Red Wolf

21

The clouds had gathered overnight. Annika stepped out of the door holding her children’s hands, cowering beneath a sky that lay heavy as lead above the rooftops. She shuddered, hunching her shoulders against the cold.

‘Do we have to walk, Mummy? Can’t we get the bus? We always get the bus with Daddy.’

They took bus number forty the two stops from Scheelegatan to Fleminggatan. After a painless dropoff she re-emerged onto the street, her heart and mind empty. She had planned to walk to the paper but she was tired and couldn’t be bothered to splash through the miserable slush all the way to Marieberg, so she boarded another bus. She got her usual two cups of coffee before going into her room, closing the door carefully behind, then discovered that the machine must be broken: the drinks were no more than lukewarm.

Without any fuss she wrote a focused and straightforward article about the attack on F21, using previously known facts and the new information from the police about the suspects: the potential terrorist who went under the name Ragnwald and his little comrade.

She read the text grumpily, the lack of caffeine throbbing dully in her head. It was thin, but that couldn’t be helped. Schyman wanted hard facts, not a poetic description of a time that had once existed and a man who may well have done the same.

With heavy limbs she got up to see if she could find any coffee anywhere when her phone rang. The screen told her it was Thomas. She stopped where she was, hesitating as it buzzed at her.

‘I’m going to be late tonight,’ he said. The words were familiar, expected, but this time they sounded strained, not as nonchalant as they usually did.

‘Why?’ she asked, looking blindly out at the newsroom.

‘A meeting of the working group,’ he said, following the familiar track. ‘I know it’s my turn to pick up the kids, but could you?’

She sat down and put her feet up on the desk, peering out at the dull floor of the newsroom, the endless day rolling ahead of her, until her eyes reached the caretaker’s booth.

‘Fine,’ she said, ‘I’ll get them. Has anything happened?’

His reply came a bit too late and a bit too loud. ‘No, nothing,’ he said. ‘What made you think that?’

She listened to the silence after his words.

‘Tell me what’s happened,’ she said quietly.

When he spoke his voice sounded harassed. ‘A woman rang about an hour ago,’ he said. ‘She and her husband filled in my questionnaire back in the spring. They were both councillors for the Centre Party, and now her husband has died. I’ve been on the phone ever since, trying to get the group together…’

Annika listened quietly, hearing her husband’s slightly strained breathing forming pulses on the line.

‘Why did she phone to tell you that?’

‘The project,’ he said. ‘They’d kept the papers we sent out about threats to politicians, and I was listed as the contact. She thinks her husband was murdered.’

Annika’s feet dropped to the floor.

‘Why does she think that?’

Thomas gave a deep sigh. ‘Annika, I don’t know if I can do this.’

‘Just tell me what happened.’ She spoke in the voice she used when the children were hysterical.

Another sigh. ‘Okay. Her husband was shot in the head with his civil defence rifle, sitting in an armchair. And that’s the problem, according to his wife, because it was her armchair. He never sat in it. If he was going to shoot himself, he would have done it in his own chair.’

Annika searched for a pen.

‘Where does she live?’

‘Do you think he could have been murdered? What do you think they’ll do to the project? Are they likely to shut us down? If they think we contributed in any way-’

‘Where does the woman live?’

He fell silent; a surprised sullenness hit her ear.

‘Huh?’

She bit her pen, hesitated and rattled it against her teeth.

‘That sounds a bit shallow,’ she said. ‘A man is dead and you’re worrying about your job.’

His reply came quick as a flash. ‘And what do you do whenever there’s a murder? All you do is moan about your bosses and your miserable colleagues.’

She held the pen still, then put it down on the desk, and there was a faint click in her left ear. She wondered if he had hung up on her.

‘Outside Östhammar,’ he said; ‘a little village in northern Uppland. They’re farmers. I don’t know how late I’m going to be – it depends on what we decide, and naturally on what the police say.’

She left his sense of grievance well alone.

‘Have you spoken to the police?’

‘To begin with they thought it was suicide, but as the wife objected they’re looking into it more closely.’

Annika put her feet back up on the desk.

‘Even if the man was killed,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t necessarily mean he was shot because he was a politician, if you get what I mean. He may have had debts, addictions, rejected children, mad neighbours, anything.’

‘I know,’ Thomas said curtly. ‘Don’t wait up.’

‘By the way,’ Annika said to the curtains, ‘what’s her name?’

A short, buzzing silence.

‘Who?’

‘The woman, of course; the wife who called you.’

‘I don’t want you getting involved with this.’

They had a silent stand-off, until Annika capitulated. ‘Your job isn’t on the line,’ she said. ‘If he was murdered then your project only becomes more important. If anyone’s going to end up in the shit it’s the politicians, because they should have started your work much earlier. With a bit of luck you can stop this sort of thing happening again.’

‘You reckon?’

‘You’re not the bad guys this time, trust me. Mind you, it might be helpful if it was me who wrote the article.’

Thomas was silent for several seconds, Annika could hear him breathing.

‘Gunnel Sandström,’ he said eventually. ‘The husband’s name was Kurt.’

22

Thomas hung up, beads of sweat on his brow. He had been on the brink of giving himself away.

When Annika had asked ‘her’ name, he had Sophia Grenborg’s name on the tip of his tongue; her shiny hair and smiling eyes, the sound of her heels clicking in his ears, her perfume in the room with him.

That was close, he thought in a muddled way without really realizing what had been close, merely aware that something had gone up in flames, something had happened, a process had started which he didn’t know if he could handle, but he still couldn’t stop.

Sophia Grenborg, with her apartment on Östermalm, in her family’s building.

His mother would like her; the thought ran through his head. She was actually not dissimilar to Eleonor. Not in appearance – Eleonor was tall and sinewy, Sophia was short and petite – but they had something else in common, an attitude, a seriousness, something deeply attractive that Annika didn’t have. He had once overheard Annika describing Eleonor as the sort of person you don’t mind having in your home, and there was something in that. Eleonor and Sophia moved effortlessly through office corridors and meeting rooms, glamorous salons and international hotel bars. Annika just got clumsy in situations like that, her clothes more dishevelled than usual, looking incredibly uncomfortable in her own skin. Whenever they went anywhere she just wanted to talk to the locals and eat in the bars where the locals ate, and wasn’t remotely interested in culture or the exclusive hotel pool.

He cleared his throat a couple of times, then picked up the phone and dialled Sophia’s direct line at the Federation of County Councils.

‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘I’d love to come to the jazz club after the meeting.’

Annika picked one of the newspaper’s courtesy cars that had studded tyres, expecting ice on the narrow lanes of northern Uppland. The radio was tuned to one of the commercial stations.

In quarter of an hour she had crept seven hundred metres along the jam-packed Essinge motorway, and angrily retuned from the adrenalin-thumping pop music to P2. The news in Serbo-Croat turned into news in Arabic, then something she guessed might have been Somali. She listened to the rhythm of the foreign languages, searching for words she recognized, picking up the names of places, countries, a president.

The traffic started to move after the Järva junction, and once she had passed Arlanda Airport it thinned out considerably. She put her foot down all the way to Uppsala, then turned off right towards Östhammar.

The agricultural landscape of Roslagen spread out around her, dark-brown soil in frostbitten furrows, islands of buildings, rust-red painted farmhouses and white-plastered barns. Communities she didn’t even know existed flew by, places with schools and supermarkets and health centres in obscurity, hotdog kiosks with curtains with abstract designs from IKEA, the occasional Christmas garland. The grey light erased the sharpness of her surroundings, and she switched on the windscreen wipers.

The road was gradually becoming narrower and more twisted the further north she got. She got stuck behind a local bus that stuck to sixty kilometres an hour, at best, for more than ten kilometres before she had a chance to overtake, and had to force herself not to get stressed. Half the point of this trip was to get out of the office. She had pulled the directions Gunnel Sandström had given her out of her bag while she was stuck behind the bus.

Over the roundabout, towards Gävle, seven kilometres north, then a red farmhouse on the right with an old wagon in the drive and a garden gnome on the veranda. Perfectly straightforward, but she still almost missed the turning and had to brake sharply, realizing that the roads really were slippery. She pulled in behind the wagon, leaving the engine on for a few moments as she looked up at the farmhouse.

