She stood up. There were loads of ways out of this.
‘Don’t limit your options,’ she said out loud to herself.
She’d made up her mind. She would never set foot in a newsroom again, and especially not this one. She’d take her bag and her box of notes and give up journalism for ever. She unlocked the toilet door with a fresh sense of determination.
The floor still wasn’t quite steady. She stayed close to the wall to make sure she didn’t fall.
Back at Berit’s desk she quickly gathered her things together in her bag.
‘Ah, there you are! Would you mind coming into my office for a few minutes?’
It was the voice of the new head editor, Anders Schyman, and she turned round in surprise.
‘Who, me?’ she said.
‘Yes, you. I’m in the aquarium with the awful curtains. Come when you’ve got a minute.’
‘I’ve got time now,’ she said.
She felt the furtive glances of the rest of the newsroom as she walked into the boss’s office.
Oh well, she thought. At least things can’t get any worse.
40
It wasn’t a nice room. The shabby curtains really were awful, and the air felt stale and enclosed.
‘Where’s that smell coming from? Haven’t you emptied the ashtray?’
‘I don’t smoke. It’s the sofa. Don’t sit on it – it gets into your clothes.’
She stayed standing in the middle of the floor, while he sat on the edge of the desk.
‘I’ve called Studio Six,’ he said. ‘I’ve never heard such a personal attack before, and they didn’t give us the right of reply. I’ve already faxed a complaint to the Broadcasting Commission. The editor-in-chief may well have been unavailable, but I’ve been here all day. Did they try to contact you?’
She didn’t answer, just shook her head.
‘I know that so-called expert commentator. He worked for a while on my magazine programme until I got rid of him.
‘He’s impossible to work with. He plotted and gossiped behind other people’s backs until the programme was on the brink of collapse. As luck would have it, he wasn’t employed directly on the programme, but used to invoice us from his own company. Once I’d made up my mind, he was gone that same day.’
Annika was staring at the floor.
‘And as for planted stories,’ Anders Schyman said, pulling a fax out of the mess that had already accumulated on his desk. ‘We’ve received an anonymous tip-off that one of the right-wing party leaders has also been questioned about Josefin’s murder.’
He held the fax out to Annika, and she took it, still numb to the world.
‘Where’s it from?’ she said.
‘My question exactly,’ the head editor said. ‘You see the sender’s number up in the top corner? It’s the number of the Social Democrats’ advertising agency.’
‘God, that’s so blatant,’ Annika said.
‘Yes, isn’t it?’
Silence. Annika took a deep breath.
‘I haven’t been the target of any planted stories,’ she said.
Anders Schyman looked at her intently, waiting for her to go on.
‘I haven’t spoken to anyone about our coverage of this story, apart from Berit and Anne Snapphane.’
‘Not the news editors?’
Annika shook her head.
‘Not much, anyway,’ she said quietly.
‘So you’ve been looking after our coverage entirely on your own?’
He sounded rather sceptical, and she squirmed.
‘Well, almost,’ she said, feeling tears welling up. ‘There’s no one else to share the blame.’
‘No, no,’ Anders Schyman said quickly. ‘That’s not what I meant. I think our coverage has been fine, really pretty good. The only thing we missed was the fact that she worked at a sex club. And you knew about that anyway, didn’t you?’
She nodded.
‘We should have written about that earlier. But doing what our rivals and Studio Six have done – making out that the girl was a prostitute – is much worse. By the way, how did you find out about the minister’s overnight flat?’
Annika sighed. ‘I was having coffee with one of his neighbours.’
‘Brilliant!’ Anders Schyman said. ‘And what really happened with those teenagers out in Täby?’
Annika’s eyes flashed.
‘That bit’s completely fucking unbelievable! They asked us to go, first out to Täby, and then to the demonstration in the park today.’
‘Yes, I heard that got a bit out of hand.’
Annika dropped her bag on the floor and held out her hands.
