Red Wolf_ A Novel Part 13

As he relaxed, he found himself at one of the vast meetings of his youth, in a huge campsite outside Pajala. Thousands of people on hard wooden benches, the smell of damp wool and sawdust. The men up on the platform made speeches, first one in Finnish, then the other translating into Swedish, the endlessness of their voices, rolling, rising, falling.

With a jerk the train pulled in to a station. He looked out along the platform. Langsele.

Langsele?

Panic hit him hard. Good grief, he was going in the wrong direction! His arms flew up, his head rising from the synthetic pillow, breathless.

Dans quelle direction est Langsele?

South, he thought. It's south, just above nge It's south, just above nge.

He sank back onto the pillow, trying to ignore his own smell, checking that the duffel bag was still at the end of the bed. He coughed weakly. He heard a door slam, felt a jolt as the train got ready to leave. He looked at his watch: 05.16.

There was no reason to worry. Everything was going as planned. He was on his way, invisible, untouchable, like a flickering shadow. Free to travel in his own thoughts in an unfree world, free to return or disappear.

And he chose to return to the meeting at the campsite, to conjure up images that had lain dusty and rusty, faded with age, but still clear.

One pair of speakers followed the other, the strictly arranged presentation which always began with a reading from the Bible, half in Finnish, half Swedish, then the interpretations, variations, a.n.a.lysis and occasionally the personal confession: I was in trouble, searching throughout my youth, something was lacking in my life and I found my way to Sin, and I found women and drink and stole a watch from a friend, but then I met a fellow believer during my national service and Jesus Christ brought light into my life, because my brother sowed a seed in my heart.

Lying in his compartment, he smiled, listening to the stories, full of pain and angst, jubilant and grateful.

But they never really took off, he interrupted himself. There was never any shouting, never any raised voices. Never any ecstasy.

He recalled the boredom of youth.

Often he had let the voices fade away and drift out of the tent together with the thoughts, hopes and restlessness. The city of tents and caravans on the meadow outside was more appealing, an ocean of possibilities concealed behind horse-carts and Volvos. His sideways glances at unknown girls on the bench in front, in their headscarves and long skirts, his awareness of their warmth and shiny hair.

The awareness that his thoughts and hard p.e.n.i.s were sinful.

He was rocked to sleep with the smell of horse manure in his nostrils.

16.

Annika was walking through Kron.o.berg Park breathlessly, her steps crunching in the frost. It was cold, high pressure threatening to bring arctic weather. The tarmac was slippery with ice, the trees smothered in blankets of frost. The gra.s.s, yesterday damp and green, was now frozen stiff and swept in silver.

This was as light as it was going to get. The daylight was thin and shadowless. She lifted her head and squinted up at the porcelain-like sky shades of blue fading to grey, white, pink clouds driven by the north wind high above.

She hurried along, the blades of gra.s.s crackling as they were crushed beneath her feet. She approached the Jewish cemetery from the back, near the place where Josefin had famously been found. She stopped by the black iron railing, her glove stroking its curves and stars, frost dusting her shoes like icing sugar.

The cemetery had been renovated a couple of years ago. Fallen, eroded lumps of sandstone had been replaced, the wild shrubbery had been cut back, the trees trimmed. And somehow the magic had vanished, the sense of experiencing a period in time that Annika had always felt there, the sounds of the city encroached in a way that they never did before, the spirits that had owned the place had gone.

Only Josefin's was left.

She sank to her knees and looked through the railing just as she had done that time so many summers before, that hot summer when the number of wasps broke all records and the election campaign just went on and on. Josefin had been lying there, mouth open in a soundless scream, eyes dull and matt, the young girl with all her dead dreams. There was a rustle in a frozen branch, a siren bounced off the buildings on Hantverkargatan.

He got his comeuppance in the end, Annika thought. Not for what he did to you, but at least he didn't get away with it Not for what he did to you, but at least he didn't get away with it.

And Karina Bjornlund had gathered enough ammunition to get a ministerial post.

