Red Wolf

32

The front door clicked shut with a bang and silence spread through the apartment. Annika was alone again. She lay in bed with her head burrowed into the pillow and her knees drawn up to her chin, the duvet cover damp with anxiety. The angels were humming in the background, monotonous and powerless.

She had to get up today, at least to pick up the children. She wasn’t ill often; Thomas wasn’t used to being responsible for them, both dropping them off and picking them up as well as preparing food and reading to them and putting them to bed. It made him grouchy and irritable and made her feel guilty.

She snuggled deeper under the covers.

Things could be worse, she thought.

If the children got sick. If Thomas left her. If the paper was shut down. If war broke out in Iraq, all of that would be worse. This is nothing.

But it was something. It was like a big hole where the foundation of her professional confidence had been.

She had trusted Schyman. Trusted his judgement.

Something had happened, either to him or to her. Maybe to both of them. Maybe it was because of the story; maybe it was too big for them.

Or maybe she really had gone mad in that tunnel. She knew that this was a real possibility.

Had she lost the ability to judge relevance and probability? Was she on the verge of losing her grip on reality?

She pulled the covers over her head and let the thought creep up on her. It stopped beside her, settling down on her pillow. She looked at it and realized that it really wasn’t dangerous.

The story was what it was, and she was right. There was something there. Schyman may have been right before, but not this time.

She threw off the duvet and gasped for air. She hurried naked into the bathroom and brushed her teeth and showered, in rapid succession.

The apartment echoed desolately without Thomas and the children. She stopped in the doorway to the kitchen and looked at the mess they had left behind them from breakfast, without really acknowledging it. Instead she listened to the sound of silence, sounds she never appreciated when they were all home and she had another function apart from just being an individual. When she became part of something bigger than herself, the little, insignificant things didn’t get through to her. In her role as Responsible Adult, only the most persistent cries reached her, like ‘Food!’ and ‘Sticky Tape!’ and ‘Where’s Tiger?’

Now she was just her own self, off sick, holed below the waterline, a used-up reporter who had passed her sell-by date, and the nuances submerged her, making her listen in mute astonishment.

The fridge was rumbling, deep and steady, a half-tone lower than the ventilation unit on the roof of the next building. The smell of frying was creeping in from somewhere, a restaurant in the block heating up pans and griddles and preparing lunch of the day. The buses at the stop down on Hantverkargatan sighed and groaned, sirens from the fire engines stationed by Kronoberg Park rose and fell.

Suddenly the panic struck.

I can’t bear it.

All the muscles in her body strained, sound and breathing vanished.

There’s nothing wrong, she thought. It just feels like it. I’m not suffocating, but the opposite. I’m hyperventilating, it’ll pass, just wait, calm down.

And the floor came closer and pressed against her thighs and elbows until she ended up staring under the dishwasher.

He completely invalidated me as a person, she thought, a moment of clarity that brought back sound and colour. Schyman wasn’t just seeing me as a reporter; he took away my honour and value as a person. He’s never done that before. He must be under serious pressure from an unlikely desire to be accepted. I’m not accepted. He can’t go into battle on my side right now, because it would cost too much.

She got up, noticing that she had banged her knee. Her arms and feet ached, a sign that she had absorbed too much oxygen. Her panic attacks had disappeared for several years. She hadn’t had any since the children were born, until the Bomber got her. Now they came at irregular intervals, with the same violence and terror as they had before.

I wonder if I need happy pills, she thought.

She knew that Anne Snapphane had a large bottle hidden in her bathroom cabinet.

But it’s all my imagination, she thought. I’m scared of my own fear. It’s all in my head. Drag these thoughts into the light and they’ll vanish, let them out and look at them and they’ll just disappear.

And she stood there with her hands on the dishwasher, feeling her body stabilize.

She knew she was right. There was a link between Ragnwald, the Minister of Culture, the attack on F21 and the deaths of the boy, the journalist and the councillor.

She had also clearly understood that she was not allowed to look into the story any more, under any circumstances.

I don’t want to hear another word about this.

At work, no, she thought. But if I make a few calls when I’m off sick at home, then it doesn’t count.

So she went into the bedroom and got dressed, then went back into the kitchen and made coffee, without clearing the mess left by Thomas and the children, just pushed all the dirty crockery into a corner of the table and sat down with her mug of coffee, her pad of paper and a ballpoint pen from the Association of Local Authorities.

She needed to know more about both the terrorist and the minister in order to see the bigger picture. She had the internet at home, but only via an old modem. Thomas had wanted to get broadband but she had refused, because he spent too much time on the computer already.

Check the church records, she wrote; backgrounds and parents.

Ask for the minister’s public records, start with the post, then journeys, representations, declarations, property register, company register, and so on.

Read more about ETA and Læstadianism.

She looked at the short list.

That would be enough for today.

She picked up the phone and asked directory inquiries to put her through to the parish office in Sattajärv – and discovered that there wasn’t one. She asked for the numbers of all parish offices covered by the local code for Pajala, and, apart from Pajala itself, was given numbers for Junesuando and Tärendö.

Sattajärvi was covered by Pajala.

Göran Nilsson was born 2 October 1948, the only son of Toivo and Elina Nilsson. His mother’s birthplace was given as Kexholm. The couple married 17 May 1946. Father died 1977, mother 1989.

She wrote all of this down and thanked them.

Kexholm?

She would have to go online after all.

Käkisalmi, also known as Kexholm, turned out to be at the mouth of the River Vuoksen, where it flowed into Lake Ladoga on the Karelian Isthmus, not far from the old Swedish city of Viborg.

In other words, now in Russia.

She found a site through the county council in Luleå, with a lot of information about the history of the area.

In the autumn of 1944 Karelia was invaded by the Soviet Union and the whole district was emptied of its original inhabitants. 400,000 people fled deeper into Finland, and some of them carried on to Sweden.

