He paid for the taxi with the newspaper’s credit card, then glanced at the reporter beside him. She looked like an unmade bed.
At the time of the Crown Princess’s wedding a year or so ago, he had introduced a new dress-code at the paper. Torn jeans, micro-skirts, washed-out college shirts and tops cut down to the navel were banned, and a certain degree of style expected. Annika hadn’t had to change much of her wardrobe. She usually wore fairly good labels, but still managed to look as if she’d fallen into them by accident. He often got the impression she’d put on one of her husband’s shirts without noticing. Today was worse than usual. She was wearing a shirt with a tanktop, a style that had been fashionable when he was still at junior school.
Most people put on weight in the USA, but not her. She was, if possible, even more angular and sharp-boned now. If it weren’t for her generously proportioned bust she could easily have been mistaken for a long-haired teenage boy.
‘That woman who was found dead outside the nursery school in Hägersten,’ she said. ‘She’d reported her husband for aggravated harassment, but the investigation was dropped because the offences had passed the statute of limitations.’
‘Don’t forget your gloves,’ Schyman said, pointing at a number of things that had fallen out of her bag on to the floor of the taxi. He stepped out, walked up to the brushed brass panel embossed with three crowns to the left of the entrance, pressed it and the door swung open. Annika trailed three steps behind him up the white marble stairs, through the white marble foyer, with its pillars and vaulted ceiling, to the security desk at the far left-hand side. From the corner of his eye Schyman saw her stop and stare at one of the statues by the wall.
With a sudden pang of loss he remembered his time as a political reporter, how a gust of wariness would sweep through these government buildings whenever he appeared (walking, striding, even forging forward) with his television crew. Politicians, businessmen and press secretaries had treated him respectfully, occasionally even fearfully. What was he doing today?
He glanced back at Annika. ‘ID,’ he said.
She went to the security desk and tossed over her driving licence.
A human-resources manager, that was what he was. And a profit machine for the family that owned the paper. An exploiter of modern life, an explorer in the boggy outer reaches of journalism.
Alien hand syndrome.
The guard was a young woman who was doing her best to exude authority. Her hair was pulled into a tight bun and she was wearing a tie. She asked him rather pompously for his own ID and carefully read his press card. She evidently didn’t recognize him. She probably didn’t follow current affairs. Then she tapped at a computer, picked up a phone to check that they had authorization to proceed, and instructed them to head up the stairs towards the lifts.
Thank you very much. He knew perfectly well where to go.
‘We’ll take the one on the right,’ Schyman said. ‘The one on the left is a goods lift that stops at every floor.’
Annika didn’t seem remotely impressed by his local knowledge.
* * *
So this was where he worked.
Thomas’s really, really, really important job.
Annika avoided looking at her reflection in the lift. She had never been here before. She’d never come to pick him up from work, had never been for coffee in the staff cafeteria, had never surprised him with tickets to the theatre or cinema, then gone out for a pizza afterwards.
Thomas had allied himself with the state, and it was her job to hold it to account.
They got out on the sixth floor, one below the Cabinet Office. Thomas was based on the fourth. Every time he had to come up to the sixth floor he would talk about it over dinner with a note of respect in his voice. This was where the real power lay: the minister, the under-secretary of state, the directors-general for legal affairs, the office manager, head of administration and political advisers. White walls, thick, pale grey carpets, doors ajar. The smell of influence and furniture polish hung in the air.
‘Welcome,’ Jimmy Halenius said, coming over and shaking their hands. ‘We’re sitting through here …’
He didn’t look as if he belonged there. He was too crumpled and unkempt. She wondered how he had managed to get the job. Sycophancy and contacts, probably. ‘Have you heard from Thomas?’ she asked.
‘No,’ Halenius said. ‘But we do have some other information.’
All sounds were muffled, as if the carpets devoured voices. The doors concealed invisible eyes: they could see and hear everything.
They walked down a corridor to a conference room with a view of Tegelbacken and the little island of Strömsborg. It was fitted out with pale wooden furniture and bottles of Swedish mineral water. She shivered, but that had nothing to do with the temperature in the room. The two men from the previous day, who were both called Hans, were already there, but without their coats this time.
She didn’t want to be there. She was obliged to be there. It was an order.
She sat down on the chair closest to the door, ignoring the men called Hans.
Halenius pulled up a chair and sat directly in front of her. Annika leaned back instinctively.
‘I appreciate that this is very difficult for you. Just say if there’s anything you’d like,’ Jimmy Halenius said, looking at her with those bright blue eyes.
She hunched her shoulders and stared at the table.
I’d like my husband back, please.
‘We’ve been in touch with Nairobi this morning, and we’ve got more details of what happened. Feel free to interrupt me if there’s anything you’re wondering.’
Wondering?
He looked straight at her as he spoke, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, in an attempt to get closer to her. To get through. She turned to the window. The tower of the City Hall reached up to the sky, with its three crowns at the top. She couldn’t see the water.
‘The delegation that Thomas was part of took off in a private plane for Liboi early in the morning of the day before yesterday. The group consisted of seven representatives, three guards, one interpreter and two drivers. The interpreter and one of the guards have been found dead, of course, but one of the drivers was discovered alive by a shepherd outside Liboi. He had received a blow to the head, but was able to take part in a short telephone interview this morning. Would you like some water?’
