Liza Marklund: Red Wolf

‘They want me to personify every super-capitalist, war-mongering, American, multinational blood-sucking corporation rolled into one,’ she said.

‘The first rule of dramaturgy,’ Annika said. ‘You have to give the villain a face. Yours just happens to fit the bill. Although I think it’s strange that they’re so angry.’

Anne carefully shut the desk drawer and put the phone down on the floor, then lay down next to it.

‘Not really,’ she said, staring at the lights in the ceiling, breathing out and feeling the room sway. ‘We’re challenging the established channels on the only advertising market they’ve not yet conquered, the global brand market. But that’s not all. We’re not only taking their money, we’re going to take their viewers with our thoroughly commercialized shitty programmes that we buy in for peanuts.’

‘And the Evening Post ’s proprietors will be hit hardest of all, is that right?’ Annika asked.

‘Because we’ll be using the terrestrial digital network, yes,’ Anne said.

‘How’s your headache?’

Anne closed her eyes, seeing the strip lighting in the ceiling as blue stripes through her eyelids.

‘Same as before,’ she said. ‘I’ve started getting pretty wobbly as well.’

‘Do you really think it’s just stress? Couldn’t you take things a bit easier?’ Annika sounded genuinely worried.

‘I’m trying,’ Anne mumbled, letting out a deep breath.

‘Have you got Miranda this weekend?’

She shook her head, a hand over her eyes. ‘She’s with Mehmet.’

‘Is that good or bad?’

‘I don’t know,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know if I can do this any more.’

‘Course you can,’ Annika said. ‘Come round to mine tomorrow. Thomas is playing tennis, I’ll get some macaroons.’

Anne Snapphane let out a snort of laughter and dried her eyes.

When they had hung up Annika drove on with a nagging anxiety in her gut. For the first time she was starting to think that there was something physically wrong with Anne. Over the years her hypochondriac friend had been to Dr Olsson with every symptom known to modern medicine, and up to now she had only ever needed antibiotics twice. Once she got some cough syrup as well, and when she found out it contained morphine she had phoned Annika in horror, imagining that she had become an addict. Annika couldn’t help smiling at the memory.

Slowly she swung off the road and in among the residential area of Svartöstaden. This really was another country, or at least another town. Not Luleå, and not really Sweden. Annika let the car drift through the shanty town, astonished by its atmosphere.

The Estonian countryside , she thought. Polish suburbs .

The headlights played across shabby wooden façades of yards and outhouses and sheds, leaning roofs and ramshackle fences. The buildings were small and misshapen, could have been built out of orange boxes. The paint was peeling off most of them, the uneven hand-blown glass in the windows twinkled. She passed a charity shop selling clothes in aid of the struggle for freedom, although whose freedom was unclear.

She pulled up behind a recycling site on Bältesgatan, left her bag in the car and got out. The noise from the ironworks was a faint song in the distance. She took a few slow steps, looking over the fences into the yards.

‘Are you looking for someone?’

A man in a woolly hat and work-boots was coming towards her from one of the gingerbread houses, glancing at her hire-car.

Annika smiled. ‘I was just passing and had to stop,’ she said with her hands in her coat pockets. ‘What an amazing place.’

The man stopped, straightening up.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is a bit unusual. An old workers’ district from the turn of the last century. Strong sense of cohesion. There’s real community spirit here. People often don’t want to leave.’

Annika nodded politely. ‘I can understand why people end up staying.’

The man pulled a cigarette from an inside pocket, lit it, then took the conversational bait and started talking.

‘We’ve got a nursery nowadays,’ he said, ‘with three classes. We had to fight for years before the council gave in. The school takes kids up to thirteen, and there’s a youth club with broadband. We’re going to have to fight to keep the old ironwork manager’s house; we never seem to get out of this obsession with pulling things down.’

He exhaled a hard plume of smoke, looking at her from under the rim of his hat.

‘So what are you doing here?’

‘I was supposed to be meeting Benny Ekland, but when I got here I found out he’d been run over.’

The man shook his head, stamping his feet. ‘Bloody awful business,’ he said. ‘On his way home, and he gets run down like that. Everyone thinks it’s terrible.’

‘Everyone here knows everyone else?’ she asked, trying hard not to sound too inquisitive.

‘For good and ill,’ he said, ‘but mostly good. We take responsibility for each other, there’s too little of that in the world today…’

‘Do you know where it happened?’

‘Down on Skeppargatan, on the way to the main road,’ he said, pointing. ‘Quite close to Blackis, that’s the big building at the edge of the forest. The kids went up there with flowers a bit earlier. Well, I really ought to…’ The man headed off towards the water.

Annika stood and watched him go.

I’d like a life like that , she thought. To belong somewhere .

The place where Benny Ekland was run down was just a couple of hundred metres from the West Checkpoint, but not visible from there. In fact, it wasn’t overlooked from anywhere, apart from a run-down housing block and small shop a hundred metres or so away. A thin row of yellow streetlamps, some of them broken, spread a dusty light over the cordons, snow and mud. To the left was an area of ragged scrub, on the right an embankment topped by a fence.

Malmvallen , she thought. The famous football pitch .

She switched off the engine and sat in the dark, listening.

Benny Ekland had just written a series of articles about terrorism. The last thing he published was about the attack on F21. After that he was run down, here, in the most desolate place in Luleå.

She didn’t like coincidences.

After a few minutes a teenage boy came out of one of the blocks nearby and walked slowly up to the fluttering plastic cordon around the crime scene, hands in his pockets. His hair was stiff with gel, making Annika smile. Her son Kalle had just discovered the joys of hair-gel.

The boy stopped just a couple of metres from her car, staring blankly at a small heap of flowers and candles inside the cordon.

Her smile faded as it dawned on her how Benny Ekland’s death had affected the people living here. They were all mourning his loss. Would any of her neighbours mourn her?

Hardly.

She started the car, intending to drive down to Malmhamnen. The moment she turned the key the boy started as though he’d been hit, and his reaction made her jump. With a cry that penetrated the car the lad rushed back to his block. She waited until he had disappeared behind the fence, then rolled off towards the harbour where the stolen car had been found.

The road was pitch-black and treacherous, leading to a dead end and a large gate. She decided to drive back up to the site of the accident, creeping along at a snail’s pace. As she passed the shop she looked into the block of flats next to it and saw the boy’s spiked hair silhouetted in the bottom-left window.

‘I didn’t mean to scare you,’ she said to herself. ‘What made you so frightened?’

She stopped the car by the cordon and got out, taking her bag. She looked up at furnace number two, still impressed, then turned and looked the other way, into the wind. This road was one of the routes into the residential district.