‘The traffic’s moving now,’ Annika said. ‘I’ll be with you in a quarter of an hour.’
She left the car in the newspaper’s garage, then headed down the steps to the underground tunnels. There used to be four ways up to the office, but bomb threats and box-tickers had made sure that all but one were now blocked. The only way to avoid the caretakers was to go from the garage into the basement, then use the lift situated beyond the reception desk. She’d also have several run-ins with a former employee … admittedly, Tore Brandt had been fired after he was found to be selling black-market booze to the night editors, but the discomfort of having to walk past that long desk was still in her blood and she almost always used the basement entrance.
She had to wait several minutes for the lift. On the way up her stomach clenched, as it always did when she was on her way to the newsroom, a sort of expectant tension at what she might find when she got there.
She took a deep breath, then stepped out on to the stained carpet.
The open-plan office had been redesigned a couple more times during the three years she had spent as the paper’s Washington correspondent, to suit the new age’s demands for collaboration and flexibility. In the centre of the room the newsdesk floated like a luminous spaceship. It had reproduced: there was no longer just one but three. Like two half-moons, Print and Online sat with their backs to each other, staring at their screens. Berit Hamrin, Annika’s favourite colleague, called them the ‘Cheesy Wotsits’. The webcast unit was situated alongside, where the reception desk used to be. A dozen huge television screens above their heads showed flickering feeds from a mixture of online sites, text-TV and docusoaps. Marketing and Advertising were now part of Editorial, physically as well as in organizational terms. The screens around the dayshift reporters’ desk had been removed altogether.
In fact, everything was much the same, just closer together. The hundreds of fluorescent lights spread their indirect glow in the same flickering blue tone. Desks were covered with drifts of paper, heads lowered in concentration.
Her years in Washington felt like a story someone had told her or the remnants of a dream. Life was back to square one. This was precisely where she had started as a summer temp thirteen years ago, in charge of the tip-off phone-line, running errands, a dogsbody in the service of the news.
She was seized by weariness. She was still hearing about the same murders of women as she had that first summer, just despatched to cover them by different heads of news. She was back, even living in the same block, albeit in a different flat.
‘Have you eaten?’ she asked Berit, who was typing furiously on her laptop.
‘I got a sandwich,’ Berit replied, without looking away from the screen or slowing down.
Annika got out her own computer. Even her mechanical gestures were the same: plug in the socket, lift the screen, switch it on, log into the network. Berit’s hair was greyer now, and she’d got different glasses, but otherwise the world around Annika was the same as it had been the year she turned twenty-four. Then it had been the height of summer, and a young woman had been found dead behind a headstone in a cemetery. Now it was freezing winter and bodies were found in the forest behind a nursery school, in car parks or residential streets or … She frowned. ‘Berit,’ she said, ‘don’t you think rather a lot of women have been murdered in Stockholm this autumn? Outdoors, I mean.’
‘No more than usual,’ Berit said.
Annika logged into mediearkivet.se where much of the Swedish media stored their published articles and columns. She searched for ‘woman murdered stockholm’ since the beginning of August that year and got a number of hits. The texts weren’t full articles, just notes, most of them from the prestigious morning paper.
Towards the end of August a fifty-four-year-old woman had been found dead in a car park in Fisksätra outside Stockholm. She had been stabbed in the back. Her husband had once served a prison sentence for beating and threatening her. He had evidently been held for her murder, but released through lack of evidence. Because he had been picked up at once, the story had never made it beyond the ‘news in brief’ column of the paper’s Stockholm section. It was labelled a domestic tragedy and written off.
The next report came from the same section, published about a week later. A nineteen-year-old immigrant woman had been found murdered at a popular beach by a lake north of the city, Ullnäsjön. She had died from multiple stab wounds. Her fiancé, who also happened to be her cousin, was in custody charged with her murder. He denied any involvement.
And in the middle of October a thirty-seven-year-old mother of three had been found stabbed to death on a street in Hässelby. The woman’s ex-husband had been questioned on suspicion of murder, but it wasn’t clear from the report whether he had been taken into custody and charged or released.
