Q sighed. "Yes, we know that. But it's Patricia's word against the seven guys'. And if, and that's a big if- if we ever get this case to court and manage to blow these guys' stories, we'd have to prosecute them all for perjury. That's unfeasible."
They sat in silence. Annika finished the by now cold coffee, he his cheese roll.
"One of them might talk," Annika said.
"Sure," Q said. "The only problem is that most of them were too drunk to remember anything. They've been served this story as the truth and they really believe what they're saying. My guess is that only one, possibly two of the guys are actually aware they're lying. They're Joachim's best pals, and both of them suddenly have come into a lot of money, I would imagine. They'll never squeal."
Annika was tired, to the point of feeling nausated. "So what do you think really happened?" she said faintly.
"Exactly what you think. He strangled her behind that gravestone."
"And raped her?"
"No, not there, not then. We found semen inside her, and the DNA tests show that it was Joachim's. They had probably had sex a couple of hours earlier."
Annika closed her eyes and searched her memory. "But first you stated that it was a sex murder. You said there were signs of sexual violence."
The Krim captain rubbed his forehead. "They were mostly old injuries, especially in the anus. He must have raped her anally."
Annika felt like throwing up. "Oh, Christ…"
They were silent.
"That other woman who was murdered in the same park," Annika suddenly said. "Eva. That murder was never solved either, was it?"
Q sighed. "No, but it's the same thing there. We consider it cleared up. It was her ex-husband. We brought him in after a couple of years but had to release him. We never managed to nail him for it. He's dead now."
"And Joachim's going to get away scot-free?"
Q put on his jacket. "Not if your information is correct. We won't have time to organize a raid tonight, but we'll go in tomorrow. Stay well away."
He got up and stood next to her chair. "There's just the one thing we can't figure out."
"What's that?"
"How she got those injuries to her hand."
As Q left, Annika sat on her chair, her body like lead.
***
The hours at the club crept by. Patricia looked at Annika. "You look sick. Are you coming down with something?"
Annika wiped the cold sweat from her brow. Her hand was smeared with foundation. "I think so. I'm cold and I feel sick."
They were sitting on a wooden bench in the locker room; the blue light made the blisters on Annika's feet shine a glaring red.
"How much money have you made?" Patricia asked.
"Not enough." Annika looked down at her sky-blue bikini.
Now she really felt as if she was going to throw up. Today was Friday, and several more naked girls were prancing around the place. They would sit on the men's laps, rubbing themselves against their thighs, tempting them inside the private rooms where they would get to work with the body lotion. Generic, economy-size lotion that went a long way and was fragrance free.
"It has to be odorless, that's crucial," Patricia had explained. "They've got to go home to their wives afterward."
Annika was jittery and on edge. What if she'd misunderstood it all? She didn't dare ask Patricia any more questions about the double bookkeeping, and Patricia hadn't brought it up again. What if the police came tonight anyway? What if Joachim had already moved the books?
She brushed her hair away from her face with shaking hands.
"Would you like a sandwich, or some coffee?" Patricia asked with concern.
Annika forced a smile. "No thanks, I'll be all right."
Joachim was next door in the office. Mercifully, she'd been busy with some gamblers when he'd arrived.
How do you become like him? she wondered. What's wrong with you when you kill the one you love? How can you kill another human being and go on living as if nothing has happened?
"I've got to go back out," Patricia said. "Are you coming?"
Annika leaned forward and put new Band-Aids on her blisters.
"Sure."
The music was louder inside the strip bar. Two girls were onstage. One was wrapping herself around the pole, thrusting her hips toward the audience. The other had brought a man from the audience up onto the stage. He was smearing shaving foam all over her breasts while she arched backward, making as if she were groaning in ecstasy.
Annika followed Patricia behind the bar and poured herself a glass of Coke.
"Doesn't it get you down having to look at this all night?" Annika said into Patricia's ear.
"Put a bottle of champagne on the bald guy," one of the nudes said, and Patricia went over to the cash register.
Annika went back out to her foyer. She shuddered; it was cold out here. Sanna wasn't there. Annika sat down on a barstool she'd pulled in behind the roulette table.
"How's business?"
Joachim was standing in the office doorway, arms across his chest and a smile on his lips.
Annika immediately jumped down from the stool. "So-so. Yesterday was better."
He came up to the table, still smiling and holding her gaze with his. "I think you've got a real future here." He came up beside her behind the table.
Annika licked her lips and tried to smile. "Thanks." She batted her eyelashes.
"How did you decide to come work here?" His voice was a few degrees cooler.
Lie, she thought, but keep as close to the truth as you can.
"I need money." She looked up. "I got sacked from my old job, they thought I was a troublemaker. One of the… customers complained about me and my boss got cold feet."
Joachim laughed, then caressed her shoulder, his hand lingering just by her breast. "What was the job?"
She swallowed, fighting the instinct to recoil from his touch. "A grocery store. I worked in the deli section at Vivo on Fridhemsplan. Slicing salami all day long isn't exactly my idea of fun."
He laughed out loud and removed his hand. "I can understand why you quit. Who did you work with?"
