She turned towards the photographer, who was loitering somewhere behind the flash. ‘Did I look sufficiently upset?’ she asked.
‘Erm,’ the photographer said, ‘can I try again?’
She looked at Bosse, and felt strangely cold inside. ‘I don’t want to comment on anything at all,’ she said. ‘I want you and your paper to leave me alone. Freedom of speech means that I have the right to say what I think, but also the right not to. Okay?’
She turned to go into the flat, and the flash went off behind her back.
‘Journalists have a duty to investigate,’ Bosse snapped.
She stopped, looked over her shoulder, and was rewarded with another flash. ‘Journalists are the only people who can get away with stalking and harassing others. Aren’t you going film me with a hidden camera as well? It’s against the law for the police and everyone else, but it’s okay if you do it.’
He blinked in surprise. I’ve just given him an idea, she thought. Why can’t I ever keep my mouth shut? She went in and shut the door behind her.
Halenius came out into the hall. His face was white.
‘What?’ Annika said, leaning against the wall. ‘
What?
’
‘The British woman,’ he said. ‘Catherine Wilson. She’s been found dead, outside a refugee camp in Dadaab.’
Her heart was pounding. Was this what Bosse had wanted her to comment on?
‘How?’
Halenius hid his face in his hands, then let them fall to his sides.
‘She’d been split open. From the inside.’
* * *
There were far more noises at night than during the day. They echoed inside the tin walls, rattling and scratching, howling and gnawing. The guards’ fire crackled like a waterfall, the folds in their clothes squeaked, their footsteps shook the earth. I tried desperately to find a corner to hide, where the noises couldn’t reach me. They’d tied my hands and feet again, but I could shuffle round, snaking and crawling. The noises hunted me, stalked me, and I couldn’t get away from them. In the end I found myself lying exhausted on the dark patch where the Dane had died. The stench swept around me, but there was slightly less noise there – it was further from the door, from the huts in the
manyatta
, and from the blood that was instantly sucked up by the earth and turned brown and hard.
The ground was so dry that it felt like stone, but it wasn’t stone, because it was alive: it devoured everything that fell on it, blood and piss and vomit, storing it and turning it to poison and bile. They tried to force me to eat but I threw the food on to the ground. They won’t force me to do anything else. I gave the food and water back to the earth. I’m never going to touch their shit again. Her eyes stalked me, glassy with pain, but still scornful and judging. They could see me in every corner.
And the noises were so loud, I couldn’t escape.
Annika was standing in the hall when the landline rang. She froze mid-step and listened in the direction of the bedroom.
‘Aren’t we going, Mummy?’
She could feel the children’s restlessness at the delay. They were starting to get sweaty in their outdoor clothes. Why was he waiting so long before answering?
The second ring.
‘Yes, of course, in a moment …’
Was this a carefully worked-out strategy among kidnap negotiators: wait for the third ring before answering? Did that make the ransom smaller, the process faster?
‘We’ve got swimming today, Mummy.’
Shit. Swimming.
There it was, the third ring.
‘Of course you do,’ she said, rushing back to the children’s room and pulling the clothes out of Ellen’s wardrobe. She found her swimsuit among the socks.
The fourth ring. Halenius answered.
She had slept badly, an experience she wasn’t used to. She’d woken up several times and gone in to see the children, had sat in the darkness listening to them breathing, then by the window in the living room, looking for stars. There weren’t any. Tiredness made her feel all at sea, off balance.
‘Can I use this bag, Mummy?’
Her daughter had found a carrier from the Co-op. She was standing in front of her, all eager, a little clock-watcher who hated being late. Kalle was kicking at the lift door out in the stairwell.
‘Of course,’ Annika said, pushing the swimsuit and a towel from the bathroom into the bag.
Halenius was talking quietly in English on the phone. She shut the door on his words and turned her face towards the light.
The weather was as heavy and grey as stone. The snow on the pavements had compacted to ice, but some of the shopkeepers along Hantverkargatan had taken it upon themselves to cut away the ice, and some had even sanded the pavement, which made the walk slightly less dangerous.
