Red Wolf: A Novel (35 page)

‘Now you’re just being silly.’

They were silent for a few moments, her chest felt warm, as did the stone.

‘But there’s something I don’t understand,’ Annika said when the silence had grown so large that she suddenly feared that she was alone on the line. ‘Someone must have had some way of communicating with him, because otherwise how would he contact his employers?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Someone must have hired him for all those messy jobs. How did they get hold of him?’

The commissioner was quiet for a moment.

‘Off the record,’ he said, and she swivelled her
head, ‘through ETA. For years the Spanish police have suspected a doctor in Bilbao of being his go-between, but they’ve never had enough evidence to charge him. This is sensitive stuff in the Basque Country. If their colleagues start openly harassing and accusing decent members of the civilian population, the whole region could ignite. The doctor in question is an unimpeachable family man, a professional with his own practice specializing in internal medicine.’

‘Couldn’t you have hired Ragnwald for something yourselves?’ Annika asked. ‘Lured him into a trap?’

A moment of hesitation.

‘Attempts may have been made, but I know nothing about that.’

So that’s where the boundary of his openness was. She decided not to press him, and rubbed her feet together, feeling the circulation coming back again.

‘But if he wasn’t in France, where was he?’

‘He most likely spent a lot of time in France,’ Q said, back on solid ground again, ‘but he didn’t live there. We don’t think he settled anywhere.’

‘So he’s spent thirty years camping?’

A short, weary sigh. ‘We believe he pretended to be from north Africa,’ Q said, ‘as part of the group of illegal immigrants who drift around the countryside looking for seasonal work.’

‘A farm labourer?’ Annika said.

‘They move from place to place, from country to country, wherever the crops are ready to harvest.’

Annika nodded unconsciously. ‘And no one says anything about anyone else,’ she said.

‘Total loyalty,’ Q said. ‘No one cares if someone disappears for a few weeks, or a few months, or for ever.’

‘And aren’t surprised if you turn up again,’ Annika filled in.

‘No questions,’ Q said.

‘Cash in hand at the end of the day.’

‘No bank accounts,’ Q said.

‘No rent to pay, no family to provide for.’

‘A lot of the seasonal labourers have families,’ Q said. ‘Some of them provide for their extended family as well, but not our Ragnwald.’

‘He picks grapes and oranges and shoots politicians in his spare time.’

‘When he’s not working in the docks or mines or somewhere else where he can be invisible and, in practical terms, unpaid.’

They were silent for a while.

‘But why haven’t you got him if he’s back in Sweden now?’

Q gave a deep sigh. ‘It’s not as easy as you seem to think,’ he said. ‘Killers who kill with no apparent motive are the hardest to catch. Take the Laser Man, he shot ten randomly chosen people in Stockholm over the course of a year and a half before he was caught, and he lived in the middle of the city, had his own car, said hello to his neighbours on the stairs. In other words he was a rank amateur. The man we’re dealing with now has killed four people that we know of. There’s nothing to connect them apart from the boy witnessing the first murder. The methods are completely different, Ekland was run over, the boy’s throat was cut, Sandström was shot. No fingerprints, the fibres we found don’t match from one crime scene to the next.’

‘That could just mean he changed his clothes and wore gloves.’

‘Exactly,’ Q said.

‘No witnesses?’

‘The best witness, the boy, is dead. Nothing else had contributed anything significant at all.’

Annika listened back to these latest comments in her mind.

‘Four,’ she said. ‘You said four.’

Q was blank. ‘What?’

‘There’s been another murder,’ she said, sitting up in bed without thinking. ‘He’s done it again. Who?’

‘You must have misheard me. I said three.’

‘Rubbish,’ Annika said. ‘Someone’s been killed in the last couple of days and another Mao quote has been sent to the relatives. Either you tell me exactly what’s happened or I start ringing round.’

He laughed. ‘An empty threat. If someone’s been killed the media would already be circling like vultures over the story.’

She responded to his laughter with a snort. ‘That’s crap. Not if it’s a woman who’s been killed. Her husband has probably already been arrested, and it would surprise me if even the local paper gave it their standard couple of lines.’

‘Standard?’

