‘Quick work,’ Annika said, trying to sound impressed.
‘They wanted to strike while it was still dark, to get the same conditions as the time of the crime, and before the media storm broke. They seem to have made it.’
‘And … ?’ she said, braking at a red light just before the Bergnäs bridge.
‘Let’s just say that the investigation has gone from hit-and-run to premeditated murder.’
‘Are you going to call in the national murder unit?’
The reply was ambiguous. ‘We’ll have to see what we turn up after the first day or so …’
The traffic light turned green. She slid over the junction with Granuddsvägen.
‘Benny had written a whole series of articles on terrorism in recent months,’ Annika said. ‘I’m actually on my way back from F21 right now. Do you think his death could have something to do with the article he wrote about the attack out there, or anything else he wrote?’
‘I don’t want to speculate. Can you hold on a moment?’
He didn’t wait for her to reply. There was a dull thud in her ear as the inspector put the phone down and crossed the floor, then the sound of a door closing.
‘But on the other hand,’ he said, back on the line, ‘there is something that I’ve spoken to Captain Pettersson about this morning that concerns you.’
She took her foot off the accelerator in sheer shock.
‘I don’t want to discuss it on the phone,’ the inspector went on. ‘Have you got time to come up here this afternoon?’
She shook her arm vigorously to get her watch to slide out of the sleeve of her coat.
‘Not really,’ she said, ‘my plane leaves at two fifty-five and I have to get over to the Norrland News before that.’
‘Okay, I’ll meet you there,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a team there now, and I’ve just promised that I’d go and talk to them about what we’re looking for.’
The receptionist’s face was puffy from crying. Annika approached cautiously and respectfully, well aware that she was disturbing her.
‘The paper’s closed to visitors,’ the woman snapped. ‘Come back tomorrow.’
‘My name’s Annika Bengtzon,’ Annika said gently. ‘I’m the one who—’
‘Is there something wrong with your hearing?’ the woman said, getting up, visibly trembling. ‘We’re in mourning today, in mourning; one of our reporters has … left us. So we’re closed. All day. Go away.’
Annika was furious. ‘For God’s sake,’ she said. ‘Has everyone gone mad? Sorry for being here.’
She turned her back on the woman and headed for the stairs to the newsroom.
‘Hey!’ the receptionist yelled. ‘This is a private company. Come back.’
Annika kept walking, glanced over her shoulder and made sure she got the last word in.
‘So shoot me.’
After just a few steps she could hear some sort of memorial service going on upstairs. From the landing outside the main office she could see the participants, a colourless mass of grey hair, dark-grey jackets, brown sweaters. Backs bent, sweaty necks, the sort of confused rage that makes people bloodless and mute. Their sighs seemed to suck up all the air, emptying the building of oxygen.
With a deep breath she slid in to the back of the room, making herself invisible whilst simultaneously craning to see whoever was talking at the front.
‘Benny Ekland had no family,’ the man said, a middle-aged media type in a dark suit and shiny shoes. ‘We were his family. He had us, and he had the Norrland News.’
The people in the room didn’t react to the words, each of them consumed by their own shocked disbelief, the impossibility of death. Fumbling hands, eyes glued to the floor or searching restlessly, each of them an island. Reporters and several photographers stood along the walls, people from other media outlets. She could pick them out by their greedy curiosity; they didn’t care, their interest was focused on the man speaking and the mourners.
‘Benny was the sort of journalist that no longer exists,’ the man in the polished shoes intoned. ‘He was a reporter who never gave up. He always had to know the truth, whatever the cost. We who had the privilege of working with Benny all these years have been given a great gift, the gift of being able to get to know such a devoted and responsible professional. For Benny there was no such thing as overtime, because he took his work seriously …’
‘Hmm,’ someone whispered in her ear, ‘now we’re getting to the truth.’
She jerked her head and saw Hans Blomberg, the archivist, standing right behind her, nodding and smiling. He leaned forward and went on in a whisper, ‘Benny was popular with management because he never asked for overtime or a pay rise. And because he earned so little he presented them with the perfect argument: if their star earned so little, surely it was only right that the others did too?’
Annika listened, astonished.
‘He broke the pay deal?’ she whispered back. ‘Why?’
‘Five weeks’ paid holiday with the whores of Thailand every year, and a running tab at the City Pub. What more could a man want?’
Two older women in front of them, with matching sweaters and swollen eyes, turned round and hissed at them to be quiet.
‘Where was Benny’s desk?’ she whispered to the archivist.
‘Follow me,’ he said, and backed out of the room.
They left the grey sea of people and went up to the next floor.
‘He was the only one besides the publisher who had his own office,’ Hans Blomberg said, pointing down a short, narrow corridor.
Annika walked along it, feeling at once the walls pressing in on her, looming over her. She stopped, took a deep breath, and saw the walls as they really were. Not moving. The hideous yellow-brown panels were bulging slightly, though, where they had come loose.
She went up to Benny Ekland’s brown-painted door and knocked loudly. To her surprise it flew open at once.
