Red Wolf: A Novel (6 page)

The man was silent for slightly too long, then he laughed. ‘Where?’ he said, standing up. ‘Here in Luleå?
In the middle of nowhere? It was the Russians, it must have been.’

‘So why content themselves with one Draken?’ Annika asked, gathering her things. ‘Why not blow up the whole base?’

Captain Pettersson shook his head and sighed. ‘To show us that they could, probably; to knock us off balance. We all wish we had the ability to see into their minds, to understand their reasoning. Why did they send Polish art dealers to visit all our officers? Why beach that submarine, U137, on the rocks outside Karlskrona? I’m sorry, but I have to give a presentation in a few minutes.’

Annika zipped up her bag and stood up, pulling on her coat.

‘Well, thank you,’ she said. ‘And thanks for the offer of the museum tour, but I’m not sure I’ll have time tomorrow. I’ve still got a few things to do and I’m flying home after lunch.’

‘Try to find the time,’ the press officer said, shaking her hand. ‘Gustaf’s got it in pretty good shape.’

She looked down at the floor, muttering under her breath.

That was completely bloody useless
, she thought as she drove back to the main road.
I can’t go back to the paper and say the whole trip was a waste of time
.

In restless disappointment she put her foot down on the accelerator. The car started to skid and she eased up, horrified.

At that moment her mobile rang, number withheld. She knew it was Spike before she even answered it.

‘Have you caught the men behind the attack then?’ he asked smoothly.

She braked cautiously and indicated right, adjusting the earpiece better.

‘The journalist I was supposed to meet is dead,’ she said. ‘Run down the day before yesterday in a hit-and-run.’

‘Ouch,’ Spike said. ‘There was a thing on one of the agencies about something like that this morning, credited to some rag up there. Was that him?’

She waited for a timber-truck to pass, making her Ford shake as it sped by. Her grip on the wheel stiffened.

‘Might have been,’ she said. ‘The staff on his paper were told yesterday, so it would be odd if it didn’t make their own paper.’

Cautiously she pulled out onto the main road.

‘Have they found the driver?’

‘Not as far as I know,’ she said, then heard herself say: ‘I was thinking of looking into his death a bit today.’

‘Why?’ Spike said. ‘He was probably just driving home drunk.’

‘Maybe,’ Annika said. ‘But he was in the middle of a big story, had some seriously controversial stuff in the paper on Friday.’
Which I know isn’t true
, she thought, biting her lip.

Spike sighed loudly. ‘Well, make sure it checks out, that’s all,’ he said, and hung up.

Annika parked outside the entrance to the hotel, went up to her room and sank onto the bed. The maid had been in and made the bed, eradicating the traces of her awful night. She had slept badly, woken up in a cold sweat and with a headache. The angels had been singing to her in a chorus of rising and falling notes almost all night long: they were much more persistent when she was away from home.

She plumped up the pillow behind her head, reached for the telephone on the bedside table and put it on her stomach, then she called her husband on his direct line at the Association of Local Authorities.

‘Thomas is at lunch,’ his secretary said sullenly.

She crept under the covers and closed her eyes as the angels’ song filled her head.

She let herself be swept away by the words.
Can’t fight any more
, she thought.

She woke with a start, unsure where she was for a moment. Putting her hand to her chin she discovered that it was wet, as was her neck, and realized with disgust that it was her own saliva. Her clothes were sticking unpleasantly to her body, and there was a nasty whistling sound in her left ear. She got unsteadily to her feet and went to the bathroom.

When she came back into the room she realized that it was almost completely dark. In a panic, she stared at her watch, but it was only quarter past three. She wiped her neck with a towel, checked that she had what she needed in her bag and left the room.

She picked up a map of Luleå from reception, only to find that Svartöstaden wasn’t on there, but the receptionist enthusiastically added the route that would take her there.

‘So you’re working on a story,’ the young woman said excitedly.

Annika, already on her way to the door, stopped and looked at her, confused.

‘Ah,’ the receptionist explained with a blush, ‘I saw that the invoice was going to the
Evening Post
.’