‘Family quarrel ends in tragedy. Not nice, not interesting, and impossible to write about. Tell me what you know and we can come to an arrangement.’

The silence was thick with thought for several seconds.

‘I’ve said it before,’ he said eventually. ‘You’re slightly creepy. How the hell could you know that?’

Annika leaned back on the pillows again, a fleeting smile crossing her face.

‘And she’s got no connection to the other three?’

‘Nothing we’ve found yet. Margit Axelsson, a nursery teacher in Piteå, married, two adult daughters, strangled on the landing of her home. Her husband was working shifts and found her when he got home.’

‘And was immediately suspected of the murder?’

‘Wrong. The time of death was before midnight, and he was in the liaison office at F21 with his colleagues until he finished his shift at one thirty.’

Annika felt the adrenalin reach her brain and automatically stretch her legs out, forcing her to sit up straight.

‘F21? He works at F21? Then there is a connection: the explosion of the Draken.’

‘We’ve already checked. He did his national service at I19 in Boden, wasn’t attached to the airbase until nineteen seventy-four. The fact that a murder victim’s husband’s employer happens to coincide with a crime scene which may have a connection to Ragnwald isn’t enough to get my pulse racing; unlike yours, apparently.’

‘The quote,’ she said. ‘What does it say?’

‘Hang on a moment . . .’

He put down the phone, opened a drawer, looked through some papers, cleared his throat and came back on the line.

‘
People of the world, unite and defeat the American aggressors and all their lackeys. People of the world, be courageous, and dare to fight, defy difficulties and advance wave upon wave. Then the whole world will belong to the people. Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed
.’

They thought in silence for a while, the swaying stopped.

‘“Monsters of all kinds shall be destroyed,”’ Annika said. ‘Monsters. Of all kinds. Including nursery school teachers.’

‘She taught for the Workers’ Educational Association as well. Ran courses in napkin-folding and ceramics. We’re not paying too much attention to the quotation; I don’t think you should either. The woman putting the
profile together thinks he uses them as messages, like your lipstick kisses.’

‘Have you got someone in from the FBI?’ Annika asked, swinging her legs off the side of the bed, warm feet against cold wood floor.

‘That was in the seventies,’ Q said. ‘We’ve been doing our own profiles of suspects for ten years.’

‘Sorry,’ Annika said. ‘What did the profiler come up with?’

‘You can pretty much guess. Male, older rather than younger, driven by hatred of a society that he has a partially warped view of, compensating for humiliations he’s suffered. Single, few friends, poor self-image, strong need for validation, restless, has difficulties holding down a job, fairly intelligent with good physical strength. More or less.’

Annika shut her eyes and tried to memorize the details, aware that he wasn’t telling her everything.

‘So why the quotes?’ she said. ‘Why that sort of scent-marking?’

‘On some level he wants us to know. He’s so incredibly superior to us that he can afford to leave these reminders of himself.’

‘Our Ragnwald,’ she said. ‘It feels almost like I know him. Imagine how it could have been – if that plane hadn’t blown up he might have been on his way to the Nobel dinner in the City Hall in three weeks’ time.’

She realized from the surprised silence that Q hadn’t followed her train of thought.

‘Karina Björnlund,’ she said. ‘Minister of Culture. She’s going to the Nobel dinner this year, or has at least been invited, and if Ragnwald hadn’t had to disappear they would have been married.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Q said.

‘Of course, there’s no way of knowing if the marriage would have lasted, but if it had . . .’

‘Listen,’ Q said. ‘Where the hell did you get that from?’

Annika twisted the phone cord.

‘The banns were published,’ she said. ‘They were due to have a civil wedding in Luleå City Hall at two o’clock on the Friday after the attack.’

‘Not a chance,’ Q said. ‘If that was true we’d know about it.’

‘Marriages had to be announced in those days, they had a note in the paper.’

‘And where was this note published?’

‘The
Norrland News
. I’ve got a bundle of cuttings from there about Karina Björnlund. Do you really mean to tell me you didn’t know they were together?’

‘A teenage fling,’ Q said. ‘Nothing more. Besides, she ended it.’

‘Retrospective adjustment,’ Annika said. ‘Karina Björnlund would do anything to save her own skin.’

