Red Wolf Page 2

  And who had fired the old fogey who was still selling advertising space like he was working on some small-town local rag?

  Schyman smiled to himself.

  But the most important thing was probably his continued development of sales on the front page and flyers. He wasn’t counting his chickens, but, fingers crossed, it looked as though they were going to catch up with their competition during the next financial year, or possibly the one after.

  The editor-in-chief stretched, massaging the small of his back. For the first time since he arrived at the Evening Post he felt a sense of real satisfaction. This was how he had imagined his new job would be.

  It was just a bit of a fucker that it had taken almost ten years.

  ‘Can I come in?’ Annika Bengtzon asked over the intercom.

  He felt his heart sink, the magic fade. He breathed in and out a couple of times before going over to his desk to press the reply button. ‘Of course’.

  He stared out the window at the Russian embassy as he waited for the reporter’s nervous steps outside the door. The newspaper’s growing success meant that the newsroom had finally started to show him a little respect. Most noticeably, there was less traffic through his door. This was partly due to the reorganization of the newsroom: four all-powerful editors now worked shifts, running the various departments, and it was working just as he had planned. He had handed the responsibility down, and instead of having to argue constantly with all of the staff, he imposed his authority through his deputies. Instead of making him weaker, the delegation of power had actually made him mightier.

  Annika Bengtzon, the former head of the crime team, had been invited to become one of the four. She had declined, and they had fallen out. Schyman had already revealed his plans for her, seeing her as one of three possible heirs to his position, and wanted to get her involved in a larger programme of development. Becoming one of the editors was the first step, but she had turned the offer down.

  ‘I can hardly punish you,’ he had said, hearing exactly how that sounded.

  ‘Of course you can,’ she had replied, her unreadable eyes fluttering across his. ‘Just get on with it.’

  Bengtzon was one of the few who believed they still had open access to him and his office, and it annoyed him that he hadn’t done anything about it. In part, her special treatment stemmed from the big media storm last Christmas, when she had been taken hostage in a tunnel by a mad serial killer. That had certainly helped break the paper’s downward spiral, the market research proved as much. Readers found their way back to the Evening Post after reading about the night the mother-of-two had spent with the Bomber. So there was good reason to treat Bengtzon with kid gloves for a while. Her way of dealing with the situation and the attention that followed her release had impressed even the board – particularly the fact that she had insisted on the press conference being held in the Post’s newsroom. The chairman of the board, Herman Wennergren, had practically turned cartwheels when he saw the paper’s logo live on CNN. Schyman had more mixed memories of the press conference, partly because he had been standing directly behind Annika in the spotlight during the broadcast, and partly because of the countless repeats that had been shown on every channel. He had been staring at the tousled hair on her head, noting the tension in her shoulders. On screen Bengtzon had been pale and giddy, answering the questions clearly but curtly in decent school-level English. ‘No embarrassing emotional outbursts, thank God,’ Wennergren had said on his mobile to one of the owners from Schyman’s office afterwards.

  He could well remember the fear he had felt at the mouth of the tunnel when the shot rang out. Not a dead reporter, he had thought, anything but a dead reporter, please.

  He stopped looking at the bunker of the embassy and sat down on his chair.

  ‘It’ll all crumble around you one day,’ Annika Bengtzon said as she closed the door behind her.

  He didn’t bother to smile. ‘I can afford a new one. The paper’s on a roll,’ he said.

  The reporter cast a quick, almost furtive glance at the graphs on the desk. Schyman leaned back, studying her as she carefully sat down on one of the heavy chairs.

