Liza Marklund - Red Wolf

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

‘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.