The large main house was on the right, with new cladding, but the window frames needed painting. A fairly new stained-wood veranda, a little white china lamp and four small African violets in the kitchen window. On the left an office and silo, stables and workshops, a heap of manure and some pieces of agricultural machinery that evidently hadn’t been used for some time.

A proper old farm, she thought, efficiently but not pedantically run, traditional but not sentimental.

She switched off the engine and caught a glimpse of the woman as a shadow in the kitchen. Taking her bag, she walked up to the house.

‘Come in,’ Gunnel Sandström said in a thin voice. Puffy eyes. Annika took her dry little hand.

She was about fifty, short and fairly plump, radiating that sort of vanity-free self-confidence. Short grey hair, a wine-red belted cardigan.

‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ Annika said, thinking the phrase sounded clumsy and feeble, but the woman’s shoulders drooped slightly, so the words seemed to have hit their mark.

‘Please, take your coat off. Can I offer you some coffee?’

Annika could still taste the cold coffee from the machine in her mouth, but said yes anyway. She hung up her coat and pulled off her outdoor shoes. The woman was acting on reflex, following patterns of behaviour ingrained over decades. In this house visitors were offered coffee, no matter what. Gunnel went to the stove and turned on the fast plate, measured four cups of water into the pot, then four spoons of roasted ground coffee from the green and pink tin next to the spice-rack, then rested her right hand on the handle, ready to pull the pot off the heat when it came to the boil.

Annika sat down at the kitchen table, her bag beside her, and surreptitiously studied Gunnel Sandström’s mechanical movements, trying to work out the woman’s mental state. She could smell bread, coffee, manure, and something that might have been mould. She let her eyes wander across the room.

‘I don’t read the Evening Post very often,’ Gunnel Sandström said once the coffee had come to the boil and she was stirring it. ‘There’s so much nonsense in it these days. Nothing to do with anyone’s real life. Nothing that means anything to people who live like we do.’

She put the pot on a mat on the table, then sat down and seemed to collapse.

‘Thomas, my husband,’ Annika said, ‘told me that both you and Kurt were active in local politics.’

Gunnel Sandström was looking out of the window. Annika followed her gaze and saw a bird table surrounded by flapping wings and scattering birdseed.

‘Kurt was on the council,’ she said. ‘I’m chair of the women’s group, and a co-opted member.’

‘For which party?’ Annika asked.

‘The Centre, of course. We care about the countryside. Kurt has always been interested in politics, from when we first met.’

Annika smiled and nodded, then stood up.

‘Shall I get some cups?’ she asked, walking towards the draining-board.

Gunnel Sandström flew up.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, how silly of me, sit down, please.’

The woman fussed about a bit longer, with cups and saucers and spoons and sugar and milk and half-frozen cinnamon buns dusted with ground almonds.

‘How did you meet? In the Centre Party’s youth group?’ Annika asked when Gunnel Sandström had sat down again and was pouring the coffee.

‘No, oh no,’ the woman said. ‘Kurt was a radical in his youth, lots of our generation were in those days. He was part of the move to the countryside out here, he joined a collective in the early seventies. We met for the first time at a meeting of the road-owners’ association. Kurt thought the payment system should be fairer. It caused a huge fuss round here.’

Annika took out her pen and notepad from her bag, noting down the details.

‘So he’s not from round here?’

‘From Nyland. He studied biology in Uppsala, and after his finals he and a few friends moved out here to start a chemical-free farm. It wasn’t called organic in those days…’

The woman looked out at the birds again, disappearing into the past. Annika waited for her to begin again.

‘It didn’t go very well,’ she went on after a while. ‘The members of the collective fell out. Kurt wanted to invest in a silo and a tractor, the others wanted to buy a horse and learn to turn hay. We were already seeing each other by then, so Kurt came to work here on the farm instead.’

‘You must have been very young,’ Annika said.

The woman looked at her.

‘I grew up here,’ she said. ‘Kurt and I took over when we got married, in the autumn of seventy-five. My mother’s still alive, lives in a home in Östhammar.’

Annika nodded, suddenly aware of the monotonous ticking of the kitchen clock. She guessed that the same clock had made the same noise against the same wall for generation after generation, and for one giddy moment she could hear all those seconds ticking through the years.

‘Belonging,’ Annika heard herself say. ‘Imagine belonging somewhere like that.’

‘Kurt belonged here,’ Gunnel Sandström said. ‘He loved his life. There’s no way he would have contemplated suicide even for a second, I swear to that.’

She looked at Annika and her eyes were flashing. Annika could sense the woman’s utter conviction, knowing at once and without any doubt that she was right.

‘Where did he die?’

‘In the sitting room,’ she said, getting up and walking over to the double doors beside the fireplace.

Annika walked into the large room. It was cooler than the kitchen, with a damp, enclosed feeling, and a scratchy blue-green fitted carpet covered with rag rugs. There was an old tiled stove in one corner, a television in another, two sofas facing each other at the far end of the room, a swivelling brown leather armchair beneath a standard lamp, with a small table alongside.

Gunnel Sandström pointed, her finger trembling.

‘That’s where Kurt sits,’ she said. ‘Always. My chair is normally on the other side of that little table. After dinner we always sit here and read, council papers, the local newspaper, journals, paperwork from the farm, we do everything in our armchairs.’

‘Where’s your chair now?’ Annika asked, although she had a good idea.

The woman turned to her, her eyes full of tears.

‘They took it away,’ she said quietly. ‘The police, to examine it. He was sitting in it when he died, holding the rifle in his right hand.’

‘Did you find him?’

The woman stared into the space left by her armchair, images chasing through her head so vividly that Annika could almost see them. Then she nodded.

‘I was at the scouts’ autumn bazaar on Saturday afternoon,’ she said, still staring at the empty space on the carpet. ‘Our daughter runs the Cubs, so I stayed to help her tidy up afterwards. When I got home… he was sitting there… in my chair.’

She turned away, the tears overflowing, and stumbled, hunched over, back towards the kitchen table. Annika followed her, rejecting an impulse to put her arm round the woman’s shoulders.

‘Where was he shot?’ Annika asked softly, sitting down beside her.

‘In the eye,’ Gunnel Sandström whispered, her voice echoing faintly between the walls like a rattling wind, the clock ticked, salt tears ran down the woman’s face, no sobbing or any other movement. Suddenly something happened to the temperature in the kitchen, Annika could feel the dead man in the next room, like a cold breath, a faint note from the angelic choir in her mind.

The woman was sitting quite still, but she raised her eyes to look into Annika’s.

‘If you were going to shoot yourself,’ she breathed, ‘why would you aim for your eye? Why would you stare down the barrel when you pulled the trigger? What would you expect to see?’

She closed her eyes.

‘It doesn’t make sense.’ Her voice was louder now. ‘He would never have done that, and certainly not in my chair. He’s never sat in it, not once. He was sending me a signal that someone was forcing him to do it. It was something about that phone call.’

She opened her eyes, Annika saw her pupils suddenly widen, only to contract again.

‘We had a call on Friday evening,’ she said. ‘Late, after nine thirty. We had just watched the news, and were about to go to bed, we have to be up early for the cows, but Kurt went out. He didn’t say who it was, just got dressed and went out, and was gone for a long time. I lay awake waiting and he didn’t get back until eleven o’clock, and of course I asked who he’d been to see but he said he’d tell me later because he was tired, but after the cows something else came up and we never got a chance to talk about it properly, so I went off to the scouts and when I got back he was…’

She slumped, putting her hands in front of her face. Annika didn’t hesitate this time but put an arm across the woman’s shoulders.

‘Did you say this to the police?’

She collected herself at once, stretched for a napkin and wiped her nose, then nodded. Annika let her arm drop.

‘I don’t know if they were interested,’ she said, ‘but they wrote it down anyway. On Saturday I was so upset I didn’t think to say anything, but I called them yesterday and then they came and collected the armchair and looked for fingerprints on the doors and furniture.’

‘And the gun?’

‘They took that on Saturday, said it was standard procedure.’

‘Kurt was in the civil defence?’

Gunnel Sandström nodded. ‘All these years,’ she said. ‘He did the officers’ course at the Home Guard Combat School in Vällinge.’

‘Where did he keep the rifle?’

‘In the gun cabinet. Kurt was always meticulous about keeping it locked. Even I don’t know where he kept the key.’

‘So he must have taken it out himself?’

