Liza Marklund - Red Wolf

Her ski-boots were in a Co-op bag next to Thomas’s old college textbooks. Her polar jacket was dusty and dirty. It had been hanging abandoned here since Sven died. She hadn’t needed it – those endless evenings standing round freezing ice hockey rinks were over for good.

She took the boots and jacket outside and brushed them off, then carried them up to the flat. She hung the jacket up and studied it critically. It was really hideous, but it was going to be even colder in Piteå than it was in Stockholm.

‘When will you be home?’

She turned and saw Thomas standing in the bedroom door pulling on his underwear.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Do you want to know when to have dinner ready?’

He turned away and walked into the kitchen.

She suddenly felt that she couldn’t stay a moment longer. She pulled on the polar jacket, laced the ski-boots and checked that she had her keys, purse, gloves and hat in her bag. She closed the door soundlessly and flew down the stairs, away from the children, leaving them behind her in the warmth, her whole chest thick with loss.

Little darlings, I shall always be with you, nothing bad will get to you.

She walked along newly woken streets towards the Arlanda Express, and took a packed train out to the airport.

There were still two hours before the plane took off. She tried drinking coffee and reading yesterday’s evening papers, but restlessness tore at her stomach until the words and the caffeine felt like they were suffocating her. She gave up and watched the wings being de-iced. She’d made up her mind not to think about the Federation of County Council middle-managers planning the day’s work, and preparing to deal with a rapidly developing crisis involving one of their employees.

As the plane moved away from the ground, her sense of being lost gradually faded. It wasn’t quite full; she had an empty seat next to her, and picked up a copy of the Norrland News that had been left by a previous passenger.

She watched the ground glistening, frozen and rock-hard beneath them, further away with every passing second.

She turned her attention to the paper and forced herself to look through it.

The inhabitants of Karlsvik were demanding more evening buses. A missing three-year-old had been found in the forest outside Risvik with the help of a helicopter with thermal imaging equipment, and everyone was happy and grateful and the police had done a wonderful job. There was the threat of a taxi strike at Kallax Airport. Luleå Hockey had lost at home in the Dolphin Stadium, 2-5 against Djurgården, served them right.

She lowered the paper and leaned her head back, shutting her eyes.

She must have dozed off, because the next moment the wheels were hitting the ice and tarmac at the Arctic Circle. She looked at her watch, almost eleven, and stretched her back, looking out of the plane window. Pale dawn was hanging over the frozen heath landscape.

As she walked through the Arrivals hall she felt empty and naked. It took a few seconds before she realized what was missing: the horde of chattering taxi-drivers by the exit.

She went over to the hire-car counter and picked up her keys.

‘The engine warmer and inside heater are plugged in,’ the young man said, smiling flirtatiously. ‘Take the cable with you. You’ll need it.’

She looked down at the floor and muttered her thanks.

The cold outside was dry as dust and utterly paralysing. It hit her like a fist. Shocked, she gasped for breath and tried to defend herself against the sharp little knives she was breathing in. The illuminated figures above the door said it was minus twenty-eight degrees.

The car was a silver-grey Volvo, anchored to an electricity post with a thick cable. Without electric engine-warmers no car would ever start in this sort of cold.

She took off her polar jacket and threw it in the back seat.

Inside the car it was stuffy and warm thanks to the heater on the passenger side. She started to sweat immediately in all her thermals. The engine started the first time, but the power-steering and wheels were sluggish and hesitant.

She passed the fighter-plane that loomed over the entrance to the airport, and took the left exit from the roundabout instead of the right, towards Piteå instead of Luleå. She peered through the windscreen to see if she recognized anything. She had taken a taxi from the airport with Anne Snapphane ten years ago.

The heathland disappeared behind her and she drove into what must have been fertile agricultural land. Large farms perched on the edge of the forest, oblong timber buildings, exuding wealth and influence. To her surprise she emerged onto a wide motorway, she didn’t remember that at all. Her surprise only grew as the motorway went on and on without her seeing a single other vehicle on the road. The feeling of surreal desolation took a stranglehold on her neck; she had to struggle to breathe normally. Was this some sort of joke? Had reality slid away from her? Was this the road to hell?

Forest flew by on both sides, short, thin pine trees with frozen crowns. The cold made the low sunlight shimmer, just like heat can. She took a tighter grip on the steering wheel and hunched forward.

Maybe your perspective changed at the Arctic Circle. Maybe up was down, right was left. In which case it would be entirely logical to build a motorway through arctic forest where no one lived.

After two wrong turns, one where she discovered she was on her way to Haparanda and the Finnish border, she reached the centre of Piteå. The town was silent, low-built. It reminded her of Sköldinge, a village between Katrineholm and Flen, just colder and barer. The main difference was the central thoroughfare, three times broader than even Sveavägen in Stockholm.

Margit and Thord Axelsson’s home was in Pitholm, the same place where Anne Snapphane’s parents lived. She rolled carefully along gritted roads until she reached the turning Thord had described to her.

The detached house was one of a row of confusingly identical properties built in the seventies, when the lending rates dictated for home-building by the state led to a previously unknown form of construction – it was the decade of the over-sized pitched roof.

She parked the hire-car behind a green Toyota Corolla identical to the one Thomas had. She got out of the Volvo, pulled on her jacket and was struck for a dizzying moment by the notion that she actually lived here, that the children were at university and she worked on the Norrland News . She took shallow breaths of the frozen air, looking up at the peak of the roof that was casting a great shadow across the street.

Anne Snapphane had grown up just a few hundred metres away, and she would rather die than move back, but it was peaceful here.

‘Annika Bengtzon?’

A man with a shock of steel-grey hair had opened the door slightly, his head peering through the gap. ‘Come in,’ he said, ‘before you freeze to death.’

She walked up to the porch, stamped her feet and shook his hand.

‘Thord?’

The look in his eyes was dark and intelligent, the set of his mouth sad and watchful.

Annika stepped into a hall with a dark-green patterned plastic mat, circa 1976, from the look of it. Thord Axelsson took her heavy jacket and hung it on a hanger below the hat-rack.

‘I’ve made some coffee,’ he said, walking ahead of her into the kitchen.

The pine table was set with woven mats and flowery cups and saucers, a birch-bark basket containing at least four different sorts of biscuit.

‘Oh, that looks good,’ Annika said politely as she settled onto a chair and put her bag down beside her.

‘Margit likes baking,’ Thord said, biting off the sentence and staring down into his cup. Then he took a deep breath through his nose, clenched his jaw and reached for the thermos he had already filled.