Red Wolf

1

Annika Bengtzon stopped at the entrance to the newsroom, blinking against the sharp white neon lighting. The noise crashed against her: chattering printers, whirring scanners, the tapping of nails against keyboards; people feeding machines endlessly with text, images, letters and commands.

She took a few deep breaths and sailed out into the room. The only activity over by the newsdesk was of the entirely silent, focused variety. Spike, the boss, was reading some pages with his feet crossed on his desk. The temporary head of news was staring at his computer screen with red-eyed attention – Reuters and French AFP, Associated Press and TTA and TTB; domestic and foreign, sport and financial, news and telegrams from all over the world, an endless stream. The exultant shouting hadn’t yet started; no noisy enthusiasm or disappointment about stories that had either worked out well or caused a stir, no excited arguments favouring one particular journalistic approach over another.

She slid past them without looking, and without being seen.

Suddenly a noise, a challenge, a voice breaking the electronic babble: ‘So you’re off again?’

She started, took an involuntary step to one side, letting her gaze swing towards Spike, and was blinded by his desk lamp.

‘I hear you’re flying to Luleå this afternoon.’

She hit her thigh on the corner of the morning team’s desk as she tried to get to her own desk too quickly. She stopped, shut her eyes for a moment, felt her bag slide down her arm as she turned around.

‘Maybe. Why?’

But the editor had already moved on, leaving her adrift, caught between people’s stares and the hum of the newsroom. She licked her lips nervously and hoisted her bag back on to her shoulder, feeling their scepticism stick to the nylon of her quilted jacket.

She was almost there. The glass of her aquarium-like office came ever closer. Relieved, she slid open the door and fled inside. Easing the door shut behind her, she rested the back of her head against the cool glass. At least they had let her keep her own room. Stability and security were becoming more and more important, she knew that much, both for her personally and for society in general.

She dropped her bag and coat on the visitors’ couch and switched on the computer. News reporting felt increasingly distant, even though she was sitting right in the middle of its pulsing, electronic heart. Things that led the front page today were forgotten tomorrow. She no longer had the energy to keep up with AP’s ENPS, the news beast of the digital age.

She ran her fingers through her hair. Perhaps she was just tired. She sat patiently with her chin on her hands as all the programs loaded, then opened up her material. She thought it was looking pretty interesting already, but the suits in charge weren’t so enthusiastic.

She recalled Spike out there, his voice above the waves. She gathered together her notes and prepared her presentation.

The stairwell was dark. The boy closed the apartment door behind him, listening intently. The loose window on the stairs up to old Andersson’s apartment was whistling as usual. The old boy’s radio was on, but otherwise it was completely quiet.

You’re useless, he thought. There’s nothing here. Wimp.

He stood there for a few moments, then set off determinedly for the front door. A real warrior would never behave like that. He knew from his video games that the was almost a master; ‘Cruel Devil’ was about to become a Teslatron God. He knew what mattered: you must never hesitate in battle.

He pushed open the door, the same plaintive creak. The endless winter snow meant that it opened only a fraction – no one had cleared the steps that morning. He forced his way out, squeezing through the gap. His rucksack caught on the door handle, though, and the unexpected jerk almost made him cry out with annoyance. He tugged and pulled until one of the seams split, but he didn’t care.

He stumbled down the steps, waving his arms frantically to keep his balance. At the bottom, he peered through the falling snow above the fence, and stopped still.

The whole sky was illuminated with blue flashing lights. They’re here now, he thought, feeling his throat tighten. This is for real.

He set off, but stopped next to a broken lawnmower that was barely visible under the snow, feeling his heart hammering, faster and faster, thud, thud, thud, thud. He screwed his eyes shut. He didn’t want to see, didn’t dare go up and look. He stood there, his hair-gel stiffening in the cold, hard snowflakes landing on his nose, his ears pricking. Every sound was wrapped in the cotton-wool of the snow, the sound of the ironworks barely audible.

Then he heard voices, a car engine, maybe two. He opened his eyes as wide as he could, looking over the fence towards the football pitch.

Police, he thought. Not dangerous.

He waited until he had calmed down before creeping towards the road and leaning carefully forward. Two police cars and an ambulance, people with confident postures and broad shoulders, with belts and uniforms.

Weapons, the boy thought. Pistols. Bang, bang, you’re dead.

They were standing there talking, walking about and pointing. One man had a roll of tape that he was unwinding; a woman closed the back doors of the ambulance before getting into the passenger seat. He waited for the sirens, but they didn’t come. No point rushing to the hospital.

Because he’s already dead, the boy thought. There’s nothing I could have done.

The sound of a bus accelerating down the road grew louder. He watched the number one go past, annoyed that he had missed it. His mum got so angry if he was late.