She stared at the screen.

Ethnic cleansing, she thought. An old concept, only the terminology is new.

Did that mean anything? Was it important that the terrorist’s mother had been driven from her home by Russian soldiers?

Not sure. Maybe.

She logged out and called the parish office in Lower Luleå. It was always easier to do this sort of research over the phone, when no one could see her being so nosy.

Karina Björnlund was born 9 September 1951, second child of three to Hilma and Helge Björnlund. The couple divorced in 1968, the mother remarried and now lives on Storgatan in Luleå. Father dead. Brothers: Per and Alf.

So what did that tell her?

Nothing.

She thanked the parish secretary and got up, restless, and walked around the flat before picking up the phone again and calling the Norrland News.

‘Hans Blomberg is off today,’ the sour receptionist said.

‘Put me through to the archive anyway,’ Annika said quickly before she got another rant about the EU.

A young woman answered.

‘I know the powers that be have decided that we should cooperate with the Evening Post, but no one ever asks us if we have enough time to do it,’ the woman said, sounding stressed. ‘You can have the password, then you can log in direct and check the archive online.’

She needs to calm down before she ends up like Hans, Annika thought.

‘What I’m looking for probably isn’t on the net,’ she said. ‘I’m after the earliest cuttings you have for Karina Björnlund.’

‘Who? The Minister of Culture? We’ve got kilometres’ worth of columns about her.’

‘The very earliest ones. Can you fax them to me?’

She gave her home number, making a mental note to turn the fax machine on.

‘How many? The first hundred?’

Annika thought for a moment. ‘The first five will do.’

The sound of air being exhaled, a long sigh.

‘Okay, but not before lunch.’

They hung up and Annika went out into the kitchen and cleared the breakfast things, checked what was in the freezer and worked out that she could do chicken fillets in coconut milk for dinner.

Then she tied on her shoes and pulled on her jacket.

Have to get out, have to breathe.

She picked up a microwaved pasta dish with mushrooms and bacon from the 7-Eleven on Fleminggatan, and ate it slowly with a plastic spoon as she crossed Kungsbron in to the city centre.

She threw the paper tray in a bin by the junction of Vasagatan and Kungsgatan, then walked quickly towards Hötorget. She only slowed down once she reached Drottninggatan, Stockholm’s only truly continental pedestrian street, with its mix of heaven and hell, street-sellers, performers, whores and the frozen tramps who filled the gaps between the retail palaces. She was pushed forward in the crush, strangely full of tenderness, she was jostled along by people, and felt something oddly melancholic as she took them in: the mothers with clenched teeth and squeaking, swaying buggies; groups of beautiful young women from immigrant suburbs with their high heels and clear voices, finally out of sight of home, their hair dancing above unbuttoned jackets and tight tops; important men with their universal uniforms of briefcases and stress; slick Östermalm kids with Canada Goose jackets and posh nasal ‘i’ sounds; tourists; hotdog sellers; couriers; idiots and drug-dealers. She let herself be swept along with them, drawn in among them, could maybe even find a home at the bottom of their big, forgiving, common well.

‘Isn’t that the Blaster? That’s her, isn’t it? Look! In the tunnel, she was on telly…’

She didn’t turn round, knew that the whispering would pass; if you sit by the river long enough, you will see the bodies of your enemies float by. Soon no one would remember the Bomber in the tunnel and she would be just one among all the others in the well, a grey-black flake slowly drifting down towards the sludge at the bottom, ignored by everyone.

She stopped before the glass door to number 16, one of the government’s discreet departmental entrances. The window-frames were all polished copper, and behind large empty glass windows and well-tended potted palms was a reception desk with bullet-proof glass and a uniformed guard.

Annika pushed open the two doors, the grit on the soles of her shoes scraping against the marble floor, and went up to the guard, her skin creeping with the feeling that she was a shameless infiltrator. She tapped on the microphone in front of the closed screen.

‘It works,’ the elderly man behind the glass said; she saw his lips move and heard the words to her left, through a hidden speaker.

‘Oh, good,’ Annika said, trying to smile and leaning towards the microphone. ‘I’d like to check Karina Björnlund’s post.’

It was done, the spy is here, about to go through the bins and the post-box.

The man picked up a phone and pressed some buttons.

‘Take a seat and I’ll call the registrar.’

She went over to the waiting area, three curved brick-red sofas, one EU flag and one Swedish flag, a designer rack holding a mass of magazines, a metal statue possibly supposed to be a small child. Maybe a girl.

She looked at the statue; was it bronze?

She took a step closer. Who was the girl? How many inquisitive spies had she watched come and go?

‘Hello? Did you want to look through the minister’s register?’

She glanced up and found herself looking at a middle-aged man with a ponytail and sideburns.

‘Yes,’ Annika said. ‘That’s me.’

She held out her hand, not mentioning her name. According to the freedom of information laws, you could check public documents without having to prove your identity, a law she was happy to safeguard as often as she had the chance. At least it saved her from having to feel the slightest shame, because they didn’t know who she was.

‘This way.’

They passed two locked doors and a passageway painted in diagonal stripes, and took the lift up to the sixth floor.

‘To your right,’ the man said.

The marble floor was replaced by linoleum.

‘Down the steps.’

Worn oak tiles.

‘This is my room. So, what did you want to see?’

‘Everything,’ Annika said, taking off her jacket and deciding to get as much spying done as possible. She put her coat and bag on a chair in the corner.

‘Okay,’ the man said, starting up a program on the computer. ‘Karina has had six hundred and sixty-eight official items since she started as a minister almost ten years ago. I’ve got the whole list on here.’

‘Can I have a printout?’

‘This year?’

‘Everything.’

The registrar’s expression didn’t change, he just started his printer.

