She was practically screaming, and the soldiers pulled back.
‘Madam, we aren’t—’
‘He was here to help Kenya secure its borders, and what thanks did he get for it? Well? What sort of men are you?’
‘Annika …’ Halenius said.
She screamed up at the roof. There were bats up there – she couldn’t see them but she could smell them.
The ground was stony. She passed homes made of tin and branches, blankets and mattresses. The road was covered with rubbish. No cars, just donkeys and carts.
She cried against the light.
They were taking her to the police station, one of the low white buildings she had seen in the distance. The door was painted blue, and through the window she could see a tangle of electricity cables.
A man (the chief of police?) received them in his office, the size of the lift back home in Agnegatan. A fan squeaked rhythmically on the ceiling, without actually creating any draught. Several other policemen crowded in and stood round the walls.
‘You’re here for an aid project?’ the man (the police chief?) asked, gesturing towards some chairs crammed next to his desk.
Halenius sat down, but Annika remained standing. She noticed that she had stopped crying. She felt empty inside, hollow. ‘No,’ she said. ‘My husband, Thomas Samuelsson, was kidnapped near here ten days ago. The Kenyan authorities were supposed to guarantee his safety, but you failed. I wonder what you, as chief of police, have to say about that?’
The police chief stared at her. ‘You’re the wife of one of the hostages?’
‘The Swedish man, Thomas Samuelsson,’ she said. ‘It was his hand you found in a box outside here a few days ago.’
She started to feel dizzy, and grabbed the edge of the desk with both hands. The police chief wrote something on a piece of paper.
‘Can you give me a description of your husband?’
‘A description? What for?’
‘Hair colour, height, distinguishing features?’
She was panting. ‘Blond,’ she said. ‘One metre, eighty-eight centimetres tall. Blue eyes. He was wearing a pink shirt when he went missing.’
The police chief stood up and left the room, then came back with a file. ‘This arrived from Dadaab yesterday evening,’ he said. ‘A shepherd found a white man outside his manyatta south of Dadaab yesterday morning. He was lying on the ground and the shepherd thought he was dead. But he was alive, and the shepherd got a team from UNHCR to collect him. The man is at the medical centre in Camp Three.’
Annika’s knees gave way and she sat down beside Halenius. ‘Do you know who he is?’
‘He hasn’t been identified. The information must have been passed to UNHCR headquarters, and the Red Cross, but the refugee situation in Dadaab is chaotic and things like this take time.’
Annika closed her eyes for several seconds. ‘Why are you telling me this?’
The police chief closed the file and looked at her intently. ‘The man had been maimed – his left hand was missing. And he was wearing a pink shirt.’
EPILOGUE
ELEVEN DAYS LATER
DAY 0
TUESDAY, 13 DECEMBER
Anders Schyman looked at the picture covering the centrefold with an ambiguous mixture of loss and euphoria. It showed endless rows of hospital beds and tents in the background, everything brown and grey, a visual depiction of the refugee camp’s hopelessness. The bed containing the blond man was in the middle, a woman leaning over him, putting her hand to his scorched cheek. At the bottom of the picture you could just make out the bandaged stump where the man’s left hand had been.
It was so beautiful it almost brought tears to his eyes.
In purely technical terms the picture was worthless (it was actually a still from a video recording), but it had struck home. The global rights to Bengtzon’s diary of the kidnapping had been sold to Reuters, and twenty seconds of her film had been shown on CNN.
He scratched his beard. It really was a hell of a story, the way Thomas had been left to die in a tin shack but managed to get out, then how Annika had found him, and their journey back to Sweden. They had sold a ridiculous number of papers, enough to overtake the competition. The next time the circulation figures were published, they would show that the Evening Post was biggest, which in turn meant that he could leave.
But this achievement wasn’t down to Annika Bengtzon alone, he reminded himself.
He closed the paper and looked at the front page:
SWEDEN’S
WORST
SERIAL
KILLER
ran the headline, next to a photograph of a smiling Gustaf Holmerud dressed up for a crayfish party.
The headline wasn’t actually true (as usual, he was on the point of thinking) because Sweden’s worst serial killer was an eighteen-year-old national service nurse from Malmö, who had killed twenty-seven old people in a hospital by feeding them corrosive disinfectant. Gustaf Holmerud had confessed to only five murders so far, but because the investigation was ongoing there was still hope of more.
He leafed through the paper.
Pages six and seven, always reserved for the biggest news stories, consisted of portrait photographs of five men and the headline: ‘CLEARED!’ The five were the husbands and boyfriends of the murdered women, and even this headline was misleading, at least in part. Oscar Andersson, one of the supposedly cleared men, had never been a suspect. The real news was that the prosecutor had initiated proceedings against Gustaf Holmerud on five counts of murder, which meant that suspicion against anyone else had been dropped.
He pushed away the paper and looked at the time.
Annika Bengtzon was late, which wasn’t like her. Schyman had always regarded her as a bit of a Fascist when it came to punctuality, which was an excellent quality in a news reporter. It didn’t matter how well you could write or what stories you managed to dig up if you couldn’t stick to a deadline.
