Liza Marklund - Red Wolf

‘How many of them were there?’

He rubbed his face. ‘I mentioned the Black Panther. The Lion of Freedom was another one, the White Tiger, and the Dragon of course. Yes, that was it. Four men, two girls.’

Annika wrote down the names, noticing how ridiculous the codenames were, but unable to smile, not even internally.

‘Karina wasn’t with them that night?’

‘She’d finished with Ragnwald, and wanted out of the group. Margit was very angry with her, thought she was betraying them. Loyalty was always very important to Margit.’

A clock chimed somewhere in the living room. Annika thought about the marriage announcement in the Norrland News . Why would you put that in if you weren’t going to get married?

She looked at the man thoughtfully, thinking about the huge burden the pair had carried together, and which was now his alone.

‘How long was it before Margit told you all this?’ she asked quietly.

‘When she got pregnant,’ Thord Axelsson said. ‘It was an accident, she’d forgotten to take the pill, but when it happened we were both delighted. But one evening she was lying there crying when I got home, and she just couldn’t stop. It took all evening to get her to tell me what it was. She thought I was going to hand her in to the police. Leave her and the child.’

He fell silent.

‘But you didn’t,’ Annika confirmed.

‘Hanna did her national service at F21,’ Thord said. ‘She’s an officer in the reserves; she’s studying nuclear physics at Uppsala.’

‘And your other daughter?’

‘Emma lives on the same corridor as Hanna; she’s doing a master’s in politics.’

‘You’ve done well,’ Annika said, honestly.

He looked through the window. ‘Yes. But the Beasts have always been with us. Margit thought about what she’d done every day. She never escaped it.’

‘Nor you,’ Annika said. ‘You went to work every day knowing what had happened.’

He merely nodded.

‘Why didn’t she tell the police?’ Annika said. ‘Wouldn’t that have been better, not having to deal with it alone?’

The man stood up. ‘If only she could have,’ he said with his back to Annika. ‘When the Dragon disappeared Margit got a package in the post. There was a finger in it, a human finger, from a small child, and a warning.’

Annika felt herself heating up, could feel the blood drain from her head, thought she was about to faint.

‘No one ever spoke about the Beasts, not ever. Margit heard nothing from them for all those years, not until this October.’

‘Then what happened?’ Annika whispered.

‘She got the call, the symbol of the yellow dragon, summoning her to their meeting place.’

Annika could see before her the strange drawing the Minister of Culture had received, in that envelope posted in France.

‘A meeting?’ she said. ‘When?’

Thord Axelsson shook his head and walked over to the sink, picked up a glass but did nothing with it.

‘Then they contacted her, one of them called her at work, asking if she was going to the meeting to celebrate the return of the Dragon. She told them to go to hell, said they’d ruined her life, and that she loathed the fact that she’d ever met them.’

His shoulders were shaking.

‘She didn’t hear from them again.’

Annika was struggling against a growing, sucking feeling of nausea. She sat for a long while, swallowing, watching the man weep, holding the glass to his forehead.

‘I want them caught,’ he said eventually, turning back to Annika, his face red and unlike itself. He sat down heavily on his chair again, and sat still for a while as the clock ticked and the antiseptic smell spread throughout Annika’s body.

‘Margit never got rid of her guilt,’ he said. ‘She paid for it all through her life. I can’t go on like this any more.’

‘Have you told the police now?’

He shook his head. ‘But I’m going to,’ he said. ‘As soon as the Dragon’s been caught and the girls are safe.’

‘What do you want me to do?’ she asked.

He looked at her blankly. ‘I don’t know. I just wanted to tell someone.’

He looked out through the window and stiffened. ‘Hanna and Emma are coming,’ he said. ‘You have to go.’

Annika stood up without thinking, stuffing her pad and pen in her bag and hurrying out into the hall, where she pulled her jacket from the hanger and tugged it on. She went back into the kitchen, and saw the man sitting there motionless, his eyes blank.

‘Thank you,’ she said quietly.

He looked at her and tried to smile.

‘By the way,’ she said. ‘Did Margit have very small feet?’

‘Size thirty-six,’ he said.

She left him by the pine table in the scrubbed kitchen with the untouched cups of coffee gradually cooling.

The car had had time to get completely cold, so she kept her polar jacket on. For one panicky moment she thought the engine wasn’t going to start, that she was going to freeze in her hire-car among the identical seventies houses, for ever held fast in the little white lies of the Axelsson family.

She turned the key so hard that the metal almost snapped. The engine started with a hesitant rattle, and as she exhaled she saw her breath freeze to ice on the inside of the windscreen. She found reverse as the gearbox protested and backed into the street, hoping she wasn’t going to hit anything. She hadn’t scraped the rear window.

The two daughters passed close to her window. She attempted a smile and waved feebly as they looked curiously at her.

The rubber of the tyres creaked on the icy road as she rolled towards town. The nausea persisted, the smell of disinfectant still in her nostrils, the thoughts bouncing around her head and chest.

Was Thord Axelsson telling the truth? Was he exaggerating? Was he hiding anything?

She drove past the secondary school and the church and Åhléns department store, and was out of the town centre before she even realized she was in it.

He wasn’t glossing over his wife’s deeds, Annika thought, nor was he making excuses for her. On the contrary, he had stated soberly that she had set fire to the aviation fuel and caused the plane to explode. He hadn’t even tried to present it as an accident.

If he had wanted to lie, he would have done so then.

The Beasts , she thought. The Yellow Dragon, ha! What a stupid idea. What a load of crap! The Lion of Freedom, the Barking Dog, the Red Wolf, the Black Panther, the White Tiger .

Where are you now? she thought as she pulled out onto the deserted motorway again, heading towards Luleå.

The Yellow Dragon, Göran Nilsson, professional hitman back on home soil. The Barking Dog, Margit Axelsson, murdered nursery schoolteacher. The Red Wolf, Karina Björnlund, Minister of Culture making panicky last-minute changes to government proposals.

And the rest of you? Three middle-aged Swedish men, where have you hidden yourselves away? How much have you forgotten?

She drove past the exit to Norrfjärden, feeling the cold whirling round her feet. The temperature had fallen to minus twenty-nine degrees; the sun was already going down, spreading a pale yellow light on the horizon. It was one thirty in the afternoon.

A child’s finger , she thought. Could that really have happened?

She swallowed, had to open the window for a few seconds to get some fresh air. Thord hadn’t said what the accompanying warning had said, but no one had blabbed about the Beasts, not ever.

She believed the finger had really existed.

The attack itself, three people involved, Margit and Göran and one other man. Did that make sense?