She glanced down the first page of the printout: registration date, item number, in date, documentation date. Then the name of the person who had been in charge of the item, the person who had sent it, name and address, a description of the item in question, and finally what it led to.

Decision, she read, ad acta.

‘What does “ad acta” mean?’ she asked.

‘No reply,’ the man with the ponytail said, turning to face her. ‘Archived without action. Could have been an encouraging note, or a rambling letter from one of our more regular correspondents.’

She went through the descriptions of the items: an invitation to the Cannes Film Festival, a request for a signed photograph, a plea to save a publishing company from closure, five questions from class 8B in Sigtuna, an invitation to the Nobel dinner in Stockholm City Hall on 10 December.

‘Where are all these letters and emails physically stored?’

‘The items you’re reading through now are still current, so they’re with secretaries.’

She took the second page and her eye was caught by the first item.

Statement from the Newspaper Publishers’ Association regarding changes to broadcast rights for digital television.

Anne Snapphane’s channel, she thought.

‘Could I look at this one?’

The registrar stretched his back, looked at the printout she was holding out, and adjusted his glasses.

‘You’ll have to contact the person dealing with that,’ he said and pointed at the name below the document date.

She moved on, there were periods of heavy correspondence regarding proposed legislation.

She reached a printout of items received very recently.

Registration date: 18 November.

Sender: Herman Wennergren.

Regarding: Request for meeting to discuss a matter of urgency.

‘What’s this?’ Annika asked, handing the man the sheet.

He read silently for a moment.

‘An email,’ he said. ‘Received Tuesday evening, registered yesterday.’

‘I want to know what was in that email,’ she said.

He shrugged. ‘I can’t help with that; it’s with the person who’s dealing with it. Anything else?’

She turned away, continued to look through the list, oddly agitated.

Why would the Evening Post’s chairman suddenly decide that he had to meet the Minister of Culture on Tuesday afternoon?

She forced her worries to one side.

Sender: Anonymous.

Regarding: Drawing of yellow dragon.

Decision: Ad acta.

She read the entry again.

‘What’s this?’ she said, leaning forward and pointing, waiting for the man to put on his glasses and look.

‘An anonymous letter,’ he said. ‘We get quite a few of those. Mostly newspaper cuttings or slightly muddled opinions.’

‘Many yellow dragons?’

He laughed. ‘Not too many.’

‘Where are the anonymous letters?’

‘I collect those here, they have their own box.’

The registrar took off his glasses and reached for a brown file labelled Government Offices: Anonymous Post. He opened it and took out the letter at the top.

‘We keep them in boxes arranged by year, five years up here and then they go into the central archive. Every envelope is stamped on the back.’

He held out the little envelope, letting her read it. It was stamped 31 October that year.

‘What’s in it?’

‘I think this one’s the dragon.’

He pulled out a sheet of A4 paper folded in four, smoothed it out and handed it to Annika.

‘I don’t know why they sent it here,’ he said, ‘but maybe it counts as culture.’

It really was a little dragon in the middle of the sheet of white paper, drawn with a rather shaky hand and coloured with yellow ink. Something clicked inside Annika’s head. She felt it physically. She had seen a dragon almost exactly the same as this recently, but where?

‘Can I have a copy of this?’ she asked.

While the man went out into the corridor to get a photocopy, Annika picked up the envelope the dragon had arrived inside. It was addressed to Minister of Culture Karina Björnlund, Stockholm, La Suède.

She looked closer at the stamp. Postmarked in Paris, le 28 Octobre.

Ragnwald had probably lived in the French part of the Pyrenees for the past thirty years. There could be a connection, but where had she seen the drawing before? She closed her eyes tight and searched her memory, catching a glimpse of something.

She opened her eyes wide, listening out for the registrar. She could hear him talking to someone down the corridor. She looked round the room and discovered a little Post-it note stuck to the bottom of his computer screen. She crept over to the computer and leaned over to read the note.

Karina direct, then a number through the departmental exchange, then the word mobile followed by a GSM number.

She stared at the number, 666 66 60. Twice the number of the beast, and then a zero. Was that just coincidence, or did it say something about Karina Björnlund?

‘Anything else I can help you with?’

Annika jumped and straightened up, turned round and smiled disarmingly.

‘Maybe another time,’ Annika said, picking up the sheaf of printouts, ten years of incoming post to the Minister of Culture.

She headed for the lifts with relief.

33

Mehmet filled Anne Snapphane’s office doorway, anger radiating from his head. Anne’s reflex reaction at the sight of him was pure, uncomplicated joy, a blinding white jubilation that shot up from her stomach all the way to her scalp.

‘We’ve got to sort this out,’ he said. ‘Now, before it gets so infected that we can never get to grips with it.’

Her happiness didn’t want to go; it clung on as a fading hymn of praise: He came! He came here to me! I’m important to him.

And Anne saw him lean against the doorframe with all the elegant nonchalance that she loved so much, her handsome man, the man she longed for so much at night that it woke her. She pushed her swivel chair back from the desk and slowly stood up.

‘I want that too,’ she said, holding out her hand to him.

He pretended not to see it, staring down at the floor.

‘Sylvia’s been off sick all week,’ he said, quietly and angrily.

Her jubilation shattered, she could hear the splinters hitting the plastic mat.

‘I haven’t betrayed anyone,’ she said, the sharp edges cutting her voice.

He raised both hands in a calming gesture.

‘We’ve got to get past that bit,’ he said. ‘It’s no one’s fault. It wasn’t working between us; surely we can at least agree on that?’

Defiance was forcing tears into Anne’s eyes. She gasped for breath far too audibly before replying. ‘I thought it was working.’

‘But I didn’t,’ he said. ‘So it couldn’t go on. If two people are going to live their lives together they have to agree about that, don’t they?’