‘Sorry,’ Annika said breathlessly, as she tumbled into his glass box. ‘The underground isn’t working, and I—’
He stopped her with a raised hand. She closed the door, dropped her bag and jacket on the floor and sank on to the visitor’s chair. Her cheeks were flushed with cold and her nose looked sore.
‘How’s Thomas?’ Schyman asked.
She caught her breath. ‘The infection has eased and the malaria’s almost gone,’ she said, putting the newspaper’s video-camera on his desk. ‘Do I need to sign anything when I hand this back?’
Schyman shook his head. ‘How’s he taking everything?’
‘Which bit? Losing his left hand? He hasn’t said anything about that yet – it probably feels fairly insignificant under the circumstances.’
He looked at Annika, her restless movements. She wasn’t remotely sentimental, which was another quality he appreciated. ‘Have you got a cold?’ he asked.
She looked surprised. ‘Why?’
‘Would you consider writing a chronicle about it?’
‘About having a cold?’
‘About Thomas, the whole situation, your lives now?’
She smiled faintly. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘For three million.’
He smiled back.
‘I saw they’d managed to locate where Thomas and the others were held captive,’ he said.
Annika nodded. ‘An abandoned manyatta twenty-three kilometres south of Dadaab,’ she said. ‘Thomas says they must have been driving round in circles, maybe because they didn’t know what to do with them. We’ll never know for sure.’
The Americans had announced triumphantly that they had blown up Grégoire Makuza on the day Thomas was found in the camp in Dadaab. The president had even made a short but forceful speech to the nation on the subject, but of course there was a presidential election next year.
Schyman hesitated for a few seconds, then took a deep breath. ‘Have you looked at mediatime.se recently?’
‘The Black Widow? Oh, yes.’
‘I
don’t think you should worry about it,’ Schyman said.
She shrugged. ‘The article was written by Anne Snapphane. We’re old friends, and everything in it is true. I did kill my boyfriend, and my husband has been maimed by terrorists. One of my sources was murdered and my house was burned down by a professional assassin. But to compare me to a spider that kills everyone close to it strikes me as something of an exaggeration.’
‘I thought Media Time were going to tidy up their act, or so they claimed when they launched their new television programme, Ronja Investigates.’
‘Was she the one who worked here as a temp a few years back?’ Annika asked.
‘How many journalists do you know called Ronja?’ Schyman asked.
‘Too many,’ Annika said, leaning over his desk and turning the paper round, still open at ‘CLEARED!’ and the five photographs. ‘This is really nasty,’ she said.
Schyman sighed. ‘Annika …’
‘I’ve started looking into it,’ she said. ‘I’ve already spoken to Viveca Hernandez. Linnea’s abuse started when she got pregnant. All the classic signs were there. She got hit if she looked at him the wrong way, hit if she said the wrong thing. He threw her out into the stairwell naked once – that was when Viveca found out what was going on.’
‘Annika …’
Her hand paused on the newspaper, but she didn’t look up at him. ‘I need to work,’ she said. ‘Otherwise there’s no point in it all. Not for me, and not for those women. They deserve it.’
‘Annika, I’ve handed in my notice.’
Now she looked at him. ‘What? When are you leaving?’
‘In May,’ he said.
She sat back in her chair. ‘I wondered how long you’d be able to bear it,’ she said. ‘Patrik and all his crappy made-up reporting. You look like a worm on a hook every time you have to keep a straight face when he comes up with another of his ideas. I know you say it sells, but I think those successes are fleeting, and very short-term. People aren’t that stupid. They can see through this.’
He regarded her in silence for a few moments. ‘You’re wrong,’ he said, ‘on all counts. People are pretty thick. They believe everything they read – just look at all the crap online. Half of Media Time’s readers now think you eat little children.’ He stood up. ‘And as far as Patrik is concerned,’ he went on, ‘I’ve suggested to the board that he should be my successor.’
She sat where she was, gazing up at him with those big green eyes. ‘That’s never going to work,’ she said quietly.
He stood there in silence, feeling unease creep down his spine.
‘You won’t be declared a hero just because the newspaper collapses without you,’ she said. ‘Quite the reverse. You’ll be the scapegoat. The board aren’t going to take any responsibility. They’ll blame everything on you. Surely you can see that.’
She got to her feet, then picked up her bag and coat. Schyman could feel his heart pounding, and puffed out his chest to hide it. ‘Think about my offer,’ he said. ‘A column about you and Thomas and your new life together now that he’s home. You won’t get three million for it, but maybe enough for you and the family to get away for a break in the new year.’
She pulled on her coat and put her bag on her shoulder. ‘That would be a bit tricky,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to be living with Thomas from now on.’
He stood there with his mouth half open, unable to find any words.
‘Thomas doesn’t know yet. I’m going to tell him today – I’m on my way to the Karolinska now.’
She slid the door open, closed it behind her, and was gone.
* * *
The sky fills my whole window. It’s low, solid as concrete, cool and grey.
