderful job. There was the threat of a taxi strike at Kallax Airport. Luleå Hockey had lost at home in the Dolphin Stadium, 2-5 against Djurgården, served them right.

She lowered the paper and leaned her head back, shutting her eyes.

She must have dozed off, because the next moment the wheels were hitting the ice and tarmac at the Arctic Circle. She looked at her watch, almost eleven, and stretched her back, looking out of the plane window. Pale dawn was hanging over the frozen heath landscape.

As she walked through the Arrivals hall she felt empty and naked. It took a few seconds before she realized what was missing: the horde of chattering taxi-drivers by the exit.

She went over to the hire-car counter and picked up her keys.

‘The engine warmer and inside heater are plugged in,’ the young man said, smiling flirtatiously. ‘Take the cable with you. You’ll need it.’

She looked down at the floor and muttered her thanks.

The cold outside was dry as dust and utterly paralysing. It hit her like a fist. Shocked, she gasped for breath and tried to defend herself against the sharp little knives she was breathing in. The illuminated figures above the door said it was minus twenty-eight degrees.

The car was a silver-grey Volvo, anchored to an electricity post with a thick cable. Without electric engine-warmers no car would ever start in this sort of cold.

She took off her polar jacket and threw it in the back seat.

Inside the car it was stuffy and warm thanks to the heater on the passenger side. She started to sweat immediately in all her thermals. The engine started the first time, but the power-steering and wheels were sluggish and hesitant.

She passed the fighter-plane that loomed over the entrance to the airport, and took the left exit from the roundabout instead of the right, towards Piteå instead of Luleå. She peered through the windscreen to see if she recognized anything. She had taken a taxi from the airport with Anne Snapphane ten years ago.

The heathland disappeared behind her and she drove into what must have been fertile agricultural land. Large farms perched on the edge of the forest, oblong timber buildings, exuding wealth and influence. To her surprise she emerged onto a wide motorway, she didn’t remember that at all. Her surprise only grew as the motorway went on and on without her seeing a single other vehicle on the road. The feeling of surreal desolation took a stranglehold on her neck; she had to struggle to breathe normally. Was this some sort of joke? Had reality slid away from her? Was this the road to hell?

Forest flew by on both sides, short, thin pine trees with frozen crowns. The cold made the low sunlight shimmer, just like heat can. She took a tighter grip on the steering wheel and hunched forward.

Maybe your perspective changed at the Arctic Circle. Maybe up was down, right was left. In which case it would be entirely logical to build a motorway through arctic forest where no one lived.

After two wrong turns, one where she discovered she was on her way to Haparanda and the Finnish border, she reached the centre of Piteå. The town was silent, low-built. It reminded her of Sköldinge, a village between Katrineholm and Flen, just colder and barer. The main difference was the central thoroughfare, three times broader than even Sveavägen in Stockholm.

Margit and Thord Axelsson’s home was in Pitholm, the same place where Anne Snapphane’s parents lived. She rolled carefully along gritted roads until she reached the turning Thord had described to her.

The detached house was one of a row of confusingly identical properties built in the seventies, when the lending rates dictated for home-building by the state led to a previously unknown form of construction – it was the decade of the over-sized pitched roof.

She parked the hire-car behind a green Toyota Corolla identical to the one Thomas had. She got out of the Volvo, pulled on her jacket and was struck for a dizzying moment by the notion that she actually lived here, that the children were at university and she worked on the Norrland News. She took shallow breaths of the frozen air, looking up at the peak of the roof that was casting a great shadow across the street.

Anne Snapphane had grown up just a few hundred metres away, and she would rather die than move back, but it was peaceful here.

‘Annika Bengtzon?’

A man with a shock of steel-grey hair had opened the door slightly, his head peering through the gap. ‘Come in,’ he said, ‘before you freeze to death.’

She walked up to the porch, stamped her feet and shook his hand.

‘Thord?’

The look in his eyes was dark and intelligent, the set of his mouth sad and watchful.

Annika stepped into a hall with a dark-green patterned plastic mat, circa 1976, from the look of it. Thord Axelsson took her heavy jacket and hung it on a hanger below the hat-rack.

‘I’ve made some coffee,’ he said, walking ahead of her into the kitchen.

The pine table was set with woven mats and flowery cups and saucers, a birch-bark basket containing at least four different sorts of biscuit.

‘Oh, that looks good,’ Annika said politely as she settled onto a chair and put her bag down beside her.

‘Margit likes baking,’ Thord said, biting off the sentence and staring down into his cup. Then he took a deep breath through his nose, clenched his jaw and reached for the thermos he had already filled.

‘Milk and sugar?’

Annika shook her head, suddenly unable to speak.

What right did she have to march into other people’s tragedies?

She picked up her spoon and unconsciously clinked it against the porcelain cup.

‘Margit was a good person,’ Thord Axelsson said, looking out of the window. ‘She meant well, but she carried awful secrets. That’s why she died.’

He took two lumps of sugar from the bowl and dropped them into his cup with a plop. Then he folded his arms on the edge of the table and looked out at the street again.

‘I’ve been doing some thinking since yesterday,’ he said without looking at Annika. ‘I want to talk about what happened, but I don’t want to sully Margit’s memory.’

She nodded, still mute, and reached for the notepad in her bag. She glanced briefly at the clean window-panes and neatly wiped orange kitchen cupboards, suddenly aware that there was a smell of antiseptic cleaning fluid.

‘How did you meet, you and Margit?’

The man looked up at the ceiling and sat quite still for a few moments, then looked over at the stove.

‘She came up to me in the City Pub in Luleå. It was a Saturday night in the spring of seventy-five. I was there with some friends from college; she was standing next to us at the bar and heard me say that I worked in the air force.’

He seemed to lose himself in history for a moment, his eyes roaming over some inner landscape.

‘She spoke first,’ he said. ‘Interested, almost inquisitive.’

He looked into Annika’s eyes, giving her a small, embarrassed smile.

‘I was flattered,’ he said, ‘she was a good-looking girl. And smart. I liked her from the start.’

Annika smiled back. ‘Was she living in Luleå then?’

‘On Lövskatan. She was at teacher training college, the nursery course. She wanted to work with children, kept saying they were the future. Doing something creative was important to her even back then, both in her art and in her life…’

He put his hand in front of his mouth and looked out at the street again.

‘Margit was a serious person,’ he said. ‘Responsible, loyal. I was lucky.’

Silence spread through the kitchen, she could hear a clock tick. The cold was making the walls creak.

‘What was the secret she carried?’ Annika eventually asked.

He turned his gaze towards her.

‘The Beasts,’ he said, with sudden strength in his voice. ‘Margit was an active member of a number of groups and associations even as a teenager, one of Norrbotten’s best athletes in the early sixties. She joined the Communist Party at an early age.’

Athletics, Annika thought, remembering the cutting from the Norrland News.

‘Did she know Karina Björnlund?’

‘They’re cousins,’ he said. ‘How did you know that?’

Annika started slightly, and looked down to hide it.

‘Karina Björnlund was an athlete, too,’ she said. ‘So they were close?’

‘Margit was two years older; she was a bit like a big sister to Karina. She was the one who got Karina started on athletics. But Margit gave up after that, of course.’

‘Why?’

‘She went into politics. And Karina followed her into that as well…’

Annika waited for the man to go on, but when nothing came she tried to help him along.

‘So what about the Beasts?’

‘They were a breakaway group,’ Thord Axelsson said, rubbing his forehead. ‘They saw themselves as an offshoot of the main organization, the Chinese Communist Party. They moved beyond conventional Maoism and went the whole hog, or at least that was how they saw it themselves.’

‘And they had codenames?’ Annika said.

He nodded and stirred his coffee.

‘Not real names but proper codenames, animal names. Margit’s was Barking Dog. She was really upset about that. The others got political names, but she got a personal one. The men in the group thought she asked too many questions, always debating and criticizing.’

Everything in the kitchen was very quiet. The cold held the house in a vice-like grip, the smell of disinfectant was suddenly very noticeable.

‘What did the Beasts do that was so bad?’ Annika asked.

Thord got up, went over to the sink and filled a glass with water, then held it without drinking.

‘She never got over it,’ he said. ‘It lay like a shadow over us all these years.’

He put the glass on the worktop and leaned against the dishwasher.

‘Margit only spoke about it once, but I remember every word.’

Thord Axelsson suddenly shrank into himself, and went on in a quiet, monotonous voice.

‘It was the middle of November. Not too cold, just a bit of snow on the ground. They got in through the back, from Lulviken, by the river. There’s nothing but summer cottages there, so there was no one around.’

He looked up at Annika with empty eyes, his arms hanging by his sides.

‘Margit had never been inside the base before, but one of the boys knew it well. They told her not to go near the hangars, so as not to wake the dogs, they were really vicious creatures.’

She was taking notes discreetly.

‘They ran across the heath for a kilometre or so. The boys waited in a clump of trees while she went closer. There was a plane on the tarmac outside the workshop. She took off the safety seal and set off a flare, and threw it into the container of spent fuel behind the plane.’

The air was heavy with antiseptic disinfectant, catching in Annika’s nose.

‘As she watched it burning she saw two conscripts approaching. She ran towards the south fence and they shouted after her. She threw herself behind the workshop. She only just made it before the explosion.’

Annika looked down at her notes.

It wasn’t Karina Björnlund. She had been wrong.

‘One of the conscripts went up like a torch. He just screamed and screamed until he finally collapsed.’

Thord Axelsson closed his eyes.

‘Margit had no memory of how she got out of the base. Afterwards they dissolved the group. They never met again.’

He walked back to the table, slumping onto his chair with his hands over his face, reliving something he had never experienced but which had coloured his whole life.

Annika tried to fit the pieces together in her head, but failed.

‘Why did the plane explode?’ she asked gently.

The man looked up and let his arms drop to the table.

‘Have you ever noticed that missile that hangs beneath a fighter-jet?’

She shook her head.

‘It looks like a moon-rocket designed by Disney. It isn’t actually a missile, but an extra tank of fuel. The skin is thin; the explosion in the fuel-container pierced a hole in it.’

‘But why was the plane sitting on the tarmac with a full tank?’

‘Fighters are always fully tanked when they’re in the hangars, it’s safer that way. The gases that build up in an empty tank are more dangerous than fuel. The lad… he was standing below the tank when the extra fuel ignited.’

The wooden walls of the house creaked and groaned. Despair hung in dark clouds between the kitchen cupboards and the pine lamps. She felt an intense desire to flee, to run away, home to the children, to kiss them and embrace their cosy chubbiness, home to Thomas, to love him with all of her body and all of her mind.

‘Who else was there?’ she asked.

Thord Axelsson’s face was completely grey. He seemed on the point of fainting.

‘The Yellow Dragon and the Black Panther,’ he said hoarsely.

‘The Dragon was the leader, Göran Nilsson from Sattajärvi,’ Annika said, and something deep, unfathomable, flickered across the man’s face. ‘Who was the other one?’

‘Don’t know,’ he said. ‘Karina was the Red Wolf, but I don’t know who the boys were in real life.’

‘How many of them were there?’

He rubbed his face. ‘I mentioned the Black Panther. The Lion of Freedom was another one, the White Tiger, and the Dragon of course. Yes, that was it. Four men, two girls.’

Annika wrote down the names, noticing how ridiculous the codenames were, but unable to smile, not even internally.

‘Karina wasn’t with them that night?’

‘She’d finished with Ragnwald, and wanted out of the group. Margit was very angry with her, thought she was betraying them. Loyalty was always very important to Margit.’

A clock chimed somewhere in the living room. Annika thought about the marriage announcement in the Norrland News. Why would you put that in if you weren’t going to get married?

She looked at the man thoughtfully, thinking about the huge burden the pair had carried together, and which was now his alone.

‘How long was it before Margit told you all this?’ she asked quietly.

‘When she got pregnant,’ Thord Axelsson said. ‘It was an accident, she’d forgotten to take the pill, but when it happened we were both delighted. But one evening she was lying there crying when I got home, and she just couldn’t stop. It took all evening to get her to tell me what it was. She thought I was going to hand her in to the police. Leave her and the child.’

He fell silent.

‘But you didn’t,’ Annika confirmed.

‘Hanna did her national service at F21,’ Thord said. ‘She’s an officer in the reserves; she’s studying nuclear physics at Uppsala.’

‘And your other daughter?’

‘Emma lives on the same corridor as Hanna; she’s doing a master’s in politics.’

‘You’ve done well,’ Annika said, honestly.

