Liza Marklund - Red Wolf

He took a deep breath, giddy with her perfume.

‘Have a good weekend,’ he said, picking up his briefcase and heading for the door.

Annika dialled Inspector Suup’s direct line, after nagging the receptionist to let her have the number, with a sense of foreboding in her stomach. The more she thought about it, the stranger he had seemed during their conversation that morning. Was he regretting letting her have the information about Ragnwald? Had he thought it would be in the next day’s paper? Was he disappointed?

Her hands were damp with sweat as she listened to the phone ring.

‘What’s happened?’ she asked him when he had picked up.

‘Something really bad,’ he said. ‘Linus Gustafsson is dead.’

Her first reaction was relief: the name meant nothing to her. ‘Who?’

‘The witness,’ Suup said, and the shutters went up in her brain, a blinding white light filled her head, guilt consuming all of her other turbulent thoughts. She heard herself gasp.

‘How?’

‘His throat was cut, at home in his bedroom. His mum found him in a pool of blood when she got home this morning.’

She was shaking her head violently. ‘No, it can’t be true,’ she whispered.

‘We believe that the killings are somehow connected, but we don’t know how yet. The only common denominator so far is that the boy was a witness to the first murder. The methods are completely different.’

Annika sat, her right hand over her eyes, feeling the dead weight in her chest pounding, making it hard to breathe.

‘Is this my fault?’ she managed to say.

‘What did you say?’

She cleared her throat. ‘Linus told me that he thought he recognized the killer,’ she said. ‘Did he tell you who he thought it was?’

The inspector was no good at pretending. His surprise was genuine, and extreme. ‘That’s news to me,’ he said. ‘Are you sure?’

She forced herself to think logically and take her responsibility as a journalist.

‘I promised him complete anonymity,’ she mused out loud. ‘Does that apply now that he’s dead?’

‘It doesn’t matter any more. He came to us of his own accord, which releases you from your responsibility,’ the police officer said, and Annika knew he was right. She breathed out.

‘When I spoke to him he said that he might have recognized the murderer, but I didn’t put it in my article. I didn’t think it made sense to highlight that.’

‘You were right not to,’ the policeman said. ‘It’s a shame it wasn’t enough.’

‘Do you think he could have told anyone else?’

‘We haven’t asked, but I’ll get on to it.’

The silence was oppressive; Annika felt the weight of her own conscience blocking their communication.

‘I feel responsible,’ she said.

‘I can understand that,’ the inspector said, ‘but you shouldn’t. Someone else is responsible for this, and we’re going to get him. You can be sure of that.’

She rubbed her eyes, thinking hard.

‘So what are you doing? Going door to door? Looking for fingerprints? Checking for footprints, cars, mopeds?’

‘All that, and a whole lot more.’

‘Talking to friends, teachers, neighbours?’

‘To start with.’

Annika made some notes. Her body was shaking.

‘Have you found anything?’

‘We’re going to be very careful with any information we get.’

Silence again.

‘A leak,’ Annika said. ‘You think you’ve got a leak that revealed the boy’s identity.’

A deep sigh at the other end of the line. ‘There are a few people who might have said something, including the boy himself. He never spoke to the mass media, but at least two of his friends knew he was the witness. His mum told her boss at work. Or what about you?’

‘I haven’t told anyone,’ she said. ‘I’m absolutely certain of that.’

There was silence again. She was an outsider, he didn’t know much about her, what she was all about, a big city journalist who he may never meet again. Could she be responsible?

‘You can trust me,’ she said quietly. ‘Just so you know. How much of this can I write about?’

‘Don’t mention the cause of death, we haven’t released that. You can quote me saying that the murder was extremely violent and that the Luleå police are shocked at its brutality.’

‘Can I mention his mother? The fact that she found him?’

‘Well, that’s logical, so you can say that, but don’t try to contact her. She probably isn’t home anyway; I think my team took her off to the hospital suffering from shock. She had no one apart from the boy. The dad seems to have been a tragic case, one of the gang that sit and drink outside the shopping centre and terrorize the shopkeepers along the main street.’

‘It couldn’t have been him?’

‘He was in a cell, drunk, from five o’clock yesterday afternoon. Taken off to dry out in Boden at seven this morning.’

‘That’s what I call an alibi,’ Annika said. ‘Is there any way I can help? Are you looking for anything in particular that we could draw people’s attention to in the paper?’

‘The last witness with a definite sighting of the boy was the driver of the last bus out to Svartöstaden last night, and that reached the last stop just after ten. The preliminary report says the boy died shortly after that, so if anyone saw him around that time we’d like to hear from them.’

‘You’ve checked out the bus-driver?’

Suup gave a deep sigh. ‘And all the passengers,’ he said. ‘We’re going to get this bastard.’

A thought occurred to her from out of nowhere. ‘In his bedroom, you said? How did the killer get into the flat?’

‘No signs of a break-in.’

Annika thought, forcing herself to outpace the guilt until the burden was out of reach, gone for ever, and she knew she was running needlessly. She was well aware of what little effect adrenalin and will-power have on a guilty conscience.

‘So he might have let him in himself,’ she said. ‘It could have been someone he knew.’

‘Or else the killer went in without knocking, or was waiting for him in the dark. The lock on the flat was pretty hopeless, one good pull and it comes open.’

She made herself think clearly and sensibly, getting lost in the familiarity of the inspector’s tone.

‘What can I write?’ she asked once more. ‘Can I mention this?’

The policeman suddenly sounded very tired. ‘Write whatever you want,’ he said, and hung up.

And Annika was left holding the phone, staring at the list of questions she had written about Ragnwald in her notebook.

She had hardly replaced the receiver in its cradle before it rang again, an internal call that made her jump.

‘Can you come and see me?’ Anders Schyman asked.

She didn’t move, paralysed, and tried to get a grip on reality again. She let her eyes roam over the mess on her desk, the pens and notepads and newspapers and printouts and a mass of other stuff. She took hold of the edge of the desk and squeezed it hard.

It was her fault; oh God, she had persuaded the boy to talk.

She was at least partially responsible for this; her ambition had been decisive in determining the boy’s fate.

I’m so sorry , she thought. Please, forgive me .

And gradually it eased, the pressure on her lungs grew lighter, the cramp in her hands stopped, she could feel her fingers aching.

I have to talk to his mum. Not now, but later .

There was a future, tomorrow was a new day, and there would be others after that, if only she allowed there to be.

If you sit by the river long enough, you will see the bodies of your enemies float by .