Red Wolf: A Novel (28 page)

Or maybe she really had gone mad in that tunnel. She knew that this was a real possibility.

Had she lost the ability to judge relevance and probability? Was she on the verge of losing her grip on reality?

She pulled the covers over her head and let the thought creep up on her. It stopped beside her, settling down on her pillow. She looked at it and realized that it really wasn’t dangerous.

The story was what it was, and she was right. There was something there. Schyman may have been right before, but not this time.

She threw off the duvet and gasped for air. She hurried naked into the bathroom and brushed her teeth and showered, in rapid succession.

The apartment echoed desolately without Thomas and the children. She stopped in the doorway to the kitchen and looked at the mess they had left behind them from breakfast, without really acknowledging it. Instead she listened to the sound of silence, sounds she never appreciated when they were all home and she had another function apart from just being an individual. When she became part of something bigger than herself, the little, insignificant things didn’t get through to her. In her role as Responsible Adult, only the most persistent cries reached her, like ‘Food!’ and ‘Sticky Tape!’ and ‘Where’s Tiger?’

Now she was just her own self, off sick, holed below the waterline, a used-up reporter who had passed her sell-by date, and the nuances submerged her, making her listen in mute astonishment.

The fridge was rumbling, deep and steady, a half-tone lower than the ventilation unit on the roof of the next building. The smell of frying was creeping in from somewhere, a restaurant in the block heating up pans and
griddles and preparing lunch of the day. The buses at the stop down on Hantverkargatan sighed and groaned, sirens from the fire engines stationed by Kronoberg Park rose and fell.

Suddenly the panic struck.

I can’t bear it
.

All the muscles in her body strained, sound and breathing vanished.

There’s nothing wrong
, she thought.
It just feels like it. I’m not suffocating, but the opposite. I’m hyperventilating, it’ll pass, just wait, calm down
.

And the floor came closer and pressed against her thighs and elbows until she ended up staring under the dishwasher.

He completely invalidated me as a person
, she thought, a moment of clarity that brought back sound and colour.
Schyman wasn’t just seeing me as a reporter; he took away my honour and value as a person. He’s never done that before. He must be under serious pressure from an unlikely desire to be accepted. I’m not accepted. He can’t go into battle on my side right now, because it would cost too much
.

She got up, noticing that she had banged her knee. Her arms and feet ached, a sign that she had absorbed too much oxygen. Her panic attacks had disappeared for several years. She hadn’t had any since the children were born, until the Bomber got her. Now they came at irregular intervals, with the same violence and terror as they had before.

I wonder if I need happy pills
, she thought.

She knew that Anne Snapphane had a large bottle hidden in her bathroom cabinet.

But it’s all my imagination
, she thought.
I’m scared of my own fear. It’s all in my head. Drag these thoughts into the light and they’ll vanish, let them out
and look at them and they’ll just disappear
.

And she stood there with her hands on the dishwasher, feeling her body stabilize.

She knew she was right. There was a link between Ragnwald, the Minister of Culture, the attack on F21 and the deaths of the boy, the journalist and the councillor.

She had also clearly understood that she was not allowed to look into the story any more, under any circumstances.

I don’t want to hear another word about this
.

At work, no
, she thought.
But if I make a few calls when I’m off sick at home, then it doesn’t count
.

So she went into the bedroom and got dressed, then went back into the kitchen and made coffee, without clearing the mess left by Thomas and the children, just pushed all the dirty crockery into a corner of the table and sat down with her mug of coffee, her pad of paper and a ballpoint pen from the Association of Local Authorities.

She needed to know more about both the terrorist and the minister in order to see the bigger picture. She had the internet at home, but only via an old modem. Thomas had wanted to get broadband but she had refused, because he spent too much time on the computer already.

Check the church records, she wrote; backgrounds and parents.

Ask for the minister’s public records, start with the post, then journeys, representations, declarations, property register, company register, and so on.

Read more about ETA and Læstadianism.

