Red Wolf: A Novel (18 page)

‘That sounds a bit shallow,’ she said. ‘A man is dead and you’re worrying about your job.’

His reply came quick as a flash. ‘And what do you do whenever there’s a murder? All you do is moan about your bosses and your miserable colleagues.’

She held the pen still, then put it down on the desk, and there was a faint click in her left ear. She wondered if he had hung up on her.

‘Outside Östhammar,’ he said; ‘a little village in northern Uppland. They’re farmers. I don’t know how
late I’m going to be – it depends on what we decide, and naturally on what the police say.’

She left his sense of grievance well alone.

‘Have you spoken to the police?’

‘To begin with they thought it was suicide, but as the wife objected they’re looking into it more closely.’

Annika put her feet back up on the desk.

‘Even if the man was killed,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t necessarily mean he was shot because he was a politician, if you get what I mean. He may have had debts, addictions, rejected children, mad neighbours, anything.’

‘I know,’ Thomas said curtly. ‘Don’t wait up.’

‘By the way,’ Annika said to the curtains, ‘what’s her name?’

A short, buzzing silence.

‘Who?’

‘The woman, of course; the wife who called you.’

‘I don’t want you getting involved with this.’

They had a silent stand-off, until Annika capitulated. ‘Your job isn’t on the line,’ she said. ‘If he was murdered then your project only becomes more important. If anyone’s going to end up in the shit it’s the politicians, because they should have started your work much earlier. With a bit of luck you can stop this sort of thing happening again.’

‘You reckon?’

‘You’re not the bad guys this time, trust me. Mind you, it might be helpful if it was me who wrote the article.’

Thomas was silent for several seconds, Annika could hear him breathing.

‘Gunnel Sandström,’ he said eventually. ‘The husband’s name was Kurt.’

Thomas hung up, beads of sweat on his brow. He had been on the brink of giving himself away.

When Annika had asked ‘her’ name, he had Sophia Grenborg’s name on the tip of his tongue; her shiny hair and smiling eyes, the sound of her heels clicking in his ears, her perfume in the room with him.

That was close
, he thought in a muddled way without really realizing what had been close, merely aware that something had gone up in flames, something had happened, a process had started which he didn’t know if he could handle, but he still couldn’t stop.

Sophia Grenborg, with her apartment on Östermalm, in her family’s building.

His mother would like her; the thought ran through his head. She was actually not dissimilar to Eleonor. Not in appearance – Eleonor was tall and sinewy, Sophia was short and petite – but they had something else in common, an attitude, a seriousness, something deeply attractive that Annika didn’t have. He had once overheard Annika describing Eleonor as the sort of person you don’t mind having in your home, and there was something in that. Eleonor and Sophia moved effortlessly through office corridors and meeting rooms, glamorous salons and international hotel bars. Annika
just got clumsy in situations like that, her clothes more dishevelled than usual, looking incredibly uncomfortable in her own skin. Whenever they went anywhere she just wanted to talk to the locals and eat in the bars where the locals ate, and wasn’t remotely interested in culture or the exclusive hotel pool.

He cleared his throat a couple of times, then picked up the phone and dialled Sophia’s direct line at the Federation of County Councils.

‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘I’d love to come to the jazz club after the meeting.’

Annika picked one of the newspaper’s courtesy cars that had studded tyres, expecting ice on the narrow lanes of northern Uppland. The radio was tuned to one of the commercial stations.

In quarter of an hour she had crept seven hundred metres along the jam-packed Essinge motorway, and angrily retuned from the adrenalin-thumping pop music to P2. The news in Serbo-Croat turned into news in Arabic, then something she guessed might have been Somali. She listened to the rhythm of the foreign languages, searching for words she recognized, picking up the names of places, countries, a president.

The traffic started to move after the Järva junction, and once she had passed Arlanda Airport it thinned out considerably. She put her foot down all the way to Uppsala, then turned off right towards Östhammar.

The agricultural landscape of Roslagen spread out around her, dark-brown soil in frostbitten furrows, islands of buildings, rust-red painted farmhouses and white-plastered barns. Communities she didn’t even know existed flew by, places with schools and supermarkets and health centres in obscurity, hotdog kiosks with curtains with abstract designs from IKEA, the
occasional Christmas garland. The grey light erased the sharpness of her surroundings, and she switched on the windscreen wipers.

