Red Wolf_ A Novel - Liza Marklund [141]
He shook his head firmly and clutched the almost empty bottle.
‘Okay, don’t then,’ Annika said, closing the jacket and looking over to the minister.
‘He’s got a gun,’ Karina Björnlund said. ‘We can shoot our way out.’
Annika shook her head. ‘The door’s made of steel. The bullets would ricochet round the room and kill the lot of us. Besides, we’d have to hit the padlock on the outside to get out.’
‘What about the windows, then?’
‘Same thing.’
Should she say she’d told the police? How would they react?
‘I knew it would turn out like this,’ Karina Björnlund said with a sniff. ‘This whole Beasts thing has been a nightmare right from the start. I should never have gone with them when they left the Communist Party.’
The Minister of Culture dug in her bag and pulled out a black garment, it might have been a T-shirt, which she held up to her nose.
‘Why not?’ Annika said, watching the minister’s shadow dance across the wall as she moved around behind the candle.
‘I don’t suppose you’d even been born in the sixties,’ Karina Björnlund said, glancing at Annika. ‘It can’t be easy for your generation to understand what it was like, but it was actually fantastic.’
Annika nodded slowly. ‘I can imagine,’ she said. ‘You were young, Göran was the leader.’
The minister nodded eagerly. ‘He was so strong and clever. He could get anyone to go along with him. All the girls wanted to be with him, all the boys looked up to him. But I should have walked away when he was thrown out. It was stupid to go along with his idea for the Beasts.’
Karina Björnlund lost herself in memories for a moment, Annika watched her with increasingly clear eyes.
‘How come you never got caught?’ Annika asked.
The minister looked up. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I never actually did anything, and Göran was very thorough. We only communicated through symbols, a forgotten old language comprehensible to anyone, across borders, races, cultures.’
‘So no minutes of meetings?’ Annika asked.
‘Not even letters or phone calls,’ Karina Björnlund said. ‘We were summoned to meetings by a drawing of a yellow dragon. A day or so later came a combination of numbers giving the day and time of the meeting.’
‘You each had a symbol?’
The woman nodded carefully, still holding the T-shirt to her nose. ‘But only the Dragon could call a meeting.’
‘And at the end of October you got the call again, in an anonymous letter to the department?’
A flicker of fear crossed the minister’s eyes. ‘It took a few seconds before I realized what I was looking at, and when I did I had to go out and throw up.’
‘Yet you still came,’ Annika said.
‘You don’t understand,’ the minister said. ‘I’ve been so scared all these years. After F21, when Göran disappeared, I got a warning in the post . . .’ She hid her face in the T-shirt.
‘A child’s finger,’ Annika said, and the minister looked up in surprise.
‘How do you know?’
‘I spoke to Margit Axelsson’s husband, Thord. The symbolism was crystal-clear.’
Karina Björnlund nodded. ‘If I didn’t keep quiet then not only would I die, but so would any children I might have in the future, and those close to me.’
Göran Nilsson groaned on the floor, moving his left leg in agitation.
Annika and the Minister of Culture looked at him with empty eyes.
‘He’s been stalking me,’ Karina Björnlund said. ‘One night he was standing outside my house in Knivsta. The next day I saw him behind a display in Åhléns in Uppsala. And on Friday I got another letter.’
‘Another warning?’
The minister closed her eyes for a few moments.
‘A drawing of a dog,’ she said, ‘and then a cross. I had an idea of what it might mean, but daren’t actually take it in.’
‘That Margit was dead?’
Karina Björnlund nodded.
‘We don’t have any contact with each other any more, of course, but I spent the whole night thinking, and in the morning I called Thord. He told me that Margit had been murdered and I understood exactly. Either I came here or I would die as well. So I came.’
She looked up at Annika, taking the T-shirt from her nose.
‘If you knew