He looked through the window. ‘Yes. But the Beasts have always been with us. Margit thought about what she’d done every day. She never escaped it.’

‘Nor you,’ Annika said. ‘You went to work every day knowing what had happened.’

He merely nodded.

‘Why didn’t she tell the police?’ Annika said. ‘Wouldn’t that have been better, not having to deal with it alone?’

The man stood up. ‘If only she could have,’ he said with his back to Annika. ‘When the Dragon disappeared Margit got a package in the post. There was a finger in it, a human finger, from a small child, and a warning.’

Annika felt herself heating up, could feel the blood drain from her head, thought she was about to faint.

‘No one ever spoke about the Beasts, not ever. Margit heard nothing from them for all those years, not until this October.’

‘Then what happened?’ Annika whispered.

‘She got the call, the symbol of the yellow dragon, summoning her to their meeting place.’

Annika could see before her the strange drawing the Minister of Culture had received, in that envelope posted in France.

‘A meeting?’ she said. ‘When?’

Thord Axelsson shook his head and walked over to the sink, picked up a glass but did nothing with it.

‘Then they contacted her, one of them called her at work, asking if she was going to the meeting to celebrate the return of the Dragon. She told them to go to hell, said they’d ruined her life, and that she loathed the fact that she’d ever met them.’

His shoulders were shaking.

‘She didn’t hear from them again.’

Annika was struggling against a growing, sucking feeling of nausea. She sat for a long while, swallowing, watching the man weep, holding the glass to his forehead.

‘I want them caught,’ he said eventually, turning back to Annika, his face red and unlike itself. He sat down heavily on his chair again, and sat still for a while as the clock ticked and the antiseptic smell spread throughout Annika’s body.

‘Margit never got rid of her guilt,’ he said. ‘She paid for it all through her life. I can’t go on like this any more.’

‘Have you told the police now?’

He shook his head. ‘But I’m going to,’ he said. ‘As soon as the Dragon’s been caught and the girls are safe.’

‘What do you want me to do?’ she asked.

He looked at her blankly. ‘I don’t know. I just wanted to tell someone.’

He looked out through the window and stiffened. ‘Hanna and Emma are coming,’ he said. ‘You have to go.’

Annika stood up without thinking, stuffing her pad and pen in her bag and hurrying out into the hall, where she pulled her jacket from the hanger and tugged it on. She went back into the kitchen, and saw the man sitting there motionless, his eyes blank.

‘Thank you,’ she said quietly.

He looked at her and tried to smile.

‘By the way,’ she said. ‘Did Margit have very small feet?’

‘Size thirty-six,’ he said.

She left him by the pine table in the scrubbed kitchen with the untouched cups of coffee gradually cooling.

43

The car had had time to get completely cold, so she kept her polar jacket on. For one panicky moment she thought the engine wasn’t going to start, that she was going to freeze in her hire-car among the identical seventies houses, for ever held fast in the little white lies of the Axelsson family.

She turned the key so hard that the metal almost snapped. The engine started with a hesitant rattle, and as she exhaled she saw her breath freeze to ice on the inside of the windscreen. She found reverse as the gearbox protested and backed into the street, hoping she wasn’t going to hit anything. She hadn’t scraped the rear window.

The two daughters passed close to her window. She attempted a smile and waved feebly as they looked curiously at her.

The rubber of the tyres creaked on the icy road as she rolled towards town. The nausea persisted, the smell of disinfectant still in her nostrils, the thoughts bouncing around her head and chest.

Was Thord Axelsson telling the truth? Was he exaggerating? Was he hiding anything?

She drove past the secondary school and the church and Åhléns department store, and was out of the town centre before she even realized she was in it.

He wasn’t glossing over his wife’s deeds, Annika thought, nor was he making excuses for her. On the contrary, he had stated soberly that she had set fire to the aviation fuel and caused the plane to explode. He hadn’t even tried to present it as an accident.

If he had wanted to lie, he would have done so then.

The Beasts, she thought. The Yellow Dragon, ha! What a stupid idea. What a load of crap! The Lion of Freedom, the Barking Dog, the Red Wolf, the Black Panther, the White Tiger.

Where are you now? she thought as she pulled out onto the deserted motorway again, heading towards Luleå.

The Yellow Dragon, Göran Nilsson, professional hitman back on home soil. The Barking Dog, Margit Axelsson, murdered nursery schoolteacher. The Red Wolf, Karina Björnlund, Minister of Culture making panicky last-minute changes to government proposals.

And the rest of you? Three middle-aged Swedish men, where have you hidden yourselves away? How much have you forgotten?

She drove past the exit to Norrfjärden, feeling the cold whirling round her feet. The temperature had fallen to minus twenty-nine degrees; the sun was already going down, spreading a pale yellow light on the horizon. It was one thirty in the afternoon.

A child’s finger, she thought. Could that really have happened?

She swallowed, had to open the window for a few seconds to get some fresh air. Thord hadn’t said what the accompanying warning had said, but no one had blabbed about the Beasts, not ever.

She believed the finger had really existed.

The attack itself, three people involved, Margit and Göran and one other man. Did that make sense?

Margit had the same shoe size as the prints found at the site. Thord Axelsson’s story included enough detail to make her believe the basic chain of events, even if she would have to check the theoretical possibilities with the press officer at the base. So why should she doubt how many people were involved?

Karina Björnlund wasn’t there.

She was innocent, at least as far as the act itself was concerned. Of course she could have been involved in the planning, maybe even assisted in other ways. And, apart from anything else, she must have known about it.

How can you be sure of that? Annika asked herself. If Thord is telling the truth, she may well have been ignorant of the attack. She had split up with Göran and wanted out of the group.

But in that case how could she be open to blackmail? Why was she allowing Herman Wennergren to scare her into changing government legislation?

And why had she put a marriage announcement in the local paper if she had broken up with him?

Maybe Karina herself hadn’t put the announcement in, she suddenly thought. Maybe the announcement was part of the jilted man’s strategy either to cause trouble or to get her back.

Annika rubbed her forehead, feeling suddenly thirsty, her lips dry. A few frozen houses from the thirties huddled in the twilight, plumes of smoke rising straight up from their chimneys, the wind had given up, the cold was clear as glass.

I have to talk to Karina Björnlund, she thought. I have to set things up so that she doesn’t get away. She won’t wriggle out of this, lying and protecting herself at any cost.

She pulled her mobile from the bag, and found she had no reception. She couldn’t be bothered to get cross, just carried on towards Luleå, looking forward to being back in civilization again.

At the turning to Gäddvik she picked up her mobile again, shut her eyes and replayed the scene in her head: the Post-it note on the registrar’s computer screen, the Minister of Culture’s mobile number. The number of the devil, twice, and then a zero.

She keyed in 070-666 66 60, stared at the number on the screen for a moment, then realized with a start that she was on the point of ignoring a right-hand bend.

What was she going to say?

Karina Björnlund will listen, she thought. It was just a question of getting hold of her.

She pressed the call button, feeling the warmth of the mobile in her hand, and pressed in the earpiece as she slowed the car’s speed.

‘Hello?’

Annika braked in surprise, the first ring had hardly started before a woman’s voice answered.

‘Karina Björnlund?’ she said, pulling up at the side of the road and pressing the earpiece further in; there was a rushing, humming sound in the background.

‘Yes?’

‘My name’s Annika Bengtzon, I work for the Evening Post-’

‘How did you get this number?’

Annika stared at the red-painted wall of a Norrbotten farmhouse and adopted a neutral tone of voice.

‘I was wondering if the Red Wolf had met the Yellow Dragon recently?’ she said, and listened intently to the noise on the line, voices talking, a metallic clattering in the background, a tannoy announcing something, then a second later the line went dead.

Annika looked at the display. She pressed redial and got an impersonal electronic answering service, and ended the call without speaking.

Where had Karina Björnlund been when she took the call? What was the metallic voice saying over the tannoy in the background?

She shut her eyes and pressed her fingertips to her temples.

‘Last call for SK009 to Stockholm, gate number five’?

A flight announcement, that much was certain. But SK? Didn’t that mean an SAS flight?

She called directory inquiries and asked to be put through to the Scandinavian Airlines System for business customers, and waited in a queue for thirty seconds until the call was picked up.

‘SK009 is the afternoon flight from Kallax to Arlanda,’ the sales assistant at SAS told her.

Annika felt the adrenalin pumping.

Karina Björnlund was at the airport just five kilometres away and either was on her way back down to Stockholm or had just arrived and was collecting her bags. She considered booking her return flight to Stockholm but decided to wait, said thank you and ended the call.

Then she drove towards the roundabout, turned right and glided along frozen roads towards Kallax Airport.

Because of the taxi strike, anyone who didn’t have their own car was forced to take the bus from the airport into Luleå. Annika could see the queue trail back outside the terminal, huddled figures fighting against the cold and their own luggage. She was about to drive past the airport bus towards the hire-car parking lot when she caught sight of Karina Björnlund.

The minister was at the back of the queue, patiently waiting her turn.

Thoughts ricocheted round Annika’s head. What was Björnlund doing here?

She pulled up by the kerb, putting the car in neutral and pulling on the handbrake, stared at the minister and picked up her mobile again. She dialled the department and asked to speak to the minister’s press secretary. She was told that Karina Björnlund had taken the day off.

‘I have a question about the proposal being presented tomorrow,’ Annika said, her eyes glued to the woman at the end of the queue. ‘I have to talk to her today.’

‘I’m afraid that isn’t possible,’ the press secretary said amiably. ‘Karina’s away and won’t be back until late this evening.’

‘Isn’t it a bit odd for a minister to take time off the day before a major proposal is presented to parliament?’ Annika said slowly, staring at Karina Björnlund’s dark fur-coat.

The press secretary hesitated. ‘It’s a private matter,’ she said quietly. ‘Karina was called to an urgent meeting that couldn’t be postponed. It’s very unfortunate timing, I have to agree with you. Karina was very upset that she had to go.’

‘But she’ll be home this evening?’

‘That’s what she was hoping.’

What sort of meeting would make a minister abandon their work? A sick relative, a partner or child or parent? A meeting in Luleå, something she couldn’t avoid, something that took priority over everything else.

The Red Wolf.

The meeting to celebrate the return of the Dragon.

Annika’s fingers started to tingle, and sweat broke out along her back.

‘Thank you,’ she said, and ended the call.

She drove past the bus, and watched in the rear-view mirror as the minister climbed on, then let the bus pass her and stayed a hundred metres behind it. Just before the Bergnäs bridge she decided it was time to get closer.

You’re sitting in there, Annika thought, staring at the vehicle’s filthy back window. You’re on your way somewhere that you don’t want to be seen, but I’m here.

And the angels starting singing gently to her, slowly and mournfully.

‘Oh, shut up!’ Annika yelled, hitting her head with the palm of her hand, and the voices disappeared.

She followed the bus over the bridge and entered the frozen city, driving past panelled houses and banks of snow and frozen cars, and turned off at a junction by a petrol station.

The airport bus stopped just across the street from the City Hotel’s heavy façade. She braked and leaned forward to watch the passengers getting off. Her breath misted the widescreen, and she wiped it with her sleeve.

Karina Björnlund was the second last off. The Minister of Culture stepped carefully out of the bus with a black leather bag in her hand. Annika could feel herself on the verge of hyperventilating.

A bag to breathe into, she thought, realizing that she didn’t have one. Instead she held her breath and counted to ten three times, and her heartbeat slowed down.

It was getting dark, but the sunset was as slow and gradual as dawn had been, and she watched Karina Björnlund stand and freeze at the bus-stop, a thickset, dark woman in a fur-coat and no hat.

The Red Wolf, Annika thought, trying to make out the features of her face in the shadows, imagining that she could see a pair of anxious, sad eyes.

What are you doing here?

Her mother lives on Storgatan, she thought. Maybe she’s on her way there.

Then realized: this is Storgatan. Why would she be standing at a bus-stop to go somewhere else? She hasn’t come to visit her mother.

Suddenly her back window was filled with the headlights of one of the local buses. She put the car in gear and rolled forward a few metres to let the bus pull in, passing the little gaggle of people waiting in the queue. In her rear-view mirror she watched as Karina Björnlund picked her bag up and climbed on board.

I’ll follow the bus to see where she gets off, Annika thought, and rolled a bit further until she realized she was heading into a pedestrianized street. People were walking slowly in front of the car, challenging her with their stares. She looked up and noticed a sign indicating that all vehicles apart from public transport were forbidden. She felt herself starting to panic again, grappled with the gear-stick to find reverse, and saw the bus gliding slowly towards her. She turned the wheel as hard as she could and swerved on crunching tyres.