Would she?
She shook her head.
Halenius reached for a sheet of paper on the conference table, put on a pair of reading glasses and read it in silence. How old was he? He had once told her: three years older than her, about forty. He looked more.
‘The delegates are, apart from Thomas, a fifty-four-year-old Frenchman called Sébastien Magurie. He’s a Member of the European Parliament, and fairly new to this. It was his first conference on the subject.’ He waved the document. ‘You’ll get a copy of this a bit later, when we’ve had everything formally confirmed.’
Wasn’t there an awful lot of dust in here? Sticky grey dust that caught in your throat?
‘Maybe I will have that water,’ Annika said.
One of the men called Hans stood up and fetched a bottle of Loka from a side-table. Wild raspberry flavour. Awful. Tasted like paraffin.
‘Catherine Wilson, thirty-two years old, the British delegate. She speaks Arabic and Swahili. She spent part of her childhood in Kenya and was acting as the group’s secretary. She managed to send one report back to the conference before the group disappeared. Alvaro Ribeiro, thirty-three, is the Spanish delegate. A lawyer, he works for the Spanish government. Helga Wolff, German, aged sixty. It doesn’t say so here, but someone said she was a clerk in Brussels. The Danish delegate’s name is Per Spang, and he’s sixty-five, a member of the Danish parliament, not in good health. Sorin Enache, the Romanian delegate, is forty-eight. An official from their Ministry of Justice, in a similar post to Thomas. Also a marathon runner.’
Helga Wolff, what a cliché. You
couldn’t get more German than that. Sixty years old, so it wasn’t her. Unless she was a government minister, skinny and had had a facelift. But not a clerk. Thomas would aim higher than that.
‘Did he volunteer to go?’ Annika asked.
Halenius lowered the document. ‘How do you mean?’
She was prepared to bet that the thirty-two-year-old Englishwoman was petite and blonde. ‘Was there any prestige to be gained in going?’ she asked.
Halenius looked tired. ‘No,’ he said. ‘This sort of assignment isn’t particularly prestigious. None of the other delegates was especially senior. I don’t know if he volunteered or was asked to go, but I can check.’ He reached for another sheet of paper.
Annika looked round the small conference room. This wasn’t a powerful room: it wasn’t the Blue Room where the department’s cabinet meetings were held, just some shitty little room where you took the wives of men who’d gone missing, maybe somewhere you prepared minor changes in the law about women who go missing and are found murdered behind nursery schools and in car parks.
‘The delegation secretary’s first report is a short description of the town of Liboi and a summary of the conversation the delegates had with the chief of police there,’ Halenius said. ‘Apparently the border crossing to Somalia isn’t manned. The police station acts as the border post, even though it’s several kilometres from the border …’
Annika leaned forward. ‘Why are you claiming that aggravated harassment has a statute of limitations of ten years?’
Anders Schyman put his hand over his eyes and groaned. ‘Annika …’
Halenius regarded her silently.
‘Because it isn’t true, is it?’ she went on. ‘That law was just playing to the gallery, wasn’t it? The Ministry of Justice wanted the applause of the women’s movement and human-rights activists, but you passed a law that’s completely toothless.’
The two men called Hans were staring at her as if she’d suddenly started to speak an entirely different language. Jimmy Halenius studied her face as though he were looking for something.
‘So, the surviving driver has been able to give a short description of what happened,’ he said slowly. ‘The delegation was stopped at a roadblock by a group of armed men, seven or eight of them. The driver isn’t sure of the number. He claims the men were Somalis, but obviously that can’t be verified.’
The chill in the room was creeping into her spine and she wrapped her arms round her body. Didn’t Anne Snapphane know a man from Somalia? A rapper, seriously handsome?
‘The cars were on an unofficial road a few kilometres south of the A3 highway, close to the Somali border. At least one of the guards was working with the men at the roadblock. He disconnected the tracking devices on both Toyotas.’
One of the men called Hans suddenly spoke. ‘The Toyota Land Cruiser 100 is extremely popular in Africa,’ he said. ‘They can get through most terrain, and the US Army used them during the invasion of Iraq. In Kenya they’re known as “Toyota Takeaways” because of the demand for stolen vehicles.’
Annika turned towards him. ‘And what does that have to do with anything?’ she asked.
The man called Hans blushed.
‘It tells us quite a lot about the men at the roadblock,’ the under-secretary of state said. ‘They knew what they were doing. The attack wasn’t just a coincidence. They were waiting for the EU delegation. They knew the cars were equipped with trackers, and they knew where they were. And they had sufficient financial awareness to know that the vehicles themselves were of considerable value.’
They’d known what they were doing.
Did anyone really know what they were doing, how they were doing it, and why? She could feel herself getting confused.
‘An inside job?’ Anders Schyman asked.
‘It looks like it. The group had chosen the location for the attack carefully. They got themselves there in another vehicle, a covered truck. The driver recognized the make, an old Mercedes.’
