Borderline Read Free Page B

people from Africa to Europe and exploiting them, in some cases until they died.’
    ‘Sounds like slander of the deceased,’ Annika said, throwing her orange peel into the paper recycling bin and eating a segment. It tasted bitter.
    ‘According to the film, there are more slaves in the world today than ever before, and they’ve never been cheaper.’
    ‘That’s the sort of thing Thomas is busy with,’ Annika said, and ate another segment.
    ‘Frontex,’ Berit said.
    Annika threw the rest of the orange into the bin. ‘Exactly. Frontex.’
    Thomas and his fancy job.
    ‘I think it’s appalling,’ Berit said. ‘The whole Frontex project is an incredibly cynical experiment, a new Iron Curtain.’
    Annika logged into Facebook and scrolled through her colleagues’ status updates.
    ‘The point,’ Berit went on, ‘is to exclude the world’s poor from the riches of Europe. And with a central organization in charge, individual governments can shrug off a whole load of criticism. When they chuck people out, they can just refer to Frontex and keep their own hands clean, like Pontius Pilate.’
    Annika smiled at her. ‘And when you were young you were in the FNL and protested against the Vietnam War.’ Eva-Britt Qvist was looking forward to going to the theatre that evening; Patrik had eaten a thin-bread wrap forty-three minutes ago, and Picture-Pelle had posted a link to an
Evening Post
documentary that had been made in the summer of 1975.
    ‘Frontex’s latest idea is to get developing countries to close their borders themselves. All very practical. And in the developed world we, with our long-established freedoms, don’t have to deal with the issue. Gaddafi in Libya was given half a billion kronor by our very own EU commissioner to keep refugees from Somalia, Eritrea and Sudan in enormous concentration camps.’
    ‘True,’ Annika said. ‘That’s why Thomas is in Nairobi. They’re trying to get the Kenyans to close the border with Somalia.’ She got her mobile out and dialled his number again.
    ‘Didn’t you get a new phone?’ Berit wondered.
    ‘Yep,’ Annika said.
    ‘Hello, you’ve reached Thomas Samuelsson at the …’
    She clicked to end the call, trying to work out what she felt. The main question was who he was sleeping with that night. She no longer felt any anger at the thought, just resignation.
    That summer, when the family had returned to Sweden, Thomas had got a job as fact-finding secretary at the Agency for Guidance in Migration Issues. It wasn’t a particularly glamorous appointment and he had been pretty grumpy about it. He’d been expecting something better after his years in Washington. Maybe he’d consoled himself with the thought of all the conferences he’d be able to go to.
    Annika thrust the thought aside and called the public prosecutors’ office that had responsibility for crimes committed in the area covered by Nacka Council – they answered calls round the clock.
    But the operator was unable to help her find out which prosecutor was in charge of the investigation into a murder that had taken place in a car park in Fisksätra in August. ‘I can only go by what I’ve got on the screen,’ the woman said apologetically. ‘I’d have to transfer you to the office, but they close at three p.m.’
    Oh, well, it had been worth a try.
    She called the prosecutors’ offices in the Northern and Western Districts as well, but they couldn’t tell her who was in charge of the investigations into the murders at the beach in Arninge or the residential street in Hässelby. (But, in marked contrast, everyone always knew who was responsible for the sexy investigations, like security vans held up by a helicopter, or sports stars taking drugs.)
    ‘And now Frontex have started chartering planes,’ Berit said. ‘They gather up immigrants with no official papers from all over Europe and dump them in Lagos or Ulan Bator. Sweden’s got rid of people like that several times.’
    ‘I