Borderline (41 page)

‘Holy macaroni,’ William Grey said. ‘That was close.’

Halenius sat up, then helped Annika up from the floor. Her back hurt.

‘Where are we?’ she asked.

‘Liboi,’ Halenius said. ‘William has to check if the plane’s been damaged.’

‘They blew up the bus,’ she said. ‘The money’s gone. Who did it? Who blew up the bus?’

William Grey was looking at Halenius. ‘Good question,’ he said. ‘Who did?’

‘A qualified guess? The Americans.’

‘How did they know where we were going?’

‘My text messages were all forwarded to Interpol in Brussels, so they must have known. But that doesn’t really explain things. They must have had their eye on that landing strip already. The whole bus must have been primed to explode. That’s not the sort of thing you can do in a hurry.’

‘They knew,’ Annika said. ‘They knew the ransom money was there.’

‘The USA is at war against terrorism,’ Halenius said. ‘And they weren’t the ones who started it.’

William Grey got out of the plane and went to talk to a soldier with a large automatic rifle on his back. A sea of people was approaching from the town, men and children of all ages, women in hijabs and burkas. They circled the plane and soon filled the runway.

The pilot opened the door on Annika’s side of the plane. She looked at him through a veil of tears. ‘Now he’s never coming back,’ she said.

‘There’s a man here who wants to talk to you,’ he said.

The soldier with the automatic rifle walked over. People crowded behind him, wide-eyed and open-mouthed.

‘Who are you?’ the soldier asked in perfect English. ‘What is the purpose of your visit?’

Annika opened her mouth to speak, but could only sob.

He was gone. If he was still alive the kidnappers would torture him to death. They’d want revenge for the explosion and their dead leader – oh, God, she hoped he was already dead. She covered her face with her hands.

Halenius stepped up beside her. ‘We’re here for an aid project,’ he said. ‘The Swedish International Development Agency.’

People were shouting and waving – Annika could see them through a haze. It was incredibly hot. The sun was at its zenith, the light corrosive and white. She was crying helplessly, unable to stop.

‘Your papers?’ the soldier said to William Grey, who handed him the flight permits.

The soldier read intently for several minutes.

He would never be coming back to her, and not just because of the explosion. He would never have been the same as he was: the man she had married was long gone, even before the ransom money had disappeared.

Through her tears she looked towards the horizon, towards the south, into the caustic light. She thought she could make out the pillar of smoke, could smell burning.

‘Come with me,’ the soldier eventually said.

‘Can I stay?’ William Grey said. ‘I don’t really want to leave the plane.’

Halenius put his arm round her shoulders but she shrugged him off.

The whole crowd, several hundred people, followed them across the runway towards a group of cracked concrete buildings.

‘What a fuss,’ Halenius said. ‘You’d think they’d never seen a plane before.’

The man stopped and turned towards Halenius. ‘Only military planes,’ he said. ‘You’re the first private plane to land in Liboi.’

Halenius looked away.

The ground was covered with stones and rubbish, torn-off branches and car tyres. Annika stumbled several times. She could see houses in the distance, low and white, a goat, people resting in the shade, trees with leathery leaves, fences of chicken-mesh and barbed wire.

The sky was so high, endless.

The soldier led them to a fenced-off yard with a large, round bamboo hut at its centre. She staggered inside, the darkness intense after the sunlight outside. The walls were lined with battered, flowery chintz sofas, she sank on to the nearest one and put her hands over her face. She felt her body shake as tears trickled through her fingers. The air was completely still. It was a hundred degrees outside. An insect was buzzing somewhere.

Thomas was sitting in his office in the council building in Vaxholm, the sun shining on his face and broad chest. He was so young, thinner back then. She was interviewing him, and he was speaking in stuffy, bureaucratic Swedish. She interrupted and asked, ‘Do you always talk like that?’

And he replied, ‘It took me a bloody long time to learn how to do it.’

Three men in military uniforms were standing in front of her in the hut, heavy guns strapped to their waists.

‘So, you are from Sweden?’ the officer in the middle said. ‘For an aid project?’