‘They’re grieving, so anything they say and do can’t be questioned. They’re having a hard time, which means that you can’t really approach them at all. Anything that’s the slightest bit unpleasant or controversial in this bloody country can never even be named. We think death and violence and suffering will just disappear if we bury it and never talk about it again. But that’s wrong! That’s so wrong! It only makes things worse. Those kids out there today were crazy! They were trying to set fire to us!’
‘Okay, you’re exaggerating a bit now,’ Anders Schyman said gently.
‘Like hell I am!’ Annika exclaimed. ‘Those pathetic little social workers have got a monopoly on suffering and grief and sympathy. Crisis team, my arse! All they’ve done is wind those kids up beyond any semblance of sanity. Most of them had never even spoken to Josefin, I’d put money on that! What the hell are they doing, having a week-long orgy of grief? Schyman, it was like they were in some kind of trance, they had no idea what they were doing. They identified us as evil, as targets for revenge, as sacrifices. So don’t try to tell me I’m exaggerating!’
Her face was red with fury and anger, and she was breathing hard and fast. The head editor was watching her with interest.
‘Do you know, I think you’re probably right,’ he said.
‘Of course I bloody am!’ she said.
He smiled. ‘It’s a good thing you don’t swear this much in your writing,’ he said.
‘What a bloody stupid thing to say,’ she said. ‘Of course I fucking don’t.’
Anders Schyman started to laugh. Annika walked over to him.
‘This isn’t funny,’ she said. ‘This is serious. Those kids at the cemetery were a lynch-mob. I don’t know if they’d really have hurt us, but they certainly threatened to. We really ought to report them to the police. Pettersson’s car has scorch marks in the paint, not that it makes much difference to a heap of junk like that, but anyway … We ought to make some sort of statement that people can’t behave however they want to, even if they think they can use grief as an alibi.’
‘There are actually a lot of crisis groups that do fantastic work,’ the head editor said seriously. ‘Tarring them all with the same brush is just as bad as suggesting that the evening papers only ever want to wallow in other people’s pain.’
Annika didn’t answer, and he looked at her for a while in silence.
‘You’ve been working a lot lately, haven’t you?’ he said.
She went on the defensive at once.
‘I’m not over-reacting because I’ve been working too much,’ she said tersely.
The head editor stood up.
‘I wasn’t thinking of that,’ he said. ‘Is this your regular shift?’
She looked down.
‘No, I start again on Saturday.’
‘Take the weekend off,’ he said. ‘Go away somewhere and relax, you need to after going through something like this.’
She turned and left the room without another word. On the way out of the newsroom she heard Johansson yell: ‘Fuck, we’ve got a brilliant paper here! The speaker of parliament confesses: I was in charge of IB; the Prime Minister comments on the murder suspect; and the Ninja Barbies have been arrested, and we’ve got exclusive pictures!’
She hurried into the lift.
It wasn’t until she was
standing in the courtyard that she realized that she didn’t have any keys. And the door could only be opened with a key, there was no coded lock. She almost started to cry again.
‘Fuck!’ she said, yanking at the door. To her surprise it glided open. A little piece of light-green cardboard floated down to the ground. Annika bent down and picked it up. She recognized the pattern: it came from a box of Clinique skin cream.
Patricia, Annika thought. She worked out that I wouldn’t be able to get in, so she wedged this in the lock.
She went up the stairs, they seemed endless. There was an envelope taped to the outside of her door, and the keys inside rattled as she pulled it off.
Thanks so much for everything. Here are your keys. I got some copies cut. I’m off to the club, back early tomorrow morning. PS. I’ve done some shopping, hope you don’t mind.
Annika unlocked the door. A fresh smell of detergent hit her, and the curtains were waving dramatically in the draught. She pulled the door shut behind her and all the curtains fell still. She walked slowly through the rooms, looking round.
