Liza Marklund - Red Wolf

‘Mummy, she’s got Tiger! Make her give him back!’

A short-circuit in Annika’s brain meant that she breathed enough air for a primal scream. She felt the colour in her face rise, and looked at Kalle with crazed eyes.

‘Out!’ she whispered. ‘Now!’

The boy looked at her in horror, then turned and ran, leaving the door wide open behind him.

‘Mummy says you have to give Tiger to me,’ she heard him shout. ‘Now!’

‘Nilsson,’ Q said. ‘His name is Göran Nilsson. Son of a Læstadian minister from Sattajärvi in Norrbotten, born October nineteen forty-eight. Moved to Uppsala to study theology autumn nineteen sixty-seven, back in Luleå a year or so later, worked in cathedral administration, vanished on the eighteenth of November nineteen sixty-nine, and hasn’t been seen under his true identity since then.’

Annika was writing so hard that her wrist hurt, hoping she would be able to decipher her scribbles.

‘Læstadian?’

‘Læstadianism is a religious movement in Norrbotten, some aspects of which are incredibly strict. No curtains, no television, no birth control.’

‘Do you know why he’s called Ragnwald?’

‘That was his codename in the Maoist groups in Luleå in the late sixties. He kept it as his stage name when he became a professional killer, but his ETA identity is probably French. He’s most likely been living in a village in the Pyrenees, on the French side, and moving across the border pretty much at will.’

Annika could hear the children fighting it out in the television room.

‘So he really did become a professional killer? Someone like Léon?’

‘No, people like that don’t exist outside Luc Besson films, but we know he was involved in a few assassinations for money. I have to go, and it sounds like you need to sort things out there.’

‘They’re fighting over a stuffed tiger,’ Annika said.

‘O man, your legacy shall be violence,’ Q said, and hung up.

She watched the end of Pippi with the children, one on each knee, then brushed their teeth and read two chapters from the Bullerby books out loud to them. They sang three songs from the Swedish Songbook together, then went out like lights. She was dizzy with tiredness when she finally sat down to write. The letters floated across the screen, she couldn’t seem to focus, and was struck by an intense sense of falling, a short second of complete helplessness.

She fled from the screen into the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face, then went into the kitchen and boiled some water, measured four spoons of coffee into the cafetière, pouring the water on as it boiled, and forcing the metal filter down hard. She took the coffee and a mug from the Federation of Local Councils and sat down at the computer again.

Empty. She had nothing left.

She picked up the phone and called Jansson.

‘I can’t pull it together,’ she said. ‘It isn’t working.’

‘You’ll get it together.’ Jansson’s voice was alive with the adrenalin of the news torrent. ‘I need you now. We can help each other out here. Where have you got stuck?’

‘Before I’ve even started.’

‘Take it from scratch. One. There’s a serial killer on the loose, that’s the angle for the front page. Start with the summary, describe the deaths in Norrland, the quotes in the letters.’

‘I’m not allowed to,’ she said, and typed, ‘serial killer, describe Luleå’.

‘Well, just balance the information as best you can. Two. Bring in the murder of the Östhammar politician, that’s new and we’ve got an exclusive on that. The wife’s story, police work. Was it murder?’

‘Yep.’

‘Good. Three. Then you link Östhammar to Luleå and describe the police’s desperate search for the killer. You’ve got the front page, six, seven, eight, nine; and the centrefold for your old terrorist – we’ve already put him in.’

She made no response, just sat there in silence listening to the noises behind the editor’s voice, a newsreader speaking on the television, a phone ringing, the tapping of a keyboard. The press – a symphony of efficiency and cynicism.

She could see Gunnel Sandström in front of her, her wine-coloured cardigan and soft cheeks, and suddenly felt a huge, infinite sense of powerlessness.

‘Okay,’ she whispered.

‘Don’t worry about pictures,’ Jansson said. ‘We’ll fix that here. There was a bit of fuss about the fact that you went to Östhammar without a photographer, but I explained that you went on a hunch and had no idea you were going to get a hole-in-one. We’ve sorted pictures of the farm, the old girl didn’t want to be in them, but we’ve got the boy’s mother and the editor-in-chief of the Norrland News as next-of-kin. That reporter wasn’t much of a family man, if I’ve got that right?’

‘That’s right,’ Annika said quietly.

‘Any chance of a shot of the letters?’

‘Tonight? Difficult. But it wouldn’t be too hard to mock something up, you’ve got all the details.’

‘Pelle!’ Jansson yelled in the direction of the picture desk. ‘Studio shot of some letters, right away.’

‘Ordinary “Sverige” envelopes,’ Annika said, ‘stamps with an ice-hockey player on. The contents are just lined A4 pages from a pad, with slightly ragged edges like when you can’t be bothered to use the perforations, text written in ballpoint, every other line, filling up about half the page.’

‘Anything else?’

‘For God’s sake, make sure you say that the picture’s a mock-up.’

‘Yeah, yeah. When do we get your stuff?’

She looked at the time, on solid ground again.

‘When do you want it?’

Thomas emerged from the pitch-black interior of the jazz club onto the illuminated street, his legs soft with beer and his brain vibrating with music. He wasn’t really into jazz, was more of a Beatles man, but the band tonight were good, talented, tuneful, and had real feeling in their music.

Behind him he heard Sophia’s ringing laughter, her response to something the guy in the cloakroom had said. She knew everyone there, was a real regular, which is how they got the best table. He let the door swing shut, buttoned his coat and turned his back to the wind as he waited for her. The noise of the city had no rhythm, it sounded out of tune after the soft jazz. He looked up at the neon lights of the signs above him, feeling his skin reflecting pink and green and blue, fumes in his hair.

She was so at ease with life, so happy – her laughter ran like a silvery spring stream over the dark floor of the club, over the heavy conference table. She was ambitious and dutiful and quietly spoken and grateful for what life gave her. With her he felt happy, satisfied. She respected him, listened to him, took him seriously. He never had to justify who he was, she never moaned or nagged, she seemed genuinely interested when he talked about his parents and childhood in Vaxholm. And she sailed as well; her family had a place on Möja.

He turned round to see her step out of the darkness and take a few tentative moves down the steps in her neat little boots and tight skirt.

‘There’s going to be a jam on Friday,’ Sophia said. ‘That gets massive sometimes. Once I was here until half six the next morning. It was brilliant.’

He smiled into her warm eyes, sucked into the sheer blueness of them. She stood in front of him and pulled up her shoulders, put her feet close together and burrowed her hands deep into her coat pockets, smiling up at his face.

‘Are you cold?’ he asked, noticing that his mouth was completely dry.

She carried on smiling as she shook her head. ‘Not at all,’ she said. ‘I’m perfectly warm.’