Borderline (12 page)

Through the wall she could hear Halenius talking loudly and quickly in English. Annika crouched beside Kalle and gave him a hug. ‘Jimmy’s talking to some people who might be able to help us free Daddy,’ she said. ‘What do you want for breakfast?’

‘Not scrambled eggs,’ Kalle said.

‘Okay,’ Annika said, standing up. ‘You can have them boiled. Or Greek yoghurt with walnuts.’

‘Have we got any raspberries?’

She’d given the last of them to Halenius with his cake the previous evening. ‘You can have jam,’ she said.

Ellen was sitting in bed, playing with her stuffed toys. She had eighteen, and they all lived on her bed, although only Poppy was allowed to lie on the pillow with her. Annika got into bed beside her, tickled her tummy, and they agreed it was time for breakfast. She went into the kitchen to get it ready.

The phone rang in the bedroom: the landline, their home number.

Annika froze mid-stride. They had been expecting the kidnappers to call that evening, if at all. She strained her ears to hear what Halenius was saying, and thought she could hear him muttering in Swedish. Then he hung up.

‘You’ll have to tell Anne Snapphane to stop calling the landline,’ Halenius said, then went into the bathroom. She could hear him peeing behind the thin wooden door as she got out the yoghurt.

‘Put the dishes in the sink when you’ve finished,’ she told the children, then went into the living room with her work mobile.

She had had it switched off since TV4 had called, and once the phone picked up a signal thirty-seven new text messages flooded in. She clicked to mark all as read, then called Anne.

‘Bloody hell, Annika!’ Anne said. ‘This is terrible. Absolutely ghastly! And who was that man who answered your phone?’

Halenius came out of the bathroom and passed her on his way to the bedroom.

‘Someone from Telia, here to fix the phone,’ she said, watching him as he passed. ‘Have you seen the papers?’

‘The papers? So old-fashioned!’ Anne said. ‘You’re out of touch.’

Their ongoing argument about the internet revolution and social media was almost as old as the papers themselves. Annika smiled. ‘What are the soothsayers on the blogs saying?’

‘Well, do you know what they usually do to people they kidnap down there? It’s outrageous!’

Annika got up from the sofa and went over to the window. The thermometer outside said it was minus fifteen. ‘I’m not sure I really want to know. I only care about my own husband right now. Do any of the bloggers know where he is?’

‘Very funny. The Kenyan government’s Facebook page has got more than fifty-one thousand likes. We’re everywhere.’

‘I feel much safer knowing that,’ Annika said, and realized she sounded like an advert for nappies.

‘Okay, I’ve been thinking,’ Anne said. ‘It’s in your name, isn’t it?’

Kalle came into the living room with yoghurt on his top lip. ‘I’ve finished,’ he said.

‘What?’ Annika said. ‘What’s in my name? Go and wash, Kalle, brush your teeth, then put some clothes on.’

‘The flat, because you’re not actually married, are you? The divorce went through, but you never remarried, did you?’

‘Aren’t we going to school today?’ Kalle said.

‘Housing associations are completely unscrupulous,’ Anne said. ‘If they get a chance to chuck you out, they’ll do it, then sell the contract to the highest bidder. Everyone knows that’s how it works.’

Anne had just bought a contract on the black market, so she probably knew what she was talking about.

‘You can have the day off,’ Annika told Kalle. ‘And maybe you could go and stay with someone this weekend, one of your grandmothers.’

Ellen, who had yoghurt on her fingers, grasped one of Annika’s legs. ‘I want to stay with you, Mummy.’

‘Annika! Do you know what else occurred to me? You’re not married so everything will go to his brother and mother. Have you thought about that? It could end up like Stieg Larsson all over again if he hasn’t got a will. Has he got one?’

‘Ellen, you’ve got yoghurt all over my dressing-gown. Go and wash, do your teeth, then get dressed. Quick march!’ She shepherded her out into the hall.

‘Do you know if he’s got a solicitor? Or a safe-deposit box in a bank? You’ll have to go through his computer and personal papers.’

The doorbell rang.

Halenius came out into the living room and pointed towards the hall. ‘Anders Schyman,’ he said. ‘I’ll get it.’

‘The children would inherit everything,’ Annika said into her mobile. ‘I’ve got to go – there’s someone at the door.’