Annika took a few steps backwards, hitting her heel against the door. A moment later she was out in the
wind. No parking ticket. She got into the freezing car and pulled out onto Södra Varvsleden. The steering wheel was ice-cold, and as she fumbled for her gloves in the bag she came close to hitting a fat woman pushing a pram. Turning the noisy ventilator on full, her heart thumping, she drove towards Malmudden.

At a red light on a viaduct over some railway tracks she checked the map again: she was already at the bottom-right corner. A couple of minutes later she was at the roundabout and from now on she would have to rely on road-signs. She glanced up: Skurholmen left, Hertsön straight on, Svartöstaden right. She caught sight of another sign – Frasse’s Hamburgers – and felt her blood-sugar plummet. When the lights turned green she swung off the road, parked by the petrol station and went in. She bought a cheeseburger with onions and ate it ravenously, taking in her surroundings: the smell of frying, the painted fibreglass walls, the plastic rubber plant in the corner, the
Star Wars
pinball machine, the shabby wood and chrome furniture.

This is the real Sweden
, she thought.
Central Stockholm is a little nature reserve. We have no idea what goes on out here in the wilderness
.

Feeling slightly queasy from the melted cheese and raw onion, she drove on. Powdery snow swirled in front of the headlights, making it hard to see, even though she was alone on the road. She drove a few kilometres, and then suddenly, out of the haze of snow, the ironworks appeared right above her. Illuminated jet-black steel skeletons that let off steam and looked almost alive. She let out a small yelp of surprise. It was beautiful! So weirdly . . . alive.

A viaduct took her across a goods yard, twenty or so rail tracks criss-crossing each other.

The final stop of Malmbanan, ‘the ore railway’, of
course. The contents of the trashed mountains in the iron-field were rolled down here to the coast by those endless ore-trains she’d seen on television.

Astonished, she drove on until she reached an illuminated sign by the main entrance, and parked by what turned out to be the West Checkpoint.

The immense monster above her was blast-furnace number two – a growling, rumbling giant turning ore into steel. Further away were the rolling-mill, the steelworks, the coke ovens, the power station. The whole site was enveloped in a rolling, rumbling sound that rose and fell, humming and singing.

What a place
, she thought, feeling the cold. The angels kept quiet. It was now completely dark.

Anne Snapphane left the press conference with her knees trembling and her palms sweating. She wanted to cry, or scream. The rumbling headache only increased her anger at the MD who had taken off for the US and left the whole presentation to her. She wasn’t employed to take the flak for the whole of TV Scandinavia, just the programming.

She made it to her room, dialled Annika’s number and looked around desperately for a glass of wine.

‘I’m standing by the ironworks in Svartöstaden,’ Annika yelled from Anne’s home territory. ‘It’s a real monster, absolutely amazing. How did the press conference go?’

‘Crap,’ Anne Snapphane said in a dull voice, feeling her hands shake. ‘They tore me to shreds, and the boys from your lot were worst.’

‘Hang on,’ Annika said, ‘I have to move the car, I’m in the way of a truck . . . Yes! I know! I’m moving!’

The sound of a car engine; Anne looked for her headache pills in the desk drawer, but the box was empty.

‘Right, tell me what happened,’ Annika said to her friend.

Anne forced her hands to be still, then put her right hand to her forehead.

‘They want me to personify every super-capitalist, war-mongering, American, multinational blood-sucking corporation rolled into one,’ she said.

‘The first rule of dramaturgy,’ Annika said. ‘You have to give the villain a face. Yours just happens to fit the bill. Although I think it’s strange that they’re so angry.’

Anne carefully shut the desk drawer and put the phone down on the floor, then lay down next to it.

‘Not really,’ she said, staring at the lights in the ceiling, breathing out and feeling the room sway. ‘We’re challenging the established channels on the only advertising market they’ve not yet conquered, the global brand market. But that’s not all. We’re not only taking their money, we’re going to take their viewers with our thoroughly commercialized shitty programmes that we buy in for peanuts.’

‘And the
Evening Post
’s proprietors will be hit hardest of all, is that right?’ Annika asked.

‘Because we’ll be using the terrestrial digital network, yes,’ Anne said.

‘How’s your headache?’

