Annika stepped into a hall with a dark-green patterned plastic mat, circa 1976, from the look of it. Thord Axelsson took her heavy jacket and hung it on a hanger below the hat-rack.
‘I’ve made some coffee,’ he said, walking ahead of her into the kitchen.
The pine table was set with woven mats and flowery cups and saucers, a birch-bark basket containing at least four different sorts of biscuit.
‘Oh, that looks good,’ Annika said politely as she settled onto a chair and put her bag down beside her.
‘Margit likes baking,’ Thord said, biting off the sentence and staring down into his cup. Then he took a deep breath through his nose, clenched his jaw and reached for the thermos he had already filled.
‘Milk and sugar?’
Annika shook her head, suddenly unable to speak.
What right did she have to march into other people’s tragedies?
She picked up her spoon and unconsciously clinked it against the porcelain cup.
‘Margit was a good person,’ Thord Axelsson said, looking out of the window. ‘She meant well, but she carried awful secrets. That’s why she died.’
He took two lumps of sugar from the bowl and dropped them into his cup with a plop. Then he folded his arms on the edge of the table and looked out at the street again.
‘I’ve been doing some thinking since yesterday,’ he said without looking at Annika. ‘I want to talk about what happened, but I don’t want to sully Margit’s memory.’
She nodded, still mute, and reached for the notepad in her bag. She glanced briefly at the clean window-panes and neatly wiped orange kitchen cupboards, suddenly aware that there was a smell of antiseptic cleaning fluid.
‘How did you meet, you and Margit?’
The man looked up at the ceiling and sat quite still for a few moments, then looked over at the stove.
‘She came up to me in the City Pub in Luleå. It was a Saturday night in the spring of seventy-five. I was there with some friends from college; she was standing next to us at the bar and heard me say that I worked in the air force.’
He seemed to lose himself in history for a moment, his eyes roaming over some inner landscape.
‘She spoke first,’ he said. ‘Interested, almost inquisitive.’
He looked into Annika’s eyes, giving her a small, embarrassed smile.
‘I was flattered,’ he said, ‘she was a good-looking girl. And smart. I liked her from the start.’
Annika smiled back. ‘Was she living in Luleå then?’
‘On Lövskatan. She was at teacher training college, the nursery course. She wanted to work with children, kept saying they were the future. Doing something creative was important to her even back then, both in her art and in her life . . .’
He put his hand in front of his mouth and looked out at the street again.
‘Margit was a serious person,’ he said. ‘Responsible, loyal. I was lucky.’
Silence spread through the kitchen, she could hear a clock tick. The cold was making the walls creak.
‘What was the secret she carried?’ Annika eventually asked.
He turned his gaze towards her.
‘The Beasts,’ he said, with sudden strength in his voice. ‘Margit was an active member of a number of groups and associations even as a teenager, one of Norrbotten’s best athletes in the early sixties. She joined the Communist Party at an early age.’
Athletics
, Annika thought, remembering the cutting from the
Norrland News
.
‘Did she know Karina Björnlund?’
‘They’re cousins,’ he said. ‘How did you know that?’
Annika started slightly, and looked down to hide it.
‘Karina Björnlund was an athlete, too,’ she said. ‘So they were close?’
‘Margit was two years older; she was a bit like a big sister to Karina. She was the one who got Karina started on athletics. But Margit gave up after that, of course.’
‘Why?’
‘She went into politics. And Karina followed her into that as well . . .’
Annika waited for the man to go on, but when nothing came she tried to help him along.
‘So what about the Beasts?’
‘They were a breakaway group,’ Thord Axelsson said, rubbing his forehead. ‘They saw themselves as an offshoot of the main organization, the Chinese Communist Party. They moved beyond conventional Maoism and went the whole hog, or at least that was how they saw it themselves.’
‘And they had codenames?’ Annika said.
He nodded and stirred his coffee.
‘Not real names but proper codenames, animal names. Margit’s was Barking Dog. She was really upset about that. The others got political names, but she got a personal one. The men in the group thought she asked too many questions, always debating and criticizing.’