‘We’ve got geography today,’ Kalle said. ‘Did you know that Stockholm is fifty-nine degrees north and eighteen degrees east?’
‘That’s right,’ Annika said. ‘The same latitude as Alaska. So why’s the climate better here?’
‘The Gulf Stream!’ the boy said, jumping with both feet into a patch of slush.
Liboi was at zero degrees latitude. And it was going to be thirty-eight degrees centigrade there today – Annika had looked it up online during her sleepless night.
She held tight to the children’s hands as they crossed the road. They were heading uphill, into the wind. When they reached the school gate she crouched and pulled the children to her. Kalle resisted, embarrassed, but she held him tight.
‘If anyone asks about Daddy, you don’t have to answer,’ she said. ‘If you want to say anything, then of course you can, but you don’t have to. Okay?’
Kalle wriggled free but Ellen gave her a hug. She craned her neck to keep them in sight as they squeezed into the school building with all the other children, then vanished into a forest of woolly hats and rucksacks.
She jogged back to Agnegatan. The lift was busy so she took the stairs and arrived breathless at the flat. Halenius was sitting at the desk in the bedroom with an earpiece in, and a distant look on his face. When she came into the room he clicked the screen, pulled out the earpiece and turned towards her. Panting, she sank on to the bed and studied his face.
‘They’ve agreed to lower the ransom demand,’ Halenius said. ‘That’s definitely a breakthrough.’
She closed her eyes. ‘Is he still alive?’
‘They didn’t give any proof of it.’
She let herself fall back on to the pillows and duvet. The ceiling was swaying above her, grey from the daylight outside. It was so nice just to lie down, with her legs dangling off the edge of the mattress, listening to the building breathe.
When had they last made love? It had been in that bed – their adventures in the shower, on the sofa and the kitchen table were a thing of the past now.
‘You ought to explore how to transfer a large sum of money to a bank in Nairobi,’ Halenius said. ‘And I think you should do it today.’
She raised her head slightly and gave him a questioning look.
‘The people negotiating on behalf of the German, Romanian and Spaniard all say they’re close to agreement. It’s going quickly, but not impossibly fast.’
Annika sat up again. ‘It usually takes between six and sixty days,’ she said.
‘The amounts in the other cases are all around a million dollars,’ he said. ‘We probably won’t get away with less.’
‘Do you think it’s the man in the video? The one who calls and does the negotiating?’
‘The Yanks have analysed the voices digitally. They say it’s the same man.’
‘What technique do they use to do that?’
Halenius raised his eyebrow. ‘You’re asking me?’
‘Why doesn’t he speak English in the videos?’
Halenius stood up and went over to the window recess, where he had set up a small laser printer. ‘The conversation was fairly short,’ he said. ‘Nine and a half minutes. I’ve translated it and printed it out. Do you want to read it?’
He offered her a printout, just two pages of A4. She shook her head. He put the sheets on the desk and sat down again.
Annika looked out across the treetops. ‘The British woman is dead,’ she said. ‘The Frenchman is dead. The Romanian, Spaniard and German are all negotiating, and we’re negotiating. Wasn’t there another, a Dane?’
‘The Danes are negotiating, but they haven’t got as far as us.’
He seemed stressed today, more tired than usual. He hadn’t spent many hours at home last night, and he was having to sleep alone now that his girlfriend was in South Africa. Maybe he had trouble sleeping when she wasn’t there. Maybe he rolled over to her side of the bed, immersing himself in her duvet, her pillows, her scent, the strands of her hair. Maybe they made love every night, or perhaps in the mornings.
‘How are you feeling?’ she asked.
He looked up at her, surprised. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’m fine. How about you?’
‘The banks are open,’ she said, and jumped off the bed. She went into the living room and packed the video-camera with the tripod.
She hadn’t made an appointment for personal financial advice, which caused the woman on Handelsbanken’s customer service desk to frown. Annika had to wait for a while as the woman went round to see if anyone would take pity on her, which shouldn’t have been that difficult as she was the only customer in the building. She ran her fingers over the video-camera and noted once again how carefully all the employees moved, the way their discreet gold jewellery shimmered, and how obvious any shortcomings seemed: creases on the back of a shirt, a ladder in a pair of tights. The man with the tired eyes, the one who had seen her last time, was nowhere in sight. Maybe her questions had been the straw that broke the camel’s back. Maybe he’d succumbed to a severe bout of nervous exhaustion as a result of her lack of enthusiasm.
