Red Wolf: A Novel by Liza Marklund Read Free Book Online Page B

said.
    ‘How’s your headache?’
    Anne closed her eyes, seeing the strip lighting in the ceiling as blue stripes through her eyelids.
    ‘Same as before,’ she said. ‘I’ve started getting pretty wobbly as well.’
    ‘Do you really think it’s just stress? Couldn’t you take things a bit easier?’ Annika sounded genuinely worried.
    ‘I’m trying,’ Anne mumbled, letting out a deep breath.
    ‘Have you got Miranda this weekend?’
    She shook her head, a hand over her eyes. ‘She’s with Mehmet.’
    ‘Is that good or bad?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know if I can do this any more.’
    ‘Course you can,’ Annika said. ‘Come round to mine tomorrow. Thomas is playing tennis, I’ll get some macaroons.’
    Anne Snapphane let out a snort of laughter and dried her eyes.
    When they had hung up Annika drove on with a nagging anxiety in her gut. For the first time she was starting to think that there was something physically wrong with Anne. Over the years her hypochondriac friend had been to Dr Olsson with every symptom known to modern medicine, and up to now she had only ever needed antibiotics twice. Once she got some cough syrup as well, and when she found out it contained morphine she had phoned Annika in horror, imagining that she had become an addict. Annika couldn’t help smiling at the memory.
    Slowly she swung off the road and in among the residential area of Svartöstaden. This really was another country, or at least another town. Not Luleå, and not really Sweden. Annika let the car drift through the shanty town, astonished by its atmosphere.
    The Estonian countryside
, she thought.
Polish suburbs
.
    The headlights played across shabby wooden façades of yards and outhouses and sheds, leaning roofs and ramshackle fences. The buildings were small and misshapen, could have been built out of orange boxes. The paint was peeling off most of them, the uneven hand-blown glass in the windows twinkled. She passed acharity shop selling clothes in aid of the struggle for freedom, although whose freedom was unclear.
    She pulled up behind a recycling site on Bältesgatan, left her bag in the car and got out. The noise from the ironworks was a faint song in the distance. She took a few slow steps, looking over the fences into the yards.
    ‘Are you looking for someone?’
    A man in a woolly hat and work-boots was coming towards her from one of the gingerbread houses, glancing at her hire-car.
    Annika smiled. ‘I was just passing and had to stop,’ she said with her hands in her coat pockets. ‘What an amazing place.’
    The man stopped, straightening up.
    ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is a bit unusual. An old workers’ district from the turn of the last century. Strong sense of cohesion. There’s real community spirit here. People often don’t want to leave.’
    Annika nodded politely. ‘I can understand why people end up staying.’
    The man pulled a cigarette from an inside pocket, lit it, then took the conversational bait and started talking.
    ‘We’ve got a nursery nowadays,’ he said, ‘with three classes. We had to fight for years before the council gave in. The school takes kids up to thirteen, and there’s a youth club with broadband. We’re going to have to fight to keep the old ironwork manager’s house; we never seem to get out of this obsession with pulling things down.’
    He exhaled a hard plume of smoke, looking at her from under the rim of his hat.
    ‘So what are you doing here?’
    ‘I was supposed to be meeting Benny Ekland, but when I got here I found out he’d been run over.’
    The man shook his head, stamping his feet. ‘Bloody awful business,’ he said. ‘On his way home, and he gets run down like that. Everyone thinks it’s terrible.’
    ‘Everyone here knows everyone else?’ she asked, trying hard not to sound too inquisitive.
    ‘For good and ill,’ he said, ‘but mostly good. We take responsibility for each other, there’s too little of that in