Borderline (31 page)

‘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 he, 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.’

Jimmy Halenius had called him just before the meeting and told him that Thomas Samuelsson had probably had his left hand cut off, but the editor-in-chief had no intention of mentioning that now.

‘The Spaniard yesterday was good,’ Patrik said, ‘but now we’re running on empty again.’

‘We’ve got pictures of him being reunited with his partner and mother,’ Picture-Pelle said.

‘Has he said anything else? Anything about Thomas Samuelsson?’ the girl from the online edition asked.

Schyman closed his eyes in despair, and Patrik groaned. ‘Not a word. He’s put out a statement through some press spokesman that he wants to be left in peace. Have we got any more about the guy in the turban?’

Schyman blinked uncomprehendingly.

‘The Butcher of Cairo,’ Patrik added.

Anders Schyman could see Thomas Samuelsson’s elegant figure in front of him, wearing a suit but no tie, and tried to imagine him without his left hand.

Halenius hadn’t been able to judge if the mutilation was a way to exert more pressure about the ransom, or the usual sadistic cruelty. They had agreed that it was probably a mixture of the two.

‘I want a double-page spread on the kidnapping,’ Schyman said. ‘Pictures of the victims, maybe, with heavy captions along the bottom: MURDERED, CAPTIVE, FREED. Run the basic facts again, who the hostages are, how they died, all that.’

He wasn’t about to let it go: it could well prove to be the lead story over the weekend. The handover of the money and release of the hostages constituted the most critical phase of the entire kidnap story, according to Jimmy Halenius. Once the money had been delivered, the victim became a dead weight and no longer served any purpose. The majority of deaths among hostages occurred after the ransom had been paid. Either they never turned up or were found dead.

Patrik wasn’t impressed. ‘We need something to have happened. That’s just heating up leftovers.’

‘Get your saucepans out then,’ Schyman said. ‘What else?’

Patrik looked down at his notes unhappily. ‘It’s time we did dieting again,’ he said. ‘I’ve put one of the temps on to it.’

Schyman made a note and nodded, good idea.

In the past articles had been published because people had contacted the newsroom and tipped them off about different events or stories, such as the fact that they had lost weight on some fantastic new diet. But that was a long time ago. These days, the newspaper’s front pages and fly-sheets were planned to fit a predetermined timetable based upon sales figures (unless something exceptional happened, like Swedish fathers-of-two being kidnapped or serial killers stalking Stockholm’s suburbs). When it was time for a new diet story, they had always started,

LOSE WEIGHT

WITH NEW

MIRACLE

DIET!

They had gone out and found the diet. There were always plenty to choose from. Then they found a professor who could verify the miraculous nature of this particular diet. All that was left was to get hold of a really good case-study with before and after pictures, preferably a decent-looking young woman who’d gone from size twenty-four to twelve in three months.

‘Anything else?’ Schyman asked.

‘It’s the anniversary of Karl the Twelfth’s death tomorrow, so the baby Nazis will probably be out waving their swastikas. We’ve got people on it. It’s also twenty-five years since reactor number one at Chernobyl was shut down. It’s Winston Churchill and Billy Idol’s birthday, and it’s your name-day.’

Schyman suppressed a yawn. ‘Shall we move on?’

‘Media Time called,’ Patrik said. ‘They were asking if you wanted to comment on your concussion.’

Anders Schyman leaned back carefully in the conference-room chair and felt with every fibre of his being that it was time for him to do something else.

* * *

‘We’ve been to Skansen!’ Ellen said. ‘And do you know what, Mummy? We saw an elk! A great big brown one! It had really big horns and a little calf with it – the baby was super cute.’

Annika swallowed a sigh. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea that the children were at an American school.

‘Was it really the elk with the horns that had the calf with it?’ she said, into the phone (she had read somewhere that you shouldn’t point out when a child made a mistake, just repeat the words in the right way). ‘It’s usually bull elks that have horns, and the calves normally go with the cow elks …’

‘And Sophia bought fizzy drinks for us. Kalle had Coke and I had a lemon Fanta.’

‘I’m glad you’re having fun.’

‘And tonight we’re going to watch a film,
Ice Age 2
–
The Meltdown
. Have you seen it, Mummy?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Here’s Kalle.’ She passed the receiver to her brother.

‘Hello, darling, are you having a nice time?’

‘I miss you, Mummy.’

