Berit came over and gave her a hug. She’d never done that before. She knew Annika wasn’t much of a hugger. ‘It’ll be all right,’ she whispered. ‘You just need to get through it.’
Annika nodded. ‘Do you want coffee?’ she asked.
‘Please,’ Schyman said.
‘Not for me,’ Berit said. ‘I was thinking of asking if Ellen and Kalle would like to go to Kronoberg Park with me.’
The children roared with delight, and hurried to get dressed.
Annika went into the kitchen and filled the kettle with trembling hands. She could hear the men talking but not what they were saying. Berit was helping Ellen with her shoes. ‘Would you like to come?’ Berit asked.
Annika stood in the kitchen doorway. ‘I don’t dare leave them alone here,’ she said, trying to smile in the direction of the living room. ‘I want to keep an eye on what they’re doing.’
‘We’ll be back in an hour or so,’ Berit said. ‘Are those your sledges out in the stairwell?’
‘The blue one’s mine!’ Ellen yelled.
They disappeared in a cacophony of heavy shoes and bright voices.
Over the noise of the kettle she could hear Schyman and Halenius talking in relaxed but clear voices, the sort powerful men use when they want to show that they’re at ease but still focused.
‘… obviously a great deal of interest from the rest of the media,’ Schyman was saying, in a tone of cheery acceptance.
She opened the fridge and stared into its cool interior without seeing anything.
‘… and in Nigeria the heads of the foreign oil companies are called “white gold”, or just “ATMs”, cash machines,’ Halenius said, sounding confident and well-informed.
She got out cream, milk and liver pâté, then put back the pâté and the milk.
‘… of course we want to know what we can expect, which scenarios are most likely,’ Schyman said eagerly.
She plugged in the electric whisk and whipped the cream, even though there was still some left from the previous evening. She closed her eyes and kept them tightly shut for so long that the cream almost turned into butter. There were no raspberries left, but she heated some jam and put it into a bowl. She made instant coffee in three mugs, then got out a tray and loaded it with the mugs, three side-plates, coffee spoons, milk, sugar, jam, cream, a cake-slice, three forks, and the rapidly drying-out sticky chocolate cake. There was only just room for the cake on the tray: it balanced dangerously close to the edge. She stopped for a moment in the hall.
‘What are the odds?’ Schyman said, through the wall.
‘The prognosis is good. Nine out of every ten kidnap victims survive, although there’s some evidence that the number of dead is rising.’
So one in ten doesn’t make it, Annika thought.
‘And they get home in reasonable condition?’
Reasonable condition?
‘Another twenty per cent of victims suffer severe physical injury …’ Halenius fell silent as she walked in. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘That cake is lethal.’
She put the tray on the coffee-table, then sat at the far end of the sofa without unloading it. ‘Help yourselves,’ she said.
Halenius and Schyman did just that. The thought of eating anything sweet made her feel sick, but she picked up the dark blue coffee mug with the words ‘The White House’ embossed in gold. It wasn’t from the White House but a souvenir stand outside, about as genuine as a Chinese Volvo.
‘We were talking about what usually happens in kidnap situations,’ Halenius said, filling his mouth with cream and jam. ‘Do you want to hear?’
As if words could make any difference. As if the situation could be made any worse by the dangers being spelled out. She huddled in the corner of the sofa.
‘Abuse is fairly usual,’ Halenius said, without looking at Annika. ‘Although, of course, we have no idea what will happen in this specific case.’
‘What scenarios are you working on?’ Schyman asked.
The doorbell rang again. She got quickly to her feet. ‘That could be our colleagues from the rest of the media,’ she said.
At first she didn’t recognize the men in the stairwell. They were standing silent and grey in their raincoats, staring at her.
She closed the door without saying anything, went back into the living room and felt her brain steaming. ‘What is this?’ she said. ‘Have I become some sort of outpost of Rosenbad?’
Halenius got to his feet, gazing at her quizzically.