She stretched her legs, looked at the time, then left Josefin with a gentle stroke of the railing. She hurried across Fridhemsplan, the wind hitting her face in Ralambshov Park so that she was fiery-cheeked by the time she reached the entrance of the Evening Post Evening Post office. office.

She made it to her aquarium of an office without triggering any tripwires and threw her outdoor clothing in a heap on the couch.

Ragnwald, she thought as her computer whirred into life, forcing herself to concentrate on the present. What does it mean? Who are you? What does it mean? Who are you?

Once Explorer had started up she Googled the name, only getting a limited number of results. A summary of details about a Folke Ragnwald, died 1963; a genealogical site based in Malta; a Christian Democrat candidate, no indication for which const.i.tuency. She read quickly, checked a few more results. A French genealogical site, a German site about royalty, a newsletter about a Danish pop star. She shut down the browser and rang Suup in Lulea instead.

'We're a bit tied up at the moment,' the inspector said. He sounded upset.

'What's happened?'

Annika picked up a pen out of reflex, immediately feeling guilty about whatever it was.

'We don't know yet,' the policeman said. 'Can you call back after lunch, we should know more then?'

Something about his voice struck a chord inside Annika, making her clench all the muscles in her face.

'It's Ragnwald,' she said. 'It's something to do with the terrorist.'

'Not at all. Call back after two. You'll get nothing out of me now.' He sounded so surprised by the idea that she didn't think to challenge his denial.

She looked at her watch; there was no point in pressing him right now, eighteen hours before her deadline. She thanked him and hung up, and laid her notes from their last meeting on the desk in front of her. She needed another cup of coffee before she got going.

She walked along the corridors with her head down, evading people's gaze, and got two coffees from the machine behind the sports desk. Back at her keyboard, she arranged her material, trying to piece together an image of her terrorist.

The young man from the Torne Valley who travelled south, but eventually came back to Lulea.

She let her hands fall, drank some coffee.

Why would a young man travel south in the sixties?

Work or college, she thought.

Why would he come back?

Because whatever he had done was over and done with.

Why Lulea?

If the place you come from feels too restrictive, but you still want to go home, you'd pick one of the larger towns in the area.

But why the biggest?

He must have lived in a big city. Maybe one with a university. Stockholm, Uppsala, Gothenburg or Lund.

She typed the cities into her computer, then realized her mistake.

The young man need not have stayed in Sweden, he could have worked or studied anywhere.

Although this was long before the EU, she reminded herself.

She let that thread fall, and picked up the next.

Where did he go after that?

ETA? Spain? Why?

Political conviction, she thought, but there was a filter of doubt in front of her computer screen.

The Basque separatists were, of course, one of the few terrorist groups that had actually achieved some of their goals, including democracy and extensive political autonomy for the Basque Country. If ETA hadn't blown up Franco's successor in December 1973, Spain's transition to democracy would have been more difficult; and, as far as she knew, the Basque Country today had its own police and its own tax system, and was well on its way to becoming a tax haven for international business.

But ETA had also, perhaps more than any other group, been afflicted with the self-perpetuating nature of terrorism. After the free elections of 1977 there was a whole generation of middle-aged Basques who had done nothing throughout their adult lives but conduct terrorist activities against the Spanish state. Peaceful daily life became too dull, so they decided the democratic state was as bad as the dictatorship and set about killing again. And the Spanish state took its revenge by creating GAL, the anti-terrorist liberation group . . .

She needed to read more about ETA, but she knew they were among the least approachable terrorist groups in the world, killers for the sake of killing. As self-appointed representatives for a homeland that had never existed they demanded compensation for injustices that had never been committed.

She wrote 'read more Bjorn k.u.mm' as a reminder, then went on.

Why Ragnwald? Did the codename have a deeper meaning? Did it symbolize something she ought to know?

She looked the name up in the National Encyclopaedia and found out that it was a combination of Old Icelandic ragn ragn, divine power, and vald vald, ruler. The ruler with divine power not a bad alias. Did it actually mean anything, other than delusions of grandeur?

But then what was terrorism, if not that?

