Borderline

by Liza Marklund

  ‘Mummy,’ Ellen said, clutching her hand. ‘Why do we have to stay with Sophia?’

  GRENBORG, Annika read, on the brass sign on the door. She could still see the mark left by the removal of the sign bearing the name SAMUELSSON.

  She stroked her daughter’s hair. ‘Sophia’s asked about you lots of times,’ she said. ‘She missed you while you were in Washington, and wanted you to come and visit.’

  ‘I call her Sofa,’ Kalle said.

  Annika opened the folding gate of the lift and pulled the children and their little suitcases on to the landing. The cases were the ones they had used during the year they had spent shuttling between her and Thomas, and the sight of them made her stomach clench.

  ‘How long do we have to stay?’ Ellen asked.

  ‘Why can’t we go to school?’ Kalle said.

  She rang the bell. They heard quick footsteps and the door opened.

  Sophia Grenborg had cut her hair. Her blonde bob was shorter, almost boyish. She was dressed in black and wasn’t wearing any makeup. Her hand was trembling as she brushed her fringe from her forehead. ‘Welcome,’ she said, taking a step back into the flat (the penthouse apartment) to let them in.

  The children huddled behind Annika’s legs and she had to nudge them inside. Sophia Grenborg sank to her knees in front of them, and Annika saw tears in her eyes. ‘So big,’ she said in amazement, raising a hand towards Ellen without touching her. ‘You’re so big now.’

  Then Kalle walked straight into her arms and held her tight, and Ellen dropped her rucksack on the floor and went to Sophia for a hug too. The three of them stayed there rocking each other, and Annika could hear Sophia sobbing.

  ‘I’ve missed you so much,’ Sophia Grenborg said, into the children’s chests.

  Annika was breathing quietly through her mouth, and could feel her hands and feet growing, becoming heavy and clumsy, in danger of banging into the walls or telephone table.

  Thomas had abandoned her and the children in a burning house and come here, to this ice-palace. He had lived here with an open view across the rooftops while she had been living in an old office that was never touched by the sun. She knew it wasn’t his fault alone.

  ‘I really am very grateful,’ Annika said.

  Sophia looked up with tears in her eyelashes and snot under her nose. ‘I’m the one …’ she said. ‘I’m the one who should be thanking you.’

  There was a pale sun somewhere behind the white clouds. Annika was walking slowly through Stockholm back to her flat on Agnegatan, heading up Kungsgatan towards Hötorget from Östermalm. Hadn’t Abba recorded one of their videos on this street, ‘I Am The Tiger’? With Agneta driving around in an open-top American car with Anni-Frid sitting next to her, a handkerchief round her head? She had loved that song as a child: it reeked of the big city, danger, tarmac and adventure. Maybe that was why it wasn’t included in the musical Mamma Mia! – it didn’t suit the idyllic Greek setting.

  She stepped into the road to cross it. A bus braked sharply and the driver blew his horn. She jerked and leaped back on to the pavement, where she knocked into a pram, causing the mother to shout something incomprehensible at her.

  She waited for the bus to pass, then crossed to the other side, as carefully as if the road were made of glass. It was a road she walked down fairly often, even if it was a bit out of her way. She usually avoided going past the NK department store on Hamngatan because the ground always lurched there. It was where she had seen Thomas kiss Sophia Grenborg for the first time. The Christmas lights had been up, as they were now, red Father Christmases and flashing LED lights spreading fake cheer over the windswept streets.

  She walked quickly and jerkily the rest of the way, cruising between the yummy mummies, the homeless people and the businessmen.

  Halenius was waiting for her in the hall when she got back to her flat. He held out a printout to her. She saw the Ks and Ns and shook her head. ‘Just tell me what it says,’ she said, going into the living room. She didn’t want to hear the kidnapper’s squeaky voice, not even in written and translated form.

  ‘We’re almost there,’ Halenius said. ‘I think he’s going to agree to a million dollars today.’

  She sat on the sofa, leaned back and shut her eyes.

