The telephone gave a little ring. 00:11. They had talked for twenty-seven minutes.
The whole flat was filled with thunderous silence. She was breathing softly, shallowly.
Now he was checking that the recording had worked, saving it on the server, switching it off …
Her legs felt heavy. Halenius came out of the bedroom door and Annika watched him float across the room.
‘He’s alive, and contactable,’ the under-secretary of state said, sinking on to the armchair.
‘Did you talk to him?’ Annika asked, her mouth dry. She could feel a pip from the cherry tomato between two of her teeth.
Halenius shook his head and ran his fingers through his hair; he seemed utterly exhausted. ‘They seldom call from where they’re holding the hostages. They’ve watched too many cop shows on television and think the police and authorities just have to press a button to trace where the call is being made from.’
‘Do they have cop shows in Somalia?’ Annika asked.
‘The man who phoned is clearly in touch with the guards somehow, probably by mobile phone. I asked the control question we agreed on, “Where was Annika living when you first met?”, and a couple of minutes later I got the answer. “Across the yard from Hantverkargatan thirty-two.”’
Across the courtyard from Hantverkargatan 32.
She had a flash of memory, of her demolition-threatened flat at the top of the building in the yard, with no hot water or bathroom, the light from the sky and the draught from the badly fitting window in the kitchen. The sofa in the living room was where they had first had sex, her on top of him.
‘Can the call be traced? Can we find out where they’re calling from?’
‘The British are working on it. The calls seem to be routed through either Liboi or a mast on the other side of the border, inside Somalia. But the areas covered by each of those masts are enormous.’
‘So where’s Thomas? Do they know which country he’s in?’
He shook his head. ‘Not from these conversations, anyway.’
‘The Frenchman was found in Mogadishu,’ Annika said.
‘But it’s not certain he was killed there. Bodies start to decay very quickly in those areas because of the heat, but a doctor at the Djibouti embassy thought he’d been dead for at least twenty-four hours before he was found. And we know that the kidnappers have access to a vehicle. Or vehicles. At least three.’
‘The truck and the two Toyotas,’ Annika said.
A fleeting smile crossed Halenius’s face. ‘So you were listening, then.’
‘Toyota Takeaways,’ Annika said. ‘What were you talking about for so long?’
He rubbed his eyes. ‘Building trust,’ he said. ‘We were discussing politics. I basically agreed with everything he said, and I didn’t actually have to lie. I think Frontex is a disgrace, but at least I’m not involved with it at the department. We could rid the developing world of poverty tomorrow, if we set our minds to it, but we don’t want to. We profit too much from it.’
Annika didn’t answer.
‘I said you weren’t in a position to pay a ransom of forty million dollars. I explained that you live in a rented flat and have two young children, and an ordinary job, but I mentioned that you have some savings from the insurance pay-out after a house fire, and that you’d be seeing your bank on Monday to find out how much you can get hold of.’
Annika straightened on the sofa. ‘What the hell did you tell him that for? Now he knows we’ve got money!’
‘They’ll ask Thomas all about your assets, and he’ll tell them.’
‘Do you think so?’
Halenius looked up at her. ‘Guaranteed.’
Annika stood up and went out into the kitchen. Halenius followed her.
‘They must never think we’re lying to them. If they do, we have to start the negotiations again. Not just from zero, but somewhere way below that.’
She leaned back against the draining board and folded her arms over her chest. ‘So you and the kidnapper are best friends now?’
Halenius stopped right in front of her. His eyes were bloodshot. ‘I’d stand on my head and sing “The Marseillaise” backwards if it would help get Thomas home to you and the children,’ he said, then went into the hall and put on his coat and shoes. ‘I’ll leave the computer here,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back first thing tomorrow morning.’
And before she had time to say anything else or apologize or thank him, he was gone.
The smell woke me up. It was like nothing I’d ever smelt before. Not fermented herring, not rotting prawns, not rubbish: something thick and heavy and acrid, with a hint of ammonia.
‘Hey,’ I whispered to the Dane. ‘Can you smell that? Do you know what it is?’
He didn’t answer.