Another nod.

‘Have you ever been threatened?’

She shook her head this time, slumping a little further.

‘No strange phone calls before the one on Friday, no odd letters?’

The woman stiffened, tilting her head slightly.

‘There was a strange letter in today’s post,’ she said. ‘Complete nonsense, I threw it in the bin.’

‘A letter? Who from?’

‘Don’t know, it didn’t say.’

‘Have you emptied the bin?’

Gunnel Sandström thought for a moment.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said, getting up and going over to the cupboard under the sink. She pulled out the bin and rummaged through the crusts and potato-peelings.

She looked up at Annika. ‘It’s not here. I must have emptied it after all.’

‘You wouldn’t have thrown it somewhere else?’ Annika asked.

The woman put the bin back in the cupboard.

‘Why do you think it’s important?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know if it is important,’ Annika said. ‘What did it say?’

‘Something about the peasants’ movement, I don’t really know. I thought it was something about the Federation of Swedish Farmers.’

‘A mail-shot, a leaflet?’

‘No, nothing like that. Handwritten.’

‘Think for a moment. Is there anywhere else you might have put it?’

‘In the fireplace, I suppose,’ she said, pointing.

In two strides Annika was at the hearth. There were several crumpled balls of paper in there, at least two of them coloured flyers from local shops. She took a piece of wood out of the basket and prodded them.

The woman came over to her, holding out her hand for them.

‘Yes, it might be here, I do throw paper on here sometimes. It’s good for getting the fire started.’

‘Hang on,’ Annika said. ‘Have you got any gloves?’

Gunnel Sandström stopped and looked up at her in surprise, then disappeared into the hall. Annika leaned forward to look at the balls of paper. Three were glossy adverts, one green with black text; the fifth was a sheet of lined A4.

‘Get that one,’ Annika said when the woman came back wearing a pair of leather gloves, pointing at the lined paper.

Gunnel Sandström leaned over, and with a little groan managed to get hold of it. She straightened up and smoothed it out.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘This is it.’

Annika moved to stand beside her as she slowly read out the anonymous text.

‘The present upsurge of the peasant movement is a colossal event,’ Gunnel read in a tone of blank suspicion. ‘In China’s central, southern and northern provinces, several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back.’

She lowered the letter.

‘What does that mean?’

Annika shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Have you still got the envelope?’

They found it beneath the adverts, a simple little envelope with the ‘Sverige’ brand, and an ice-hockey player on the stamp. It was addressed to the Sandström family and postmarked in Uppsala the previous day.

‘Can you lay it out on the table so I can copy it?’

Dark fear swept across Gunnel’s eyes. ‘Do you think it’s something serious?’

Annika looked at the woman, her grey hair, her knitted cardigan, soft cheeks and bent back, and was overwhelmed by a sympathy that took her breath away.

‘No,’ she said, trying to smile. ‘I don’t think so. But I still think you should tell the police about the letter.’

Annika copied the letter on the kitchen table. The handwritting was even, soft and round, the words symmetrically placed on the page, every other line left blank to make it easier to read. She noted the torn edge, which showed that the sheet had been pulled from a pad of lined paper, and wondered if she ought to feel the quality of the paper in one corner, but decided against it.

‘Are you going to write anything in the paper about Kurt?’ Gunnel Sandström asked when she had stood up and pushed in her chair.

‘I don’t know,’ Annika said. ‘Maybe. If I do, I’ll call you first to let you know.’

She took the woman’s hand.

‘Have you got anyone to look after you?’ she asked.

Gunnel nodded. ‘We’ve got a son and two daughters. They’re coming this afternoon with their families.’

Annika felt the room spin again. There was something here, a sense of belonging that ran through the generations, a love that had lived here for centuries.

Maybe people shouldn’t leave their roots, she thought. Maybe our longing for progress ruins the natural force that makes us capable of love.

‘You’ll be okay,’ she said, surprised that she was so certain.

Gunnel Sandström looked at her with eyes that Annika could see were devoid of something vital.

‘I’m going to get justice as well,’ she said.

Then she suddenly turned and went out into the hall, then up a creaking staircase to the floor above.

Annika quickly pulled on her outdoor clothes, and hesitated at the foot of the stairs.

‘Well, thank you,’ she shouted cautiously.

No reply.

23

Berit Hamrin bumped into Annika at the caretaker’s booth by the lifts.

‘Are you coming for something to eat?’ she asked.

Annika put the car-keys on the counter and looked at the time.

‘Not today,’ she said. ‘I’ve got loads to check, and I have to get the kids. Are you faint with hunger, or have you got time to look at something?’

Berit pondered this theatrically.

‘Faint with hunger,’ she said. ‘What is it?’

‘Follow me,’ Annika said, and sailed off towards her office. She tossed her outdoor clothes in the usual corner and emptied the contents of her bag on the desk, picking out her notebook. She leafed through to the last page, then rushed round the desk and tugged open the second drawer, pulling out another pad.

‘Read this,’ she told Berit, holding up two pages of notes.

Her colleague took the first pad and read the opening line aloud.

‘The present upsurge of the peasant movement is a colossal event.’ She put down the pad. ‘But this is a classic text.’

‘In what way?’ Annika said, like a coiled spring.

Without looking away from Annika, Berit intoned loudly and clearly from memory:

‘In China’s central, southern and northern provinces, several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back.’

Annika felt her jaw drop; she stared speechlessly at her colleague.

‘Report on an investigation of the peasant movement in Hunan,’ Berit said. ‘Written in nineteen forty-nine, if I remember rightly. One of Mao Tse-tung’s most famous works. We all knew it off by heart.’

Annika searched through a box and pulled out a couple more notebooks. She leafed through them until she found what she was looking for.

‘What about this?’

She gave Berit the notes she had taken up in Luleå.

‘There is no construction without destruction,’ Berit read. ‘Destruction means criticism and rejection, it means revolution. It involves reasoning things out, which means construction. If you concentrate on destruction first, you get construction as part of the process.’

‘And?’ Annika said.

‘Another Mao quote. Why have you written them down?’

Annika had to sit down.

‘They’re letters,’ she said. ‘Anonymous letters to murder victims. The destruction one was sent to Benny Ekland’s workplace a couple of days after the first murder, the peasants’ movement was sent to a local councillor in Östhammar the day after his presumed suicide.’

Berit sat down on Annika’s desk, her face pale. ‘What the…?’

Anna shook her head, pressing her hands to her forehead. ‘I have to speak to Linus Gustafsson’s mother,’ she said.

The phone rang out into the echoing, frozen space a thousand kilometres north. Her hand was sweating as she pressed the phone to her ear.

‘Should I go?’ Berit mouthed, pointing first at herself, then at the sliding door.

Annika shook her head, closed her eyes.

In the middle of a ring the phone was picked up. The voice that answered sounded newly woken, confused.

‘My name’s Annika Bengtzon, I’m calling from the Evening Post in Stockholm,’ Annika said in the slow, clear tone of voice she had learned to use in her years as a night editor, the shift when most phone calls reached people who were fast asleep.

‘Who?’ the woman on the phone said.

‘I wrote about Linus in the paper,’ Annika said, suddenly feeling tears welling up. ‘I just wanted to call to say how very sorry I am.’

Suddenly the boy was in front of her, his spiked hair and watchful eyes, his defensive body language and uncertain voice; she couldn’t help a sudden and audible sob.

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I-’ She put her hand over her mouth to cover her sobs, ashamed that Berit, who was now sitting down in one of the chairs, should see her like this.

‘It wasn’t your fault,’ the woman said, still sounding sleepy.

‘Are you his mum?’

‘I’m Viveka.’ She pronounced it unusually.

‘I feel horribly guilty,’ Annika said, realizing that the phone call wasn’t turning out as she had imagined. ‘I shouldn’t have written about Linus.’

‘We’ll never know,’ the woman said flatly. ‘But I thought it was a good thing that you got it out of him. I couldn’t work out what was wrong with him. He was a different person after it happened, and he refused to tell me what it was.’

‘Well,’ Annika said, ‘but what if-’

The woman interrupted her, rather sharply. ‘Do you believe in God, Annika Bengtzon?’

Annika hesitated as the tears dried up. ‘Not really,’ she managed to say.