She closed her eyes for a few seconds, then raised her head and tried to smile. ‘Serfdom has been abolished, you mean?’

He took a couple of steps into the room.

‘Anne,’ he said in a pleading tone that made her smile fade, ‘if we can’t sort out normal communication, now, then we’ll be sitting with a payment plan that’ll last for ever. And Miranda will be the one it costs most. We can’t mess up like this.’

She pressed her fingertips against the desk, looking down at her shoes.

A flash of insight worked its way up from her feet, through her gut, rushing up to her head. She suddenly saw the world from his point of view, realized what was important for him: Miranda, his daughter; his new woman and new child. She was no longer in his consciousness in that way, all tenderness was exhausted and gone. Now she was a necessary evil, someone he once shared a child and a bed with, a by-product from a past life that he would always have to deal with.

Self-pity threatened to suffocate her; a feeble embarrassing sound escaped her throat. She took several silent breaths.

‘But I love you,’ she said, without looking at him.

He went over to her and hugged her, she wrapped her arms hard round his waist and leaned her head against his neck and wept.

‘I love you so bloody much,’ she whispered.

He rocked her gently, stroking her hair, and kissed her on the forehead.

‘I know,’ he said softly. ‘I understand that it hurts, and I’m sorry. Forgive me.’

Anne Snapphane opened her eyes to his polo sweater, feeling a tear run down her nose and hang there.

‘There’s no point in clinging on to pride any more,’ he said quietly. ‘Will you be okay?’

She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

‘I don’t know,’ she whispered.

There were five sheets in the fax machine when Annika got home. She dropped her outdoor clothes in a heap on the hall floor; she was going to have to go out to pick up the children later anyway.

She settled onto the wooden chair by the hall table, surrounded by piles of bills, and looked quickly through the documents the woman at the Norrland News archive had faxed through, in the order they had been published in.

The first cutting indicated that Karina Björnlund had been a promising athlete as a teenager. The article was a report from the NC, which Annika presumed meant either Norrland Championship or Norrbotten Championship. The picture was grainy, with too much contrast; Annika had to screw up her eyes to make out the skinny young girl with a ponytail and the number 18 on her chest, waving a bunch of flowers jubilantly towards the photographer. There was something ecstatic about the picture that was still almost tangible, thirty-five years after it had been taken. Karina Björnlund was a success, she won all the sprint distances at the championship and was predicted a glorious future.

For some reason it made the register detailing the minister’s post feel even more shameful.

Annika put the picture of the athlete at the bottom of the pile and went on.

The second cutting was an article about the Working Dogs’ Club in Karlsvik, and showed Bamse the golden retriever and his owner Karina Björnlund, along with five other dogs and owners, getting ready for a display in the sports hall that weekend. The picture was smaller than the last one, and she could only really make out the minister’s white teeth and the dog’s dark tongue.

The third was stamped 6 June 1974, and showed a group of new graduates from the medical secretarial course at Umeå University. Karina Björnlund was third from the left in the top row. Annika glanced across the homogenous group on the picture, no men, no immigrants, most of them with their hair in a page-cut, one side curled to form a wing over one eyebrow.

The fourth cutting was the smallest, a note from 1978 under the heading Names & News, in which the Norrbotten County Council announced that Karina Björnlund had been appointed as secretary to the commissioner of the council.

The fifth was a report of what had evidently been a turbulent public meeting in the county council offices in the autumn of 1980. The picture showed four men discussing the coordination of healthcare in the district, with expansive gestures and presumably raised voices. In the background stood a woman in a flowery skirt, with watchful eyes and folded arms.

Annika looked at the sheet more closely and read the small print of the caption.

Council Commissioner Christer Lundgren defended the position of politicians on the issue of a new central hospital for Norrbotten in discussions with the Medical Council and the pressure group Protect Our Health. His secretary Karina Björnlund listens.

Okay, Annika thought, letting the paper drop. So that’s how she did it. She got a job with Christer Lundgren, who eventually became Trade Minister, clung on to his coat-tails and followed him all the way into government.

She looked at the cutting again, and saw it had been published on page twenty-two, a long way back for a local paper, and read the start of the article, which was about some technicality in the political decision-making process. She skimmed the rest of the piece until her eye caught the picture byline at the bottom right corner.

Hans Blomberg, council reporter.

She blinked, looked again. Yes, it was definitely him, a much younger and thinner version of the archivist at the Norrland News.

She let out a snort, suddenly picturing the archivist’s background as clearly as the messy table in front of her. There were people like him on every paper, conscientious but unimaginative reporters who covered Important Things, political decisions and social developments, the sort of person who wrote dull texts and defended the fact with reference to the seriousness of the subject, looking down derisively on journalists who wrote engaging, committed articles. He had probably been union representative at some point, fighting for all the hopeless cases, but never for people like her, because they could look after themselves.

And now he was sitting in the archive and counting the days until his misery was finally over.

Little Hans, she thought, twisting her arm to check the time.

Time to pick up the rugrats.

Ellen rushed towards her, arms open wide, Tiger dangling from her left hand. The joy that welled up within Annika was so hot that something melted, the sight of tights and pigtails and the red dress with a chequered heart on it made something hard and sharp give way and disappear.

She caught her daughter as she jumped at her, astonished at the child’s utter trust, and stroked her straight little legs and arms, her soft shoulders and stiff back, inhaling the divine softness of her hair.

‘I made a sweet machine,’ Ellen said, struggling to get down. She took Annika by the finger and pulled her over to the craft corner.

‘We’ll show Daddy,’ the child said, about to pick up her cardboard creation, as the top swayed disconcertingly and Annika leaped forward.

‘We can’t really take it with us today,’ she said, taking hold of the cardboard, ‘because we have to go into town and buy new shoes for Kalle. We’d better not take the sweet machine with us in case it gets broken.’