He ought to hurry, he ought to run, but his legs refused to move. He couldn’t go onto the road. There might be cars. Gold-coloured cars.

He sank to his knees, his hands shaking, and started to cry, thinking what a wimp he was, but he couldn’t stop.

‘Mum,’ he whispered, ‘I didn’t want to see anything.’

2

Anders Schyman, editor-in-chief, unfolded the graph of the circulation figures on the conference table in front of him. His hands were twitchy and slightly sweaty. He already knew what the columns showed, but the conclusions and analysis made him blush.

It was actually working. It was okay.

He took a deep breath, put his hands palm-down on the table, leaned forward and let the information sink in. The new direction the team had taken was making a clear difference, both to the circulation figures and to the finances. Here it was, in black and white. It was working; the bitterness from the latest round of cutbacks was dying down. The reorganization was complete; people were motivated, working towards a common goal, in spite of the cuts.

He walked round the shiny walnut table, his fingers stroking the wood. It was a beautiful piece of furniture. He deserved it. His high-handed treatment of the staff had turned out to be exactly the right thing to do.

I wonder if anyone else could have done it, he thought, even though he knew there was no one else. He had finally been able to prove himself.

The deal he had worked out with the printers had cut their print costs by eight per cent. That was saving the owners millions each year. And the recession meant that the cost of paper had gone down, which of course he couldn’t take any credit for, but it all added to the successful development of the business. The recruitment of a new sales manager had helped attract advertisers, and in the last three quarters they had taken market-share from both the morning papers and the broadcast media.

And who had fired the old fogey who was still selling advertising space like he was working on some small-town local rag?

Schyman smiled to himself.

But the most important thing was probably his continued development of sales on the front page and flyers. He wasn’t counting his chickens, but, fingers crossed, it looked as though they were going to catch up with their competition during the next financial year, or possibly the one after.

The editor-in-chief stretched, massaging the small of his back. For the first time since he arrived at the Evening Post he felt a sense of real satisfaction. This was how he had imagined his new job would be.

It was just a bit of a fucker that it had taken almost ten years.

‘Can I come in?’ Annika Bengtzon asked over the intercom.

He felt his heart sink, the magic fade. He breathed in and out a couple of times before going over to his desk to press the reply button. ‘Of course’.

He stared out the window at the Russian embassy as he waited for the reporter’s nervous steps outside the door. The newspaper’s growing success meant that the newsroom had finally started to show him a little respect. Most noticeably, there was less traffic through his door. This was partly due to the reorganization of the newsroom: four all-powerful editors now worked shifts, running the various departments, and it was working just as he had planned. He had handed the responsibility down, and instead of having to argue constantly with all of the staff, he imposed his authority through his deputies. Instead of making him weaker, the delegation of power had actually made him mightier.

Annika Bengtzon, the former head of the crime team, had been invited to become one of the four. She had declined, and they had fallen out. Schyman had already revealed his plans for her, seeing her as one of three possible heirs to his position, and wanted to get her involved in a larger programme of development. Becoming one of the editors was the first step, but she had turned the offer down.

‘I can hardly punish you,’ he had said, hearing exactly how that sounded.

‘Of course you can,’ she had replied, her unreadable eyes fluttering across his. ‘Just get on with it.’

Bengtzon was one of the few who believed they still had open access to him and his office, and it annoyed him that he hadn’t done anything about it. In part, her special treatment stemmed from the big media storm last Christmas, when she had been taken hostage in a tunnel by a mad serial killer. That had certainly helped break the paper’s downward spiral, the market research proved as much. Readers found their way back to the Evening Post after reading about the night the mother-of-two had spent with the Bomber. So there was good reason to treat Bengtzon with kid gloves for a while. Her way of dealing with the situation and the attention that followed her release had impressed even the board – particularly the fact that she had insisted on the press conference being held in the Post’s newsroom. The chairman of the board, Herman Wennergren, had practically turned cartwheels when he saw the paper’s logo live on CNN. Schyman had more mixed memories of the press conference, partly because he had been standing directly behind Annika in the spotlight during the broadcast, and partly because of the countless repeats that had been shown on every channel. He had been staring at the tousled hair on her head, noting the tension in her shoulders. On screen Bengtzon had been pale and giddy, answering the questions clearly but curtly in decent school-level English. ‘No embarrassing emotional outbursts, thank God,’ Wennergren had said on his mobile to one of the owners from Schyman’s office afterwards.

He could well remember the fear he had felt at the mouth of the tunnel when the shot rang out. Not a dead reporter, he had thought, anything but a dead reporter, please.

He stopped looking at the bunker of the embassy and sat down on his chair.