Sometimes I see a bird fly past, like a black silhouette against the light, but apart from that the view is empty. I might have wished for a tree, or just a few bare branches.
It’s deathly dull here.
My hand has started to ache, the hand that is no longer there. Sometimes it itches between the fingers, sometimes the palm. That’s normal, they say.
I’m going to get a prosthesis.
They say they’re very good, these days. Some are controlled by Bluetooth: they react to muscle contractions and respond to pressure and movement. Soon there might even be one that can feel things. That’s a Swedish invention.
Annika’s been so fantastic. She’s listened and listened.
I’ll never be able to forget.
It got so quiet outside my shack. They brought me no water, no food. In the end I kicked the sheet of tin away from the doorway.
All the men were gone, the cars and guns. My memories stop out in the savannah. I don’t remember anything about the refugee camp, only Annika’s face above me in the plane on the way home to Sweden.
They haven’t found the Dane. His daughter thinks he’s alive, even though I’ve explained that he’s dead. She thinks I made a mistake.
Annika saved me. She took all the money she had and tried to free me, but by then it was already too late.
Kalle didn’t dare look at my hand to start with, but Ellen wanted to take the bandage off at once and investigate. She’s inherited Holger’s doctor genes.
I miss Annika so much. She’s been here as often as she can, but there’s so much to do, what with the children and Christmas and everything. She’ll be here soon – she’s bringing mulled wine and gingersnaps.
They say I’ll be able to go back to work, but I don’t know if I want to. My boss, Jimmy Halenius, has been an incredible source of support. He’s come in several times to see me. The prime minister and the minister of justice have sent their best wishes.
She’ll be here soon. I asked her to bring some Lucia buns as well, fresh ones, with raisins and lots of saffron.
I want us to celebrate Christmas in Vaxholm. If we’re lucky we’ll get snow this year again, a white Christmas.
It isn’t over, it’s only just beginning.
They say I’m going to be fine. Completely fine. Just with a prosthetic hand.
You can even learn to tie shoelaces, they say.
She’s here now. I can hear her coming – I recognize her footsteps in the corridor, her heels on the cork floor.
She’ll soon be here with me.
Acknowledgements
Let me start by repeating what I have said since I wrote my very first ‘author’s acknowledgements’ in the autumn of 1997: this is fiction. All the characters are entirely the creation of my own imagination. Although I conduct an almost absurdly comprehensive amount of research, the whole of Annika Bengtzon’s world takes shape inside my head. This means, for instance, that I am able to position American junior schools where they don’t actually exist, to describe invented routines and decision-making processes at newspapers, to rearrange the layouts of existing buildings, and to invent Sunday schools where they may never have existed.
There is, however, one thing that I want to emphasise quite specifically:
I don’t know if the Swedish government (or any other government, for that matter) has insurance that covers the kidnap of any members of its staff. I haven’t tried to find out. IF that is the case, and IF – against all expectation – they were to tell me about it (which is extremely unlikely), I wouldn’t have been able to write about it. Because to do so would increase the risk of Swedish personnel being kidnapped, both in Sweden, but even more so in other countries, and it would push up the ransom demands. Nor do I know if the Swedish government has paid for kidnap training from the FBI. IF they – against all expectation – have done so, I have no idea if an under-secretary of state would have received such training. But in this novel I have stuck to a fictitious scenario that may lie somewhere close to the truth, or possibly nowhere remotely near it. It is safer for all concerned if we don’t know which.
In order to put myself in the position of a kidnap victim, I read stacks of memoirs written by people who have been held hostage for varying amounts of time. The biograp
hies often describe in minute detail the routines and conditions of different stages of their captivity, which in the long run can be, frankly, incredibly monotonous. Few writers have truly managed to express the feeling of desperation and madness that they are actually trying to convey.
The outstanding exceptions are Terry Anderson’s Den of Lions, in which the former head of the Associated Press bureau in Beirut describes his almost seven years of captivity with Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Ingrid Betancourt’s Even Silence has an End, in which she describes her years with the FARC guerrillas in Colombia.
I have also found a number of academic books about kidnapping very useful, as well as books about the art of negotiating a ransom amount. The most important of these was Kidnap for Ransom – Resolving the Unthinkable by Richard P. Wright.
I would also like to thank the following people (their titles below refer to the positions they held at the time of my investigation):
Peter White, the pilot who flew me to Liboi.
Peter Rönnerfalk, senior consultant at Södermalm Hospital in Stockholm, who has once again helped me with medical details.
Cecilia Roos Isaksson from the National Bank of Sweden, Bengt Carlsson from Handelsbanken, Anna Urrutia from Forex Bank and Jonas Karlsson from Swedish Customs’ crime prevention unit, for information about the rules governing international money transfers.
The staff at Expressen newspaper in Stockholm, for allowing me to visit them for research purposes.
Sara Löwestam, my fellow author, for help with Swahili.
Nikke L., from whose blog (at reco.se) I borrowed the splendid remark about cucumber in aioli.
Anna Laestadius Larsson, from whom I borrowed the parallel between dirty toilets and child abuse.
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