She put the contraption back on the worktop. The girl’s mouth fell open, her eyes welled up with tears, her lip starting to quiver.

‘But,’ she said, ‘that means Daddy won’t get to see it.’

‘Yes he will.’ Annika crouched down beside her. ‘The machine’s safe here, and we can get it tomorrow instead. Maybe you could paint it?’

Ellen looked down at her feet, shaking her head and making her pigtails dance.

‘What lovely pigtails you’ve got,’ Annika said, taking hold of one of them and tickling her daughter’s ear. ‘Who did those for you?’

‘Lennart!’ Ellen said, giggling and shrugging to escape the tickling. ‘He helped me with the sweet machine.’

‘Come on, let’s go and get your brother,’ Annika said, and the battle was over, Ellen put on her overalls, hat and gloves, and even remembered to take Tiger home with her.

Kalle’s school was on Pipersgatan, two blocks away. Annika held Ellen’s warm little hand in hers as they carefully negotiated the puddles, singing nursery rhymes.

Kalle was sitting in the reading corner concentrating on a book about Peter No-Tail. He didn’t look up until Annika crouched down next to him and kissed the top of his head.

‘Mummy,’ he said, ‘where’s Uppsala?’

‘Just north of Stockholm,’ she said. ‘Why?’

‘Can we go and see Peter and the other cats one day?’

‘Definitely,’ Annika said, remembering that there were special cat walks where you could follow in the author Gösta Knutsson’s footsteps around the churches, castle and university.

‘I think she’s prettiest,’ Kalle said, pointing to a white cat and slowly spelling out ‘Ma-ry Cream-nose’.

Annika blinked. ‘Can you read?’ she said, astonished. ‘Who taught you to do that?’

He shrugged. ‘On the computer,’ he said. ‘Otherwise you can’t play.’

He stood up, closed the book and put it back on the shelf. Then looked sternly down at her sitting on the red cushion.

‘Boots,’ he said. ‘You promised. My old ones have got a hole in.’

She smiled, caught hold of one trouser leg and pulled him to her, he laughed and struggled, and she blew on his neck.

‘We’ll get the bus to the shops,’ she said. ‘Go and get your clothes on. Ellen’s waiting for us.’

The number one pulled up just as they reached the bus-stop, and the three of them found seats right at the back.

‘Army green,’ Kalle said. ‘I don’t want blue again, only babies have blue boots.’

‘I’m not a baby,’ Ellen said.

‘Of course you can have green,’ Annika said. ‘As long as they’ve got some.’

They got off at Kungsträdgården and hurried across the street between the showers of slush thrown up by the cars driving past. They tugged off their hats and gloves and scarves when they were inside the shopping centre, stuffing them into Annika’s roomy bag. In a shoe shop on the upper floor they found a pair of army-green, lined rubber boots in the right size, tall enough and with reflective patches. Kalle refused to take them off. Annika paid and they took the old ones home in a bag.

They got out in the nick of time, Ellen had got too hot and was starting to whine, but she fell silent again once they were out in the cold and darkness of Hamngatan, quietly walking along with her hand in Annika’s. Annika took Kalle’s hand as well as they went to cross the road by the department store, concentrating on fending off the cascades of dirty water from the cars, when the silhouette of a person on his way out of the shop across the street caught her eye.

That’s Thomas, she thought without realizing she was thinking it. What’s he doing here?

No, she thought, it isn’t him.

The man took a couple of steps forward, his breath lit up by a streetlamp, yes, it was him!

Her face broke into a broad smile, the warm joy that melted things came back. He was out buying Christmas presents! Already!

She laughed; he was such a Christmas freak. Last year he started buying presents in September – she remembered how angry he got when she found them at the bottom of his wardrobe and had wondered what those parcels were and what they were doing there.

A violent spray of slush hit them and Ellen screamed. Annika pulled the children back from the kerb and yelled angrily at the taxi. When she looked up again Thomas was gone, she searched the crowd for him, and saw him again, he was turning to face someone, a woman with blond hair and a long coat went up to him and he put his arm round her. Thomas pulled the other woman to him and kissed her. There was complete silence and everyone else vanished. Annika was staring down a long tunnel and at the other end her husband was kissing a blonde woman with a passion that made her insides freeze and shatter.

34

‘Mummy, it’s green!’

But she didn’t move. People jostled her, she saw their faces talking to her but their voices were mute. She saw Thomas go off, vanishing with his arm round the blonde woman’s shoulders, the woman’s hand round his waist, they walked slowly away with their backs to her, enclosed in their coupledom, swallowed up by the sea of people.

‘Why aren’t we going, Mummy? Now it’s red again.’

She looked down at her children, their faces looking up at her, eyes clear and questioning, and realized that her mouth was wide open. She swallowed a scream, snapped her mouth shut, looked at the traffic.

‘Soon,’ she said, in a voice that came from deep within her. ‘We’ll go next time.’

And the lights went green and the bus came and they had to stand all the way to Kungsholmstorg.

The children started singing as they climbed the stairs, the tune was familiar but she couldn’t place it, she couldn’t find the right door-key and had to try several times.

She went into the kitchen and picked up the phone, dialled his mobile number but got the message service. He had turned it off. He was walking with his arm round a blonde woman somewhere in Stockholm, not answering when she called.

So she called his office, and Arnold, his tennis partner, and no one anywhere answered.

‘What are we having for tea?’

Kalle was standing in the door in his shiny new boots.

‘Coconut chicken with rice.’

‘With broccoli?’

She shook her head, feeling a panic attack bubbling up. She clutched the sink, looking into her son’s eyes and decided not to drown.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Water chestnuts and bamboo shoots and baby sweetcorn.’

His face relaxed, he smiled and came a step closer.

