Borderline (10 page)

She went out into the kitchen, opened the fridge, scraped the food out of the Tupperware box on to a plate and put it into the microwave. She clicked the display, three minutes ought to do, then pressed start. The machine began to hum.

She went to the sink and rinsed the box – it was the one she took to work most days.

The closure of most of the entrances to the paper’s offices meant that no one had lunch at the Seven Rats any more: it was too far to walk round so lunchboxes had taken over. She missed the salad bar, the coffee machine in the corner and the dusty little biscuits next to the packets of sugar. The problem with lunchboxes was that people kept forgetting about them: they were sent out on jobs or went to the pub instead, and the boxes were left sitting in the fridge until the contents were unrecognizable. She leaned against the cupboard door and made a promise to herself. When this is over and Thomas is back home, I’m going to start going to the Seven Rats again. No more lunchboxes.

The microwave bleeped three times. She sliced a tomato for decoration.

And the phone didn’t ring and didn’t ring and didn’t ring.

‘Not exactly Operakällaren,’ she said, putting the plate, cutlery and a glass of tap-water in front of him on the coffee-table.

‘Thomas’s mother is still alive, isn’t she?’ Halenius said, shovelling a forkful of macaroni into his mouth – he was evidently hungry.

‘Doris,’ Annika said. ‘Yes, she is.’

‘You ought to call her.’

‘Yes,’ Annika said. ‘Or maybe you should.’

He took a sip of water. ‘Why?’

‘She doesn’t like me. Do you want a napkin?’

‘No, I’m fine. Why not?’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Thomas was married before, to a bank director. She thought her son ought to have found someone better than me. Holger, his brother, is married to a doctor.’

Halenius put a meatball into his mouth, chewed and swallowed. ‘What about the grandchildren?’

‘Holger and his husband, Sverker, have a little girl called Victoria. They had her with some friends, a lesbian couple. Doris loves Victoria. How are the meatballs?’

‘A bit cold in the middle. Your father’s dead, isn’t he?’

She stiffened. Ingvar, her father, had been a union boss at the works in Hälleforsnäs, something he had been very proud of, but that hadn’t helped when the business had started to make a loss at the end of the 1980s. He was surplus to requirements, and was fired along with hundreds more. His already fairly heavy drinking had toppled into addiction. He had frozen to death in a snowdrift beside the road to Granhed when Annika was eighteen.

‘How did you know that?’ she asked.

‘Roly,’ he said, and pushed the plate away. ‘Have you got her number? Doris Samuelsson?’

‘It’s in my contacts, under “Dinosaur”,’ Annika said, handing over her work mobile and taking the plate out into the kitchen. From the living room she heard him sigh.

‘Mrs Doris Samuelsson? Good evening, my name is Jimmy Halenius. I’m under-secretary of state at the Department of Justice … Yes, that’s right, Thomas’s boss … I’m sorry to call so late, but I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news …’

She stood beside the microwave, squeezing the dishcloth between her fingers as she waited for Halenius to finish the call. Afterwards her hands smelt disgusting, and she had to scrub them with lemon-scented washing-up liquid.

‘She didn’t take it terribly well, then?’ Annika said, putting a plate of sticky chocolate cake on the table.

‘No. Have you been baking?’

Why did he sound so surprised?

‘Raspberries and cream?’

‘Definitely.’

She whipped some cream and thawed some frozen raspberries in the microwave, then put them on the coffee-table and sat on the sofa, straight-backed.

‘I should call Mum as well, shouldn’t I?’

‘It would be pretty odd if she found out from the media.’

She took a deep breath, picked up her work mobile and dialled her childhood telephone number. It had never changed.

She could hear her heartbeat above the ringing.

‘Mum? It’s Annika. How are you?’

Her mother’s reply was indistinct. She picked up something about lumbago and overdue social-security payments.

‘Mum,’ she interrupted, ‘I’m afraid something awful’s happened. Thomas has gone missing in Africa.’

There was silence at the other end of the line.

‘What do you mean, missing?’ her mother said. ‘Has he gone off with some woman?’

Now she could hear that her mother wasn’t entirely sober. ‘No, Mum, he’s been kidnapped. We don’t know how serious it is yet, but I thought you ought to know.’

