Liza Marklund - Red Wolf

Annika pulled her torch out of the bag and shone it behind the police cordon. The snow of recent days had covered all traces that might have been visible to the average person. The ice on the tarmac showed no signs of emergency braking, but any that had been there would have been obliterated by now.

She shone the beam on the fence some ten metres away. That was where he had been found. Inspector Suup was right; Benny Ekland’s last movements had been a flight through the air.

She stood with the torch in her hand, listening to the distant noise of the steelworks. Turning around, she saw the boy’s head again, this time in the right-hand window.

She might as well go and knock, seeing as she was here.

The yard was dark, and she had to use her torch to find her way. It looked like a scrap yard, and the house was ramshackle. The panels on the roof were rusty, the paint peeling. She switched off the torch, put it in her bag and went up to the plain front door. It led into a pitch-black hallway.

‘What are you doing here?’

She leaped back, fumbling for the torch once more. The voice had come from the right, a boy whose voice was breaking.

‘Hello?’ she said.

There was a click and the hall lit up. She blinked, momentarily confused. She was surrounded by dark-brown panelled walls that seemed to loom over her. It felt like the ceiling was pressing down on her. She put her hands above her head and screamed.

‘What on earth’s the matter? Take it easy.’

The boy was gangly and skinny, and was wearing thick socks. He was pressed against a door bearing the name Gustafsson, his eyes dark, watchful.

‘Jesus,’ Annika said. ‘You scared me.’

‘I’m not the son of God,’ the boy said.

‘What?’ And the angels suddenly started singing. ‘Oh, just shut up!’ she yelled.

‘Are you nuts?’ the boy said.

She gathered her thoughts and met his gaze. It was inquisitive, and slightly scared. The voices fell silent, the ceiling slid away, the walls stopped throbbing.

‘I just get a bit dizzy sometimes,’ she said.

‘What are you doing creeping around here?’

She pulled a crumpled paper handkerchief out of the bag and wiped her nose.

‘My name’s Annika Bengtzon; I’m a journalist,’ she said. ‘I came to see the place where my colleague died.’

She held out her hand, the boy hesitated, then shook it half-heartedly.

‘Did you know Benny?’ he asked, pulling his slender fingers away.

Annika shook her head. ‘But we wrote about the same things,’ she said. ‘I was supposed to meet him yesterday.’

The hall went dark again.

‘So you’re not with the police?’ the boy said.

‘Can you turn the lights on again, please?’ Annika said, hearing the note of panic in her voice.

‘You are a bit nuts,’ the boy said, sterner now. ‘Unless you’re just scared of the dark?’

‘Nuts,’ Annika said. ‘Turn the lights on!’

The boy pressed the switch and the bulb lit up for another minute or so.

‘Look,’ Annika said, ‘could I use your toilet?’

The boy hesitated. ‘I can’t let crazy women into my flat,’ he said. ‘You can understand that, can’t you?’

Annika couldn’t help spluttering with laughter. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll just pee in the hall instead.’

He raised his eyebrows, opened the door with the hand that had been resting on the handle.

‘But don’t tell Mum,’ he said.

‘Promise,’ Annika said.

The bathroom had vinyl wallpaper from the seventies, decorated with stylized sunflowers. She splashed her face, washed her hands, ran her fingers through her hair.

‘Did you know Benny?’ she asked when she emerged.

The boy nodded.

‘What’s your name, by the way?’ Annika said.

He looked at the floor. ‘Linus,’ he said, his voice managing to perform somersaults within the space of just five letters.

‘Linus,’ Annika said, ‘do you know if anyone in the building saw what happened to Benny?’

The boy’s eyes opened wide, he took two steps back.

‘So you are police?’

‘Is there something wrong with your hearing?’ Annika said. ‘I’m a hack, like Benny. We wrote about the same stuff. The police say that someone ran into him and scarpered. I don’t know if that’s true. Do you know if anyone heard anything that night?’

‘The police have already been here, they asked the same thing.’

‘So what did you tell them, Linus?’

His voice went into falsetto when he replied. ‘That I hadn’t seen anything, of course. I came home when I was supposed to. I don’t know anything. You should go now.’

He took a step towards her, raising his arms as though he was thinking of pushing her out of the door. Annika didn’t move.

‘There’s a difference between talking to the press and talking to the police,’ she said slowly.

‘I know,’ Linus said. ‘When you talk to the press you end up on the front page.’

‘Anyone who tells us anything can stay anonymous if they want. None of the authorities can ask who we’ve spoken to, that’s against the law. Freedom of expression – did Benny ever talk about that?’

The boy stood in silence, eyes wide, deeply sceptical.

‘If you saw anything, Linus, or know someone who did, that person can tell me, and no one would find out that it was them who said anything.’

‘Would you believe them, then?’

‘I don’t know. That depends on what they say, of course.’

‘But you’d write about it in the paper?’

‘Only the information; not who said it, if they didn’t want me to.’

She looked at the boy, knowing that her intuition was right.

‘You didn’t come home when you were supposed to, did you, Linus?’

The boy shifted his weight from one skinny leg to the other, and gulped, making his Adam’s apple jerk up and down.

‘When should you have come home?’

‘On the last bus, the number one stops at twenty-one thirty-six.’

‘So what did you do instead?’

‘There’s a night bus as well, the fifty-one, that goes as far as Mefos. It’s for the blokes who work shifts at the steelworks… I get it sometimes when I’m out late.’

‘And then you have to walk?’

‘Not far, just across the footbridge over the railway and down Skeppargatan…’

He looked away and padded through the hall to his bedroom. Annika followed, and found him sitting on the bed, neatly made with a bedspread and some scatter-cushions. A few schoolbooks were open on the desk, an ancient computer, but everything else in the room was arranged on shelves or stacked in boxes.

‘Where had you been?’

He pulled his feet up beneath him, and sat there cross-legged, looking down at his hands.

‘Alex has got broadband, we were playing Teslatron.’

‘Where are your parents?’

‘Mum.’ He looked up at her angrily. ‘I just live with Mum.’ He looked down again. ‘She works nights. I promised not to be out so late. The neighbours keep an eye out, so I have to sneak in if it’s late.’

Annika looked at the big little boy on the bed, filled for a moment with an intense longing for her own children. Tears came to her eyes, and she took several deep breaths through her mouth, forcing the tears back down.

That’s what Kalle will be like in a few years , she thought. Sensitive, smart, cool, puppyish .

‘So you took the other bus, the night bus?’ she said, her voice trembling slightly.

‘The half twelve from the bus station. Benny was on it as well. He knows my mum. Everyone knows everyone in Svartöstaden, so I hid right at the back.’

‘He didn’t see you?’

The boy looked at her like she was mad. ‘He was pissed out of his head, wasn’t he? Otherwise he’d have driven, wouldn’t he?’