They stood there, feet wide apart, with all the power bestowed by firearms.

‘We’re here to evaluate the collaboration between the UN and the World Food Programme,’ Halenius said, shaking hands with all three.

‘Really?’ the soldier said. ‘How?’

Annika got to her feet and walked up to him, her eyes stinging. ‘We’re here to look for my husband,’ she said, ‘and it’s your fault he’s gone.’

All eyes turned towards her. Halenius took hold of her upper arm but she pulled free.

‘And the aid project?’ the soldier said. He was wary, his tone suspicious.

‘He was kidnapped here ten days ago,’ Annika said. ‘He landed at this airstrip, just like we did, and he was promised protection and security from
you
!’ She pointed at the man in front of her and felt herself turning into an angry little animal, a vicious creature with sharp teeth. ‘
You
promised to protect him and the others, but what have you done? You found his amputated left hand, that’s what!’

She was practically screaming, and the soldiers pulled back.

‘Madam, we aren’t—’

‘He was here to help Kenya secure its borders, and what thanks did he get for it? Well? What sort of men are you?’

‘Annika …’ Halenius said.

She screamed up at the roof. There were bats up there – she couldn’t see them but she could smell them.

The ground was stony. She passed homes made of tin and branches, blankets and mattresses. The road was covered with rubbish. No cars, just donkeys and carts.

She cried against the light.

They were taking her to the police station, one of the low white buildings she had seen in the distance. The door was painted blue, and through the window she could see a tangle of electricity cables.

A man (the chief of police?) received them in his office, the size of the lift back home in Agnegatan. A fan squeaked rhythmically on the ceiling, without actually creating any draught. Several other policemen crowded in and stood round the walls.

‘You’re here for an aid project?’ the man (the police chief?) asked, gesturing towards some chairs crammed next to his desk.

Halenius sat down, but Annika remained standing. She noticed that she had stopped crying. She felt empty inside, hollow. ‘No,’ she said. ‘My husband, Thomas Samuelsson, was kidnapped near here ten days ago. The Kenyan authorities were supposed to guarantee his safety, but you failed. I wonder what you, as chief of police, have to say about that?’

The police chief stared at her. ‘You’re the wife of one of the hostages?’

‘The Swedish man, Thomas Samuelsson,’ she said. ‘It was his hand you found in a box outside here a few days ago.’

She started to feel dizzy, and grabbed the edge of the desk with both hands. The police chief wrote something on a piece of paper.

‘Can you give me a description of your husband?’

‘A description? What for?’

‘Hair colour, height, distinguishing features?’

She was panting. ‘Blond,’ she said. ‘One metre, eighty-eight centimetres tall. Blue eyes. He was wearing a pink shirt when he went missing.’

The police chief stood up and left the room, then came back with a file. ‘This arrived from Dadaab yesterday evening,’ he said. ‘A shepherd found a white man outside his
manyatta
south of Dadaab yesterday morning. He was lying on the ground and the shepherd thought he was dead. But he was alive, and the shepherd got a team from UNHCR to collect him. The man is at the medical centre in Camp Three.’

Annika’s knees gave way and she sat down beside Halenius. ‘Do you know who he is?’

‘He hasn’t been identified. The information must have been passed to UNHCR headquarters, and the Red Cross, but the refugee situation in Dadaab is chaotic and things like this take time.’

Annika closed her eyes for several seconds. ‘Why are you telling me this?’

The police chief closed the file and looked at her intently. ‘The man had been maimed – his left hand was missing. And he was wearing a pink shirt.’

Anders Schyman looked at the picture covering the centrefold with an ambiguous mixture of loss and euphoria. It showed endless rows of hospital beds and tents in the background, everything brown and grey, a visual depiction of the refugee camp’s hopelessness. The bed containing the blond man was in the middle, a woman leaning over him, putting her hand to his scorched cheek. At the bottom of the picture you could just make out the bandaged stump where the man’s left hand had been.

It was so beautiful it almost brought tears to his eyes.

