Liza Marklund - Red Wolf

She threw off the duvet, reached for the phone and dialled Q’s direct line.

If he answers, it’s a sign , she thought, and forced the thought away at once, because what would happen if he didn’t answer, what demons would she have let loose then?

But he did answer, and he sounded tired. She sat up in bed and the angels withdrew immediately.

‘Has something happened?’ she asked nervously.

‘Are you thinking of anything in particular?’

She shut her eyes, relieved to hear his voice.

‘I don’t mean whether or not you’ve been fucked.’

‘Okay,’ Q said. ‘And what would you know about things like that?’

She tried to smile towards the phone.

‘Have you found our friend Ragnwald?’

He pretended to yawn.

‘Seriously,’ she said, yanking the phone lead. ‘You must have made some sort of progress. Kurt Sandström, what’s happened with him?’

‘He died. Definitely died.’

She leaned back hard against the pillows, feeling the pain settle down, and almost relaxed.

‘Göran Nilsson from Sattajärvi,’ she said. ‘How can someone vanish for thirty years without you or Interpol or the CIA or Mossad or anyone else getting hold of him? How is that possible?’

Q was silent for several long seconds. ‘We haven’t exactly been dragging our feet, whatever you might think.’

‘No?’ She looked up at the ceiling. ‘You knew he lived in France; how hard can it be? Surely it’s just a question of getting out the vacuum cleaner and pressing the on button?’

‘The French police have big vacuum cleaners that suck up almost every sort of particle. This one kept getting through the filter, for all those years.’

Reality clarified and her free fall stopped. She was floating weightless and secure, calm.

‘How could he do that? If he’s as dangerous as you think, if he really was an international killer who took on assassinations for loads of money, how could he possibly get away with it? Why didn’t anyone catch him?’

‘We don’t know how much money was involved, or if there was any money at all. Maybe he killed out of pure, unadulterated conviction.’

‘But how do you know it’s him?’

‘There are a number of cases where we’re convinced, and several more where we’re pretty sure, and a whole heap of bodies where we’ve got nothing but our suspicions.’

She was safe now, secure in her work.

‘But why Ragnwald? Did he leave fingerprints? Little napkins with lipstick kisses at the crime scenes?’

‘Undercover agents,’ Q said. ‘The security apparatus.’

‘Ah,’ Annika said. ‘You mean rumours and speculation.’

‘Now you’re just being silly.’

They were silent for a few moments, her chest felt warm, as did the stone.

‘But there’s something I don’t understand,’ Annika said when the silence had grown so large that she suddenly feared that she was alone on the line. ‘Someone must have had some way of communicating with him, because otherwise how would he contact his employers?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Someone must have hired him for all those messy jobs. How did they get hold of him?’

The commissioner was quiet for a moment.

‘Off the record,’ he said, and she swivelled her head, ‘through ETA. For years the Spanish police have suspected a doctor in Bilbao of being his go-between, but they’ve never had enough evidence to charge him. This is sensitive stuff in the Basque Country. If their colleagues start openly harassing and accusing decent members of the civilian population, the whole region could ignite. The doctor in question is an unimpeachable family man, a professional with his own practice specializing in internal medicine.’

‘Couldn’t you have hired Ragnwald for something yourselves?’ Annika asked. ‘Lured him into a trap?’

A moment of hesitation.

‘Attempts may have been made, but I know nothing about that.’

So that’s where the boundary of his openness was. She decided not to press him, and rubbed her feet together, feeling the circulation coming back again.

‘But if he wasn’t in France, where was he?’

‘He most likely spent a lot of time in France,’ Q said, back on solid ground again, ‘but he didn’t live there. We don’t think he settled anywhere.’

‘So he’s spent thirty years camping?’

A short, weary sigh. ‘We believe he pretended to be from north Africa,’ Q said, ‘as part of the group of illegal immigrants who drift around the countryside looking for seasonal work.’

‘A farm labourer?’ Annika said.

‘They move from place to place, from country to country, wherever the crops are ready to harvest.’

Annika nodded unconsciously. ‘And no one says anything about anyone else,’ she said.

‘Total loyalty,’ Q said. ‘No one cares if someone disappears for a few weeks, or a few months, or for ever.’

‘And aren’t surprised if you turn up again,’ Annika filled in.

‘No questions,’ Q said.

‘Cash in hand at the end of the day.’

‘No bank accounts,’ Q said.

‘No rent to pay, no family to provide for.’

‘A lot of the seasonal labourers have families,’ Q said. ‘Some of them provide for their extended family as well, but not our Ragnwald.’

‘He picks grapes and oranges and shoots politicians in his spare time.’

‘When he’s not working in the docks or mines or somewhere else where he can be invisible and, in practical terms, unpaid.’

They were silent for a while.

‘But why haven’t you got him if he’s back in Sweden now?’

Q gave a deep sigh. ‘It’s not as easy as you seem to think,’ he said. ‘Killers who kill with no apparent motive are the hardest to catch. Take the Laser Man, he shot ten randomly chosen people in Stockholm over the course of a year and a half before he was caught, and he lived in the middle of the city, had his own car, said hello to his neighbours on the stairs. In other words he was a rank amateur. The man we’re dealing with now has killed four people that we know of. There’s nothing to connect them apart from the boy witnessing the first murder. The methods are completely different, Ekland was run over, the boy’s throat was cut, Sandström was shot. No fingerprints, the fibres we found don’t match from one crime scene to the next.’

‘That could just mean he changed his clothes and wore gloves.’

‘Exactly,’ Q said.

‘No witnesses?’

‘The best witness, the boy, is dead. Nothing else had contributed anything significant at all.’

Annika listened back to these latest comments in her mind.

‘Four,’ she said. ‘You said four.’

Q was blank. ‘What?’

‘There’s been another murder,’ she said, sitting up in bed without thinking. ‘He’s done it again. Who?’

‘You must have misheard me. I said three.’

‘Rubbish,’ Annika said. ‘Someone’s been killed in the last couple of days and another Mao quote has been sent to the relatives. Either you tell me exactly what’s happened or I start ringing round.’

He laughed. ‘An empty threat. If someone’s been killed the media would already be circling like vultures over the story.’

She responded to his laughter with a snort. ‘That’s crap. Not if it’s a woman who’s been killed. Her husband has probably already been arrested, and it would surprise me if even the local paper gave it their standard couple of lines.’

‘Standard?’

‘Family quarrel ends in tragedy. Not nice, not interesting, and impossible to write about. Tell me what you know and we can come to an arrangement.’

The silence was thick with thought for several seconds.

‘I’ve said it before,’ he said eventually. ‘You’re slightly creepy. How the hell could you know that?’