  ‘I’ve spoken to Frida,’ he said. ‘We can use her account. You can transfer the money whenever you like.’

  She pressed the palms of her hands to her eyelids. ‘One million dollars, to a Nigerian woman living in Kenya. And you think we’ll ever see the money again?’

  She heard him sit down on the sofa.

  ‘Her uncle is an oil tycoon in Abuja. The family isn’t short of money, to put it mildly. If I hadn’t told her the money was on its way, she’d never have noticed. Probably best to transfer a bit more than a million, just to be on the safe side.’

  She raised her head from the sofa and gave Halenius a quizzical glance. He handed a different printout to her. ‘A lot of Africans live in huts, but not all of them. Here’s her account number, the bank’s IBAN number and Swift address.’

  She took the sheet of paper, picked up her laptop and went into the children’s room. It was possible to send money abroad using the bank’s online service. She transferred everything that was in the account, 9,452,890 Swedish kronor, to the Kenya Commercial Bank, account holder Frida Arokodare. She filled in all the numbers, addresses and codes, chose 452 (‘other services’) for the tax office, accepted the transaction fee and pressed ‘send’.

  The money vanished instantly from her savings account.

  The balance glowed out at her in red: 0.00 kronor.

  She blinked at the screen, trying to imagine her burned house swirling around in cyberspace, floating as a series of figures through the electronic smog. She looked inside herself in an attempt to find any emotional response to the empty account: nothing.

  ‘How did you get on?’ Halenius asked from the doorway.

  ‘Fine,’ Annika said.

  The entire procedure had taken less than ten minutes.

  She slept for a while on Ellen’s bed, haunted by dreams. When she woke she was anxious and sweaty, and spent a long time standing under a cool shower. She prepared lunch for herself and Halenius (vegetarian pasta sauce, made with fresh tomatoes, peppers, onion, garlic, pesto and honey, and fettuccine).

  After that she shut herself into the children’s room and spent several hours working on her freelance article and filming herself (on Kalle’s bed this time), then went into the living room and sank down on the sofa.

  It was already dark outside. The streetlamps were casting shadows across the ceiling.

  Halenius was sitting in the armchair with a bundle of newspapers and journals in his lap. He waved the top one. ‘There’s a good article here about Kibera,’ he said. ‘A district in central Nairobi, often described as the biggest slum in the world, although that opinion’s been revised now.’

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ she said, studying him through the gloom.

  He raised his eyebrows.

  ‘It’s a bit personal,’ she said.

  He put the journal down. It was an African business magazine.

  ‘If you had the choice, would you have chosen to be born?’

  He was silent for a while. ‘Difficult to say,’ he said eventually. ‘There’s no obvious answer. Probably.’

  ‘Do you think it’s an odd question?’

  He looked at her thoughtfully. ‘Why do you ask?’

  She clasped her hands. ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that I’d rather not have been born. But saying so tends to be very provocative. Mum was furious, told me I was spoiled and ungrateful. Thomas was furious and accused me of not loving him and the children, but it’s not about that – of course I love them. It’s about whether you think life is worth the bother …’

  ‘I think I understand what you mean.’

  She shifted position on the sofa. ‘I know there’s no point in wondering why we’re here. If we were suppos
ed to know, we’d have all the answers by now, wouldn’t we? So there’s no sense in worrying about it. We aren’t meant to know.’

  ‘But?’ he said.

  ‘It just doesn’t feel like much of a reward,’ she said. ‘More like a trial. You have to get through it and try to do your best along the way, and of course there are things that are great, the children and work and a few summer days, but if I’d had the choice …’

  She brushed the hair from her face. ‘Do you think I’m spoiled?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘I understand that it might look like it. Especially when you’re aware of how much other people have to put up with.’ She pointed at one of the papers on the coffee-table – she presumed it was the Evening Post, but it might just as well have been the competition. The headline was ‘The Butcher of Kigali’, above a photograph of Thomas’s kidnapper, Grégoire Makuza.

  Halenius reached for the paper. ‘The Brits have dug up more detail about his background,’ he said.