‘Hasse and Hasse are standing outside,’ Annika said, gesturing towards the front door. ‘But enough’s enough. Tell them to leave.’
‘They might want—’
‘Tell them to send an email,’ she said, and went into the bathroom.
She heard Halenius go out into the stairwell and have a short conversation with the two men called Hans. Then he came back in, alone, shut the door and returned to the living room. ‘Colleagues from the department,’ he said apologetically to Schyman.
The legs of an armchair scraped the wooden floor.
‘Do you think you could give an overview of an incident like this?’ the editor-in-chief said.
‘That depends on what sort of crime it is. Commercial kidnappings are often easier to resolve. Politically motivated ones are considerably more complicated, and often more violent.’
‘Daniel Pearl,’ Schyman said.
Annika locked the bathroom door.
She had written an article about the Pearl case during her time in the USA. Daniel Pearl had been a journalist, head of the Wall Street Journal’s office in South East Asia when he was kidnapped by al-Qaeda in January 2002. Nine days later he was beheaded. The video had still been on the internet several years later – maybe even now – three minutes and thirty-six seconds of utterly revolting propaganda. She had forced herself to watch it. Daniel Pearl addressed the camera, naked from the waist up, with images of dead Muslims surrounding his face. After one minute and fifty-five seconds a man came into shot and cut Pearl’s throat. The last minute of the video consisted of a list of political demands scrolling across the screen over the image of the journalist’s severed head. Someone was holding it up by the hair.
‘Female kidnap victims are often raped,’ she heard Halenius say quietly, in the living room. ‘Men too, for that matter. In Mexico ears or fingers are amputated and sent to the victim’s family. In the former Soviet Union it’s teeth.’
‘And in East Africa?’ Schyman asked, almost in a whisper.
She straightened and pricked her ears.
Halenius cleared his throat. ‘I don’t have any exact statistics, but mortality rates are high. The kidnappers have plenty of weapons. It’s striking how many hostages end up getting shot. And Somalia is a country where amputations form part of the legal system. It’s traditional that all the external parts of young girls’ genitals are cut off …’
She turned on the cold tap in the basin and let the water run over her wrists. She felt like crying, but was too angry. There had to be limits. She didn’t want to hear about mutilated little girls. She needed help, but not at any cost. The government might want to keep its hands clean, but she refused to accept responsibility for all the violence in the world. She wasn’t going to surrender her home and her bedroom to a load of strange men.
She turned the tap off, dried her hands, unlocked the door and went out.
‘There seem to be several different motivations behind this kidnap, financial as well as political,’ Schyman said, as she wandered over to her corner of the sofa.
Halenius pulled his legs out of the way to let her pass. ‘Unless there’s a combination of motives that aren’t necessarily contradictory. When you consider the political situation in East Africa …’
Annika sank into the cushions. She hoped the children weren’t too cold up in Kronoberg Park. She had got frostbite in her left foot one winter’s day at her grandmother’s cottage at Lyckebo, on the Harpsund estate, which the old woman had been allo
wed to rent because of the years she had spent as housekeeper at the prime minister’s country residence. To this day Annika had problems with the toes of her left foot, which stiffened and turned bluish-white when there was frost. The first time Thomas had seen them he had been horrified and wanted to call for an ambulance. He’d never been very good at dealing with bodily matters. But no doubt he wasn’t freezing at the moment. It was probably very hot in Somalia, she thought, recalling the parched yellow soil in the satellite picture of Liboi.
‘… geographic and cultural circumstances,’ Halenius was saying.
‘And the kidnappers?’ Schyman said. ‘What sort of people might they be?’
‘These groups are strikingly similar all over the world,’ the under-secretary of state said. ‘Often it’s a group of eight to ten people under the leadership of one strong commander. Commercial kidnappers regard themselves as employees. Just like everyone else, they go to work and take holidays and spend their free time with their families. Often they’re childhood friends, or studied together, or belong to the same political or religious groups. They usually start as small-time criminals, raiding shops and banks, things like that.’