‘It’ll all crumble around you one day,’ Annika Bengtzon said as she closed the door behind her.

He didn’t bother to smile. ‘I can afford a new one. The paper’s on a roll,’ he said.

The reporter cast a quick, almost furtive glance at the graphs on the desk. Schyman leaned back, studying her as she carefully sat down on one of the heavy chairs.

‘I want to do a new series of articles,’ she said, looking at her notes. ‘Next week is the anniversary of the attack on the F21 airbase in Luleå, so it would make sense to start there. I think it’s time for a proper summary of what happened, all the known facts. There aren’t many of those, to be honest, but I could do some digging. It’s over thirty years ago, but some of the employees from those days will still be in the Air Force. Maybe it’s time for someone to talk. You don’t get any answers if you don’t ask the questions…’

Schyman nodded, folding his hands on his stomach. Once all the fuss had died down last Christmas, she had spent three months at home. A sabbatical, they had agreed to call it. When she returned to work at the start of April she had insisted on being an independent investigative reporter. Since then she had chosen to focus on terrorism, its history and consequences. Nothing remarkable, no revelations – routine reports from Ground Zero and 9/11; a few follow-up pieces about the bombing of that shopping centre in Finland; interviews with survivors of the Bali bombings.

The fact was that she hadn’t really done much lately. Now she wanted to investigate even deeper into past acts of terrorism. But just how relevant was all this, and did it make sense to embark on that battle right now?

‘Okay,’ he said slowly, ‘that could be good. Dusting off our old national traumas, the hijack at Bulltofta, the siege of the West German embassy, the hostage crisis on Norrmalmstorg-’

‘And the Palme murder, I know. And out of all of them, the attack on F21 is the least written about.’

She dropped her notes in her lap and leaned forward.

‘The Defence Department has kept the lid on this, applying a whole arsenal of secrecy legislation. There were no media-trained PR people on the defence staff in those days, so the poor bastard in charge of the base had to stand there in person shouting at reporters to respect the security of the nation.’

Let her run with it a bit longer, he thought.

‘So what do we know?’ he said. ‘Really?’

She looked dutifully down at her notes, but he got the distinct impression that she knew all the facts by heart.

‘On the night of the seventeenth of November nineteen sixty-nine a Draken fighter-plane exploded in the middle of the F21 base at Kallax Heath outside Luleå,’ she said quickly. ‘One man was burned so badly that he died of his wounds.’

‘A conscript, wasn’t it?’

‘That only came out later, yes. He was transferred by air ambulance to the University Hospital in Uppsala, and hovered between life and death for a week before he died. The family was gagged. They kicked up a real stink a few years later because they never got any compensation from the Air Force.’

‘And no one was ever arrested?’

‘The police interrogated a thousand people or so, the security police probably even more. Every single leftwing group in Norrbotten was pulled in, down to their least significant members, but nothing was ever found. It wasn’t as simple as all that, though. The real left had managed to stay pretty tight-knit. No one knew all their names, and the whole lot of them used codenames.’

Anders Schyman smiled nostalgically. He himself had gone under the name of ‘Per’ for a short period. ‘You can never keep stuff like that secret, though.’

‘Not completely, of course not. They all had close friends in the groups, after all, but as far as I know there are still people in Luleå who only recognize each other by the codenames they used in left-wing groups at the end of the sixties.’

She could hardly have been born then, he thought.

‘So who did it?’

‘What?’

‘Who blew up the plane?’

‘The Russians, probably. That’s the conclusion the armed forces came to, anyway. The situation was completely different then, of course. We’re talking about the height of the arms race, the deepest freeze of the Cold War.’

He closed his eyes for a moment, conjuring up images and the spirit of the time. ‘There was a huge debate about the level of security at military bases,’ he suddenly remembered.

‘Exactly. Suddenly the public – or rather the media – demanded that every single base in Sweden had to be guarded better, which was completely unrealistic, of course. It would have taken the whole of the military budget to do it. But security was certainly stepped up for a while, and eventually secure zones were established within the bases. Dirty great fences with video cameras and alarms and what have you around all the hangars and so on.’

‘And that’s where you want to go? Which one of the editors have you spoken to?’

She glanced at her watch. ‘Jansson. Look, I’ve got an open plane ticket for this afternoon. I want to meet a journalist on the Norrland News up there, a bloke who’s found out some new information. He’s going off to south-east Asia on Friday, away until Christmas, so I’m in a bit of a hurry. I just need you to give the okay.’

Anders Schyman felt the irritation rising again, maybe because she was excusing herself so breathlessly.

‘Couldn’t Jansson do that?’

Her cheeks started to go red.

