‘Hello, it’s Annika,’ Annika said. ‘Am I disturbing you?’
Doris cleared her throat. ‘Hello, Annika. No, you’re not disturbing me. We’ve just finished dinner, so it’s fine. Have you heard anything from Thomas?’
‘Not since the video I told you about on Saturday,’ Annika said. ‘But we’ve had some news concerning him. One of the other hostages, the Spaniard, Alvaro Ribeiro, has been released by the kidnappers, safe and sound.’
Doris breathed out. ‘It’s about time these people came to their senses. You can’t keep people prisoner like that. Well, at least they’ve realized …’
Annika pressed a hand to her forehead. ‘Doris,’ she said, ‘Alvaro Ribeiro’s description of what the hostages have been going through is extremely difficult to hear. They’ve been subjected to violence and starvation and abuse. Thomas … has also been threatened and forced to do terrible things.’
Doris was silent for several seconds. ‘Tell me,’ she said.
Soundless breathing.
‘They threatened to cut off his hands unless he did as they said.’
A gasp on the line. ‘Have they? Have they maimed him?’
‘No,’ Annika said. ‘Not as far as we know. The Spaniard didn’t say anything about that. I don’t know how many of the details the papers are going to publish tomorrow, but …’
She fell silent, unable to go on. Your son raped a woman who’d been crucified. She was the woman he went to Liboi to seduce. ‘They’ve been forced to commit sexual assault,’ she said at last. ‘They’ve been badly beaten. The Spaniard had two broken ribs as a result of being kicked. They’ve been forced to eat food full of maggots …’
‘That’s enough,’ Doris said quietly. ‘I understand. If you’ll excuse me, I must—’
‘One more thing,’ Annika said. ‘I can’t have the children with me in the city. They keep being pestered by journalists, and I don’t want them at school when the Spaniard’s story goes public.’
‘Hmm,’ Doris said, in her inimitable, unhappy way.
‘And we’re hoping to reach agreement about the ransom soon,’ Annika said, ‘and that will mean going to Kenya …’
‘A ransom? Are you serious? You’re going to give money to these murderers?’
Annika swallowed. ‘The Spaniard’s partner is in Kenya at the moment. He left a million dollars in a rubbish bin on the outskirts of Nairobi yesterday evening. That’s why the Spaniard was released. We’re probably going to have to fly down there, with a bit of luck maybe this week …’
‘There’s so much going on here,’ Doris said. ‘We’ve got people coming for lunch on Wednesday and Friday, and I have to clean the house. I hope you understand.’
You’d have been only too happy to look after Eleonor’s children, she thought, but Eleonor hadn’t wanted kids. Eleonor hadn’t wanted to spoil her figure and her career, but she never told you that, did she? Thomas’s ex-wife just smiled rather sadly when you asked about children, and whether she and Thomas had talked about having any, and then you thought she couldn’t have any, and you felt so sympathetic, didn’t you? And that was why you said what you did to Thomas: ‘Having children, even a dog can manage that, but looking after them, that’s another matter.’ That’s how you see me, isn’t it, as a bitch? And your own grandchildren aren’t important enough to play on your Persian rugs … ‘Of course,’ Annika said. ‘I understand perfectly. I’ll be in touch if anything new happens.’
She pressed to end the call, shaking with anger.
‘No luck with Doris?’ Halenius asked from the bedroom.
Someone had been eavesdropping.
‘And guess how surprised we are,’ Annika said, dial-ling her mother’s number.
Barbro sounded sober but tired. ‘I’m slaving away all week,’ she said, ‘nine to six.’
Slaving away? Ordinary full-time hours? She let the exaggeration pass. ‘Mum, can I ask a favour?’
‘It’s not that I’m complaining. You always need a bit of money before Christmas.’
‘We’ve had some news about Thomas,’ she said. ‘The hostages are being treated very badly down there. We need to try to get him home as soon as possible, so I was wondering if you’d be able to look after Kalle and Ellen for a few days.’