‘Yes, what is it?’ A plain-clothes policeman was kneeling in the centre of the room. He looked her up and down in irritation. Behind him two other officers looked up from cupboards and drawers. Annika took a step backward, feeling herself blush.
‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I’m looking for … I was wondering …’
‘This is Benny Ekland’s room,’ the plain-clothes officer said, then went on in a more friendly tone, ‘You’re Annika Bengtzon, aren’t you? The one who got stuck with the Bomber in the tunnel?’
She stared at him for a couple of seconds, contemplating running away, but nodded. She could hear the angels tuning up at the back of her mind. No, she thought. Not now.
‘Suup called and said he was going to meet you here, but he’s not here yet. Forsberg,’ he said, getting up and holding out his hand. He gave her a wolfish grin beneath his mane of blond hair.
Annika looked down, bewildered, and realized that her hands were cold and sweaty.
‘How’s it going?’ she said, only to have something to say, rubbing her head lightly with one hand to get the voices to shut up.
‘Suup said how you got hold of the Gustafsson boy,’ Forsberg said as he put a bundle of papers back on a shelf, sighing. ‘This place is a hell of a mess.’
‘He got quite a bit of post today,’ Hans Blomberg said from behind Annika’s back. ‘Have you been through that yet?’
The officers looked at one another, and all three shook their heads.
‘Where is it?’ Forsberg asked.
‘I put it in his pigeon-hole, like I usually do. Do you want me to get it?’
Annika went with the archivist down to the postroom rather than stay and get in the way of the police.
‘You don’t seem to have been Benny Ekland’s biggest fan,’ she said as Hans Blomberg pulled out the dead man’s post.
‘There’s no need,’ the fat man puffed. ‘There are plenty of others fighting for that accolade. I have a more nuanced view of our star reporter.’
He headed towards the stairs again. Annika
followed the bobbly cardigan.
‘What sort of view would that be, then?’
The man panted as he laboriously climbed the stairs.
‘It didn’t matter who got who a tip-off here. If there was anything worth having then Big Ben got his hands on it. He was always the last one here in the evening, so he could go in and change a sentence or two in someone else’s article and get a double byline.’
‘Was that his nickname, Big Ben?’
‘Mind you, he was brilliant at digging up stories,’ Hans Blomberg conceded. ‘You’ve got to give him that.’
‘Annika Bengtzon?’ a voice said from below.
She went back down a few steps, leaned over and looked round the corner.
‘Suup,’ said a thin man with grey hair. ‘Can I have a word?’
She went down and shook the older man’s hand, looking into a pair of eyes that for a moment seemed to her to belong to a child, bright and translucent.
‘I promised to talk to the staff in a little while, but this won’t take long,’ he said. The wrinkles in his face emphasized the impression of stability and honesty.
‘You’re making me very curious,’ Annika said, going into the letters-page editor’s room where she had written her article the previous evening.
It struck her that he wasn’t bitter. He’s a good man; he does what he thinks is right, and other people respond to that. He’s a solid person.
She pulled out a chair for the inspector, then sat down herself on the corner of the desk.
‘We appreciate the fact that you came to us with your information yesterday,’ the man said in a quiet voice. ‘And I have to say that it came as a surprise to us that you gave away your story. The Norrland News comes out much earlier than the Evening Post up here, so you weren’t first, and it wasn’t an exclusive.’
Annika smiled, noting that the angels had gone quiet.
‘You’ve spent a long time dealing with the press,’ she said, ‘I can tell.’
‘Which is why I spoke to Pettersson at F21 about some information we’ve had for some time and have been wondering about releasing.’
She felt adrenalin slowly spreading out from the small of her back, up towards her chest.
‘For years now we’ve had a chief suspect for the attack,’ he said quietly. ‘A young man who came to Luleå from the south at the end of the sixties, but who was originally from somewhere in the Torne Valley. He was active in a couple of leftwing groups, went under the codename Ragnwald. We’ve had a couple of different suggestions of his real identity, but we don’t know for sure.’
Annika stared at the inspector in silence. The astonishing information was making her hair stand on end.
‘Do you mind if I take notes?’
‘Not at all.’
She took out a notebook and pen and scribbled down what the inspector had told her, shaking so much that it was almost illegible.
‘What makes you suspect this particular man?’ she asked.
‘Ragnwald disappeared,’ Suup said. ‘We believe he moved to Spain and became a member of ETA. He became a full-time terrorist, and the attack on F21 was his qualification.’
There was a knock on the door and Inspector Forsberg looked in.
‘Sorry, boss, but we’ve found something pretty weird.’
‘What?’
‘An unsigned letter, pretentious language, unclear content.’
He cast a look at Annika and fell silent.
She was thinking furiously and trying to look unconcerned.
‘Sounds like the usual sort of nutter’s letter,’ she said. ‘I’ve got eighteen bin-bags full of them.’
‘Read it out,’ Inspector Suup said.
Forsberg hesitated for just a second. Then he pulled out a sheet torn from a pad of A4, folded in four, which he held carefully with gloved hands.