She looked at Halenius, sitting on her sofa, so relaxed and comfortable, with the top button of his shirt undone, his hair sticking out, his sleeves rolled up. For Jimmy Halenius this was just another working day, perhaps a bit more exciting than usual because he had the chance to use what he knew – and, my goodness, how much he knew!
‘It’s a bit different with religious or political kidnappings,’ he was saying. ‘Their leader is often a fairly well-educated man who saw the political light while he was at university. He may have embarked on this in a noble attempt to change the world, but once he gets a taste for the ransom money, the ideological fervour tends to diminish.’
‘Is that what we’re dealing with here?’ Schyman asked.
Halenius finished his coffee. ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘The kidnapper who called spoke clear East African English, the sort you hear at the universities in Nairobi.’
‘How do you know that?’ Annika said, aware that her eyes had narrowed to slits.
‘My ex-wife studied there,’ he said. ‘The universities in South Africa weren’t open to people like her during apartheid.’
An African wife. She’d had no idea. She said something about ‘How?’ and ‘Why?’
‘The Swedish Social Democratic Youth Movement helped arrange an ANC Youth League congress in Nairobi in 1989,’ he said. ‘The president of Kenya at the time, Daniel arap Moi, had just released all political prisoners and was in the middle of some sort of charm offensive. That was where we met. She was born and raised in Soweto.’
He turned to the editor-in-chief. ‘That’s one of the reasons I was asked to handle this case. I’m not a native, of course, but of everyone who could have done it, I’m most familiar with the language and dialect.’
‘So you know Nairobi?’ Schyman asked.
‘We got married there. She moved to Södermalm once she’d graduated.’
‘But you’re divorced now?’
‘She works for the South African government,’ Halenius said. ‘She actually has much the same job as me, but in the Ministry of Trade.’
‘What’s her name?’ Annika asked.
‘Angela Sisulu.’
Angela Sisulu. It sounded like a song.
‘Any relation to Walter Sisulu?’ Schyman asked.
‘Distant.’
Annika was breathing through her mouth. They knew everything, were aware of everything, and she knew nothing. ‘Who’s Walter Sisulu?’ she asked.
‘ANC activist,’ Halenius said. ‘Nelson Mandela’s right-hand man, you could say. He was convicted along with Mandela in the Rivonia trial in 1964, and was with him throughout his time on Robben Island. He was elected deputy president of the ANC at their first legal congress in 1991. He died in 2003.’
Schyman nodded, striking right at the heart of her insecurity. She didn’t know the names of all the old ANC leaders off by heart. She hadn’t graduated in Nairobi or grown up in Soweto. She had only just made it through journalism college, and had grown up in Tattarbacken in Hälleforsnäs. They were sitting in her living room, talking hypothetically and in general terms about hostage-taking and kidnapping, but this was happening for real, it had happened, and her family had been hit by it, and there was nothing she could do.
‘What was it you wanted to talk to me about?’ she asked Schyman.
‘I’ve informed the chairman of the board about your situation and have been given the go-ahead to help you. I understand that it’s difficult to avoid the question of a ransom, so the newspaper would like to propose an agreement that would give you the chance to pay the ransom and bring Thomas home.’
She opened her mouth, but couldn’t find any words. Stunned, she shut it again. The newspaper was offering to pay? ‘How much?’ she managed to say.
‘As much as it takes,’ Schyman replied simply.
‘They want forty million dollars,’ Annika said, and was rewarded with a glare from Halenius. She bit her lip. She wasn’t supposed to reveal any details of the negotiations.
Schyman went rather pale.
‘If we agree on a figure for the ransom, it will be considerably lower than that,’ the under-secretary of state said. ‘But I must ask you not to divulge that information anywhere else.’
Schyman nodded again.
‘And what do I have to do in return?’ Annika asked.