‘I’m babysitting Destiny in the evenings because Birgitta’s got some extra shifts at Right Price.’
She hit her forehead on the coffee-table three times. What had she expected? ‘Okay,’ Annika said. ‘Have you got Birgitta’s number?’
‘Are you going to apologize at long last?’
She sat up on the sofa and took a silent breath. ‘Yes,’ she said.
Her mother gave her the number, and they ended the call.
She shivered. The chill in the room had eaten its way into her. Her fingers and feet felt icy. Halenius came into the living room. ‘Is it really cold in here?’ she asked.
‘We might have to fly down tomorrow or on Wednesday,’ he said.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’m trying. I’m prepared to humiliate myself as much as necessary if it means I can get someone to look after the children. Okay?’
He went back into the bedroom.
She dialled her sister’s mobile number. Birgitta answered at once.
‘First and foremost,’ Annika said, looking into the video-camera that was set up next to the television, recording everything she said and did, ‘I want to apologize for not coming to your wedding. It was wrong of me to put my job first. People are always more important than articles. I know that now.’
And as she said it she realized it was true.
‘Wow,’ Birgitta said. ‘Little Miss Perfect has come to her senses. What are you after?’
There was no point skirting the issue. ‘I need help,’ Annika said. ‘I need someone to look after the children while I go to East Africa and try to get my husband back. Can you help?’
‘Like you helped me on Saturday, you mean?’
‘Birgitta,’ she said, ‘we’ve got a kidnap-control centre in my flat. I’ve got people here from the Ministry of Justice trying to negotiate with the kidnappers to get Thomas released. We’ve got computers and recording equipment and God knows what else, and we’re trying to stay in touch with the other negotiators and their respective governments.’
‘Is this where I’m supposed to be impressed by how smart and special you are?’
That shut Annika up. Birgitta had a point. Annika had spent the last thirty years trying to beat her by being smarter and more special, and she’d succeeded, by God she’d succeeded, first with Sven, then the College of Journalism, then all her lovely jobs, crowned by her time as correspondent in the USA, and a husband who worked in Rosenbad, and two children at an international private school. She’d won the status race, no doubt about that.
But Birgitta still had her friends. It was Birgitta who went round to Mum’s to watch the Eurovision Song Contest, she was the one who’d bought the old cottage next to Lyckebo and had managed to grow her own apple trees.
‘Sorry,’ Annika said. ‘Sorry I called. I shouldn’t have. I don’t deserve any help, not from you.’
‘Psh,’ Birgitta said. ‘I’m at work from noon until we close all this week and next, otherwise they could have stayed here.’
The room got slightly less cold. Her shoulders relaxed. ‘Christmas rush?’ Annika said.
‘And all the extra money I’m earning will go on presents, so the whole thing just goes round and round.’
Annika laughed. It really was that simple.
‘Mind you, they could be with Steven, but he’s not that great with children …’
Annika looked down at the covering of the sofa and heard Birgitta’s voice get small and lost when Steven wouldn’t get up from the sofa on Saturday night. Don’t pull him like that. He might get angry … Don’t talk to Steven like that.
No, it was probably just as well for the children to be somewhere else.
‘It’s okay,’ Annika sa
id. ‘I’ll find someone. But thanks anyway.’
‘What are you doing for Christmas? Are you coming down to Hälleforsnäs?’
Birgitta sounded happy, keen.
‘I’m not sure,’ Annika said. ‘We’ll have to see if Thomas …’
‘But you have to meet Destiny. She’s the cutest baby in the world.’
They hung up, and Annika lowered her mobile to her lap. She couldn’t ask Berit again. Both she and Thord worked full-time and commuted to Stockholm.
Halenius popped his head into the living room again. ‘Is it safe?’ he said.
She didn’t answer.
‘Can you switch the camera off?’ he asked, as he sat down next to her on the sofa.
‘What for? I’m supposed to be recording what happens behind the scenes.’
‘Please,’ he said.