She looked at the short list.

That would be enough for today.

She picked up the phone and asked directory inquiries
to put her through to the parish office in Sattajärv – and discovered that there wasn’t one. She asked for the numbers of all parish offices covered by the local code for Pajala, and, apart from Pajala itself, was given numbers for Junesuando and Tärendö.

Sattajärvi was covered by Pajala.

Göran Nilsson was born 2 October 1948, the only son of Toivo and Elina Nilsson. His mother’s birthplace was given as Kexholm. The couple married 17 May 1946. Father died 1977, mother 1989.

She wrote all of this down and thanked them.

Kexholm?

She would have to go online after all.

Käkisalmi, also known as Kexholm, turned out to be at the mouth of the River Vuoksen, where it flowed into Lake Ladoga on the Karelian Isthmus, not far from the old Swedish city of Viborg.

In other words, now in Russia.

She found a site through the county council in Luleå, with a lot of information about the history of the area.

In the autumn of 1944 Karelia was invaded by the Soviet Union and the whole district was emptied of its original inhabitants. 400,000 people fled deeper into Finland, and some of them carried on to Sweden.

She stared at the screen.

Ethnic cleansing
, she thought.
An old concept, only the terminology is new
.

Did that mean anything? Was it important that the terrorist’s mother had been driven from her home by Russian soldiers?

Not sure. Maybe
.

She logged out and called the parish office in Lower Luleå. It was always easier to do this sort of research over the phone, when no one could see her being so nosy.

Karina Björnlund was born 9 September 1951, second child of three to Hilma and Helge Björnlund. The couple divorced in 1968, the mother remarried and now lives on Storgatan in Luleå. Father dead. Brothers: Per and Alf.

So what did that tell her?

Nothing.

She thanked the parish secretary and got up, restless, and walked around the flat before picking up the phone again and calling the
Norrland News
.

‘Hans Blomberg is off today,’ the sour receptionist said.

‘Put me through to the archive anyway,’ Annika said quickly before she got another rant about the EU.

A young woman answered.

‘I know the powers that be have decided that we should cooperate with the
Evening Post
, but no one ever asks us if we have enough time to do it,’ the woman said, sounding stressed. ‘You can have the password, then you can log in direct and check the archive online.’

She needs to calm down before she ends up like Hans
, Annika thought.

‘What I’m looking for probably isn’t on the net,’ she said. ‘I’m after the earliest cuttings you have for Karina Björnlund.’

‘Who? The Minister of Culture? We’ve got kilometres’ worth of columns about her.’

‘The very earliest ones. Can you fax them to me?’

She gave her home number, making a mental note to turn the fax machine on.

‘How many? The first hundred?’

Annika thought for a moment. ‘The first five will do.’

The sound of air being exhaled, a long sigh.

‘Okay, but not before lunch.’

They hung up and Annika went out into the kitchen and cleared the breakfast things, checked what was in the freezer and worked out that she could do chicken fillets in coconut milk for dinner.

Then she tied on her shoes and pulled on her jacket.

Have to get out, have to breathe
.

She picked up a microwaved pasta dish with mushrooms and bacon from the 7-Eleven on Fleminggatan, and ate it slowly with a plastic spoon as she crossed Kungsbron in to the city centre.

She threw the paper tray in a bin by the junction of Vasagatan and Kungsgatan, then walked quickly towards Hötorget. She only slowed down once she reached Drottninggatan, Stockholm’s only truly continental pedestrian street, with its mix of heaven and hell, street-sellers, performers, whores and the frozen tramps who filled the gaps between the retail palaces. She was pushed forward in the crush, strangely full of tenderness, she was jostled along by people, and felt something oddly melancholic as she took them in: the mothers with clenched teeth and squeaking, swaying buggies; groups of beautiful young women from immigrant suburbs with their high heels and clear voices, finally out of sight of home, their hair dancing above unbuttoned jackets and tight tops; important men with their universal uniforms of briefcases and stress; slick Östermalm kids with Canada Goose jackets and posh nasal ‘i’ sounds; tourists; hotdog sellers; couriers; idiots and drug-dealers. She let herself be swept along with them, drawn in among them, could maybe even find a home at the bottom of their big, forgiving, common well.

