Borderline

by Liza Marklund

  For some reason he had in his head a quote from one of Sweden’s best-known and most controversial political scientists, Stig-Björn Ljunggren: ‘One of the most common complaints in politics is that the media distort reality. It’s a litany that assumes that the role of the media should be to function as some sort of mirror to society. This is a false assumption. The media are part of an experience industry whose purpose is to entertain rather than inform us … Their role is not to reflect reality, but to dramatize it.’

  He looked at the time. If he left now, he would get home just as his wife returned from her break.

  Chapter 13

  The drive had been cleared and the yard sanded. Annika parked next to the farmhouse, turned the engine off and sat in the car for a minute or so. Out on the frozen lake, far off to the south, she could see three dots: one large and two smaller. She hoped they’d managed to catch some perch. They could fry them in butter, and eat them with crispbread. Delicious, but a nightmare to fillet.

  She went up to the porch and knocked. There was no bell.

  She turned to look out over the lake again.

  Berit and Thord had sold their house in Täby and bought the farm after their children had left home. Annika knew there had been another reason for the move: Berit had had an affair with Superintendent Q, and it had been a last-ditch attempt to save the marriage. It had evidently worked.

  Berit opened the door. ‘What are you standing out here for? Why didn’t you just come in?’

  Annika smiled wanly. ‘Too urban?’

  ‘They’re still out fishing. You’ll be eating perch for the next week. Coffee?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ Annika said, stepping inside the large farmhouse kitchen. It looked like something out of Country Living or Homes and Gardens: stripped pine tiles on the floor, a wood-burning stove, wood panel-ling, a drop-leaf table, grandfather clock, an Ilve gas hob and a fridge with an ice-maker.

  She sat at the table and watched Berit as she dealt with the coffee percolator. She was wearing the same sort of clothes she wore at work, black trousers, a blouse and a cardigan. Her movements were calm and precise, economical, not calculated to impress.

  ‘You never pretend to be anything but yourself,’ Annika said. ‘You’re always … complete.’

  Berit stopped what she was doing with the coffee scoop in mid-air. ‘I do, you know,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I pretend to be different. But not usually at work, these days. I’ve grown out of that.’

  She tipped the coffee into the percolator, switched it on and sat down at the table with two clean mugs.

  On the table lay that day’s papers, the Evening Post and its rival, and the two big morning papers with their huge Sunday supplements. Annika ran her fingers over them but couldn’t bring herself to open one.

  ‘We’ve received a video,’ she said quietly. ‘Proof of life. He looked like shit.’ She closed her eyes and saw his face before her, his swollen eye, terrified expression, hair dark with sweat. Her hands shook and she felt herself starting to panic – If Europe’s leaders don’t listen, I will die, if you don’t pay, I will die, he’s dying, he’s dying, he’s dying, and there’s nothing I can do.

  ‘Oh, God,’ she said, ‘oh, God …’

  Berit came round the table, pulled up a chair beside her and took her in her arms, holding her tight. ‘This will pass,’ she said. ‘One day this will all be over. You’re going to cope.’

  Annika forced herself to breathe normally. ‘It’s so awful,’ she whispered. ‘I’m so impotent.’

  Berit handed her a piece of kitchen roll, and she blew her nose loudly.

  ‘I can just about imagine it,’ Berit said, ‘but I can’t say I really understand what it feels like.’

  Annika pressed her knuckles against her eyes. ‘I’m falling apart,’ she said. ‘I’m never going to be the same again. Even if I do manage to patch myself up, I’m never going to be the same person again.’

  Berit stood up and went back to the percolator. ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘in the National Museum in Cardiff, in Wales, there’s a Japanese dish that was broken deliberately and then repaired. The old Japanese masters often broke valuable porcelain because they thought it was much more beautiful after it had been repaired.’

  She filled the mugs with coffee, then sat down opposite Annika. ‘I really wish you didn’t have to go through this, but it’s not going to kill you.’

  Annika warmed her hands on the mug. ‘It might kill Thomas.’

  ‘It might,’ Berit said.