‘Well, I do,’ the woman said slowly, and with slightly forced emphasis. ‘It’s helped me through many trials over the years. The Lord called Linus to Him; I don’t understand why, but I accept it.’

Sorrow travelled like an ice-cold wind down the phone line from Luleå, making Annika shiver. The destructive power of human loss, where God’s love might provide the flickering flame that prevented the definitive final chill.

‘My grandmother died,’ Annika said. ‘Seven years ago. I think of her every day. I can’t even begin to imagine your loss.’

‘I have to continue my time on earth without Linus,’ his mother said, ‘even if I can’t see right now how I’m going to manage. But I’m firm in my faith that God the Father is doing what is best for me, that His hand rests above me.’

The woman fell silent, Annika could hear her weeping. She waited, not sure if she should try to end the conversation and hang up.

‘In time I may come to understand why,’ the woman went on suddenly, in a clear, lucid voice. ‘And I shall meet Linus again, of course, in the House of Our Lord. I know this to be true. It gives me the strength to carry on living.’

‘I wish I had your God,’ Annika said.

‘He is there for you, too,’ the woman said. ‘He is there, if only you want to take Him to you.’

The silence that followed could have been difficult, but to her surprise Annika found it warm.

‘There was something else I wanted to ask,’ she said. ‘Have you had anything strange in the post since Linus died?’

Viveka Gustafsson thought for a few seconds before she replied. ‘You mean that thing about youth?’

Annika looked over at Berit.

‘Youth?’

‘An anonymous letter arrived, no signature or anything; I thought it was a note of sympathy from one of the neighbours who didn’t want to disturb me by knocking.’

‘Have you still got it?’

The woman let out a deep sigh that stemmed from the hopelessness of having to do anything connected with the living, the sort of daily routines that had brought light and united her with the rest of the world for decades but had now suddenly lost all meaning.

‘I think I put it in the pile with the newspapers, hang on, I’ll go and get it…’

A sharp noise hit Annika’s ear as the other phone was put down on a wooden table somewhere in Svartöstaden. There was the sound of rustling on the line, of footsteps coming and going.

‘Sorry to take so long,’ the woman said tiredly. ‘I’ve got it. It says: How should we judge whether a youth is revolutionary? How to discern this? There is only one criterion: if he is disposed to stand, and stands in practice, with the great worker and peasant masses. He is revolutionary if he wants to do so and does it; otherwise he is non-revolutionary or counter-revolutionary.’

Annika stared wide-eyed at Berit and grabbed a pen.

‘Can you repeat that slowly, please? I’d like to write it down. “How should we judge whether a youth is revolutionary?”’

‘How to discern this? There is only one criterion: if he is disposed to stand, and stands in practice, with the great worker and peasant masses. He is revolutionary if he wants to do so and does it; otherwise he is non-revolutionary or counter-revolutionary.’

‘“How to discern this? There is only one criterion…”’

Berit nodded, mouthed ‘Mao’.

Viveka Gustafsson continued reading down the line. ‘… if he is disposed to stand, and stands in practice, with the great worker and peasant masses. He is revolutionary if he wants to do so and does it; otherwise he is non-revolutionary or counter-revolutionary.’

‘Have you mentioned this to the police?’

‘No,’ the woman said, and for the first time life filtered in, a surprise which one day would lead to curiosity, and finally to actual joy in being alive. ‘Should I have done?’

‘What does the letter look like?’

‘Well,’ the woman said, ‘what can I say? It looks like an ordinary sheet torn out of a pad.’

‘A4? Lined?’

‘Blue lines. Is that important?’

‘Have you still got the envelope?’

‘Yes, it’s here.’

‘What does it look like?’

‘Look like? An ordinary little white envelope, like when you fold a sheet of paper in four. Addressed to us, the Gustafsson family. Normal stamp, postmark… what does it say? Luleå, but I can’t see the date.’

‘What sort of stamp?’

A few seconds’ silence.

‘Someone playing hockey.’

Annika screwed her eyes tight shut, forcing her pulse to slow down.

‘I think you should call the police and tell them that you’ve received this letter. I might mention in the newspaper the fact that you got it, is that okay with you?’

The woman’s surprise had turned to confusion. ‘But why would you do that?’

Annika hesitated, unable to be entirely honest with Viveka Gustafsson.

‘I don’t really know if it means anything or not,’ she said. ‘It would be wrong of me to speculate about something I don’t know.’

The woman reflected on this, and it sounded almost as if she was nodding.

‘When you don’t know, you shouldn’t say,’ she said. ‘I’ll speak to the inspector.’

‘Call me if there’s anything I can do for you,’ Annika said, aware that her words sounded empty.

24

‘What a weird conversation,’ Berit said. ‘For a while I thought the boy was actually here in the room.’

Annika pressed her hands against her cheeks, noticing that they were trembling.

‘It’s the same killer,’ she said. ‘It can’t mean anything else.’

‘Which police districts?’

‘Two cases in Luleå, one in Uppsala.’

‘It would make sense to talk to the National Murder Commission at once. If it hasn’t already reached their desks, it’ll soon be there after that call.’

‘You’re sure?’ Annika said. ‘All three are quotations from Mao?’

Berit stood up, drying her eyes, and walked towards the door.

‘Now you’re insulting an old revolutionary,’ she said. ‘Well, I’m finally going to get some food. Otherwise I’ll be a dead revolutionary.’

She closed the door behind her.

Annika stayed where she was, listening to her own heartbeat.

Was there any other explanation? Could different people, unknown to each other, send quotations from Mao to people whose relatives had just met a violent death, on similar paper, with the same sort of stamp on the envelope?

She stood up and walked over to the glass wall that separated her world from the newsroom, looking over the heads of the people out there, and trying to glimpse the real world through the window beyond the sports desk. From the fourth floor she could only make out a faint grey horizon, and some single flakes of snow drifting gently down towards the top of a tall birch tree.

We live in a desperate country, she thought. Whatever made people want to settle here? And why are we still here? What makes us put up with it?

She closed her eyes hard, and she knew the answer. We live where those close to us live; we live for those we love, for our children. And then someone comes along and kills them, destroying the meaning of our lives.

Unforgivable.

She hurried back to her desk and dialled Q’s mobile phone.

The metallic voice of his voicemail explained that he was busy in meetings for the rest of the day, that messages couldn’t be left; try again tomorrow.

She dialled his direct line at the national crime unit, a secretary answered after various clicks indicating that the call was being transferred.

‘He’s in a meeting,’ she said. ‘And he has another meeting straight after that.’

‘Yes, I know,’ Annika said, shaking her arm to look at her watch: 15.32. ‘We agreed to see each other briefly between his meetings, and I’m supposed to show up just before four.’

The secretary was suspicious. ‘He hasn’t mentioned that.’

‘He knows it won’t take long.’

‘But he has to be in the Ministry of Justice at four; the car’s picking him up at quarter to.’

Annika jotted that down, writing ‘Rosenbad 4’ on her notepad. Justice occupied the fourth and fifth floors of the main government building, with the Cabinet Office directly above.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘It was that committee, wasn’t it…?’

The sound of the secretary leafing through some papers.

‘JU 2002:13, the new correctional treatment act,’ she said.

Annika scribbled out Rosenbad 4 and wrote ‘Regeringsgatan’ instead.

‘I must have misunderstood,’ she said. ‘I’ll try to catch him tomorrow.’

She stuffed her notes in her bag, grabbed her hat, gloves and scarf, searched for her mobile in the mess on her desk but failed to find it, and assumed it must be somewhere in her bag, then yanked open the door and headed for the newsdesk.

Jansson had only just arrived. He was sitting there bleary-eyed and unkempt, reading the local papers.

‘There’s something wrong with the machine,’ he said to Annika, pointing at a plastic cup on his desk.

‘Isn’t it time for a smoke?’ she said, and Jansson immediately took out his cigarette packet.

Annika stepped into the empty smoking area.

‘I may have found a serial killer,’ she said as Jansson lit his twentieth cigarette of the day.

He exhaled a plume of smoke and stared up at the extractor fan. ‘May?’

‘I don’t know if, or what, the police know,’ she said. ‘I’m hoping to grab Q on his way to a departmental committee in quarter of an hour.’

‘So what have you got?’