The road was gradually becoming narrower and more twisted the further north she got. She got stuck behind a local bus that stuck to sixty kilometres an hour, at best, for more than ten kilometres before she had a chance to overtake, and had to force herself not to get stressed. Half the point of this trip was to get out of the office. She had pulled the directions Gunnel Sandström had given her out of her bag while she was stuck behind the bus.

Over the roundabout, towards Gävle, seven kilometres north, then a red farmhouse on the right with an old wagon in the drive and a garden gnome on the veranda. Perfectly straightforward, but she still almost missed the turning and had to brake sharply, realizing that the roads really were slippery. She pulled in behind the wagon, leaving the engine on for a few moments as she looked up at the farmhouse.

The large main house was on the right, with new cladding, but the window frames needed painting. A fairly new stained-wood veranda, a little white china lamp and four small African violets in the kitchen window. On the left an office and silo, stables and workshops, a heap of manure and some pieces of agricultural machinery that evidently hadn’t been used for some time.

A proper old farm
, she thought, efficiently but not pedantically run, traditional but not sentimental.

She switched off the engine and caught a glimpse of the woman as a shadow in the kitchen. Taking her bag, she walked up to the house.

‘Come in,’ Gunnel Sandström said in a thin voice. Puffy eyes. Annika took her dry little hand.

She was about fifty, short and fairly plump, radiating that sort of vanity-free self-confidence. Short grey hair, a wine-red belted cardigan.

‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ Annika said, thinking the phrase sounded clumsy and feeble, but the woman’s shoulders drooped slightly, so the words seemed to have hit their mark.

‘Please, take your coat off. Can I offer you some coffee?’

Annika could still taste the cold coffee from the machine in her mouth, but said yes anyway. She hung up her coat and pulled off her outdoor shoes. The woman was acting on reflex, following patterns of behaviour ingrained over decades. In this house visitors were offered coffee, no matter what. Gunnel went to the stove and turned on the fast plate, measured four cups of water into the pot, then four spoons of roasted ground coffee from the green and pink tin next to the spice-rack, then rested her right hand on the handle, ready to pull the pot off the heat when it came to the boil.

Annika sat down at the kitchen table, her bag beside her, and surreptitiously studied Gunnel Sandström’s mechanical movements, trying to work out the woman’s mental state. She could smell bread, coffee, manure, and something that might have been mould. She let her eyes wander across the room.

‘I don’t read the
Evening Post
very often,’ Gunnel Sandström said once the coffee had come to the boil and she was stirring it. ‘There’s so much nonsense in it these days. Nothing to do with anyone’s real life. Nothing that means anything to people who live like we do.’

She put the pot on a mat on the table, then sat down and seemed to collapse.

‘Thomas, my husband,’ Annika said, ‘told me that both you and Kurt were active in local politics.’

Gunnel Sandström was looking out of the window. Annika followed her gaze and saw a bird table surrounded by flapping wings and scattering birdseed.

‘Kurt was on the council,’ she said. ‘I’m chair of the women’s group, and a co-opted member.’

‘For which party?’ Annika asked.

‘The Centre, of course. We care about the countryside. Kurt has always been interested in politics, from when we first met.’

Annika smiled and nodded, then stood up.

‘Shall I get some cups?’ she asked, walking towards the draining-board.

Gunnel Sandström flew up.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, how silly of me, sit down, please.’

The woman fussed about a bit longer, with cups and saucers and spoons and sugar and milk and half-frozen cinnamon buns dusted with ground almonds.

‘How did you meet? In the Centre Party’s youth group?’ Annika asked when Gunnel Sandström had sat down again and was pouring the coffee.

‘No, oh no,’ the woman said. ‘Kurt was a radical in his youth, lots of our generation were in those days. He was part of the move to the countryside out here, he joined a collective in the early seventies. We met for the first time at a meeting of the road-owners’ association. Kurt thought the payment system should be fairer. It caused a huge fuss round here.’

Annika took out her pen and notepad from her bag, noting down the details.

‘So he’s not from round here?’