The bus slid past and she felt the sweat sticking her legs to the seat. She was about to lose sight of the minister, and had no idea where she was heading.

Bus number one, she thought. The bus that Linus Gustafsson usually took.

Svartöstaden.

East, towards Swedish Steel.

And she drove down towards the harbour, turning right towards the ironworks. She pulled over to the side and waited; if she was right the bus would have to pass her here. Four minutes later the bus glided past her and carried on towards Malmudden.

She just had time to register the name of the street, Lövskatan, as the bus turned right; wasn’t that where Margit Axelsson used to live? Another sign, Föreningsgatan, and the bus carried on along the edge of a messy and desolate industrial estate, huddling in the shadow of an enormous jet-black mound of iron-ore. On the left was a row of identical two-storey apartment blocks from the forties, and up ahead loomed a huge, abandoned industrial building that seemed to have grown into the side of the mountain of iron-ore. Dark windows sent warnings into the twilight, cold cries into the darkness. She followed the bus as the road swung up and left and ran alongside the railway line. An immense steel pipe hung high above, and below lurked a row of graffiti-covered and ramshackle industrial units, surrounded by pipes, steel girders, tyres, pallets. No sign of life anywhere.

The bus indicated and pulled in at a bus-stop. Annika braked and pulled up behind an abandoned car twenty metres further down the hill.

Karina Björnlund got off, clutching her leather bag. Annika slumped down in her seat and stared at her.

The bus pulled away, and the Minister of Culture was left staring out at the railway track, her breath drifting like clouds around her. She seemed to hesitate.

Annika switched off the engine and pulled out the key, waiting inside the warm interior of the car without taking her eyes off the woman.

Then Karina Björnlund suddenly turned round and started walking towards the crown of the hill, away from the industrial units.

Annika stiffened, fumbled with the ignition key, biting the inside of her cheek.

Should she get out and follow the minister? Drive up and offer her a lift? Wait and see if she came back?

She rubbed her eyes for a moment.

Wherever Karina Björnlund was going, she evidently didn’t want company.

Annika opened the car door, pulling her hat and ski-gloves from her bag, pushed the door shut and locked the car with a bleep. She gasped for breath, reeling from the cold; how was it possible to live in a climate like this?

She blinked a few times; the cold was making the air incredibly dry, hurting her eyes.

The daylight was dark grey now, almost gone. The sky was distant, clear and entirely colourless; a few stars twinkled above the mounds of ore. Two streetlamps further down the road spread a dull, hopeless light in a small circle around their own feet. Karina Björnlund had disappeared over the crown of the hill, and there was no other sign of life anywhere. The rumble from the steelworks was carried through the cold along the railway track, reaching her like a dull vibration.

Walking carefully, she started up the hill, looking hard at every bush and shadow. At the top of the hill the road swung sharply to the left and led back into the housing estate. Straight ahead was a narrow track, clear of snow and ice, with a sign forbidding vehicle traffic.

Annika narrowed her eyes and peered around her, unable to see the minister anywhere. She took a few steps along the private track, jogging as fast as she dared on the ice and grit. She passed a bundle of cables leading down to the railway tracks and ran past an empty car park, then the track emerged alongside the railway line again. Far ahead the ironworks, coke ovens, and blastfurnaces sat brooding darkly against the winter sky, millions of tons of ore turned into a rolling carpet of steel. To the left was nothing but slurry and snow. The full moon had risen behind the mounds of ore, its blue light mixing with the yellow lights illuminating the ore railway.

She ran for several minutes until she was forced to stop and catch her breath, coughing drily and quietly into her glove, blinking moisture out of her eyes and looking round for Karina Björnlund.

The track looked as though it was rarely used. She could see just a few footprints, some tracks left by dogs and a bicycle, but no minister.

The angels suddenly burst out in song.

She hit the back of her head so hard that the voices fell silent. She shut her eyes and breathed for a few seconds, listening to the emptiness in her head, and in the echo of the silence she suddenly heard other voices, human voices, coming from within the forest up ahead. She couldn’t make out any words, could just hear a male and a female voice talking fairly quietly.

She passed beneath a viaduct, either a road or a railway, Annika couldn’t tell. She no longer knew where she was. The voices grew louder, and in the light of the moon and the railway track she suddenly saw footsteps leading into an opening in the scrub.

She stopped, peering through the low trees, just able to make out shadows, spirits.

‘Well, I’m here now,’ Karina Björnlund was saying. ‘Don’t hurt me.’

A rough male voice with a Finnish accent answered, ‘Karina, don’t be scared. I’ve never meant you any harm.’

‘Believe me, Göran, no one’s ever done me as much harm as you have. Say what you want and… let me go.’

Annika caught her breath, her stomach turning somersaults, her dry mouth turned to sandpaper. She took a careful step into the first of the footprints already there in the snow, then another, and another. In the moonlight she saw the forest open out into a clearing, and at its centre was a small brick building with a sheet-metal roof and sealed-up windows.

In the middle of the clearing stood the Minister of Culture in her thick fur, and a thin grey man in a long coat and leather cap, with a dark duffel bag beside him.

Göran Nilsson, the ruler with divine power, the Yellow Dragon.

Annika stared at him with painfully dry eyes.

Terrorist, mass-murderer, evil personified, this was what it looked like, hunched and dull and trembling slightly?

She had to call the police.

Then realized: her mobile was in the bag on the passenger seat of the Volvo down by the abandoned car.

44

‘How can you think I’ve ever meant you any harm?’ the man said, his voice carrying through the still air. ‘All my life you’re the person who’s meant the most to me.’

The woman shuffled her feet nervously.

‘I got your messages,’ she said, and Annika realized at once why she sounded so scared. She had received the same warnings as Margit.

The man, the Yellow Dragon, lowered his head for a few seconds. Then he looked up again, and Annika could see his eyes. In the strange light they glimmered red and hollow.

‘I had a reason for coming here, and you’re all going to hear it,’ he said, his voice as cold as the wind. ‘You may have come a long way, but I’ve come further.’

The woman was shaking under her fur, her voice scared, and she was close to tears. ‘Don’t hurt me.’

The man went up to her. Annika could see him pull something from his coat pocket, black, shiny.

A weapon. A revolver.

‘I shan’t trouble you again,’ he said quietly. ‘This is the last time. You’ll just have to wait at the meeting place. There’s something I need to take care of first.’

The wind freshened, tugging at the branches of the pine trees.

‘Please,’ the woman pleaded. ‘Let me go.’

‘In,’ he said harshly. ‘Now.’

And Karina Björnlund picked up her bag from the ground and, with the revolver aimed at her back, walked inside the little brick building. Göran Nilsson didn’t move, watched her go inside, put the gun in his pocket again, turned round and walked over to the duffel bag leaning against the wall of the building.

Annika took a deep breath. She had heard more than enough. She moved softly and carefully back along the trail of footprints and emerged onto the track, casting a last glance at the trees so she could describe the site properly to the police.

Someone was moving, someone was coming towards her.

Her breathing came hard and deep. She looked around in panic.

Ten metres or so behind her was a metal box with a mass of thick cables snaking out of it, and behind it was a thicket of young pine trees. Annika fled towards them, her feet scarcely touching the crunching surface of the track. She flew into the sharp branches, parting them with both hands, then peered behind her.

The grey man emerged into the dim light from the railway track, dragging the duffel bag behind him. It was clearly very heavy. He stood still on the icy track for a few seconds, then put his hand to his stomach and bent over, his breath rising from his mouth in panting bursts. Annika craned her neck to see better. It looked like the man was about to fall flat on his face.

Then his breathing calmed down, he straightened his back and took a few unsteady steps forward.

Then he looked straight at Annika.

Horrified, she let go off the branch she had been holding back, and put her hand over her mouth to muffle the sound and cloud of her breath. She stood completely still in the darkness as the man slowly walked towards her. His panting breath and strained steps grew in her head, coming closer and closer until she thought she was going to scream. She closed her eyes and heard him stop a metre or so away from her, on the other side of the little pine trees.

There was a scraping noise. She opened her eyes.

Metal scraping against metal, she held her breath and listened.

The man was doing something with the metal box. He was opening the doors of the cabinet containing all the cables. She could hear him panting, and realized that she had to take another breath, inhaling quickly and silently, only to feel a huge and instant desire to throw up.

The man stank. A smell of decay filtered through the branches and made her put her hand in front of her mouth again. He was panting and struggling with something on the other side of the trees. The scraping sounds continued, then fell silent. There was a squeak, and then a click.

Ten seconds of easier breathing, then some more steps, away.

Annika turned round and pushed the branch aside to take another look.

The man was on his way back into the bushes. The duffel bag was gone.

He put it in the box, she thought.

The undergrowth swallowed him up, erasing his presence in the weak light.

Annika stood up and flew along the track, only pausing at the edge of the forest. She turned and ran as quietly as she could, under the viaduct and back up to the Skanska building, past the empty car park, until suddenly she saw another figure coming towards her.

She stopped instantly, looked around with adrenalin racing through her veins, threw herself down in the forest and sank up to her chin into the snow.

It was a man. He was bare-headed, dressed in jeans and a thin padded jacket. From his stumbling gait and unsteady movements she read the signs of serious and long-term alcohol abuse, a drunk.

A few seconds later he had vanished behind the Skanska building and she was able to get out onto the road again, rushing on without trying to brush off the snow.

To begin with she couldn’t see the hire-car, and had a moment of panic before she found it behind the abandoned car. She clicked open the lock and threw herself into the driver’s seat, pulling off her gloves and fumbling for her mobile, her fingers trembling so much that she had trouble keying in Inspector Suup’s direct number.

‘Karlsson, Central Control.’

She had reached the switchboard.

‘Suup,’ she said, ‘I’m trying to reach Inspector Suup.’

‘He’s finished for the day,’ Karlsson said.

Her brain went into overdrive; she shut her eyes and rubbed a sweaty palm across her forehead.

‘Forsberg,’ she said. ‘Is Forsberg there?’

‘Which one? We’ve got three.’

‘In crime?’

‘Hang on, I’ll put you through.’

The line went quiet and she ended up in a vague cyberspace without sound or colour. After three minutes she gave up and rang again.

‘I’m trying to get hold of someone on the Benny Ekland and Linus Gustafsson murder inquiries,’ she said in a tone of panic when Karlsson answered once more.

‘About what?’ the young man said, uninterested.

She forced herself to breathe calmly.

‘My name is Annika Bengtzon, and I’m a reporter on the Evening Post, and I-’

‘Suup’s in charge of the press,’ Karlsson interrupted. ‘You’ll have to call him tomorrow.’

‘Listen to me!’ she screamed. ‘Ragnwald is here, Göran Nilsson, the Yellow Dragon, I know where he is, he’s in a small brick building next to the ore railway together with Karina Björnlund. You’ve got to come and arrest him, now!’

‘Björnlund?’ Karlsson said. ‘The Minister of Culture?’

‘Yes!’ Annika shouted. ‘Göran Nilsson from Sattajärvi is with her in a small building below the ironworks. I can’t explain exactly where, it’s close to a viaduct-’

‘Listen,’ Karlsson said. ‘Are you sure you’re feeling okay?’

She paused and realized that she sounded like a lunatic, cleared her throat and forced herself to speak calmly and coherently. ‘I know this might sound a little crazy,’ she said, trying to smile down the line. ‘I’m calling from somewhere called Lövskatan, it’s not far from the ironworks, the railway track runs right alongside-’

‘Lövskatan, yes, we do know where Lövskatan is,’ the policeman said, and she could hear that his patience was wearing thin.

‘A man you’ve been looking for for years has come back to Luleå,’ Annika said, sounding almost normal. ‘His name is Göran Nilsson, and since he returned to Sweden he’s committed at least four murders. The Mao murders. And right now he’s outside that building, or at least was very recently, a brick building with a tin roof a short way into the forest below a viaduct…’

Officer Karlsson sighed audibly down the line.

‘The duty officer is booking someone in,’ he said, ‘but I’ll pass on your message as soon as she gets back.’

‘No!’ Annika yelled. ‘You have to come now! I don’t know how long he’s going to be there.’

‘Listen,’ the policeman said firmly. ‘Calm down. I’ve just told you, I’ll talk to the duty officer.’

‘Good,’ Annika said, breathing heavily, ‘good. I’ll wait here by the bus-stop until you come so I can show you the way. I’m parked here, I’m in a silver Volvo.’

‘Okay,’ the policeman said. ‘Just you wait there.’ And he hung up.

