Red Wolf

with adverts to sell and stories to write and police reports to check.

The layout and print quality of newspapers in the sixties was terrible, scratchy fonts and badly reproduced pictures. She was glad she hadn’t been working then.

But every age has its own ideals, she thought as she headed towards her glass room. You live in an age just as much as you do in a place, and the sixties wouldn’t have suited her.

Did the twenty-first century, though?

She heard the phone start to ring and lengthened her strides.

‘I heard you were trying to get hold of me,’ said Hans Blomberg, the archivist of the Norrland News.

‘Oh, I’m glad you called,’ Annika said, pulling the door shut behind her. ‘How are you?’

A brief moment of surprise. ‘Why do you ask?’

She sat down on her chair, surprised in turn that he sounded so nonplussed.

‘The receptionist said you were ill, I was worried.’

‘Ah, yes, the tenderness of women,’ Hans Blomberg said, sounding as Annika remembered him, and she had to smile, picturing him sitting there in his cardigan next to his battered desk with the noticeboard above it, the child’s drawing, the sign telling him to hold out until retirement.

‘Nothing serious, I hope?’ Annika stretched back in her chair.

‘No, no,’ the archivist said, ‘just the usual. I’m past my sell-by date, but I’m probably okay in the fridge for a few more days before they throw me out.’

Her smile faded as he spoke. The tone was cheerful but his frustration was obvious.

‘Ha,’ Annika said brightly, choosing to ignore the bitterness. ‘To me you’re like a vintage wine.’

‘Oh, it takes a Stockholm girl to appreciate a real man. What can I help you with, young lady?’

‘A general question of an even older vintage,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to find information about a young man from Sattajarvi who lived in Lulea at the end of the sixties, probably worked for the Church. His name’s Goran Nilsson.’

‘Is he dead?’ Hans Blomberg said, his pen scratching in the background.

‘I don’t think so,’ Annika said.

‘So we’ll leave the dear departed alone, then. What do you want to know?’

‘Anything. If he won a jitterbug competition, demonstrated against imperialism, robbed a bank, got married.’

‘Goran Nilsson? You couldn’t have picked a more common name, then?’

‘I’ve looked everywhere but haven’t come up with a thing,’ Annika said.

The archivist groaned loudly. Annika could see him gripping the desk and heaving himself out of his chair.

‘This might take a few minutes,’ he said, and that was the understatement of the day.

Annika had time to look through a few websites, read about all the detached houses for sale in the Stockholm region, and fall in love with a beautiful, newly built house on Vinterviksvagen in Djursholm for a measly 6.9 million. She went to get some coffee and spoke to Berit, then tried to ring Thomas’s mobile and left a message for Anne Snapphane before there was a noise on the line again.

‘Well, I’ve looked for easier things,’ he said with a deep sigh. ‘Have you any idea how many Goran Nilssons there are in the archive?’

‘Seventy-two and a half,’ Annika said.

‘Exactly right,’ Hans Blomberg said. ‘And the only one from Sattajarvi I could find was in the wedding announcements.’

Annika raised her eyebrows, feeling her mood slump.

‘The wedding announcements? What, the kind of thing ministers did in church when people got married back in the eighteen hundreds?’

‘Well,’ Hans Blomberg said, ‘it was actually obligatory until nineteen seventy-three, but you’re right about the church connection. The banns had to be read in church for three Sundays in a row before a wedding, to keep everyone happy.’

‘So why did they put it in the paper?’

Hans Blomberg thought for a moment. ‘That’s just how it was in those days, there was a special column. The cutting is from the twenty-ninth of September nineteen sixty-nine; do you want me to read it out?’

‘Yes, please,’ Annika said.

‘Parish assistant Goran Nilsson, born in Sattajarvi, now of Lulea, and student Karina Bjornlund, born and living in Karlsvik. The wedding will take place in Lulea City Hall, Friday twenty November at two p.m.’

Her pen raced across the notepad as she tried to keep up with him, feeling the goosebumps prickle. She had difficulty breathing. Good God. Bloody hell, this is impossible!

She forced herself not to get too excited, not yet; she couldn’t be sure until she checked.

‘Well, goodness,’ Annika said hoarsely. ‘Thanks, thanks a lot. You’re a vintage champagne.’

‘Whenever, my dear, just give me a call.’

They hung up and Annika had to stand up. Yes! Her mind was racing, the rush of blood pumping in her ears. She ran out into the newsroom with her heart pounding, but somewhere near the sports desk she gathered her senses and realized that she actually didn’t have anything yet. She got a cup of coffee from the machine and hurried over to Berit.

‘Where’s the Minister of Culture from?’ she asked.

Berit looked up from her screen, glasses on the tip of her nose. ‘Norrbotten,’ she said. ‘Lulea, I think.’

‘Not from somewhere called Karlsvik?’

Berit took off her glasses and lowered her hands to her lap.

‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘Why?’

‘Where does she live now?’

‘A suburb, north of the city somewhere.’

‘Married?’

‘Living with someone,’ Berit said, ‘no children. What are you after?’

Annika rocked back and forth on her heels, shaking the noise from her head.

‘Just information,’ she said, ‘an old wedding announcement I need to check.’

‘A wedding announcement?’ Berit echoed as Annika walked off without explaining.

Back in her office Annika sat down at her screen and waited for her pulse to slow down. Then she raised her hands and let them slowly uncover the truth.

She started with the government site, and downloaded a PDF file about the head of the Ministry of Culture. It had a picture of Karina Bjornlund giving a crooked smile, and information about her areas of responsibility: cultural heritage, art, the printed word, radio and television, faith communities.

In the personal section of the file it said that she was born in 1951 and raised in Lulea, and now lived in Knivsta with her partner.

Nothing about Karlsvik, Annika thought, and clicked on to an information website.

She looked up Karina Bjornlund Knivsta on the census and found one match, a woman born in 1951. She clicked on background information and got the name of the parish she was born in.

Lower Lulea.

She bit the inside of her cheek, her palms were itching, she needed to look deeper. She went onto Google again, and did a general search for ‘karlsvik and lower lulea’: nineteen results. The top one was the history of a saw-fitter, an Olof Falck from Hallestrom (1758-1830) in what was now the parish of Norrfjarden in Pitea council district. Annika did a search within that page and discovered that one of the saw-fitter’s descendants, a Beda Markstrom, born 1885, had settled in Karlsvik in the parish of Lower Lulea.

She searched for a map and found it.

Karlsvik was a small community just outside Lulea, on the other side of the river.

She leaned back, letting the information sink in. It was making her scalp itch, her mouth dry, her fingers twitch. She jotted the main points in her notebook, then dialled the editor-in-chief’s internal number.

‘Have you got a few minutes?’