‘He isn’t in any registers held by the Yanks, the Brits or the French.’
‘Was it him you spoke to on the phone?’
Halenius ran his fingers through his fringe. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s possible. In the video he’s talking Kinyarwanda, but the man who phoned spoke faultless Nairobi English. Mind you, both voices were quite high, a bit whiny, so it could have been the same person.’
‘What are the French saying?’
‘Their government isn’t involved and I haven’t spoken to anyone there – the French are always a bit stand-offish. I don’t know if their officials have any insurance, but members of the European Parliament certainly don’t.’
‘What about the others?’
‘The Spaniard has someone negotiating for him, the German woman too. I don’t know about the Romanian or the Dane. The British have told Sky News that they never negotiate with terrorists, which isn’t a smart move considering the situation the hostages are in. What did the bank say?’
She put her feet up on the coffee-table. ‘Borrowing forty million dollars with no security might be a bit tricky,’ she said. ‘But a hundred and fifty thousand kronor would be okay, if God and the bank management can have receipts and contracts covering exactly what I want to buy, or if I can give them some form of security in the form of property or a car, or a guarantor …’
‘Isn’t there anyone who could guarantee a loan? Thomas’s mother?’
Annika shook her head. ‘We asked if she’d be a guarantor when the lease on the flat was up for sale, because then we would have paid a lower rate of interest. It was a policy decision, she said, always to say no to being a guarantor. Alvar, her father-in-law, apparently agreed to act as guarantor for his reckless brother and it all ended disastrously. The family lost everything.’
‘Shame. Your mother?’
‘She asks me once a year if I can guarantee a loan for her, usually because she’s found an unmissable investment opportunity online …’
He raised one hand. ‘I get it. So how much money have you got?’
‘Barely six and a half million,’ she said. ‘Kronor, that is.’
Halenius opened his eyes wide. ‘Really? Do you mind me asking …?’
‘Insurance. Our house out in Djursholm burned down – well, of course you know that. You came out there once.’
‘The Kitten,’ he said.
The contract killer who had eventually been linked to the fire at Annika’s home had been part of a highly dubious prisoner exchange (well, Annika thought it was dubious), and as a result the insurance company had finally, at long, long last, agreed to pay up. By that time Annika and Thomas had been on their way to the USA, so the money had been deposited in the new savings account with Handelsbanken.
‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘The Kitten.’
‘Does Thomas know how much money is in that account?’
‘No. Nor do I. Not down to the last krona, anyway. Why?’
‘But he has a rough idea? That there’s about a million dollars there?’
‘Yeah, I’d say so.’
Halenius wrote something in a notebook. ‘Have you got anything valuable that you could sell? Anything of Thomas’s?’
‘He did have a yacht, but his ex-wife got that. And then he bought a motorboat with Sophia Grenborg, but she got that when he left her. As a consolation … Why do you ask?’
‘Why Handelsbanken?’ Halenius asked.
‘Because they don’t pay bonuses to their directors,’ Annika said.
The under-secretary of state let out a short, genuine laugh. ‘I’ve switched my accounts too,’ he said, ‘for exactly the same reason. The bankers took it for granted that they had a right to their millions in bonuses, even though the financial crisis was their fault.’
‘Mind you, to start with they need several million as an annual salary just to turn up at work. And then they demand the same again as a bonus to do anything,’ Annika said.
‘For bankers, money is purely hypothetical,’ Halenius said. ‘They don’t understand that someone always has to pay, and it’s usually the poor fellow at the bottom of the food chain.’
‘Or girl,’ Annika said.
They smiled at each other.
‘So, one million dollars,’ Halenius said. ‘That’s what we’ve got to play with.’
‘One million dollars,’ Annika confirmed.
* * *
It was radiant white, like an angel’s wing, the Andreas Church in Vaxholm, the church of the missionary parish (although in those days it was called the Swedish Missionary Society): I was one of Paul Petter Waldenström’s young lambs, small and innocent (at least to start with).