Annika looked at the display on her phone, a glowing rectangle in the darkness.

She pushed in the earpiece and called Jansson’s direct number in the newsroom.

‘I might have to stay in Luleå tonight,’ she said. ‘Just wanted to check it’s okay to book into the City Hotel tonight if I have to.’

‘Why?’ Jansson said.

‘There might be something going on up here,’ she said.

‘No terrorism,’ Jansson said. ‘I got hauled over the coals this morning for letting you go up to Norrbotten again.’

‘Okay,’ Annika said.

‘Are you listening?’ Jansson said. ‘Not one single line about another bloody terrorist, is that clear?’

She waited a second before replying. ‘Of course. Understood. I promise.’

‘Stay at the City,’ the editor said closer to the receiver in a considerably quieter and friendlier voice. ‘Call room service. Get pay-TV and watch porn films, I’ll sign for the whole lot. I know how it is, we all have to get away sometimes.’

‘Okay,’ she said smartly and ended the call, dialled directory inquiries and asked to be put through to the City Hotel, Luleå, booking a business-class room on the top floor.

After that she sat in the car and stared out of the windscreen. Her breath hit the windows and they soon froze over again. She could do nothing more. All she could do was sit and wait for the police.

It’ll soon be over, she thought, feeling her pulse-rate slow.

She saw Thord Axelsson’s grey face before her, Gunnel Sandström’s swollen eyes and wine-red cardigan, Linus Gustafsson’s spiky gelled hair and watchful eyes, and was consumed with burning fury.

You’re finished, you bastard.

And she realized she was freezing. She thought about starting the car engine to heat it up, but opened the door instead and got out, far too restless to sit still. She checked that her mobile was in her pocket, locked the door and walked up towards the top of the hill.

The arctic night had taken an iron grip on the landscape, as hard and unrelenting as the steel produced in the blast-furnaces down by the shore. Annika’s breath drifted around her, light veils of frozen warmth.

It’s beautiful, she thought, her eyes following the rails and ending up among the stars.

Then she heard a vehicle rumbling behind her, she turned round, hoping it was the police.

It was a local Luleå bus, the number one.

It drove towards her and stopped. She realized that she was standing at the bus-stop and took a few steps to one side to indicate that she wasn’t waiting for it.

But the bus stopped a few metres away from her anyway, the back door opened and a thickset man stepped onto the street, moving slowly, heavily.

She looked at him and took a step closer.

‘Hans!’ she said. ‘Hans, hello; it’s me, Annika.’

Hans Blomberg, the archivist from the Norrland News, looked up and met her gaze.

45

‘What are you doing here?’ Annika said.

‘I live here,’ the man said, smiling cheerfully. ‘On Torsgatan.’

He gestured over his shoulder towards the housing estate.

‘Do you?’ Annika said as the bus pulled away. She took a step closer and looked into his eyes, and at that moment something clicked inside her head, suddenly she remembered when she had seen the drawing of the yellow dragon before, all of a sudden she knew where it was. She had thought it was a child’s drawing, a yellow dinosaur, on Hans Blomberg’s pinboard in the archive of the Norrland News. She took a couple of involuntary steps back.

‘Surely the real question is,’ Hans Blomberg said, ‘what are you doing here?’

The bus disappeared beyond the crown of the hill and the man walked towards her, his hands in his pockets. He stopped in front of her and in the moonlight his eyes were almost transparent.

She laughed nervously. ‘I’m up on a job and got lost,’ she said. ‘Föreningsgatan, which one is that?’

‘You’re standing on it,’ the archivist said in amusement. ‘Doesn’t anyone have a sense of direction in Stockholm?’

‘They’d run out by the time they got to me,’ she said, realizing she would soon be unable to speak.

‘Who are you meeting?’

She shrugged. ‘I’ve already missed my deadline,’ she said.

‘But then you must come inside and warm up,’ he said. ‘Can I offer you a cup of tea?’

She searched frantically for an excuse, the man took no notice of her hesitation and took a firm grip of her arm and started walking.

‘I live in a little two-room flat on the ground floor,’ he said. ‘It’s not much, but what can you do when consumer society has left you behind?’

She tried to pull her arm away and found it was held in a vice-like grip.

‘It’s not often a guy like me gets such a charming visitor,’ he said. ‘A lovely young lady all the way from the capital.’

He smiled genially at her, she tried to smile back.

‘Which one of them are you?’ Annika said. ‘The Panther, Tiger or Lion?’

He was looking straight ahead, pretending he hadn’t heard the question, just took tighter hold of her. The houses were disappearing behind them; they were approaching the no vehicles sign. She glanced over to the left, past the power cables and into the undergrowth.

‘So you live out here in the forest?’

He didn’t answer, and the next instant she was back in that tunnel. She felt the earth tilt, heard someone breathing hard, panting, and realized it was her, her mouth wide open.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to. Please.’

Her legs gave way beneath her. Hans Blomberg caught her with a smile.

‘You’re a reporter,’ he said. ‘A proper, inquisitive little reporter. Of course you want to get a good story, don’t you?’

Her memory flashed up the pipes in the roof of the tunnel above her, and she started to cry.

‘Let me go!’

She jammed her feet in the ice and struggled and was rewarded with a ringing blow to the head. She saw stars and Sven was there screaming at her and she ducked, sank to the ground and put her hands over her head.

‘Don’t hit me.’

The world slowed down and stopped, the ground stopped tilting and she could hear herself panting. She looked up cautiously and saw Hans Blomberg shaking his head anxiously at her.

‘God, the way you carry on,’ he said. ‘Up you get. The leader’s waiting.’

And she stumbled forward in the moonlight with the lights above the railway track swaying far off to the left. The angels were completely silent, where their anxious voices had been was now only dark emptiness.

They passed the Skanska building, it was completely black.

‘We’re going to the little brick building, aren’t we? The one beyond the viaduct?’

‘So you’ve already found our headquarters,’ the archivist said in his good-natured voice. ‘Have you been creeping around in the bushes? Very talented. Then I may as well tell you what to expect. The Dragon has called us together again. I don’t think everyone can make it, we’ve suffered something of a decline in membership recently, but Karina will probably be there, and Yngve, of course. He never misses a good party.’

The archivist laughed happily. Annika struggled against nausea.

‘Poor Yngve,’ the man went on. ‘Göran wanted me to look after him, but what’s a chap to do? To help an addict you have to change the whole apparatus of oppression, and I haven’t been able to do that. Unfortunately I have to admit that Yngve no longer has any hold on reality, it’s truly tragic. I have failed in my duty…’

A moment later she heard something heavy and rhythmic behind her. She glanced over her shoulder and found herself staring into the headlight of a huge diesel locomotive coming down the track.

‘Straight on,’ Hans Blomberg said.

Annika obeyed, peering at the great engine as it slowly rumbled past her towards the ironworks with its endless train of fully laden ore-trucks behind it.

Her heart was thudding. She tried to see herself from the train-driver’s perspective. She was dressed in black against a dark background of scrub, only lit by the cold moonlight.

She forced her heart to slow down; tried to see how long the train was without twisting her head, but couldn’t see the end of it.

They walked under the viaduct, the train thundered past, dunkdunk dunkdunk dunkdunk, wagon after wagon after wagon, casting black shadows from the railway track.

Then the last one disappeared, the end of a long tail heading towards the fiery heat of the blast-furnace.

Annika swallowed hard and found that her hands were shaking.

They reached the transformer box where Göran Nilsson had hidden his duffel bag. She glanced at the box; it was closed, sealed up.

‘Down to the left here,’ Hans Blomberg said, pushing her towards the gap in the undergrowth.

She slipped and was on the verge of falling down the slope, but grabbed hold of some branches and managed to stay upright.

‘Take it easy,’ she said lamely and walked towards the brick building.

The windows were sealed with metal shutters, a half-collapsed flight of wooden steps led up to the door, which was slightly open. Annika stopped, but Blomberg shoved her in the back.

‘Go on, in you go. It’s just an old compressor shed.’

She took hold of the door and pulled it open, noting that its lock consisted of two welded metal hasps, one with a rusty old padlock hanging from it. The same terrible stench that she had smelled behind the pine trees poured out through the door.

Ragnwald was in there.

She stepped into the solid darkness, blinking, hearing people breathing. It was icy cold inside; paradoxically it felt even colder than outside.

‘Who are you?’ Karina Björnlund said from the far left corner.

‘We have an important guest,’ Hans Blomberg said, shoving Annika further into the room, then stepping inside.

The Minister of Culture ignited her cigarette lighter. A weak flame illuminated the shed, the shadows cast across her nose and eyes made her look monstrous. Yngve the alcoholic was next to her, Göran Nilsson leaning against the wall to the right. On the wall beside him hung a picture of Chairman Mao.

Annika could feel panic rising at the sight of the murderer, the characteristic itch in her fingers, giddiness and numbness.

Calm down, she thought. Don’t hyperventilate. Hold your breath.

Karina Björnlund bent down and lit a small candle at her feet, put the lighter down, then stood up holding the candle.

‘What’s this?’ she said, looking at Hans Blomberg. ‘Why have you brought her here?’

She put the candle on a piece of rusty machinery that may have been the old compressor. Their breath hung like clouds around each of them.

I’m not alone, Annika thought. This isn’t the same as the tunnel.

‘May I present Miss Annika Bengtzon,’ Hans Blomberg said, ‘snooping reporter from the Evening Post.’

Karina Björnlund started and stepped back a step.

‘Are you mad?’ she said in a loud voice. ‘Bringing a journalist here? Don’t you understand what you’re exposing me to?’

Göran Nilsson looked at them, his eyes cloudy and tired.

‘This isn’t for outsiders,’ he said, surprisingly sharply. ‘Panther, what on earth are you thinking?’

Hans Blomberg, the Black Panther, pulled the door firmly shut behind him and smiled.

‘Miss Bengtzon already knows about us,’ he said. ‘She was standing outside, so I couldn’t let her run around telling anyone.’

Karina Björnlund stepped closer to Blomberg.

‘It’s all ruined now,’ she said in a shrill voice. ‘Everything I’ve worked for all these years. Damn you all.’

She picked up her bag and turned towards the door, and Göran Nilsson stepped into the small circle of light. Annika could see no sign of a weapon. The man’s face was sunken and drawn, he looked weak and ill.

Yet Karina Björnlund still stopped mid-pace, frightened and uncertain.

‘Wait,’ he said to the minister, then turned to Blomberg. ‘Do you accept responsibility for her? Do you guarantee the safety of the group?’

Annika stared at the killer, noting his shabby appearance and slow sentences, as if he had to search for the words before he found them.

‘No problem,’ the archivist said enthusiastically. ‘I’ll take care of her afterwards.’

Annika felt her feet turn to lead; her body grew heavy and turned to stone. Inside her she heard a pleading, whimpering sound grow, but it never reached her throat.

The Yellow Dragon looked straight at Annika, she daren’t even breathe.

‘Stand in the corner,’ he said, pointing.

‘We can’t have a reporter here, surely you can understand that,’ Karina Björnlund said animatedly. ‘I won’t agree to that.’

The Dragon raised a hand. ‘That’s enough now,’ he said. ‘Our group commander bears the responsibility.’

He put his hands in his pockets.

The gun, Annika thought.

‘It’s very cold today,’ he said. ‘I shall be brief.’

Yngve the alcoholic stepped forward. ‘Great,’ he said, ‘but has anyone got something to drink?’

Hans Blomberg undid the top button of his jacket, and from his inside pocket he pulled out a bottle of Absolut. Yngve’s eyes lit up, his lips parting in rapture, and he took the bottle as gently as if it were a baby.

‘I thought we might have a little celebration,’ Hans Blomberg said, nodding encouragingly.

Yngve unscrewed the cap with tears in his eyes. Annika looked down at the floor and wriggled her toes to stop them from going stiff.

What were they going to do with her?

It’s not like the tunnel, it’s not like the tunnel.

Karina Björnlund put her bag down on the floor again.

‘I don’t understand what we’re doing here,’ she said.

‘Your power has made you impatient,’ Göran Nilsson said, looking at the minister with his dragon’s eyes, pausing until he had everyone’s full attention. Then he tilted his head back and looked up at the ceiling.

‘I am very aware that some of you were surprised to get my call,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long time since I gathered you together like this, and I appreciate that it aroused mixed feelings. But there’s no need for you to be scared.’

He looked straight at the Minister of Culture.

‘I’m not here to harm you,’ he said. ‘I’m here to thank you. You became the only family I had, and I say that without any sentimentality.’