  ‘He didn’t have to be there,’ Annika said. ‘He volunteered to go on that trip to Liboi.’ She looked out of the window. She couldn’t see the lake from there. ‘The reason’s name is Catherine. She’s British.’ She had seen pictures of her online. Blonde, pretty, neatly proportioned, like Eleonor and Sophia Fucking Bitch Grenborg. Just his type, and as far from herself as you could get.

  She turned to Berit again. ‘I know it’s possible to go on, I know …’

  Berit smiled slightly.

  Annika stirred her coffee. ‘We were thinking of moving, but we’re going to lose the insurance money now. Maybe it’s just as well. It wasn’t really mine in the first place. It was Ragnwald’s.’

  Annika had found a sack of euro notes in a junction box outside Luleå when she had uncovered a story several years ago. The ten per cent reward for finding it had given her the chance to buy the villa in Djursholm, and a flat for Anne Snapphane, both of which were now gone (burned down and sold, respectively).

  ‘Do you want to carry on?’ Berit asked. ‘If he comes back?’

  Annika put her hand over her mouth and felt tears falling once more. Berit tore off another sheet of kitchen roll and dried her cheeks. ‘There, there,’ she said. ‘Don’t meet trouble halfway. You can grieve for a divorce if you have a reason to do so in the future. Would you like some lunch? I was going to make rissoles with onion.’

  Annika managed to smile. ‘That sounds great.’

  Berit went to the fridge and got out some potatoes and a bowl of rissole mixture. She peeled the potatoes and put them into a saucepan, lit the gas hob and set them to boil. She lit another ring and got out a frying pan.

  Annika sat where she was, incapable of moving. Outside, the wind was tugging at a naked birch, and a great tit pecked at some seed on a bird-table. Soon it would be dark again. The butter began to sizzle in the pan on the stove. Annika pulled the Evening Post to her. ‘Did you see about that latest murder? She had two teenage daughters.’

  ‘It’s starting to get really nasty,’ Berit said. ‘I still don’t believe there’s a serial killer, but the latest one clearly wasn’t an ordinary domestic killing. The ex-husband is on a business trip in Germany – Düsseldorf, I think it was. He’s cut it short to come home and look after the girls. No history of threatening behaviour or violence.’

  Annika read the article again. ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ she said. ‘She wasn’t chosen at random. Early evening, right outside where she lived, stabbed hard in the neck. It’s too intimate, too personal.’

  Berit rinsed her hands under the tap, then started to make the rissoles.

  ‘The Haga Man, who raped women up in Umeå over several years, picked his victims at random, and that was both intimate and very personal. And sometimes close to where they lived as well.’ She turned on the extractor fan and put the first rissoles in the pan.

  ‘Unless this is a copycat,’ Annika said. ‘Someone who’s been inspired by Patrik Nilsson’s idea and has gone out and put it into practice.’

  ‘Unless I’m misremembering, it was actually your idea,’ Berit said, smiling over her shoulder.

  ‘I was pulling his leg,’ she said. ‘Do you have to signpost your jokes, these days?’

  ‘I think we’ve got a gang of fishermen outside,’ Berit said, nodding towards the porch.

  The children’s cheeks were rosy as Christmas apples, their eyes glistening. They had caught fourteen perch and a pike, carefully strung up on a
length of birch. They were talking at the same time, waving the bundle of fish about, until one of the fins caught Annika in the eye. They agreed to share the catch, seven perch for Kalle and Ellen, and seven for Thord, who got to keep the pike as well because he had provided the rods and bait.

  The rissoles were delicious.

  As dusk fell the weather turned, becoming mild and damp. There was rain in the air.

  The children were watching a film in the living room with Thord and Soraya. Berit was doing a crossword, and Annika fell asleep on the guest bed in the little maid’s room.

  When she woke up it was pouring with rain.

  ‘It’s going to be really slippery all the way back into the city,’ Thord warned, as Annika waved goodbye through the open car window.

  Good job I’ve got a killer car, she thought. Thomas had bought a secondhand Jeep Grand Cherokee when they’d got back from the USA, a big American SUV that was lethal to all other road-users but safe for anyone inside it.

