Red Wolf_ A Novel - Liza Marklund [130]
The airport bus stopped just across the street from the City Hotel’s heavy façade. She braked and leaned forward to watch the passengers getting off. Her breath misted the widescreen, and she wiped it with her sleeve.
Karina Björnlund was the second last off. The Minister of Culture stepped carefully out of the bus with a black leather bag in her hand. Annika could feel herself on the verge of hyperventilating.
A bag to breathe into, she thought, realizing that she didn’t have one. Instead she held her breath and counted to ten three times, and her heartbeat slowed down.
It was getting dark, but the sunset was as slow and gradual as dawn had been, and she watched Karina Björnlund stand and freeze at the bus-stop, a thickset, dark woman in a fur-coat and no hat.
The Red Wolf, Annika thought, trying to make out the features of her face in the shadows, imagining that she could see a pair of anxious, sad eyes.
What are you doing here?
Her mother lives on Storgatan, she thought. Maybe she’s on her way there.
Then realized: this is Storgatan. Why would she be standing at a bus-stop to go somewhere else? She hasn’t come to visit her mother.
Suddenly her back window was filled with the headlights of one of the local buses. She put the car in gear and rolled forward a few metres to let the bus pull in, passing the little gaggle of people waiting in the queue. In her rear-view mirror she watched as Karina Björnlund picked her bag up and climbed on board.
I’ll follow the bus to see where she gets off, Annika thought, and rolled a bit further until she realized she was heading into a pedestrianized street. People were walking slowly in front of the car, challenging her with their stares. She looked up and noticed a sign indicating that all vehicles apart from public transport were forbidden. She felt herself starting to panic again, grappled with the gear-stick to find reverse, and saw the bus gliding slowly towards her. She turned the wheel as hard as she could and swerved on crunching tyres.
The bus slid past and she felt the sweat sticking her legs to the seat. She was about to lose sight of the minister, and had no idea where she was heading.
Bus number one, she thought. The bus that Linus Gustafsson usually took.
Svartöstaden.
East, towards Swedish Steel.
And she drove down towards the harbour, turning right towards the ironworks. She pulled over to the side and waited; if she was right the bus would have to pass her here. Four minutes later the bus glided past her and carried on towards Malmudden.
She just had time to register the name of the street, Lövskatan, as the bus turned right; wasn’t that where Margit Axelsson used to live? Another sign, Föreningsgatan, and the bus carried on along the edge of a messy and desolate industrial estate, huddling in the shadow of an enormous jet-black mound of iron-ore. On the left was a row of identical two-storey apartment blocks from the forties, and up ahead loomed a huge, abandoned industrial building that seemed to have grown into the side of the mountain of iron-ore. Dark windows sent warnings into the twilight, cold cries into the darkness. She followed the bus as the road swung up and left and ran alongside the railway line. An immense steel pipe hung high above, and below lurked a row of graffiti-covered and ramshackle industrial units, surrounded by pipes, steel girders, tyres, pallets. No sign of life anywhere.
The bus indicated and pulled in at a bus-stop. Annika braked and pulled up behind an abandoned car twenty metres further down the hill.
Karina Björnlund got off, clutching her leather bag. Annika slumped down in her seat and stared at her.
The bus pulled away, and the Minister of Culture was left staring out at the railway track, her breath drifting like clouds around her. She seemed to hesitate.
Annika switched off the engine and pulled out the key, waiting inside the warm interior of the car without taking her eyes off the