Red Wolf: A Novel Read Online Free

street next to the Town Hall. There were free parking spaces outside the entrance, she noted with surprise.
    Her room had a view of the Norrbotten Theatre and Stadsviken, a strangely colourless picture in which the leaden, grey water of the river swallowed any light. She turned her back on the window, and rested the laptop against the bathroom door, taking her toothbrush and spare clothes out of her bag. Then she sat down at the desk and used the hotel phone to call the
Norrland News
. It took almost two minutes before a sullen female voice answered.
    ‘Could I speak to Benny Ekland please?’ Annika said, looking back out of the window. It was completely dark now. She listened to the mute hum of the line for several seconds.
    ‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Is Benny Ekland there? Hello?’
    ‘Hello?’ the woman said quietly.
    ‘My name’s Annika Bengtzon. I’m meeting Benny Ekland this week,’ Annika added, getting up and hunting through her bag for a pen.
    ‘So you haven’t heard?’ the woman said.
    ‘What?’ Annika said, taking out her notes.
    ‘Benny’s dead. We only found out this morning.’
    At first she almost laughed with the shock, then realized that it wasn’t funny and got angry instead. ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘We don’t really know what happened,’ the woman gulped. ‘Only that there was some sort of accident. Everyone on the paper’s just shocked.’
    Annika stood there, her notes in one hand, the phoneand pen in the other, staring at her own reflection in the window. She felt like she was floating.
    ‘Hello?’ the woman said. ‘Would you like to talk to anyone else?’
    ‘I . . . I’m sorry,’ Annika said, swallowing. ‘What happened?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ the woman said, now almost in tears. ‘I have to take another call now, then I’m done for the day. It’s been a terrible day, a terrible day . . .’
    Silence on the line again. Annika hung up, sat down on the bed and fought a sudden feeling of nausea. She saw that there was a local telephone directory under one of the bedside tables. She pulled it out, found the number for the police, dialled, and ended up talking to the station.
    ‘Ah, the journalist,’ the duty officer said when she asked what had happened to Benny Ekland. ‘It was out in Svartöstaden somewhere. You can talk to Suup in crime.’
    She waited, one hand over her eyes, as he transferred her, listening to the organic noises of the hotel: water rattling through a pipe in the wall, a rumbling ventilator outside, sexual groans from the TV in a neighbouring room.
    Inspector Suup in the criminal investigation department sounded like he had reached the age and experience where very few things actually shook him.
    ‘A bad business,’ he said with a deep sigh. ‘I must have spoken to Ekland every day for the past twenty years. He was always on the phone, like a dog with a bone. There was always something he wanted to know more about, something he had to check but which we really couldn’t tell him, and of course he knew that. “Listen, Suup,” he used to say, “I can’t make sense of this, what about this, or that, what the hell do you lot spend yourtime doing, unless you’ve got your thumbs rammed up your backsides . . .”’ The inspector gave a quiet, sad little laugh.
    Annika stroked her forehead, hearing the German porn-stars faking their noisy orgasms on the other side of the wall, and waited for the man to go on.
    ‘It’ll be empty without him,’ Suup eventually said.
    ‘I was supposed to be meeting up with him,’ Annika said. ‘We’d arranged to compare notes. How did he die?’
    ‘The post mortem isn’t done yet, so I don’t want to speculate about the cause of death.’
    The policeman’s measured note of caution unsettled her. ‘But what happened? Was he shot? Beaten to death? Stabbed?’
    The inspector sighed once more. ‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘it’ll get out anyway. We think he was run over.’
    ‘Run over?’
    ‘Hit at high