Patricia had cleaned the whole flat apart from Annika’s bedroom. That was just as messy as usual. The fridge was full of different cheeses, olives, hummus, strawberries, and on the worktop there were plums, grapes and avocados.
I’ll never be able to eat all this before it goes off, Annika thought. Then it hit her: There are two of us here now.
She nudged open the door to the little maid’s room. Patricia’s mattress lay neatly in one corner, made up with flowery linen. Beside it was a sports bag full of clothes. On one wall hung Josefin’s pink dress.
I want to stay, she thought. I don’t want to go back to Hälleforsnäs. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in Lyckebo.
That night she dreamed of the three men from the Studio Six radio programme for the first time – the presenter, the reporter and the commentator. They were standing in silence, dark and faceless beside her bed. She could feel their cold, watchful antagonism like cramp in her stomach.
‘How can you say it was my fault?’ she shouted.
The men came closer.
‘I’ve really thought about this! Maybe I got things wrong, but at least I tried!’
The men tried to shoot her. The noise of their guns thundered through her head.
‘I’m not Josefin! No!’
They bent over her in unison, and as their ice-cold breath reached her consciousness she woke up to the sound of her own screams.
It was pitch black in the room. It was raining torrentially outside. The thunder and lightning came at precisely the same time. The bedroom window was banging in the wind, and the room felt cool.
She staggered up to close the window, the wind making it hard to fasten. In the silence after the rain she felt a trickle down her leg. She had got her period. The box of tampons was empty, but she had a few sanitary towels in her bag.
As the storm passed overhead she lay and cried, curled up into a little ball, for a very long time.
Eighteen years, six months and fourteen days
He feels so insulted, and whatever I say has little effect. I know he’s right, of course. No one can ever love me like he does. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do for me, but somehow I still care more for superficial things than for him.
My despair is growing, my inadequacy is blossoming: poisonous, ice-cold, blue. It’s destructive, never being good enough. I want to watch television when he wants to make love, and he dislocates my shoulder. Emptiness that takes over, black and damp, shapeless, impenetrable. He says I’m letting him down, and I can find no way out.
We have to work together, find our way back to our little heaven. Love is eternal, fundamental. I’ve never doubted that. But who says it’s ever simple? If perfection was granted to everyone, why would anyone want to fight for it?
I can’t give up now.
We are the most important thing
that has happened
to each other.
Friday 3 August
41
Anders Schyman got completely soaked over the short distance to his car. The rain was pouring down with furious force, trying to make up for all those boiling-hot days in one single, torrential downpour. The head editor swore and tried to wriggle out of his jacket as he sat wedged behind the steering wheel. The back and shoulders of his shirt were wet through as well.
‘Oh, it’ll soon dry,’ he said to himself.
His efforts to get his jacket off had made the windows steam up, so he set the heater on full.
His wife was waving from the kitchen window, and he wiped the side window and blew her a kiss, then sighed and headed towards the city. He could hardly see the road, even though the windscreen wipers were going at top speed. And he kept having to wipe the condensation from the windows to be able to see anything at all.
Traffic was moving relatively smoothly on the main road from Saltsjöbaden, but as soon as he hit the suburb of Nacka everything ground to a halt. An accident on the Värmdö motorway was causing mile-long tailbacks of motionless traffic. He groaned out loud. Traffic fumes were rising like fog through the rain. In the end he switched off the engine and set the air-conditioning to recycle the air inside the car.
He was having trouble getting to grips with the Evening Post. He’d been reading it scrupulously for four months now, since he first received the offer to take over day-to-day responsibility for its content. A lot of it was pretty obvious, of course, such as the way the paper was always balancing on the edge of what was morally and ethically defensible. That’s what a tabloid was supposed to do. Sometimes they crossed the line, but not very often, when it came down to it. He had studied reports and judgements from the Press Complaints Commission and the press ombudsman, and naturally the evening papers featured heavily in the statistics. They had far more complaints made against them than the other papers, which was entirely understandable. Their purpose was to be provocative and encourage debate. Even so, only a handful of rulings went against them each year. He was surprised to discover that the list of libellous articles was usually topped by the local press, small papers around the country that often seemed to have trouble working out where the boundaries were.
