Red Wolf: A Novel (21 page)

Tall, thin, with long, strawberry-blond hair in soft curls over one shoulder. A Palestinian shawl.

Anne blinked.

So ridiculously medieval, wearing a Palestinian shawl.

The woman stiffened when she saw Anne, her eyes taking on a look of slight panic.

‘I . . .’ she began, collecting herself. ‘My name’s Sylvia, I’m Sylvia.’

She took a few steps forward, and held out her hand.

Anne stared at the woman, nausea growing like a tornado in her stomach, unable to lift her hand or return the greeting.

‘What are you doing here?’ she said. The words sounded brittle and echoey to her own ears.

Mehmet’s new woman, his fiancée, his future wife, the woman who was carrying his new child, she was standing in front of her looking confused and pretty terrified.

‘I . . . was going to pick Miranda up, but she said that you . . .’

‘It’s my week,’ Anne said, unable to understand why her voice was coming from so far away. ‘Why are you here?’

Sylvia Pregnant Fiancée ran her tongue over her lips and Anne noticed they were sensual, she was beautiful. Sylvia was much more beautiful than she was. Jealousy and spite pricked her eyes like knives, warping her sight. She was beside herself with spite and humiliation and realized at that very moment that she had lost, and if she allowed herself to look destroyed then she would be. She would have to construct some self-respect for herself.

‘I must have got it wrong,’ Sylvia said. ‘I thought I was supposed to be collecting her today. I thought it was my day.’

‘Do you start all your sentences with “I”?’ Anne said, suddenly able to move again, her legs manoeuvring past Sylvia Beautiful Pregnant Fiancée and into the kitchen to a yell of ‘Mummy!’

Miranda flew into her arms, holding an apple-core in one hand, and buried her sticky mouth in her hair.

‘Darling,’ Anne Snapphane whispered. ‘I bet you almost blew away today!’

The girl leaned back and looked at the ceiling.

‘They had to tie me down,’ she said. ‘Then I flew like a kite all the way to Lidingö.’

Anne laughed, the girl wriggled loose and ran past Sylvia Beautiful without taking any notice of her stepmother. She called over her shoulder, ‘Can we have pancakes for tea? Can I break the eggs?’

Anne walked up to Sylvia, who was in her way by the door.

‘Sorry now?’ she said dully.

‘I feel so sick,’ Sylvia said, tears welling up in her eyes. ‘I don’t understand how I could get it so wrong. Sorry. It’s just . . . I feel so ill the whole time. I spend all my time being sick.’

‘Get an abortion, then,’ Anne said.

Beautiful Sylvia flinched as though she’d been slapped, her face turning bright red. ‘What?’ she said.

Anne took a step closer, breathing right into the other woman’s face. ‘The worst thing I know,’ Anne said, ‘is spoiled bitches whining. You really expect my sympathy?’

Pregnant Lovely Sylvia took a step back and hit her head on the doorframe, mouth and eyes wide open.

Anne Snapphane walked past her, feeling her face blazing. She went over to her daughter who was putting her clothes on and chattering about different sorts of pancake batter. She took her hand and left the nursery, Sylvia’s offended muteness at her back.

Annika was frying fish-fingers and making mashed potato from powder, something she never did when Thomas was home. Thomas was used to well-made, proper food; his mother had always placed great importance on having good ingredients, but then it could hardly have been that hard. The family had owned a grocery shop, after all. It wasn’t as if her beloved mother-in-law suffered from the strain of working in the shop itself. She just went down and picked out what she wanted without paying, and looked after the accounts, so of course she had time to cook.

Thomas had never peeled a potato for himself. Ready-made food had been a complete mystery to him when Annika turned up with her tins of ravioli. His children, on the other hand, seemed perfectly happy to eat reshaped fish and powdered mash.

‘Do we have to eat the red stuff?’ Kalle asked.

She had dutifully placed cubes of red pepper on their plates, which they were now both picking out.

She was itching to get going. She knew she had at least four hours’ work ahead of her.

‘No,’ she said. ‘You can watch a film if you want. Which one would you like?’

‘Yay!’ Ellen said, throwing her arms out and knocking her plate to the floor.

Annika got up and picked up the plate, which had survived, and the food, which hadn’t.

‘
Beauty and the Beast
!’ Kalle said, jumping down from his chair.

‘No!’ Annika said, noticing that she was shouting. ‘Not that one!’