‘So why did you kill Margit, then?’ Karina Björnlund said, her voice tight with fear.

Göran Nilsson shook his head, his stinking yellow dragon head, his divine, revolting ruler’s head.

‘You’re not listening,’ he said. ‘You’re just talking. You weren’t like this before. Power really has changed you.’

Hans Blomberg took a step forward, apparently tired of the lack of focus. ‘Tell me what I should do,’ he said to his leader. ‘I’m ready for armed struggle.’

Göran Nilsson turned to him, sorrow in his eyes. ‘Panther,’ he said, ‘there won’t be any armed struggle. I’ve come home to die.’

The archivist’s eyes opened wide, an imbecilic expression spreading across his face.

‘But you’re back now,’ he said. ‘You’re here again, our leader, we’ve been waiting years. The revolution is near.’

‘The revolution is dead,’ the Dragon said harshly. ‘Capitalist society that treats human beings like cattle has won, and with it all the false ideologies: democracy, freedom of expression, justice before the law, women’s rights.’

Hans Blomberg listened devoutly, Karina Björnlund seemed to shrink with every word, and the alcoholic was completely absorbed in his newfound bottle of bliss.

‘The working class has been reduced to a brain-washed horde of cretinous consumers,’ he said. ‘There’s no desire to improve things any more. The false authorities herd people into the meat-grinder without a word of protest.’

He fixed his eyes on Karina Björnlund.

‘The authorities use people up, now as then,’ he said, his voice clear and steady. ‘They wring us out like dishcloths and then they throw us away. This is how it has always been, but today it is governments elected by the people that permit the buyers of labour to exploit us until we break. I have accepted that this is the case, and I have fought against it in my own way. Revolution?’ He shook his head. ‘There’ll never be any revolution. Humanity has bartered it for Coca-Cola and cable television.’

Hans Blomberg stared at him, his eyes blank and bewildered. ‘But that’s not true. You’re back, and I’ve been waiting so long. I’ve trained all these years, just as you said, and I’m ready. It isn’t too late.’

Göran Nilsson raised his hand.

‘I have very little of my life left,’ he said. ‘I have accepted my personal condition, and the condition that we are all in together. Fundamentally, there is no difference between me and the lies of the bourgeoisie. I shall live on through my children, and in return I give them their inheritance.’

He staggered, clutching his stomach.

‘No one will be able to exploit you any more,’ he said. ‘Your days on the treadmill are over.’

‘What do you mean?’ Karina Björnlund seemed less scared now.

‘He’s going to give us presents,’ Hans Blomberg said, his voice echoing with astonished disbelief. ‘It’s Christmas for all of us! Or perhaps some post-funeral coffee? The revolution is dead, didn’t you hear?’

‘Stop it, Hans,’ Karina Björnlund said, taking hold of his arm. ‘Mao’s dead, too, and even China is capitalist now.’

‘You believed as well,’ Hans said. ‘You were a revolutionary too.’

‘But, good God,’ she said, ‘we were nothing but children. Everyone believed in the revolution. That was just the way things were back then, but that all vanished long ago.’

‘Not for me!’ Hans Blomberg shouted, and Göran Nilsson took an unsteady step towards him.

‘Panther,’ he said, ‘you’ve misunderstood me.’

‘No!’ the archivist yelled, his eyes red and moist. ‘You can’t do this to me. The revolution is the only thing that matters.’

‘Pull yourself together,’ Karina Björnlund said, shaking the archivist’s arm in irritation.

With an angry tug the man pulled himself free from the Minister of Culture and the next moment he raised his clenched right fist and punched her hard in the face.

46

Someone screamed. It could have been the minister or the alcoholic or Annika herself; and then the furious archivist turned to face Göran Nilsson and shoved him with all his strength against the wall with the poster of Mao. The Yellow Dragon fell to the concrete floor with the audible crack of breaking bone, and a hissing sound as the air went out of his lungs.

‘You bloody traitors!’

Hans Blomberg’s voice was breaking. He gathered himself and leaped for the door, throwing it open with a crash and slamming it behind him with the same force.

The candle flame flickered but did not go out; the shadows slowly stopped dancing about.

‘I’m bleeding,’ the minister shouted from the floor behind the compressor. ‘Help me!’

Then silence settled heavily and the cold grew even harsher. Annika could hear the archivist cursing through the brick wall as he disappeared towards the railway line. She went over to Göran Nilsson. He was unconscious by the wall, his right foot twisted at an unnatural angle. His right leg looked a bit shorter than the left. Yngve the alcoholic stared drunkenly and unsteadily at his leader lying there on the floor, his face almost completely colourless and his teeth chattering. Karina Björnlund struggled to her feet, holding a hand to her face, blood was trickling between her fingers and down onto her fur-coat.

‘My nose is broken,’ she howled. ‘I have to get to hospital.’ She started to cry, then stopped because it was too painful.

Annika went over to the minister, put a hand gently on her arm. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, inspecting the woman’s face behind her hand. ‘It’ll heal okay.’

‘But what if it’s crooked?’

Annika turned away and went back to the man slumped on the floor. He really did smell unbelievably bad, the stench of something severely diseased.

‘Göran,’ she said loudly. ‘Göran Nilsson, can you hear me?’

Without waiting for a response she leaned over, taking off her gloves, and pulled the man’s gun from his pocket, it was heavy and ice-cold. With her back to the others she slipped it quietly into one of the outer pockets of her polar jacket, she knew nothing about revolvers and tried to convince herself that the safety catch must be on.

The Yellow Dragon groaned, his pale eyelids flickering. She put her hand on the frozen cement floor to see how cold it was, sweat making her fingers stick to it at once. Shocked, she pulled them away.

‘You can’t lie here,’ she told the man, ‘you have to get up. Can you stand up?’

She looked up at Karina Björnlund.

‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ she said. ‘This place is worse than a freezer. Can you help me carry him?’

‘But I’m wounded,’ the Minister of Culture said. ‘And why should I help him? After all he’s done to me. Can’t Yngve carry him?’

The alcoholic had sat down on the floor clutching the half-empty bottle in his arms.

‘You can’t fall asleep here,’ Annika said to Yngve, feeling reality letting go of her, the ice-cold room threatening to strangle her.

‘If you knew how much I’ve suffered over the years,’ Karina Björnlund said from over by the compressor. ‘Always afraid that someone would let on that I knew these fools. But that’s what happens when you’re young, isn’t it? You think a load of crazy things, get in with the wrong crowd?’

Göran Nilsson tried to sit up but let out a little cry and slumped back on the concrete floor.

‘Something’s broken in my hip,’ he whispered, and Annika remembered her grandmother’s broken hip that winter when there was so much snow.

‘I’ll go and get help,’ Annika said, but a second later the man was holding her wrist in a vice-like grip.

‘Where’s Karina?’ he muttered, his eyes unfocused.

‘She’s here,’ Annika said quietly and wriggled loose in horror, standing up and turning to the minister. ‘He wants to talk to you.’

‘About what? We’ve got nothing to say to each other.’

Karina Björnlund’s voice sounded thin and nasal. She took a few cautious steps towards the man and Annika could see that her nostrils were bleeding badly. Her face was bruised and swollen, from her lips right up to her eyes. Annika met her gaze, reading in it all the bewilderment that she herself was feeling, and inside her a small light went on: she wasn’t alone, she wasn’t alone.

‘Keep him company,’ Annika said, and the minister went hesitantly over to the terrorist, but as she leaned over him he screamed.

‘Not blood,’ he panted. ‘Take the blood away.’

Something short-circuited in Annika’s head. There he was, the mass-murderer, the professional hitman, the full-time terrorist, and he was whining like a cry-baby. She flew over to him and grabbed him by the coat.

‘So you don’t like the sight of blood, you bastard? But killing all those people, that was all right, was it?’

His head fell back and he closed his eyes.

‘I’m a soldier,’ he said flatly. ‘I am nowhere near as guilty as the leaders of the free world.’

She felt tears welling up.

‘Why Margit?’ she said. ‘Why the boy?’

He shook his head.

‘Not me,’ he whispered.

Annika looked up at Karina Björnlund, who was standing in the middle of the floor, a look of shock on her face.

‘He’s lying,’ she said. ‘Of course it was him.’

‘I only strike at the enemy,’ Göran Nilsson said flatly. ‘Not against friends or the innocent.’

Annika stared at the man’s pain-racked face, his apathy, disinterest, and she suddenly knew that he was telling the truth.

It wasn’t him who murdered them. There was no reason for him to kill Benny Ekland, Linus Gustafsson, Kurt Sandström or Margit Axelsson.

So who had done it?

She was shaking. She stood up on numb legs and walked unsteadily towards the door.

It was shut. Stuck fast, immovable.

She remembered the lock on the outside, and realization hit her like a physical blow. Hans Blomberg had shut them in.

She was locked inside an ice-box with three other people, it was thirty degrees below zero, two of them were wounded and the third was blind drunk.

Hans Blomberg, she thought. Is that remotely possible?

And the next moment the tunnel was over her again, the pipes stretching along the ceiling, she could feel the weight of the dynamite on her back, and somewhere in the distance a woman was crying, snorting and howling with pain and despair and she realized that it was the Minister of Culture, Karina Björnlund. And she wasn’t alone, she wasn’t alone.

She let go of the tunnel and grabbed hold of reality. She mustn’t fall apart, if she fell apart she would die.

It’s so cold, she thought, how long can you survive in this sort of cold?

Her breathing slowed down. She was in no immediate danger herself. In her polar outfit she could last the night if need be. The minister had her fur-coat, but the men were worse off. The drunk’s eyelids were already drooping, he wouldn’t last another hour. The terrorist had better clothes, but was lying directly on the cement floor, which was like a block of ice.

We have to get out of here. Now. How?

Her mobile!

She let out a small noise of triumph as she fumbled in her pocket and pulled out her phone.

No reception.

She held it up in the light of the candle, trying it in every corner of the room. Not a trace of a signal. She tried to make a call anyway. Nothing happened.

Don’t panic.

Think.

The minister had a phone. Annika had called her on it just a couple of hours before.

‘See if you can get reception,’ she said to the minister.

‘What?’

‘Your phone! You’ve got a mobile on you; I called you, didn’t I?’

‘Oh, right.’

The minister carefully searched in her black leather bag, pulled out her mobile and switched it on with pin-codes and a lot of loud puffing, then held it up in the air.

‘I haven’t got a signal,’ she said in surprise.

Annika put her hands over her face, feeling the cold bite at her skin.

It’s all right, she thought. I’ve already called the police. They should be here any minute.

And she studied the minister. The woman was bruised and shaken. She looked towards the alcoholic, in the flickering candlelight his lips looked dark blue. He was shaking with cold in his thin jacket.

‘Okay,’ Annika said, forcing her head to think rationally. ‘We are where we are. Is there any sort of blanket here? A tarpaulin, any insulating material?’

‘Where did Hans go?’ Yngve said.

‘Did he lock the door?’ Karina Björnlund asked.

Shaking, Annika did a circuit of the dusty little building: a few rusty tins, a lot of dirt, and a rat’s skeleton.

‘He can’t have locked the door,’ the Minister of Culture said, going over to try it for herself. ‘Göran has the key.’

‘You can just click a padlock shut,’ Annika said. ‘So what is this place, anyway?’

She felt the walls, saw that the windows were sealed shut with coarse wooden planks nailed from the inside, and remembered the metal shutters outside.

‘It’s been derelict for forty years,’ Karina Björnlund said. ‘My father was on the railway, he brought me here as a child.’

‘What’s it for?’

‘It was a compression room. They built a new one when they rerouted the railway. How are we going to get out?’

‘Are there any tools anywhere?’ Annika asked.

‘We’re stuck,’ Karina Björnlund said, her eyes now so swollen that they were almost completely closed. ‘God, how are we going to get out?’

She wouldn’t find any forgotten tools, Annika realized, they would have been removed years ago. The walls were of solid concrete, and the door couldn’t be forced.

‘We have to keep moving,’ she said. ‘We have to keep each other warm.’

She gulped, feeling panic creeping up on her. What if the police didn’t come? What if Karlsson in central control had forgotten her?

She shook off the thought and went over to the rancid-smelling man below the Mao poster. His breathing was shallow and rattling, a string of saliva hanging from his mouth.

‘Göran,’ Annika said, crouching down next to him and struggling against the stench. ‘Göran Nilsson, can you hear me?’

She shook his shoulder and the man looked up at her with vacant eyes, his bottom lip shivering with cold.

‘J’ai très froid,’ he whispered.