Anne closed her eyes, seeing the strip lighting in the ceiling as blue stripes through her eyelids.

‘Same as before,’ she said. ‘I’ve started getting pretty wobbly as well.’

‘Do you really think it’s just stress? Couldn’t you take things a bit easier?’ Annika sounded genuinely worried.

‘I’m trying,’ Anne mumbled, letting out a deep breath.

‘Have you got Miranda this weekend?’

She shook her head, a hand over her eyes. ‘She’s with Mehmet.’

‘Is that good or bad?’

‘I don’t know,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know if I can do this any more.’

‘Course you can,’ Annika said. ‘Come round to mine tomorrow. Thomas is playing tennis, I’ll get some macaroons.’

Anne Snapphane let out a snort of laughter and dried her eyes.

When they had hung up Annika drove on with a nagging anxiety in her gut. For the first time she was starting to think that there was something physically wrong with Anne. Over the years her hypochondriac friend had been to Dr Olsson with every symptom known to modern medicine, and up to now she had only ever needed antibiotics twice. Once she got some cough syrup as well, and when she found out it contained morphine she had phoned Annika in horror, imagining that she had become an addict. Annika couldn’t help smiling at the memory.

Slowly she swung off the road and in among the residential area of Svartöstaden. This really was another country, or at least another town. Not Luleå, and not really Sweden. Annika let the car drift through the shanty town, astonished by its atmosphere.

The Estonian countryside
, she thought.
Polish suburbs
.

The headlights played across shabby wooden façades of yards and outhouses and sheds, leaning roofs and ramshackle fences. The buildings were small and misshapen, could have been built out of orange boxes. The paint was peeling off most of them, the uneven hand-blown glass in the windows twinkled. She passed a
charity shop selling clothes in aid of the struggle for freedom, although whose freedom was unclear.

She pulled up behind a recycling site on Bältesgatan, left her bag in the car and got out. The noise from the ironworks was a faint song in the distance. She took a few slow steps, looking over the fences into the yards.

‘Are you looking for someone?’

A man in a woolly hat and work-boots was coming towards her from one of the gingerbread houses, glancing at her hire-car.

Annika smiled. ‘I was just passing and had to stop,’ she said with her hands in her coat pockets. ‘What an amazing place.’

The man stopped, straightening up.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is a bit unusual. An old workers’ district from the turn of the last century. Strong sense of cohesion. There’s real community spirit here. People often don’t want to leave.’

Annika nodded politely. ‘I can understand why people end up staying.’

The man pulled a cigarette from an inside pocket, lit it, then took the conversational bait and started talking.

‘We’ve got a nursery nowadays,’ he said, ‘with three classes. We had to fight for years before the council gave in. The school takes kids up to thirteen, and there’s a youth club with broadband. We’re going to have to fight to keep the old ironwork manager’s house; we never seem to get out of this obsession with pulling things down.’

He exhaled a hard plume of smoke, looking at her from under the rim of his hat.

‘So what are you doing here?’

‘I was supposed to be meeting Benny Ekland, but when I got here I found out he’d been run over.’

The man shook his head, stamping his feet. ‘Bloody awful business,’ he said. ‘On his way home, and he gets run down like that. Everyone thinks it’s terrible.’

‘Everyone here knows everyone else?’ she asked, trying hard not to sound too inquisitive.

‘For good and ill,’ he said, ‘but mostly good. We take responsibility for each other, there’s too little of that in the world today . . .’

‘Do you know where it happened?’

‘Down on Skeppargatan, on the way to the main road,’ he said, pointing. ‘Quite close to Blackis, that’s the big building at the edge of the forest. The kids went up there with flowers a bit earlier. Well, I really ought to . . .’ The man headed off towards the water.

Annika stood and watched him go.

I’d like a life like that
, she thought.
To belong somewhere
.

The place where Benny Ekland was run down was just a couple of hundred metres from the West Checkpoint, but not visible from there. In fact, it wasn’t overlooked from anywhere, apart from a run-down housing block and small shop a hundred metres or so away. A thin row of yellow streetlamps, some of them broken, spread a dusty light over the cordons, snow and mud. To the left was an area of ragged scrub, on the right an embankment topped by a fence.