  ‘I want to do a new series of articles,’ she said, looking at her notes. ‘Next week is the anniversary of the attack on the F21 airbase in Luleå, so it would make sense to start there. I think it’s time for a proper summary of what happened, all the known facts. There aren’t many of those, to be honest, but I could do some digging. It’s over thirty years ago, but some of the employees from those days will still be in the Air Force. Maybe it’s time for someone to talk. You don’t get any answers if you don’t ask the questions …’

  Schyman nodded, folding his hands on his stomach. Once all the fuss had died down last Christmas, she had spent three months at home. A sabbatical, they had agreed to call it. When she returned to work at the start of April she had insisted on being an independent investigative reporter. Since then she had chosen to focus on terrorism, its history and consequences. Nothing remarkable, no revelations – routine reports from Ground Zero and 9/11; a few follow-up pieces about the bombing of that shopping centre in Finland; interviews with survivors of the Bali bombings.

  The fact was that she hadn’t really done much lately. Now she wanted to investigate even deeper into past acts of terrorism. But just how relevant was all this, and did it make sense to embark on that battle right now?

  ‘Okay,’ he said slowly, ‘that could be good. Dusting off our old national traumas, the hijack at Bulltofta, the siege of the West German embassy, the hostage crisis on Norrmalmstorg—’

  ‘And the Palme murder, I know. And out of all of them, the attack on F21 is the least written about.’

  She dropped her notes in her lap and leaned forward.

  ‘The Defence Department has kept the lid on this, applying a whole arsenal of secrecy legislation. There were no media-trained PR people on the defence staff in those days, so the poor bastard in charge of the base had to stand there in person shouting at reporters to respect the security of the nation.’

  Let her run with it a bit longer, he thought.

  ‘So what do we know?’ he said. ‘Really?’

  She looked dutifully down at her notes, but he got the distinct impression that she knew all the facts by heart.

  ‘On the night of the seventeenth of November nineteen sixty-nine a Draken fighter-plane exploded in the middle of the F21 base at Kallax Heath outside Luleå,’ she said quickly. ‘One man was burned so badly that he died of his wounds.’

  ‘A conscript, wasn’t it?’

  ‘That only came out later, yes. He was transferred by air ambulance to the University Hospital in Uppsala, and hovered between life and death for a week before he died. The family was gagged. They kicked up a real stink a few years later because they never got any compensation from the Air Force.’

  ‘And no one was ever arrested?’

  ‘The police interrogated a thousand people or so, the security police probably even more. Every single leftwing group in Norrbotten was pulled in, down to their least significant members, but nothing was ever found. It wasn’t as simple as all that, though. The real left had managed to stay pretty tight-knit. No one knew all their names, and the whole lot of them used codenames.’

  Anders Schyman smiled nostalgically. He himself had gone under the name of ‘Per’ for a short period. ‘You can never keep stuff like that secret, though.’

  ‘Not completely, of course not. They all had close friends in the groups, after all, but as far as I know there are still people in Luleå who only recognize each other by the codenames they used in leftwing groups at the end of the sixties.’

  She could hardly have been born then, he thought.

  ‘So who did it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Who blew up the plane?’

  ‘The Russians, probably. That’s the conclusion the armed forces came to, anyway. The situation was completely different then, of course. We’re talking a
bout the height of the arms race, the deepest freeze of the Cold War.’

  He closed his eyes for a moment, conjuring up images and the spirit of the time. ‘There was a huge debate about the level of security at military bases,’ he suddenly remembered.

  ‘Exactly. Suddenly the public – or rather the media – demanded that every single base in Sweden had to be guarded better, which was completely unrealistic, of course. It would have taken the whole of the military budget to do it. But security was certainly stepped up for a while, and eventually secure zones were established within the bases. Dirty great fences with video cameras and alarms and what have you around all the hangars and so on.’

  ‘And that’s where you want to go? Which one of the editors have you spoken to?’

  She glanced at her watch. ‘Jansson. Look, I’ve got an open plane ticket for this afternoon. I want to meet a journalist on the Norrland News up there, a bloke who’s found out some new information. He’s going off to south-east Asia on Friday, away until Christmas, so I’m in a bit of a hurry. I just need you to give the okay.’

  Anders Schyman felt the irritation rising again, maybe because she was excusing herself so breathlessly.

