* * *
The woman had been killed by four stab wounds to the neck. She was lying at the edge of the forest, close to a footpath, behind the buildings on Kungsätravägen to the south of Stockholm. There was a playground not far away. She had been found at about six o’clock in the evening by a man walking his dog. There were striking similarities to the murder of Linnea Sendman, according to the Evening Post, which, to be on the safe side, had presented them in list form, accompanied by big pictures:
The murder weapon: a knife (didactic picture of a hunting knife, although the caption made clear that this was not the actual murder weapon).
The stab wounds: from behind, in the neck (illustrated by an anonymous woman’s neck, probably that of the reporter, Elin Michnik).
The scene of the crime: next to a playground (photograph of abandoned swing).
The suburbs: there were just five kilometres between the sites of the two murders (map with arrows).
The murdered woman’s name was Lena Andersson, she was forty-two, single, and had two teenage daughters. Her laughing face looked out at Annika from the newspaper, her red hair swirling in the wind.
And now the theory about a serial murder in the Stockholm suburbs seemed to have taken root among the police. Two named detectives confirmed that the investigations into Lena and Linnea were being combined (the paper was already on first-name terms with both murdered women).
‘Where do you get all these photographs of murder victims?’ Halenius asked, eating a rye-bread sandwich. ‘I thought we’d blocked access to those archives.’
Annika closed the paper and pushed it away from her. She couldn’t bear to think of the two teenage girls left alone. Had they sat up waiting for their mother on Saturday night, listening for her footsteps? Or were they out with their friends, not thinking about her at all, maybe not knowing she was missing until the police appeared at the door, ‘We’re very sorry …’?
‘In some ways it’s got harder since you blocked the archives,’ Annika said, ‘but in the new digital world there are countless new sources to dig about in.’
‘Such as?’
‘Blogs, Twitter, online papers, discussion forums, the PR pages of various companies and public bodies, and Facebook, of course. Even the suicide bomber who blew himself up on Drottninggatan was on Facebook.’
‘What about copyright?’ Halenius said. ‘I thought you were all very concerned about that.’
‘It’s a grey area,’ Annika said.
The image of the red-haired woman was floating in front of her above the breakfast table. She had been living alone with her daughters for three years, according to Elin Michnik’s article, and worked as a chiropractor at a clinic in the centre of Skärholmen. She had been on her way home from a yoga class when she’d met her fate in the winter darkness.
Annika drank some apple juice and took a bite of her sandwich.
Halenius wasn’t quite so neat today, which supported her suspicion that his girlfriend did his ironing for him. ‘Have your children got there yet?’ she asked.
He glanced at his watch. ‘They landed an hour ago. Can I have the newspaper?’
She pushed it across the table and stood up: if he didn’t want to talk about his children, she wasn’t going to force him. ‘Well, I’m going to call mine,’ she said, taking her mobile and going into the children’s room, shutting the door quietly behind her.
She didn’t bother turning any lights on. There was a kind of grey, cloudy half-light outside, the sort that was incapable of penetrating the shadows. She curled up in a foetal position on top of Kalle’s duvet, hugging his pillow to her. She needed to change the sheets – it had been a fortnight since she’d last done it. At least. And she needed to go through the children’s wardrobes – she hadn’t done that properly since they’d got back from the USA, had just chucked everything from their cases into the cupboard, along with all the things they’d grown out of. She sat up.
She’d have to see if they’d grown out of their Lucia clothes – they must have done by now. And on the day before 13 December the whole of Sweden had always been sucked dry of Lucia dresses and boys’ robes. She must remember to buy new ones as soon as possible. Perhaps Kalle wouldn’t want to join in any longer. And maybe their new American school didn’t celebrate Lucia in the same way as Swedish schools.
She picked up her mobile and dialled Berit’s home number. Thord, her husband, answered. ‘Don’t come and get them too early,’ he said. ‘We’re about to go out fishing.’
Kalle came on the line.
