Red Wolf

a local bus that stuck to sixty kilometres an hour, at best, for more than ten kilometres before she had a chance to overtake, and had to force herself not to get stressed. Half the point of this trip was to get out of the office. She had pulled the directions Gunnel Sandstrom had given her out of her bag while she was stuck behind the bus.

Over the roundabout, towards Gavle, seven kilometres north, then a red farmhouse on the right with an old wagon in the drive and a garden gnome on the veranda. Perfectly straightforward, but she still almost missed the turning and had to brake sharply, realizing that the roads really were slippery. She pulled in behind the wagon, leaving the engine on for a few moments as she looked up at the farmhouse.

The large main house was on the right, with new cladding, but the window frames needed painting. A fairly new stained-wood veranda, a little white china lamp and four small African violets in the kitchen window. On the left an office and silo, stables and workshops, a heap of manure and some pieces of agricultural machinery that evidently hadn’t been used for some time.

A proper old farm, she thought, efficiently but not pedantically run, traditional but not sentimental.

She switched off the engine and caught a glimpse of the woman as a shadow in the kitchen. Taking her bag, she walked up to the house.

‘Come in,’ Gunnel Sandstrom said in a thin voice. Puffy eyes. Annika took her dry little hand.

She was about fifty, short and fairly plump, radiating that sort of vanity-free self-confidence. Short grey hair, a wine-red belted cardigan.

‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ Annika said, thinking the phrase sounded clumsy and feeble, but the woman’s shoulders drooped slightly, so the words seemed to have hit their mark.

‘Please, take your coat off. Can I offer you some coffee?’

Annika could still taste the cold coffee from the machine in her mouth, but said yes anyway. She hung up her coat and pulled off her outdoor shoes. The woman was acting on reflex, following patterns of behaviour ingrained over decades. In this house visitors were offered coffee, no matter what. Gunnel went to the stove and turned on the fast plate, measured four cups of water into the pot, then four spoons of roasted ground coffee from the green and pink tin next to the spice-rack, then rested her right hand on the handle, ready to pull the pot off the heat when it came to the boil.

Annika sat down at the kitchen table, her bag beside her, and surreptitiously studied Gunnel Sandstrom’s mechanical movements, trying to work out the woman’s mental state. She could smell bread, coffee, manure, and something that might have been mould. She let her eyes wander across the room.

‘I don’t read the Evening Post very often,’ Gunnel Sandstrom said once the coffee had come to the boil and she was stirring it. ‘There’s so much nonsense in it these days. Nothing to do with anyone’s real life. Nothing that means anything to people who live like we do.’

She put the pot on a mat on the table, then sat down and seemed to collapse.

‘Thomas, my husband,’ Annika said, ‘told me that both you and Kurt were active in local politics.’

Gunnel Sandstrom was looking out of the window. Annika followed her gaze and saw a bird table surrounded by flapping wings and scattering birdseed.

‘Kurt was on the council,’ she said. ‘I’m chair of the women’s group, and a co-opted member.’

‘For which party?’ Annika asked.

‘The Centre, of course. We care about the countryside. Kurt has always been interested in politics, from when we first met.’

Annika smiled and nodded, then stood up.

‘Shall I get some cups?’ she asked, walking towards the draining-board.

Gunnel Sandstrom flew up.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, how silly of me, sit down, please.’

The woman fussed about a bit longer, with cups and saucers and spoons and sugar and milk and half-frozen cinnamon buns dusted with ground almonds.

‘How did you meet? In the Centre Party’s youth group?’ Annika asked when Gunnel Sandstrom had sat down again and was pouring the coffee.

‘No, oh no,’ the woman said. ‘Kurt was a radical in his youth, lots of our generation were in those days. He was part of the move to the countryside out here, he joined a collective in the early seventies. We met for the first time at a meeting of the road-owners’ association. Kurt thought the payment system should be fairer. It caused a huge fuss round here.’

Annika took out her pen and notepad from her bag, noting down the details.

‘So he’s not from round here?’

‘From Nyland. He studied biology in Uppsala, and after his finals he and a few friends moved out here to start a chemical-free farm. It wasn’t called organic in those days…’

The woman looked out at the birds again, disappearing into the past. Annika waited for her to begin again.

‘It didn’t go very well,’ she went on after a while. ‘The members of the collective fell out. Kurt wanted to invest in a silo and a tractor, the others wanted to buy a horse and learn to turn hay. We were already seeing each other by then, so Kurt came to work here on the farm instead.’

‘You must have been very young,’ Annika said.

The woman looked at her.

‘I grew up here,’ she said. ‘Kurt and I took over when we got married, in the autumn of seventy-five. My mother’s still alive, lives in a home in Osthammar.’

Annika nodded, suddenly aware of the monotonous ticking of the kitchen clock. She guessed that the same clock had made the same noise against the same wall for generation after generation, and for one giddy moment she could hear all those seconds ticking through the years.

‘Belonging,’ Annika heard herself say. ‘Imagine belonging somewhere like that.’

‘Kurt belonged here,’ Gunnel Sandstrom said. ‘He loved his life. There’s no way he would have contemplated suicide even for a second, I swear to that.’

She looked at Annika and her eyes were flashing. Annika could sense the woman’s utter conviction, knowing at once and without any doubt that she was right.

‘Where did he die?’

‘In the sitting room,’ she said, getting up and walking over to the double doors beside the fireplace.

Annika walked into the large room. It was cooler than the kitchen, with a damp, enclosed feeling, and a scratchy blue-green fitted carpet covered with rag rugs. There was an old tiled stove in one corner, a television in another, two sofas facing each other at the far end of the room, a swivelling brown leather armchair beneath a standard lamp, with a small table alongside.

Gunnel Sandstrom pointed, her finger trembling.

‘That’s where Kurt sits,’ she said. ‘Always. My chair is normally on the other side of that little table. After dinner we always sit here and read, council papers, the local newspaper, journals, paperwork from the farm, we do everything in our armchairs.’

‘Where’s your chair now?’ Annika asked, although she had a good idea.

The woman turned to her, her eyes full of tears.

‘They took it away,’ she said quietly. ‘The police, to examine it. He was sitting in it when he died, holding the rifle in his right hand.’

‘Did you find him?’

The woman stared into the space left by her armchair, images chasing through her head so vividly that Annika could almost see them. Then she nodded.

‘I was at the scouts’ autumn bazaar on Saturday afternoon,’ she said, still staring at the empty space on the carpet. ‘Our daughter runs the Cubs, so I stayed to help her tidy up afterwards. When I got home… he was sitting there… in my chair.’

She turned away, the tears overflowing, and stumbled, hunched over, back towards the kitchen table. Annika followed her, rejecting an impulse to put her arm round the woman’s shoulders.

‘Where was he shot?’ Annika asked softly, sitting down beside her.

‘In the eye,’ Gunnel Sandstrom whispered, her voice echoing faintly between the walls like a rattling wind, the clock ticked, salt tears ran down the woman’s face, no sobbing or any other movement. Suddenly something