She sighed, fighting a wave of tiredness sweeping her eyes. The coffee was cold and tasted disgusting. She went out and poured the contents of the almost full cups down the toilet, stretched her back, blinded by the neon lights.

She looked over at Berit's desk, but she hadn't arrived yet.

She shut the door of her aquarium carefully behind her and went back to work.

What about the shoes? The footprints had been common knowledge for years, one of the few pieces of evidence the perpetrators had left, but their size had never been made public. Thirty-six. That couldn't be anyone but a small woman, or a very young man, actually a boy. But what was most likely? That a twelve-year-old blew up a plane, or that an adult woman did it?

So he probably had a woman with him, she noted.

But who would want to do something like that? Suup hadn't said anything about a woman. She wrote the question on her notes, but if she had to speculate? Historically, which women had become terrorists? Gudrun Ensslin had been Andreas Baader's partner. Ulrika Meinhof became world-famous when she freed Baader. Francesca Mambro was convicted of blowing up the railway station in Bologna together with her boyfriend Valerio Fioravanti.

'Ragnwald's girlfriend', she wrote, and summarized: 'The young man from the Torne Valley went away and worked or studied in a large town down south, then came back to Norrbotten, joined a left-wing group under the name Ragnwald, the ruler with divine power, which suggests a certain megalomania. He got a girlfriend and persuaded her to blow up a fighter-jet. Then he fled the country and carried on as a killer with ETA.'

She sighed as she read through her notes.

If she was going to get any of this in the paper it had to be considerably more articulate and factual. She looked at her watch. It would soon be time to call Suup again.

Miranda rang the doorbell with her usual insistence. Anne Snapphane hurried down the stairs so that the old b.a.s.t.a.r.d downstairs wouldn't go mad, one hand clutching the towel around her, the other holding a towel round her hair.

The door jammed. It always did when it was below freezing.

Her daughter ran to her without a word, and she leaned over and held her tight. From the corner of her eye she saw Mehmet approach from the car with the little girl's bag, neutral but contained.

'There are m.u.f.fins in the kitchen,' Anne whispered in the girl's ear, and the child let out a little cry and ran upstairs.

In a moment of defiance and pride she stood up without wrapping the towel around her, not caring if the neighbours saw her. Completely naked, apart from the towel round her hair, she looked Mehmet in the eye and took the little bag. He lowered his gaze.

'Anne,' he said, 'you don't have to-'

'You wanted to talk to me,' she said, forcing her voice to sound calm. 'I presume it's about Miranda.'

She turned her back on him, her b.u.t.tocks dancing in front of his face as she went up the stairs. She went into the bathroom and pulled on a dressing gown, stopping in front of the mirror, trying to see herself through his eyes.

'Do you want coffee?' she called, staring into her own eyes.

'Thanks,' he said, 'I'm fine. I have to get to work.'

She swallowed, realizing that this was going to be unpleasant. He wanted a quick line of retreat, not a scalding mug of coffee to empty in hurried embarra.s.sment. He was standing at the living-room window, looking down at the neighbour's garden.

'What is it?' she said, as she sat on the sofa.

Mehmet turned round. 'We're getting married.'

She felt the arrow hit her without trying to stop it.

'That has nothing to do with me or Miranda,' she said, blowing on her coffee.

He sat down opposite her, legs wide apart, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.

'We're expecting a child,' he said. 'Miranda's going to have a little brother or sister.'

Her head started to spin, and against her instinct she looked down at the floor.

'I see,' she said. 'Congratulations.'

He sighed. 'Anne, I know how hard this must be for you . . .'

She looked up, took a deep breath. 'No,' she said. 'I don't want your sympathy. What will it mean, in purely practical terms, for Miranda?'

Mehmet pressed his lips together in that way she knew so well, and she was overcome by a hot, intense longing for the man before her; her heart and groin ached. To her own irritation she let out a little sob.

He reached out a hand to her cheek; she closed her eyes and let him stroke her.

'I'd like her to live with us,' Mehmet said, 'full time. But I won't fight for it if you don't want that.'

She forced herself to laugh. 'You can take most things from me,' she said, 'but not my child. Get out.'

'Anne-'