Annika looked down at her coffee cup, and Frida stretched her back.
‘He’s already dictated the make of car, but if we’re unlucky he might demand other ways of recognizing it or us – specific clothes, or stickers in the windows.’
Annika looked across the restaurant. Above the bar there were stacks of leather cases. They seemed to be aiming for the ambience of an old train. She remembered something Halenius had said – was it yesterday or last year? ‘If the kidnappers say they want your head shaved, you just get your razor out.’
Would she shave off her hair to get Thomas back? Would she sacrifice her left hand? Would she have sex with the negotiator?
Frida was toying with her gold bracelet. ‘You know what the Somali pirates use the ransom money for?’ she said to Halenius.
‘If they don’t drown with their share of the loot, you mean?’
‘They provide for entire villages, whole regions of the country,’ Frida said.
‘Well,’ Halenius said, ‘not all of them.’
‘More than you think. They’re keeping the economy going along the entire coastal area.’
Annika sat up straighter and Halenius finished his coffee. ‘True,’ he said. ‘Prices have more than doubled since the pirates started their kidnapping racket. Everything from land to men’s shoes, and it’s created a whole load of social problems on top of everything else the population has to deal with, such as famine, civil war …’
Frida waved towards the coast. ‘Oil tankers worth hundreds of millions of dollars float past the coast of Somalia every day, and starving people can do nothing but stand on the beach and watch them.’
‘That doesn’t give them the right to kidnap people and take hostages,’ Halenius said.
Annika put her cup down, and noticed her hand was shaking. ‘I understand the Robin Hood thinking,’ she said, ‘but my husband isn’t an oil tanker, he’s just being tortured. Do you defend that as well?’
Frida took off her sunglasses. Her eyes were pale, almost grey. ‘How come,’ she said, ‘that violence is so much worse when it starts to affect white people?’ She said it in a calm, neutral voice, without a trace of emotion.
Annika thought about Rwanda and had no answer.
‘You’re so particular about your employment laws and trade-union agreements and wage negotiations in the developed world, but only in so far as they affect you. You don’t care about the working conditions of those in the textile factories in Asia who stitch your clothes, or the oil workers in Sudan who make sure you can drive your cars. You always talk about democracy and human rights, but you’re referring to your own comforts.’
She put her sunglasses back on and smiled very briefly. ‘Don’t take it the wrong way,’ she said to Annika. ‘I just want to turn the argument round. Not everything in the world is always black and white.’
She looked at the time. ‘If you’ve finished, we should go to the bank. Shall we get the case now or when we come back?’
Halenius turned to Annika and waited until she had put her bag over her shoulder. ‘This was where Thomas was staying during the conference,’ he said. ‘They’ve packed his things and cleared his room, but they know you’re coming and—’
She stopped abruptly. ‘His things are here?’
Suddenly the smell of his aftershave filled the Traveller’s Restaurant.
‘We can ask them to send the case home to Agnegatan if you’d rather not take it with you,’ Halenius said.
She was standing in the middle of the floor, unable to move. His things didn’t matter, his razor and ties and jackets. ‘I’ll take it with me,’ she heard herself say, she didn’t know why.
Frida glided across the marble floor towards the concierge, who disappeared into some inner room and returned with Thomas’s aluminium Rimowa case. Annika signed a receipt, then stood in Reception holding the bulky suitcase. She remembered him packing it. She had noted that he was taking his pink shirt with him. It wasn’t there now, she knew. He was wearing it, and the left sleeve was dark with blood.
She trailed after Frida and Halenius, pulling the case behind her, towards the lifts and the garage.
It was only half a block from the Hilton and the large branch of the Kenya Commercial Bank on Moi Avenue. Frida drove out of the hotel’s garage and straight into the bank’s.
‘This shouldn’t take too long,’ she said. ‘I warned them I was coming. The plastic, duct tape and bags you wanted are all in the boot.’
Halenius nodded. Frida jumped out of the car, gave a security guard a little wave as she went past and vanished into a lift.
The silence was thick. The yellow lighting of the garage was casting brown shadows inside the car. Halenius was sitting with his head turned away, staring out of the side window; she could see his spiky hair silhouetted in the semi-darkness.
