It felt so odd to have him in her home, walking about in her kitchen and bathroom while she was out meeting people for coffee, sitting in her bedroom while she was away at the newsroom. He radiated warmth, like a paraffin heater.
‘I don’t know what Schyman paid the King’s mistress when she spilled the beans in the paper the other year,’ she said, getting two plates out of the top cupboard without looking at him, ‘but it must have been something like the same amount.’
Halenius was leaning against the doorframe, and she could feel his eyes following her as she laid the table. ‘Do you think so?’ he said. ‘That the paper paid for the interview?’
She stopped and looked at him. ‘I don’t know for sure,’ she said. ‘I was in Washington at the time. But why else would she have agreed to do it?’
‘For the attention?’ Halenius suggested.
‘If she was after a bit of time in the limelight she could have done the rounds of the chat shows and gossip magazines, rather than just the
Evening Post
. She’s a smart woman. Tandoori chicken or lamb korma?’
He leaned over the aluminium trays. ‘Which is which?’
She wasn’t sure she’d be able to eat, but she sat down anyway and spooned some of the chicken on to her plate. He sat opposite her and their knees collided under the table.
‘You were right,’ he said. ‘Thomas volunteered to go on the reconnaissance trip up to Liboi. How did you know?’
She chewed for a few moments. The chicken seemed to be swelling in her mouth. ‘Thomas doesn’t really like roughing it. He likes vintage wine and restaurants that serve complicated food. There are three reasons why he’d go on a trip like that: prestige, compulsion, or a woman.’
Halenius had already dismissed the idea of it being prestigious when they’d met at the department, and now compulsion was ticked off as well. For some reason the realization seemed to embarrass him.
‘What?’ she said, taking a bite of naan bread.
He shook his head without replying.
She put the bread down. ‘It’s not your fault,’ she said. ‘Thomas isn’t monogamous. I think he tries, but it doesn’t work.’
‘Does it have to be anyone’s fault?’ he said, with a faint smile.
Suddenly she felt very tired. She popped the last piece of chicken into her mouth, then stood up. ‘I think I’ll go and have a lie-down,’ she said.
She slept for half an hour on Kalle’s bed. When she woke it was dark outside, a grey, moonless darkness with no stars. Her head felt leaden. Halenius was talking quietly on his mobile in the bedroom. She crept into the bathroom in just her T-shirt and pants, and swallowed two headache pills, peed, brushed her teeth, then sat on the toilet for a while letting herself wake up properly. When she went out into the hall again Halenius was standing there with his hair on end and a mug of coffee.
‘Come with me,’ he said simply, and went into the bedroom. ‘The kidnappers have posted a new video online.’
‘Is it Thomas?’
‘No. The man in the turban.’
She dashed into the children’s room, pulled on her jeans and cardigan, then followed him on bare feet. He was sitting at his computer with a frozen film clip on the screen.
‘News of the Frenchman is out,’ Halenius said. ‘They seem to have been waiting for the announcement because this video was posted just a couple of minutes after the AFP newsflash.’
Annika leaned over his shoulder. The picture showed the man in the turban and military outfit from the previous film. Even the dark red background and the rest of the setting seemed to be the same. ‘Have they used the same server as well?’ Annika asked.
The under-secretary of state scratched his head. ‘You’re not really asking the right person, seeing as I have trouble logging into my own computer … Apparently there are two or three internet providers in Somalia. The largest is called Telcom, but it’s not their servers that are being used, it’s one of the smaller companies. Do you want to see it?’
‘Can you understand what he’s saying?’
‘This is the BBC’s link and they’ve subtitled it. Pull up a chair.’
She stretched, and realized that her hair had fallen across his shoulder. She quickly grabbed the clothes from the chair by the window and threw them on to the bed, then moved the chair to the desk, where she positioned it at a decent distance from Halenius. He clicked the screen and the image shook into action. Annika had to crane her neck to see, and Halenius moved back so she could get a bit closer. The man in the turban was staring straight into the camera. His eyes were very small. He presented his message in the same language as last time, with the same slow, deliberate pronunciation. The content was much the same, although his demands had escalated.