Sunday school was great. It was always sunny in the parish hall, no matter what the weather was like outside. First we would sing and pray together, then the bigger children would go off into the back room for Bible study, and not just any Bible study: the Bible in cartoon form! Every Sunday we got a new sheet, folded in half to make four pages. The paper was of such poor quality that there were splinters in it. If you tried to rub out a pencil mark, it disintegrated. If you were really lucky, there were cartoons on all four pages, but that didn’t often happen. On the fourth and final page, and sometimes even on the third, there were questions to be answered, crosswords made up of Christian words, articles of faith to discuss, and that was all very boring, but I still went, every Sunday, because the cartoon was like a serial that seemed to have no end.
But of course it did. Everything comes to an end.
Even this will come to an end.
They’ve been to collect the Spaniard now, Alvaro Ribeiro. I remembered his name because my grandfather was called Alvar and there was once a promising tennis player called Francis Ribeiro. He trained in Finland for a while. I wonder what happened to him.
They collected him after it had got dark. He didn’t say anything when they came for him. No goodbye, nothing.
The Romanian hadn’t come back.
I listened to the sounds inside me, to the darkness.
The lambs who were thirteen and above and were good at Bible study became shepherds for the younger ones – actually, everyone did except me. I don’t know why I wasn’t allowed to be a shepherd. I haven’t thought about it for ages but I used to wonder about it. Perhaps I wasn’t pious enough. Perhaps I played too much ice-hockey. Perhaps the older shepherds knew that Linus and I smoked behind the boat refuelling station, or that we’d drunk the beer Linus’s dad kept hidden in the boot of his car.
There were far more mosquitoes now. They were biting me the whole time, on my fingers, arms, ears, cheeks, eyelids.
Annika’s laughter was echoing around me. She doesn’t believe in God. She usually says He’s a patriarchal construct invented by men to hold the masses and women in their place. I know it isn’t rational, but every time she says something like that, I get a bit scared. I find it so unnecessary, because
if
He exists I doubt He’d appreciate being described as a patriarchal construct. Who would? I said that to her once, and she stared at me with a really odd look in those big eyes of hers. She said: ‘If God does exist, then He knows what I’m thinking, doesn’t He? Otherwise He’s not really up to much, is He? Maybe He appreciates the fact that I’m not a hypocrite.’
Now there were only me and the Dane left. He was lying completely still beside me. It was a relief that he wasn’t rattling and groaning any more. His chest seemed nice and quiet. It was completely dark. The guards had lit a fire outside the shack – I could see the light from the flames through the gaps around the tin door.
We hadn’t been given anything else to eat. I had emptied my bladder on the floor once.
I wondered if God could see me now.
* * *
The landline rang at 23:44.
Annika had almost dozed off on the sofa and jumped as if she’d been kicked.
‘Do you want to listen in?’ Halenius asked. His eyes were red and his skin chapped; his shirt had come un-tucked from his trousers.
Annika shook her head.
But perhaps she should. She could be some sort of support in the bedroom, pointing at notes on the walls to remind him of different aspects and keywords they’d agreed on, make sure that the recording equipment was working and that everything was being saved to the hard-drive the way it should be.
‘I’d rather not,’ she said.
The telephone rang a second time.
Halenius stood up rather heavily and went into the bedroom, shutting the door behind him. Now he was starting the recording. Now he was checking that it was working. Now he was waiting for the next ring, and then he would answer.
The third ring and, sure enough, it was cut off halfway, and Annika could hear Halenius speaking, forming sentences, but couldn’t make out the words.
The clock on the DVD-player clicked to 23:45, the exact angle of the tilt of the Earth.
She had spent the evening answering all the text messages, voicemail and emails she had received from journalists wanting to interview her. ‘Thanks for your enquiry about interviewing me on my husband’s situation. But I won’t be making any comment for the time being. If I change my mind I’ll get in touch. Please respect my decision.’
Bosse, from the other evening paper, was the only one to get in touch after that, with a long, antagonistic text in which he demanded at least to know what was going on, even if he didn’t use it in an article the following day. He thought they could discuss the matter, if nothing else, maybe come to some agreement. Annika answered, ‘Do I look like a carpet-seller?’
