Red Wolf_ A Novel Part 39

Inside the car it was stuffy and warm thanks to the heater on the pa.s.senger side. She started to sweat immediately in all her thermals. The engine started the first time, but the power-steering and wheels were sluggish and hesitant.

She pa.s.sed the fighter-plane that loomed over the entrance to the airport, and took the left exit from the roundabout instead of the right, towards Pitea instead of Lulea. She peered through the windscreen to see if she recognized anything. She had taken a taxi from the airport with Anne Snapphane ten years ago.

The heathland disappeared behind her and she drove into what must have been fertile agricultural land. Large farms perched on the edge of the forest, oblong timber buildings, exuding wealth and influence. To her surprise she emerged onto a wide motorway, she didn't remember that at all. Her surprise only grew as the motorway went on and on without her seeing a single other vehicle on the road. The feeling of surreal desolation took a stranglehold on her neck; she had to struggle to breathe normally. Was this some sort of joke? Had reality slid away from her? Was this the road to h.e.l.l?

Forest flew by on both sides, short, thin pine trees with frozen crowns. The cold made the low sunlight s.h.i.+mmer, just like heat can. She took a tighter grip on the steering wheel and hunched forward.

Maybe your perspective changed at the Arctic Circle. Maybe up was down, right was left. In which case it would be entirely logical to build a motorway through arctic forest where no one lived.

After two wrong turns, one where she discovered she was on her way to Haparanda and the Finnish border, she reached the centre of Pitea. The town was silent, low-built. It reminded her of Skoldinge, a village between Katrineholm and Flen, just colder and barer. The main difference was the central thoroughfare, three times broader than even Sveavagen in Stockholm.

Margit and Thord Axelsson's home was in Pitholm, the same place where Anne Snapphane's parents lived. She rolled carefully along gritted roads until she reached the turning Thord had described to her.

The detached house was one of a row of confusingly identical properties built in the seventies, when the lending rates dictated for home-building by the state led to a previously unknown form of construction it was the decade of the over-sized pitched roof.

She parked the hire-car behind a green Toyota Corolla identical to the one Thomas had. She got out of the Volvo, pulled on her jacket and was struck for a dizzying moment by the notion that she actually lived here, that the children were at university and she worked on the Norrland News Norrland News. She took shallow breaths of the frozen air, looking up at the peak of the roof that was casting a great shadow across the street.

Anne Snapphane had grown up just a few hundred metres away, and she would rather die than move back, but it was peaceful here.

'Annika Bengtzon?'

A man with a shock of steel-grey hair had opened the door slightly, his head peering through the gap. 'Come in,' he said, 'before you freeze to death.'

She walked up to the porch, stamped her feet and shook his hand.

'Thord?'

The look in his eyes was dark and intelligent, the set of his mouth sad and watchful.

Annika stepped into a hall with a dark-green patterned plastic mat, circa 1976, from the look of it. Thord Axelsson took her heavy jacket and hung it on a hanger below the hat-rack.

'I've made some coffee,' he said, walking ahead of her into the kitchen.

The pine table was set with woven mats and flowery cups and saucers, a birch-bark basket containing at least four different sorts of biscuit.

'Oh, that looks good,' Annika said politely as she settled onto a chair and put her bag down beside her.

'Margit likes baking,' Thord said, biting off the sentence and staring down into his cup. Then he took a deep breath through his nose, clenched his jaw and reached for the thermos he had already filled.

'Milk and sugar?'

Annika shook her head, suddenly unable to speak.

What right did she have to march into other people's tragedies?

She picked up her spoon and unconsciously clinked it against the porcelain cup.

'Margit was a good person,' Thord Axelsson said, looking out of the window. 'She meant well, but she carried awful secrets. That's why she died.'

He took two lumps of sugar from the bowl and dropped them into his cup with a plop. Then he folded his arms on the edge of the table and looked out at the street again.

'I've been doing some thinking since yesterday,' he said without looking at Annika. 'I want to talk about what happened, but I don't want to sully Margit's memory.'

She nodded, still mute, and reached for the notepad in her bag. She glanced briefly at the clean window-panes and neatly wiped orange kitchen cupboards, suddenly aware that there was a smell of antiseptic cleaning fluid.

'How did you meet, you and Margit?'

The man looked up at the ceiling and sat quite still for a few moments, then looked over at the stove.

'She came up to me in the City Pub in Lulea. It was a Sat.u.r.day night in the spring of seventy-five. I was there with some friends from college; she was standing next to us at the bar and heard me say that I worked in the air force.'

He seemed to lose himself in history for a moment, his eyes roaming over some inner landscape.

'She spoke first,' he said. 'Interested, almost inquisitive.'

He looked into Annika's eyes, giving her a small, embarra.s.sed smile.

'I was flattered,' he said, 'she was a good-looking girl. And smart. I liked her from the start.'

Annika smiled back. 'Was she living in Lulea then?'

'On Lovskatan. She was at teacher training college, the nursery course. She wanted to work with children, kept saying they were the future. Doing something creative was important to her even back then, both in her art and in her life . . .'

He put his hand in front of his mouth and looked out at the street again.

'Margit was a serious person,' he said. 'Responsible, loyal. I was lucky.'

Silence spread through the kitchen, she could hear a clock tick. The cold was making the walls creak.

'What was the secret she carried?' Annika eventually asked.

He turned his gaze towards her.

'The Beasts,' he said, with sudden strength in his voice. 'Margit was an active member of a number of groups and a.s.sociations even as a teenager, one of Norrbotten's best athletes in the early sixties. She joined the Communist Party at an early age.'

Athletics, Annika thought, remembering the cutting from the Norrland News Norrland News.

'Did she know Karina Bjornlund?'

'They're cousins,' he said. 'How did you know that?'

Annika started slightly, and looked down to hide it.

'Karina Bjornlund was an athlete, too,' she said. 'So they were close?'

'Margit was two years older; she was a bit like a big sister to Karina. She was the one who got Karina started on athletics. But Margit gave up after that, of course.'

'Why?'

'She went into politics. And Karina followed her into that as well . . .'

Annika waited for the man to go on, but when nothing came she tried to help him along.

'So what about the Beasts?'

'They were a breakaway group,' Thord Axelsson said, rubbing his forehead. 'They saw themselves as an offshoot of the main organization, the Chinese Communist Party. They moved beyond conventional Maoism and went the whole hog, or at least that was how they saw it themselves.'

'And they had codenames?' Annika said.

He nodded and stirred his coffee.

'Not real names but proper codenames, animal names. Margit's was Barking Dog. She was really upset about that. The others got political names, but she got a personal one. The men in the group thought she asked too many questions, always debating and criticizing.'

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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 hoa.r.s.ely.

'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 Norrland News Norrland News. Why would you put that in if you weren't going to get married?

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.'