Everything in the kitchen was very quiet. The cold held the house in a vice-like grip, the smell of disinfectant was suddenly very noticeable.
‘What did the Beasts do that was so bad?’ Annika asked.
Thord got up, went over to the sink and filled a glass with water, then held it without drinking.
‘She never got over it,’ he said. ‘It lay like a shadow over us all these years.’
He put the glass on the worktop and leaned against the dishwasher.
‘Margit only spoke about it once, but I remember every word.’
Thord Axelsson suddenly shrank into himself, and went on in a quiet, monotonous voice.
‘It was the middle of November. Not too cold, just a bit of snow on the ground. They got in through the back, from Lulviken, by the river. There’s nothing but summer cottages there, so there was no one around.’
He looked up at Annika with empty eyes, his arms hanging by his sides.
‘Margit had never been inside the base before, but one of the boys knew it well. They told her not to go near the hangars, so as not to wake the dogs, they were really vicious creatures.’
She was taking notes discreetly.
‘They ran across the heath for a kilometre or so. The boys waited in a clump of trees while she went closer. There was a plane on the tarmac outside the workshop. She took off the safety seal and set off a flare, and threw it into the container of spent fuel behind the plane.’
The air was heavy with antiseptic disinfectant, catching in Annika’s nose.
‘As she watched it burning she saw two conscripts approaching. She ran towards the south fence and they shouted after her. She threw herself behind the workshop. She only just made it before the explosion.’
Annika looked down at her notes.
It wasn’t Karina Björnlund. She had been wrong.
‘One of the conscripts went up like a torch. He just screamed and screamed until he finally collapsed.’
Thord Axelsson closed his eyes.
‘Margit had no memory of how she got out of the base. Afterwards they dissolved the group. They never met again.’
He walked back to the table, slumping onto his chair with his hands over his face, reliving something he had never experienced but which had coloured his whole life.
Annika tried to fit the pieces together in her head, but failed.
‘Why did the plane explode?’ she asked gently.
The man looked up and let his arms drop to the table.
‘Have you ever noticed that missile that hangs beneath a fighter-jet?’
She shook her head.
‘It looks like a moon-rocket designed by Disney. It isn’t actually a missile, but an extra tank of fuel. The skin is thin; the explosion in the fuel-container pierced a hole in it.’
‘But why was the plane sitting on the tarmac with a full tank?’
‘Fighters are always fully tanked when they’re in the hangars, it’s safer that way. The gases that build up in an empty tank are more dangerous than fuel. The lad . . . he was standing below the tank when the extra fuel ignited.’
The wooden walls of the house creaked and groaned. Despair hung in dark clouds between the kitchen cupboards and the pine lamps. She felt an intense desire to flee, to run away, home to the children, to kiss them and embrace their cosy chubbiness, home to Thomas, to love him with all of her body and all of her mind.
‘Who else was there?’ she asked.
Thord Axelsson’s face was completely grey. He seemed on the point of fainting.
‘The Yellow Dragon and the Black Panther,’ he said hoarsely.
‘The Dragon was the leader, Göran Nilsson from Sattajärvi,’ Annika said, and something deep, unfathomable, flickered across the man’s face. ‘Who was the other one?’
‘Don’t know,’ he said. ‘Karina was the Red Wolf, but I don’t know who the boys were in real life.’
‘How many of them were there?’
He rubbed his face. ‘I mentioned the Black Panther. The Lion of Freedom was another one, the White Tiger,
and the Dragon of course. Yes, that was it. Four men, two girls.’
Annika wrote down the names, noticing how ridiculous the codenames were, but unable to smile, not even internally.
‘Karina wasn’t with them that night?’
‘She’d finished with Ragnwald, and wanted out of the group. Margit was very angry with her, thought she was betraying them. Loyalty was always very important to Margit.’
A clock chimed somewhere in the living room. Annika thought about the marriage announcement in the
Norrland News
. Why would you put that in if you weren’t going to get married?
She looked at the man thoughtfully, thinking about the huge burden the pair had carried together, and which was now his alone.
‘How long was it before Margit told you all this?’ she asked quietly.