‘In principle,’ Annika Bengtzon said, meeting his gaze. ‘But you know what it’s been like. He just wants to know that you’re not against it.’

He nodded.

She closed the door carefully behind her. He stared at the space she had left, understanding exactly what she meant. She works without boundaries, he thought. I’ve always known that. She hasn’t got any instinct for self-preservation. She gets herself into all sorts of situations, things normal people would never dream of doing, because there’s something missing there. Something got lost long ago, yanked out, roots and all, the scar fading over the years, leaving her exposed to the world, and to herself. All she’s got left is her sense of justice, the truth like a beacon in a world full of darkness. She can’t do anything else.

This could get really messy.

The editorial team’s euphoria over the sales figures for the Christmas holiday had come to an abrupt halt when it emerged that Bengtzon had got an exclusive interview with the murderer while she was being held captive. It had been typed on the murdered Olympic delegate’s computer. Schyman had read it, it was sensational. The problem was that Annika, like a real pest, had refused to let the paper publish it.

‘That’s just what the bastard wanted,’ she had said. ‘And because I’ve got copyright I can say no.’

She had won. If they had published without her consent, she had promised to sue them. Even if she might have lost the case, he wasn’t prepared to challenge her, considering the amount of good publicity the story had already got them.

She’s not stupid, Anders Schyman thought, but she might have lost her bite.

He stood up, went over to the graphs again.

Well, there would be further cutbacks in the future.

3

The sunset was spreading a fiery glow in the cabin of the plane, even though it was only two o’clock in the afternoon. Annika looked for gaps in the whipped-cream clouds beneath her but found none. The fat man next to her drove his elbow into her ribs as he spread out his copy of the Norrland News with a sigh.

She closed her eyes, shutting herself off. She pulled the shutter down against the hiss of the plane’s air-conditioning, the pain in her ribs, the captain’s reports on the temperature outside the cabin and the weather in Luleå. Let herself be carried at a thousand kilometres an hour, concentrating on the pressure of her clothes against her body. She felt dizzy, shaky. Loud noises had begun to startle her in a way she had never experienced before. Open spaces had become impossibly large; cramped spaces made her feel suffocated. Her sense of spatial awareness was warped, so that she had difficulty judging distances. She was always covered in bruises from where she had walked into things, furniture and walls, cars and the edge of pavements. Sometimes the air seemed to vanish around her. Other people used it all up, leaving nothing for her.

But it wasn’t dangerous, she knew that. She just had to wait until it passed and the sounds came back and colours became normal again. It wasn’t dangerous. Wasn’t dangerous.

She suppressed the thought, letting herself float away, feeling her chin drop, and suddenly the angels were there.

Fear made her sit bolt upright in her chair. She hit the folding table, spilling orange juice against the wall of the cabin. The racing of her heart filled her head, shutting out all other sound. The fat man was saying something to her, but she couldn’t make out what.

Nothing scared her as much as the sound of the angels singing.

She didn’t mind as long as they kept to her dreams. The voices sang to her at night, chanting, comforting, meaningless words with an indefinable beauty. Nowadays they sometimes carried on after she woke up, which made her mad with anxiety.

She shook her head, cleared her throat, rubbed her eyes, and checked that she hadn’t got orange juice on her laptop.

As the plane broke through the clouds on its final approach it was surrounded by swirling ice. Through the snowstorm she caught a glimpse of the half-frozen grey of the Gulf of Bothnia, interrupted by dark-grey islands.

The landing was uncomfortably rough, the wind tugging at the plane.

She was last out of the plane, restlessly shuffling her feet as the fat man heaved himself out of his seat, got his luggage from the overhead compartment and struggled to pull on his coat. She ran past him on the way out and noted with some satisfaction that he ended up behind her in the queue for hire-cars.

Key in hand, she hurried past the crowd of taxi-drivers by the exit, a cluster of dark uniforms that laughed, shamelessly evaluating passers-by.

The cold shocked her as she walked out of the terminal building. She gasped for air, pulling her bag higher on her shoulder. The lines of dark-blue taxis sparked a memory of a previous visit here with her closest friend Anne Snapphane, on the way to Piteå. That must have been almost ten years ago. God, time flies.

The car park was down to the right, beyond the bus-stops. Her gloveless hand holding the laptop was soon ice-cold. The sound her feet made on the ice reminded her of broken glass, making her cautious. As she moved forward, she left doubt and fear behind her. She was on her way, she had a purpose.

The car was at the end of the row. She cleared the snow from the number-plate to make sure it was the right one.

Dusk was falling incredibly slowly, covering the daylight that had never really arrived. The snowfall was blurring the outline of the stunted pines that edged the car park. She leaned forward, peering through the windscreen.

