Liza Marklund: Red Wolf

She closed her eyes, shutting herself off. She pulled the shutter down against the hiss of the plane’s air-conditioning, the pain in her ribs, the captain’s reports on the temperature outside the cabin and the weather in Luleå. Let herself be carried at a thousand kilometres an hour, concentrating on the pressure of her clothes against her body. She felt dizzy, shaky. Loud noises had begun to startle her in a way she had never experienced before. Open spaces had become impossibly large; cramped spaces made her feel suffocated. Her sense of spatial awareness was warped, so that she had difficulty judging distances. She was always covered in bruises from where she had walked into things, furniture and walls, cars and the edge of pavements. Sometimes the air seemed to vanish around her. Other people used it all up, leaving nothing for her.

But it wasn’t dangerous, she knew that. She just had to wait until it passed and the sounds came back and colours became normal again. It wasn’t dangerous. Wasn’t dangerous .

She suppressed the thought, letting herself float away, feeling her chin drop, and suddenly the angels were there.

Fear made her sit bolt upright in her chair. She hit the folding table, spilling orange juice against the wall of the cabin. The racing of her heart filled her head, shutting out all other sound. The fat man was saying something to her, but she couldn’t make out what.

Nothing scared her as much as the sound of the angels singing.

She didn’t mind as long as they kept to her dreams. The voices sang to her at night, chanting, comforting, meaningless words with an indefinable beauty. Nowadays they sometimes carried on after she woke up, which made her mad with anxiety.

She shook her head, cleared her throat, rubbed her eyes, and checked that she hadn’t got orange juice on her laptop.

As the plane broke through the clouds on its final approach it was surrounded by swirling ice. Through the snowstorm she caught a glimpse of the half-frozen grey of the Gulf of Bothnia, interrupted by dark-grey islands.

The landing was uncomfortably rough, the wind tugging at the plane.

She was last out of the plane, restlessly shuffling her feet as the fat man heaved himself out of his seat, got his luggage from the overhead compartment and struggled to pull on his coat. She ran past him on the way out and noted with some satisfaction that he ended up behind her in the queue for hire-cars.

Key in hand, she hurried past the crowd of taxi-drivers by the exit, a cluster of dark uniforms that laughed, shamelessly evaluating passers-by.

The cold shocked her as she walked out of the terminal building. She gasped for air, pulling her bag higher on her shoulder. The lines of dark-blue taxis sparked a memory of a previous visit here with her closest friend Anne Snapphane, on the way to Piteå. That must have been almost ten years ago. God, time flies .

The car park was down to the right, beyond the bus-stops. Her gloveless hand holding the laptop was soon ice-cold. The sound her feet made on the ice reminded her of broken glass, making her cautious. As she moved forward, she left doubt and fear behind her. She was on her way, she had a purpose.

The car was at the end of the row. She cleared the snow from the number-plate to make sure it was the right one.

Dusk was falling incredibly slowly, covering the daylight that had never really arrived. The snowfall was blurring the outline of the stunted pines that edged the car park. She leaned forward, peering through the windscreen.

Luleå, Luleå, which way was Luleå?

In the middle of a long bridge heading into town the snow suddenly eased, revealing the frozen river beneath her. The structure of the bridge rose and sank around her in soft waves as the car rolled onward. The town gradually crept out of the snowstorm, and off to the right dark industrial skeletons rose towards the sky.

The steelworks and ore harbour , she thought.

Her reaction as the buildings began to surround her was immediate and violent, a déjà vu from childhood. Luleå was like an arctic version of Katrineholm – only colder, greyer, lonelier. The buildings were low, in varying colours, built of cement blocks, steel and brick panels. The streets were wide, the traffic thin. The City Hotel was easy to find, on the main street next to the Town Hall. There were free parking spaces outside the entrance, she noted with surprise.

Her room had a view of the Norrbotten Theatre and Stadsviken, a strangely colourless picture in which the leaden, grey water of the river swallowed any light. She turned her back on the window, and rested the laptop against the bathroom door, taking her toothbrush and spare clothes out of her bag. Then she sat down at the desk and used the hotel phone to call the Norrland News . It took almost two minutes before a sullen female voice answered.

‘Could I speak to Benny Ekland please?’ Annika said, looking back out of the window. It was completely dark now. She listened to the mute hum of the line for several seconds.

‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Is Benny Ekland there? Hello?’

‘Hello?’ the woman said quietly.

‘My name’s Annika Bengtzon. I’m meeting Benny Ekland this week,’ Annika added, getting up and hunting through her bag for a pen.

‘So you haven’t heard?’ the woman said.

‘What?’ Annika said, taking out her notes.

‘Benny’s dead. We only found out this morning.’

At first she almost laughed with the shock, then realized that it wasn’t funny and got angry instead. ‘What do you mean?’

‘We don’t really know what happened,’ the woman gulped. ‘Only that there was some sort of accident. Everyone on the paper’s just shocked.’

Annika stood there, her notes in one hand, the phone and pen in the other, staring at her own reflection in the window. She felt like she was floating.

‘Hello?’ the woman said. ‘Would you like to talk to anyone else?’

‘I… I’m sorry,’ Annika said, swallowing. ‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know,’ the woman said, now almost in tears. ‘I have to take another call now, then I’m done for the day. It’s been a terrible day, a terrible day…’

Silence on the line again. Annika hung up, sat down on the bed and fought a sudden feeling of nausea. She saw that there was a local telephone directory under one of the bedside tables. She pulled it out, found the number for the police, dialled, and ended up talking to the station.

‘Ah, the journalist,’ the duty officer said when she asked what had happened to Benny Ekland. ‘It was out in Svartöstaden somewhere. You can talk to Suup in crime.’

She waited, one hand over her eyes, as he transferred her, listening to the organic noises of the hotel: water rattling through a pipe in the wall, a rumbling ventilator outside, sexual groans from the TV in a neighbouring room.

Inspector Suup in the criminal investigation department sounded like he had reached the age and experience where very few things actually shook him.

‘A bad business,’ he said with a deep sigh. ‘I must have spoken to Ekland every day for the past twenty years. He was always on the phone, like a dog with a bone. There was always something he wanted to know more about, something he had to check but which we really couldn’t tell him, and of course he knew that. “Listen, Suup,” he used to say, “I can’t make sense of this, what about this, or that, what the hell do you lot spend your time doing, unless you’ve got your thumbs rammed up your backsides…”’ The inspector gave a quiet, sad little laugh.

Annika stroked her forehead, hearing the German porn-stars faking their noisy orgasms on the other side of the wall, and waited for the man to go on.