She got up and pressed pause.
‘I think the kidnappers will be in touch this evening,’ Halenius said. ‘They want to get this over and done with now. How are you doing?’
‘Haven’t found anyone yet,’ she said.
‘This is important,’ Halenius said. ‘You need to leave your comfort zone. A teacher at school, a neighbour, someone at the afterschool club?’
‘So there are universities in Somalia,’ she said.
He sat silent for a few seconds.
‘Apparently it’s a small private university that trains medical staff and nurses. I’ve no idea how well it works.’
‘Do you think that’s where Thomas is? In Kismayo?’
Halenius leaned back and closed his eyes. ‘It’s nowhere near certain. Kismayo is two hundred, two hundred and fifty kilometres from Liboi. The Spaniard thinks he was lying in a vehicle for at least eight hours, so he must have been driven a fair distance. And we’re not talking motorways here.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘The Spaniard? The Yanks’ base in the south of Kenya. They went in and picked him up with a Black Hawk.’
She didn’t bother asking how the American military had got permission to fly an attack helicopter through Somali airspace to pick up a foreign citizen. Presumably they hadn’t. She cleared her throat. ‘I’m going to make another call,’ she said.
Halenius got up from the sofa and went back into the bedroom.
She took several deep breaths. She knew the number by heart, but her fingers burned as she pressed the buttons.
It rang three times, four, five.
Then there was an answer.
‘Hello, this is Annika. Annika Bengtzon.’
* * *
When I was little I used to fly a kite behind Söderby farm, on the meadow where the cows grazed in the autumn. It had an eagle painted on the stiff plastic, wings and head and beak, all yellow-brown. It used to frighten the birds in the meadow: they’d leave their nests and do all they could to protect their young because they thought that my kite was a real eagle.
It was a brilliant kite. It flew high, high up among the clouds, sometimes just a little dot in the blue sky, and I was good: I could make it dive towards the ground, then pull it up at the last moment. It had the strength and tension of a large, powerful animal, but it always obeyed my slightest command.
Holger was always nagging and wanting to borrow it, but I’d asked for it for my birthday and I took really good care of it. I looked after the lines, and always wiped any dirt off it afterwards.
Once, when I was ill with measles, Holger took my kite anyway. He went to the forest behind the youth hostel because there he couldn’t be seen from our house. The kite got caught in the top of a pine tree, the plastic tore and the line broke.
I’ve never forgiven Holger for taking my kite.
I’ve never felt as free as I did when I was flying it. Space was bright and white and stretched all the way to eternity, I can see it now – I can see my kite among the clouds, flitting and dancing, coming closer and closer. The Earth is dark, but all around the kite the stars are shining, crackling and sparkling. It opens a door to the truth, and soon it will be here.
DAY 7
TUESDAY, 29 NOVEMBER
Chapter 16
HELL
ON EARTH
‘An inferno of brutality, starvation and sexual abuse – sensitive readers should look away’
Anders Schyman nodded to himself. The calculation had paid off. Sjölander and young Michnik had managed to include every grotesque detail of the Spaniard’s story without seeming to wallow in the misery (or, at least, not in such a way as to be obvious). ‘Alvaro Ribeiro, 33, has come back to life. He has been on a journey to hell and back. Together with the other hostages in East Africa, among them Swedish father-of-two Thomas Samuelsson, he has had to endure unimaginable cruelty …’
It might not win a Pulitzer Prize, but it worked. The idea of warning sensitive readers about the content of the article was a stroke of genius: it aroused interest and instilled trust. The group rape and murder of the British woman was described as ‘a sadistic assault, calculated in its raw brutality’. Even the pictures were good: there was a technically inadequate photograph of the Spaniard’s filthy and mosquito-bitten face, presumably taken with a mobile phone (they had bought the Swedish rights from El País), and an agency picture of a dusty street in Kismayo (which in contrast had cost almost nothing).
The article covered four pages: six and seven, eight and nine.
