Red Wolf

‘Bloody weird coincidence,’ he said. ‘A bit too weird to have happened by accident.’

‘Do you have anything else that connects the three deaths?’

He sighed deeply. ‘We don’t know yet, but there are no similarities in the way they were killed. The deaths are very different. We’ve found fibres on the victims, but nothing that matches. No fingerprints.’

‘Just the letters?’

‘Just the letters.’

‘So what conclusions are you prepared to draw?’

Another sigh. ‘The man from Osthammar was murdered, we know that much now. He was shot from a distance of at least one metre, and it’s difficult to hold an AK 4 that far away and still pull the trigger. Of course there’s a connection between the boy and the journalist, but so far we haven’t found any link to the local councillor. The boy saw the hack get run down, so that’s a fairly standard motive. Maybe he could have identified the killer.’

‘Maybe he knew the killer,’ Annika said.

There was a moment of surprised silence from the commissioner. ‘What makes you say that?’

She shook her head, looking at the wallpaper.

‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘Just a feeling I got when I was talking to him. He got very scared, made me leave.’

‘I’ve read the report of his questioning by the Lulea police. There’s nothing in there about him being scared.’

‘Of course there isn’t,’ Annika said. ‘He was protecting himself.’

The silence on the line was suspicious.

‘You don’t think the boy knew him at all,’ Annika said, ‘because you think it was Ragnwald.’

The door flew open and Ellen came into the bedroom.

‘Mummy, he’s got the remote control, he says I can’t have it.’

‘Hang on,’ she said, putting the mobile down, getting up and going back to the television with Ellen.

Kalle was curled up in a corner of the sofa, clutching the remotes for the television and the video to his chest.

‘Kalle,’ Annika said, ‘let Ellen have one of them.’

‘No,’ the boy said, ‘she keeps pressing buttons and messing it up.’

‘Okay,’ Annika said, ‘then I’ll take them both.’

‘No!’ Ellen howled. ‘I want one!’

‘That’s enough!’ Annika shouted. ‘Give me the bloody remotes and sit and watch quietly, or you’ll have to go to bed!’

She grabbed the remotes and walked back into the bedroom with Kalle’s cries ringing in her ears.

She shut the door and picked up the phone again.

‘Ragnwald,’ Q said.

‘Suup leaked some information to me, to let Ragnwald know that you know that he’s back,’ Annika said. ‘Were you involved in that decision?’

He snorted. ‘I haven’t seen any article so far.’

‘It’ll be in tomorrow’s paper, although it’s a pretty thin story, I have to say. Suup didn’t give me much. I think you’ve got a lot more than that.’

The commissioner didn’t respond.

‘How much do you know?’ Annika asked. ‘Have you got an ID?’

‘A couple of things first,’ Q said. ‘You can use the anonymous letters, but not the fact that they contain Mao quotations.’

Annika was taking notes.

‘And Ragnwald?’

‘We’re sure he’s back.’

‘Why? To kill these individuals?’

‘He’s been gone for more than thirty years, so he must have a bloody good reason for coming back. But what that is, we don’t yet know.’

‘Is he the Mao-murderer?’

‘Nice headline, shame you can’t use it. I don’t know if it’s him. It might be, but I wouldn’t swear to it.’

‘But he blew up the plane at F21?’

‘He was involved somehow, but we don’t know if he was there for the explosion itself.’

‘What’s his name? His real name?’

Commissioner Q hesitated.

‘You got a serial killer out of me,’ Annika said. ‘Surely I can get a terrorist out of you?’

‘You can’t use it,’ Q said. ‘We’ve kept his details quiet for thirty years, and it has to stay that way for a bit longer. This is only for your own personal records. No notes on the computer, no stray notes in the office.’

Annika swallowed hard, her pen poised, her pulse throbbing in her neck. She drew breath to ask about the level of secrecy when the door suddenly flew open and Kalle rushed in.

‘Mummy, she’s got Tiger! Make her give him back!’

A short-circuit in Annika’s brain meant that she breathed enough air for a primal scream. She felt the colour in her face rise, and looked at Kalle with crazed eyes.

‘Out!’ she whispered. ‘Now!’

The boy looked at her in horror, then turned and ran, leaving the door wide open behind him.

‘Mummy says you have to give Tiger to me,’ she heard him shout. ‘Now!’

‘Nilsson,’ Q said. ‘His name is Goran Nilsson. Son of a L?stadian minister from Sattajarvi in Norrbotten, born October nineteen forty-eight. Moved to Uppsala to study theology autumn nineteen sixty-seven, back in Lulea a year or so later, worked in cathedral administration, vanished on the eighteenth of November nineteen sixty-nine, and hasn’t been seen under his true identity since then.’

Annika was writing so hard that her wrist hurt, hoping she would be able to decipher her scribbles.

‘L?stadian?’

‘L?stadianism is a religious movement in Norrbotten, some aspects of which are incredibly strict. No curtains, no television, no birth control.’

‘Do you know why he’s called Ragnwald?’

‘That was his codename in the Maoist groups in Lulea in the late sixties. He kept it as his stage name when he became a professional killer, but his ETA identity is probably French. He’s most likely been living in a village in the Pyrenees, on the French side, and moving across the border pretty much at will.’

Annika could hear the children fighting it out in the television room.

‘So he really did become a professional killer? Someone like Leon?’

‘No, people like that don’t exist outside Luc Besson films, but we know he was involved in a few assassinations for money. I have to go, and it sounds like you need to sort things out there.’

‘They’re fighting over a stuffed tiger,’ Annika said.

‘O man, your legacy shall be violence,’ Q said, and hung up.

She watched the end of Pippi with the children, one on each knee, then brushed their teeth and read two chapters from the Bullerby books out loud to them. They sang three songs from the Swedish Songbook together, then went out like lights. She was dizzy with tiredness when she finally sat down to write. The letters floated across the screen, she couldn’t seem to focus, and was struck by an intense sense of falling, a short second of complete helplessness.

She fled from the screen into the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face, then went into the kitchen and boiled some water, measured four spoons of coffee into the cafetiere, pouring the water on as it boiled, and forcing the metal filter down hard. She took the coffee and a mug from the Federation of Local Councils and sat down at the computer again.

Empty. She had nothing left.

She picked up the phone and called Jansson.

‘I can’t pull it together,’ she said. ‘It isn’t working.’

‘You’ll get it together.’ Jansson’s voice was alive with the adrenalin of the news torrent. ‘I need you now. We