The children stared at her, wide-eyed.

‘But we got it from Grandma,’ Kalle said. ‘Don’t you like Beauty?’

She swallowed her stress and knelt down by the children.

‘
Beauty and the Beast
is a really bad film,’ she said. ‘It lies to us. The Beast takes Beauty and her father prisoner; he torments both of them, kidnaps them and locks them up. That isn’t nice, is it?’

Both children shook their heads in silence.

‘Exactly,’ Annika said. ‘But Beauty still has to love the Beast, because if she loves him enough then she’ll be able to save him.’

‘But that’s good, isn’t it?’ Kalle said. ‘That she saves him.’

‘But why would she do that?’ Annika said. ‘Why would she save the Beast, when he’s only been horrid to her?’

She could see the boy’s confusion, and Ellen’s uncomprehending eyes, and put her arms round Kalle.

‘You’re a good boy,’ she whispered to him. ‘You don’t know how horrid people can sometimes be. But there are horrid people, and you can’t cure them with love.’

She stroked his hair and kissed him on the cheek.

‘Why don’t you watch
Mio, My Mio
?’

‘Only if you watch it with us,’ Ellen said. ‘It’s so scary.’

‘What about
Pippi
, then?’

‘Yay!’

Thirty seconds after she had started the film, there was a buzzing sound from the depths of her bag. She ran into the bedroom, shut the door and emptied the contents of the bag on to the unmade bed. The cord of her mobile had got tangled up with the spiral binding of one of her notebooks.

It was Q.

‘I’ve checked the quotes you mentioned.’

She pulled out the right notebook and a pen.

‘And?’ she said, sinking to the floor with her back against the bed.

‘Bloody weird coincidence,’ he said. ‘A bit too weird to have happened by accident.’

‘Do you have anything else that connects the three deaths?’

He sighed deeply. ‘We don’t know yet, but there are no similarities in the way they were killed. The deaths are very different. We’ve found fibres on the victims, but nothing that matches. No fingerprints.’

‘Just the letters?’

‘Just the letters.’

‘So what conclusions are you prepared to draw?’

Another sigh. ‘The man from Östhammar was murdered, we know that much now. He was shot from a distance of at least one metre, and it’s difficult to hold an AK 4 that far away and still pull the trigger. Of course there’s a connection between the boy and the journalist, but so far we haven’t found any link to the local councillor. The boy saw the hack get run down, so that’s a fairly standard motive. Maybe he could have identified the killer.’

‘Maybe he knew the killer,’ Annika said.

There was a moment of surprised silence from the commissioner. ‘What makes you say that?’

She shook her head, looking at the wallpaper.

‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘Just a feeling I got when I was talking to him. He got very scared, made me leave.’

‘I’ve read the report of his questioning by the Luleå police. There’s nothing in there about him being scared.’

‘Of course there isn’t,’ Annika said. ‘He was protecting himself.’

The silence on the line was suspicious.

‘You don’t think the boy knew him at all,’ Annika said, ‘because you think it was Ragnwald.’

The door flew open and Ellen came into the bedroom.

‘Mummy, he’s got the remote control, he says I can’t have it.’

‘Hang on,’ she said, putting the mobile down, getting up and going back to the television with Ellen.

Kalle was curled up in a corner of the sofa, clutching the remotes for the television and the video to his chest.

‘Kalle,’ Annika said, ‘let Ellen have one of them.’

‘No,’ the boy said, ‘she keeps pressing buttons and messing it up.’

‘Okay,’ Annika said, ‘then I’ll take them both.’

‘No!’ Ellen howled. ‘I want one!’

‘That’s enough!’ Annika shouted. ‘Give me the bloody remotes and sit and watch quietly, or you’ll have to go to bed!’

She grabbed the remotes and walked back into the bedroom with Kalle’s cries ringing in her ears.

She shut the door and picked up the phone again.

‘Ragnwald,’ Q said.

‘Suup leaked some information to me, to let Ragnwald
know that you know that he’s back,’ Annika said. ‘Were you involved in that decision?’

He snorted. ‘I haven’t seen any article so far.’

‘It’ll be in tomorrow’s paper, although it’s a pretty thin story, I have to say. Suup didn’t give me much. I think you’ve got a lot more than that.’

The commissioner didn’t respond.

‘How much do you know?’ Annika asked. ‘Have you got an ID?’