  ‘Couldn’t Jansson do that?’

  Her cheeks started to go red.

  ‘In principle,’ Annika Bengtzon said, meeting his gaze. ‘But you know what it’s been like. He just wants to know that you’re not against it.’

  He nodded.

  She closed the door carefully behind her. He stared at the space she had left, understanding exactly what she meant. She works without boundaries, he thought. I’ve always known that. She hasn’t got any instinct for self-preservation. She gets herself into all sorts of situations, things normal people would never dream of doing, because there’s something missing there. Something got lost long ago, yanked out, roots and all, the scar fading over the years, leaving her exposed to the world, and to herself. All she’s got left is her sense of justice, the truth like a beacon in a world full of darkness. She can’t do anything else.

  This could get really messy.

  The editorial team’s euphoria over the sales figures for the Christmas holiday had come to an abrupt halt when it emerged that Bengtzon had got an exclusive interview with the murderer while she was being held captive. It had been typed on the murdered Olympic delegate’s computer. Schyman had read it, it was sensational. The problem was that Annika, like a real pest, had refused to let the paper publish it.

  ‘That’s just what the bastard wanted,’ she had said. ‘And because I’ve got copyright I can say no.’

  She had won. If they had published without her consent, she had promised to sue them. Even if she might have lost the case, he wasn’t prepared to challenge her, considering the amount of good publicity the story had already got them.

  She’s not stupid, Anders Schyman thought, but she might have lost her bite.

  He stood up, went over to the graphs again.

  Well, there would be further cutbacks in the future.

  3

  The sunset was spreading a fiery glow in the cabin of the plane, even though it was only two o’clock in the afternoon. Annika looked for gaps in the whipped-cream clouds beneath her but found none. The fat man next to her drove his elbow into her ribs as he spread out his copy of the Norrland News with a sigh.

  She closed her eyes, shutting herself off. She pulled the shutter down against the hiss of the plane’s air-conditioning, the pain in her ribs, the captain’s reports on the temperature outside the cabin and the weather in Luleå. Let herself be carried at a thousand kilometres an hour, concentrating on the pressure of her clothes against her body. She felt dizzy, shaky. Loud noises had begun to startle her in a way she had never experienced before. Open spaces had become impossibly large; cramped spaces made her feel suffocated. Her sense of spatial awareness was warped, so that she had difficulty judging distances. She was always covered in bruises from where she had walked into things, furniture and walls, cars and the edge of pavements. Sometimes the air seemed to vanish around her. Other people used it all up, leaving nothing for her.

  But it wasn’t dangerous, she knew that. She just had to wait until it passed and the sounds came back and colours became normal again. It wasn’t dangerous. Wasn’t dangerous.

  She suppressed the thought, letting herself float away, feeling her chin drop, and suddenly the angels were there.

  Fear made her sit bolt upright in her chair. She hit the folding table, spilling orange juice against the wall of the cabin. The racing of her heart filled her head, shutting out all other sound. The fat man was saying something to her, but she couldn’t make out what.

  Nothing scared her as much as the sound of the angels singing.

  She didn’t mind as long as they kept to her dreams. The voices sang to her at night, chanting, comforting, meaningless words with an indefinable beauty. Nowadays they sometimes carried on after she woke up, which made her mad with anxiety.

  She shook her head, cleared her throat, rubbed her eyes, and checked that she hadn’t got orange juice on her laptop.

  As the plane broke through the clouds on its final approach it was surrounded by swirling ice. Through the snowstorm she caught a glimpse of the half-frozen grey of the Gulf of Bothnia, interrupted by dark-grey islands.

  The landing was uncomfortably rough, the wind tugging at the plane.

  She was last out of the plane, restlessly shuffling her feet as the fat man heaved himself out of his seat, got his luggage from the overhead compartment and struggled to pull on his coat. She ran past him on the way out and noted with some satisfaction that he ended up behind her in the queue for hire-cars.