‘The other night—’ she began.
‘We can talk about that later.’
She gasped as if she’d been slapped, and her cheeks burned red.
Suddenly the Rimowa case in the boot seemed to fill the whole car.
‘Frida,’ Annika said, with a dry mouth, ‘she’s not like I expected.’
Halenius glanced at her in the rear-view mirror. ‘She’s unusual,’ he said. ‘There was no need for her to get an education or a job but that was what she chose to do.’
‘Purple hair,’ Annika said.
‘She does a brilliant job for the UNHCR, the United Nations’ refugee agency. She’s not afraid to get her hands dirty.’
Am I supposed to cheer? Annika thought, but said nothing.
Frida came back with two security guards, each carrying a box. She opened the door where Annika was sitting. The boxes of money (her money) were loaded on to the seats and the security guards went back to the lifts. Two of their colleagues, one by the lift and one by the exit, remained, watching them.
‘What do we do now?’ Frida said.
‘Can we trust them?’ Halenius asked, nodding towards the guards.
The Nigerian woman tugged nervously at her hair. ‘I don’t think it’s a very good idea to repack the money now, not in the middle of a garage.’
‘Can we go back to yours?’ Halenius asked.
‘To Muthaiga? It would take hours to drive there through this traffic.’
His forehead was wet with sweat, in spite of the damp cool of the garage. ‘Well, we can’t do it out on the street.’
‘Shall we get a room at the Hilton?’
Halenius looked at his watch. ‘He’s going to call in fifteen minutes, and we need to be ready to roll then.’
Annika got out of the car and opened the rear door. She grabbed the plastic, the bags, the duct tape and two large pairs of scissors. ‘The contents of one box in each bag,’ she said, taking a pair of scissors.
Halenius clenched his jaw and pulled out the first box of money. Annika stared at it: she’d never seen notes packed like that except in films.
Her house in Vinterviksgatan: there it was, packed into bundles of notes, five thousand dollars in each one.
Halenius put the box on the floor and opened one of the newly bought bags. It still had the price-tag on it, 3,900 shillings. It was a sports bag, black, with a red logo on one side, about half a metre long and thirty centimetres in width and height.
Annika tore her eyes away from the money and rolled the plastic out on the floor, it was two metres long, thick and unyielding, the sort you use to damp-proof buildings. With the scissors in her hand, she measured out a long strip by eye as Halenius began to unload the money.
‘That’s going to be too big,’ he said, nodding at the plastic.
‘I’ll cut the end off,’ she said.
Halenius passed the bundles of notes to her, grey-green bricks with straps round their middles, tightly packed, nine at a time.
‘One hundred and ten bundles in each bag,’ Halenius said.
‘I know,’ Annika said. She piled the bundles on top of each other, over and over, until the stack was forty-five centimetres long, twenty across and about thirty high. She wrapped the plastic round it, long sides first, tore off a piece of duct tape with her teeth and fastened it along the top, then folded the ends in the way she wrapped the children’s Christmas presents.
It was 1 December, and in three and a half weeks it would be Christmas. Would she be home then? Would Thomas?
‘Can you help me with the tape?’ she asked Halenius, and he put the second box of money down, picked up the duct tape, then began to wrap it round the whole parcel. It ended up being surprisingly heavy and they worked together to get it into the sports bag. There was only just room for it.
Annika gazed at the bag. ‘What does Kenyan law have to say about bringing large amounts of cash into the country?’ she said.
Frida and Halenius looked up at her.
‘Those Brits who were caught this summer with a load of money in Somalia,’ Annika said, ‘they got ten years in prison. Does the same rule apply here?’
‘Fifteen years, actually,’ Frida said. ‘And they weren’t just British. Two of them were Kenyans.’
‘So could that happen here?’ Annika asked.
Frida and Halenius exchanged a glance and Annika felt the hair on her neck stand up. She couldn’t get stuck here, not her as well, not for fifteen years, in a Kenyan prison: what would happen to the children? Why hadn’t she left any instructions about what she wanted to happen if she didn’t get back? Who would look after them? Not Doris: she was far too precious about her own lifestyle, and her mum couldn’t afford to. Anne Snapphane? Hardly.