  She looked out of the window. The sky was grey and dark red.

  ‘There were a number of testimonies at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, held in Arusha, Tanzania, describing a massacre in Makuza’s suburb in May 1994.’

  She sank deeper into the sofa.

  ‘Several thousand people were killed, women and young girls raped, teenage boys forced to eat their own testicles …’

  She put a hand to her mouth and turned to face the wall.

  ‘That would explain his unnaturally high voice,’ Halenius said quietly.

  ‘I don’t want to know,’ Annika said.

  ‘He had a sister in France. She was the eldest of the children, had left Kigali in the autumn of 1992 and was working illegally in a textile factory outside Lyon. She must have earned a bit of money because she paid for his education at university in Nairobi, until the penultimate term.’

  ‘Shame she didn’t carry on,’ Annika muttered.

  Halenius’s face was no longer visible in the darkness. ‘The factory caught fire and she died in the blaze. The fire escapes were blocked and there were no extinguishers. Makuza had to give up his education. Instead of returning to Rwanda he made his way to Somalia.’

  Annika got up and switched on the main light, then the lamps in the windows.

  ‘When did the fire happen?’ she asked, getting her laptop from the children’s room. The internet cable flowed behind her, like a snake.

  ‘It must be almost exactly five years ago now,’ Halenius said.

  She Googled factory fire lyon. It took a while to find the right result. It hadn’t been a particularly well-publicized event. A short article from the BBC World Service said that six seamstresses had died, and twenty-eight had survived. The factory made designer handbags, which cost tens of thousands of kronor in luxury boutiques, under the label Made in France. All of the dead were illegal immigrants, six of the hundreds of thousands in Western Europe who lived in conditions not far from slavery, people who had fled to get a better life but found themselves trapped in a cycle of debt to pay off their journey to the old, free world.

  There were no pictures to illustrate the article.

  ‘Not an excuse,’ Halenius said, ‘but an explanation.’

  His mobile phone rang and Annika shivered, as if she feared the worst. He disappeared into the bedroom, connected the phone to the recording equipment and spoke quietly, as he always did when he took important calls from the JIT in Brussels, the security services that were involved, the other negotiators, or the liaison officers from National Crime. He was speaking Swedish, which suggested that it was the latter who had called.

  Unless it was someone from the department. That lunchtime, a right-wing MP (a woman, to be specific) had reported the minister of justice to the Parliamentary Committee on the Constitution for exceeding his authority, so perhaps that was what they were discussing. Unless it was the embassy in Nairobi wanting to find something out. It could be any one of a number of interested parties.

  She made two mugs of coffee.

  When she returned to the living room, Halenius was standing there, white as a sheet.

  She put the mugs on the coffee-table.

  ‘Annika …’

  ‘Is he dead?’

  He walked over to her and took hold of her shoulders. ‘A box has been found outside the police station in Liboi,’ he said. ‘It contained a severed left hand.’

  Her legs gave way and she slumped on to the sofa.

  Halenius sat beside her and fixed his eyes on hers. ‘Annika, are you listening? I have to tell you this.’

  She was clinging to the arm of the sofa.

  ‘It’s a white man’s hand,’ he said. ‘It still has a plain gold ring on it.’

  The whole room began to spin, and she could feel herself starting to hyperventilate. They had really been too late to get the rings engraved – it was just before Christmas and all the goldsmiths were busy – but they had found a large man in a leather apron on Hantverkargatan who did it while they waited. It had added something extra to their engagement, the fact that they had found each other so late.

  ‘The inscription on the inside of the ring says Annika, and a date, thirty-one/twelve …’

  She pushed him away, stumbled through the hall to the bathroom and threw up. The vomit splattered across the porcelain sides of the toilet and hit her cheeks. She howled, the flush swirled. Her hands were tingling and her ears singing.

  She came to her senses, gasping into the toilet, and felt Halenius’s hands on her shoulders.

  ‘Can I do anything?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘The date, New Year’s Eve?’

  ‘The day we got engaged,’ she whispered.

