Red Wolf_ A Novel - Liza Marklund [57]
‘You reckon?’
‘You’re not the bad guys this time, trust me. Mind you, it might be helpful if it was me who wrote the article.’
Thomas was silent for several seconds, Annika could hear him breathing.
‘Gunnel Sandström,’ he said eventually. ‘The husband’s name was Kurt.’
22
Thomas hung up, beads of sweat on his brow. He had been on the brink of giving himself away.
When Annika had asked ‘her’ name, he had Sophia Grenborg’s name on the tip of his tongue; her shiny hair and smiling eyes, the sound of her heels clicking in his ears, her perfume in the room with him.
That was close, he thought in a muddled way without really realizing what had been close, merely aware that something had gone up in flames, something had happened, a process had started which he didn’t know if he could handle, but he still couldn’t stop.
Sophia Grenborg, with her apartment on Östermalm, in her family’s building.
His mother would like her; the thought ran through his head. She was actually not dissimilar to Eleonor. Not in appearance – Eleonor was tall and sinewy, Sophia was short and petite – but they had something else in common, an attitude, a seriousness, something deeply attractive that Annika didn’t have. He had once overheard Annika describing Eleonor as the sort of person you don’t mind having in your home, and there was something in that. Eleonor and Sophia moved effortlessly through office corridors and meeting rooms, glamorous salons and international hotel bars. Annika just got clumsy in situations like that, her clothes more dishevelled than usual, looking incredibly uncomfortable in her own skin. Whenever they went anywhere she just wanted to talk to the locals and eat in the bars where the locals ate, and wasn’t remotely interested in culture or the exclusive hotel pool.
He cleared his throat a couple of times, then picked up the phone and dialled Sophia’s direct line at the Federation of County Councils.
‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘I’d love to come to the jazz club after the meeting.’
Annika picked one of the newspaper’s courtesy cars that had studded tyres, expecting ice on the narrow lanes of northern Uppland. The radio was tuned to one of the commercial stations.
In quarter of an hour she had crept seven hundred metres along the jam-packed Essinge motorway, and angrily retuned from the adrenalin-thumping pop music to P2. The news in Serbo-Croat turned into news in Arabic, then something she guessed might have been Somali. She listened to the rhythm of the foreign languages, searching for words she recognized, picking up the names of places, countries, a president.
The traffic started to move after the Järva junction, and once she had passed Arlanda Airport it thinned out considerably. She put her foot down all the way to Uppsala, then turned off right towards Östhammar.
The agricultural landscape of Roslagen spread out around her, dark-brown soil in frostbitten furrows, islands of buildings, rust-red painted farmhouses and white-plastered barns. Communities she didn’t even know existed flew by, places with schools and supermarkets and health centres in obscurity, hotdog kiosks with curtains with abstract designs from IKEA, the occasional Christmas garland. The grey light erased the sharpness of her surroundings, and she switched on the windscreen wipers.
The road was gradually becoming narrower and more twisted the further north she got. She got stuck behind a local bus that stuck to sixty kilometres an hour, at best, for more than ten kilometres before she had a chance to overtake, and had to force herself not to get stressed. Half the point of this trip was to get out of the office. She had pulled the directions Gunnel Sandström had given her out of her bag while she was stuck behind the bus.
Over the roundabout, towards Gävle, seven kilometres north, then a red farmhouse on the right with an old wagon in the drive and a garden gnome on the veranda. Perfectly straightforward, but she still almost missed the turning and had to brake sharply, realizing that the roads really were slippery. She