‘When she got pregnant,’ Thord Axelsson said. ‘It was an accident, she’d forgotten to take the pill, but when it happened we were both delighted. But one evening she was lying there crying when I got home, and she just couldn’t stop. It took all evening to get her to tell me what it was. She thought I was going to hand her in to the police. Leave her and the child.’
He fell silent.
‘But you didn’t,’ Annika confirmed.
‘Hanna did her national service at F21,’ Thord said. ‘She’s an officer in the reserves; she’s studying nuclear physics at Uppsala.’
‘And your other daughter?’
‘Emma lives on the same corridor as Hanna; she’s doing a master’s in politics.’
‘You’ve done well,’ Annika said, honestly.
He looked through the window. ‘Yes. But the Beasts have always been with us. Margit thought about what she’d done every day. She never escaped it.’
‘Nor you,’ Annika said. ‘You went to work every day knowing what had happened.’
He merely nodded.
‘Why didn’t she tell the police?’ Annika said. ‘Wouldn’t that have been better, not having to deal with it alone?’
The man stood up. ‘If only she could have,’ he said with his back to Annika. ‘When the Dragon disappeared Margit got a package in the post. There was a finger in it, a human finger, from a small child, and a warning.’
Annika felt herself heating up, could feel the blood drain from her head, thought she was about to faint.
‘No one ever spoke about the Beasts, not ever. Margit heard nothing from them for all those years, not until this October.’
‘Then what happened?’ Annika whispered.
‘She got the call, the symbol of the yellow dragon, summoning her to their meeting place.’
Annika could see before her the strange drawing the Minister of Culture had received, in that envelope posted in France.
‘A meeting?’ she said. ‘When?’
Thord Axelsson shook his head and walked over to the sink, picked up a glass but did nothing with it.
‘Then they contacted her, one of them called her at work, asking if she was going to the meeting to celebrate the return of the Dragon. She told them to go to hell, said they’d ruined her life, and that she loathed the fact that she’d ever met them.’
His shoulders were shaking.
‘She didn’t hear from them again.’
Annika was struggling against a growing, sucking feeling of nausea. She sat for a long while, swallowing,
watching the man weep, holding the glass to his forehead.
‘I want them caught,’ he said eventually, turning back to Annika, his face red and unlike itself. He sat down heavily on his chair again, and sat still for a while as the clock ticked and the antiseptic smell spread throughout Annika’s body.
‘Margit never got rid of her guilt,’ he said. ‘She paid for it all through her life. I can’t go on like this any more.’
‘Have you told the police now?’
He shook his head. ‘But I’m going to,’ he said. ‘As soon as the Dragon’s been caught and the girls are safe.’
‘What do you want me to do?’ she asked.
He looked at her blankly. ‘I don’t know. I just wanted to tell someone.’
He looked out through the window and stiffened. ‘Hanna and Emma are coming,’ he said. ‘You have to go.’
Annika stood up without thinking, stuffing her pad and pen in her bag and hurrying out into the hall, where she pulled her jacket from the hanger and tugged it on. She went back into the kitchen, and saw the man sitting there motionless, his eyes blank.
‘Thank you,’ she said quietly.
He looked at her and tried to smile.
‘By the way,’ she said. ‘Did Margit have very small feet?’
‘Size thirty-six,’ he said.
She left him by the pine table in the scrubbed kitchen with the untouched cups of coffee gradually cooling.
The car had had time to get completely cold, so she kept her polar jacket on. For one panicky moment she thought the engine wasn’t going to start, that she was going to freeze in her hire-car among the identical seventies houses, for ever held fast in the little white lies of the Axelsson family.
She turned the key so hard that the metal almost snapped. The engine started with a hesitant rattle, and as she exhaled she saw her breath freeze to ice on the inside of the windscreen. She found reverse as the gearbox protested and backed into the street, hoping she wasn’t going to hit anything. She hadn’t scraped the rear window.
The two daughters passed close to her window. She attempted a smile and waved feebly as they looked curiously at her.
The rubber of the tyres creaked on the icy road as she rolled towards town. The nausea persisted, the smell of disinfectant still in her nostrils, the thoughts bouncing around her head and chest.