‘Isn’t that the Blaster? That’s her, isn’t it? Look! In the tunnel, she was on telly . . .’

She didn’t turn round, knew that the whispering would pass;
if you sit by the river long enough, you will see the
bodies of your enemies float by
. Soon no one would remember the Bomber in the tunnel and she would be just one among all the others in the well, a grey-black flake slowly drifting down towards the sludge at the bottom, ignored by everyone.

She stopped before the glass door to number 16, one of the government’s discreet departmental entrances. The window-frames were all polished copper, and behind large empty glass windows and well-tended potted palms was a reception desk with bullet-proof glass and a uniformed guard.

Annika pushed open the two doors, the grit on the soles of her shoes scraping against the marble floor, and went up to the guard, her skin creeping with the feeling that she was a shameless infiltrator. She tapped on the microphone in front of the closed screen.

‘It works,’ the elderly man behind the glass said; she saw his lips move and heard the words to her left, through a hidden speaker.

‘Oh, good,’ Annika said, trying to smile and leaning towards the microphone. ‘I’d like to check Karina Björnlund’s post.’

It was done, the spy is here, about to go through the bins and the post-box.

The man picked up a phone and pressed some buttons.

‘Take a seat and I’ll call the registrar.’

She went over to the waiting area, three curved brick-red sofas, one EU flag and one Swedish flag, a designer rack holding a mass of magazines, a metal statue possibly supposed to be a small child. Maybe a girl.

She looked at the statue; was it bronze?

She took a step closer. Who was the girl? How many inquisitive spies had she watched come and go?

‘Hello? Did you want to look through the minister’s register?’

She glanced up and found herself looking at a middle-aged man with a ponytail and sideburns.

‘Yes,’ Annika said. ‘That’s me.’

She held out her hand, not mentioning her name. According to the freedom of information laws, you could check public documents without having to prove your identity, a law she was happy to safeguard as often as she had the chance. At least it saved her from having to feel the slightest shame, because they didn’t know who she was.

‘This way.’

They passed two locked doors and a passageway painted in diagonal stripes, and took the lift up to the sixth floor.

‘To your right,’ the man said.

The marble floor was replaced by linoleum.

‘Down the steps.’

Worn oak tiles.

‘This is my room. So, what did you want to see?’

‘Everything,’ Annika said, taking off her jacket and deciding to get as much spying done as possible. She put her coat and bag on a chair in the corner.

‘Okay,’ the man said, starting up a program on the computer. ‘Karina has had six hundred and sixty-eight official items since she started as a minister almost ten years ago. I’ve got the whole list on here.’

‘Can I have a printout?’

‘This year?’

‘Everything.’

The registrar’s expression didn’t change, he just started his printer.

She glanced down the first page of the printout: registration date, item number, in date, documentation
date. Then the name of the person who had been in charge of the item, the person who had sent it, name and address, a description of the item in question, and finally what it led to.

Decision, she read, ad acta.

‘What does “ad acta” mean?’ she asked.

‘No reply,’ the man with the ponytail said, turning to face her. ‘Archived without action. Could have been an encouraging note, or a rambling letter from one of our more regular correspondents.’

She went through the descriptions of the items: an invitation to the Cannes Film Festival, a request for a signed photograph, a plea to save a publishing company from closure, five questions from class 8B in Sigtuna, an invitation to the Nobel dinner in Stockholm City Hall on 10 December.

‘Where are all these letters and emails physically stored?’

‘The items you’re reading through now are still current, so they’re with secretaries.’

She took the second page and her eye was caught by the first item.

Statement from the Newspaper Publishers’ Association regarding changes to broadcast rights for digital television.