Red Wolf_ A Novel - Liza Marklund [21]
The boy stood in silence, eyes wide, deeply sceptical.
‘If you saw anything, Linus, or know someone who did, that person can tell me, and no one would find out that it was them who said anything.’
‘Would you believe them, then?’
‘I don’t know. That depends on what they say, of course.’
‘But you’d write about it in the paper?’
‘Only the information; not who said it, if they didn’t want me to.’
She looked at the boy, knowing that her intuition was right.
‘You didn’t come home when you were supposed to, did you, Linus?’
The boy shifted his weight from one skinny leg to the other, and gulped, making his Adam’s apple jerk up and down.
‘When should you have come home?’
‘On the last bus, the number one stops at twenty-one thirty-six.’
‘So what did you do instead?’
‘There’s a night bus as well, the fifty-one, that goes as far as Mefos. It’s for the blokes who work shifts at the steelworks . . . I get it sometimes when I’m out late.’
‘And then you have to walk?’
‘Not far, just across the footbridge over the railway and down Skeppargatan . . .’
He looked away and padded through the hall to his bedroom. Annika followed, and found him sitting on the bed, neatly made with a bedspread and some scatter-cushions. A few schoolbooks were open on the desk, an ancient computer, but everything else in the room was arranged on shelves or stacked in boxes.
‘Where had you been?’
He pulled his feet up beneath him, and sat there cross-legged, looking down at his hands.
‘Alex has got broadband, we were playing Teslatron.’
‘Where are your parents?’
‘Mum.’ He looked up at her angrily. ‘I just live with Mum.’ He looked down again. ‘She works nights. I promised not to be out so late. The neighbours keep an eye out, so I have to sneak in if it’s late.’
Annika looked at the big little boy on the bed, filled for a moment with an intense longing for her own children. Tears came to her eyes, and she took several deep breaths through her mouth, forcing the tears back down.
That’s what Kalle will be like in a few years, she thought. Sensitive, smart, cool, puppyish.
‘So you took the other bus, the night bus?’ she said, her voice trembling slightly.
‘The half twelve from the bus station. Benny was on it as well. He knows my mum. Everyone knows everyone in Svartöstaden, so I hid right at the back.’
‘He didn’t see you?’
The boy looked at her like she was mad. ‘He was pissed out of his head, wasn’t he? Otherwise he’d have driven, wouldn’t he?’
Of course, she thought, waiting silently for him to go on.
‘He fell asleep on the bus,’ the boy said. ‘The driver had to wake him up at Mefos. I sneaked out of the back door while they were busy.’
‘Where did Benny live?’
‘Over on Laxgatan.’
He gestured vaguely in a direction that Annika couldn’t make out.
‘And you saw him walking home from the bus-stop?’
‘Yeah, but he didn’t see me. I made sure I stayed behind him, and it was snowing really hard.’
He fell silent. Annika was starting to feel hot in her padded jacket. Without saying anything she let it slide off her arms, picked it up and put it on the chair by the boy’s desk.
‘What did you see, Linus?’
The boy lowered his head even further, twisting his fingers together.
‘There was a car,’ he said.
Annika waited.
‘A car?’
He nodded frenetically. ‘A Volvo V70, but I didn’t know that then.’
‘When did you find out?’
He sniffed. ‘It had reversed back onto the football pitch, you could only see the front half. The front was sticking out from behind a tree.’
‘So you did notice it, then?’
He didn’t answer, knotting his fingers.
‘How come you noticed it?’
The boy looked up, his jaw trembling.
‘Someone was sitting in the car. There’s a yellow streetlamp at the crossing and the light was sort of shining on the car. You could see his hand on the wheel, kind of holding it, like this.’
The boy held one hand up in front of him, letting it hang in the air above an imaginary steering wheel, his eyes open wide.
‘So what did you do?’
‘Waited. I didn’t know who it was, did I?’
‘But you could see