‘There!’ Annika said. ‘Did you see? Sixty-four!’
‘What?’ Roger said.
‘Rewind,’ Annika said. ‘Can you pause it?’
Roger pressed the remote.
‘Bloody hell,’ Anne said. ‘How did you catch that?’
‘I was there today, and I was thinking about this then,’ Annika said. ‘Keep going, maybe there’s more.’
A mass of people suddenly crowded in front of the camera. Someone jogged it, and Roger appeared in shot again.
‘Christer!’ he cried on screen, waving his hand.
The Roger on screen stood on tiptoe, looking over to his left, then turned to his wife and spoke into the living room.
‘Did you see? There’s Anna-Lisa’s Christer! He’s on the same plane.’
‘Well, go and say hello!’ a disembodied woman’s voice said.
Roger Sundström turned round, and on the screen Annika saw how the sea of people suddenly parted, and at the far end, albeit out of focus, she could see Christer Lundgren rushing towards a gate. It was the former Minister for Foreign Trade, there was no doubt about that.
‘Do you see?’ Annika exclaimed. ‘He’s holding a ticket! He was definitely getting on a plane!’
The Roger on screen lost the minister in the crowd, looked in another direction, called out ‘Christer!’, and then the screen went dark. The picture started to break up, then the tape started to rewind. Annika felt a surge of adrenalin rush through her body.
‘It’s not surprising you didn’t see him on the plane,’ she said. ‘Christer Lundgren didn’t leave from gate sixty-four. He was heading for gate sixty-five!’
‘So where was that going?’ Anne asked, bewildered.
‘We’re going to find out,’ Annika said. ‘Thank you so much for letting us disturb your evening, Roger.’
She shook his hand and hurried out.
‘What did I tell you?’ she said jubilantly when they got down to Ankarskatavägen. ‘The bastard, the sodding bastard. He was somewhere else that night, and he can’t tell anyone where!’
She performed a little wardance on the road.
‘We know where he was,’ Anne Snapphane said calmly. ‘At the sex club.’
‘No!’ Annika said. ‘He was flying somewhere, somewhere absolutely secret.’
‘Pah,’ Anne said. ‘You’re talking nonsense.’
Annika did a little pirouette.
‘It’s so damn secret that he’d rather be accused of murder and have to resign.’
‘Rather than what?’
Annika stopped.
‘Rather than tell the truth,’ she said.
Nineteen years, four months and seven days
I have to decide what’s important. I have to reach a conclusion about who I am. Do I exist, apart from through him? Do I breathe, apart from through his mouth? Do I think, apart from with his world view?
I’ve tried talking to him about it. His logic is simple and clear.
Do I exist, he says, apart from through you? Do I live without you? he asks. Can I love, without your love?
Then he gives the answer.
No.
He needs me. He can’t live without me. Never leave me, he says. We are the most important thing in the world to each other.
He says
he will never
let me go.
I’ve been alone for so long.
Tuesday 4 September
55
Patricia had been asleep for several hours when she was woken by an indefinable sense of unease.
She sat up on the mattress, pushed the hair from her face, caught sight of the man and screamed.
‘Who are you?’ the young man by the door said. He was squatting down, looking at her as if he’d been sitting there for a while.
Patricia pulled the covers up to her chin and backed against the wall.
‘Who are you?’ she said.
‘My name’s Sven,’ he said. ‘Where’s Annika?’
Patricia gulped, trying to get everything to fit together.
‘I … she … I don’t know.’
‘Wasn’t she supposed to get back from her holiday yesterday?’
Patricia cleared her throat. ‘Yes, I think so. Her clothes were spread out to dry when I got home.’
‘Home?’
She looked down.
‘Annika said I could stay here for a while. I was living with a friend who … I didn’t see her yesterday. I don’t know where she is. She didn’t sleep here last night.’
The words hung in the air, and Patricia was struck by a disorientating sense of déjà vu.
‘So where do you think she is now?’
She’d heard the question before, and the room started to spin. She answered much as she had the last time round.
‘I don’t know. Maybe she’s out shopping, maybe she’s gone to see you …’
The young man looked at her hard.
‘And you’ve no idea when she’s coming back?’
She shook her head, feeling tears pricking her eyes.
Sven stood up.
‘Okay, we’ve cleared up who I am, and what I want. So who the hell are you?’
Patricia swallowed. ‘My name’s Patricia. I got to know Annika when she worked at the Evening Post. She said I could stay here for a while.’
The man studied her carefully, and she clutched the duvet closer to her chin.
‘So you’re a journalist too? What do you write about? Have you known her long?’
Patricia was starting to feel extremely uneasy. She’d answered so many questions, had to explain so many things that were nothing to do with her. The man took several steps towards her, stopping only when he was looming over her.
‘Annika hasn’t been herself lately,’ he said. ‘She got it into her head that she could get some sort of big career in the city, but that was never going to happen. Are you the one who’s dragged her into all this?’
The words flashed into Patricia’s head, and she screamed right at him: ‘I haven’t dragged anyone into anything! Never! How can you say it’s all my fault?’
She glared up at him, and he took a step back.