With some difficulty Frida picked up the packed bag and put it on the floor by the seat where Annika had been sitting. The logo glowed in the gloom.
Annika unrolled another length of plastic and started to cut it.
Frida looked up at the concrete roof. ‘Is there any reception down here?’ she asked.
Halenius pulled out his mobile phone and swore through his teeth. ‘I’ve got to get up to street level,’ he said, and ran towards the exit.
Frida opened the driver’s door and got in. She clearly had no intention of packing any money.
Annika finished cutting the second length of builders’ plastic, trimmed the side, laid it out on the floor and began to shift the bundles. She filled her arms with green bricks of cash and tipped them on to the plastic, one of the bands came loose and the notes spilled out across the concrete. The guard by the exit was shuffling nervously. How much had he seen? With her fingers shaking, she packed the bundles in the same way as before, layer upon layer, nine bundles each time. Then she sealed the plastic. Finally she repeated what Halenius had done, and wrapped the whole package in several loops of tape. She shifted the parcel into the second bag, pulled the sides up and fastened the zip. It was heavy and she had to use both hands to lift it into the car.
The best solution would probably be for the children to stay with Sophia Grenborg.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Halenius running back from the exit with his mobile in his hand.
‘Langata Cemetery,’ he said. ‘We have to leave the money in Langata Cemetery, the entrance from Kungu Karumba Road.’
They tore out of the garage with the bags of money bouncing on the floor next to Annika’s feet.
‘And he was okay with me driving?’ Frida asked, forcing her way out into the almost static traffic.
‘He didn’t have much choice. I said we couldn’t do it ourselves, that we couldn’t find the way.’
‘Did you tell him my name?’
‘First name, not surname.’
Frida let out a small yelp. ‘For God’s sake, Jimmy, you weren’t supposed to tell him my name! You promised!’
Halenius looked out of the window – Annika saw that his lips had turned white.
‘The kidnapper went mad. He refused to give us proof of life.’
Annika stared at the back of his head. ‘But you said … we wouldn’t pay unless …’
‘I know.’
Frida muttered something in a strange language as she forced her way aggressively through the sluggish traffic. She braked at an almost rusted-through stop sign, then turned into Ngong Road. Electricity cables hung across the street like spiders’ webs, and there were no white lines, just dust and tarmac.
Annika shut her eyes against the faces streaming past. What would she do if Thomas was dead?
And what would she do if he survived?
If he came back, mutilated and traumatized?
They had no money to buy a new apartment, and he hated her rented flat. Would he be able to go back to work? Were there prosthetic hands that worked like real ones?
What would it feel like to make love to him?
She took a deep breath. ‘Where do I have to leave the money?’ she asked.
‘We’re going to get the final instructions once we’re there,’ Halenius said, through gritted teeth.
It started to rain again. Frida switched on the windscreen-wipers. One squeaked. Langata Road swept, like a frayed cord, up slopes and down hillsides. Corrugated metal bus-stops, concrete walls topped with barbed wire. Trees whose trunks split at ground level, then grew up like roofs against the sky. There was a smell of exhaust fumes and brown coal.
Frida turned off to the right and the car lurched and shook. She slowed to a halt.
‘Is this it?’ Halenius asked. Annika followed his gaze to a rusting sign:
City Council of Nairobi
Area Councillor Ward manager
Mugumoini Ward
Welcome
The rain was falling silently on the windscreen. Frida pushed her sunglasses up into her hair and switched off the engine. They were parked next to a fence made of chicken-mesh, topped with barbed wire. There were several cars nearby, indistinguishable vehicles in various states of decay, but there was also a large, shiny black Mercedes.
‘What happens now?’ Annika asked.
‘We wait,’ Halenius said.
‘Does he know we’re here?’ she asked.
‘He’s bound to,’ Halenius said.
Annika swung round, as if the kidnappers’ observer was hiding behind her back. Two men went past the rear of the car, a woman with a child, a boy on a bike. Which one, which one, which one? The oxygen in the car ran out and she put her hand instinctively to her neck. ‘Can I get out?’
‘No.’
She sat there with her hand on the door handle.
Seconds ticked past. Minutes. No one said anything.