Red Wolf_ A Novel - Liza Marklund [68]
Both children shook their heads in silence.
‘Exactly,’ Annika said. ‘But Beauty still has to love the Beast, because if she loves him enough then she’ll be able to save him.’
‘But that’s good, isn’t it?’ Kalle said. ‘That she saves him.’
‘But why would she do that?’ Annika said. ‘Why would she save the Beast, when he’s only been horrid to her?’
She could see the boy’s confusion, and Ellen’s uncomprehending eyes, and put her arms round Kalle.
‘You’re a good boy,’ she whispered to him. ‘You don’t know how horrid people can sometimes be. But there are horrid people, and you can’t cure them with love.’
She stroked his hair and kissed him on the cheek.
‘Why don’t you watch Mio, My Mio?’
‘Only if you watch it with us,’ Ellen said. ‘It’s so scary.’
‘What about Pippi, then?’
‘Yay!’
Thirty seconds after she had started the film, there was a buzzing sound from the depths of her bag. She ran into the bedroom, shut the door and emptied the contents of the bag on to the unmade bed. The cord of her mobile had got tangled up with the spiral binding of one of her notebooks.
It was Q.
‘I’ve checked the quotes you mentioned.’
She pulled out the right notebook and a pen.
‘And?’ she said, sinking to the floor with her back against the bed.
‘Bloody weird coincidence,’ he said. ‘A bit too weird to have happened by accident.’
‘Do you have anything else that connects the three deaths?’
He sighed deeply. ‘We don’t know yet, but there are no similarities in the way they were killed. The deaths are very different. We’ve found fibres on the victims, but nothing that matches. No fingerprints.’
‘Just the letters?’
‘Just the letters.’
‘So what conclusions are you prepared to draw?’
Another sigh. ‘The man from Östhammar was murdered, we know that much now. He was shot from a distance of at least one metre, and it’s difficult to hold an AK 4 that far away and still pull the trigger. Of course there’s a connection between the boy and the journalist, but so far we haven’t found any link to the local councillor. The boy saw the hack get run down, so that’s a fairly standard motive. Maybe he could have identified the killer.’
‘Maybe he knew the killer,’ Annika said.
There was a moment of surprised silence from the commissioner. ‘What makes you say that?’
She shook her head, looking at the wallpaper.
‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘Just a feeling I got when I was talking to him. He got very scared, made me leave.’
‘I’ve read the report of his questioning by the Luleå police. There’s nothing in there about him being scared.’
‘Of course there isn’t,’ Annika said. ‘He was protecting himself.’
The silence on the line was suspicious.
‘You don’t think the boy knew him at all,’ Annika said, ‘because you think it was Ragnwald.’
The door flew open and Ellen came into the bedroom.
‘Mummy, he’s got the remote control, he says I can’t have it.’
‘Hang on,’ she said, putting the mobile down, getting up and going back to the television with Ellen.
Kalle was curled up in a corner of the sofa, clutching the remotes for the television and the video to his chest.
‘Kalle,’ Annika said, ‘let Ellen have one of them.’
‘No,’ the boy said, ‘she keeps pressing buttons and messing it up.’
‘Okay,’ Annika said, ‘then I’ll take them both.’
‘No!’ Ellen howled. ‘I want one!’
‘That’s enough!’ Annika shouted. ‘Give me the bloody remotes and sit and watch quietly, or you’ll have to go to bed!’
She grabbed the remotes and walked back into the bedroom with Kalle’s cries ringing in her ears.
She shut the door and picked up the phone again.
‘Ragnwald,’ Q said.
‘Suup leaked some information to me, to let Ragnwald know that you know that he’s back,’ Annika said. ‘Were you involved in that decision?’
He snorted. ‘I haven’t seen any article so far.’
‘It’ll be in tomorrow’s paper, although it’s a pretty thin story, I have to say. Suup didn’t give me much. I think you’ve got a lot more than that.’
The commissioner didn’t respond.
‘How much do you know?’ Annika asked. ‘Have you got an ID?’
‘A couple of things first,’ Q said. ‘You can use the anonymous letters,