‘Kidnapped? Like that millionaire? Whatever for? You haven’t got any money!’

Annika closed her eyes and put a hand to her forehead. She had no idea what millionaire her mother was referring to. ‘Mum,’ she said, ‘could the children come and stay with you for the weekend? I don’t know how long this is going to take, but I’ll be pretty busy over the next few days.’

Her mother muttered something.

‘It would be a huge help.’

‘Kidnapped?’

‘With six other delegates at a security conference in Nairobi. As far as we know, he hasn’t been hurt. Is there any chance you could look after Kalle and Ellen? Even for just one day?’

‘I can’t,’ her mother said. ‘I’ve got Destiny.’

Annika blinked. ‘What?’

‘Birgitta’s working an extra shift at Right Price this weekend. I have to look after De-hestiny.’

Barbro had started to hiccup. Birgitta’s one-year-old daughter was called Destiny, poor little thing.

‘But,’ Annika said, ‘isn’t Birgitta married? Can’t Steven look after his own child?’

Her mother dropped something, and Annika heard swearing in the background. Perhaps she had a new boyfriend.

‘Listen,’ her mother said, ‘I’ve g-got to go. And you need to apologize to Birgitta.’

‘Sure, Mum,’ she said. ‘’Bye.’

She pressed to end the call and lowered the mobile. Tears burned behind her eyelids. ‘Is there anything more shameful than not being loved by your own mother?’ she said shakily.

‘Yes,’ Halenius said. ‘Not being loved by your own children.’

She laughed. ‘Isn’t that a scene from a film?’

Halenius smiled. ‘Yep,’ he said. ‘One starring Sven-Bertil Taube.’

The phone rang.

* * *

They carried us out, one by one, and they started with me.

It had got completely dark. No moonlight. No fire anywhere. They carried me by my feet and shoulders, just as they had the Frenchman, and I was surrounded by black nothingness on my way towards a swaying nothingness. I was on the point of losing consciousness, and my bowels and bladder emptied in fear. I thought I could see sabre-like knives glinting in the darkness, and they probably were – the plastic tie around my feet came off. Someone pulled down my trousers and threw a bucket of water over my crotch. Cold, but it stung my inflamed skin. I didn’t cry out, because that wasn’t permitted, ‘No allowed,’ Kiongozi Ujumla had said, and no talking either. We had lain tightly packed together until the noises died away outside and only the Dane’s wheezing breaths were audible in the darkness.

The temperature fell rapidly at night. My teeth were chattering.

One of the guards, I couldn’t see which, wrapped a length of checked cloth round me in place of my trousers. I was allowed to keep my shirt, the one I had selected with such care the morning we took off for Liboi, the pale pink one with the slight shimmer. It’s Annika’s favourite – she calls it my ‘gay shirt’: ‘Can’t you wear your gay shirt today?’ she often says, grinning with that big mouth of hers … Then I had to walk to the other end of the
manyatta
and they shut me inside a different hut. It was smaller and smelt different. There had never been any fires in this one. The sounds as I moved were harsh and metallic. There was no hole in the roof.

They bound my feet again. I must have lost consciousness because when I came round the Dane, Per, was lying next to me, with the Romanian whose name I didn’t know, and Spanish Alvaro. They had split us up, men and women.

Per’s breathing was rasping and uneven.

There were four of us men left now.

‘Forty million dollars, to be paid in Nairobi first thing tomorrow morning,’ Jimmy Halenius said, sitting down in the armchair in front of her.

She covered her face with her hands.

‘It isn’t a disaster,’ he added. ‘We wanted contact, and now it’s been established.’

He sounded reassuring.

Annika let her hands fall and concentrated on breathing. ‘That’s the same amount they told the Spanish guy.’

‘I explained that the family doesn’t have access to that sort of money, and not so quickly. The man spoke perfect East African English. Well educated, I’d say. His demands were unreasonable, and he knew it. I asked how Thomas was, but he didn’t answer.’

‘Who did you say you were?’

‘A colleague, and a friend of the family.’

‘Not his employer?’

‘In purely formal terms, the Swedish government isn’t involved in this.’

She looked out through the window. The sky was so strangely red at night, a dusty, greyish red from the pollution and the city’s lights on the clouds. ‘What else did he say?’