There had been a number of murders in the home in other parts of the country, but the reports were even shorter.
‘Hey, Annika,’ Patrik said, looming above her. ‘Can you go and check out a fire in Sollentuna? Probably the start of the Christmas fire season, old dears getting a bit carried away with their Advent candles. Do an overview of how crap Swedes are at using fire-extinguishers and changing the batteries in their smoke alarms – could be a good consumer piece, “How to Stop Your Candles Killing You” …’
‘I’ve already got the dead mum outside the nursery school,’ Annika said.
Patrik blinked uncomprehendingly. ‘But that’s nothing,’ he said.
‘The fourth murder since I got back,’ she said, turning the laptop towards him. ‘All women, all from Stockholm, all stabbed. What if there’s a serial killer on the loose?’
The head of news looked suddenly uncertain. ‘Do you think so? How did this one die? Where was it again? Bredäng?’
‘Axelsberg. You saw the picture, what do you think?’
Patrik stared across the newsroom, clearly digging out the picture from somewhere in his brain. Then he snorted. ‘Serial killer? Wishful thinking!’ He turned on his heel and went off to talk to another reporter about his killer candles.
‘So you got that one,’ Berit said. ‘Mum with a young kid. Divorce? Reports of threatening behaviour that no one took seriously?’
‘Probably,’ Annika said. ‘The police haven’t released her name yet.’
Without her name, it was impossible to track down her address, and thereby her neighbour, which meant no background and no story, if she really had been murdered.
‘Something good?’ Annika asked, nodding towards what Berit was writing as she fished an orange out of her bag.
‘Do you remember Alain Thery? There was quite a bit written about him last autumn.’
Last autumn Annika had been immersed in the Tea Party movement and the American congressional elections. She shook her head.
‘French businessman, blown up on his yacht off Puerto Banús?’ Berit said, peering at her over her glasses.
Annika thought hard. Puerto Banús. White boats and blue sea … That was where she and Thomas had got back together, in the Hotel Pyr, a room overlooking the motorway. She had been covering the story of the Söderström family, killed in a gas-attack at their home, and Thomas had been living with Sophia Grenborg at the time, but was in Málaga for a conference, at which he’d been unfaithful to her with his wife.
‘A film’s been posted on YouTube,’ Berit said, ‘claiming that Alain Thery was Europe’s biggest slave trafficker. His whole business empire was a front for smuggling young 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.
&
nbsp; 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 think I’m going to pack it in for the day,’ Annika said.
She closed down her laptop, folding it away with practised movements and putting it into her bag, then pulled her jacket on and headed towards the door.
‘Hey, Bengtzon!’ came a cry from the caretakers’ desk, as she was on her way out through the revolving doors.
Shit, she thought. The car keys.
She followed the door round and emerged back in the entrance hall with a strained smile. ‘I’m really sorry,’ she said, putting the keys to TKG 297 on the reception desk.
But the caretaker, who was new, just took the keys without shouting at her or asking if she’d filled the car up again or made a note in the logbook (she hadn’t done either).
‘Schyman’s looking for you,’ the new caretaker said. ‘He’s in the Frog conference room. He wants you to go and see him at once.’
Annika stopped mid-stride. ‘What for?’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Even worse working hours?’ he suggested.
Maybe there was hope for the caretakers after all.
She set off for the conference room. Why on earth was it called ‘Frog’?
The editor-in-chief opened the door for her. ‘Hello, Annika, come in and sit down.’
‘Are you relocating me?’ she asked.
Three serious-looking men in dark overcoats stood up as she walked through the door. They had spread out around the small birch-wood table. The reflection of a halogen spotlight off the whiteboard on the far wall dazzled her. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked, raising a hand to shield her eyes.
‘We’ve met before,’ the man closest to her said, holding out his right hand.
It was Jimmy Halenius, Thomas’s boss, under-secretary of state at the Department of Justice. She shook it, unable to think of anything to say.
‘Hans-Erik Svensson and Hans Wilkinsson,’ he said, gesturing towards the other two men. They didn’t move.
