Borderline (5 page)

I didn’t have the faintest idea where we were. Kenya? Somalia? Surely we hadn’t gone far enough north to be in Ethiopia. The night was dense in every direction, no sign of any town glowing on the horizon with its halo of electricity.

The men with guns were walking in front of and behind us. There were four of them, two young boys and two grown men. They weren’t Kenyan, according to Catherine. She could speak Arabic, Swahili and Maa (the local language of the Masai), as well as English, obviously, and she couldn’t understand what they were saying when they spoke among themselves. It might have been another of the sixty local Kenyan languages, but it wasn’t Bantu, or any of the Nilotic tongues. She guessed it was Somali, from the Afro-Asiatic, or East Cushitic, group of languages. One of the men, the tall one who had opened my car door, spoke to us occasionally in poor Swahili. Among other things, he told us that we were faithless dogs who deserved to die a slow and painful death, and that the Great Leader, or the Great General, would decide our fate. He called the man Kiongozi Ujumla, unless that was the word for ‘leader’ in one of his languages. Who or where the great leader was was unclear.

The two men ahead of us stopped. The tall one said something to the boys behind us, sounding tired and irritable. He was waving his hands and gun about.

One of the boys scampered off into the darkness.

The tall man pointed his gun towards us.

‘
Kaa! Chini! Kaa chini
…’

‘He’s telling us to sit down,’ Catherine said, and slumped to the ground.

I sat beside her. I could feel insects on my hands, but made no effort to brush them off. I lay down, and ants crawled into my ears. I got a hard kick in the back.

‘
Kaa!
’

I struggled up to a sitting position. Evidently the women were allowed to lie down, but not us men.

I don’t know how long I sat there. Cold was creeping into my sweaty, damp clothes, turning them ice-cold, and soon my teeth were chattering. Maybe I managed to sleep for a while, because suddenly the boy with the gun was back and the tall man shouted at us to get up (we didn’t need a translation of the Swahili: his gesture with his gun was perfectly clear).

We started to walk back the way we had come, or perhaps we didn’t, I don’t know, but Catherine couldn’t take any more. She collapsed into my arms and I fell to the ground, with her on top of me.

The tall man kicked her bad ankle and pulled her hair until she was on her feet again.

‘
Tembea!
’

The Romanian – I hadn’t caught his name at the reception and had forgotten to look in the notes to find out what it was – appeared at Catherine’s other side. I thought it was a bit forward of him to grab her as he did but I was hardly in a position to protest.

I don’t know if it’s possible to walk upright when you’re unconscious, but I know that I kept drifting in and out of consciousness for the rest of the night.

Faint signs of dawn started to show and suddenly we were standing in front of a wall of branches and dry bushes.

‘A
manyatta
,’ Catherine whispered.

‘This is completely unacceptable!’ the Frenchman cried. ‘I demand that we be given water and food!’

I saw the tall man walk up to Sébastien Magurie and raise the butt of his rifle.

Kalle always wanted chocolate milkshake in the morning. Annika wasn’t very keen on this – his blood-sugar rocketed, making him first hyperactive, then lethargic and irritable. They had reached a compromise: he could have it as long as he ate his bacon and scrambled eggs – fat and protein with a low glycaemic index. Ellen loved thick Greek yoghurt with raspberries and walnuts so Annika didn’t need to make a breakfast deal with her.

‘Can we go to the ice-hockey on Sunday?’ Kalle asked. ‘It’s the local derby, Djurgården against AIK.’

‘I’m not sure that’s a good idea,’ Annika said. ‘They’re usually quite violent, those derbies. The Black Army throw firecrackers on to the ice and the Stoves retaliate. No, thank you very much.’

Ellen, wide-eyed, had a spoonful of yoghurt poised halfway to her mouth. ‘Why do they do that?’

‘They’re fans,’ Kalle said. ‘They love their team.’

Annika shot Kalle a surprised look. ‘Love?’ she said. ‘Is that how you show that you love a team? By throwing fireworks at the players?’

Kalle shrugged.