Ten and eleven were dominated by a freeze-frame video-still of the kidnapper, Grégoire Makuza. The headline was:
THE BUTCHER
OF KIGALI
The article included few facts about the man. It reported that he came from a suburb of the Rwandan capital and focused mainly on the genocide in the central African state almost twenty years ago. It meant that the horror carried on building across those two pages as well, but that was unavoidable. They had reasoned that, for readers to have any chance of understanding how the man had become such a monster, his life had to be seen in its social and historical context.
Schyman read the text once again. It made him feel as dizzy as he had when he had first read it in outline (on the printout of the final layout) the previous evening.
Nine hundred and thirty-seven thousand people, most of them Tutsis, had been murdered by the Hutu militia between 6 April and early July in 1994. Most had been killed with machetes. Rape was the rule rather than the exception. Up to half a million women and girls (some extremely young) were violated during the conflict, and not just by the militia. Forcing family members to rape each other was part of the militia’s campaign of terror. For this reason, neighbours would often swap places with each other at night so that the girls would at least escape being raped by their own fathers and brothers (a Google search for rwanda forced incest produced over 5.6 million results). Family members were also compelled to eat each other (so-called forced cannibalism, which, with the additional search-word rwanda, produced 2.7 million hits). Amputations were common, not just hands, feet, arms and legs: breasts and penises were sliced off, the walls of vaginas cut out, pregnant women split open. Raped women were impaled on spikes until they bled to death.
He pushed the newspaper away. He’d had enough horror. He reached instead for the first edition of the rival evening paper and leafed through it quickly.
They had pretty much the same layout, with similar headlines (they called Grégoire Makuza the ‘Rwandan Executioner’), but towards the end of their coverage they had one story all of their own. A picture of Annika’s children in a school playground (the lack of definition revealed that it had been taken with a long telephoto lens), accompanied by a text about how sad they were that their daddy was gone. According to the article, Kalle had said, ‘I hope he’ll be home for Christmas’, which also gave them their headline. (Clearly the boy had said nothing of the sort: the reporter would have asked, ‘Do you hope Daddy will be home for Christmas?’ and the child would have replied, ‘Mm.’)
There’d be a fuss about this. The fact that African women had been impaled
on machetes in their thousands usually passed without comment in the Swedish debate, but the fact that a secretly taken picture of two (Swedish) children had been published would make the acolytes of the Journalism God furious. Okay, so the editor hadn’t done anything wrong, but plenty of commentators and ordinary readers had trouble telling the difference between the two big tabloids. In a few weeks’ time half of the readers would swear the picture had been published in the Evening Post. That was why there was never any point in criticizing the other paper. It was like shooting yourself in the foot, which he usually tried to avoid.
The one thing that might deflect attention from the snatched photograph was that the boy had evidently said that ‘Jimmy from Daddy’s work’ was in their flat helping to get Daddy released. The reporter went on to explain that there was only one Jimmy in the whole Department of Justice, and that was Under-secretary of State Jimmy Halenius, the minister’s right-hand man, and the question was whether the Social Democrat justice minister wasn’t guilty of exceeding his authority by allowing a senior official to negotiate with terrorists …
Schyman leaned back in his chair.
In all likelihood, some right-wing MP would report the minister to the Parliamentary Committee on the Constitution before the afternoon was out, and the right-wing members of the committee would make a lot of noise before it was agreed that a group of terrorists could not be regarded as an official body and that there was therefore no question that the minister had exceeded his authority.
And at that moment, just as he was imagining the flushed, indignant faces of the committee members, the back-rest of his office chair broke and he tumbled backwards into the bookcase.
* * *
The lift glided soundlessly up the marble stairwell and stopped with a little jolt at the top floor, the ‘penthouse’, as the building’s owner liked to call her home.
Annika had never imagined she would ever again set foot in the place or be about to ring at that door. Everything was so familiar in its chilly elegance, even though she hadn’t been there in more than three years: the white stone floor, wooden doors, thick carpet.
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