  He sat on the bathroom floor and pulled her to him. Her teeth were chattering, and she cried silently until the fabric on the shoulder of his shirt was dark and wet. He rocked her gently and she clung to his shoulders. When she had calmed down and was breathing in little gasps against his neck he helped her to her feet.

  ‘Is he dead? Is he going to die?’ she asked, her voice hoarse.

  ‘Let’s go and sit on the sofa,’ Halenius said.

  She pulled off some toilet paper, blew her nose and dried her face.

  Astonishingly, the living room looked the same as before. The main light and the lamps were all lit, and the papers were in a pile on the coffee-table. Their mugs were still there, the coffee with skin on it now.

  They sat down beside each other on the sofa.

  ‘It’s not entirely certain that this is Thomas’s hand,’ Halenius said. ‘The ring is his, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the hand is. It was the guys from National Crime who called. They’re waiting for the analysis of the fingerprints. Then we’ll know for sure.’

  She took some deep, silent breaths. ‘Analysis?’

  ‘Everyone entering Kenya has their fingerprints taken by Customs.’

  She shut her eyes.

  ‘But even if it is Thomas’s hand, it isn’t necessarily an absolute disaster,’ Halenius said. ‘Is he right-handed?’

  Annika nodded.

  He stroked her hair. ‘Thomas will be okay,’ he said. ‘Having a hand amputated doesn’t kill you.’

  She cleared her throat. ‘But it must bleed really badly. Maybe he’s bleeding to death.’

  ‘It would bleed a lot. Apparently there are two arteries that run into the hand, but they contract out of some sort of reflex. If you help them by holding your arm up and applying a tourniquet, the bleeding stops after ten, fifteen minutes. The biggest danger is infection.’

  ‘It must hurt?’ she whispered.

  ‘The pain can make you pass out, and it aches really badly for two or three days.’

  She blinked at him. ‘The liaison officers knew all this? About arteries and reflexes?’

  ‘I called a doctor friend at Södermalm Hospital.’

  He really did think of everything. Now his eyes were edged with red again, as if h
e, too, had been crying. She stroked a lock of hair from his forehead, and he smiled at her. She pulled her legs up and curled into a ball with her head on Halenius’s lap. The glow from the lamps was reflecting off the glass in the windows, red and green against the winter sky, as the tassels on the shades swayed in an imperceptible draught. Soon she fell asleep.

  * * *

  The quality of our office furnishings matches our journalism and ability to hit deadlines, Anders Schyman thought, as he gingerly felt the bandage round his head.

  The six o’clock meeting was gradually slipping to half past six, sometimes even later, but it was still called the six o’clock meeting. It was already a quarter to seven. Schyman felt as if he’d been sitting at his desk for several centuries, while Entertainment and Features and Comment and Sport and Online and Pictures and the newsdesk made their way noisily into the room, slopping their coffee on the way to their time-honoured places.

  Schyman let out a deep sigh. ‘Shut the door and sit down so we can finally make a start.’

  The editors fell silent and looked at him expectantly, as if he was about to pull a rabbit from a hat, as if he set the agenda for the world.

  He nodded to Patrik. News was the most important department, he was always careful to emphasize that. Patrik was wriggling with excitement on his chair.

  ‘The police have a suspect for the suburb murders,’ he said triumphantly. ‘We haven’t had formal confirmation yet, but Michnik and Sjölander will be working on it during the evening.’

  Schyman nodded thoughtfully to himself. ‘The Suburb Murders’ wasn’t a bad name: they could use it as the overarching tagline. ‘Do we know any details?’ he asked, clicking his ballpoint pen.

  ‘There are witnesses who can link him to at least one of the murders, and his mobile phone left an electronic trace at another. So we’ve got our front page and fly-sheet for tomorrow.’ Patrik exchanged a high five with his deputy.

  Schyman touched his bandage. He’d had to have four stitches at the back of his head, and had managed to get blood on the latest set of annual accounts. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘let’s wait and see what we’ve got. We need to maintain interest in the kidnap story as well. Things are going to be happening there.’