In purely technical terms the picture was worthless (it was actually a still from a video recording), but it had struck home. The global rights to Bengtzon’s diary of the kidnapping had been sold to Reuters, and twenty seconds of her film had been shown on CNN.

He scratched his beard. It really was a hell of a story, the way Thomas had been left to die in a tin shack but managed to get out, then how Annika had found him, and their journey back to Sweden. They had sold a ridiculous number of papers, enough to overtake the competition. The next time the circulation figures were published, they would show that the
Evening Post
was biggest, which in turn meant that he could leave.

But this achievement wasn’t down to Annika Bengtzon alone, he reminded himself.

He closed the paper and looked at the front page:

SWEDEN’S

WORST

SERIAL

KILLER

ran the headline, next to a photograph of a smiling Gustaf Holmerud dressed up for a crayfish party.

The headline wasn’t actually true (as usual, he was on the point of thinking) because Sweden’s worst serial killer was an eighteen-year-old national service nurse from Malmö, who had killed twenty-seven old people in a hospital by feeding them corrosive disinfectant. Gustaf Holmerud had confessed to only five murders so far, but because the investigation was ongoing there was still hope of more.

He leafed through the paper.

Pages six and seven, always reserved for the biggest news stories, consisted of portrait photographs of five men and the headline: ‘CLEARED!’ The five were the husbands and boyfriends of the murdered women, and even this headline was misleading, at least in part. Oscar Andersson, one of the supposedly cleared men, had never been a suspect. The real news was that the prosecutor had initiated proceedings against Gustaf Holmerud on five counts of murder, which meant that suspicion against anyone else had been dropped.

He pushed away the paper and looked at the time.

Annika Bengtzon was late, which wasn’t like her. Schyman had always regarded her as a bit of a Fascist when it came to punctuality, which was an excellent quality in a news reporter. It didn’t matter how well you could write or what stories you managed to dig up if you couldn’t stick to a deadline.

‘Sorry,’ Annika said breathlessly, as she tumbled into his glass box. ‘The underground isn’t working, and I—’

He stopped her with a raised hand. She closed the door, dropped her bag and jacket on the floor and sank on to the visitor’s chair. Her cheeks were flushed with cold and her nose looked sore.

‘How’s Thomas?’ Schyman asked.

She caught her breath. ‘The infection has eased and the malaria’s almost gone,’ she said, putting the newspaper’s video-camera on his desk. ‘Do I need to sign anything when I hand this back?’

Schyman shook his head. ‘How’s he taking everything?’

‘Which bit? Losing his left hand? He hasn’t said anything about that yet – it probably feels fairly insignificant under the circumstances.’

He looked at Annika, her restless movements. She wasn’t remotely sentimental, which was another quality he appreciated. ‘Have you got a cold?’ he asked.

She looked surprised. ‘Why?’

‘Would you consider writing a chronicle about it?’

‘About having a cold?’

‘About Thomas, the whole situation, your lives now?’

She smiled faintly. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘For three million.’

He smiled back.

‘I saw they’d managed to locate where Thomas and the others were held captive,’ he said.

Annika nodded. ‘An abandoned
manyatta
twenty-three kilometres south of Dadaab,’ she said. ‘Thomas says they must have been driving round in circles, maybe because they didn’t know what to do with them. We’ll never know for sure.’

The Americans had announced triumphantly that they had blown up Grégoire Makuza on the day Thomas was found in the camp in Dadaab. The president had even made a short but forceful speech to the nation on the subject, but of course there was a presidential election next year.

Schyman hesitated for a few seconds, then took a deep breath. ‘Have you looked at mediatime.se recently?’

‘
The Black Widow
? Oh, yes.’

‘I don’t think you should worry about it,’ Schyman said.

She shrugged. ‘The article was written by Anne Snapphane. We’re old friends, and everything in it is true. I did kill my boyfriend, and my husband has been maimed by terrorists. One of my sources was murdered and my house was burned down by a professional assassin. But to compare me to a spider that kills everyone close to it strikes me as something of an exaggeration.’

‘I thought Media Time were going to tidy up their act, or so they claimed when they launched their new television programme,
Ronja Investigates
.’