‘An anonymous letter arrived, no signature or anything; I thought it was a note of sympathy from one of the neighbours who didn’t want to disturb me by knocking.’
‘Have you still got it?’
The woman let out a deep sigh that stemmed from the hopelessness of having to do anything connected with the living, the sort of daily routines that had brought light and united her with the rest of the world for decades but had now suddenly lost all meaning.
‘I think I put it in the pile with the newspapers, hang on, I’ll go and get it…’
A sharp noise hit Annika’s ear as the other phone was put down on a wooden table somewhere in Svartostaden. There was the sound of rustling on the line, of footsteps coming and going.
‘Sorry to take so long,’ the woman said tiredly. ‘I’ve got it. It says:
Annika stared wide-eyed at Berit and grabbed a pen.
‘Can you repeat that slowly, please? I’d like to write it down. “How should we judge whether a youth is revolutionary?”’
‘
‘“How to discern this? There is only one criterion…”’
Berit nodded, mouthed ‘Mao’.
Viveka Gustafsson continued reading down the line. ‘…
‘Have you mentioned this to the police?’
‘No,’ the woman said, and for the first time life filtered in, a surprise which one day would lead to curiosity, and finally to actual joy in being alive. ‘Should I have done?’
‘What does the letter look like?’
‘Well,’ the woman said, ‘what can I say? It looks like an ordinary sheet torn out of a pad.’
‘A4? Lined?’
‘Blue lines. Is that important?’
‘Have you still got the envelope?’
‘Yes, it’s here.’
‘What does it look like?’
‘Look like? An ordinary little white envelope, like when you fold a sheet of paper in four. Addressed to us, the Gustafsson family. Normal stamp, postmark… what does it say? Lulea, but I can’t see the date.’
‘What sort of stamp?’
A few seconds’ silence.
‘Someone playing hockey.’
Annika screwed her eyes tight shut, forcing her pulse to slow down.
‘I think you should call the police and tell them that you’ve received this letter. I might mention in the newspaper the fact that you got it, is that okay with you?’
The woman’s surprise had turned to confusion. ‘But why would you do that?’
Annika hesitated, unable to be entirely honest with Viveka Gustafsson.
‘I don’t really know if it means anything or not,’ she said. ‘It would be wrong of me to speculate about something I don’t know.’
The woman reflected on this, and it sounded almost as if she was nodding.
‘When you don’t know, you shouldn’t say,’ she said. ‘I’ll speak to the inspector.’
‘Call me if there’s anything I can do for you,’ Annika said, aware that her words sounded empty.
24
‘What a weird conversation,’ Berit said. ‘For a while I thought the boy was actually here in the room.’
Annika pressed her hands against her cheeks, noticing that they were trembling.
‘It’s the same killer,’ she said. ‘It can’t mean anything else.’
‘Which police districts?’
‘Two cases in Lulea, one in Uppsala.’
‘It would make sense to talk to the National Murder Commission at once. If it hasn’t already reached their desks, it’ll soon be there after that call.’
‘You’re sure?’ Annika said. ‘All three are quotations from Mao?’
Berit stood up, drying her eyes, and walked towards the door.
‘Now you’re insulting an old revolutionary,’ she said. ‘Well, I’m finally going to get some food. Otherwise I’ll be a dead revolutionary.’
She closed the door behind her.
Annika stayed where she was, listening to her own heartbeat.
Was there any other explanation? Could different people, unknown to each other, send quotations from Mao to people whose relatives had just met a violent death, on similar paper, with the same sort of stamp on the envelope?
She stood up and walked over to the glass wall that separated her world from the newsroom, looking over the heads of the people out there, and trying to glimpse the real world through the window beyond the sports desk. From the fourth floor she could only make out a faint grey horizon, and some single flakes of snow drifting gently down towards the top of a tall birch tree.
She closed her eyes hard, and she knew the answer.
Unforgivable.
She hurried back to her desk and dialled Q’s mobile phone.
The metallic voice of his voicemail explained that he was busy in meetings for the rest of the day, that messages couldn’t be left; try again tomorrow.
She dialled his direct line at the national crime unit, a secretary answered after various clicks indicating that the call was being transferred.
‘He’s in a meeting,’ she said. ‘And he has another meeting straight after that.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Annika said, shaking her arm to look at her watch: 15.32. ‘We agreed to see each other briefly between his meetings, and I’m supposed to show up just before four.’
The secretary was suspicious. ‘He hasn’t mentioned that.’
‘He knows it won’t take long.’
‘But he has to be in the Ministry of Justice at four; the car’s picking him up at quarter to.’
Annika jotted that down, writing ‘Rosenbad 4’ on her notepad. Justice occupied the fourth and fifth floors of the main government building, with the Cabinet Office directly above.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘It was that committee, wasn’t it…?’
The sound of the secretary leafing through some papers.
‘JU 2002:13, the new correctional treatment act,’ she said.
Annika scribbled out Rosenbad 4 and wrote ‘Regeringsgatan’ instead.
‘I must have misunderstood,’ she said. ‘I’ll try to catch him tomorrow.’
She stuffed her notes in her bag, grabbed her hat, gloves and scarf, searched for her mobile in the mess on