‘Ah, of course. Yes, Stieg didn’t have any children.’

‘And, Anne,’ Annika said, ‘could you call me on my work mobile from now on? There’s something wrong with the landline. Got to run.’

Schyman wasn’t alone: Berit Hamrin had come with him.

Annika hurried into the bedroom, shut the door and threw on the previous day’s clothes. Oddly, it seemed far more reasonable for the under-secretary of state at the Ministry of Justice to see her half naked than her boss.

The editor-in-chief had brought a bundle of newspapers with him: their own, the main competition, the two morning papers and a couple of the free-sheets. He dropped them all on to the coffee-table; they landed with a dusty thud. The
Evening Post
was on top, with Thomas smiling at her from the front page, a tie knotted tightly round his neck.

It was his official photograph from the department. He always said he thought it made him look pushy.

‘There’s something I want to talk to you about,’ Schyman said to Annika. ‘There’s no hurry. You don’t have to give me an answer until tomorrow.’

Annika picked up the paper. Swedish father of two, Thomas, hostage in Kenya.

The floor started to sway and she let go of the paper as if it were burning her.

Berit came over and gave her a hug. She’d never done that before. She knew Annika wasn’t much of a hugger. ‘It’ll be all right,’ she whispered. ‘You just need to get through it.’

Annika nodded. ‘Do you want coffee?’ she asked.

‘Please,’ Schyman said.

‘Not for me,’ Berit said. ‘I was thinking of asking if Ellen and Kalle would like to go to Kronoberg Park with me.’

The children roared with delight, and hurried to get dressed.

Annika went into the kitchen and filled the kettle with trembling hands. She could hear the men talking but not what they were saying. Berit was helping Ellen with her shoes. ‘Would you like to come?’ Berit asked.

Annika stood in the kitchen doorway. ‘I don’t dare leave them alone here,’ she said, trying to smile in the direction of the living room. ‘I want to keep an eye on what they’re doing.’

‘We’ll be back in an hour or so,’ Berit said. ‘Are those your sledges out in the stairwell?’

‘The blue one’s mine!’ Ellen yelled.

They disappeared in a cacophony of heavy shoes and bright voices.

Over the noise of the kettle she could hear Schyman and Halenius talking in relaxed but clear voices, the sort powerful men use when they want to show that they’re at ease but still focused.

‘… obviously a great deal of interest from the rest of the media,’ Schyman was saying, in a tone of cheery acceptance.

She opened the fridge and stared into its cool interior without seeing anything.

‘… and in Nigeria the heads of the foreign oil companies are called “white gold”, or just “ATMs”, cash machines,’ Halenius said, sounding confident and well-informed.

She got out cream, milk and liver pâté, then put back the pâté and the milk.

‘… of course we want to know what we can expect, which scenarios are most likely,’ Schyman said eagerly.

She plugged in the electric whisk and whipped the cream, even though there was still some left from the previous evening. She closed her eyes and kept them tightly shut for so long that the cream almost turned into butter. There were no raspberries left, but she heated some jam and put it into a bowl. She made instant coffee in three mugs, then got out a tray and loaded it with the mugs, three side-plates, coffee spoons, milk, sugar, jam, cream, a cake-slice, three forks, and the rapidly drying-out sticky chocolate cake. There was only just room for the cake on the tray: it balanced dangerously close to the edge. She stopped for a moment in the hall.

‘What are the odds?’ Schyman said, through the wall.

‘The prognosis is good. Nine out of every ten kidnap victims survive, although there’s some evidence that the number of dead is rising.’

So one in ten doesn’t make it, Annika thought.

‘And they get home in reasonable condition?’

Reasonable condition?

‘Another twenty per cent of victims suffer severe physical injury …’ Halenius fell silent as she walked in. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘That cake is lethal.’

She put the tray on the coffee-table, then sat at the far end of the sofa without unloading it. ‘Help yourselves,’ she said.

Halenius and Schyman did just that. The thought of eating anything sweet made her feel sick, but she picked up the dark blue coffee mug with the words ‘The White House’ embossed in gold. It wasn’t from the White House but a souvenir stand outside, about as genuine as a Chinese Volvo.

‘We were talking about what usually happens in kidnap situations,’ Halenius said, filling his mouth with cream and jam. ‘Do you want to hear?’