‘I feel sorry for the fans,’ Annika said. ‘What dull lives they must have. They haven’t found anything to be interested in, not school, not work, not other people, not politics. Instead they devote themselves to a hockey team. Tragic.’

Kalle shovelled in the last of the egg and emptied his mug. ‘Well, I like Djurgården, anyway.’

‘And I like Hälleforsnäs,’ Annika said.

‘Me too,’ Ellen said.

They hadn’t asked about their dad. Annika didn’t mention him now, because what could she say?

The children brushed their teeth and got dressed without her having to nag.

For once they actually left home on time.

It was milder today. The sky was thick and colourless. There was a smell of damp and exhaust fumes. The snow on the streets already looked like brown coal.

The children’s school, the American International Primary School of Stockholm, was on the way to the newspaper, just behind Kungsholmen High School. She took them to the wrought-iron gate facing the street, gave Ellen a quick hug and watched them disappear behind the heavy oak door. She remained where she was, children and parents flooding past her through the gateway, boys and girls, mums and dads, a steady and powerful stream. There were a few hard hands and irritated voices, but mostly there was love, tolerance, patience and boundless pride.

She stayed until the torrent had subsided and her toes were frozen.

It was a good school, even if most of the teaching was in English. It certainly hadn’t been her idea for them to come here. Thomas had insisted that the children should carry on studying in English after they got home, but she was sceptical about the benefit to them. They were Swedish, and were going to live in Sweden: why make things more complicated?

She could hear his voice now: ‘Who’s making things more complicated? They’ll do Swedish in their language lessons anyway. Think of the advantage to them of being completely bilingual. Let them build on what they already know.’

And she had given in, but it wasn’t the children’s ability to communicate internationally that she cared about (to be honest, it didn’t bother her at all), but rather her own experience of the traditional, council-run Swedish school system. Kalle had had a rough time at the hands of the spoiled little monsters in his class who felt they had to assert themselves at someone’s expense, and preferably someone who didn’t make much of a fuss, like Kalle.

The thought hit her like a brick: what would she do if Thomas didn’t come back?

She had to lean against a wall, and concentrate on breathing steadily.

Would she go on sending the children there, as Thomas had wanted, or would she take them away? Would she honour the memory of her children’s father and allow his initiative to shape their upbringing? That would be her responsibility. She would be their sole custodian. This was her and the children’s lives she was dealing with …

As she stepped through the door at the paper she had no idea how she’d got there. The reception desk was swaying like an out-of-focus boat. By some miracle she managed to pull out her passcard and sail past it as if she was riding on a big wave.

Berit wasn’t in yet.

The newsdesk was still there, which steadied her. There was a smell of paper, extension leads and scorched coffee. She unpacked her laptop, logged into the network, went on to Facebook and immediately stumbled over Eva-Britt Qvist’s paean of praise to
Waiting for Godot
. She could hear her colleagues talking on the phone, news jingles, the rumble of the ventilation system. She pushed her laptop away and grabbed a copy of that day’s paper from the next table.

HARRIET ATTACKED – BY HER OWN HAND!

The front page was dominated by a picture of a fat woman in a hospital bed, scratching her face and apparently howling in pain. Evidently she was suffering from ‘alien hand syndrome’.

It was almost comforting. Her husband might have gone missing in north-eastern Kenya, but at least Annika wasn’t being attacked by her own right hand. Mothers with young children might be getting murdered, but at least she had a job to go to.

She leafed quickly through the news section, with hands that did exactly what she wanted them to.

Not one word about the mother murdered outside the nursery school in Axelsberg.

She tossed the paper into the recycling bin, went over to the sales analysts’ desk and borrowed (okay, stole) a copy of the prestigious morning paper. In the Stockholm section, under ‘news in brief’, there was a report about the dead body that had been found in a patch of woodland in Hägersten. No indication that a crime had been committed, no mention of the nursery school or of a human being. A dead body. Found. In a patch of woodland.

She despatched the morning paper the same way as its evening colleague, pulled her laptop closer and began to search the blogs.

