Red Wolf_ A Novel - Liza Marklund [80]
Her pen raced across the notepad as she tried to keep up with him, feeling the goosebumps prickle. She had difficulty breathing. Good God. Bloody hell, this is impossible!
She forced herself not to get too excited, not yet; she couldn’t be sure until she checked.
‘Well, goodness,’ Annika said hoarsely. ‘Thanks, thanks a lot. You’re a vintage champagne.’
‘Whenever, my dear, just give me a call.’
They hung up and Annika had to stand up. Yes! Her mind was racing, the rush of blood pumping in her ears. She ran out into the newsroom with her heart pounding, but somewhere near the sports desk she gathered her senses and realized that she actually didn’t have anything yet. She got a cup of coffee from the machine and hurried over to Berit.
‘Where’s the Minister of Culture from?’ she asked.
Berit looked up from her screen, glasses on the tip of her nose. ‘Norrbotten,’ she said. ‘Luleå, I think.’
‘Not from somewhere called Karlsvik?’
Berit took off her glasses and lowered her hands to her lap.
‘Don’t know,’ she said. ‘Why?’
‘Where does she live now?’
‘A suburb, north of the city somewhere.’
‘Married?’
‘Living with someone,’ Berit said, ‘no children. What are you after?’
Annika rocked back and forth on her heels, shaking the noise from her head.
‘Just information,’ she said, ‘an old wedding announcement I need to check.’
‘A wedding announcement?’ Berit echoed as Annika walked off without explaining.
Back in her office Annika sat down at her screen and waited for her pulse to slow down. Then she raised her hands and let them slowly uncover the truth.
She started with the government site, and downloaded a PDF file about the head of the Ministry of Culture. It had a picture of Karina Björnlund giving a crooked smile, and information about her areas of responsibility: cultural heritage, art, the printed word, radio and television, faith communities.
In the personal section of the file it said that she was born in 1951 and raised in Luleå, and now lived in Knivsta with her partner.
Nothing about Karlsvik, Annika thought, and clicked on to an information website.
She looked up Karina Björnlund Knivsta on the census and found one match, a woman born in 1951. She clicked on background information and got the name of the parish she was born in.
Lower Luleå.
She bit the inside of her cheek, her palms were itching, she needed to look deeper. She went onto Google again, and did a general search for ‘karlsvik and lower luleå’: nineteen results. The top one was the history of a saw-fitter, an Olof Falck from Hälleström (1758–1830) in what was now the parish of Norrfjärden in Piteå council district. Annika did a search within that page and discovered that one of the saw-fitter’s descendants, a Beda Markström, born 1885, had settled in Karlsvik in the parish of Lower Luleå.
She searched for a map and found it.
Karlsvik was a small community just outside Luleå, on the other side of the river.
She leaned back, letting the information sink in. It was making her scalp itch, her mouth dry, her fingers twitch. She jotted the main points in her notebook, then dialled the editor-in-chief’s internal number.
‘Have you got a few minutes?’
29
The air in the conference room on the seventh floor of the Federation of County Councils was sour with stale oxygen. Coffee fumes and old nicotine breath mixed with the sweat of middle-aged men in wool jackets. Thomas wiped his brow. Unconsciously he slid a finger under the knot of his tie and pulled it open to let in more air.
This was the conference group’s first official meeting, which meant that the hierarchies and structures had not settled in yet. The mood of back-slapping had slid into territorial scent-marking the longer the meeting went on. It would take at least one more marathon meeting before they could get anything sensible done.
The congress of the Federation of County Councils and the Association of Local Councils at Norrköping in June was due to