‘From Nyland. He studied biology in Uppsala, and after his finals he and a few friends moved out here to start a chemical-free farm. It wasn’t called organic in those days . . .’

The woman looked out at the birds again, disappearing into the past. Annika waited for her to begin again.

‘It didn’t go very well,’ she went on after a while. ‘The members of the collective fell out. Kurt wanted to invest in a silo and a tractor, the others wanted to buy a horse and learn to turn hay. We were already seeing each other by then, so Kurt came to work here on the farm instead.’

‘You must have been very young,’ Annika said.

The woman looked at her.

‘I grew up here,’ she said. ‘Kurt and I took over when we got married, in the autumn of seventy-five. My mother’s still alive, lives in a home in Östhammar.’

Annika nodded, suddenly aware of the monotonous ticking of the kitchen clock. She guessed that the same clock had made the same noise against the same wall for generation after generation, and for one giddy moment she could hear all those seconds ticking through the years.

‘Belonging,’ Annika heard herself say. ‘Imagine belonging somewhere like that.’

‘Kurt belonged here,’ Gunnel Sandström said. ‘He loved his life. There’s no way he would have contemplated suicide even for a second, I swear to that.’

She looked at Annika and her eyes were flashing. Annika could sense the woman’s utter conviction, knowing at once and without any doubt that she was right.

‘Where did he die?’

‘In the sitting room,’ she said, getting up and walking over to the double doors beside the fireplace.

Annika walked into the large room. It was cooler than the kitchen, with a damp, enclosed feeling, and a scratchy blue-green fitted carpet covered with rag rugs. There was an old tiled stove in one corner, a television in another, two sofas facing each other at the far end of
the room, a swivelling brown leather armchair beneath a standard lamp, with a small table alongside.

Gunnel Sandström pointed, her finger trembling.

‘That’s where Kurt sits,’ she said. ‘Always. My chair is normally on the other side of that little table. After dinner we always sit here and read, council papers, the local newspaper, journals, paperwork from the farm, we do everything in our armchairs.’

‘Where’s your chair now?’ Annika asked, although she had a good idea.

The woman turned to her, her eyes full of tears.

‘They took it away,’ she said quietly. ‘The police, to examine it. He was sitting in it when he died, holding the rifle in his right hand.’

‘Did you find him?’

The woman stared into the space left by her armchair, images chasing through her head so vividly that Annika could almost see them. Then she nodded.

‘I was at the scouts’ autumn bazaar on Saturday afternoon,’ she said, still staring at the empty space on the carpet. ‘Our daughter runs the Cubs, so I stayed to help her tidy up afterwards. When I got home . . . he was sitting there . . . in my chair.’

She turned away, the tears overflowing, and stumbled, hunched over, back towards the kitchen table. Annika followed her, rejecting an impulse to put her arm round the woman’s shoulders.

‘Where was he shot?’ Annika asked softly, sitting down beside her.

‘In the eye,’ Gunnel Sandström whispered, her voice echoing faintly between the walls like a rattling wind, the clock ticked, salt tears ran down the woman’s face, no sobbing or any other movement. Suddenly something happened to the temperature in the kitchen, Annika could feel the dead man in the next room, like
a cold breath, a faint note from the angelic choir in her mind.

The woman was sitting quite still, but she raised her eyes to look into Annika’s.

‘If you were going to shoot yourself,’ she breathed, ‘why would you aim for your eye? Why would you stare down the barrel when you pulled the trigger? What would you expect to see?’

She closed her eyes.

‘It doesn’t make sense.’ Her voice was louder now. ‘He would never have done that, and certainly not in my chair. He’s never sat in it, not once. He was sending me a signal that someone was forcing him to do it. It was something about that phone call.’

She opened her eyes, Annika saw her pupils suddenly widen, only to contract again.

‘We had a call on Friday evening,’ she said. ‘Late, after nine thirty. We had just watched the news, and were about to go to bed, we have to be up early for the cows, but Kurt went out. He didn’t say who it was, just got dressed and went out, and was gone for a long time. I lay awake waiting and he didn’t get back until eleven o’clock, and of course I asked who he’d been to see but he said he’d tell me later because he was tired, but after the cows something else came up and we never got a chance to talk about it properly, so I went off to the scouts and when I got back he was . . .’