‘Do you know what, Mummy?’ he said. ‘I’ve got a wobbly tooth. Feel!’

And she reached out her hand, saw that it was trembling, she felt his left front tooth and, yes, it was definitely loose.

‘That’ll come out soon.’

‘Then I get a gold coin from the tooth fairy,’ Kalle said.

‘Then you get a gold coin from the tooth fairy,’ Annika said, turning away; she had to sit down.

Her insides had turned into razorblades and shards of ice, cutting her when she breathed. The kitchen table was swaying. There’s no point, it sang, there’s no point. And the angels tuned up in the background.

Suddenly she felt that she was about to be sick. She dashed into the toilet behind the kitchen and her stomach turned inside out, half-digested pasta from 7-Eleven tore at her throat, making her tears overflow.

Afterwards she hung across the toilet, the stench revolting her. The angels sang at full volume.

‘Shut up!’ she yelled, slamming the toilet lid.

She walked angrily into the kitchen, pulling out all the ingredients for dinner, burned herself on the flame when she put the rice on, cut herself when she sliced the onion and cut up the chicken, shaking as she opened the tins of coconut milk and baby sweetcorn and Asian chestnuts.

Was she wrong? It wasn’t impossible. Thomas looked like a lot of other Swedish men – tall and fair and broad-shouldered, with the beginnings of a stomach, and it had been dark and they were quite a long way away; maybe it wasn’t him standing there with the blonde woman at all.

She gripped the stove, closed her eyes and took four deep breaths.

Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe she’d seen wrong.

She straightened up, relaxed her shoulders, opened her eyes and heard the door open.

‘Daddy!’

The children’s cries of joy and sturdy welcoming hugs, his deep voice expressing a mixture of happiness and cautious fending-off; she fixed her gaze on the extractor fan and wondered if it showed, if there was something in his face that would give her the answer.

‘Hello,’ he said behind her back, kissing her on the back of her head. ‘How are you feeling? Better?’

She breathed in and out before turning round and setting her eyes on him.

He looked the same as usual. He looked exactly like he usually did. Dark-grey jacket, dark-blue jeans, light-grey shirt, shimmering silk tie. His eyes were the same, they were a bit tired and slightly disillusioned, his hair thick and brush-like above his bushy eyebrows.

She noticed she was holding her breath and took a deep, greedy breath.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘a bit better.’

‘Are you going to work tomorrow?’

She turned round to stir the chicken, hesitating.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve just been sick.’

‘As long as you don’t give us all this winter vomiting bug,’ Thomas said, sitting down at the kitchen table.

It couldn’t have been him. It must have been someone else.

‘How was work today?’ she said, putting the saucepan on a trivet from Designtorget.

He sighed, holding the morning paper out in front of him, preventing her from seeing his eyes.

‘Cramne at Justice is difficult to deal with. A load of talk and not much action. The girl from the Federation of County Councils and I are having to do most of the work, and he gets the credit.’

Annika stood still, the pan of rice in her hand, and stared at the headline on the front page of the paper, something to do with a leak about the culture proposal that was due next week.

‘The Federation of County Councils,’ she said. ‘What was her name again?’

Thomas inadvertently let one corner of the paper fold back, she met his eyes for an instant before he shook the paper to make it stand up again.

‘Sophia,’ he said. ‘Sophia Grenborg.’

Annika stared at the picture of the Minister of Culture illustrating the article.

‘What’s she like?’

Thomas carried on reading, hesitating a few moments before replying. ‘Ambitious,’ he said, ‘pretty good. Often tries to lobby for the Federation at our expense. She can be bloody annoying.’

He folded the paper, got up and tossed it onto the window sill.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’ll get the kids. I don’t want to miss tennis this week.’

And he came back into the kitchen with a squealing child under each arm, put them on their chairs, felt the loose tooth and admired the new boots, flicked the pigtails and listened to tales of sweet machines and promises to visit Peter No-Tail in Uppsala.

I’m imagining things, she thought. I must have seen wrong.

She tried to laugh, but couldn’t thaw out the sharp stone in her chest.

It wasn’t him. It was someone else. We’re his family and he loves us. He’d never let the children down.

They ate quickly, didn’t want to miss the cartoons.

‘That was great, thanks,’ Thomas said, giving her a peck on the cheek.

They cleared up together, their hands occasionally touching, their eyes meeting for brief moments.

He would never leave me.

She poured detergent into the dishwasher and switched it on. He took her face in his hands, studying her face with a frown.

‘It’s good you’re going to have another day at home,’ he said. ‘You look really pale.’

She looked down, pushed his hands away.

‘I feel a bit washed out,’ she said, and walked out of the kitchen.

‘Don’t wait up,’ he said to the back of her head. ‘I promised Arnold I’d go for a beer afterwards.’

She turned to ice in the doorway, the razor-sharp stone rotating in her chest. She stood still, feeling her heart thud.

‘Okay,’ she said, regaining control of her muscles again, moving one foot in front of the other, out into the hall, into the bedroom, onto the bed. She heard him take his sports bag and tennis racket out of the hall cupboard, he called goodbye to her and the children, she heard their distracted reply and her own silence.

Had he noticed anything odd about her? Had he reacted in a particular way?

She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly.

To be honest, she had been a bit strange this past year. He wasn’t just reacting to this evening.

She got up, walked round the bed to use the phone on her little table.

‘Thomas said you were ill,’ Arnold said, the only one of Thomas’s old friends who had ever really accepted her. ‘Are you feeling any better?’

Annika swallowed and muttered.

‘Well, I can quite see why he can’t play tonight when you’re this bad, but this is the second week in a row.’

Annika fell. The floor beneath her became a black hole and she was sailing off through space.

‘I’ll have to find another partner if he keeps cancelling, I hope you can see that.’