  ‘Mummy, can I have a dog?’

  She ignored the question and concentrated on keeping the car on the road.

  They stopped at McDonald’s in Hägernäs and bought two Happy Meals and two Big Macs, then carried on into Stockholm. She reached Norrtull without mishap and even managed to find a parking space on Bergsgatan, just outside their building, probably because it was a street-cleaning night and she’d end up getting a hefty fine if she didn’t move it before midnight.

  Halenius was talking on his mobile when they got inside the flat. She mimed, ‘Has anyone called?’ and he shook his head. She left one of the Big Macs on top of his computer and went to have hers in the kitchen with the children. They were both exhausted and could hardly keep their eyes open long enough to finish their fries.

  Kalle started to cry before he fell asleep. ‘Is Daddy ever going to come home?’

  ‘We’re doing all we can to make sure he does,’ Annika said, stroking his hair. ‘As soon as I know, you’ll be the first person I tell.’

  ‘Is he going to die in Africa?’

  She kissed his forehead. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t think so. The people who are holding him want us to pay them to let him go, and we’ve got a bit of money in the bank, so I’m going to pay them as soon as I can.’

  He turned away from her.

  ‘Would you like me to leave the light on?’

  He nodded.

  ‘That was one seriously revolting hamburger,’ Halenius said, coming out with the remnants screwed up in the paper bag.

  ‘Wasn’t it just?’ Annika said. ‘Has anything happened?’

  ‘Quite a bit,’ the under-secretary of state said.

  ‘Don’t talk so loud,’ Kalle called.

  They went into the bedroom and shut the door behind them. Halenius sat on his usual seat (the office chair), and Annika opened the window to let some air in, then sat cross-legged on the bed. Outside it was raining gently, a steady winter drizzle that made the city greyer and the darkness thicker. Halenius looked tired. His hair was a mess and his shirt was unbuttoned halfway to his navel.

  ‘The man in the turban has been identified,’ he said. ‘Grégoire Makuza, a Tutsi, born in Kigali in Rwanda. You were right – he’s well educated, studied biochemistry in Nairobi. That’s how he was identified.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The British came up with this, and it’s not much to go on, but it’s still possible to draw a number of conclusions from even such scant information, and it does raise a number of other questions …’

  ‘The genocide in Rwanda,’ Annika said. ‘Was he there? What was his name? Gregorius?’

  ‘Grégoire Makuza,’ Halenius said, with a nod. ‘Exactly. A teenage Tutsi in Kigali in 1994 …’

  ‘If he was actually there then,’ Annika said, ‘maybe he was already living in Kenya.’

  ‘True.’

  Annika shivered, got up from the bed and went to close the window. ‘A biochemist,’ she said. ‘What made him turn to kidnapping?’ She sat down on the other chair.

  ‘He never graduated,’ Halenius said. ‘For some reason he broke off his studies when he had only one term left. He was no genius, but he was getting good marks. He seemed to be heading for a career as a researcher in the pharmaceutical industry.’

  Annika got to her feet again and went to stand by Halenius’s computer. ‘Bring up a picture of him,’ she said.

  Halenius did a bit of clicking, searching emails and folders. Annika was standing behind his back, looking down at his head. He had some grey hairs, and a few white ones. His shoulders were enormous, broad and strong. She wondered if he lifted weights. She clenched her hands to fight an impulse to touch them, to feel if they were as hard as they looked under his shirt.

  ‘Here,’ he said, clicking to play the video. Annika pulled the chair over and sat down beside him.

  It was the first of the two clips that had been posted online. The man’s face appeared on the screen, in low resolution and fairly shaky. Halenius froze the image. ‘Born in the early 1980s,’ he said.

  ‘So around thirty now,’ Annika said.

  ‘He could be older,’ Halenius said, tilting his head as he studied the screen.

  ‘Or younger,’ Annika said.

  They stared at the man’s rough features in silence.

  ‘Tutsis,’ Annika said. ‘The other group was the Hutus, wasn’t it? What’s the difference between them?’