47

‘Je comprends,’ Annika said quietly, and turned to the minister. ‘Karina, come and sit next to Göran, put your arms round him and wrap him in your fur.’

The Minister of Culture backed away until she reached the corner behind the compressor.

‘Never,’ she said. ‘Never in a million years. He’s done me so much harm.’

Annika looked at the man beside her, his waxy, pale skin, his shaking hands. Maybe she should let him die? Wasn’t that what he deserved?

She left Göran Nilsson and went over to the man leaning against the wall.

‘Yngve?’ she said. ‘Is your name Yngve?’

The man nodded, had pushed his hands up into his armpits to keep them warm.

‘Come here,’ she said, opening her polar jacket. ‘Come and stand next to me. We’re going for a walk.’

He shook his head firmly and clutched the almost empty bottle.

‘Okay, don’t then,’ Annika said, closing the jacket and looking over to the minister.

‘He’s got a gun,’ Karina Björnlund said. ‘We can shoot our way out.’

Annika shook her head. ‘The door’s made of steel. The bullets would ricochet round the room and kill the lot of us. Besides, we’d have to hit the padlock on the outside to get out.’

‘What about the windows, then?’

‘Same thing.’

Should she say she’d told the police? How would they react?

‘I knew it would turn out like this,’ Karina Björnlund said with a sniff. ‘This whole Beasts thing has been a nightmare right from the start. I should never have gone with them when they left the Communist Party.’

The Minister of Culture dug in her bag and pulled out a black garment, it might have been a T-shirt, which she held up to her nose.

‘Why not?’ Annika said, watching the minister’s shadow dance across the wall as she moved around behind the candle.

‘I don’t suppose you’d even been born in the sixties,’ Karina Björnlund said, glancing at Annika. ‘It can’t be easy for your generation to understand what it was like, but it was actually fantastic.’

Annika nodded slowly. ‘I can imagine,’ she said. ‘You were young, Göran was the leader.’

The minister nodded eagerly. ‘He was so strong and clever. He could get anyone to go along with him. All the girls wanted to be with him, all the boys looked up to him. But I should have walked away when he was thrown out. It was stupid to go along with his idea for the Beasts.’

Karina Björnlund lost herself in memories for a moment, Annika watched her with increasingly clear eyes.

‘How come you never got caught?’ Annika asked.

The minister looked up. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I never actually did anything, and Göran was very thorough. We only communicated through symbols, a forgotten old language comprehensible to anyone, across borders, races, cultures.’

‘So no minutes of meetings?’ Annika asked.

‘Not even letters or phone calls,’ Karina Björnlund said. ‘We were summoned to meetings by a drawing of a yellow dragon. A day or so later came a combination of numbers giving the day and time of the meeting.’

‘You each had a symbol?’

The woman nodded carefully, still holding the T-shirt to her nose. ‘But only the Dragon could call a meeting.’

‘And at the end of October you got the call again, in an anonymous letter to the department?’

A flicker of fear crossed the minister’s eyes. ‘It took a few seconds before I realized what I was looking at, and when I did I had to go out and throw up.’

‘Yet you still came,’ Annika said.

‘You don’t understand,’ the minister said. ‘I’ve been so scared all these years. After F21, when Göran disappeared, I got a warning in the post…’ She hid her face in the T-shirt.

‘A child’s finger,’ Annika said, and the minister looked up in surprise.

‘How do you know?’

‘I spoke to Margit Axelsson’s husband, Thord. The symbolism was crystal-clear.’

Karina Björnlund nodded. ‘If I didn’t keep quiet then not only would I die, but so would any children I might have in the future, and those close to me.’

Göran Nilsson groaned on the floor, moving his left leg in agitation.

Annika and the Minister of Culture looked at him with empty eyes.

‘He’s been stalking me,’ Karina Björnlund said. ‘One night he was standing outside my house in Knivsta. The next day I saw him behind a display in Åhléns in Uppsala. And on Friday I got another letter.’

‘Another warning?’

The minister closed her eyes for a few moments.

‘A drawing of a dog,’ she said, ‘and then a cross. I had an idea of what it might mean, but daren’t actually take it in.’

‘That Margit was dead?’

Karina Björnlund nodded.

‘We don’t have any contact with each other any more, of course, but I spent the whole night thinking, and in the morning I called Thord. He told me that Margit had been murdered and I understood exactly. Either I came here or I would die as well. So I came.’

She looked up at Annika, taking the T-shirt from her nose.

‘If you knew how scared I’ve been,’ she said. ‘How much I’ve suffered. Being terrified every day that someone would find out about all of this. It’s poisoned my whole life.’

Annika looked at her, this powerful woman in her thick fur, the girl who had hung out with her cousin, first sport, then politics, who got together with the leader of the gang, strong, charismatic, but then finished with him when he lost his power.

‘Shutting down TV Scandinavia to sweep it all under the carpet was a huge bloody mistake,’ she said.

Karina Björnlund looked at her like she hadn’t understood what she’d just heard. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve got the email that Herman Wennergren sent you. I know why you changed the culture proposal.’

The Minister of Culture got to her feet and took three quick steps over to Annika, her swollen eyes narrow slits.

‘You, you shitty little gutter reporter,’ she said, her bloody face right in front of Annika’s. ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’

Annika didn’t back down, but looked into her bloodshot eyes.

‘Don’t you know?’ she said. ‘We’ve spoken before. A long time ago, almost ten years now.’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘I contacted you for a comment about Christer Lundgren’s trip to Tallinn the night Josefin Liljeberg was murdered. I told you what had happened to the lost archive. I told you the government was being blackmailed to conduct illegal weapons exports, and I asked you to pass on my questions to the Trade Minister. But you didn’t go to him; you went to the Prime Minister, didn’t you?’

Karina Björnlund had turned white as Annika spoke, staring at her like she’d seen a ghost.

‘That was you?’ she said.

‘You used the information to get a cabinet post, didn’t you?’

The Minister of Culture gasped loudly, suddenly colouring again.

‘How dare you?’ she yelled. ‘I’ll sue you for this.’

‘I’ve only got one question,’ Annika said. ‘Why are you getting so upset?’

‘You come here and make terrible insinuations like that? Am I supposed to have called the Prime Minister in Harpsund and forced my way into a ministerial post?’

‘Oh,’ Annika said. ‘So you got hold of him out at Harpsund? How did he react? Was he angry? Or is he really as pragmatic and rational as people say?’

Karina Björnlund fell silent, her eyes bulging.

A moment later the silence was shattered by Yngve’s empty bottle hitting the cement floor and splintering into a thousand pieces. The alcoholic slid, unconscious, down the wall and slumped on the floor.

Annika stopped focusing on the Minister of Culture and ran over to Yngve.

‘Hello!’ she shouted, slapping him lightly on the cheek with her glove. ‘Up you get!’

The man blinked. ‘What?’

She tugged open her coat, grabbed the man by the armpits and dragged him to his feet.

‘Hold on to me,’ she said, wrapping the polar jacket round him at the same time as she clasped her arms round his back. The man breathed warmly and damply against her neck, he was so skinny that she could almost fasten the coat behind his back.

‘Can you move your feet? We have to keep moving.’

‘You won’t get away with this,’ the Minister of Culture said, but Annika paid her no attention, putting all her effort into getting the drunk to shuffle across the floor in a macabre and ice-cold dance.

‘Which one are you?’ Annika said quietly to Yngve. ‘Lion or Tiger?’

‘The Lion of Freedom,’ the man said through chattering teeth.

‘So where’s the Tiger?’

‘Don’t know,’ the drunk muttered, almost asleep.

‘He had the sense not to come,’ Karina said. ‘He always was the smartest one of us.’

Suddenly, over by the wall, Göran Nilsson moved, trying to get up, kicking with his good leg, his eyes staring as he tried to take his jacket off.

‘C’est très chaud,’ he said, lying down again.

‘Put your coat back on,’ Annika said, trying to go over to him, but the alcoholic had his arms round her and wouldn’t let go.

‘Listen to me, Göran, put your coat on.’

But the man slumped beneath the poster of Mao, his legs jerked spasmodically before settling, and he fell asleep. His chest was fluttering lightly under his ivory-coloured linen shirt.

‘You’ve got to help him,’ Annika said to Karina. ‘At least put his coat back on.’

The woman shook her head, and at that moment the candle went out.

‘Light it again,’ Annika said, hearing the fear in her voice.

‘It’s burned out,’ Karina said. ‘There’s no wick left.’

And with the darkness came silence, as the cold grew sharper and drier.

Annika opened her eyes wide but could see absolutely nothing. She was hovering in an empty, ice-cold space, and was struck with a sense of utter and immense loneliness. Surely nothing in the world could feel worse than this. Anything but isolation.

‘We have to keep moving,’ Annika said. ‘Karina, don’t stand still.’

But Annika heard the minister sink to the floor, and a muffled and uncontrollable attack of sobbing rose from the corner.

The woman was crying, wailing, drooling, and Annika and Yngve were moving ever slower in the ice-cold freezer. She held the shivering man in her arms, feeling his limbs getting heavier and heavier, his breathing more and more strained, and she tightened her grip, her arms rigid.

Responsibility for others, she thought, staring into the darkness. Nothing without each other. And Ellen’s and Kalle’s soft faces appeared in front of her, she could feel their silky-smooth warmth and sweet smell.

Soon, she thought. I’ll soon be with you again.

The Minister of Culture gradually calmed down, her sobbing dying away. The silence that followed was even deeper than before. It took a few seconds before Annika realized why.

Göran Nilsson had stopped breathing.

The thought sent sparks through her mind. Her fingers itched like mad, a sound emerged. Panic.

A moment later Yngve slumped in her arms, his legs gave way beneath him and his head fell on her shoulder.

‘Shit!’ she screamed in the man’s ear. ‘Don’t die. Help, someone, help!’

She didn’t have the strength to hold the man upright, he slid into a heap at her feet and she was hit by a complete blackout.

‘Help!’ she screamed at the top of her voice. ‘Help us, someone!’

‘There isn’t any help,’ Karina Björnlund said.

‘Help!’ Annika shrieked, fumbling forward to where she thought the door was, and walked right into the compressor, her knee striking the metal. ‘Help!’

Somewhere behind her she heard muffled voices and for a moment feared she was about to suffer a new onslaught from the angels. Talking, cries, the voices were definitely human, and a moment later came a sharp knocking sound.

‘Hello?’ a male voice called from the other side of the wall. ‘Is there someone in there?’

She spun round and stared into the darkness in the direction the voice had come from.

‘Yes!’ she screamed, falling over Yngve. ‘Yes! We’re in here. We’re locked in. Help us!’

‘We’ll have to cut the padlock off,’ the man said. ‘It may take a while. How many of you are there?’

‘Four,’ Annika said, ‘but I think one man is dead. Another is on the point of falling asleep; I can’t keep him awake. Hurry!’

‘I’ll get the tools,’ the voice said, then Karina Björnlund came back to life.

‘No!’ the minister shouted. ‘Don’t leave me! I have to get out, now!’

Annika found her way over to Yngve where he lay on the floor, breathing shallowly. She stroked his rough hair, clenching her jaw, then lay down on the floor and pulled the man on top of her, wrapping the polar jacket around them both.

‘Don’t die,’ she whispered, rocking him as though he were a child.

And she lay like that until she heard the cutting torch break the lock and the door was pulled open, and a torch was shining right in her eyes.

‘Take him first,’ Annika said. ‘I think he’s about to give up.’

A moment later the man was lifted off her, put on a stretcher, and floated out of her line of vision in just a couple of seconds.

‘What about you? Can you stand?’

She peered up at the light, could see nothing but the silhouette of a policeman.

‘I’m okay,’ she said, and stood up.

Inspector Forsberg looked at her anxiously.

‘You’ll have to go to hospital and get checked out,’ he said. ‘When you feel like talking I want to speak to you down at the station.’

Annika nodded, suddenly mute. Instead she pointed at Göran Nilsson, noting that her hand was trembling.

‘You’re so frozen you’re shaking,’ Forsberg said.

‘I think he’s dead,’ she whispered.

The paramedics returned and went over to Göran Nilsson, checked his breathing and pulse.

‘I think he broke his leg,’ Annika said. ‘And he’s ill; he said he was going to die soon.’

They put him on a stretcher and carried him quickly out of the building.

Karina Björnlund stepped out from the shadows, leaning on a paramedic. Her face had dissolved in tears, her nose still bleeding.

Annika looked at her swollen face and memorized it.

Karina Björnlund stopped right next to her and whispered so low that no one else could hear. ‘I’m going to say everything myself,’ she said. ‘You can forget all about your exclusive.’