‘Can’t you give it a bit longer?’ Annika said, sinking into the bed. ‘He appreciates your matches so much.’

Arnold sighed, irritated. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘but Thomas is a real bloody pest. He can never make a decision and stick to it. If you book a fixed time on court for the whole autumn, you can’t just decide not to use it.’

Annika put a hand over her eyes, her heart racing.

‘Well, I’ll tell him,’ she said, and hung up.

Some time must have passed, because suddenly the children were with her in bed, one on each side of her, they were singing something she vaguely recognized and she hummed along, and in the background the angels sang a harmony.

These are my children, she thought. He’ll never take my children away from me.

‘Right,’ she said, ‘it’s time for bed.’

And she got them into bed by reading them a story, without any awareness of what she was reading. She tucked them in and kissed them and went round turning out the lights. She huddled into the alcove by the living-room window and rested her temple against the ice-cold glass. She could feel the draught from the ill-fitting frame against her thighs, and listened to the wind as it tried to creep round the hinges. Her insides were mute and calm, weighed down by the rumbling stone.

The apartment lay in darkness behind her. The swinging streetlamp outside cast yellow shadows across the room, from the outside her windows were nothing but black holes.

She listened, trying to hear the children’s breathing but could only hear her own. She held her breath trying to hear more, but her hearing was blocked by her heartbeat, the blood rushing and racing and bubbling in her head.

Unfaithful, she thought. Sven was always unfaithful.

She had refused to see it for all those years, and the only time she protested he had hit her in the head with a pair of pliers. Without realizing it, she fingered the small scar on her forehead, it was almost invisible now, she hardly ever thought about it.

She was used to men being unfaithful.

She could see him in front of her: her first love, her childhood friend, her fiancé, the sports star. Sven Mattsson who loved her more than anything else in the world, Sven who worshipped her so much that no one else could get close to her but him, couldn’t even talk to her, and she wasn’t allowed to think about anyone else but him, actually, nothing else but him. Anything else would be punished, and he punished her, he punished her and punished her until the day he stood before her by the furnace in the Hälleforsnäs works with his hunting knife in his hand.

She turned away from the image, stood up and shook it off, shrugging it off the same way she shrugged off her nightmares, the familiar nightmares that came back after that night in the tunnel, the men from Studio Six who were discussing what to do with her, Sven with his bloody knife, her cat flying through the air with its guts hanging out.

And now Thomas was unfaithful.

Right now he was probably in bed with blonde Sophia Grenborg, maybe he was entering her right now, maybe they were licking each other or relaxing in each other’s sweat.

She stared at the yellow shadows, planted her feet firmly on the wooden floor, the newly sanded floor that she had varnished three times. She folded her arms over her chest and forced herself to breathe slowly. The apartment responded to her with gentle caution.

How much was she prepared to sacrifice to hold her life together?

She had a choice. It was just a matter of making a decision.

The realization made her shoulders relax, and it was suddenly easier to breathe. She went over to her computer and logged on to the internet. In the darkness she looked up Sophia Grenborg in Stockholm in the census results, getting a load of hits.

The woman she had seen with Thomas outside NK was in her thirties, or slightly younger. Certainly not over thirty-five.

Annika narrowed the search.

As the representative of the Federation of County Councils in a research project looking into threats to politicians, she couldn’t be younger than twenty-five.

She removed anyone born after 1980.

Still too many.

She logged out and went into the Federation’s own website, and looked among the employees.

She spelled her name with ‘ph’. So incredibly bloody anally retentively absurdly sodding pretentious.

Back to the other website and the name search.

Sophia Grenborg. Just the one. Twenty-nine. Lived in Upper Östermalm, born in Engelbrekt parish. Oh how terribly, terribly bloody smart.

She printed out the page through the fax machine and logged out. With the printout in her hand she rang the duty desk of the National Police Board and asked for a copy of the passport belonging to the person with Sophia Grenborg’s personal identity number.

‘Ten minutes,’ the officer said tiredly.

Without making a sound she checked that the children were asleep, then crept out into the Stockholm night.

It had started to snow. Wet flakes materialized against the dirty grey sky, falling onto her face when she looked up. All sounds descended half an octave, striking her eardrums with doubt and deception.

She hurried through the snow, leaving damp tracks behind her on the pavement.

The entrance to the Stockholm Police Headquarters was on Bergsgatan, two hundred metres from her door. She stopped at the big electric gates, pressed the pedestrian intercom and was let into the oblong cage that led to the door itself.

The copy hadn’t arrived yet, so she was told to take a seat for a few minutes.

She sat down on one of the chairs along the wall, swallowed and refused to feel bad.

All passport photos in Sweden were still public documents and could be requested at any time. There had been discussions about restricting access, but so far no decision had been taken.

I don’t need to explain myself, she thought. I don’t need an excuse.

When she was given the envelope she couldn’t wait to see if she was right, and turned away from the reception desk and pulled out the Polaroid picture.

It was her. No doubt at all.

Sophia Grenborg.

Her husband was walking around Stockholm kissing Sophia Grenborg.

She put the photograph back in the envelope and went back to her children.

35

Margit Axelsson had believed in the innate power of human beings all her life. She was convinced that every individual had the power to influence events; it was just a matter of will-power and engagement. As a young woman she had believed in global revolution, that the masses would be freed and cast off the yoke of imperialism as the world rang out with hymns of praise.

She stretched her back and looked out over the room.

Today she knew that you could act on a large scale, or on a small scale. She knew that she was making a contribution, day by day, in her work with the children at the nursery, the collective future, everyone’s responsibility, but also in her work here, in the ceramics room of Pitholm’s People’s Hall.

The Workers’ Educational Association had always believed that those who had received the fewest of society’s resources should be compensated through education, cultural activities and opportunities. She regarded it as justice applied in the educational and cultural sphere.