Luleå, Luleå, which way was Luleå?

In the middle of a long bridge heading into town the snow suddenly eased, revealing the frozen river beneath her. The structure of the bridge rose and sank around her in soft waves as the car rolled onward. The town gradually crept out of the snowstorm, and off to the right dark industrial skeletons rose towards the sky.

The steelworks and ore harbour, she thought.

Her reaction as the buildings began to surround her was immediate and violent, a déjà vu from childhood. Luleå was like an arctic version of Katrineholm – only colder, greyer, lonelier. The buildings were low, in varying colours, built of cement blocks, steel and brick panels. The streets were wide, the traffic thin. The City Hotel was easy to find, on the main street next to the Town Hall. There were free parking spaces outside the entrance, she noted with surprise.

Her room had a view of the Norrbotten Theatre and Stadsviken, a strangely colourless picture in which the leaden, grey water of the river swallowed any light. She turned her back on the window, and rested the laptop against the bathroom door, taking her toothbrush and spare clothes out of her bag. Then she sat down at the desk and used the hotel phone to call the Norrland News. It took almost two minutes before a sullen female voice answered.

‘Could I speak to Benny Ekland please?’ Annika said, looking back out of the window. It was completely dark now. She listened to the mute hum of the line for several seconds.

‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Is Benny Ekland there? Hello?’

‘Hello?’ the woman said quietly.

‘My name’s Annika Bengtzon. I’m meeting Benny Ekland this week,’ Annika added, getting up and hunting through her bag for a pen.

‘So you haven’t heard?’ the woman said.

‘What?’ Annika said, taking out her notes.

‘Benny’s dead. We only found out this morning.’

At first she almost laughed with the shock, then realized that it wasn’t funny and got angry instead. ‘What do you mean?’

‘We don’t really know what happened,’ the woman gulped. ‘Only that there was some sort of accident. Everyone on the paper’s just shocked.’

Annika stood there, her notes in one hand, the phone and pen in the other, staring at her own reflection in the window. She felt like she was floating.

‘Hello?’ the woman said. ‘Would you like to talk to anyone else?’

‘I… I’m sorry,’ Annika said, swallowing. ‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know,’ the woman said, now almost in tears. ‘I have to take another call now, then I’m done for the day. It’s been a terrible day, a terrible day…’

Silence on the line again. Annika hung up, sat down on the bed and fought a sudden feeling of nausea. She saw that there was a local telephone directory under one of the bedside tables. She pulled it out, found the number for the police, dialled, and ended up talking to the station.

‘Ah, the journalist,’ the duty officer said when she asked what had happened to Benny Ekland. ‘It was out in Svartöstaden somewhere. You can talk to Suup in crime.’

She waited, one hand over her eyes, as he transferred her, listening to the organic noises of the hotel: water rattling through a pipe in the wall, a rumbling ventilator outside, sexual groans from the TV in a neighbouring room.

Inspector Suup in the criminal investigation department sounded like he had reached the age and experience where very few things actually shook him.

‘A bad business,’ he said with a deep sigh. ‘I must have spoken to Ekland every day for the past twenty years. He was always on the phone, like a dog with a bone. There was always something he wanted to know more about, something he had to check but which we really couldn’t tell him, and of course he knew that. “Listen, Suup,” he used to say, “I can’t make sense of this, what about this, or that, what the hell do you lot spend your time doing, unless you’ve got your thumbs rammed up your backsides…”’ The inspector gave a quiet, sad little laugh.

Annika stroked her forehead, hearing the German porn-stars faking their noisy orgasms on the other side of the wall, and waited for the man to go on.

‘It’ll be empty without him,’ Suup eventually said.

‘I was supposed to be meeting up with him,’ Annika said. ‘We’d arranged to compare notes. How did he die?’

‘The post mortem isn’t done yet, so I don’t want to speculate about the cause of death.’

The policeman’s measured note of caution unsettled her. ‘But what happened? Was he shot? Beaten to death? Stabbed?’

The inspector sighed once more. ‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘it’ll get out anyway. We think he was run over.’

‘Run over?’

‘Hit at high speed, probably by a large-engined car. We found a stolen Volvo down in the ore harbour with some damage to the bodywork, so that might be the one.’

She took a few steps, reaching for her bag, and pulled out her notebook.

‘When will you know for sure?’

‘We brought it in yesterday afternoon. The experts are checking it now. Tomorrow or Wednesday.’

Annika sat down on the bed with the notebook in her lap. It bent and slid away from her as she tried to write.

‘Do you know what time it happened?’

‘Sometime during Sunday night or early Monday morning. He was seen in the pub on Sunday and seems to have caught the bus home.’

‘Did he live in…?’