As if words could make any difference. As if the situation could be made any worse by the dangers being spelled out. She huddled in the corner of the sofa.

‘Abuse is fairly usual,’ Halenius said, without looking at Annika. ‘Although, of course, we have no idea what will happen in this specific case.’

‘What scenarios are you working on?’ Schyman asked.

The doorbell rang again. She got quickly to her feet. ‘That could be our colleagues from the rest of the media,’ she said.

At first she didn’t recognize the men in the stairwell. They were standing silent and grey in their raincoats, staring at her.

She closed the door without saying anything, went back into the living room and felt her brain steaming. ‘What is this?’ she said. ‘Have I become some sort of outpost of Rosenbad?’

Halenius got to his feet, gazing at her quizzically.

‘Hasse and Hasse are standing outside,’ Annika said, gesturing towards the front door. ‘But enough’s enough. Tell them to leave.’

‘They might want—’

‘Tell them to send an email,’ she said, and went into the bathroom.

She heard Halenius go out into the stairwell and have a short conversation with the two men called Hans. Then he came back in, alone, shut the door and returned to the living room. ‘Colleagues from the department,’ he said apologetically to Schyman.

The legs of an armchair scraped the wooden floor.

‘Do you think you could give an overview of an incident like this?’ the editor-in-chief said.

‘That depends on what sort of crime it is. Commercial kidnappings are often easier to resolve. Politically motivated ones are considerably more complicated, and often more violent.’

‘Daniel Pearl,’ Schyman said.

Annika locked the bathroom door.

She had written an article about the Pearl case during her time in the USA. Daniel Pearl had been a journalist, head of the
Wall Street Journal
’s office in South East Asia when he was kidnapped by al-Qaeda in January 2002. Nine days later he was beheaded. The video had still been on the internet several years later – maybe even now – three minutes and thirty-six seconds of utterly revolting propaganda. She had forced herself to watch it. Daniel Pearl addressed the camera, naked from the waist up, with images of dead Muslims surrounding his face. After one minute and fifty-five seconds a man came into shot and cut Pearl’s throat. The last minute of the video consisted of a list of political demands scrolling across the screen over the image of the journalist’s severed head. Someone was holding it up by the hair.

‘Female kidnap victims are often raped,’ she heard Halenius say quietly, in the living room. ‘Men too, for that matter. In Mexico ears or fingers are amputated and sent to the victim’s family. In the former Soviet Union it’s teeth.’

‘And in East Africa?’ Schyman asked, almost in a whisper.

She straightened and pricked her ears.

Halenius cleared his throat. ‘I don’t have any exact statistics, but mortality rates are high. The kidnappers have plenty of weapons. It’s striking how many hostages end up getting shot. And Somalia is a country where amputations form part of the legal system. It’s traditional that all the external parts of young girls’ genitals are cut off …’

She turned on the cold tap in the basin and let the water run over her wrists. She felt like crying, but was too angry. There had to be limits. She didn’t want to hear about mutilated little girls. She needed help, but not at any cost. The government might want to keep its hands clean, but she refused to accept responsibility for all the violence in the world. She wasn’t going to surrender her home and her bedroom to a load of strange men.

She turned the tap off, dried her hands, unlocked the door and went out.

‘There seem to be several different motivations behind this kidnap, financial as well as political,’ Schyman said, as she wandered over to her corner of the sofa.

Halenius pulled his legs out of the way to let her pass. ‘Unless there’s a combination of motives that aren’t necessarily contradictory. When you consider the political situation in East Africa …’

Annika sank into the cushions. She hoped the children weren’t too cold up in Kronoberg Park. She had got frostbite in her left foot one winter’s day at her grandmother’s cottage at Lyckebo, on the Harpsund estate, which the old woman had been allowed to rent because of the years she had spent as housekeeper at the prime minister’s country residence. To this day Annika had problems with the toes of her left foot, which stiffened and turned bluish-white when there was frost. The first time Thomas had seen them he had been horrified and wanted to call for an ambulance. He’d never been very good at dealing with bodily matters. But no doubt he wasn’t freezing at the moment. It was probably very hot in Somalia, she thought, recalling the parched yellow soil in the satellite picture of Liboi.