‘Do you know if there’s going to be a Lucia procession at school this year?’ Annika asked.
‘Mum,’ Kalle said, ‘Daddy’s promised to take us to Norway and go fishing for trout in Randsfjorden loads of times. If he doesn’t come home can I go with Thord instead?’
She took a deep breath. ‘Sure.’
‘Yay!’ the boy exclaimed, and passed the phone to Ellen.
‘Mummy, can I have a dog? A yellow one, called Soraya?’
‘Are you having a nice time with Berit and Thord?’ Annika asked.
‘Pleeease? Just a little dog?’
‘I’ll be coming to get you soon so make the most of Soraya while you can. And we can see her lots more times.’
‘We’re going fishing now,’ Ellen said, putting the phone down with a thud.
She heard footsteps approaching, then crackling as the phone was picked up. ‘It’s full-on here,’ Berit said.
‘How can I ever thank you?’ Annika said.
‘How are you getting on?’
‘Don’t know,’ Annika said. ‘We haven’t heard any more. I’ve agreed with Schyman to write and film everything, and we’ll see what can be published when it’s all over.’
‘Sounds like a good deal,’ Berit said. ‘Just say if you need help with anything.’
She noticed that someone had scribbled on the wallpaper in felt-tip. ‘Where are they going fishing? Isn’t the lake frozen?’
‘Thord’s got a hole in the ice out by the perch fishing ground. He keeps it open all winter.’
They hung up, and Annika sat there for a while with the phone in her hand. Then she stood up and went over to the wardrobes, opened the first and looked at the mess inside. All the clothes they’d had when they were little had gone up in the fire, but Kalle and Ellen had grown a fair bit since then. At the front was a little Batman costume. She pulled it out and held it up. She’d had no idea it was still there. She put it on Kalle’s bed, as the start of the pile of things to keep. Next came a jumper with a train on it that Birgitta had knitted for his third birthday. She was so practical. It had been at their grandmother’s in Vaxholm and had therefore escaped the fire. That ended up in the ‘keep’ pile as well. A princess dress that Sophia Grenborg had bought: get rid of. Old pyjamas, odd socks and washed out T-shirts all ended up on the scrapheap. Just a few went back on to hangers and into the drawers.
She’d got halfway through the first wardrobe when Halenius knocked on the door.
‘It’s arrived,’ he said.
He sat her on the office chair in the bedroom, with the computer on the desk in front of her. The screen was black. In the middle a little triangle inside a circle indicated that a video had loaded but was paused.
‘It’s nothing awful,’ Halenius said. ‘I’ve watched it. It’s pretty standard, short and concise. Nothing weird, nothing shocking. It was recorded yesterday, as you’ll see.’
Annika clutched the edge of the desk.
‘This is exactly what we’ve been expecting,’ he went on, crouching beside her. ‘Our kidnappers have clearly done the whole kidnapping course. They’ve done this before. Thomas has been sleeping outdoors or in very basic conditions for almost a week, and it shows. Don’t be alarmed by how unkempt he looks. The actual message is completely irrelevant. What matters is that he’s alive and seems reasonably okay. Do you want me to play it?’
She nodded.
The image flickered, a
beam of light moved across it, and then a terrified face appeared on the screen.
Annika gasped. ‘God, what have they done to him?’ she said, pointing at his left eye. It was swollen shut, and his eyelid looked like a bright red cocktail sausage.
Halenius froze the image. ‘Looks like an insect bite,’ he said. ‘Could be a mosquito or some other flying pest. His face shows no sign of having been hit. You see he hasn’t been able to shave?’
Annika nodded again. She reached out her hand and touched the screen, stroking his cheek. ‘He’s wearing his gay shirt,’ she said. ‘He really did want to impress her.’
‘Shall I go on?’
‘Wait,’ Annika said.
She pushed the chair back and ran into the children’s room, grabbed the newspaper’s video-camera and hurried back into the bedroom.