  Key in hand, she hurried past the crowd of taxi-drivers by the exit, a cluster of dark uniforms that laughed, shamelessly evaluating passers-by.

  The cold shocked her as she walked out of the terminal building. She gasped for air, pulling her bag higher on her shoulder. The lines of dark-blue taxis sparked a memory of a previous visit here with her closest friend Anne Snapphane, on the way to Piteå. That must have been almost ten years ago. God, time flies.

  The car park was down to the right, beyond the bus-stops. Her gloveless hand holding the laptop was soon ice-cold. The sound her feet made on the ice reminded her of broken glass, making her cautious. As she moved forward, she left doubt and fear behind her. She was on her way, she had a purpose.

  The car was at the end of the row. She cleared the snow from the number-plate to make sure it was the right one.

  Dusk was falling incredibly slowly, covering the daylight that had never really arrived. The snowfall was blurring the outline of the stunted pines that edged the car park. She leaned forward, peering through the windscreen.

  Luleå, Luleå, which way was Luleå?

  In the middle of a long bridge heading into town the snow suddenly eased, revealing the frozen river beneath her. The structure of the bridge rose and sank around her in soft waves as the car rolled onward. The town gradually crept out of the snowstorm, and off to the right dark industrial skeletons rose towards the sky.

  The steelworks and ore harbour, she thought.

  Her reaction as the buildings began to surround her was immediate and violent, a déjà vu from childhood. Luleå was like an arctic version of Katrineholm – only colder, greyer, lonelier. The buildings were low, in varying colours, built of cement blocks, steel and brick panels. The streets were wide, the traffic thin. The City Hotel was easy to find, on the main street next to the Town Hall. There were free parking spaces outside the entrance, she noted with surprise.

  Her room had a view of the Norrbotten Theatre and Stadsviken, a strangely colourless picture in which the leaden, grey water of the river swallowed any light. She turned her back on the window, and rested the laptop against the bathroom door, taking her toothbrush and spare clothes out of her bag. Then she sat down at the desk and used the hotel phone to call the Norrland News. It took almost two minutes before a sullen female voice answ
ered.

  ‘Could I speak to Benny Ekland please?’ Annika said, looking back out of the window. It was completely dark now. She listened to the mute hum of the line for several seconds.

  ‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Is Benny Ekland there? Hello?’

  ‘Hello?’ the woman said quietly.

  ‘My name’s Annika Bengtzon. I’m meeting Benny Ekland this week,’ Annika added, getting up and hunting through her bag for a pen.

  ‘So you haven’t heard?’ the woman said.

  ‘What?’ Annika said, taking out her notes.

  ‘Benny’s dead. We only found out this morning.’

  At first she almost laughed with the shock, then realized that it wasn’t funny and got angry instead. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘We don’t really know what happened,’ the woman gulped. ‘Only that there was some sort of accident. Everyone on the paper’s just shocked.’

  Annika stood there, her notes in one hand, the phone and pen in the other, staring at her own reflection in the window. She felt like she was floating.

  ‘Hello?’ the woman said. ‘Would you like to talk to anyone else?’

  ‘I … I’m sorry,’ Annika said, swallowing. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the woman said, now almost in tears. ‘I have to take another call now, then I’m done for the day. It’s been a terrible day, a terrible day …’

  Silence on the line again. Annika hung up, sat down on the bed and fought a sudden feeling of nausea. She saw that there was a local telephone directory under one of the bedside tables. She pulled it out, found the number for the police, dialled, and ended up talking to the station.

  ‘Ah, the journalist,’ the duty officer said when she asked what had happened to Benny Ekland. ‘It was out in Svartöstaden somewhere. You can talk to Suup in crime.’

  She waited, one hand over her eyes, as he transferred her, listening to the organic noises of the hotel: water rattling through a pipe in the wall, a rumbling ventilator outside, sexual groans from the TV in a neighbouring room.