Possibly a little too abrupt, she thought, as she stared at the time on the DVD-player. The truth was that she found Bosse difficult to deal with. He was the one who had tried to stir up a scandal around her Spanish air-kiss with Halenius outside the Järnet restaurant. It had been his revenge for her breaking off the beginnings of a flirtation between them about a century and a half ago.
Halenius was talking and talking and talking in there.
Anders Schyman was the only person she hadn’t replied to. She realized she had reacted irrationally to his proposal. It wasn’t that bad an offer. The real question was what it actually meant. They would hardly stretch to forty million dollars, but on the other hand it was unlikely that the ransom would end up being that large, not if Halenius’s theory was correct.
23:51. He had now been talking to the kidnapper for six minutes. That was roughly how long the first conversation had lasted. Halenius had listened to the recording several times during the evening, and had made a transcript, which he had asked her if she wanted to read. ‘Maybe later,’ she had said. She didn’t want to hear what the kidnapper sounded like, but maybe she could read what he had said, absorb his message without needing to deal with the individual. But not now, not tonight.
Right now it was quiet in Kidnap Control, but the phone hadn’t clicked, so the call hadn’t ended. What was he doing in there? Had something gone wrong?
‘Yes?’ she heard him say, and felt herself letting go of the air in her lungs.
She would have talk to Schyman again and find out what his offer actually meant. How much money was the paper prepared to pay? How much would she be forced to reveal about her relationship with Thomas? Sex, cooking, their favourite television programmes? Would the children have to be involved?
She went out into the kitchen with Halenius’s muffled voice surrounding her like fog. They had eaten grilled goat’s cheese on rocket salad with pine nuts, cherry tomatoes, honey and raspberry balsamic vinegar as a starter (an old classic), then pork chops with potato wedges and chanterelle sauce (she had picked her own, then parboiled and frozen them). Halenius had had the last of the sticky chocolate cake as dessert.
‘I’m going to end up rolling out of here,’ he had said, as he pushed the chocolate-smeared plate away from him.
Annika had loaded the dishwasher without replying.
Between six and sixty days: that was the usual length of a commercial kidnapping. And a politically motivated kidnapping could last much longer. Terry Anderson, head of the Associated Press bureau in Beirut, had been held for almost seven years by Hezbollah. Ingrid Betancourt had spent the same amount of time with the FARC guerrillas in Colombia.
She could still hear Halenius murmuring on the other side of the wall; they seemed to have a lot to talk about. She wiped the draining board again. The stainless steel sparkled. She opened the fridge, took out a cherry tomato and bit into it. It exploded with a little pop inside her mouth.
Why was he talking for so long?
She went back into the living room and sat down on the sofa.
23:58. Almost a quarter of an hour now.
The television was still on, with the sound turned down. She switched it off.
All the news programmes that evening had included short items on Thomas Samuelsson, the Swede kidnapped in Kenya. The rest of the hostages hadn’t been named. News that the Frenchman’s body had been found hadn’t yet leaked out, but it was only a matter of time. Tonight, or tomorrow morning at the latest, it would crash-land in the mass media. Then all the colleagues she had replied to that evening would get in touch again and ask if she had any comment on the fact that the hostages had begun to be executed.
She shut her eyes.
What would she do if Thomas died – if they killed him? How would she react? Would she go to pieces? Go mad? Feel relieved? Would she agree to cry in public? Maybe Letterman would call. Or Oprah. Did she still have her own programme, or had she stopped doing it? Who would she ask to the funeral? Would it be a small, intimate affair for close family, or should she invite all the news crews, the papers, everyone he had studied with in Uppsala, Sophia Grenborg and his first wife, Eleonor, the stuck-up bank director?
She opened her eyes.
He wasn’t dead.
He was still living and breathing: she could feel his breath right beside her.
Or was she just imagining things? Like when old people lose their husband or wife and suddenly start seeing ghosts, conjuring up the image of their deceased soulmate and communicating with them in words and thoughts.
00:07.
It was taking a very long time. Twenty-three minutes now. What were they talking about?