Her heart stopped. Did he know someone there? "Why?" She smiled. "Do you have connections in the sausage business?"
He guffawed. "I think you should give the stage some thought." He moved closer to her. "You'd look fantastic in the spotlight. Have you ever wanted to be a star?"
He pushed both his hands into her hair and gave her neck a hug. To her dismay, she felt a pang of excitement in her genitals.
"A star? What, like Josefin?"
The words slipped out of her before she had time to think. He reacted as if she'd punched him, let go of her head, and took a step back.
"What the hell? What do you know about her?"
Jesus, how fucking stupid can I be? she thought, and cursed her big mouth.
"She worked here, didn't she? I heard about her," she said, unable to control her trembling voice.
Joachim backed off farther. "Why, did you know her or something?"
Annika smiled nervously. "No, not at all, I never met her. But Patricia told me she used to work here."
He went up and stood face-to-face with her. "Josefin came to a really fucking bad end," he said in a tense, deliberate voice. "We get some powerful people here, and she thought she could con some money out of them. Don't. Don't ever try to roll anyone here. Not the customers, not me."
Joachim spun round and went up the spiral staircase.
Annika was holding on to the roulette wheel, ready to faint.
Nineteen Years, Seven Months, and Fifteen Days
I 'm driven by my wish to understand. I realize that I'm looking for explanations and a framework where there aren't any. What do I really know about the terms of love?
He isn't really bad- only vulnerable and thin-skinned, scarred by his childhood. There is nothing to suggest his powerlessness will always find the same expression. When he becomes more mature, he'll stop
hitting. My own mean doubts run stakes of shame through my abdomen; I've judged him far too rashly. I take my own development for granted, his I completely ignore.
Yet the chill has built a nest in my breast.
Because he says
he will never
let me go.
Saturday 8 September
She felt strange using the elevator again. She remembered the last time she'd stood here, thinking she'd never be here again.
Nothing is forever, she thought. Everything goes around in circles.
The newsroom was bright, quiet, and weekend-empty, just as she preferred it. Ingvar Johansson had his back turned and was on the phone; he didn't see her.
Anders Schyman was sitting behind his desk in his fish tank.
"Come in." He indicated for her to sit down on his new burgundy leather couch. Annika pushed the door closed behind her and looked out at the newsroom behind the tired old curtains. It felt strange that everything should look exactly as it did when she'd left, as if she'd never existed.
"You're looking good."
I've heard that one before, Annika thought. "I wasn't that tired before," she said, and sat on the couch. The upholstery was hard, the leather cold.
"How was the Caucasus?"
She wasn't following and pressed her lips together.
"You were going," Schyman said.
"There were no last-minute trips left. I went to Turkey instead."
The deputy editor smiled. "Lucky for you. It looks like war down there. They seem to be mobilizing the army."
Annika nodded. "The government forces got hold of some weapons."
They sat in silence for a while.
"So what have you got cooking?" Schyman said after a while.
Annika took a deep breath. "I haven't written it. I don't have a computer. I was going to outline it to you and see what you think."
"Shoot."
Annika pulled up her photocopies from the bag. "It's about the murder of Josefin Liljeberg and the minister."
Anders Schyman waited in silence.
"The minister is innocent of the murder," she said. "As far as the police are concerned, the murder has been cleared up. The boyfriend did it, the strip-club owner Joachim. They can't nail him, though, as he has six witnesses that give him an alibi. They couldn't prosecute them all for perjury, but the police are convinced that they're lying."
Annika fell silent and leafed through her papers.
"So no one's going to be brought to trial for the murder?" Schyman said slowly.
"Nope. It'll remain unsolved unless the people giving the alibi start talking. And in twenty-five years the statute of limitations will expire."
She got up and put two photocopies on the deputy editor's desk. "Check this out. Here's the receipt from Studio 69 from the early hours on July twenty-eight. Seven people spent fifty-five thousand six hundred kronor on entertainment and refreshments. Josefin rang it up- you can see that on the code here, and it was paid for with a Diners Club card in Christer Lundgren's name. Look at the signature."
Anders Schyman picked up the photocopy and studied it. "It's illegible."
"Yep. Now look at this."
She held out the invoice for the Tallinn trip.
"Christer Lundgren," Schyman read, and looked up at Annika. "The two signatures were written by different people."
Annika nodded and licked her lips. Her mouth was completely dry. She wished she had a glass of water. "The minister for foreign trade was never at the strip club. I think the Studio 69 receipt was signed by the undersecretary at the ministry."
Anders Schyman picked up the first slip and held it close to his glasses. "Yes. Could be."
"Christer Lundgren was in Tallinn that night. He flew out on Estonian Air at eight in the evening of the twenty-seventh of July, you can tell from the invoice. He met with someone there and flew back in a privately chartered plane the following morning."
The deputy editor changed papers. "What do you know… What was he doing there?"
Annika drew a light breath. "It was a highly secret meeting. It had to do with an arms deal. He didn't want to hand in his invoices to his own ministry where they could be found, so instead he sent them to the National Inspectorate of Strategic Products."