‘Svartöstaden. I think he may even have grown up there.’

Her pen wouldn’t work. She drew big heavy circles on the paper until it started again.

‘Where was he found, and who by?’

‘By the fence down by Malmvallen, opposite the ironworks. He must have been thrown quite some distance. A bloke finishing his shift called early yesterday morning.’

‘And there’s no trace of the culprit?’

‘The car was stolen in Bergnäset on Saturday, and of course we found a few things at the scene…’ Inspector Suup trailed off.

Annika listened to the silence for a while. The man next door had switched the channel to MTV. ‘What do you think happened?’ she eventually asked quietly.

‘Junkies,’ the policeman went on in the same tone. ‘Don’t quote me, but they were high as kites. It was icy; they hit him and drove off. Death by dangerous driving. We’ll get them. No question.’

Annika could hear voices in the background, people working in the police station demanding the inspector’s attention.

‘One more thing,’ she said. ‘Were you working in Luleå in November nineteen sixty-nine?’

The man gave a short laugh. ‘Well, I’m old enough,’ he said, ‘so I could have been. No, I missed the explosion at F21 by a few months. I was in Stockholm at the time, didn’t start up here until May nineteen seventy.’

4

The main office of the Norrland News was in a three-storey office block between the Town Hall and the County Governor’s Residence. Annika looked up at the yellow brick façade, estimating that it had been built in the mid-1950s.

It struck her that it could have been the Katrineholm Post. It looked just the same. That impression only grew stronger when she leaned against the glass door, shielding her eyes from the lamp above with her hands to get a look at the reception area. Gloomy and deserted, just an illuminated emergency exit sign casting a dull light on green newspaper racks and chairs.

The speaker above the doorbell crackled. ‘Yes?’

‘My name’s Annika Bengtzon, I’m on the Evening Post. I was supposed to be seeing Benny Ekland this evening, but I’ve just found out that he’s dead.’

The silence radiated out into the winter darkness, accompanied by some crackles of static. She looked up at the sky. The clouds had cleared and the stars were out. The temperature was falling rapidly now, and she rubbed her gloved hands together.

‘Oh?’ the voice from the newsroom said, suspicion clearly audible over the poor connection.

‘I was going to give Benny some material; there were a few things we were going to discuss.’

This time the reply came immediately. ‘In return for what?’

‘Let me in and we can talk about it,’ she said.

Three seconds of static hesitation later the lock clicked and Annika opened the door. Warm air smelling of paper dust enveloped her. She blinked to get used to the low green light and let the door click shut behind her. The stairs up to the newsroom were to the left of the door, worn grey linoleum with rubber edges.

A large man with his white shirt hanging out met her by the photocopier. His face was flushed, his eyes painfully red.

‘I’m really very sorry,’ Annika said, holding out her hand. ‘Benny Ekland was a legend even down in Stockholm.’

The man took her hand and nodded. He introduced himself as Pekkari, the night manager.

‘He could have got a job at any of the Stockholm papers whenever he wanted. He turned them down often enough, preferred to stay up here.’

Annika tried to smile to compensate for her white lie. ‘So I gather,’ she mumbled.

‘Do you want coffee?’

She followed Pekkari to the staff room, a tiny windowless cell containing a small kitchen unit.

‘You’re the one from the tunnel, aren’t you?’ he asked, sounding confident of his facts.

Annika nodded quickly, taking off her coat as he poured thick tar-like liquid into two badly washed mugs.

‘So what were you two going to talk about?’ Pekkari asked, handing her the sugar.

She waved it away.

‘I’ve written quite a bit about terrorism recently. Last week I spoke to Benny about the attack on F21, and he said he was on the track of something new, something big – a description of what actually happened.’

The editor put the sugar bowl on the table, digging among the lumps with nicotine-stained fingers.

‘We ran that last Friday,’ he said.

She was shocked. She hadn’t heard anything about new revelations in any of the media.

Pekkari dropped three lumps in his mug.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘But you’re on one of the biggies; you don’t know what it’s like for locals. The agencies only care about Stockholm. As far as they’re concerned, our scoops are worth less than cats’ piss.’

Not true, she thought to herself, it depends on the quality of the material. She suppressed the thought and looked down at her lap.

‘I started out on the Katrineholm Post,’ she said, ‘so I know exactly what it’s like.’

The man stared at her, eyes wide open. ‘Then you must know Macke?’

‘On sport? Of course I do. He’s an institution.’

An out-of-control alcoholic even when I was there, Annika thought, smiling at Pekkari.

‘What did you have for Ekland?’ the man said, slurping his coffee.

‘A few historical summaries,’ she replied quickly. ‘Mostly archive material from the seventies, pictures and text.’