  ‘No one knows any more. The definitions have kept changing over the years. It’s pretty much a class difference now.’

  ‘And the Tutsis were the privileged ones?’

  ‘The Belgians, who were given a mandate to rule Rwanda in 1916, reinforced the differences by introducing passports that included the term “racial identity”, and gave the Tutsis better jobs and higher status.’

  He started the film again. The thin voice crackled out of the computer.

  ‘Fiqh Jihad has taken seven EU delegates hostage as punishment for the evil and ignorance of the Western world.’

  Annika closed her eyes. Without the English subtitles the words meant nothing. It was a song in a Bantu language she would probably never hear again in her life, an ode to a crime that would follow her for ever. ‘Allahu Akbar,’ the song ended, and silence took over.

  ‘That last bit is Arabic rather than Kinyarwanda,’ Halenius said.

  ‘Allah is great,’ Annika said.

  ‘Actually “the greater” or “the greatest”. It’s the opening phrase of all Islamic prayers, as instructed by the Prophet Muhammad himself.’

  Annika squinted towards the black screen. ‘But Rwandans aren’t Muslims, are they?’

  Halenius rolled his chair back. ‘There weren’t many before the genocide, but the Christian leaders managed to change all that. Loads of priests, monks and nuns took part in the massacre of Tutsis but the Muslims sheltered them.’

  ‘But they were convicted afterwards?’ Annika said.

  ‘Some, but that wasn’t enough to restore faith in Christianity. There’ve been a lot of conversions to Islam, and today something like fifteen per cent of the population of Rwanda is Muslim.’

  ‘Rewind the clip a bit,’ Annika said.

  ‘Er,’ Halenius said, ‘I’m not sure how to do that …’

  As Annika took the mouse from him, he snatched away his hand. She clicked to bring up an image a couple of seconds before the end, where the man was staring straight into the camera with his small, expressionless eyes. Was that evil she could see? Pure, unadulterated evil? A weapon to be used for power and oppression, used by wife-beaters and dictators and terrorists with the same insane delusions of grandeur about their right to control: you do as I say, and if you don’t I’ll kill you. Or was she looking at something else, an indifference to life? Like Osama bin Laden, the son of a wealthy man who had finally felt validation when he had won a battle against the Soviet Union in the Afghan mountains just before the end of the war, a man who became a war hero and felt obliged t
o find himself a new war. He had certainly managed that, starting a self-proclaimed war against an enemy he knew little about, an enemy he called the Great Satan, and other young men without a cause suddenly found they had something to do, something to care about: they were going to fight for a God they had invented.

  ‘Was this film posted on a server in Mogadishu as well?’

  ‘No,’ Halenius said. ‘It’s from Kismayo, a Somali city on the shore of the Indian Ocean. It’s two hundred, two hundred and fifty kilometres from Liboi.’

  ‘What does that mean, in practical terms? Were the kidnappers in different places when they posted the recordings? Or can they control that from a distance? What sort of communications are they using? Satellite phones, mobiles, some sort of wireless internet?’

  Halenius fingered his chin. ‘I’ve had this explained to me, but I’m not sure I can repeat it …’

  She couldn’t help smiling. ‘Just the analysis, then.’

  ‘It isn’t possible to locate the kidnappers through the different servers they’ve been using. And the calls haven’t been traced either, or not according to the information I’ve received. To be honest, I don’t think the Yanks are telling us all they know – they usually keep things to themselves—’

  He was interrupted by a persistent ringing on the doorbell.

  ‘Show time,’ Annika said.

  Halenius gave her a quizzical look.

  She went out into the hall, the bell still ringing. There were only two types of people who would behave so intrusively at eleven o’clock on a Sunday evening: a reporter from an investigative social affairs programme on television, or a journalist from an evening paper, and she doubted the former would be trying to get hold of her tonight. The bell kept ringing. She glanced towards the children’s room: it was only a matter of time before he woke them both. She took a deep breath, unlocked the door and stepped on to the landing. A flash went off, dazzling her.