‘A couple of things first,’ Q said. ‘You can use the anonymous letters, but not the fact that they contain Mao quotations.’

Annika was taking notes.

‘And Ragnwald?’

‘We’re sure he’s back.’

‘Why? To kill these individuals?’

‘He’s been gone for more than thirty years, so he must have a bloody good reason for coming back. But what that is, we don’t yet know.’

‘Is he the Mao-murderer?’

‘Nice headline, shame you can’t use it. I don’t know if it’s him. It might be, but I wouldn’t swear to it.’

‘But he blew up the plane at F21?’

‘He was involved somehow, but we don’t know if he was there for the explosion itself.’

‘What’s his name? His real name?’

Commissioner Q hesitated.

‘You got a serial killer out of me,’ Annika said. ‘Surely I can get a terrorist out of you?’

‘You can’t use it,’ Q said. ‘We’ve kept his details quiet for thirty years, and it has to stay that way for a bit longer. This is only for your own personal records. No notes on the computer, no stray notes in the office.’

Annika swallowed hard, her pen poised, her pulse throbbing in her neck. She drew breath to ask about the
level of secrecy when the door suddenly flew open and Kalle rushed in.

‘Mummy, she’s got Tiger! Make her give him back!’

A short-circuit in Annika’s brain meant that she breathed enough air for a primal scream. She felt the colour in her face rise, and looked at Kalle with crazed eyes.

‘Out!’ she whispered. ‘Now!’

The boy looked at her in horror, then turned and ran, leaving the door wide open behind him.

‘Mummy says you have to give Tiger to me,’ she heard him shout. ‘Now!’

‘Nilsson,’ Q said. ‘His name is Göran Nilsson. Son of a Læstadian minister from Sattajärvi in Norrbotten, born October nineteen forty-eight. Moved to Uppsala to study theology autumn nineteen sixty-seven, back in Luleå a year or so later, worked in cathedral administration, vanished on the eighteenth of November nineteen sixty-nine, and hasn’t been seen under his true identity since then.’

Annika was writing so hard that her wrist hurt, hoping she would be able to decipher her scribbles.

‘Læstadian?’

‘Læstadianism is a religious movement in Norrbotten, some aspects of which are incredibly strict. No curtains, no television, no birth control.’

‘Do you know why he’s called Ragnwald?’

‘That was his codename in the Maoist groups in Luleå in the late sixties. He kept it as his stage name when he became a professional killer, but his ETA identity is probably French. He’s most likely been living in a village in the Pyrenees, on the French side, and moving across the border pretty much at will.’

Annika could hear the children fighting it out in the television room.

‘So he really did become a professional killer? Someone like Léon?’

‘No, people like that don’t exist outside Luc Besson films, but we know he was involved in a few assassinations for money. I have to go, and it sounds like you need to sort things out there.’

‘They’re fighting over a stuffed tiger,’ Annika said.

‘O man, your legacy shall be violence,’ Q said, and hung up.

She watched the end of
Pippi
with the children, one on each knee, then brushed their teeth and read two chapters from the Bullerby books out loud to them. They sang three songs from the Swedish Songbook together, then went out like lights. She was dizzy with tiredness when she finally sat down to write. The letters floated across the screen, she couldn’t seem to focus, and was struck by an intense sense of falling, a short second of complete helplessness.

She fled from the screen into the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face, then went into the kitchen and boiled some water, measured four spoons of coffee into the cafetière, pouring the water on as it boiled, and forcing the metal filter down hard. She took the coffee and a mug from the Federation of Local Councils and sat down at the computer again.

Empty. She had nothing left.

She picked up the phone and called Jansson.

‘I can’t pull it together,’ she said. ‘It isn’t working.’

‘You’ll get it together.’ Jansson’s voice was alive with the adrenalin of the news torrent. ‘I need you now. We can help each other out here. Where have you got stuck?’

‘Before I’ve even started.’

‘Take it from scratch. One. There’s a serial killer
on the loose, that’s the angle for the front page. Start with the summary, describe the deaths in Norrland, the quotes in the letters.’

‘I’m not allowed to,’ she said, and typed, ‘serial killer, describe Luleå’.

‘Well, just balance the information as best you can. Two. Bring in the murder of the Östhammar politician, that’s new and we’ve got an exclusive on that. The wife’s story, police work. Was it murder?’