She felt her back stiffen with wariness.
‘Annika,’ Anders Schyman said, ‘sit down.’
Fear appeared out of nowhere and dug its claws into her with a force that left her breathless. ‘What?’ she managed to say, and remained standing. ‘Is it something to do with Thomas? What’s happened to him?’
Jimmy Halenius took a step closer to her. ‘As far as we know, Thomas isn’t in any danger,’ he said, looking her in the eye.
His eyes were quite blue. She remembered being struck by the intensity of the colour before. I wonder if he wears contact lenses, she thought.
‘You know that Thomas is attending the Frontex conference in Nairobi about increased co-operation concerning European borders?’ the under-secretary of state said.
Our new Iron Curtain, Annika thought. Land of the free, and all that.
‘Thomas attended the first four days of the conference at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre. Yesterday morning he left the conference to act as Swedish delegate on a reconnaissance trip to Liboi, close to the Somali border.’
For some reason an image of the snow-covered body behind the nursery school in Axelsberg came into her mind. ‘Is he dead?’
The dark-clad men behind Halenius exchanged a glance.
‘There’s nothing to suggest that he is,’ Jimmy Halenius went on, pulling out a chair and waving her into it. She sank down and noted the look that passed between the two men called Hans.
‘Who are they?’ she asked, gesturing at them.
‘Annika,’ Halenius said, ‘I want you to listen carefully to what I’m going to say.’
She looked around the room: no windows, just a whiteboard, an antiquated overhead projector in one corner and some sort of ventilation shaft in the ceiling. The walls were pale green, a shade that had been popular in the 1990s. Lime green.
‘The delegation consisted of representatives from seven EU member states who were going to find out more about border security between Kenya and Somalia, then report back to the conference. The problem is that the delegation has disappeared.’
Her heartbeat was pounding in her ears. The brown boot with its pointed heel was sticking straight up to the sky.
‘They were travelling in two vehicles, both Toyota Land Cruiser 100s, and there’s been no word of either vehicles or delegates since yesterday afternoon …’ The under-secretary of state fell silent.
Annika stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘What does “disappeared” mean?’
He started to speak but she interrupted him. ‘How … I mean, what does “there’s been no word” mean?’ She stood up. The chair toppled
over behind her.
Jimmy Halenius got to his feet too. His blue eyes were crackling. ‘The tracking equipment from one of the vehicles has been found just outside Liboi,’ he said, ‘with the delegation’s interpreter and one of the guards. They were both dead.’
The room lurched and she grabbed the table for support. ‘This can’t be true,’ she said.
‘We haven’t had any information to suggest that anyone else in the group has been injured.’
‘It must be a mistake,’ she said. ‘Maybe they took the wrong turning. Are you sure they haven’t just got lost?’
‘It’s been over twenty-four hours now. We can dismiss the idea that they got lost.’
‘How did they die? The guard and the interpreter?’
Halenius studied her for a few seconds. ‘They were shot in the head at close range.’
She grabbed her bag, threw it on to the table and hunted through it for her mobiles, but couldn’t find one. She turned the bag out on the table. An orange rolled off and landed beneath the overhead projector. She picked up her private mobile with trembling fingers and dialled Thomas’s number, but pressed the wrong button and had to start again. The call went through, with a good deal of crackling and hissing, buzzing and clicking:
‘Hello, you’ve reached …’
She dropped the phone on to the floor, where it landed next to her gloves and a notebook. Jimmy Halenius bent down and picked it up.
‘It isn’t true,’ she said, unsure if she’d spoken aloud. The under-secretary of state said something but she couldn’t make any sense of it: his lips were moving and he took hold of one of her arms. She pushed his hand away. They had met a few times but he knew nothing about her; he had no idea about the state of her relationship with Thomas.
Anders Schyman leaned forward and said something as well; his eyelids looked swollen.
‘Leave me alone,’ she said, slightly too loudly, because everyone was staring at her. She gathered all her things back into her bag, apart from the notebook, which she really didn’t need – it was just her notes from the idiotic job at Ikea – then headed towards the door, the way out, escape.
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