‘The Evening Post gets exclusive rights to the story,’ Schyman said. ‘Either you write about it and do the filming yourself, or you pick a reporter to follow you the whole way through. Behind the scenes, through all the negotiations, possibly to Africa if that turns out to be necessary. If anything happens that may threaten the lives or wellbeing of other people, obviously we can edit that out, but otherwise the job would be a documentary account of the entire sequence of events. Tears, loss, pain, relief and joy.’
She leaned back in the sofa. Of course! She should have realized at once. Maybe it was because she hadn’t eaten anything, but she suddenly noticed how nauseous she was feeling. ‘Do you want me to blog as well?’ she asked. ‘I could be “The Hostage’s Wife”. A photographic blog, perhaps?’ She stood up, spilling coffee over the table. ‘I could take pictures of the children every day, show how they’re wasting away because they miss their dad so much. I could describe how much I miss getting fucked at night, because sex sells, doesn’t it? How about a fashion blog with the latest trends in widow’s weeds? Fashion blogs are the most popular ones, aren’t they?’
She went out into the hall, tripping over Kalle’s video game on the way, blinded by tears.
‘Annika!’
She aimed for the bathroom door, managed to get it open, stumbled over the threshold and locked herself in. She stood still in the pitch blackness, her heartbeat seeming to fill the whole room.
‘Annika?’ Schyman said, knocking on the door.
‘Get out of here,’ she said.
‘Think about it,’ the editor-in-chief said. ‘It’s an offer, that’s all. You don’t have to accept it.’
She didn’t answer.
Chapter 8
The Dane was wheezing and rattling, whistling and gurgling with every breath. His chest was rising and falling with fluttering jerks. Even though he was lying right next to me, I couldn’t make out his features. It was darker there than in the last hut. There were no windows or other openings: the only light came from cracks and gaps between the panels that made up the walls. The door looked like a blinding rectangle against the light outside, if it could be called a door: a sheet of tin held in place by some sort of bar and a few bricks.
I had managed to find a position where I wasn’t lying on my hands, without having my face pressed into the bare floor. My head was resting on a stone I had found. My weight was resting on my right shoulder and left knee, in a sort of flattened recovery position, just with my wrists and
ankles tied.
I hadn’t had to relieve myself again, which was some comfort, but it probably wasn’t a good thing: seeing as the main reason was that I hadn’t been given anything to eat or drink. My head felt light and I think I was drifting in and out of consciousness.
The Spaniard and Romanian weren’t moving. Perhaps they were asleep.
The heat inside the tin shack was stifling. My mouth tasted of sand.
None of us had mentioned the Frenchman.
I thought about Catherine, who was in the other hut with the German woman. She had no one to comfort her now. She was completely alone – but perhaps she always had been. What sort of support was I?
Tears stung my eyes, not only because of the sand and dust.
An image of Annika was hovering in front of me in the darkness, smiling at me like she does when she’s really looking at me, so close and vulnerable, that hesitant smile of hers, as if she’s unsure she has the right to be happy, or even to exist. You wouldn’t think it, but she’s so fragile, and I’ve been so heartless. I’ve seen the way I’ve hurt her and it’s made me cross and irritable. She makes me feel as if I’ve been found out. Unmasked. I can be standing right in front of her, and she can see into eternity through me. She has a remarkable ability to see through people, to understand their weaknesses, and she refuses to adapt. That can be a nuisance, embarrassing, even. I’m not saying that was why I went with other women – that would be shifting the blame on to her, and that’s not what I mean … but those women (there weren’t very many, not that that’s any excuse), what did they give me? Validation, I suppose. A diversion. Adrenalin, the joy of the chase, and a bitter aftertaste. They may have seen me for a short while, but they never really saw me.
What’s wrong with me?
Why do I keep hurting the person I love most?
* * *
Berit and the children came back with a clatter of noise and snow-caked boots. Annika had made baked cod with prawns, cream, dill and white wine, and had boiled some rice. It wasn’t Kalle’s favourite, but he’d eat it if he was allowed to pick out the prawns.
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