‘Annika’s going to be moving back to Hälleforsnäs soon,’ he said. ‘I hope you’ve got somewhere else to go. I’m going to be staying for a couple of days. Tell her I’ll be back this evening.’
Patricia heard him walk through the flat and shut the front door as he left. She let out a long whimpering sound, rolled onto her side and curled up into a little ball. She clasped her hands tightly round her and began to cry, until she drifted off to sleep again.
Hans Snapphane was drinking coffee and reading the local paper when Annika padded into the kitchen.
‘There are boiled eggs on the stove,’ he said.
Annika fished out a hard-boiled egg, ran it under the cold tap, then sat down.
‘I presume my daughter’s still asleep?’
Annika nodded with a smile.
‘She been working too hard for too long,’ she said.
Hans Snapphane sighed and folded his paper.
‘It’s good that she got away from there. That job was no good for her. This new job in television sounds much better – the hours are more humane, and there are more women in senior positions.’
Annika glanced over at him. He was pretty smart.
‘Could I borrow the phone to make a couple of calls?’ Annika asked as he stood up with his briefcase.
‘Of course, but maybe lay off the Jim Steinman for a while? Britt-Inger’s working late again tonight.’
He waved from the car.
Annika forced herself to finish the egg, then ran upstairs lightly. She dialled the Civil Aviation Administration’s information centre at Arlanda.
‘Yes, hello, I was wondering if I could check when a particular flight left?’
‘Of course,’ the man at the other end said. ‘Which flight?’
‘Ah, well, it’s a bit tricky,’ Annika explain
ed. ‘All I really know is which gate it left from.’
‘That’s okay, as long as it was in the last couple of days.’
Annika was stumped.
‘I’m afraid it wasn’t. Is there no way of finding out?’
‘Do you know the time of the flight? I can see flights one day back and six days ahead.’
Annika’s heart sank.
‘This was five weeks ago,’ she said.
‘And you only know the gate number? That’s makes it pretty difficult. We can’t see that far back.’
‘But you must have timetables?’ she said. ‘I know roughly when the plane left.’
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to approach the airline direct. Can I ask what it’s about? Is it for insurance purposes?’
‘No, not at all,’ she said.
There was silence on the line.
‘Well,’ the man at the Civil Aviation Administration said, ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to go direct to the airline in question.’
She sighed. ‘I don’t know which airline it was,’ she said gloomily. ‘Which ones fly from Terminal Two?’
The man listed them: ‘Maersk Air, a Danish company flying out of Jutland, Alitalia, Delta Air from the US, Estonian Air, Austrian Airlines and Finnair.’
Annika was writing the names down.
‘And they all fly from any of the gates?’
‘Not quite,’ the man said. ‘Foreign flights usually leave from gates sixty-five to sixty-eight, and seventy to seventy-three, which are on the ground floor and use buses to get passengers to their planes.’
‘Sorry?’ Annika said. ‘Gate sixty-five is for foreign flights?’
‘Yes, it’s beyond passport control and the security checks.’
‘And gate sixty-four, what sort is that one?’
‘Mostly domestic,’ the man said. ‘The gates are arranged in pairs. Although it’s possible to alter them by changing the layout of the doors …’
‘Thanks very much for your help,’ Annika said quickly and hung up.
A foreign flight … So Christer Lundgren travelled abroad on the evening of Friday, 27 July, and was back soon after five o’clock the next morning.
‘Well, he didn’t go to the States,’ Annika said out loud to herself, crossing out Delta Airlines.
Denmark, Finland, Estonia and Austria were all possible. The distances were short enough to make a return trip possible. Italy was more doubtful.
But how could he have got home in the middle of the night? she wondered. It must have been a bloody important meeting, which meant it must have lasted a while.
She counted on her fingers.
If he left at 8 p.m., wherever he was going he wouldn’t have got there and cleared customs before 9.30 p.m. Then he’d probably have gone on by car or taxi, unless the meeting took place at the airport.
Let’s say that the meeting started at 10 p.m., she reasoned. Maybe he could have been finished by 11 p.m. Back to the airport, check in … He couldn’t have arrived back in Sweden before midnight.
There weren’t that many scheduled flights at that time of day, not with those airlines. So, what exactly was Maersk Air?
She sighed.
He could have come home by a different means, she thought, by car or boat. Which would rule out Austria and Italy.
She looked down at her notebook. That left Denmark, Finland and Estonia. She found a number for Finnair’s ticket office in the phone book. It was a free call, an 020 number, and she ended up talking to the airline’s customer services department in Helsinki.
‘No,’ said a friendly man who had an accent just like Moomintroll in the cartoon series, ‘I can’t check that sort of information on my computer. You don’t have a flight number? If you have, I could check back …’
Annika closed her eyes, rubbing her forehead.
‘Where do you fly to from Stockholm?’
The man checked.
‘Helsinki, of course,’ he said. ‘Oslo, Copenhagen, Vienna, Berlin and London.’
A dead end. She couldn’t find out where the plane was going this way, it was impossible.
‘One last question,’ she said. ‘When does your last flight to Stockholm leave?’