‘The evil and ignorance of the West will not go unpunished. The hour of vengeance is at hand. Fiqh Jihad has killed the French dog on account of his sins. But there is still a chance for absolution. Our demands are simple. Open the borders to Europe. Abolish Frontex. Distribute the Earth’s resources fairly. Remove protective customs tariffs.
‘More will meet the same fate as the Frenchman if the world doesn’t listen. Freedom for Africa! Allah is great!’
The image trembled slightly, as if someone had had to press hard to switch off the video-camera. The screen faded to black. Halenius clicked to close the Explorer window. ‘This one’s thirty-eight seconds long as well,’ he said.
‘Does that matter?’ Annika said.
‘I don’t know,’ Halenius said.
They sat in silence, staring at the dark monitor.
‘So, what does this mean?’ Annika said.
‘We can draw a few conclusions from it,’ the under-secretary of state said. ‘The group’s claiming responsibility for the Frenchman’s death, that goes without saying, but the justification, that he had sinned, is harder to understand.’
‘Had he been pushing hard for Frontex in the EU?’
Halenius shook his head. ‘Since he was a newcomer to the issue. The Nairobi conference was the first time he’d been involved. And he doesn’t seem to have demonstrated any racist or extreme nationalist views privately either. His wife was born in Algeria.’
Annika leaned closer to the computer. ‘Play it again,’ she said.
Halenius clicked the wrong thing a few times, but eventually the video was running again. Annika looked at the man’s eyes while he was talking. He glanced to the left a few times, as if to check a written script.
‘He’s educated,’ Annika said. ‘I mean, he can read.’
The image shuddered and faded out.
‘And there are at least two of them. Turban Man and someone standing behind or next to the camera, who switches it off. Is it possible to check with the internet provider who’s been using that server?’
‘The legal position is unclear,’ Halenius said. ‘Internet providers aren’t allowed to give out information about their users to anyone. Certainly a series of crimes has been committed in this instance, but the demand to reveal information has to come from some official body, and there aren’t any in Somalia.’
‘But surely the British and Americans don’t let that sort of thing bother them,’ Annika said.
‘True. The Yanks got it into their heads that bin Laden was using Somali servers for financial transactions around the year 2000, so they simply shut off all internet traffic in the entire country. It was down for months.’
Annika bit her lip. ‘He talks about “dogs” and “absolution”. That’s fairly high-flown stuff, isn’t it? Symbolic, maybe. Maybe the Frenchman’s sins symbolize something else. The sins of France, or the whole of Europe?’
‘There’s another aspect of the message, which is more important,’ Halenius said.
Annika looked out of the window. Yes, she’d realized that. ‘He’s threatening to kill the rest of the hostages if their demands aren’t met.’
Halenius nodded.
Annika stood up. ‘I’ll go and put my mobiles on silent.’
The first call to her work mobile appeared four minutes later. She let it go to voicemail. It was from the main Swedish news agency, TT: they wanted her reaction to the latest developments in the East African hostage crisis.
Instead of waiting for the rest of the media onslaught, she put the phones in the hall and shut herself into the children’s room with her laptop. She had the best-paid freelance article of her life to write: ‘How it felt when my husband was kidnapped’. She had no ambition to be politically correct. Truthful, certainly. Detailed and thorough, too, but only to the extent that she saw fit. She decided to write in the present tense, a device that was forbidden in tabloid journalism but, in this context, might work. If nothing else, it would break the usual structure. She wrote without holding back, letting the words pour out without stopping because there was no way of knowing if it would ever be read. There was no point in focusing on any particular aspect of the story for the time being so she recorded everything she’d been bottling up since Thursday, dividing it into days, hours, even minutes.
She wrote for several hours, until she started to feel hungry.
Then she set up the video camera on a tripod, aimed it at Ellen’s bed, pressed record, crept in among the stuffed toys and did a test, one, two, one, two. She went back to the camera and checked the result: the camera was aimed too low, pointing at her stomach. She tilted it up slightly, but overdid it. After a couple more attempts she was in the middle of the picture, just like the man in the turban, and spoke into the camera.
‘It’s Saturday, the twenty-sixth of November,’ she said to the black lens. It stared back at her, like the eye of a Cyclops, an extra-terrestrial or some ancient beast, ice-cold and watchful.