‘Three deaths,’ she said. ‘A journalist killed in a hit-and-run, a murdered boy in Luleå, and a local councillor shot in Östhammar. The relatives all received anonymous letters the day after the deaths, handwritten Mao quotations on lined A4, posted in ‘Sverige’ envelopes with ice-hockey players on the stamps.’

Jansson fixed his glazed eyes on her, exhausted by eighteen years on the nightshift, a fourth wife and a fifth baby.

‘Sounds like you’re sorted,’ he said. ‘The police just have to confirm it.’

‘With a bit of luck they’ll have more information.’

The editor looked at his watch.

‘Get downstairs straight away,’ he said, putting out the half-smoked cigarette in the chrome ashtray. ‘I’ll get a car.’

She spun to her right and raced, with tunnel-vision, towards the lift. She ran down the stairs because both lifts were busy.

A taxi was waiting outside the main entrance.

‘Name?’ the driver said.

‘Torstensson,’ Annika said as she sank into the back seat.

It was an old trick of the trade from the previous editor’s time. Annika, Jansson and a few of the others got into the habit of booking taxis in the former editor-in-chief’s name, because it was usually quicker to jump into another taxi than the one you yourself had booked. Occasionally the booked taxi-driver who had been left waiting angrily for ‘Torstensson’ would go in and shout his name in the newsroom, which never failed to raise a laugh. Even though Torstensson had been elbowed out by Schyman, the old tradition lived on.

Sleet was whipping at the windows of the car, making Annika blink and flinch. The traffic was solid; a traffic-light changed up ahead but the line of cars failed to move at all.

Annika could feel adrenalin making her fingers itch.

‘I’m in one hell of a hurry,’ she said. ‘Is there any other way of getting there?’

The driver looked at her over his shoulder with a look of scorn. ‘You called for a taxi, not a tank.’

She checked the time, trying to tell herself that the traffic would be just as bad for Q.

‘After these lights there’s a bus lane,’ the driver said encouragingly.

At three minutes to four he pulled up on Hamngatan, at the corner of Regeringsgatan. She scrawled her name on the receipt for the invoice and leaped out of the taxi with her bag hanging from one arm, her chest hammering with anxiety.

The traffic was roaring around her, splashing water and mud up her trousers. The banks and shops had all put in their Christmas windows already, the lights flashing in her eyes. She peered through the sleet.

Was she too late? Had he already gone in?

A dark-blue Volvo with tinted windows pulled up outside Regeringsgatan 30-32. She noticed it because it was far too unobtrusive. Before her brain had even worked out why, she knew he was inside. She rushed over and positioned herself by the doorway, so he would have to pass her on his way in.

‘My secretary said you called and were fishing,’ he said as he slammed the back door of the Volvo. The car glided away quickly and noiselessly into the traffic, swallowed up by the snow, totally neutral.

‘I want to know if you know about the serial killer,’ she said, staring at him, icy water trickling down her temples.

‘Which one?’ he said.

‘Very funny,’ she said, feeling the sleet run down the back of her neck. ‘The one sending Mao quotes to his victims.’

Q stared at her for several seconds. She saw the snow settle on his hair and slowly slide down towards his eyebrows. The shoulders of his flame-coloured raincoat were soon soaked. The bare hand clutching his briefcase imperceptibly gripped the handle tighter.

‘I’m not with you,’ he said, and she felt a chill come from inside out rather than the other way round.

‘The journalist in Luleå,’ she said. ‘The boy who witnessed his death. A Centre Party councillor in Östhammar. There must be something that connects them.’

He took a couple of paces towards her, his eyes darkly watchful, and tried to get past her.

‘I can’t talk now,’ he said from the corner of his mouth.

She moved quickly to the right, blocking his path.

‘It’s Ragnwald,’ she said in a low voice when he was right in front of her. ‘He’s back, isn’t he?’

Commissioner Q looked at her for several long seconds, their white breath mingling as it was blown away by the wind.

‘One fine day you’re going to be too clever for your own good,’ he said.

‘Have been, all my life,’ she said.

‘I’ll call you this evening,’ he said, and she let him walk round her, hearing him speak into the entry phone, and the click as the lock opened.

Anne Snapphane was walking straight into the wind, no matter which direction she faced. Every time she changed direction, the sleet changed as well. As usual she cursed the fact that she had been so amenable when Mehmet had suggested that Miranda go to a nursery in his block rather than near her. He was firmly settled in his home, and she wasn’t, so it had made sense at the time.

But not any more, four years and eighteen thousand hours of travelling back and forth later.

The nursery really was in an idyllic setting, in an inner courtyard off one of the quietest and smartest streets on Östermalm. Almost all Miranda’s friends there had posh names with ‘von’ or ‘af’.

Okay, so there was a pair of twins with the common name Andersson, but they were the daughters of Sweden’s most popular film actress.

She turned the last corner and was met with a storm of icy shards, making her gasp, ready to admit defeat. She stopped to catch her breath, squinted and could just make out the entrance further down the street, as she leaned against the building at her side.

It wasn’t the wind or sleet that was getting to her, she was well aware of that. And it wasn’t some hideous disease that would end up being named after her either.

It was her job, or rather it was the boiling cauldron of power-struggles that the owners of the company had ignited when they set up TV Scandinavia. Today the family that owned the biggest film distribution company in Scandinavia, and which also happened to own Annika’s bloody tabloid, had sabotaged all the negotiations they had conducted with both foreign and Swedish film companies. The agreements that formed the very foundation of TV Scandinavia had been broken, one by one, starting at half past eight that morning. The owners had been busy over the weekend, scaring the life, not to mention the profit, out of every single independent film company north of the Equator.

I wonder what’s going to happen, Anne thought, closing her eyes against the darkness. Is this television company built on solid ground, or quicksand?

She was desperate to get home; and desperate for a drink, a bloody large glass of vodka with lemon and ice, cotton-wool for the brain, and a chance for her body to relax.

Not in front of Miranda, she thought. She could see Annika’s face in front of her when she had told her about her father’s drinking, how he had made such a fool of himself, falling over and shouting, until he was eventually found dead in a snowdrift a few hundred metres from the works in Hälleforsnäs.

Can’t let that happen, she thought, bracing herself against the wind and setting off again towards the nursery.

A strong smell of small children and wet raincoats hit her as she opened the door. The porch was a sea of brown mud, with the cheery command ‘Hello! All shoes off!’ on a colourful sign above the shoe-rack.

Anne wiped her feet half-heartedly: the state of the doormat suggested that it wasn’t going to make any difference. Then she tiptoed into the hall where all the little blue shelves, an alcove for every child, were full to overflowing with children’s clothes, stuffed toys, drawings, photographs of holidays, birthdays, Christmases.

She took a deep breath, about to call to her daughter, when she caught sight of the woman in the door to the kitchen.

Tall, thin, with long, strawberry-blond hair in soft curls over one shoulder. A Palestinian shawl.

Anne blinked.

So ridiculously medieval, wearing a Palestinian shawl.

The woman stiffened when she saw Anne, her eyes taking on a look of slight panic.

‘I…’ she began, collecting herself. ‘My name’s Sylvia, I’m Sylvia.’

She took a few steps forward, and held out her hand.

Anne stared at the woman, nausea growing like a tornado in her stomach, unable to lift her hand or return the greeting.

‘What are you doing here?’ she said. The words sounded brittle and echoey to her own ears.

Mehmet’s new woman, his fiancée, his future wife, the woman who was carrying his new child, she was standing in front of her looking confused and pretty terrified.

‘I… was going to pick Miranda up, but she said that you…’

‘It’s my week,’ Anne said, unable to understand why her voice was coming from so far away. ‘Why are you here?’

Sylvia Pregnant Fiancée ran her tongue over her lips and Anne noticed they were sensual, she was beautiful. Sylvia was much more beautiful than she was. Jealousy and spite pricked her eyes like knives, warping her sight. She was beside herself with spite and humiliation and realized at that very moment that she had lost, and if she allowed herself to look destroyed then she would be. She would have to construct some self-respect for herself.

‘I must have got it wrong,’ Sylvia said. ‘I thought I was supposed to be collecting her today. I thought it was my day.’

‘Do you start all your sentences with “I”?’ Anne said, suddenly able to move again, her legs manoeuvring past Sylvia Beautiful Pregnant Fiancée and into the kitchen to a yell of ‘Mummy!’

Miranda flew into her arms, holding an apple-core in one hand, and buried her sticky mouth in her hair.