It was light outside the shack: the rectangle around the door was dazzlingly bright and clear. I wondered what time it was. It got light early on the equator, maybe six or seven o’clock. Sweden was two hours behind, so it would be four or five there. Annika was probably asleep. The children might be with her, in our big bed. We had supposedly agreed that beds were personal space, and that everyone should stick to their own, but I knew Annika relaxed the rules when I wasn’t there, especially with Kalle. Sometimes he had really bad nightmares, and she used to let him come into our bed so she could rock him back to sleep.
The lack of water was making my head pound. My mouth was full of dust. Both my hands had gone numb, and I rolled on to my stomach to try to get some feeling back into them. They had tied them with rope this time, perhaps because they’d run out of cable ties.
In the middle of the night the tall man had come into the shack, shone a torch in my face, dragged me up into a sitting position and yelled, ‘
Soma
,
soma!
’ Then he had given me a piece of paper with the words ‘Where did Annika live when you met her?’
‘What?’ I said, my heart hammering. The torch was dazzling me and all I could see were spots of light. How could he know about Annika? Was this some sort of trick? What did he want?
I turned towards the Dane, but I couldn’t see him through all the spots of light dancing in my eyes.
‘
Andika
,’ the tall man shouted. ‘
Andika jibu
.’
He leaned forward with a large knife in his hand, and my vision went dark. He didn’t stab me, just cut the cable tie binding my wrists, then tossed a pencil into my lap.
‘
Andika jibu
,’ he repeated, holding out the piece of paper.
Did he want me to write the answer?
My hands wouldn’t do as I wanted, I tried to grasp the pencil but kept dropping it. The tall man was barking above my head, ‘
Haraka, haraka!
’ and I managed to write the answer shakily. Then the guard tied my hands again, turned off the torch and vanished into a darkness that was denser than ever.
‘What was that about?’ I whispered to the Dane, but he didn’t answer.
I was exhausted, and fell asleep almost instantly.
Now, in the morning light, the mystery remained.
How could they know about Annika? I hadn’t mentioned her to anyone, not the guards or any of the other hostages. How could they know? My mobile had been switched off when they took it from me, and I hadn’t given them my PIN so they couldn’t have got anything from there. My wallet?
I heard the air go out of my lungs. Of course. I had pictures of her and the children, with names and dates on the back.
But why did they want to know where she was living when we first met? What a ridiculous question to ask. What could they do with that information? It was utterly irrelevant, something hardly anyone knew …
I gasped.
They’d spoken to her.
Oh, God, they’d spoken to her and she wanted to check I was still alive, that they really were holding me captive. That had to be it! A wave of relief washed over me and I laughed out loud.
But how had they got hold of her phone number? All our numbers were ex-directory, apart from my mobile, and obviously they couldn’t have reached her on that.
I peered out at the light filtering through a gap under one of the sheets of tin that formed the walls. My field of vision was at the same level as a small spider. We stared at each other for a minute or so in the gloom, the spider and I, before it scuttled to my face and climbed up it, as if it were a small rock. I shut my eyes and felt its tiny feet scrambling over my eyelids. Once it had passed my ear and vanished into my hair I could no longer feel it. I didn’t think it was poisonous, but just to be on the safe side I shook my head fairly vigorously to make it fall off.
Then I lay still and listened towards the light. I could hear the guards moving around out there, one saying something to the other. The smell in there really was terrible.
‘Hey,’ I whispered to the Dane, shuffling into a sitting position. ‘Where’s that stink coming from?’
From my new position I could see the Dane properly, Per. He was lying on his back and staring up at the roof with eyes that had a greyish look to them. His face was grey, his whole body was grey. His grey lips were wide open, as if he were shouting up at the roof. Something was crawling inside his mouth, something was moving in there, and a cry rose up to the roof and out through the cracks round the door and right across the
manyatta
and off towards the horizon, but it wasn’t the Dane shouting, it wasn’t Per, it was me, screaming. I screamed and screamed until the tin door was removed and the light fell in on the body, like an explosion, and I saw all the ants.