‘Must all be online,’ Pekkari said.

‘Not this.’

‘So you weren’t trying to get his story?’

The man’s eyes stared fixedly at her over the edge of the mug, and she calmly met his gaze.

‘I have many good qualities,’ she said, ‘but mind-reading isn’t one of them. Benny called me. How else would I know what he was up to?’

The editor took another lump of sugar, sucking on it thoughtfully as he drank his coffee.

‘You’re right,’ he said, once he had swallowed with an audible gulp. ‘What do you need?’

‘Help to get access to Benny’s articles on terrorism.’

‘Go down to the archive and talk to Hans.’

Every newspaper archive in the whole of Sweden looks like this, she thought, and Hans Blomberg looks like archivists have always looked. A dusty little man in a grey cardigan, glasses and a comb-over. Even his noticeboard contained the anticipated prerequisites: a child’s drawing of a yellow dinosaur, a noisy ‘Why aren’t I RICH instead of BEAUTIFUL?’ sign, and a calendar counting down to an unspecified goal with the words ‘NEARLY THERE!’

‘Benny was a stubborn bastard,’ the archivist said, sitting down heavily behind his computer. ‘Worse than a mule, never gave up. Wrote more than anyone else I’ve come across, sometimes at the expense of quality. You know the type?’

He looked at Annika over the rim of his glasses, and she couldn’t help smiling.

‘Not to speak ill of the dead,’ the man went on, conducting a slow waltz on the keyboard with his index finger, ‘but we might as well be honest.’

He batted his eyelashes at her.

‘His death seems to have affected people here badly,’ Annika said tentatively.

Hans Blomberg sighed. ‘He was the star reporter, the darling of the management team, the union’s hate-figure, you know? The boy who dances into the newsroom after one job and cries, “Get me a picture byline, because tonight I’m immortal!”’

Annika burst out laughing. She had actually seen someone do precisely that. She thought it might have been Carl Wennergren, one of the former newsroom morons.

‘Well then, young lady, what exactly are you looking for?’

‘Benny’s series about terrorism, especially the article on F21 that was published the other day.’

The archivist looked up, his eyes twinkling. ‘Aha. So a nice young girl like you is interested in dangerous things?’

‘Dear Uncle Blomberg,’ Annika said, ‘I’m married and I’ve got two children.’

‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Feminists… Printouts or cuttings?’

‘Copies, preferably, if it isn’t too much bother,’ Annika said.

The man groaned and got up again.

‘This business with computers,’ he said, ‘everything was going to get so much easier, but it hasn’t. Twice the work, that’s what computers have meant.’

He disappeared in amongst the cabinets, muttering ‘T… T… terrorism…’, opening drawers and huffing and puffing.

‘Here you are,’ he said a few moments later, triumphantly holding out a brown envelope. ‘Terrorism à la Ekland. You can sit over there. I’m here till six o’clock.’

Annika took the envelope, opening it with sweaty fingers as she went over to the desk he had indicated. Cuttings were infinitely superior to computer printouts. On screen all the headings were the same size, all articles the same size, every picture just as small. On the page the articles could live and breathe beneath noisy or subtle headlines: the typeface alone could tell her a lot about what the editors were hoping to achieve, what signals they wanted to send. The number of pictures, their layout and technical quality told her even more: how important the item was deemed to be, but also how important this picture or article was in the general torrent of news that day. The skills of an entire profession of editors had been wiped out by the electronic archive.

But she had serious stuff to study here.

The clips were arranged in date order, oldest at the front. The first text had been published at the end of April and provided tasty details from the history of Swedish terrorism, including the story of the inventor, Dr Martin Ekenberg from Töreboda, who really only succeeded with one invention: the letter bomb. She paused when she recognized several phrases she herself had used in articles on the same subject published just weeks before. She concluded drily that Ekland had evidently allowed his colleagues to inspire him in a very direct way.

She leafed through the pile of cuttings. A lot of it was old padding, but some of it was new to her. She read with growing interest about the fuss on the Norrbotten islands in the spring of 1987 when the military spent days searching for submarines and Spetsnaz brigades that had been landed on the skerries. A stubborn, fifteen-year-old rumour had it that a Russian frogman had been shot in the leg by a Swedish officer. The officer’s dog picked up a scent and started barking, and the officer dashed into some bushes, where bloody tracks were later found, leading to the water. Benny Ekland had been more interested in retelling the rumour as entertainingly as possible than in getting to the bottom of what had really happened. There was a brief quote from military command in Boden, to the effect that the atmosphere was completely different in the late eighties, that everyone misjudges things sometimes, even the Swedish military, and that it had never been ascertained that there had ever been any submarine encroachment in northern Swedish waters.