On the internet there wasn’t a trace of the caution, ethical restraint or possible disinterest that the established media had shown towards the murdered mother. Speculation about what had happened to the dead woman behind the nursery school covered several pages. Most of the theories were presented as incontrovertible fact, and four names had been attributed to the victim. Either Karin, Linnea, Simone or Hannelore had lost her life: take your pick. Most had supplied her with too many children or no children at all, but one blog, ‘The Good Life in Mälarhöjden’, expressed concern, in a hideously misspelled post, over how poor little Wilhelm would manage, in much the same terms as Anne Snapphane had worried about Annika’s own children’s impending fatherless state.

‘And Linnea Sendman was allways so nice, even tho you could tell the divorse had been reelly awful …’

That might be something, if her name really was Sendman, but the name might have been misspelled too.

She searched for ‘linnea sendman’, and found pages on Facebook and LinkedIn, results from the Järfalla national swimming competition, that autumn’s new high-school students, and bingo!

She leaned closer to the screen. A post from a Viveca Hernandez, blogging at one of the
Evening Post
’s own servers.

When Linnea reported Evert to the police they took her seriously. The list of offences was so extensive and had been going on for so long that they said they were going to charge him with aggravated harassment. But they never did. Evert carried on as usual, calling at all hours of day and night, kicking the door and yelling so loudly it echoed up the stairwell. A week later Linnea called the prosecutor’s office and asked why they hadn’t picked him up, seeing as she’d filed an official complaint. The prosecutor told her that the crime had passed the statute of limitation. Abuse, unlawful threats and sexual assault of the sort she had described in her report had a time limit of two years. But aggravated harassment, Linnea said, had a limitation period of ten years, because she’d checked. Then the prosecutor told her the law didn’t work like that. Aggravated harassment wasn’t regarded as a continuous crime, apparently. Each offence had to be considered separately, and would have its own limitation period. He said that the ten-year period was purely hypothetical …

Annika was astonished. Could that really be true? She herself had written plenty of articles and interviewed loads of experts and lawyers about aggravated harassment, and she’d thought she had a fairly good idea of what the law meant.

For a woman living in a violent relationship it could be difficult to remember if she got her black eye on Thursday and the cracked rib on Friday, or the other way round. That was why the law concerning aggravated harassment had been passed, so that the abuse would be considered as a whole, not as various separate incidents. And the statute of limitations had been raised to ten years to underline the seriousness of this type of crime.

Had she misunderstood? It was possible, but wouldn’t that mean all the other journalists and lawyers had as well?

The phone on her desk rang. An internal call, judging by the screen. She picked up the receiver.

‘You can’t just switch your mobile off and unplug your landline when something like this is going on,’ Anders Schyman said. ‘Halenius has been trying to get hold of you all night. What if something had happened, if there was something to tell you?’

It sounded as if he was outside: there was a lot of wind and interference on the line.

‘So what?’

‘What?’

‘What’s happened?’

‘Nothing, as far as I know.’

‘So it didn’t make any difference that I unplugged the phone, did it?’

‘You’re behaving irrationally and irresponsibly,’ Schyman said angrily. ‘What if Thomas had tried to reach you?’

‘I have another mobile that Thomas calls me on. That one was switched on.’

In the background, she heard a large vehicle, a bus or lorry, thunder past, then heard Schyman yell, ‘Watch where you’re going, you fucking moron!’

When he came back he sounded more focused. ‘Halenius wants to inform you of the current situation, and tell you how the government is going to handle things. He can come round to yours or meet you somewhere in the city, but he can’t come here to the office again. They want to keep this under the radar for a bit longer.’

‘I don’t want him in my home.’

‘You can go to the department if you’d rather.’

‘Did you know that aggravated harassment doesn’t actually have a limitation period of ten years?’

A siren went past.

‘What did you say?’

She shut her eyes. ‘Nothing. Where are you?’

‘My wife’s just dropped me at Fridhemsplan. I’ll be in the newsroom shortly.’

They hung up. Annika pulled her laptop closer and logged on to one of Sweden’s biggest online databases. It wasn’t a comprehensive list of everyone in the country, but almost all of the phone numbers that weren’t ex-directory were listed there, usually with the address of the subscriber, maps and directions.