Her legs were aching, and she stamped her feet to make them feel better.
The woman appeared again and waved her over, then cruised between the desks towards one corner where another tired-looking man in steel-rimmed glasses sat behind a fairly messy desk. He was slightly younger than his colleague from last Friday.
‘Pay no attention to this,’ Annika said, setting up the tripod next to the visitor’s chair and attaching the camera to the top of it, then pointing it at the astonished young banker and pressing ‘record’.
‘Er,’ the man said, ‘what’s this about?’
Annika sat down opposite him. ‘I want to make sure I don’t miss anything,’ she said. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’
‘No video or audio recording is permitted in here under any circumstances. Put it away. Okay?’
She sighed, took the camera off the tripod, then put it back in its bag.
‘I might need to send money to Nairobi,’ Annika said. ‘I’d like to find out how that would work.’
‘Nairobi? In Kenya?’
‘Is there another Nairobi?’
‘And what’s the reason for the transfer?’
Annika lowered her voice. ‘Either I close all my accounts here at Handelsbanken, or you answer my questions. Okay?’
The man took a deep breath, then tapped at his computer, his glasses flaring. ‘I’m obliged to ask,’ he said. ‘Depending on the amount, the Swedish tax office will have to be informed of the transfer. They need a code to explain what sort of payment you want to make – for instance, if you’re importing something. If no code is provided, the payment won’t go through. But with a code, the information is automatically sent to the tax office when the payment is processed.’
Suddenly she felt exhausted. ‘Just tell me how it works,’ she said.
‘You need the IBAN number and Swift address of the bank the money is being transferred to, as well as the account details, of course.’
‘The account? In a bank in Nairobi?’
‘Obviously you can choose to send the money to anyone you want, providing the codes are filled in properly. The money is sent as a foreign payment. That usually takes three days, and costs between a hundred and fifty and two hundred kronor. Express payments take a day, but cost more.’
‘How much can I send?’
He gave her a sarcastic smile. ‘That depends on the assets you have access to.’
She leaned across the desk and put her driving licence under the man’s nose. ‘I want to send the money in my online savings account to Nairobi, but I don’t have an account in a bank there. And in Nairobi I want access to the money at once, in American dollars, small denominations.’
The man tapped her ID number into his computer and blinked several times, presumably unprepared for that amount. Schyman’s money had been paid in during the early hours of the morning, meaning that the account now contained almost nine and a half million kronor. ‘And you want to send this to Kenya? The whole amount?’
‘How much would that be in dollars?’ she asked.
‘US dollars?’ He tapped at the keyboard.
‘One million, four hundred and ninety-four thousand, three hundred and fourteen dollars and eighty cents. At today’s exchange rate, six kronor and thirty-three öre to the dollar.’
Almost one and a half million dollars. Her head was spinning.
‘So, if I don’t have a bank account in Kenya, how do I get the money out there? Can you send it somewhere else, to one of those Western Union offices?’
The banker’s cheeks had turned red. ‘It isn’t possible to send money from Handelsbanken to Western Union in Kenya. If you’re going to send money to them, you’d have to use their system, but for amounts of this size that isn’t particularly efficient. You can send seventy-five thousand kronor at a time, a maximum of twice in one day.’
She was holding tight to the desk to stop herself falling. ‘So I need an account,’ she said. ‘With a bank in Nairobi.’
He looked at her blankly.
‘Could I take the money with me?’ she asked. ‘In a bag?’
‘Each dollar bill weighs one gram, regardless of denomination. So a million dollars in twenty-dollar notes would weigh fifty kilos.’
He’d worked that out in his head: impressive.
‘And you can’t take that much money out of the EU without informing Customs,’ the banker said. ‘You have to fill in a special EU form, giving the purpose of the transfer, whose money it is, who’s taking the money out of the EU, where the money comes from, what currency it is …’