At the bottom of the pile was the article she was interested in, and it contained information entirely new to her.

Benny Ekland wrote that during the late sixties the old Lansen planes of the Norrbotten air defences were being switched for more modern Drakens, for search and reconnaissance purposes. The airbase was subjected to numerous acts of sabotage against the new planes, mostly in the form of matches being inserted in the planes’ pitot tubes. These tubes sat like small spears at the front of the planes, and were used to measure airspeed, pressure, and so on.

It was thought fairly obvious that left-wing groups from Luleå, probably Maoists, were responsible for the sabotage. No damage was ever done, and none of the match-wielders was ever caught, but the article cited anonymous sources in F21 claiming that these acts were the basis of the more serious attack that followed. The Maoists were believed to have discovered something that had catastrophic consequences.

After each flight, when the plane was on the tarmac, absorbent material had to be spread on the ground, or a stainless-steel container placed behind the plane. Not all of the fuel in the engine was burned off, so it had to be drained after the engine had stopped. On the evening of the attack, the night of 18 November 1969, the whole base had been involved in a large exercise. Afterwards the planes remained on the tarmac, and that was when the terrorists struck.

Instead of sticking the match in the pitot tube as usual, they lit it and tossed it into the bucket of surplus fuel behind the plane. The explosion was instant, and massive.

Ekland wrote that considering the air group’s lamentable history, it was easy to conclude that it was the local leftists who were behind this act of sabotage as well, even if it did have fatal consequences this time.

He writes like an idiot, Annika thought; but the theory was very interesting.

‘Can I have a copy of this one?’ she asked, holding up the article.

Not looking up from his screen, the archivist responded, ‘You found it readable then?’

‘Of course,’ Annika said, ‘I haven’t seen this information before. Might be worth looking into.’

‘The photocopier’s out by the stairs. If you give it a knock it might work.’

5

The man glided soundlessly through dark streets. The pain was under control, his body vibrated with energy. His thoughts echoed between the frozen walls, giving answers that were alien to him.

Luleå had shrunk over the years. He remembered the town as big and brash, full of self-confidence, rolling in glitter and commercialism.

Tonight the self-confidence was gone, way out of sight. It had probably never really existed. The place felt impotent. The main street had been closed to traffic and turned into a long, windswept playground, lined with sad little birch trees. This was where people were supposed to make their living; this was where they were meant to consume their way out of depression.

The curse of freedom, he thought. The bastard Renaissance man who woke up one morning in twelfth-century Florence and invented capitalism, sitting up in bed and realizing the possibilities for his own ego, realizing that the state was an organism that could be controlled and manipulated.

He sat down on a bench outside the library to let the worst of the morphine rush leave his body. He knew it wasn’t good to sit still in this sort of cold, but he didn’t care. He wanted to sit here and look at the cathedral, the building where he had founded his dynasty. The ugly extension on the corner of ‘nameless street’ was one of his old haunts. The lights were still on. There were probably meetings going on right now, just as there had been all those years ago.

None of them like ours, though, he thought. There’ll never be any like ours.

Two young women were on their way out. He saw them stop in the lobby and read the notices of cultural events on the board.

Maybe it’s unlocked, he thought vaguely. Maybe I can get in.

The girls glanced at him as they passed each other a few metres from the door, the sort of unfocused glance that you only get in small, narrow-minded places: we don’t know him, we’ll ignore him. In larger towns no one noticed anyone at all. That suited him much better.

The library was still open. He stopped in the middle of the lobby to let the memories come. And they came, overwhelmed him, took his breath away. The years were erased, he was twenty again, it was summer, hot, his girl was beside him, his beloved Red Wolf who was to succeed in ways no one could have dared to imagine. He held her to him and smelled the henna in her copper-coloured hair-

A sudden draught hit his legs and pulled him back to the present.

‘Are you all right? Do you need help?’

An old man was looking amiably at him.

The standard phrase, he thought, shaking his head and swallowing his French reply.

The hall came back into focus. The other man went into the warmth and left him alone with the notices on the board: a storyteller session, a carol service, a concert by Håkan Hagegård, and a festival of feminism. He waited until his breathing had calmed down, ran his hands over his hair and took a cautious step towards the internal door, checking discreetly behind the glass. Then he quickly crossed the hall and went down the backstairs.

Good grief, he thought, I’m here. I’m actually here.

He looked at the closed doors, one after the other, conjuring up the images behind them. He knew all of them. The cheap oak-coloured plywood panels, the stone steps, the folding tables, the bad lighting. He smiled at his shadow, the young man who booked rooms in the name of the Fly Fishing Association, then held Maoist meetings until long into the night.

He was right to have come.