Red Wolf_ A Novel - Liza Marklund [74]
Tuesday 17 November
27
The news boards shrieked out their bright yellow messages about serial killers and police hunts all the way along Fleminggatan, standing out like sunflowers against an iron-grey lawn in the morning light. Annika saw them flash past from the window of the bus and felt the same strange effect as usual – a fascination at having put something into the world that goes on and lives its own life. Her articles could reach hundreds of thousands of people whom she would never meet, her words could generate emotions and reactions that she would never know about.
The journey to work passed quickly, accompanied by the screaming sunflowers.
In the newspaper’s lobby, a whole wall was papered each morning with that day’s newsbills, forming an entire enthusiastic choir.
Up in the newsroom she noted a change in temperature as she sailed out. Her lowered head was met with reassuringly warm glances where she usually encountered blocks of ice. She was back on track, dominating that day’s paper, someone to be reckoned with. All the old stuff was forgotten because things were happening again, nineteen hours to deadline and she had the picture byline on page six.
She turned her back on her colleagues’ ingratiating glances and pushed the glass door of her office shut behind her with a bang.
Göran Nilsson, she thought, throwing off her outdoor clothes, frowning with tiredness. Born 1948 in Sattajärvi, emigrated, professional killer since 1969. No point looking him up on national databases. He would have been erased from the National Population Address Register decades ago.
She drummed her fingers in irritation as her computer slowly started up, then Googled ‘göran nilsson’ and got several hundred results.
There were so many Göran Nilssons in the world. She searched through the results and then turned instead to the Yellow Pages website to see how common the name really was, trying different districts at random. There were 73 in Blekinge alone, 55 in Borås, 205 in Stockholm and 46 in Norrbotten. Several thousand in the whole country, in other words.
She had to narrow the search somehow, add another word to the terms.
‘göran nilsson sattajärvi’. No results.
The letters, she thought. Maoism or left-wing groups.
Bingo. Masses of hits, like Kristina Nilsson, Mao Zedong, Göran Andersson, all in the same result.
Then she tried to find pictures instead, ‘göran nilsson mao’.
Four results, small squares on the screen that she squinted at, leaning right forward. Two were logos for something she didn’t investigate further, one cultural revolutionary portrait of the Master himself on someone’s homepage, and finally a black-and-white picture of some young people in dated outfits. She looked closer, reading the description, clicked on the link and reached a homepage that someone had set up about their youth in Uppsala. There was a caption that put the picture in context.
After the establishment of the fundamental 9 April Declaration, Mats Andersson, Fredrik Svensson, Hans Larsson and Göran Nilsson were prepared to bravely mobilize the masses in the name of the Master.
She read the text twice, surprised at the slightly ridiculous religiosity it suggested. Then she stared at the young man on the far right, his shoulder hidden behind the man next to him, short hair, nondescript features, evidently not that tall. Dark eyes that were staring at a point to the left of the photographer.
She clicked back to the front page of the site and discovered that there were more photographs from Uppsala on the server, several from various demonstrations, but mostly from parties of one sort or another. She looked through all of them, but the dark young man named Göran Nilsson didn’t appear on any of the others.
Could it be him? Could he really have been an identifiable activist in the sixties, in which case he might well appear in various media from those days?
Archives like that were never available digitally; it was all envelopes of pictures and cuttings.
Her newspaper had the largest archive in the country. She grabbed