Study groups were a lesson in democracy. They took as their starting point the belief that every individual has the capacity and desire to develop themselves, to exert influence and take responsibility, that every individual is a resource.

And she saw how the members grew, young and old alike. When they learned to handle the clay and the glazes their self-confidence grew, their understanding of the opinions of others, and, with that, their ability to actively influence what went on in the society around them.

She had to remind herself of this as she stood beside her sculpture.

She had had to live with the mistakes of her youth all her life. Not one day had passed without her peace of mind being disrupted by the thought of the consequences of her actions. For long periods the impact was small, superficial, life and work functioned as a plaster on her guilt. But other days she could hardly get out of bed, paralysed with rage at her own inadequacy.

Those days had got fewer over the years. Nonetheless, she knew they took their toll, had always known that the guilt she carried would kill her. She wasn’t just thinking about how overweight she was, how the comfort eating helped her through the bad patches, but about the gnawing away of her own psyche, her inability to fend off anxiety. She was often ill, had an unusually poor immune system.

And now he was back.

All those years she had had nightmares about him, turning round quickly in dark alleyways and imagining him behind her, and now he was really here.

Her reaction hadn’t been as violent as she had imagined.

She didn’t scream, didn’t faint, just noticed her heartbeat quicken, and felt slightly dizzy. She sank onto a chair in the hall with the yellow dragon in her hand, his unpleasant, childish signal that they should meet up at their old meeting place.

She knew he would seek her out. He wanted something more than just a group meeting like they used to have. The yellow dragon was simply a reminder, a way of bringing the Beasts back to life. He had already contacted the Black Panther – she knew that because the Panther had called her for the first time in thirty years to tell her, asking what she thought about the Dragon coming home.

She had merely hung up. Hadn’t said a word, just hung up and pulled the lead out of the socket.

But you never escape, she thought, looking at the sculpture that she never managed to finish, the child and the goat and the profound communication between them, beyond words and visions, based on understanding and intuitive sensitivity. She could never quite manage to express that, and she wasn’t going to get any further tonight.

Her back ached, she moved heavily over to the damp blanket that stopped the piece from drying out and cracking. She wrapped it up the usual way, and tied it in place. She took off her apron, hanging it up with the others and going off to check the kiln and wash her hands. Then she went round and looked at her students’ creations, making sure they had covered their work correctly, that the finished pieces weren’t drying too quickly, gathering up some stray tools. She filled the kiln ready for firing the following day, leaving some space for the Friday group at the top.

She stopped in the door, listening to the silence. As usual on Thursdays, she was the last one out. She changed her shoes, pulled on her outdoor clothes, shut the door behind her and locked it with a jangling key-ring.

The corridor ahead of her was weakly lit and full of dark shadows.

She didn’t like the dark. Before the events at the airbase it had never bothered her, but since then the screams and flames pursued her in a way that made night prickly and threatening.

She started walking, past the pottery room, the woodwork shop and the model railway. She reached the end of the corridor and carefully went down the creaking stairs, past the cafeteria and library. She checked the doors, shutting and locking them.

The front door stuck in the cold, it always did. She managed to force it shut with a groan, and locked it with a tangible feeling of relief. She took several deep breaths before embarking on the slippery journey down to the street.

Snow was falling, thin and sharp, falling silently and gently in the still air. It had got considerably colder during the evening, the temperature continuing to plummet as the snowflakes stopped.

The new snow crunched under the rubber soles of her boots. She took her kick-sledge and pushed it ahead of her on squeaking runners down towards the main road.

I ought to walk more, she thought.

Snow had settled on the porch, but her legs were frozen and she decided to leave it for Thord. She scraped her boots on the coir brush, unlocked the door and stepped into the hall.

She was so hungry she felt faint.

She pulled off her boots, hung up her coat, went into the kitchen without turning on the light, and opened the fridge door.

She had prepared a starter of prawns and eggs before she left, and took it over to the table, wolfing it down so fast that she got mayonnaise on her nose. Afterwards she sat there panting, feeling empty inside, and stared at the sink, realizing how tired she was.

She had to open the nursery early next morning; she would have to be up at half past five to get there in time.

I should go to bed, she thought, without moving.

She sat there in the dark kitchen until the phone rang.

‘Are you still up? You know you should be in bed.’

She smiled at her husband’s voice.

‘I was just going,’ she lied.

‘Did you have a good evening?’

She sighed gently. ‘That youngster can never get enough attention, she needs constant reassurance.’

‘And the sculpture?’

‘Nothing.’

A short silence. ‘You haven’t heard anything?’ Thord asked.

‘Heard anything?’

‘From them?’

She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘I’ll be home at two. Don’t you lie there waiting, though.’

She smiled again. ‘I was just…’

They hung up and she climbed slowly up the stairs. The twiggy shadow of a snow-covered birch swept across the walls as a car drove past, headlights on full.

In spite of everything, she was lucky. The girls had grown into healthy, motivated individuals, good people with the right basic values that society needed. And Thord – her jackpot in life.

She ran a finger over the wedding photo that took pride of place on the landing.

She washed her face and brushed her teeth, undressed and went onto the landing again. She folded her clothes and put them on a chair next to the linen cupboard.

She had just pulled on her nightgown when the man stepped out of the closet. He looked just as she remembered him, except a little heavier and greyer.

‘You!’ she said in surprise. ‘What are you doing here?’

She wasn’t frightened. Not even when he raised his gloved hands and put them round her neck.

Panic only hit when her airway was blocked and the adrenalin shock reached her brain. The room tilted, she saw the ceiling arching over her and his face coming closer, his hands rigid as steel round her neck.

No thoughts, no feelings.

Only the muscles of her bowels relaxing and the unexpected warmth in her underwear.