‘Film me while I watch the video,’ she said to Halenius, passing him the camera. ‘Can you do that?’
He nodded. ‘Why?’
‘Three million reasons. Or shall I get the tripod?’
‘Give it here.’
She sat in front of the computer again, adjusted her hair, then stared into Thomas’s frightened eyes. His hair was dark with sweat, his face shiny, his eyes bloodshot and staring. In the background there was a dark brown wall, something stripy. Wallpaper? Damp?
‘He’s thinking about Daniel Pearl,’ Annika said. ‘He thinks they’re going to behead him. Have you switched the camera on?’
‘Er, I don’t really know how to …’
Annika took the camera and pressed play.
‘Just point and shoot,’ she said, then turned back to the computer.
She looked Thomas in the eye.
She thought, I’m doing this for us.
‘Sunday morning,’ she said, into thin air. ‘We’ve just received a video from the kidnappers, so-called proof of life, to show that my husband is still alive. I haven’t watched the film yet. I’m about to start it running.’
She clicked on the computer.
The picture shook slightly. Thomas was blinking against the harsh light shining into his face. He was glancing up to the right – perhaps someone was standing there, pointing a gun at him. He was holding a piece of paper. His wrists looked red and swollen.
‘Today is the twenty-seventh of November,’ he said in English. She turned the volume up to maximum: the sound was poor and she could hardly hear what he was saying. There was a lot of hissing and crackling, as if it were windy. She could hear the video-camera whirring beside her.
‘A French plane crashed into the Atlantic this morning,’ Thomas went on.
Halenius froze the picture. ‘The kidnappers don’t have access to any newspapers,’ he said. ‘That’s the commonest way to show that a hostage is alive at a particular moment. Instead they’ve got him to say something he couldn’t otherwise have known.’
‘Are you filming?’ Annika asked.
‘Course I am,’ Halenius said.
The video continued.
‘I’m well,’ Thomas said hoarsely. ‘I’m being treated well.’
Annika pointed to a mark on his forehead. ‘There’s something crawling there. I think it’s a spider.’
He moved the note and read in silence for a moment, while the spider made its way up to his hair.
‘I want to encourage all the governments of Europe to act on the demands of …’ he moved the note closer to his face and squinted against the bright light ‘… Fick … Fiqh Jihad, to act on their demands for openness and the distribution of resources. It is time for a new age.’
‘That’s the political message,’ Halenius muttered.
‘And I want to emphasize the importance of paying the ransom promptly. If Europe’s leaders don’t listen, I will die. If you don’t pay, I will die. Allah is great.’
He lowered the note and looked up from his squatting position to the right. The picture faded to black.
‘Someone’s standing there,’ Annika said, pointing to Thomas’s right side.
‘Can I stop filming now?’
‘Just a bit more,’ Annika said, and turned towards Halenius. She felt oddly strengthened by the camera lens, as if she’d been sucked through the black hole and found herself in a parallel reality where the outcome wasn’t in the hands of crazy Somali kidnappers but in hers. Her own capacity to focus and concentrate made all the difference.
‘He says he’s being treated well,’ she said quietly, ‘but I don’t believe him. They forced him to say that. I think he’s having a terrible time.’ She looked at Halenius. ‘Now you can stop.’
He lowered the camera. Annika switched it off.
‘The British are going to analyse the film,’ Halenius said. ‘They try to uncover things you can’t see or hear at first, background noises, details in the image, that sort of thing.’
‘When did it arrive?’ Annika asked.
‘Eleven twenty-seven. Twenty minutes ago. I watched it, forwarded it to the Brits, then came to get you.’
She put the camera down. ‘I’m going to pick up the children,’ she said.