She smiled and felt tears welling up. He was so incredibly loyal. He probably hadn’t thought about her all day, but he wanted to reassure her that she was the most important person to him. ‘I miss you too,’ she said, ‘but I’m really happy that you can spend a few days with Sophia while we try to get Daddy home.’

‘Have you talked to the kidnappers?’

Where had he learned all the phrases?

‘Jimmy has. We hope they’re going to let him go soon.’

‘They killed that woman,’ he said.

She shut her eyes. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘they did. We don’t know why. But they let a man go yesterday, a Spanish man called Alvaro, and the last time he saw Daddy he … was all right.’ She couldn’t bring herself to say, ‘He was alive.’

Kalle sniffed. ‘I miss Daddy too,’ he whispered.

‘So do I,’ Annika said. ‘I hope he’ll soon be coming home.’

‘But what if he doesn’t? What if they kill him too?’

Annika gulped. Even at the post-natal clinic they had said you should never tell children something didn’t hurt if it did. ‘Darling, sometimes people get kidnapped, but they usually get back home to their families. We just have to hope that happens with Daddy.’

‘But
if
?’

She dried her eyes. ‘In that case we’ll have each other. You and me and Ellen, Sophia too.’

‘I like Sophia,’ Kalle said.

‘Me too,’ Annika said, and it might well have been true.

She let herself slowly sink back to earth. She had made a meal that she hadn’t been able to eat. She had written some more of her article, trying to capture the feeling of receiving incomprehensible news. She had watched the news and
Antiques Roadshow
without understanding what they were talking about.

Halenius was talking English in the bedroom, she didn’t know who to.

She could just give in to this. She could stay on the sofa and sink down to the basement, then through the rock, past the underground tunnels and sewage pipes. Stockholm’s underworld was like Swiss cheese, full of passageways and cubbyholes. She didn’t have any sense of direction and could wander around down there for all eternity, hopelessly lost among the drains and water-damaged electricity cables.

She took a deep breath, got to her feet and went into the children’s room. She ran her hand over their toys and duvets, picked up Kalle’s pyjamas from the floor. The aftermath of her attempt to clear their wardrobes was piled against the wall.

She paused, absorbing the children’s presence from the walls and bedclothes, feeling their breath as a pulse in her stomach.

It was going on, and on, and on.

Human beings were not their disabilities. They were not defined by them. A disability was a circumstance, a condition, not a characteristic.

‘Annika? Can you come?’

She dropped the pyjamas and went to Halenius in the other bedroom. He had put his mobile down and was sitting with headphones on, typing something on his computer.

‘I heard you mention the German woman’s name,’ she said, sitting on the bed.

He switched off the audio file, pulled off the headphones and turned towards her. ‘She’s been released,’ he said. ‘At the roadblock where they were kidnapped. She followed the road back towards Liboi and was found by a military patrol just outside the town.’

Annika tucked her hands under her thighs and tried to work out what she was feeling. Relief? Injustice? Ambivalence? She couldn’t tell.

‘She was subjected to some of the same treatment as the British woman. The guards raped her and the remaining male hostages were forced to … but Thomas refused. The leader chopped his left hand off with his machete.’

Annika was staring at the window. All she could see was her own reflection.

‘This morning she was taken to a car, driven around for several hours, then thrown out by the roadblock.’

‘When did it happen?’

‘The rape? Yesterday morning.’

Thomas had been without his left hand for a day and a half.

Annika went into the living room for the video-camera. ‘Can you say that again, please?’ She raised the camera, located Halenius in the fold-out screen, and gave him a thumbs-up to begin.

‘My name is Jimmy Halenius,’ he said, looking into the lens. ‘I’m sitting in Annika Bengtzon’s bedroom, where we’re trying to get her husband back home.’

‘I was thinking more the bit about the German woman,’ Annika said.

‘I’ve often imagined myself here,’ he said, ‘in her bedroom, but not under these circumstances.’

She kept the camera where it was, wary now.

He looked away for a moment, then back, and their eyes met through the screen.

‘Helga Wolff has been found outside Liboi this evening, exhausted and dehydrated, but without any other physical injuries. It isn’t clear whether or not any ransom was paid to secure her release, but it seems likely.’

‘You sound like a block of wood,’ Annika said, lowering the camera.

Halenius switched off his computer. ‘I think I’ll go home and get some sleep,’ he said.

She kept hold of the camera, but lowered it to her side. ‘But what if they call?’

‘I can forward calls on your landline to my mobile.’ He started to gather his things.