Red Wolf_ A Novel - Liza Marklund [145]
‘Why?’
‘She didn’t want to discuss anything over the phone, if I can put it like that.’
He nodded and jotted something down.
‘And the Minister of Culture went for a walk in the woods next to the railway and you followed her?’
Annika nodded.
‘I drove to Lövskatan, my hire-car is still there.’
Forsberg reached for a sheet of paper and read it with a frown.
‘I’ve got a report here,’ he said, ‘which says that a person with your name called Central Command at fifteen twelve and said that someone we’ve been looking for was in a brick building, location unknown, near a viaduct. Does that ring any bells?’
‘The guy on the phone wasn’t exactly Einstein,’ Annika said, realizing that her whole body was still cold in spite of the checks and efforts of the hospital staff. ‘I tried to explain to him as best I could, but he wasn’t grasping it.’
The Inspector studied the report.
‘The caller, in other words you, is described as incoherent and hysterical.’
Annika looked down at her hands, dry, chapped and red, and didn’t respond.
‘How were you able to identify Göran Nilsson?’
She shrugged slightly without looking up. ‘Karina called him Göran, and I knew they were together once upon a time.’
‘And the revolver you handed to us, he gave that to you of his own free will?’
‘I took it out of his pocket when he collapsed on the floor . . .’
All of a sudden she had had enough. She stood up and walked nervously round the room.
‘I’ve been digging into this story for a couple of weeks now, everything just fell into place. Have you found Hans Blomberg?’
She stopped in front of Forsberg with her hands on her hips. The police officer paused for a moment before turning away.
‘No,’ he said.
‘It was Blomberg who locked us in.’
‘So I heard,’ Forsberg said. ‘As well as the story about the Beasts, and the plane getting blown up at F21.’
‘Can I go now? I’m shattered.’
‘We’ll have to talk to you in more detail, about what was said and exactly what happened in that shed.’
She looked at the police officer from the end of a long tunnel.
‘I don’t remember anything else,’ she said.
‘Rubbish,’ he said. ‘You’re going to tell me what you know before you leave.’
‘Am I being arrested?’ Annika asked. ‘Suspected of some crime?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Right, then,’ Annika said. ‘I’m leaving.’
‘I’m ordering you to stay.’
‘So lock me up,’ Annika said, and walked out.
She took a taxi out to Lövskatan to pick up her car, and paid with the paper’s credit card, one of the few perks she had been able to keep since she voluntarily stopped being an editor. As the taxi rolled away she was left standing there, infinite space above her, listening to the rumble of the steelworks.
She had hardly thought about Thomas all day. One of the nurses had called to tell him that she had been taken in for observation in Luleå Hospital, which wasn’t quite true, she had just been examined and released, but she wasn’t complaining. It wouldn’t do him any harm to think she was ill.
She took a deep breath, the air crackling like sandpaper in her throat.
The light around her changed. She lifted her face to the sky and saw a veil drift across the moon, and the next moment a firework display went off above her head, like something she’d never seen before.
From horizon to horizon, an arc of pale-blue light stretched across the sky, moving in sweeping ripples, splitting into cascades of luminous colours over the whole sky. She stood there gawping at it. Pink, white, swirling and twisting, colours and lights and stars tumbling over one another, getting brighter and then dissolving.
The northern lights, she thought, and a second later the sky began to crackle.
She gasped and took several steps back, surrounded by sparkling space.
A streak of purple merged with a semicircle of green, the two playing around each other, cracking and sparking and vibrant.
It’s a strange world up here, she thought. When the earth is frozen