Red Wolf_ A Novel - Liza Marklund [19]
‘So what are you doing here?’
‘I was supposed to be meeting Benny Ekland, but when I got here I found out he’d been run over.’
The man shook his head, stamping his feet. ‘Bloody awful business,’ he said. ‘On his way home, and he gets run down like that. Everyone thinks it’s terrible.’
‘Everyone here knows everyone else?’ she asked, trying hard not to sound too inquisitive.
‘For good and ill,’ he said, ‘but mostly good. We take responsibility for each other, there’s too little of that in the world today . . .’
‘Do you know where it happened?’
‘Down on Skeppargatan, on the way to the main road,’ he said, pointing. ‘Quite close to Blackis, that’s the big building at the edge of the forest. The kids went up there with flowers a bit earlier. Well, I really ought to . . .’ The man headed off towards the water.
Annika stood and watched him go.
I’d like a life like that, she thought. To belong somewhere.
8
The place where Benny Ekland was run down was just a couple of hundred metres from the West Checkpoint, but not visible from there. In fact, it wasn’t overlooked from anywhere, apart from a run-down housing block and small shop a hundred metres or so away. A thin row of yellow streetlamps, some of them broken, spread a dusty light over the cordons, snow and mud. To the left was an area of ragged scrub, on the right an embankment topped by a fence.
Malmvallen, she thought. The famous football pitch.
She switched off the engine and sat in the dark, listening.
Benny Ekland had just written a series of articles about terrorism. The last thing he published was about the attack on F21. After that he was run down, here, in the most desolate place in Luleå.
She didn’t like coincidences.
After a few minutes a teenage boy came out of one of the blocks nearby and walked slowly up to the fluttering plastic cordon around the crime scene, hands in his pockets. His hair was stiff with gel, making Annika smile. Her son Kalle had just discovered the joys of hair-gel.
The boy stopped just a couple of metres from her car, staring blankly at a small heap of flowers and candles inside the cordon.
Her smile faded as it dawned on her how Benny Ekland’s death had affected the people living here. They were all mourning his loss. Would any of her neighbours mourn her?
Hardly.
She started the car, intending to drive down to Malmhamnen. The moment she turned the key the boy started as though he’d been hit, and his reaction made her jump. With a cry that penetrated the car the lad rushed back to his block. She waited until he had disappeared behind the fence, then rolled off towards the harbour where the stolen car had been found.
The road was pitch-black and treacherous, leading to a dead end and a large gate. She decided to drive back up to the site of the accident, creeping along at a snail’s pace. As she passed the shop she looked into the block of flats next to it and saw the boy’s spiked hair silhouetted in the bottom-left window.
‘I didn’t mean to scare you,’ she said to herself. ‘What made you so frightened?’
She stopped the car by the cordon and got out, taking her bag. She looked up at furnace number two, still impressed, then turned and looked the other way, into the wind. This road was one of the routes into the residential district.
Annika pulled her torch out of the bag and shone it behind the police cordon. The snow of recent days had covered all traces that might have been visible to the average person. The ice on the tarmac showed no signs of emergency braking, but any that had been there would have been obliterated by now.
She shone the beam on the fence some ten metres away. That was where he had been found. Inspector Suup was right; Benny Ekland’s last movements had been a flight through the air.
She stood with the torch in her hand, listening to the distant noise of the steelworks. Turning around, she saw the boy’s head again, this time in the right-hand window.
She might as well go and knock, seeing as she was here.
The yard was dark, and she