Red Wolf

forming a wall of iron one kilometre long between her and Hans Blomberg.

And she got to her feet and ran and ran and ran towards the noise, towards the glowing red eyes at the top of blast-furnace number two. She scrambled up a steep slope and over a mountain of coal, knives tearing at her lungs; in the distance the sign, West Checkpoint.

Tuesday 24 November

51

Thomas put the evening papers down on the desk before he took off his coat and hung it up on a hanger. He glanced at the desk over his shoulder as he hung the hanger on the back of the door. Annika’s solemn face stared up at him from the front page of the Evening Post, the new photo she had taken after the business with the Bomber, with her looking older and sadder.

Evening Post Reporter CRACKED TERRORIST GANG, the headline screamed, and his pulse started to race as he sat down and ran a finger over her face.

His wife, the mother of his children, was unique, and not only in his eyes.

He opened the paper. Articles about how Annika’s investigations had cracked the Norrbotten terrorist cell took up half the paper. Across the first news-spread inside, pages six and seven, there was a night picture, taken from a plane, of the Gulf of Bothnia, with someone running within an illuminated circle of light, and the caption: Terrorist hunt at sea tonight – serial killer tracked by helicopters with thermal cameras.

A long article described how a single man from Lulea had murdered at least four people in just the last few weeks. Journalist Annika Bengtzon had sounded the alarm at the West Checkpoint of Swedish Steel, the police had sealed off the Lovskatan district, forcing the man out onto the ice. Fortunately police helicopters were already fitted with thermal-imaging cameras, because they had been searching for a missing three-year-old the year before. He glanced through the article, then moved on.

The next spread described how Annika had been locked in an abandoned compressor shed beside the railway in Lulea with members of the terrorist cell, the Beasts, and how she had managed to alert the police before she was captured, and how she had saved the life of pensioner Yngve Gustafsson by keeping him warm with her own body-heat.

Thomas felt a jolt at that sentence, and had to swallow. He stopped reading and looked at the pictures.

A nice picture of Annika in the newsroom. Below that was a photograph taken with a flash, of a little red brick building. His wife could have died there.

He ran a hand through his hair and loosened his tie.

Annika had escaped the killer by throwing herself in front of an iron-ore train, and had run for a kilometre to Swedish Steel and sounded the alarm at the West Checkpoint. The article had been written by a reporter, Patrick Nilsson. Annika herself was interviewed and just said she was fine and that she was glad it was all over.

He breathed out hard. She was mad. What on earth was she thinking? How could she put herself in such a dangerous situation when she had him and the children?

They had to talk. She couldn’t carry on like this.

The following pages were full of Minister of Culture Karina Bjornlund’s story of how she was lured to join the Beasts, a Maoist group in Lulea in the late 1960s. After Bjornlund left the group it went to pieces and turned to violence, something she deeply regretted. The minister tried to describe the spirit of the times, a desire for justice and freedom that span out of control. The Prime Minister welcomed her honesty, and was giving her his full backing.

The truth about the story of the attack on F21 filled the next two pages. The serial killer now in custody had thrown one of the military’s own flares into a container of surplus aviation fuel and thereby caused the explosion.

He skipped the article once he’d read the introduction and captions.

The next two pages covered the hitman Ragnwald, one of ETA’s most ruthless terrorists, who had evaded the world’s police and security services for three decades. He had frozen to death in the compressor shed while Annika and the others had looked on, powerless to help.

He looked at the grainy photograph of a young man, dark and skinny, with nondescript features.

Then Annika was back again, a brief summary of her work and achievements.

He put the palm of his hand over her face and shut his eyes.

Strangely, he thought he could feel warmth from the newspaper.

A moment later the phone rang, and he picked it up with a smile.

‘I have to see you,’ Sophia Grenborg said, sobbing loudly. ‘Something terrible has happened. I’m on my way to you now.’

For a moment he was caught up in her panic, his throat constricting, terrorists, hitmen, people frozen to death.

Then everything fell into place. Sophia’s terrible things were not Annika’s. He cleared his throat and looked at the time, trying to think of an excuse not to see her.

‘There’s a committee meeting in quarter of an hour,’ he said, blushing at the lie.

‘I’ll be there in five minutes.’

She hung up and he was left sitting there with an unidentifiable summer tune in his head.

On Friday she had been happy as a lark, because she was going to be in an article in County Council World. They had asked her what she wanted for Christmas.

‘I said you,’ she had whispered, then kissed him on the ear.

He looked at the front page of the Evening Post, one of the biggest papers in Scandinavia, his serious-looking wife uncovering a group of terrorists. She was changing reality, while he and his colleagues were trying to tame it and administer it; she was making a difference while he was putting up smokescreens.

The telephone rang again, an internal call from reception.

‘There’s someone here to see you.’

He stood up and stared out across the churchyard below, frosted and frozen. He rolled his shoulders in an attempt to shake off the disquiet, the clamminess, the feeling of reluctance and obligation.

A few seconds later Sophia Grenborg stumbled into his room, her eyes red with crying, her nose puffy and swollen. He went over and helped her take off her coat.

‘I don’t understand what’s happened,’ she sniffed, pulling a handkerchief from her bag. ‘I don’t know what’s got into them.’

He stroked her on the cheek and tried to smile. ‘What’s happened?’

She sank onto a chair, holding the handkerchief to her mouth.

‘Management want to move me,’ she said, breathing unevenly. ‘Clerk in the traffic safety department.’

She lowered her head, her shoulders began to shake, he shuffled his feet a couple of times, bewildered, then leaned over her, paused.

‘Sophia,’ he said. ‘Oh dear, come on, poor you…’

She stopped, looking up at him in genuine confusion.

‘After all the work I’ve done,’ she said. ‘I’ve put everything into this job for five years. How can they downgrade me like this?’

‘Are you sure it isn’t a promotion?’ he said, sitting down on the desk and putting his hand on her back.

‘Promotion?’ she said. ‘I’m losing my project management bonus, and I have to clear my room this afternoon and move out to an open-plan office in Kista. I won’t even have my own desk.’

Thomas rubbed her shoulders, looking down at her hair, breathing in the smell of apples.