Liza Marklund - Red Wolf

‘Milk and sugar?’

Annika shook her head, suddenly unable to speak.

What right did she have to march into other people’s tragedies?

She picked up her spoon and unconsciously clinked it against the porcelain cup.

‘Margit was a good person,’ Thord Axelsson said, looking out of the window. ‘She meant well, but she carried awful secrets. That’s why she died.’

He took two lumps of sugar from the bowl and dropped them into his cup with a plop. Then he folded his arms on the edge of the table and looked out at the street again.

‘I’ve been doing some thinking since yesterday,’ he said without looking at Annika. ‘I want to talk about what happened, but I don’t want to sully Margit’s memory.’

She nodded, still mute, and reached for the notepad in her bag. She glanced briefly at the clean window-panes and neatly wiped orange kitchen cupboards, suddenly aware that there was a smell of antiseptic cleaning fluid.

‘How did you meet, you and Margit?’

The man looked up at the ceiling and sat quite still for a few moments, then looked over at the stove.

‘She came up to me in the City Pub in Luleå. It was a Saturday night in the spring of seventy-five. I was there with some friends from college; she was standing next to us at the bar and heard me say that I worked in the air force.’

He seemed to lose himself in history for a moment, his eyes roaming over some inner landscape.

‘She spoke first,’ he said. ‘Interested, almost inquisitive.’

He looked into Annika’s eyes, giving her a small, embarrassed smile.

‘I was flattered,’ he said, ‘she was a good-looking girl. And smart. I liked her from the start.’

Annika smiled back. ‘Was she living in Luleå then?’

‘On Lövskatan. She was at teacher training college, the nursery course. She wanted to work with children, kept saying they were the future. Doing something creative was important to her even back then, both in her art and in her life…’

He put his hand in front of his mouth and looked out at the street again.

‘Margit was a serious person,’ he said. ‘Responsible, loyal. I was lucky.’

Silence spread through the kitchen, she could hear a clock tick. The cold was making the walls creak.

‘What was the secret she carried?’ Annika eventually asked.

He turned his gaze towards her.

‘The Beasts,’ he said, with sudden strength in his voice. ‘Margit was an active member of a number of groups and associations even as a teenager, one of Norrbotten’s best athletes in the early sixties. She joined the Communist Party at an early age.’

Athletics , Annika thought, remembering the cutting from the Norrland News .

‘Did she know Karina Björnlund?’

‘They’re cousins,’ he said. ‘How did you know that?’

Annika started slightly, and looked down to hide it.

‘Karina Björnlund was an athlete, too,’ she said. ‘So they were close?’

‘Margit was two years older; she was a bit like a big sister to Karina. She was the one who got Karina started on athletics. But Margit gave up after that, of course.’

‘Why?’

‘She went into politics. And Karina followed her into that as well…’

Annika waited for the man to go on, but when nothing came she tried to help him along.

‘So what about the Beasts?’

‘They were a breakaway group,’ Thord Axelsson said, rubbing his forehead. ‘They saw themselves as an offshoot of the main organization, the Chinese Communist Party. They moved beyond conventional Maoism and went the whole hog, or at least that was how they saw it themselves.’

‘And they had codenames?’ Annika said.

He nodded and stirred his coffee.

‘Not real names but proper codenames, animal names. Margit’s was Barking Dog. She was really upset about that. The others got political names, but she got a personal one. The men in the group thought she asked too many questions, always debating and criticizing.’

Everything in the kitchen was very quiet. The cold held the house in a vice-like grip, the smell of disinfectant was suddenly very noticeable.

‘What did the Beasts do that was so bad?’ Annika asked.

Thord got up, went over to the sink and filled a glass with water, then held it without drinking.

‘She never got over it,’ he said. ‘It lay like a shadow over us all these years.’

He put the glass on the worktop and leaned against the dishwasher.

‘Margit only spoke about it once, but I remember every word.’

Thord Axelsson suddenly shrank into himself, and went on in a quiet, monotonous voice.

‘It was the middle of November. Not too cold, just a bit of snow on the ground. They got in through the back, from Lulviken, by the river. There’s nothing but summer cottages there, so there was no one around.’

He looked up at Annika with empty eyes, his arms hanging by his sides.

‘Margit had never been inside the base before, but one of the boys knew it well. They told her not to go near the hangars, so as not to wake the dogs, they were really vicious creatures.’

She was taking notes discreetly.

‘They ran across the heath for a kilometre or so. The boys waited in a clump of trees while she went closer. There was a plane on the tarmac outside the workshop. She took off the safety seal and set off a flare, and threw it into the container of spent fuel behind the plane.’

The air was heavy with antiseptic disinfectant, catching in Annika’s nose.

‘As she watched it burning she saw two conscripts approaching. She ran towards the south fence and they shouted after her. She threw herself behind the workshop. She only just made it before the explosion.’

Annika looked down at her notes.

It wasn’t Karina Björnlund. She had been wrong.

‘One of the conscripts went up like a torch. He just screamed and screamed until he finally collapsed.’

Thord Axelsson closed his eyes.

‘Margit had no memory of how she got out of the base. Afterwards they dissolved the group. They never met again.’

He walked back to the table, slumping onto his chair with his hands over his face, reliving something he had never experienced but which had coloured his whole life.

Annika tried to fit the pieces together in her head, but failed.

‘Why did the plane explode?’ she asked gently.

The man looked up and let his arms drop to the table.

‘Have you ever noticed that missile that hangs beneath a fighter-jet?’

She shook her head.

‘It looks like a moon-rocket designed by Disney. It isn’t actually a missile, but an extra tank of fuel. The skin is thin; the explosion in the fuel-container pierced a hole in it.’

‘But why was the plane sitting on the tarmac with a full tank?’

‘Fighters are always fully tanked when they’re in the hangars, it’s safer that way. The gases that build up in an empty tank are more dangerous than fuel. The lad… he was standing below the tank when the extra fuel ignited.’

The wooden walls of the house creaked and groaned. Despair hung in dark clouds between the kitchen cupboards and the pine lamps. She felt an intense desire to flee, to run away, home to the children, to kiss them and embrace their cosy chubbiness, home to Thomas, to love him with all of her body and all of her mind.

‘Who else was there?’ she asked.

Thord Axelsson’s face was completely grey. He seemed on the point of fainting.

‘The Yellow Dragon and the Black Panther,’ he said hoarsely.

‘The Dragon was the leader, Göran Nilsson from Sattajärvi,’ Annika said, and something deep, unfathomable, flickered across the man’s face. ‘Who was the other one?’

‘Don’t know,’ he said. ‘Karina was the Red Wolf, but I don’t know who the boys were in real life.’