‘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 blastfurnace 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. W
e’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.
8
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.
Malmvallen, she thought. The famous football pitch.
She switched off the engine and sat in the dark, listening.
Benny Ekland had just written a series of articles about terrorism. The last thing he published was about the attack on F21. After that he was run down, here, in the most desolate place in Luleå.
She didn’t like coincidences.
After a few minutes a teenage boy came out of one of the blocks nearby and walked slowly up to the fluttering plastic cordon around the crime scene, hands in his pockets. His hair was stiff with gel, making Annika smile. Her son Kalle had just discovered the joys of hair-gel.
The boy stopped just a couple of metres from her car, staring blankly at a small heap of flowers and candles inside the cordon.
Her smile faded as it dawned on her how Benny Ekland’s death had affected the people living here. They were all mourning his loss. Would any of her neighbours mourn her?
Hardly.
She started the car, intending to drive down to Malmhamnen. The moment she turned the key the boy started as though he’d been hit, and his reaction made her jump. With a cry that penetrated the car the lad rushed back to his block. She waited until he had disappeared behind the fence, then rolled off towards the harbour where the stolen car had been found.
The road was pitch-black and treacherous, leading to a dead end and a large gate. She decided to drive back up to the site of the accident, creeping along at a snail’s pace. As she passed the shop she looked into the block of flats next to it and saw the boy’s spiked hair silhouetted in the bottom-left window.
‘I didn’t mean to scare you,’ she said to herself. ‘What made you so frightened?’
She stopped the car by the cordon and got out, taking her bag. She looked up at furnace number two, still impressed, then turned and looked the other way, into the wind. This road was one of the routes into the residential district.
Annika pulled her torch out of the bag and shone it behind the police cordon. The snow of recent days had covered all traces that might have been visible to the average person. The ice on the tarmac showed no signs of emergency braking, but any that had been there would have been obliterated by now.
She shone the beam on the fence some ten metres away. That was where he had been found. Inspector Suup was right; Benny Ekland’s last movements had been a flight through the air.
She stood with the torch in her hand, listening to the distant noise of the steelworks. Turning around, she saw the boy’s head again, this time in the right-hand window.
She might as well go and knock, seeing as she was here.
The yard was dark, and she had to use her torch to find her way. It looked like a scrap yard, and the house was ramshackle. The panels on the roof were rusty, the paint peeling. She switched off the torch, put it in her bag and went up to the plain front door. It led into a pitch-black hallway.
‘What are you doing here?’
She leaped back, fumbling for the torch once more. The voice had come from the right, a boy whose voice was breaking.
‘Hello?’ she said.
There was a click and the hall lit up. She blinked, momentarily confused. She was surrounded by dark-brown panelled walls that seemed to loom over her. It felt like the ceiling was pressing down on her. She put her hands above her head and screamed.
‘What on earth’s the matter? Take it easy.’
The boy was gangly and skinny, and was wearing thick socks. He was pressed against a door bearing the name Gustafsson, his eyes dark, watchful.
‘Jesus,’ Annika said. ‘You scared me.’
‘I’m not the son of God,’ the boy said.
‘What?’ And the angels suddenly started singing. ‘Oh, just shut up!’ she yelled.
‘Are you nuts?’ the boy said.
She gathered her thoughts and met his gaze. It was inquisitive, and slightly scared. The voices fell silent, the ceiling slid away, the walls stopped throbbing.
‘I just get a bit dizzy sometimes,’ she said.
‘What are you doing creeping around here?’
She pulled a crumpled paper handkerchief out of the bag and wiped her nose.
‘My name’s Annika Bengtzon; I’m a journalist,’ she said. ‘I came to see the place where my colleague died.’
She held out her hand, the boy hesitated, then shook it half-heartedly.
‘Did you know Benny?’ he asked, pulling his slender fingers away.
Annika shook her head. ‘But we wrote about the same things,’ she said. ‘I was supposed to meet him yesterday.’
The hall went dark again.
‘So you’re not with the police?’ the boy said.
‘Can you turn the lights on again, please?’ Annika said, hearing the note of panic in her voice.
‘You are a bit nuts,’ the boy said, sterner now. ‘Unless you’re just scared of the dark?’
‘Nuts,’ Annika said. ‘Turn the lights on!’
The boy pressed the switch and the bulb lit up for another minute or so.
‘Look,’ Annika said, ‘could I use your toilet?’
The boy hesitated. ‘I can’t let crazy women into my flat,’ he said. ‘You can understand that, can’t you?’
Annika couldn’t help spluttering with laughter. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll just pee in the hall instead.’
He raised his eyebrows, opened the door with the hand that had been resting on the handle.
‘But don’t tell Mum,’ he said.
‘Promise,’ Annika said.
The bathroom had vinyl wallpaper from the seventies, decorated with stylized sunflowers. She splashed her face, washed her hands, ran her fingers through her hair.
‘Did you know Benny?’ she asked when she emerged.
The boy nodded.
‘What’s your name, by the way?’ Annika said.
He looked at the floor. ‘Linus,’ he said, his voice managing to perform somersaults within the space of just five letters.
‘Linus,’ Annika said, ‘do you know if anyone in the building saw what happened to Benny?’
The boy’s eyes opened wide, he took two steps back.
‘So you are police?’
‘Is there something wrong with your hearing?’ Annika said. ‘I’m a hack, like Benny. We wrote about the same stuff. The police say that someone
ran into him and scarpered. I don’t know if that’s true. Do you know if anyone heard anything that night?’
‘The police have already been here, they asked the same thing.’
‘So what did you tell them, Linus?’
His voice went into falsetto when he replied. ‘That I hadn’t seen anything, of course. I came home when I was supposed to. I don’t know anything. You should go now.’
He took a step towards her, raising his arms as though he was thinking of pushing her out of the door. Annika didn’t move.
‘There’s a difference between talking to the press and talking to the police,’ she said slowly.
‘I know,’ Linus said. ‘When you talk to the press you end up on the front page.’
‘Anyone who tells us anything can stay anonymous if they want. None of the authorities can ask who we’ve spoken to, that’s against the law. Freedom of expression – did Benny ever talk about that?’
The boy stood in silence, eyes wide, deeply sceptical.
‘If you saw anything, Linus, or know someone who did, that person can tell me, and no one would find out that it was them who said anything.’
‘Would you believe them, then?’
‘I don’t know. That depends on what they say, of course.’
‘But you’d write about it in the paper?’
‘Only the information; not who said it, if they didn’t want me to.’
She looked at the boy, knowing that her intuition was right.
‘You didn’t come home when you were supposed to, did you, Linus?’
The boy shifted his weight from one skinny leg to the other, and gulped, making his Adam’s apple jerk up and down.
‘When should you have come home?’
‘On the last bus, the number one stops at twenty-one thirty-six.’
‘So what did you do instead?’
‘There’s a night bus as well, the fifty-one, that goes as far as Mefos. It’s for the blokes who work shifts at the steelworks … I get it sometimes when I’m out late.’
‘And then you have to walk?’
‘Not far, just across the footbridge over the railway and down Skeppargatan …’
He looked away and padded through the hall to his bedroom. Annika followed, and found him sitting on the bed, neatly made with a bedspread and some scatter-cushions. A few schoolbooks were open on the desk, an ancient computer, but everything else in the room was arranged on shelves or stacked in boxes.
Red Wolf Page 5