‘Darling,’ Anne Snapphane whispered. ‘I bet you almost blew away today!’

The girl leaned back and looked at the ceiling.

‘They had to tie me down,’ she said. ‘Then I flew like a kite all the way to Lidingö.’

Anne laughed, the girl wriggled loose and ran past Sylvia Beautiful without taking any notice of her stepmother. She called over her shoulder, ‘Can we have pancakes for tea? Can I break the eggs?’

Anne walked up to Sylvia, who was in her way by the door.

‘Sorry now?’ she said dully.

‘I feel so sick,’ Sylvia said, tears welling up in her eyes. ‘I don’t understand how I could get it so wrong. Sorry. It’s just… I feel so ill the whole time. I spend all my time being sick.’

‘Get an abortion, then,’ Anne said.

Beautiful Sylvia flinched as though she’d been slapped, her face turning bright red. ‘What?’ she said.

Anne took a step closer, breathing right into the other woman’s face. ‘The worst thing I know,’ Anne said, ‘is spoiled bitches whining. You really expect my sympathy?’

Pregnant Lovely Sylvia took a step back and hit her head on the doorframe, mouth and eyes wide open.

Anne Snapphane walked past her, feeling her face blazing. She went over to her daughter who was putting her clothes on and chattering about different sorts of pancake batter. She took her hand and left the nursery, Sylvia’s offended muteness at her back.

25

Annika was frying fish-fingers and making mashed potato from powder, something she never did when Thomas was home. Thomas was used to well-made, proper food; his mother had always placed great importance on having good ingredients, but then it could hardly have been that hard. The family had owned a grocery shop, after all. It wasn’t as if her beloved mother-in-law suffered from the strain of working in the shop itself. She just went down and picked out what she wanted without paying, and looked after the accounts, so of course she had time to cook.

Thomas had never peeled a potato for himself. Ready-made food had been a complete mystery to him when Annika turned up with her tins of ravioli. His children, on the other hand, seemed perfectly happy to eat reshaped fish and powdered mash.

‘Do we have to eat the red stuff?’ Kalle asked.

She had dutifully placed cubes of red pepper on their plates, which they were now both picking out.

She was itching to get going. She knew she had at least four hours’ work ahead of her.

‘No,’ she said. ‘You can watch a film if you want. Which one would you like?’

‘Yay!’ Ellen said, throwing her arms out and knocking her plate to the floor.

Annika got up and picked up the plate, which had survived, and the food, which hadn’t.

‘Beauty and the Beast!’ Kalle said, jumping down from his chair.

‘No!’ Annika said, noticing that she was shouting. ‘Not that one!’

The children stared at her, wide-eyed.

‘But we got it from Grandma,’ Kalle said. ‘Don’t you like Beauty?’

She swallowed her stress and knelt down by the children.

‘Beauty and the Beast is a really bad film,’ she said. ‘It lies to us. The Beast takes Beauty and her father prisoner; he torments both of them, kidnaps them and locks them up. That isn’t nice, is it?’

Both children shook their heads in silence.

‘Exactly,’ Annika said. ‘But Beauty still has to love the Beast, because if she loves him enough then she’ll be able to save him.’

‘But that’s good, isn’t it?’ Kalle said. ‘That she saves him.’

‘But why would she do that?’ Annika said. ‘Why would she save the Beast, when he’s only been horrid to her?’

She could see the boy’s confusion, and Ellen’s uncomprehending eyes, and put her arms round Kalle.

‘You’re a good boy,’ she whispered to him. ‘You don’t know how horrid people can sometimes be. But there are horrid people, and you can’t cure them with love.’

She stroked his hair and kissed him on the cheek.

‘Why don’t you watch Mio, My Mio?’

‘Only if you watch it with us,’ Ellen said. ‘It’s so scary.’

‘What about Pippi, then?’

‘Yay!’

Thirty seconds after she had started the film, there was a buzzing sound from the depths of her bag. She ran into the bedroom, shut the door and emptied the contents of the bag on to the unmade bed. The cord of her mobile had got tangled up with the spiral binding of one of her notebooks.

It was Q.

‘I’ve checked the quotes you mentioned.’

She pulled out the right notebook and a pen.

‘And?’ she said, sinking to the floor with her back against the bed.

‘Bloody weird coincidence,’ he said. ‘A bit too weird to have happened by accident.’

‘Do you have anything else that connects the three deaths?’

He sighed deeply. ‘We don’t know yet, but there are no similarities in the way they were killed. The deaths are very different. We’ve found fibres on the victims, but nothing that matches. No fingerprints.’

‘Just the letters?’

‘Just the letters.’

‘So what conclusions are you prepared to draw?’

Another sigh. ‘The man from Östhammar was murdered, we know that much now. He was shot from a distance of at least one metre, and it’s difficult to hold an AK 4 that far away and still pull the trigger. Of course there’s a connection between the boy and the journalist, but so far we haven’t found any link to the local councillor. The boy saw the hack get run down, so that’s a fairly standard motive. Maybe he could have identified the killer.’

‘Maybe he knew the killer,’ Annika said.

There was a moment of surprised silence from the commissioner. ‘What makes you say that?’

She shook her head, looking at the wallpaper.

‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘Just a feeling I got when I was talking to him. He got very scared, made me leave.’

‘I’ve read the report of his questioning by the Luleå police. There’s nothing in there about him being scared.’

‘Of course there isn’t,’ Annika said. ‘He was protecting himself.’

The silence on the line was suspicious.

‘You don’t think the boy knew him at all,’ Annika said, ‘because you think it was Ragnwald.’

The door flew open and Ellen came into the bedroom.

‘Mummy, he’s got the remote control, he says I can’t have it.’

‘Hang on,’ she said, putting the mobile down, getting up and going back to the television with Ellen.

Kalle was curled up in a corner of the sofa, clutching the remotes for the television and the video to his chest.

‘Kalle,’ Annika said, ‘let Ellen have one of them.’

‘No,’ the boy said, ‘she keeps pressing buttons and messing it up.’

‘Okay,’ Annika said, ‘then I’ll take them both.’

‘No!’ Ellen howled. ‘I want one!’

‘That’s enough!’ Annika shouted. ‘Give me the bloody remotes and sit and watch quietly, or you’ll have to go to bed!’

She grabbed the remotes and walked back into the bedroom with Kalle’s cries ringing in her ears.

She shut the door and picked up the phone again.

‘Ragnwald,’ Q said.

‘Suup leaked some information to me, to let Ragnwald know that you know that he’s back,’ Annika said. ‘Were you involved in that decision?’

He snorted. ‘I haven’t seen any article so far.’

‘It’ll be in tomorrow’s paper, although it’s a pretty thin story, I have to say. Suup didn’t give me much. I think you’ve got a lot more than that.’

The commissioner didn’t respond.

‘How much do you know?’ Annika asked. ‘Have you got an ID?’

‘A couple of things first,’ Q said. ‘You can use the anonymous letters, but not the fact that they contain Mao quotations.’

Annika was taking notes.

‘And Ragnwald?’

‘We’re sure he’s back.’

‘Why? To kill these individuals?’

‘He’s been gone for more than thirty years, so he must have a bloody good reason for coming back. But what that is, we don’t yet know.’

‘Is he the Mao-murderer?’

‘Nice headline, shame you can’t use it. I don’t know if it’s him. It might be, but I wouldn’t swear to it.’

‘But he blew up the plane at F21?’

‘He was involved somehow, but we don’t know if he was there for the explosion itself.’

‘What’s his name? His real name?’

Commissioner Q hesitated.

‘You got a serial killer out of me,’ Annika said. ‘Surely I can get a terrorist out of you?’

‘You can’t use it,’ Q said. ‘We’ve kept his details quiet for thirty years, and it has to stay that way for a bit longer. This is only for your own personal records. No notes on the computer, no stray notes in the office.’

Annika swallowed hard, her pen poised, her pulse throbbing in her neck. She drew breath to ask about the level of secrecy when the door suddenly flew open and Kalle rushed in.

‘Mummy, she’s got Tiger! Make her give him back!’

A short-circuit in Annika’s brain meant that she breathed enough air for a primal scream. She felt the colour in her face rise, and looked at Kalle with crazed eyes.

‘Out!’ she whispered. ‘Now!’