Schyman looked up at her. "The authority that controls Swedish arms exports?"
Annika nodded.
"Are you sure?"
She pointed at the verifications.
"Indeed," said the deputy editor. "Why, though?"
"I can only think of one reason. The export deal wasn't quite, shall we say, all in order."
A furrow appeared between Schyman's eyebrows. "It doesn't make sense. Why would this government do a shady arms deal? Who with?"
Annika straightened up and swallowed. "I don't think they had any choice," she said quietly.
Schyman leaned back in his swivel chair. "You'll have to be precise."
"I know, but the fact is that Christer Lundgren went to Tallinn that night on some business that's so controversial he'd rather get caught up in a murder investigation and resign than make it public. That's a fact. And what could be worse?"
She was standing up and gesticulating. Anders Schyman watched her with interest.
"I imagine you have a theory," he said, amused.
"IB. The lost archives, original documents that would sink the Social Democrats for a long time."
Schyman leaned forward. "But they've been destroyed."
"I don't believe so. A copy of the foreign archive turned up at the Defense Staff Headquarters on the seventeenth of July this year. It came from abroad, via diplomatic mail. I think it was a warning to the government: do as we say or we'll make the rest turn up. The originals."
"But how would this have happened?"
Annika sat on his desk and sighed. "The Social Democrats were spying on the Communists all through the postwar era, storing up as much information on them as they could lay their hands on. Meanwhile, do you think the guys over here were just sitting around doing nothing?" She pointed over her shoulder toward the Russian embassy. "Hardly. They knew exactly what the Swedes were up to." She got up, got her bag, and pulled out her pad. "In the spring of 1973, Elmér and the boys at IB knew that the journalists Guillou and Bratt were on their heels. The Social Democrats began to panic. Of course the Russians knew. And they knew that the Swedes would try to sweep away all traces of their spying. So what did they do?"
She held out her copies of the news items in the broadsheet from April 2, 1973.
"The Russians stole the archives. The Stockholm embassy's KGB man saw to it that they were taken out of the country, probably in large courier's bags."
Schyman took her pad and read.
"And who was the Stockholm head of KGB in the early seventies?" Annika said. "Yes, the man who today is the president of a troubled nation in the Caucasus region. He even speaks Swedish. This president has one gigantic problem: he's got no weapons to fight the guerrillas with and the international community has decided that he can't be sold any."
The deputy editor was fingering the papers.
Annika sat down on the couch to deliver her conclusion. "So what does the president do? He digs up the old documents from twenty-four Grevgatan and fifty-six Valhallavägen. If the Swedish government doesn't supply him with weapons, he'll see to it that they lose power for a long time to come. At first the government refuses to listen. Maybe they don't believe he has any archives, so he sends his warning to the Defense Staff Headquarters. A selection of copies from the foreign archive- not enough to topple the government, but enough for the Social Democrats to be saddled with an IB debate in the middle of an election campaign. So the prime minister decides to send his minister for foreign trade to meet the president's representatives. They meet halfway, in Estonia. They make a deal and agree on the consignment of arms to be delivered immediately via some third country, probably Singapore. The army prepares for war."
Annika rubbed her for
ehead. "Everything goes according to plan. Except there's a hitch- a young woman is murdered outside the minister's front door on the same night that the meeting in Tallinn takes place. Through the most ill-fated coincidence it turns out that the minister's undersecretary has brought a bunch of German union reps to the strip club where the murder victim worked and paid the check with the minister's credit card. The minister's up the proverbial creek- his hands are tied. He can't say where he's been or what he's been doing."
The silence in the office was tangible. Annika could see that Schyman's brain was working at full speed. He fiddled with the pad and the photocopies, made a note, scratched his head.
"I'll be damned. I'll be damned… What does he have to say for himself?"
Annika swallowed, desperately trying to moisten her throat. No success. "I've only spoken to his wife, Anna-Lena. Lundgren refuses to come to the phone. Then I tried reaching him through his former press secretary, Karina Björnlund. I gave her the whole scenario, how I think it all came about. She was going to try to get a comment, but she never phoned back."
They sat without talking for a while, then the deputy editor cleared his throat. "How many people have you told this to?"
"None," Annika instantly replied, "just you."
"And Karina Björnlund. Anyone else?"
Annika closed her eyes and thought. "No. Only you and Karina Björnlund." She felt herself tense up. The counterarguments would come now.
"This is incredibly interesting, but it's unpublishable."
"Why?" Annika quickly replied.
"Too many loose ends. Your line of argument is logical, even possible, but it can't be proved."
"I've got the copies of the invoices and the receipts!" Annika exclaimed.
"Sure, but it's not enough. You know that."
Annika didn't respond.
"That the minister was in Tallinn is news, but it doesn't give him an alibi for the time of the murder. He was home by five, the time when the girl was murdered. You remember the neighbor who bumped into him?"
Annika nodded.
Schyman continued, "Christer Lundgren has resigned, and you don't kick-"
Studio Sex aka Studio 69 / Exposed Page 32