He had come to the conclusion that the Evening Post was a responsible media organization, and that its articles, flysheets and headlines were well judged, and were based on continuity, openness and discussion.
But he had already discovered that reality was light-years away from this idealized vision.
The Evening Post often didn’t have a fucking clue what it was doing. Sending that young temp out to deal with bodies and lynch-mobs, for instance, and expecting her to somehow be able to make clear and responsible decisions. He had spoken to the head of news and the night-editor the previous evening, and neither of them had actually discussed the paper’s coverage of the murder of Josefin Liljeberg with her. He regarded this as a prime example of editorial incompetence and irresponsibility.
Then there was the peculiar story of the feminist terrorist group. No one in a position of any authority appeared to know where the story had come from. A temp waltzed into the newsroom with sensational pictures, and everyone was ecstatic and published them without a moment’s thought.
It couldn’t go on like this. If you’re going to balance successfully on the boundary of what was morally and ethically defensible, you had to know where that boundary lay. Disaster was only a short step away, and he had already felt its sour breath. That radio programme the previous evening, Studio Six, was only the first sign. The Evening Post was on the way to becoming a real target. If any blood was actually shed, the vultures would soon gather. Others in the media would start to tear the paper to shreds. And then it wouldn’t matter what the paper published, because it would all be seen as inaccurate and unreliable. If they didn’t get their act together soon, they were heading for disaster – in terms of sales, journalism and finances.
He sighed. The traffic started to move again in the
lane next to him. He started the car, letting it run in neutral with the handbrake on.
There was no doubt that the paper employed a large number of very knowledgeable and capable people. The problems lay with the management team: there was no real sense of context, no notion of who was responsible for what. Every journalist on the paper had to know exactly what their job was, and what was expected of them. Their targets had to be made clearer.
This had made him realize yet another of his responsibilities in the newsroom. He would have to be the one who steered them all away from disaster. He would have to shine a spotlight on what the dangers were, through discussions, seminars, daily meetings and new routines.
The cars to his left were sweeping past faster and faster, but he still wasn’t moving. He swore and tried to look behind him, but couldn’t see a thing. In the end he put his indicator on and pulled out regardless. The driver he forced to brake blew his horn.
‘Oh, get a life,’ he muttered at the rear-view mirror.
And the traffic stopped again. The lane next to him, the one he had been stuck in, began to move and was soon going nicely.
He leaned his head on the wheel and let out a loud groan.
Annika peered carefully inside the maid’s room. Patricia was asleep. She closed the door quietly, put some coffee on without making a noise, and went out for the morning paper. She tossed it onto the table, and by coincidence it fell open at the review of yesterday’s radio programmes. Annika’s eyes were drawn to the article, and she read the reviewer’s verdict with a growing sense of nausea.
The liveliest and most engaging news programme these days is without doubt Studio Six on P3. Yesterday it dealt with the endless dumbing down of the evening papers, and their relentless exploitation of people in grief. Sadly, this debate has never been more called for …
Annika grabbed the paper and screwed it into a ball, then rammed it into the bin. Then she went into the living room and phoned to cancel her subscription.
She tried to eat half an avocado, but the green flesh seemed to swell in her mouth, making her feel sick. She tried a few strawberries, but they had the same effect. Coffee and orange juice went down okay, but she threw out the rest of the avocado and a few more strawberries so Patricia would think she’d eaten something. Then she wrote a note saying that she was going down to Hälleforsnäs for the weekend. She wondered to herself whether she would ever be coming back. If not, Patricia could take over the flat. After all, she’d need it.
Exposed Page 22