Everything in the kitchen was very quiet. The cold held the house in a vice-like grip, the smell of disinfectant was suddenly very noticeable.
‘What did the Beasts do that was so bad?’ Annika asked.
Thord got up, went over to the sink and filled a glass with water, then held it without drinking.
‘She never got over it,’ he said. ‘It lay like a shadow over us all these years.’
He put the glass on the worktop and leaned against the dishwasher.
‘Margit only spoke about it once, but I remember every word.’
Thord Axelsson suddenly shrank into himself, and went on in a quiet, monotonous voice.
‘It was the middle of November. Not too cold, just a bit of snow on the ground. They got in through the back, from Lulviken, by the river. There’s nothing but summer cottages there, so there was no one around.’
He looked up at Annika with empty eyes, his arms hanging by his sides.
‘Margit had never been inside the base before, but one of the boys knew it well. They told her not to go near the hangars, so as not to wake the dogs, they were really vicious creatures.’
She was taking notes discreetly.
‘They ran across the heath for a kilometre or so. The boys waited in a clump of trees while she went closer. There was a plane on the tarmac outside the workshop. She took off the safety seal and set off a flare, and threw it into the container of spent fuel behind the plane.’
The air was heavy with antiseptic disinfectant, catching in Annika’s nose.
‘As she watched it burning she saw two conscripts approaching. She ran towards the south fence and they shouted after her. She threw herself behind the workshop. She only just made it before the explosion.’
Annika looked down at her notes.
It wasn’t Karina Bjornlund. She had been wrong.
‘One of the conscripts went up like a torch. He just screamed and screamed until he finally collapsed.’
Thord Axelsson closed his eyes.
‘Margit had no memory of how she got out of the base. Afterwards they dissolved the group. They never met again.’
He walked back to the table, slumping onto his chair with his hands over his face, reliving something he had never experienced but which had coloured his whole life.
Annika tried to fit the pieces together in her head, but failed.
‘Why did the plane explode?’ she asked gently.
The man looked up and let his arms drop to the table.
‘Have you ever noticed that missile that hangs beneath a fighter-jet?’
She shook her head.
‘It looks like a moon-rocket designed by Disney. It isn’t actually a missile, but an extra tank of fuel. The skin is thin; the explosion in the fuel-container pierced a hole in it.’
‘But why was the plane sitting on the tarmac with a full tank?’
‘Fighters are always fully tanked when they’re in the hangars, it’s safer that way. The gases that build up in an empty tank are more dangerous than fuel. The lad… he was standing below the tank when the extra fuel ignited.’
The wooden walls of the house creaked and groaned. Despair hung in dark clouds between the kitchen cupboards and the pine lamps. She felt an intense desire to flee, to run away, home to the children, to kiss them and embrace their cosy chubbiness, home to Thomas, to love him with all of her body and all of her mind.
‘Who else was there?’ she asked.
Thord Axelsson’s face was completely grey. He seemed on the point of fainting.
‘The Yellow Dragon and the Black Panther,’ he said hoarsely.
‘The Dragon was the leader, Goran Nilsson from Sattajarvi,’ Annika said, and something deep, unfathomable, flickered across the man’s face. ‘Who was the other one?’
‘Don’t know,’ he said. ‘Karina was the Red Wolf, but I don’t know who the boys were in real life.’
‘How many of them were there?’
He rubbed his face. ‘I mentioned the Black Panther. The Lion of Freedom was another one, the White Tiger, and the Dragon of course. Yes, that was it. Four men, two girls.’
Annika wrote down the names, noticing how ridiculous the codenames were, but unable to smile, not even internally.
‘Karina wasn’t with them that night?’
‘She’d finished with Ragnwald, and wanted out of the group. Margit was very angry with her, thought she was betraying them. Loyalty was always very important to Margit.’
A clock chimed somewhere in the living room. Annika thought about the marriage announcement in the
She looked at the man thoughtfully, thinking about the huge burden the pair had carried together, and which was now his alone.
‘How long was it before Margit told you all this?’ she asked quietly.
‘When she got pregnant,’ Thord Axelsson said. ‘It was an accident, she’d forgotten to take the pill, but when it happened we were both delighted. But one evening she was lying there crying when I got home, and she just couldn’t stop. It took all evening to get her to tell me what it was. She thought I was going to hand her in to the police. Leave her and the child.’
He fell silent.
‘But you didn’t,’ Annika confirmed.
‘Hanna did her national service at F21,’ Thord said. ‘She’s an officer in the reserves; she’s studying nuclear physics at Uppsala.’
‘And your other daughter?’
‘Emma lives on the same corridor as Hanna; she’s doing a master’s in politics.’
‘You’ve done well,’ Annika said, honestly.
He looked through the window. ‘Yes. But the Beasts have always been with us. Margit thought about what she’d done every day. She never escaped it.’
‘Nor you,’ Annika said. ‘You went to work every day knowing what had happened.’
He merely nodded.
‘Why didn’t she tell the police?’ Annika said. ‘Wouldn’t that have been better, not having to deal with it alone?’
The man stood up. ‘If only she could have,’ he said with his back to Annika. ‘When the Dragon disappeared Margit got a package in the post. There was a finger in it, a human finger, from a small child, and a warning.’
Annika felt herself heating up, could feel the blood drain from her head, thought she was about to faint.
‘No one ever spoke about the Beasts, not ever. Margit heard nothing from them for all those years, not until this October.’
‘Then what happened?’ Annika whispered.
‘She got the call, the symbol of the yellow dragon, summoning her to their meeting place.’
Annika could see before her the strange drawing the Minister of Culture had received, in that envelope posted in France.
‘A meeting?’ she said. ‘When?’
Thord Axelsson shook his head and walked over to the sink, picked up a glass but did nothing with it.
‘Then they contacted her, one of them called her at work, asking if she was going to the meeting to celebrate the return of the Dragon. She told them to go to hell, said they’d ruined her life, and that she loathed the fact that she’d ever met them.’
His shoulders were shaking.
‘She didn’t hear from them again.’
Annika was struggling against a growing, sucking feeling of nausea. She sat for a long while, swallowing, watching the man weep, holding the glass to his forehead.
‘I want them caught,’ he said eventually, turning back to Annika, his face red and unlike itself. He sat down heavily on his chair again, and sat still for a while as the clock ticked and the antiseptic smell spread throughout Annika’s body.