She was fighting an urge to stand up and walk over to the window. She clutched the chair’s armrests instead. ‘So where are they now?’ she asked.
‘We don’t know,’ Jimmy Halenius said. ‘The truck was gone by the time the police and the military got there so it was probably used to move the members of the delegation.’
Don’t know. Looks like it. Probably.
‘You don’t really know anything, do you?’
She saw Anders Schyman exchange a look with the two men called Hans. The editor-in-chief reached for a bottle of water and asked something about the tracking devices the cars were fitted with, and they started talking about them, as if they were remotely important, as if they mattered. They were a German model, small but reasonably powerful, combining two established methods of positioning, part GSM, part traditional radio …
She felt the words flow through her head without settling. The trackers didn’t need either an external aerial or satellite coverage, and the smallest model, which was evidently the one used in this instance, was smaller than a mobile phone and weighed just 135 grams; they had been hidden in the engine compartment, behind the antifreeze container.
She looked out over Riddarfjärden again. It was about to start snowing. The clouds were hanging just above the rooftops.
‘You’re right. We know very little with any certainty. But we can make a number of assumptions. We could be dealing with a hostage situation – the people in the group have been kidnapped. It isn’t unusual in that part of the world. You might have heard of the Somali pirates who hijack ships at sea. This could be a land-based version of that.’
‘Like the Danish family on that yacht?’ Anders Schyman asked.
‘Kidnapped?’ Annika said.
‘If we’re dealing with kidnap, we’ll find out about it within the next few days, probably today or tomorrow.’
Annika couldn’t sit still any longer. She got up and went to the window. Ducks were swimming about in the water: how come their feet didn’t freeze?
‘There are routines in most things,’ Jimmy Halenius said. ‘If we’re lucky the kidnappers will just demand money. If we’re unlucky this could be a political kidnapping, and some fundamentalist group will assume responsibility and start demanding the release of terrorists held captive around the world, or that the US withdraws from Afghanistan, or that global capitalism be dismantled. That’s much more difficult.’
Annika could feel her hands starting to tremble: alien hand syndrome.
‘There’s no chance that they’ll just turn up?’ the editor-in-chief asked. ‘Shaken but unharmed?’
‘Of course it’s a possibility,’ Halenius said. ‘We don’t know anything about the men at the roadblock or their motives so the scenario is completely open.’ He stood up and came over to stand beside her at the window. ‘From the government’s side,’ he went on, ‘we’ll keep you informed of everything that reaches us from Brussels, Nairobi, and the authorities in all the other countries concerned. In other words, Britain, Romania, France, Germany, Spain and Denmark. What information we receive will determine how we proceed. You can count on our support, no matter what happens. I’ve got your email address, so I’ll send you the delegation secretary’s report and details of the other delegates as soon as it’s been checked and cleared. Is there a number I can reach you on?’
She hesitated, then put her hand into her bag and pulled out the newspaper’s mobile. ‘This one,’ she said quietly, switching it on and tapping in her PIN.
Behind her Schyman stood up, and the two men called Hans followed suit.
‘We’ve looked into the limitation period for aggravated harassment,’ the under-secretary of state said quietly. ‘It was done here in the department back in 2007, precisely because of the issue you raised. The inquiry concluded that aggravated harassment was not a continuous crime but consisted of separate offences. That means they each have a separate statute of limitation. Anything else would be out of the question. There’d be a risk of m
iscarriages of justice.’
She turned and looked up at him. He had been listening to what she had said. ‘There are still prosecutors calling this a political law,’ she said. ‘Did you know that?’
Halenius nodded.
‘So what are all other laws?’ she said. ‘God-given?’ She walked out of the little room.
Behind her she heard Anders Schyman and the under-secretary of state mumbling. She knew exactly what they were talking about. How long could this be kept from the public? Until some group claimed responsibility, probably, but no longer than that. There were too many countries involved, too many organizations. When could Schyman go to press? Who was going to make a statement?
She took the lift down without waiting for Schyman.
* * *
The hut consisted of a single windowless room. The inside was pitch black with soot. In the centre of the floor there was a hearth that presumably acted both as a stove and a source of heat and light, but at the moment just took up space. A hole in the roof to let the smoke out was spreading a gloomy light, making our bodies look dark and indistinct. Our hands had been tied behind our backs again. They had removed our shoes.
It was very cramped.
I was lying with my face towards the crotch of Alvaro the Spaniard. He had had to relieve himself in his trousers, like the rest of us. The stench was heavy and acrid.
The Dane, Per, was having difficulty breathing. He didn’t complain, but his wheezing filled the gloom. The German woman was snoring.
We were in a camp for people and livestock behind a wall of branches and thorny bushes, known as a manyatta. I’d managed to count eight huts in the moonlight before we were shut inside this one. But I hadn’t seen anyone apart from our guards. No cows or goats either. I think I must have slept for a while during the morning.
The air was perfectly still. It was incredibly hot. The square of light in the roof showed that the sun was approaching its zenith. Sweat was running into my eyes. The salt made them sting, not that it mattered.
We’d been given food. Ugali, boiled maize flour, the staple in East Africa. I ate too quickly and got stomach cramps.
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