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.
‘Where had you been?’
He pulled his feet up beneath him, and sat there cross-legged, looking down at his hands.
‘Alex has got broadband, we were playing Teslatron.’
‘Where are your parents?’
‘Mum.’ He looked up at her angrily. ‘I just live with Mum.’ He looked down again. ‘She works nights. I promised not to be out so late. The neighbours keep an eye out, so I have to sneak in if it’s late.’
Annika looked at the big little boy on the bed, filled for a moment with an intense longing for her own children. Tears came to her eyes, and she took several deep breaths through her mouth, forcing the tears back down.
‘So you took the other bus, the night bus?’ she said, her voice trembling slightly.
‘The half twelve from the bus station. Benny was on it as well. He knows my mum. Everyone knows everyone in Svartostaden, so I hid right at the back.’
‘He didn’t see you?’
The boy looked at her like she was mad. ‘He was pissed out of his head, wasn’t he? Otherwise he’d have driven, wouldn’t he?’
‘He fell asleep on the bus,’ the boy said. ‘The driver had to wake him up at Mefos. I sneaked out of the back door while they were busy.’
‘Where did Benny live?’
‘Over on Laxgatan.’
He gestured vaguely in a direction that Annika couldn’t make out.
‘And you saw him walking home from the bus-stop?’
‘Yeah, but he didn’t see me. I made sure I stayed behind him, and it was snowing really hard.’
He fell silent. Annika was starting to feel hot in her padded jacket. Without saying anything she let it slide off her arms, picked it up and put it on the chair by the boy’s desk.
‘What did you see, Linus?’
The boy lowered his head even further, twisting his fingers together.
‘There was a car,’ he said.
Annika waited.
‘A car?’
He nodded frenetically. ‘A Volvo V70, but I didn’t know that then.’
‘When did you find out?’
He sniffed. ‘It had reversed back onto the football pitch, you could only see the front half. The front was sticking out from behind a tree.’
‘So you did notice it, then?’
He didn’t answer, knotting his fingers.
‘How come you noticed it?’
The boy looked up, his jaw trembling.
‘Someone was sitting in the car. There’s a yellow streetlamp at the crossing and the light was sort of shining on the car. You could see his hand on the wheel, kind of holding it, like this.’
The boy held one hand up in front of him, letting it hang in the air above an imaginary steering wheel, his eyes open wide.
‘So what did you do?’
‘Waited. I didn’t know who it was, did I?’
‘But you could see it was a V70?’
He shook his head hard. ‘Not to start with. Only once it had driven out. Then I could see the lights on the back.’
‘What about the lights on the back?’
‘They went all the way up to the roof. I liked the way it looked. I’m pretty sure it was a V70, gold…’
‘And the man in the car started the engine and drove off?’
Linus nodded, shaking himself to gather his thoughts. ‘He started the car and slowly pulled out, then he hit the accelerator.’
Annika waited.
‘Benny was drunk,’ the boy said, ‘but he still heard the car and sort of moved aside, but the car followed him, so Benny jumped the other way but the car followed him again, and then he was sort of in the middle of the road when the car…’
He took a deep breath.
‘What happened?’
‘There were two thumps, then he flew through the air.’
‘Two thumps, then Benny was thrown into the air? And landed by the fence up by the football pitch?’
The boy sat in silence for a few seconds, then lowered his head. Annika had to suppress the urge to put her arms round him.
‘He didn’t land by the football pitch?’
Linus shook his head, wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
‘In the middle of the road,’ he said almost inaudibly. ‘And the car braked so that all the lights on the back went on, that’s when I saw what make of Volvo it was. And he reversed slowly, and Benny was lying there, and he drove over him again, and then he sort of aimed for… for his head, and then he drove over his face…’
Annika felt her stomach turn, and opened her mouth to breathe.
‘You’re sure?’ she whispered.