‘There is no construction without destruction,’ he read. ‘Destruction means criticism and rejection, it means revolution. It involves reasoning things out, which means construction. If you concentrate on destruction first, you get construction as part of the process.’
Annika was scribbling furiously, got half the words down. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Forsberg lower the letter.
‘Does that ring any bells?’ he said.
Annika saw Inspector Suup shake his head and mechanically mimicked his movement.
‘We’ll be upstairs,’ Forsberg said, and disappeared again.
‘Can I go public with Ragnwald?’ Annika asked.
The inspector nodded.
‘And it won’t mess up any investigation if I write about it?’
‘Quite the reverse,’ Suup said.
Annika looked at the policeman, aware that he would be prepared to bend the rules if it would help the investigation. He could doubtless be pretty sly if he had to be, but that was just part of the job.
‘So why are you telling me?’ she said.
The man stood up surprisingly quickly. ‘The information is correct insofar as it matches our suspicions,’ he said. ‘We don’t know if he actually did it, but we believe he was involved. He may even have arranged the whole thing. He must have had accomplices; you know there were footprints found at the site. There aren’t many men with size thirty-six shoes.’
This last detail was new.
He left her sitting among the readers’ letters about rubbish collections and dogshit, with the distinct suspicion that she had been given more than just a scoop.
Slowly she filled in the letters she had missed in her notes.
There is no construction without destruction.
True enough, she thought.
If you concentrate on destruction first you get construction as part of the process.
God knows.
12
The taxi-drivers’ voices cascaded over her as she walked through the small airport, making her feel slightly hunted. Didn’t they ever work? Maybe they just stood by the entrance, in the warm air coming out of the doors of heated buildings, protected against the arctic cold in their dark-blue uniforms and gold buttons.
She got a seat at the back of the plane, next to a woman with two young children. The woman had one of them on her lap, while the other clambered about the cabin. Annika felt the stress rising beyond her tolerance level: this was her only chance to get anything written.
‘Excuse me,’ she said to the stewardess once they were in the air. ‘I have to work. Is it okay if I move forward a bit?’
She stood up and gestured a few rows ahead in the half-empty cabin. The toddler in its mother’s lap started to scream in her ear.
‘You’re booked into this seat, so I’m afraid you can’t move. You should have booked Business Class,’ the stewardess said curtly, turning back to her drinks trolley.
‘I’m sorry,’ Annika said, louder this time, ‘but I did. Or rather my employer did. Can I move, please?’
She struggled past the mother and blocked the aisle. The stewardess squeezed past the trolley with irritated little steps.
‘You heard what I said. After September eleventh, you can’t just change seats.’
Annika took a long stride closer to the stewardess, breathing right in her face.
‘So throw me off,’ she whispered, taking her laptop from the overhead locker and moving five rows forward.
With stress raging through her veins she wrote three articles before the plane touched down at Arlanda: an account of Luleå the day after the murder announcement, the sorrow of Benny Ekland’s workmates, and the police questioning of the witness at the crime scene. The night crew would have to put together the overview and factual box-outs. She held back the details about Ragnwald and the F21 attack. She wasn’t going to let go of them that quickly.
She hurried across the terminal and disappeared underground with her heart racing. She called Spike from the Arlanda Express and gave him an update, then he put her through to Pelle on the picture desk so they could talk about illustrations. The newly esta
blished collaboration with the Norrland News gave the Evening Post full access to the whole of their picture archive, both new and old, which saved them having to send someone up or use a freelancer.
‘Hmm, you’re not going to find picture of the year among this lot,’ the pictures editor said, as Annika heard him clicking through the transferred material, ‘but they’ll do for tomorrow’s edition. At least some of them are decent resolution, and even in focus.’
With her coat flapping, she walked from the central station to the place her six-year-old spent his days. The wind was damp and full of the smells of soil, leaves and car fumes; the grass was still green and half-dead leaves clung to a few branches. The light from a million lamps overpowered the Nordic autumn evening, giving the illusion that reality could be controlled, tamed.
There are never any stars in the city, she thought.
Annika’s son threw himself at her as if she had been away six months. He pressed his sticky face against hers and ran his fingers through the hair at the back of her neck.
‘I missed you, Mummy,’ he said in her ear.
She rocked the boy in her arms, stroking the stiff little back, kissing his hair.
Hand in hand they walked off to Ellen’s nursery school, until the boy pulled himself free and ran the last ten metres to the door.
Ellen was tired and reserved when she came over. She didn’t want to go home, didn’t want a hug. Wanted to carry on cutting out pictures, Daddy would pick her up.
Annika clenched her jaw to stop herself exploding, noting that her boundaries had evaporated.
‘Ellen,’ she said firmly, ‘Kalle and I are going now.’
The girl stiffened, her face contorted, eyes open wide, and a desperate cry came out.
‘My oversall,’ she screamed. ‘I haven’t got my oversall!’
She dropped the scissors and ran over to her peg, searching frantically for the overall. Annika could sense the disapproving stares of two other mothers further down the corridor.
‘Well, come on now,’ she said, going over to her daughter. ‘I’ll help you, but you’ve to stop being cross.’
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