* * *
The eleven o’clock meeting was drawing to a close. The atmosphere had been a bit too euphoric for Schyman’s taste, too much backslapping, too many bad jokes, but that was what happened when people thought they’d done something big, and by that he didn’t mean in-depth analysis of global events or natural disasters, but the type of thing that was invented within the newsroom by the editors or during meetings like this. Of course the cause of the excitement was the increasingly real serial killer. Not because women were being murdered but because the paper had taken a guess and struck lucky. So far the other evening paper hadn’t caught on, but it was only a matter of time. On the other side of the city they would be tearing their hair out, trying desperately to find a way into the story without letting on that they’d been left standing at the starting gate.
‘Okay,’ he said, trying to sound stern. ‘Quick run-through. What are we leading with?’
In front of him sat Entertainment and Sport, Online and Net-TV, Op-ed and Features, the head of news and his deputy. He pointed at Entertainment.
‘The rumour that Benny Andersson is going to be the new boss of the Eurovision Song Contest,’ said the slight young woman, whose name he couldn’t for the life of him remember.
Schyman sighed inwardly. Why the hell would Benny from Abba want that job? Particularly when it had once been held by the Evening Post’s old sports editor.
He looked encouragingly at Hasse, from Sport.
‘Milan are against Juventus tonight, and Zlatan Ibrahimovic is playing, so something’s bound to happen.’
Vague, but okay.
‘News?’
Patrik straightened. ‘Apart from the serial killer, we’ve got an old boy who lay dead in his flat for three years without anyone noticing or missing him. And a tip-off that the minister of finance has just had his apartment renovated using black-market labour.’
He exchanged a high-five with his temporary deputy, a young star called Brutus, and Schyman knocked on the table. ‘We need to follow developments in the kidnapping in East Africa as well,’ he said.
Patrik groaned. ‘There’s nothing going on with that,’ he said. ‘They’re not letting anything slip, no pictures, no info. It’s completely dead.’
Schyman stood up and walked out of the meeting room, heading for his glass office.
The story of the murdered women was troubling him.
As soon as he’d got to work that morning, before he’d even managed to take his coat off, his phone had rung: it was the mother of one of the victims, Lena. She was angry, shocked, upset. She was crying but wasn’t hysterical, and spoke in a shaky voice, but she was clear and coherent.
‘This was no serial killer,’ she said. ‘It was Gustaf, the lazy bastard she was with. He’s been stalking her ever since she finished with him, and that was several months ago, July, the end of July …’
‘So you’re sayi
ng it was the girls’ father who—’
‘No, no, not Oscar. Lena always got on well with Oscar. This man came to see her at the clinic. He was on incapacity benefit, problems with his back. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. He refused to accept that their relationship was over. What would she have seen in him? Just another expense, that’s all he was …’
‘Did he hit her?’ Schyman asked, because he had read up about women’s helplines.
‘He wouldn’t have dared,’ Lena’s mother said. ‘Lena would have had him locked up instantly. You didn’t mess with her.’
‘Did she report him to the police?’
‘What for?’
‘You said he’d been stalking her?’
The mother sniffed. ‘She shrugged it off, said he’d get tired, that it was nothing to worry about. And now look what’s happened!’
She was crying inconsolably. Schyman listened. Distraught people didn’t affect him much. Maybe empathy eroded over time: an occupational injury caused by too many years’ chasing and holding people to account, exploiting and exposing them.
‘We’re only reporting the suspicions of the police,’ he said. ‘Obviously their investigations will look into all the possibilities. If this man is guilty –’
‘His name’s Gustaf.’
‘– then it’s likely he’ll be arrested and charged, and if it’s someone else, they’ll be convicted instead.’
The mother blew her nose. ‘Do you believe that?’
‘Almost all murder cases get solved,’ Schyman said, in a confident tone, hoping he was right.
And with that they had hung up, but the sense of unease still hadn’t left him.
What if all these murdered women were just ordinary, humdrum stories? The statistics certainly pointed in that direction. The victim, the weapon, modus operandi, motive: husband no longer in control of his wife kills her with a breadknife, inside or in the immediate vicinity of her home. He didn’t need Annika Bengtzon there, banging on about press ethics, to feel his own doubts growing.
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