And then the minister went out to the floodlights and police cars and ambulances.

48

Inspector Forsberg had a cramped, messy office on the second floor of the yellow-brown monstrosity that was the police station. Annika was dozing off on one of the chairs, but gave a start and sat up straight when the door flew open.

‘Sorry you’ve had to wait. No milk or sugar,’ the police officer said, putting a steaming-hot plastic cup in front of her on the desk, then went round and sat on his swivel-chair.

Annika picked up the cup, burning her hands and blowing on the drink. She took a cautious sip. Machine coffee, the worst sort.

‘Is this an interrogation?’ she asked, putting the cup down.

Forsberg looked through a drawer without answering.

‘Witness questioning, I suppose we should call it. Where the hell have I put it? There it is!’

He pulled out a little tape-recorder and a mess of cables, straightened up, looked Annika in the eye and smiled.

‘You’re not too frozen, then?’ His gaze held hers.

She looked away.

‘Oh, I am,’ she said. ‘But I learned to dress properly the hard way. How are the others?’

‘Ragnwald is dead, like you thought. Yngve Gustafsson is in intensive care, his body temperature was down to twenty-eight degrees. He’ll make it though. Did you know he was the father of Linus, the boy who was killed?’

Annika looked up at the police officer, a lump in her throat, and shook her head.

‘And Karina Björnlund?’ she said.

‘She’s having her face patched up, and she’s got frostbite in her feet. So what happened?’

He leaned forward and switched on the tape-recorder.

‘Okay,’ she said, ‘do you want the full story?’

He looked at her thoughtfully for a few moments, then looked away and pulled out her personal details.

‘Witness questioning of Annika Bengtzon,’ he said, ‘of Hantverkargatan thirty-two in Stockholm; location: questioner’s office; conversation begins…’

He looked at his watch.

‘… at twenty-two fifteen. How did you come to be in an abandoned compressor shed near Swedish Steel in Luleå this evening?’

She cleared her throat towards the microphone, which was standing on a memo from the National Police Commissioner.

‘I wanted to interview the Minister of Culture, Karina Björnlund, and happened to catch sight of her at Kallax Airport, and I followed her.’

The inspector looked at her and smiled. ‘Interview her?’ he said. ‘What about?’

She tried to smile back but discovered that she was too exhausted.

‘The imposition of the new library regulations,’ she said.

He sat in silence, pondering her reply for several seconds, then leaned over and switched off the tape-recorder.

‘Better now?’ he said, blinking flirtatiously.

She nodded and reached for the plastic coffee, prepared to give it another chance.

‘What happened?’ he said.

‘Just so we get this straight from the start,’ she said, sipping the drink again and suppressing a grimace, before putting the cup down for good. ‘I’m a journalist. All my sources are protected by law. You represent an official authority and you would be breaking the law if you made any attempt to find out what I know and who I learned it from.’

He stopped smiling. ‘And I have a case to solve. Can you tell me why you came to Luleå in the first place?’

‘I was here on a job,’ she said. ‘I got it into my head to call the Minister of Culture and ask her about her connection to Ragnwald, and I could hear that she was at Kallax Airport, so I drove off to find her.’

‘Why?’

‘She didn’t want to discuss anything over the phone, if I can put it like that.’

He nodded and jotted something down.

‘And the Minister of Culture went for a walk in the woods next to the railway and you followed her?’

Annika nodded.

‘I drove to Lövskatan, my hire-car is still there.’

Forsberg reached for a sheet of paper and read it with a frown.

‘I’ve got a report here,’ he said, ‘which says that a person with your name called Central Command at fifteen twelve and said that someone we’ve been looking for was in a brick building, location unknown, near a viaduct. Does that ring any bells?’

‘The guy on the phone wasn’t exactly Einstein,’ Annika said, realizing that her whole body was still cold in spite of the checks and efforts of the hospital staff. ‘I tried to explain to him as best I could, but he wasn’t grasping it.’

The Inspector studied the report.

‘The caller, in other words you, is described as incoherent and hysterical.’

Annika looked down at her hands, dry, chapped and red, and didn’t respond.

‘How were you able to identify Göran Nilsson?’

She shrugged slightly without looking up. ‘Karina called him Göran, and I knew they were together once upon a time.’

‘And the revolver you handed to us, he gave that to you of his own free will?’

‘I took it out of his pocket when he collapsed on the floor…’

All of a sudden she had had enough. She stood up and walked nervously round the room.

‘I’ve been digging into this story for a couple of weeks now, everything just fell into place. Have you found Hans Blomberg?’

She stopped in front of Forsberg with her hands on her hips. The police officer paused for a moment before turning away.

‘No,’ he said.

‘It was Blomberg who locked us in.’

‘So I heard,’ Forsberg said. ‘As well as the story about the Beasts, and the plane getting blown up at F21.’

‘Can I go now? I’m shattered.’

‘We’ll have to talk to you in more detail, about what was said and exactly what happened in that shed.’

She looked at the police officer from the end of a long tunnel.

‘I don’t remember anything else,’ she said.

‘Rubbish,’ he said. ‘You’re going to tell me what you know before you leave.’

‘Am I being arrested?’ Annika asked. ‘Suspected of some crime?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Right, then,’ Annika said. ‘I’m leaving.’

‘I’m ordering you to stay.’

‘So lock me up,’ Annika said, and walked out.

She took a taxi out to Lövskatan to pick up her car, and paid with the paper’s credit card, one of the few perks she had been able to keep since she voluntarily stopped being an editor. As the taxi rolled away she was left standing there, infinite space above her, listening to the rumble of the steelworks.

She had hardly thought about Thomas all day. One of the nurses had called to tell him that she had been taken in for observation in Luleå Hospital, which wasn’t quite true, she had just been examined and released, but she wasn’t complaining. It wouldn’t do him any harm to think she was ill.

She took a deep breath, the air crackling like sandpaper in her throat.

The light around her changed. She lifted her face to the sky and saw a veil drift across the moon, and the next moment a firework display went off above her head, like something she’d never seen before.

From horizon to horizon, an arc of pale-blue light stretched across the sky, moving in sweeping ripples, splitting into cascades of luminous colours over the whole sky. She stood there gawping at it. Pink, white, swirling and twisting, colours and lights and stars tumbling over one another, getting brighter and then dissolving.

The northern lights, she thought, and a second later the sky began to crackle.

She gasped and took several steps back, surrounded by sparkling space.

A streak of purple merged with a semicircle of green, the two playing around each other, cracking and sparking and vibrant.

It’s a strange world up here, she thought. When the earth is frozen solid the sky starts singing and dancing.

She laughed quietly, a soft and unfamiliar sound. It had been a very peculiar day. She clicked open the lock, climbed in and put the key in the ignition. The engine protested but decided to cooperate, and she found an ice-scraper in the glove compartment, got out and cleared the ice and frost from all the windows. Got in again, turned the headlights on full.

There was a glow at the top of the hill where Karina Björnlund had disappeared earlier. On the horizon she saw a ribbon of pink light flicker and die, and suddenly remembered the transformer box and the duffel bag.

Less than a kilometre away, she thought.

She put the car in first gear and drove slowly up the road, as the ball-bearings in the wheels protested. She went past the no vehicles sign, under the power lines, past the Skanska building and the empty car park. The track got narrower and narrower; she crept along as the headlights played over scrub and craggy snowdrifts.

She put the car in neutral and pulled on the handbrake shortly after the viaduct, climbed out and walked towards the box. There was a handle, and a sliding bolt. Hesitant, she took hold of the frozen metal, twisted and pulled. The door opened and the duffel bag fell out at her feet. It was heavy, but not as unwieldy as it had looked when Göran Nilsson was dragging it behind him.

Annika looked round, feeling like a thief in the night. Nothing but the stars and northern lights. Her breath hung white around her, making it hard to see when she crouched down. Whatever this might be, it was Ragnwald’s bequest to his children. He had gathered them together to read them his will. She held her breath and untied the large knot holding the bag closed, then stood up, holding the bag upright.

She peered into it, heart pounding, saw nothing, reached in her hand and found a box of Spanish medicine. She put it carefully on the ground, reached in for the next.

A bottle of large yellow pills.

Göran Nilsson had been heavily medicated towards the end.

A packet of suppositories.

A box of red and white capsules.

She sighed and reached in one last time.

A five-centimetre-thick bundle of notes.

She stopped and stared at the money, as a light wind blew eerily through the trees.

Euros. Hundred-euro notes.

She looked around her. The sky was flaming, blast-furnace number two over at the ironworks was roaring.

How much?

She pulled off her gloves and ran a finger over the notes, new notes, entirely unused, at least a hundred of them.

One hundred hundred-euro notes.

Ten thousand euros, almost one hundred thousand kronor.

She pulled on her gloves again, leaned over and pulled out two more bundles.

She folded down the sides of the bag and looked openmouthed at its contents. Nothing but bundles of euros, dozens of them. She pressed the bag, trying to work out how many layers there were inside. A lot. An absurd number.

Then she felt sick.

The executioner’s death-tainted bequest to his children.

Without reflecting any more about it she picked up the bag and threw the money into the boot of the car.

49

The glass internal doors of the City Hotel slid open with a swishing sound. Annika walked into the chandelier-lit space, blinking against the light.

‘I think she’s just walked in,’ the receptionist said into a telephone behind the counter. ‘Annika Bengtzon?’

Annika looked at the young woman.

‘It is you, isn’t it? From the Evening Post? We spoke when you were here two weeks ago. I’ve got your boss on the phone.’

‘Which one?’

The woman listened.

‘Anders Schyman,’ she called across the lobby.

Annika hoisted her bag onto her shoulder and walked over to the desk.

‘Tell him I’ll call him in five minutes, I just need to check in.’

Ten seconds of silence.

‘He says he wants to talk to you now.’

Annika reached for the receiver.

‘What do you want?’

The editor-in-chief sounded muted and clenched when he spoke.

‘The newspaper’s telegram agency has just sent out a newsflash that the police in Luleå have cracked a thirty-year-old terrorist cell. That the attack on a Draken plane at F21 has been cleared up, that an international hitman has been found dead, and that a suspected terrorist is still at large.’

Annika glanced at the receptionist’s inquisitive ears, turned round and stretched the lead as far as she could.

‘Goodness,’ she said.

‘It says you were there when the hitman died. That you were locked up with some of the terrorists. That Minister of Culture Karina Björnlund was one of the members. That you alerted the police so that they could be arrested.’

Annika shifted her weight from one foot to the other.

‘Oops,’ she said

‘What are you planning for tomorrow?’

She glanced at the receptionist over her shoulder, who was trying hard to look as though she wasn’t listening.

‘Nothing, of course,’ she said. ‘I’m not allowed to write about terrorism, that was a direct order. I obey my orders.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Schyman said. ‘But what are you writing? We’ve torn up everything we’ve got, all the way to the centrefold.’

She clenched her jaw.

‘Not one single line. Not in the Evening Post. I’ve got a hell of a lot of material, but because you’ve forbidden me to gather it then of course I won’t be using it.’

There was a short, astonished silence.

‘Now you’re being silly,’ he eventually said. ‘That would be a very bad miscalculation on your part.’

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘but who’s responsible for the miscalculations on this story?’

Silence echoed along the line. She knew the editor-in-chief was fighting against a justifiable instinct to tell her to go to hell and slam the phone down, but with an entirely empty news section he couldn’t afford to.

‘I’m on my way to bed,’ she said. ‘Was there anything else you wanted?’

Anders Schyman started to say something, but changed his mind. She could hear him breathing down the line.

‘I’ve had some good news today,’ he said, trying to sound conciliatory.

She swallowed her derision. ‘Oh?’

‘I’m going to be the new chair of the Newspaper Publishers’ Association.’

‘Congratulations.’

‘I knew you’d be pleased,’ he said. ‘Why aren’t you answering your mobile, by the way?’

‘There’s no coverage up here. Goodnight.’

She handed the phone back to the receptionist.

‘Can I check in now, please?’

The door of the lift was heavy and Annika had to strain to push it open. She stumbled out onto the fourth floor, the thick carpet swallowing her steps.

Home, she thought, home at last.

Her business-class room was off to the left. The hotel corridor was tilting slightly from side to side, and she had to put her hand out to steady herself against the wall twice.

She found her room, pushed the card in, waited for the little bleep and the green light.

She was greeted by a gentle hum, and narrow slivers of light creeping round the closed curtains, her safe haven on earth. She shut the door behind her; it closed with a well-oiled click. She let her bag slide to the floor and switched on the main lamp.