The boy looked at her in horror, then turned and ran, leaving the door wide open behind him.

‘Mummy says you have to give Tiger to me,’ she heard him shout. ‘Now!’

‘Nilsson,’ Q said. ‘His name is Göran Nilsson. Son of a Læstadian minister from Sattajärvi in Norrbotten, born October nineteen forty-eight. Moved to Uppsala to study theology autumn nineteen sixty-seven, back in Luleå a year or so later, worked in cathedral administration, vanished on the eighteenth of November nineteen sixty-nine, and hasn’t been seen under his true identity since then.’

Annika was writing so hard that her wrist hurt, hoping she would be able to decipher her scribbles.

‘Læstadian?’

‘Læstadianism is a religious movement in Norrbotten, some aspects of which are incredibly strict. No curtains, no television, no birth control.’

‘Do you know why he’s called Ragnwald?’

‘That was his codename in the Maoist groups in Luleå in the late sixties. He kept it as his stage name when he became a professional killer, but his ETA identity is probably French. He’s most likely been living in a village in the Pyrenees, on the French side, and moving across the border pretty much at will.’

Annika could hear the children fighting it out in the television room.

‘So he really did become a professional killer? Someone like Léon?’

‘No, people like that don’t exist outside Luc Besson films, but we know he was involved in a few assassinations for money. I have to go, and it sounds like you need to sort things out there.’

‘They’re fighting over a stuffed tiger,’ Annika said.

‘O man, your legacy shall be violence,’ Q said, and hung up.

She watched the end of Pippi with the children, one on each knee, then brushed their teeth and read two chapters from the Bullerby books out loud to them. They sang three songs from the Swedish Songbook together, then went out like lights. She was dizzy with tiredness when she finally sat down to write. The letters floated across the screen, she couldn’t seem to focus, and was struck by an intense sense of falling, a short second of complete helplessness.

She fled from the screen into the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face, then went into the kitchen and boiled some water, measured four spoons of coffee into the cafetière, pouring the water on as it boiled, and forcing the metal filter down hard. She took the coffee and a mug from the Federation of Local Councils and sat down at the computer again.

Empty. She had nothing left.

She picked up the phone and called Jansson.

‘I can’t pull it together,’ she said. ‘It isn’t working.’

‘You’ll get it together.’ Jansson’s voice was alive with the adrenalin of the news torrent. ‘I need you now. We can help each other out here. Where have you got stuck?’

‘Before I’ve even started.’

‘Take it from scratch. One. There’s a serial killer on the loose, that’s the angle for the front page. Start with the summary, describe the deaths in Norrland, the quotes in the letters.’

‘I’m not allowed to,’ she said, and typed, ‘serial killer, describe Luleå’.

‘Well, just balance the information as best you can. Two. Bring in the murder of the Östhammar politician, that’s new and we’ve got an exclusive on that. The wife’s story, police work. Was it murder?’

‘Yep.’

‘Good. Three. Then you link Östhammar to Luleå and describe the police’s desperate search for the killer. You’ve got the front page, six, seven, eight, nine; and the centrefold for your old terrorist – we’ve already put him in.’

She made no response, just sat there in silence listening to the noises behind the editor’s voice, a newsreader speaking on the television, a phone ringing, the tapping of a keyboard. The press – a symphony of efficiency and cynicism.

She could see Gunnel Sandström in front of her, her wine-coloured cardigan and soft cheeks, and suddenly felt a huge, infinite sense of powerlessness.

‘Okay,’ she whispered.

‘Don’t worry about pictures,’ Jansson said. ‘We’ll fix that here. There was a bit of fuss about the fact that you went to Östhammar without a photographer, but I explained that you went on a hunch and had no idea you were going to get a hole-in-one. We’ve sorted pictures of the farm, the old girl didn’t want to be in them, but we’ve got the boy’s mother and the editor-in-chief of the Norrland News as next-of-kin. That reporter wasn’t much of a family man, if I’ve got that right?’

‘That’s right,’ Annika said quietly.

‘Any chance of a shot of the letters?’

‘Tonight? Difficult. But it wouldn’t be too hard to mock something up, you’ve got all the details.’

‘Pelle!’ Jansson yelled in the direction of the picture desk. ‘Studio shot of some letters, right away.’

‘Ordinary “Sverige” envelopes,’ Annika said, ‘stamps with an ice-hockey player on. The contents are just lined A4 pages from a pad, with slightly ragged edges like when you can’t be bothered to use the perforations, text written in ballpoint, every other line, filling up about half the page.’

‘Anything else?’

‘For God’s sake, make sure you say that the picture’s a mock-up.’

‘Yeah, yeah. When do we get your stuff?’

She looked at the time, on solid ground again.

‘When do you want it?’

26

Thomas emerged from the pitch-black interior of the jazz club onto the illuminated street, his legs soft with beer and his brain vibrating with music. He wasn’t really into jazz, was more of a Beatles man, but the band tonight were good, talented, tuneful, and had real feeling in their music.

Behind him he heard Sophia’s ringing laughter, her response to something the guy in the cloakroom had said. She knew everyone there, was a real regular, which is how they got the best table. He let the door swing shut, buttoned his coat and turned his back to the wind as he waited for her. The noise of the city had no rhythm, it sounded out of tune after the soft jazz. He looked up at the neon lights of the signs above him, feeling his skin reflecting pink and green and blue, fumes in his hair.

She was so at ease with life, so happy – her laughter ran like a silvery spring stream over the dark floor of the club, over the heavy conference table. She was ambitious and dutiful and quietly spoken and grateful for what life gave her. With her he felt happy, satisfied. She respected him, listened to him, took him seriously. He never had to justify who he was, she never moaned or nagged, she seemed genuinely interested when he talked about his parents and childhood in Vaxholm. And she sailed as well; her family had a place on Möja.

He turned round to see her step out of the darkness and take a few tentative moves down the steps in her neat little boots and tight skirt.

‘There’s going to be a jam on Friday,’ Sophia said. ‘That gets massive sometimes. Once I was here until half six the next morning. It was brilliant.’

He smiled into her warm eyes, sucked into the sheer blueness of them. She stood in front of him and pulled up her shoulders, put her feet close together and burrowed her hands deep into her coat pockets, smiling up at his face.

‘Are you cold?’ he asked, noticing that his mouth was completely dry.

She carried on smiling as she shook her head. ‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘I’m perfectly warm.’

He gave in and pulled her to him. Her head was just under his nose. She was taller than Annika. Her hair smelled of apples. She wrapped her arms around him, holding him tight. A violent jolt went through his body, so hot and rigid that it took his breath away, making him gasp.

‘Thomas,’ she whispered against his chest, ‘if only you knew how much I’ve been longing for this.’

He gulped and closed his eyes, holding her even tighter, absorbing her smell, apples and perfume and the wool of her coat, then relaxed and saw her turn her face to his. He was breathing through his mouth as he stared into her eyes, saw the pupils contract, noticing that she was panting.

If I do this there’s no way back, he thought. If I give in now I’m lost.

And he leaned forward and kissed her, endlessly slowly and carefully. Her lips were cold and tasted of gin and menthol cigarettes. Shivers ran up and down his spine. Then she took a little step towards him, almost imperceptible, but their teeth met and the warmth from her mouth entered his and a moment later he thought he was going to explode. Good God, he had to have this woman now.

‘Do you want to come home with me?’ she whispered against his neck.

He could only nod.

She let go of him and hailed a taxi, with her usual success. They stepped apart, she adopted a look that said sensible Federation of County Councils representative, adjusted her hair, and simultaneously sent him a radiant glance across the roof of the car. They climbed in their respective back doors; she gave the driver the address of her flat on Östermalm. Then they sat in their corners of the back seat with their hands clasped hard together beneath her handbag as the taxi rattled them through the city centre and up towards Karlaplan.

He paid with his business account, signing with trembling fingers.

She lived at the top of a magnificent building from 1898. The marble staircase was discreetly lit by soft brass lamps; a thick carpet swallowed their steps as she quickly pulled him towards the lift. They closed the ornamental gate and she pressed the button for the sixth floor, then pulled off his coat. He let it fall to the floor, not caring if it got dirty, and took off her coat and jacket and blouse, filling his hands with her breasts. She moaned gently against his shoulder, both of her hands massaging his groin. Then she found the zip, opened it and pulled his erection out of his underwear. He couldn’t help closing his eyes and leaning back, afraid he was going to faint.