He hesitated. ‘Thomas will die if we don’t deliver the money before ten tomorrow morning, local time. Do you want to listen to the recording?’

She shook her head.

He took one of her hands between both of his. ‘This is likely to go on for a while,’ he said. ‘Most kidnaps for ransom last anywhere between six and sixty days. It’s possible that you’ll have to pay up to get him released.’

She pulled her hand away. ‘Can’t the police do anything?’

‘Interpol in Brussels have set up a JIT, Joint Investigation Team. They’ll collect and collate the information from all the cases and circulate it to everyone involved. National Crime are sending two men to act as contacts in Nairobi. They’ll be working through the Swedish Embassy. And Hans and Hans-Erik have been assigned to deal with it within the department.’

She nodded, aware that the Swedish police couldn’t act in any official capacity abroad. ‘What about the Kenyan police?’

He didn’t reply for a few moments. Then he said, ‘They’re renowned for their violence and corruption. I was there over Christmas one year when the police announced they were going to be mounting raids to seize hidden weapons in north-western Kenya. That corner of the country emptied of women and children because the police usually rape anyone they come across during that sort of raid. It causes massive problems, because many of the police have got HIV, so when a woman is raped her husband rejects her. If we get in touch and involve the Kenyan police, there’s a serious risk that they’ll demand part of the ransom. It would make it more dangerous and more expensive.’

Annika held her hand up. ‘No Kenyan police. What about the Somalis?’

‘Somalia has been without a government or any national authorities since 1991. There is something called the Somali police force, but I don’t know if they actually do anything.’

She clenched her hands in her lap.

‘We’re going to talk to a couple of other organizations,’ Halenius said, ‘but you should take a look at your finances. We could reach a point where you need to pay a ransom. Have you got any money?’

The insurance money from the villa in Djursholm, she thought.

It had finally been paid out almost two years after the fire, almost six million kronor in an account with Handelsbanken, something like a million dollars. She had two hundred thousand or so in another account, which she had saved while they were in the USA.

‘They won’t get in touch again until tomorrow evening at the earliest. But, if it’s okay, I’ll come over as soon as I wake up. There’s a lot of preparatory work to get done.’

‘Haven’t you got a job to do?’ she asked.

‘Yep,’ he said. ‘And that’s exactly what I’m doing.’

The hanger rattled as he pulled his coat off it. She got up from the sofa on legs of lead and stood in the hall doorway. He looked tired. His hair was thinner than she remembered.

‘What sort of preparatory work?’

He scratched his head, making his brown hair stand on end. ‘That depends on what you want to do, whether you do the rest yourself or need help from us.’

A flash of panic ran through her. ‘Not myself,’ she said.

He nodded. ‘We need to set up a command centre, where we can keep our equipment and notes.’

‘Would the bedroom work?’

‘We need to start a log covering everything that happens. Agree on our respective roles. I’d suggest that I handle the negotiations and you deal with the logistics. Your job will be to make sure that the equipment works, that we’ve got food and coffee, that our mobiles are charged. Is that okay?’

So, she was moving from kidnap negotiator to coffee maker in 0.2 seconds.

‘If your landline rings while I’m not here, make sure to start recording before you answer,’ he said. ‘If it’s them, don’t say you’re Thomas’s wife. Tell them you’re the child-minder and that everyone else is out. Then call me at once. You’ve got all my numbers in that email I sent you.’

‘Do you remember what I said to you the very first time we met?’ she asked. ‘The very first sentence?’

Jimmy Halenius zipped up his coat and tucked his briefcase under his arm. He was concentrating on putting his gloves on as he answered. ‘“I thought only small-time gangsters had names ending in Y,”’ he said. ‘That’s what you said. And “How come there are never any escaped prisoners called Stig-Björn?”’

He flashed her a quick smile, then opened the front door and disappeared.

Swedish

Father of Two

THOMAS

HOSTAGE

IN KENYA

Anders Schyman polished his glasses with his shirt-sleeve and examined the front page with a stern and reasonably neutral gaze.

This was one of their best covers all year. Not just because they were the only paper who had the Swedish angle but because Thomas Samuelsson was very photogenic. Blond, handsome, sporty, dignified and smiling, the sort of man all Swedish men wanted to be and all women wanted to have.