Hans Blomberg was sitting on her bed.

50

She froze to ice, her body utterly rigid. She couldn’t breathe.

‘Good evening, young lady,’ the archivist said, pointing a pistol at her.

She stared at the man, his grey cardigan and friendly face, trying to get her brain to work.

‘What a long time you’ve been. I’ve been waiting for several hours.’

Annika roused her legs and took a step back, fumbling behind her for the door handle.

Hans Blomberg stood up.

‘Don’t even think about it, my dear,’ he said. ‘My trigger finger is terribly itchy tonight.’

Annika stopped and let her arm drop.

‘I can believe that,’ she said, her voice high and very thin. ‘You haven’t hesitated so far.’

He chuckled. ‘How true,’ he said. ‘Where’s the money?’

She leaned against the wall for support.

‘What?’

‘The money? The Dragon’s bequest?’

Her brain rattled into action, her thoughts rushing in a torrent, the day ran past in images and emotions and conclusions.

‘Why do you think there’s money, and why would I know where it is?’

‘Little Annika the Amateur Detective who creeps around the bushes. If anyone knows, it’s you.’

The man approached her with an ingratiating smile. She stared up at his face.

‘Why?’ she said. ‘Why did you kill those people?’

He paused, and leaned his head to one side.

‘But this is war,’ he said. ‘You’re a journalist, haven’t you noticed? The war on terror? That must mean armed struggle on both sides, don’t you think?’ He chuckled contentedly.

‘It wasn’t my idea,’ he went on, ‘but suddenly it was legitimate to eliminate dictators and false authorities, and there are lots of those around the world, they’re everywhere.’

He looked at her and smiled.

‘As a journalist, Annika,’ he said, ‘you’ll be familiar with the old adage, “dig where you stand”. There are stories everywhere, why cross the river to fetch water? The same thing applies to false authorities, why look further than you have to?’

‘And Benny Ekland was one of them?’

Hans Blomberg took a few steps back and sat down on the bed again, waving with the pistol to indicate that she should sit at the desk. She obeyed, moving through air as thick as cement, and dropped her polar jacket beside the chair.

‘You haven’t quite understood,’ the archivist said. ‘Hans Blomberg is just my alias. I’m really the Black Panther; I’ve never been anything else.’

He nodded to emphasize his words, as Annika searched feverishly for a loose thread, something that could make him unravel.

‘That isn’t strictly true,’ she said. ‘You’ve tried to fit in as Hans Blomberg as well, haven’t you? All those articles about the county council that were always published at the bottom of page twenty-two, was that it?’

A flash of anger crossed his face.

‘A way of maintaining my façade until the Dragon came back. He promised, and his return was the signal.’

Then he smiled again.

‘Benny made sure I ended up in the archive. Not that I’m bitter, because of course I won in the end.’

Annika forced back a feeling of nausea.

‘But why the boy?’

Hans Blomberg shook his head sorrowfully. ‘It was a shame that he had to go, but war claims many civilian casualties.’

‘Because he recognized you? You used to see the family socially, didn’t you?’

Hans Blomberg didn’t reply, merely smiled gently.

‘Kurt Sandström?’ Annika said, fear pounding in her stomach, putting pressure on her bladder.

‘False authority,’ he said. ‘A traitor.’

‘How did you know him?’

‘From Nyland,’ Hans Blomberg said. ‘The big lad on the next farm, he was one year older than me. We were at Uppsala together, and joined the movement at the same time. But Kurt’s faith was weak, and he drifted over to the side of capitalism and exploitation, to the farmers’ movement. I gave him a chance to change his mind, but he chose his own fate.’

She was holding on to the desk.

‘And Margit Axelsson?’

Hans Blomberg sighed, adjusting the hair across his scalp.

‘Little Margit,’ he said. ‘Ever-lovely, trying to make the world a better place. She always meant well. A shame she was so loud and obstinate.’

‘And that’s why you strangled her?’

‘She betrayed us.’

Annika shifted on the chair and felt that she would have to pee soon.

‘So tell me,’ she said, ‘why did you blow up the plane?’

The man gave a small shrug.

‘It was really just a test,’ he said. ‘Of the Dog’s loyalty.’

‘And she did as she was told?’

He chuckled at the memory.

‘She was so angry about the Wolf leaving that she would have done anything. The Dog was so disappointed, but you know what girls are like. Popular little Karina was only interested in fucking whoever all the others wanted.’

‘But,’ Annika said, ‘why were they getting married, if that was the case?’

The archivist laughed out loud. ‘You really fell for that,’ he said. ‘The marriage announcement. I made it up there and then, wanted to give you something to chew on. And, my word, you did chew, didn’t you?’

He calmed down and nodded thoughtfully, and Annika stood up.

‘I have to go to the toilet,’ she said.

Blomberg was on his feet with the same speed she had seen when he attacked the Minister of Culture in the compressor shed.

‘Not a chance.’

‘Then I’ll wet myself.’

The man stepped back, but hit the bed.

‘Go on, then, but no tricks. Leave the door open.’

She did as he said, went into the bathroom, pulled down her trousers and underwear, and relieved herself.

She looked at herself in the mirror, and in her eyes she could see what she had to do.

If she stayed in the room she would die. She had to get out, even if that meant taking Hans Blomberg with her.

‘Who’s the Tiger?’ she asked as she walked back into the room, concealing her intentions behind dull eyes.

Something needy and lustful had lit up in the archivist’s eyes. He was staring at her crotch.

‘Kenneth Uusitalo,’ he said. ‘Departmental manager at Swedish Steel. A really great guy, active in the Manufacturers’ Association, negotiates slave-contracts with the Third World. Unfortunately he’s been away for a while.’

He licked his lips.

Annika went over to the desk again, and leaned over it.

‘But really,’ she said, ‘you’re not much better yourself. You’re only after Göran’s money.’

He flew up like a shot, raced across the room and pressed the pistol to her forehead.

‘For being sarcastic,’ he said, taking the safety catch off, and she felt fear loosen her bladder and let out the few drops that were in there.

‘Good luck with the treasure hunt,’ she croaked, her mouth completely dry.

He stared at her for a few seconds, then pulled the gun away from her head, pointing it at the ceiling.

‘What do you know?’

‘I’m not sure,’ she said, ‘but I saw Göran Nilsson put a duffel bag in a transformer box next to the railway. Could that be it?’

She gulped audibly, the man raised his eyebrows.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘so it’s suddenly time to tell the truth, is it?’

‘Can I sit down?’

He moved so that he had her in his line of fire as her knees gratefully lowered her onto the chair.

‘Where exactly is this box?’

She struggled for air for several seconds.

‘Not far from the viaduct,’ she said. ‘There’s a little clump of pine trees right next to it.’

‘How come you saw that?’

‘I was hiding, watching Karina, and I saw Göran put the bag in there.’

The archivist went up to her, put his hand round her neck, breathing right in her face and staring into her eyes.

‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘I do believe you’re telling the truth. Put your coat on.’

Hans Blomberg backed towards the door.

‘I’ll have the pistol in my pocket the whole time. If you try anything you won’t be the only one. You’ll be taking the girl in reception with you to hell. Understood?’

Annika nodded, pulling on her jacket. They stepped out of the room; the corridor was tilting and swaying. In the lift the archivist stood so close to her she could feel his chest against her breasts.

‘How did you know where I’d be staying?’ she asked, looking up at his face.

‘Your charming boss told me. I think his name was Jansson?’

The lift stopped with a jerk.

‘I shall be walking right behind you,’ the archivist said. ‘If you’re a good girl then the little lady in reception will get a chance to grow up.’

He moved even closer to her, his hands sliding into her coat pockets and down towards her crotch.

She kicked the door to open it.

He quickly withdrew his hands from her pockets, and in one hand he was holding her mobile phone.

‘Nice and quiet, now,’ he whispered.

They stepped into the lobby. Linda the receptionist came out from the kitchen, talking on the phone, and smiled warmly at them.

Ring the police, Annika tried to tell her telepathically, staring at her with fire in her eyes. Ring the police! Ring the police!

But the young woman waved to them and went back into the room behind reception with her phone.

‘And out we go,’ Hans Blomberg whispered.

The cold tore at her skin, and she felt the pistol at her back again.

‘To the right,’ the archivist said. She turned and walked unsteadily along the pavement, they passed her hire-car with Ragnwald’s millions in the boot. Hans Blomberg pulled her by the arm and steered her towards an old Passat that was parked outside a bookshop.

‘It isn’t locked,’ he said. ‘Jump in.’

Annika did as he said. The car-seat was ice-cold, the man walked round the car and got in the driver’s seat.

‘Where did you steal this one?’ Annika asked.

‘Porsön,’ Hans Blomberg said, hot-wiring the ignition.

They rolled off towards the water and turned off to follow the railway track. For the third time that day Annika drove through the industrial estate on Lövskatan.

‘How did you get into my room?’ she asked, staring into the rear-view mirror. Behind them, a long way back, she caught sight of a distant but growing point of light.

The archivist laughed slightly. ‘A little hobby of mine,’ he said. ‘I can break into anything. Anything else you’d like to know?’

She thought, shut her eyes and swallowed. ‘Why did you change the way you killed them each time?’

He shrugged, braked at the opening of the narrow track with the no vehicles sign, craned his neck and peered through the windscreen.

‘I wanted to try things out,’ he said. ‘At our training camp in Melderstein in the summer of sixty-nine the Dragon appointed me his supreme commander. I was the one who would lead the armed struggle. All summer we practised different forms of attack, different ways to take a life. Over the years I kept up my interest and my education. How far do we drive?’

‘To the viaduct,’ Annika said, glancing in the mirror again, the light was closer now. ‘Margit Axelsson received a warning after the Dragon disappeared. Did you get one as well?’

The archivist laughed again, louder this time.

‘But dear girl,’ he said, ‘I was the one who sent them. They all got one.’

‘Whose fingers were they?’

‘A little boy who had been killed in a car accident,’ Hans Blomberg said. ‘I broke into the mortuary and cut them off. There’s no need to worry, he didn’t miss them.’

She looked out of the window until she could talk again.

‘But why start killing them now?’ she said, looking at him. ‘Why did you wait so long?’

He glanced back at her and smiled.

‘You’re not listening,’ he said. ‘The revolution is here. It was going to start when the Dragon returned. He promised that before he left, and now he’s back.’

‘Göran Nilsson is dead.’

Hans Blomberg shrugged. ‘Ah well,’ he said with a sigh. ‘All false authorities die sooner or later.’

He pulled up, put the car in neutral and put on the handbrake, leaving the stolen car running. He turned to look at Annika, suddenly serious and thoughtful.

‘The Dragon promised that he would come back, and I knew it was true. I waited all those years. Of course I’ve had moments of doubt, but I’m the winner in the end.’

‘Do you really believe that?’ Annika said.

He slapped her across the face with the flat of his hand.

‘So now we go out and find the box,’ he said, reaching over her to open the passenger door, his hand pausing on her stomach.

She heaved herself out, taking a quick glance backward.

Not yet time.

She turned towards the box and pointed. ‘There.’

‘Open it.’

She walked slowly forward, lead weights round her feet.

It won’t work, she thought. I can’t do it.

She listened behind her, thought she could hear the dull rumble. Not yet, but soon. She took hold of the handle, tried to twist, pulled, used both hands, pulled even harder, braced her feet on the ground, and groaned loudly.

‘I can’t get it open,’ she said, letting go.

The light was close now, the whistling sound was very clear, merging with the distant rumble of the steelworks. Soon, soon, soon.

Hans Blomberg walked over, annoyed. ‘Get out of the way.’

Holding the pistol in his right hand, he grabbed the handle with his left, gathered his strength, then pulled. The door flew open, the man’s eyes opening wide as he leaned over and stared into the darkness, and Annika shrugged off her heavy jacket and ran.

She threw herself down onto the track, slipping on the sleepers, running though her legs felt like lead, unable to hear amidst the panic.

A bullet flew past her left ear, then another, and then she was bathed in the full glare of the diesel locomotive’s headlight. The driver pulled the whistle but it was too late, she was already across. She collapsed on the other side and the train thundered past her with its endless cargo of ore-truck after ore-truck after ore-truck, forming a wall of iron one kilometre long between her and Hans Blomberg.

And she got to her feet and ran and ran and ran towards the noise, towards the glowing red eyes at the top of blast-furnace number two. She scrambled up a steep slope and over a mountain of coal, knives tearing at her lungs; in the distance the sign, West Checkpoint.