Then the lift stopped with a jolt, she kissed him and laughed into his mouth.

‘Well, project leader, come on. We’re nearly there.’

They gathered their clothes and bags and briefcases and tumbled out of the lift. She hunted for the keys in her handbag, and he ran his tongue over the back of her neck as she unlocked the door.

‘I have to turn the alarm off,’ she whispered.

After a few bleeping sounds they were in her hallway, his hands caressing her naked waist. They moved upwards and found her breasts, she pressed her body against him before turning round and pulling him with her onto the floor of the hall.

Her eyes were radiant, her breathing light and urgent, and as he pushed into her she held his gaze and he was lost, drowning, wanted to carry on drowning until he died, then he died and everything went black for a moment when he came.

All of a sudden he was conscious of his own panting. He was lying with his knee in one of her shoes, and realized that they hadn’t even closed the door. A cold draught was making his sweaty skin shiver.

‘We can’t stay like this,’ he said, sliding out of her.

‘Oh, Thomas,’ Sophia said, ‘I think I’m in love with you.’

He looked at her lying beneath him with her blond hair spread over the parquet floor, lipstick smeared on her cheek, her mascara under her eyes. A sense of incredible awkwardness suddenly came over him, and he looked away and stood up. The room swayed a little. He must have drunk more than he thought. From the corner of his eye he saw her get up beside him, still wearing her bra, her skirt awry.

‘That was wonderful, wasn’t it, Thomas?’

He gulped and made himself look at her, slender, slightly fragile in her half-nakedness, defenceless and breathless as a small child. He forced himself to smile at her, she was so sweet.

‘You’re wonderful,’ he said, and she stroked her hand quickly against his cheek.

‘Do you want coffee?’ she asked, closing the front door and unzipping the back of her skirt, letting it fall to the ground along with her bra.

‘Please,’ he said as she walked naked through the apartment. ‘Thanks.’

A moment later she was back, wrapped in an ivory dressing gown, and holding another one, wine-red.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘The shower’s on the left at the end.’

He took the dressing gown and considered the shower for a moment. Even if Annika was asleep when he got home, it wasn’t worth taking the risk.

Sophia had disappeared off to the right somewhere; he thought he could hear the hiss of an espresso machine. Cautiously he stepped into the room in front of him, and found himself in a studio with an eight-metre ceiling and huge windows facing the dull city sky. The walls were brick, the floor the same oiled oak as in the hall.

He couldn’t help being impressed. This was what an apartment should really look like.

‘Sugar?’ Sophia called from the kitchen.

‘Please,’ he said, and hurried towards the bathroom.

He showered quickly and thoroughly, using the most neutrally scented soap he could find, scrubbing his crotch with a sponge. Took care not to get his hair wet.

She was sitting at a table of smoked glass in the designer kitchen when he came in wrapped in his wine-red dressing gown; she was smoking one of her menthol cigarettes.

‘You have to go home?’ she said, framing it as a question.

He nodded and sat down, wondering what he was feeling. Mostly he felt pleased. He smiled at her, touching her hand.

‘Right away?’

He sat for a moment, then nodded. She put the cigarette out, pulled her hands away and put them in her lap.

‘Do you love your wife?’ she asked, staring at the table.

He swallowed. He didn’t know what to say, didn’t actually know whether he did or not.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I think so.’

He let his subconscious conjure up images of Annika, and his response to her.

Once, when he was still living with Eleonor, he had dreamed about her, and in the dream she had had burning hair. Her head had been covered with flames, singing and dancing around her face, and she was quite unconcerned about it. Fire was her natural element, it ran like silk along her back and shoulders.

After that night he had often imagined her like that, as someone who dwelled in fire.

‘She’s boundless, somehow,’ he said. ‘Has none of the barriers normal people have, can put herself through pretty much anything if she’s set her mind to it.’

‘Sounds a bit uncomfortable,’ Sophia said.

He nodded slowly. ‘And fascinating,’ he said. ‘I’ve never met anyone like her.’

Sophia Grenborg smiled at him, a careful, friendly smile. ‘I’m glad you came.’

He smiled back. ‘So am I.’

‘Shall I call a taxi?’

He nodded again, then looked down at his hands, waiting quietly as she went out to the phone.

‘Five minutes,’ she said.

He drank his coffee; it was too strong and too sweet. Then he stood up and put the cup on the draining-board. He went out into the hall and quickly gathered together his clothes, pulling them on with concise, efficient movements.

Once he had pulled on his coat and found his briefcase she slid up behind him, a light shadow of perfume and apple-scent. She wound her arms round his waist, laid her cheek against his back.

‘Thanks for this evening,’ she whispered.

He blinked a few times, turned round and kissed her gently.

‘Thank you,’ he whispered.

She locked the door behind him, and he could feel her watching through the spyhole in the door until the lift carried him down with it.

His taxi glided up soundlessly through the thickening snow, and he jumped in when he suddenly noticed it. From the back seat he told the taxi-driver his address, Hantverkargatan 32.

He must have dozed off, because the next moment they were there. He fumbled for his business account card and paid, gathered his things with some difficulty, pushed the door shut and stopped to look up at the house.

The lights in the flat were still on. He glimpsed a shadow moving inside.

Annika was still up, even though she was always so tired in the evening, after all those years on the nightshift.

Why wasn’t she asleep? What was she doing, wandering from room to room?

There were only two reasons. Either she was still working or else she suspected something, and once these thoughts had formulated themselves in his head the result was inevitable.

Guilt and regret hit him in the guts like the kick of a horse, the utterly fundamental paralysis that comes from unwelcome awareness. He couldn’t breathe; his diaphragm contracted and made him collapse.

Oh, good God, what had he done?

What if she found out? What if she understood? What if she already knew? Had someone seen something? Had someone called? Maybe someone had tipped off the paper?

He was breathing raggedly and with some difficulty, forcing himself to be sensible.

Tipped off the paper? Why the hell would anyone tip off the paper?

He was on the verge of losing his grip.

Slowly he straightened up, and looked up at the windows again. The sitting-room light was out now. She was on her way to bed.

Maybe she knows I’m coming, he thought. Maybe she’s trying to fool me into thinking she doesn’t know, even though she knows everything. Maybe she’ll pretend to be asleep when I go in and then kill me in my sleep.

And he saw her in front of him with fire for hair, clutching an iron bar with both hands, poised to strike.

He felt like crying as he unlocked the front door, unable to think how he could bear to look at her. He walked up the two flights of stairs with silent steps and stopped outside the door, their door, the big double doors with the stained glass that Annika thought was so beautiful. And he stood there with the keys in his hand, shaking, a vibration in his stomach like a jamming jazz band, looking at the doors with strange eyes until his breathing was calmer, something like normal, and he could move again.

The hall was dark. He crept in and closed the heavy door quietly behind him.

‘Thomas?’

Annika popped her head out of the bathroom, and took the toothbrush out of her mouth.

‘How did it go?’

He collapsed on the hall bench, feeling utterly empty.

‘It was a devil of a meeting,’ he said. ‘Everyone’s in shock.’

She vanished into the bathroom again; he heard water running, the sound of spitting. The sounds rolled into the hall and were amplified, growing until he had to put his hands over his ears.

She came out of the bathroom, in a pair of black tanga briefs, her large breasts swinging.

‘It may have been a devil of a meeting,’ she said, settling down next to him and putting her hand on the back of his neck, ‘but I don’t think this death has anything to do with the devil’s political views. I’m pretty sure you can all relax.’

He looked up at her, feeling her breast against his arm, realized he had tears in his eyes.

‘How can you know that?’

‘No one really knows anything at all yet,’ she said, ‘but there’s something bigger behind this than just the local council in Östhammar.’

She kissed him on the cheek, stroked the arm of his coat and stood up.

‘I’m buzzing like an idiot tonight,’ she said. ‘I’ve drunk two hundred litres of coffee this evening.’

He let out a deep sigh. ‘Me too,’ he said.

‘You smell of smoke and drink as well,’ she said over her shoulder as she went into the bedroom.

‘I hope so,’ he said, ‘because the taxpayer was paying.’

She gave a flat little laugh.

‘Are you coming?’ she called.

I can do this, he thought. I’m going to be able to do this.