‘I see,’ Q said. ‘Little Miss Amateur-Profiler has spoken.’

Annika was thinking about Herman Wennergren’s email,
request for meeting to discuss a matter of urgency
, and then the Minister of Culture’s last-minute amendment of the government proposal, so that the law on the deregulation of digital broadcasters would exclude TV Scandinavia, just like Herman Wennergren wanted, and the only outstanding question was what arguments her paper’s proprietors had applied to make her change her mind.

In her mind Annika could hear her own voice asking the Trade Minister’s press secretary to convey her request for a comment on the IB affair, and heard herself revealing the Social Democrats’ biggest secrets to
Karina Björnlund. And just a few weeks later Björnlund was made a minister, in one of the most unforeseen promotions ever.

‘Trust me,’ Annika said. ‘I know more about her than you do.’

‘I’ve got to go,’ Q said, and she had nothing to add because the angels were gone now, they had withdrawn to their hiding place.

She put down the phone and hurried over to her laptop, switching it on and pulling on a pair of socks as the programs loaded. She typed in the new details from the conversation until the backs of her knees started to sweat and her ankles began to freeze.

The doorbell rang. Annika opened the front door cautiously, not sure what she would find out there. The angels started humming anxiously, but calmed down when she saw Anne Snapphane standing there breathless on the landing, lips white, eyes red.

‘Come in,’ Annika said, backing into the flat.

Anne Snapphane didn’t answer, just walked in, hunched and self-contained.

‘Are you dying?’ Annika asked, and Anne nodded, slumped onto the hall bench and pulled off her headband.

‘It feels like it,’ she said, ‘but you know what they say in
Runaway Train
.’

‘Anything that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,’ Annika said, sitting down beside her.

As the central heating clicked, a toilet somewhere in the building flushed, and a bus pulled up and set off again down below, they sat there staring at the cupboard with the carved pineapples that Annika had bought from a flea-market.

‘There are always noises in the city,’ Anne eventually said.

Annika let some air out from her lungs in a dull sigh.
‘At least you’re never alone,’ she said, getting up. ‘Do you want anything? Coffee? Wine?’

Anne Snapphane didn’t move.

‘I’ve stopped drinking,’ she said.

‘Oh, it’s one of those days, is it?’ Annika said, standing and looking beyond the balcony at the courtyard below. Someone had forgotten to close the door to the room containing the waste-bins, it swung back and forth in the violent winds playing round the building.

‘It feels like I’ve been thrown in a bottomless pit and I’m just falling and falling,’ Anne said. ‘It started with Mehmet and his new fuck, then the talk about Miranda living with them; and now that my job has gone there’s nothing I can hold on to any more. Drinking on top of all that would be like pressing the fast-forward button.’

‘I see what you mean,’ Annika said, putting her hand on the door-handle to help her stay upright.

‘When I walk around town everything seems so strange. I don’t remember it ever looking like this. It’s hard to breathe, somehow. Everything’s so fucking grey. People look like ghosts; I get the idea that half of them are already dead. I don’t know if I’m alive. Can anyone live like that?’

Annika nodded and swallowed audibly, the door to the bin room crashed twice, bang, bang.

‘Welcome to the darkness,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry you’ve come to keep me company.’

It took a few moments for Anne to appreciate the seriousness of her words.

‘What’s happened?’ she said, getting up, taking off her coat and scarf and hanging them up. Then she joined Annika at the window, looking down at the bin room.

‘It’s a whole load of things,’ Annika said. ‘My position at work is pretty shaky; Schyman has forbidden me to write about terrorism. He thinks the Bomber made me a bit crazy.’

‘Huh,’ Anne said, folding her arms.

‘And Thomas is having an affair,’ she went on, almost in a whisper, the words rolling round the walls, growing larger and larger until they got caught on the ceiling.

Anne looked sceptically at her. ‘Whatever makes you think that?’

Annika’s throat contracted, the sticky little words wouldn’t come out. She looked down at her hands and cleared her throat, then looked up. ‘I saw them. Outside NK. He kissed her.’

Anne’s mouth had fallen half open, scepticism and disbelief dancing across her face.

‘Are you sure? You couldn’t be mistaken?’

Annika shook her head, looked down at her hands again.