Red Wolf_ A Novel - Liza Marklund [126]
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