* * *
Annika was looking at her face in the bathroom mirror, running her fingers along the dark rings under her eyes. That was where loneliness settled, the absence of the children, her inability to work, her unfaithful husband …
She listened to the sounds of the building: Lindström, her neighbour, running a tap on the other side of the wall, the hiss of the bathroom extractor fan, the rattle of the lift. The sounds weren’t hers any more: her home had been occupied by kidnappers and civil servants.
Mind you, it wasn’t much of a home – at least, not according to Thomas. He thought the flat was too small and difficult to furnish nicely, which was true after he had moved in and demanded furniture that didn’t come from Ikea. He hated the bathroom most of all, the plastic floor, the shower curtain, the cheap little basin. In Vaxholm he and Eleonor had had a spa complete with sauna and Jacuzzi. She ran her hand down the bathroom mirror, as if she were apologizing.
It wasn’t the apartment’s fault, and it wasn’t hers.
It was Thomas who had put himself on that plane, in that Toyota. It had been his decision, but she had been dragged into paying part of the cost.
She had an ice-cold shower.
She got dressed, made the bed and had breakfast.
By the time Halenius rang the doorbell she had cleared up in the kitchen. His hair was wet, as if he’d just got out of the shower as well, and he was wearing the same jeans as yesterday, but with a pale blue shirt, freshly ironed.
I wonder if he does his own ironing, or if his girlfriend does it, she thought, as he hung up his coat.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I won’t question your methods or your judgement again. I’d be completely lost without you. Thank you for everything you’re doing. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. Honestly. If you want Hans and Hans here as well, that’s fine. It really is.’
She fell silent. When she’d practised it in her head, she’d thought her speech sounded humble and poetic and vulnerable, but everything had tumbled out in a rush and in the wrong order.
She bit her lower lip, but he was smiling.
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I’m easily bribed with coffee and cake.’
She smiled back, surprised by how relieved she was. ‘I’ve been feeling like a right arsehole since you left,’ she said, hurrying into the kitchen to fill the kettle. He took it without milk, didn’t he?
‘The families of the Romanian and the Spaniard have received proof of life,’ he said. ‘They have received video films, emailed directly to them.’
He said it in a neutral voice, but Annika felt her muscles tense. ‘I haven’t checked my email today,’ she said.
‘I’ve checked for you,’ Halenius said. ‘You haven’t received anything.’
She didn’t bother asking how he had managed to do that.
‘And a French passenger plane crashed in the Atlantic this morning,’ Halenius said. ‘No Swedes on board.’
‘A terrorist attack?’ Annika asked.
‘Bad weather,’ Halenius said, disappearing into the bedroom. She heard him switch on the computer and fiddle with the mobile phone.
She leaned back against the draining board for a minute to let the information sink in.
Proof of Life
. Wasn’t there a film with that title, starring Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe? Hadn’t Meg and Russell got together while they were making it? And then she’d divorced Dennis Quaid?
She turned the oven on, 175 degrees, melted a large lump of butter in the microwave, took out a bowl and cracked some eggs, then added sugar, vanilla sugar, a pinch of salt, syrup, cocoa, the melted butter and a large scoop of flour.
So the Spaniard and the Romanian were alive. I wonder what the Frenchman did wrong.
She greased the tin, the one with the loose base, then poured in the mixture and put it into the oven. She waited fifteen minutes for it to bake, then got some vanilla ice-cream out of the freezer, heated some blackberries, and went into the bedroom (Kidnap Control), with coffee, cake, ice-cream and blackberries. ‘I took you at your word and made a sticky toffee cake.’
Halenius gave her a look of total bemusement. He was obviously immersed in something far removed from her baking exploits.
All of a sudden she felt ridiculous. There was nowhere to put the tray – the desk was covered with recording equipment, computer accessories and notes, and there was still a great heap of clothes on the other chair (why did she never tidy up after herself?). She felt herself starting to blush.
‘Let’s have it out there,’ Halenius said, standing up.
She turned away gratefully, went into the living room and put the tray on the coffee-table, then curled up in the corner of the sofa with the fake White House mug and let her hair fall in front of her face.