‘My name is Annika Bengtzon. My husband has been kidnapped. His name is Thomas. We have two children. He disappeared outside Liboi, in north-eastern Kenya, four days ago …’ She realized she was crying. She shut her eyes to the blank lens and let the tears fall. ‘I’ve just found out that the hostages are going to be executed unless the kidnappers’ demands are met,’ she whispered.
She sat there for a while, letting the camera run, then wiped her tears with the back of her hand. Her mascara was stinging her eyes.
‘Opening Europe up to the developing world,’ she went on, ‘relinquishing our privileges and doing something about injustice: these are unreasonable demands. Everyone can understand that. The governments of Europe aren’t going to change their bunker mentality just because a few low-ranking civil servants are threatened with execution.’
Her nose was blocked now, and she was breathing through her mouth.
‘Maybe it’s our turn to pay,’ she said, turning to the window. ‘Those of us in the old, free world, those of us on the right side of the wall. Why should we get everything for free?’
She looked at the lens, slightly bewildered. This was hardly what Schyman wanted. But on the other hand she hadn’t been given any instructions. In which case it was up to her to work things out for herself, wasn’t it?
She got up from the bed and switched off the camera, probably causing the same sort of shaking as she’d noticed in Turban Man’s film.
In the hall the doorbell rang.
She looked at her watch. It was hardly surprising that she was hungry.
Halenius cracked open the door to the children’s room. ‘Are you expecting anyone?’
Annika brushed the hair from her face. ‘At half-past eight on a Saturday evening? Maybe they’re here for my private disco. Have we had a video yet?’
‘Negative. I’ll go and hide,’ Halenius said, then vanished into the bedroom.
Annika took a deep breath. A process of elimination was telling her that someone from the rival evening paper was in the stairwell. They’d had several hours to put together an article based on the fact that hostages in East Africa were being executed. Now all they needed was a picture of the kidnapped Swede’s distraught wife. The moment she opened the door a flashbulb would go off in her face. No matter how much she argued about the right to privacy and press ethics, she would find herself quoted alongside a big portrait of herself in the following day’s paper. Assuming it was actually their rivals. And assuming she opened the door.
Why hadn’t she got round to fitting a peephole?
She went out into the hall and put her ear to the wooden door. She could hear nothing.
The doorbell rang again.
‘Annika?’ she heard Bosse say.
He knocked on the door, right where her ear was, and she took a step back.
‘Annika? I saw your lights on. We only want a brief comment. Can’t you open the door?’
How could he know which windows belonged to her flat? Bosse’s desire to talk to her seemed to have got out of hand.
‘Annika? I know you’re in there.’
He pressed the doorbell, and kept it pressed for a long, long time. The sound shredded the air and filled the whole flat. Annika stayed where she was, and forced herself to remain calm. They wanted her to yank the door open and tell them to stop. They wanted her upset and wide-eyed and, in photographic terms, inconsolable.
Halenius put his head into the hall. ‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ he mimed.
Annika merely shook her head.
‘What are you playing at?’ a bass voice shouted from the stairwell.
It was Lindström, her next-door neighbour. He was a retired police superintendent, and not to be trifled with.
The ringing stopped at once.
Annika put her ear to the door again.
‘We’re from the media,’ Bosse said quietly.
‘What you’re doing counts as disorderly conduct under chapter sixteen, section sixteen of the Penal Code. Get out of here before I have you arrested.’
She heard shoes scraping on a gritty floor, the lift door opening and closing, then the whining of cables. Lindström’s door closed.
She breathed out and looked up at Halenius. ‘Dinner?’ she asked, heading into the kitchen.
* * *
Anders Schyman had been standing in the doorway, on his way home, when the news about the dead Frenchman was confirmed and the new video from the kidnappers was made public. The temperature in the newsroom immediately hit the roof and he took off his jacket again. It didn’t matter. His wife was away on a spa break for the weekend with her girlfriends, and all that was waiting for him at home was a frozen fish pie and Henrik Berggren’s biography of Palme,
A Wonderful Time Ahead
. It was a brilliant depiction of twentieth-century Sweden as seen through the story of the Palme family, and Olof in particular, but it would still be there tomorrow.