‘From Helsinki? At nine forty-five p.m. It gets into Stockholm at nine forty. You’re an hour behind us, of course.’
She thanked him and hung up.
He must have got back to Sweden some other way, certainly not by any scheduled flight. A private plane, she thought. He could have chartered a plane.
Expensive, though, she thought, remembering the fuss about the cost of the Prime Minister’s private flights. Chartered flights had to be paid for, and she doubted Christer Lundgren would have footed the bill. It would be against his religion.
She looked up, out through Hans Snapphane’s office window. Off to the right she could just make out one of the commonest sort of house in Piteå, a red, wooden, single-storey building from the seventies. In front of her, on the other side of the street, was a larger white brick building with dark, stained gables. Beyond that she could see a small patch of forest.
There has to be a receipt, an expenses claim somewhere, she thought. Regardless of how he got back to Sweden, the Minister for Foreign Trade must have invoiced a government department or some other state-funded body.
It struck her that she didn’t even know which department foreign trade came under.
She went into Anne’s room and woke her up.
‘I have to get back to Stockholm,’ Annika said. ‘I’ve got a lot to do.’
56
She went straight from the City Terminal to the Foreign Ministry building on Gustav Adolfs torg. The pale pink building was surrounded by dark, shiny cars, important-looking men with watchful expressions, and pensioners with cameras. The crowd made her nervous, and she walked uncertainly towards the main entrance. A large black car with a stylized crown on the number-plate stood in the way. As she walked round it a plump little guard in an olive-green uniform blocked her path.
‘And where are you going?’
‘In,’ Annika said.
‘There’s enough press in there already,’ the guard said.
Fuck, Annika thought.
‘But I’m going to see the registrar,’ she said.
‘You’ll have to wait,’ the man said, crossing his hands in front of his crotch.
Annika stood her ground. ‘Why?’
The guard looked less sure of himself.
‘There’s a state visit. The South African President is here.’
‘Shit,’ Annika said, realizing how out of the loop she was.
‘Come back after three p.m.,’ he said.
Annika turned on her heel and headed off across Norrbro. She looked at her watch: over an hour to wait. It had stopped raining and she decided to take a quick walk to Södermalm. She’d done a lot of running in Turkey and had noticed the difference regular exercise made to her mood. So she walked quickly through Gamla Stan towards the steps leading up to Mosebacke torg. With her bag strapped across her chest she ran up and down the steep steps until her pulse was racing and she was running with sweat. She stopped at the top of a narrow street, Klevgränd, and looked out over Stockholm, at the little alleys leading away from the water at Skeppsbron, at the gleaming white hull of the clipper, af Chapman, and at the pale-blue roller-coaster over at the funfair, Gröna lund, standing out against the greenery of Djurgården behind it like a tangled ball of wool.
I have to find some way of staying here, she thought.
At five minutes to three all the cars in front of the Foreign Ministry had gone.
‘I’d like to know the procedures for when government ministers travel abroad,’ Annika politely asked the woman behind the desk. She felt a drop of sweat running down her nose and quickly wiped it away.
The woman raised her eyebrows slightly.
‘I see,’ she said. ‘And you are?’
Annika smiled. ‘I don’t have to provide ID. You don’t even ha
ve the right to ask. But you are, however, obliged to answer my questions.’
The woman stiffened.
‘What happens when a government minister is planning a foreign trip?’ Annika asked sweetly.
The woman’s voice was frosty. ‘The minister’s PA books the trip through the agency currently being used by the government according to agreed protocols. Nyman and Schultz have the contract at the moment.’
‘Do ministers have their own travel budgets?’
The woman sighed quietly. ‘Yes, of course.’
‘In that case I would like to make a request to consult a document in the public domain. An expenses claim signed for by the Minister for Foreign Trade, Christer Lundgren, on the twenty-eighth of July this year.’
The Foreign Ministry woman could hardly conceal the note of triumph in her voice. ‘No, that isn’t possible,’ she said.
‘Oh?’ Annika said. ‘Why not?’
‘The Minister for Foreign Trade comes under the Ministry of Enterprise, Energy and Communications, not the Foreign Ministry. That’s been the case since the current Prime Minister took office,’ she said. ‘The Prime Minister moved the promotion of exports from the Foreign Ministry to the Ministry of Enterprise, and in return the Foreign Ministry assumed responsibility for asylum and immigration.’
Annika blinked.
‘So the Minister for Foreign Trade doesn’t claim expenses from this department at all?’
‘No, not at all,’ the woman said.
‘Nothing for entertainment, nor any other expenses claims?’
‘Not a single one.’
Annika was at a loss. The presenter of Studio Six had said they’d found the invoice from the sex club at the Foreign Ministry, she was absolutely sure of that. The entire programme was still echoing through her head, whether or not she wanted it to.
‘Where’s the Ministry of Enterprise?’
She walked up past the Museum of Mediterranean Antiquities to number 8, Fredsgatan.
‘I’d like to look at a claim for travel expenses and one for entertainment from the twenty-eighth of July this year,’ Annika said. ‘Will it take long?’
The registrar was a friendly, efficient-looking woman.
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