Liza Marklund - Red Wolf

She made it to her aquarium of an office without triggering any tripwires and threw her outdoor clothing in a heap on the couch.

Ragnwald , she thought as her computer whirred into life, forcing herself to concentrate on the present. What does it mean? Who are you?

Once Explorer had started up she Googled the name, only getting a limited number of results. A summary of details about a Folke Ragnwald, died 1963; a genealogical site based in Malta; a Christian Democrat candidate, no indication for which constituency. She read quickly, checked a few more results. A French genealogical site, a German site about royalty, a newsletter about a Danish pop star. She shut down the browser and rang Suup in Luleå instead.

‘We’re a bit tied up at the moment,’ the inspector said. He sounded upset.

‘What’s happened?’

Annika picked up a pen out of reflex, immediately feeling guilty about whatever it was.

‘We don’t know yet,’ the policeman said. ‘Can you call back after lunch, we should know more then?’

Something about his voice struck a chord inside Annika, making her clench all the muscles in her face.

‘It’s Ragnwald,’ she said. ‘It’s something to do with the terrorist.’

‘Not at all. Call back after two. You’ll get nothing out of me now.’ He sounded so surprised by the idea that she didn’t think to challenge his denial.

She looked at her watch; there was no point in pressing him right now, eighteen hours before her deadline. She thanked him and hung up, and laid her notes from their last meeting on the desk in front of her. She needed another cup of coffee before she got going.

She walked along the corridors with her head down, evading people’s gaze, and got two coffees from the machine behind the sports desk. Back at her keyboard, she arranged her material, trying to piece together an image of her terrorist.

The young man from the Torne Valley who travelled south, but eventually came back to Luleå.

She let her hands fall, drank some coffee.

Why would a young man travel south in the sixties?

Work or college , she thought.

Why would he come back?

Because whatever he had done was over and done with .

Why Luleå?

If the place you come from feels too restrictive, but you still want to go home, you’d pick one of the larger towns in the area .

But why the biggest?

He must have lived in a big city. Maybe one with a university. Stockholm, Uppsala, Gothenburg or Lund .

She typed the cities into her computer, then realized her mistake.

The young man need not have stayed in Sweden, he could have worked or studied anywhere.

Although this was long before the EU , she reminded herself.

She let that thread fall, and picked up the next.

Where did he go after that?

ETA? Spain? Why?

Political conviction , she thought, but there was a filter of doubt in front of her computer screen.

The Basque separatists were, of course, one of the few terrorist groups that had actually achieved some of their goals, including democracy and extensive political autonomy for the Basque Country. If ETA hadn’t blown up Franco’s successor in December 1973, Spain’s transition to democracy would have been more difficult; and, as far as she knew, the Basque Country today had its own police and its own tax system, and was well on its way to becoming a tax haven for international business.

But ETA had also, perhaps more than any other group, been afflicted with the self-perpetuating nature of terrorism. After the free elections of 1977 there was a whole generation of middle-aged Basques who had done nothing throughout their adult lives but conduct terrorist activities against the Spanish state. Peaceful daily life became too dull, so they decided the democratic state was as bad as the dictatorship and set about killing again. And the Spanish state took its revenge by creating GAL, the anti-terrorist liberation group…

She needed to read more about ETA, but she knew they were among the least approachable terrorist groups in the world, killers for the sake of killing. As self-appointed representatives for a homeland that had never existed they demanded compensation for injustices that had never been committed.

She wrote ‘read more Björn Kumm’ as a reminder, then went on.

Why Ragnwald? Did the codename have a deeper meaning? Did it symbolize something she ought to know?

She looked the name up in the National Encyclopaedia and found out that it was a combination of Old Icelandic ragn , divine power, and vald , ruler. The ruler with divine power – not a bad alias. Did it actually mean anything, other than delusions of grandeur?

But then what was terrorism, if not that?

She sighed, fighting a wave of tiredness sweeping her eyes. The coffee was cold and tasted disgusting. She went out and poured the contents of the almost full cups down the toilet, stretched her back, blinded by the neon lights.

She looked over at Berit’s desk, but she hadn’t arrived yet.

She shut the door of her aquarium carefully behind her and went back to work.

What about the shoes? The footprints had been common knowledge for years, one of the few pieces of evidence the perpetrators had left, but their size had never been made public. Thirty-six. That couldn’t be anyone but a small woman, or a very young man, actually a boy. But what was most likely? That a twelve-year-old blew up a plane, or that an adult woman did it?

So he probably had a woman with him, she noted.

But who would want to do something like that? Suup hadn’t said anything about a woman. She wrote the question on her notes, but if she had to speculate? Historically, which women had become terrorists? Gudrun Ensslin had been Andreas Baader’s partner. Ulrika Meinhof became world-famous when she freed Baader. Francesca Mambro was convicted of blowing up the railway station in Bologna together with her boyfriend Valerio Fioravanti.

‘Ragnwald’s girlfriend’, she wrote, and summarized: ‘The young man from the Torne Valley went away and worked or studied in a large town down south, then came back to Norrbotten, joined a left-wing group under the name Ragnwald, the ruler with divine power, which suggests a certain megalomania. He got a girlfriend and persuaded her to blow up a fighter-jet. Then he fled the country and carried on as a killer with ETA.’

She sighed as she read through her notes.

If she was going to get any of this in the paper it had to be considerably more articulate and factual. She looked at her watch. It would soon be time to call Suup again.

Miranda rang the doorbell with her usual insistence. Anne Snapphane hurried down the stairs so that the old bastard downstairs wouldn’t go mad, one hand clutching the towel around her, the other holding a towel round her hair.

The door jammed. It always did when it was below freezing.

Her daughter ran to her without a word, and she leaned over and held her tight. From the corner of her eye she saw Mehmet approach from the car with the little girl’s bag, neutral but contained.

‘There are muffins in the kitchen,’ Anne whispered in the girl’s ear, and the child let out a little cry and ran upstairs.

In a moment of defiance and pride she stood up without wrapping the towel around her, not caring if the neighbours saw her. Completely naked, apart from the towel round her hair, she looked Mehmet in the eye and took the little bag. He lowered his gaze.

‘Anne,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to-’

‘You wanted to talk to me,’ she said, forcing her voice to sound calm. ‘I presume it’s about Miranda.’

She turned her back on him, her buttocks dancing in front of his face as she went up the stairs. She went into the bathroom and pulled on a dressing gown, stopping in front of the mirror, trying to see herself through his eyes.