The Bomber

by Liza Marklund

  Annika took a deep breath and smiled. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You won’t write anything about what I’ve said, will you?’ the man said anxiously.

  ‘Said?’ Annika said. ‘You haven’t said anything. All you’ve done is tell me it’s confidential.’

  She ended the call. Great, now she had her angle. Breathing deeply, she stared out through the windscreen.

  5

  One of the fire engines drove off, but the ambulance and paramedics were still there. The bomb squad had arrived; their vehicles were spread out over the plaza. Men in grey overalls were pulling things out of their vans. The fire was out now; she could hardly see any smoke.

  ‘How did we get the tip-off?’ she said.

  ‘From Smoothy,’ Henriksson said.

  Every newspaper has a number of more or less professional tip-off agents who keep an eye on what’s going on in their areas of interest, and the Evening Post was no exception. Smoothy and Leif were their best sources for police news; they slept with the police radio on beside their beds. As soon as anything happened, no matter how big or small, they called the paper. Other sources kept an eye on judicial records, and reporting from various public bodies.

  Annika sank deep into her own thoughts, her eyes roaming across the rest of the site. Immediately in front of them was a ten-storey building where the technical aspect of the Games would be controlled. A footbridge led from the top of the building right across to the rocky hillside. Weird, who on earth would want to go over there? She looked along the path of the bridge.

  ‘Henriksson,’ she said, ‘there’s one more picture we need.’

  She looked at the time. Five thirty. They still had time before the press conference.

  ‘If we climb up beside the Olympic flame, right at the top of the hill, we ought to get a pretty good view.’

  ‘You think so?’ the photographer said sceptically. ‘They’ve put up huge walls to stop people looking in.’

  ‘The centre of the arena is probably blocked, but we might be able to see the north side of the stadium, and that’s the interesting bit right now.’

  Henriksson checked his watch.

  ‘Will we have time? Haven’t we got those shots from the helicopter? And don’t you want to keep an eye on the ambulance?’

  She bit her lip.

  ‘The chopper’s gone now; the police have probably banned them. And we can ask one of the freelancers to watch the vehicles. Come on, let’s get going.’

  The rest of the journalists had discovered the ambulance and the air was thick with questions. The television crew had moved their truck down to the canal to get a better view of the stadium. A frozen reporter was preparing his piece for the six o’clock bulletin. There were no police nearby. Once Annika had spoken to the freelancer they set off.

  Climbing the hill took longer and was much harder than she had expected. The ground was slippery and stony. They clambered up through the darkness, stumbling and swearing. Henriksson was carrying a large tripod. But they didn’t encounter any barriers and made it to the top in time, only to be met with a two-and-a-half-metre-high concrete wall.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Henriksson groaned.

  ‘Oh, yes, and maybe it’s for the best,’ Annika said. ‘Climb up on my shoulders and I’ll try to push you up. Then you can climb up onto the torch itself. You should be able to see something from there.’

  The photographer stared at her.

  ‘You want me to stand on the Olympic torch?’

  ‘Yes, why not? It’s not lit, and it isn’t cordoned off. I’m sure you can get up there; it’s only a metre or so from the top of the wall. If it’s strong enough to carry the eternal flame, I’m sure it can carry you. Up you go!’

  Annika passed the tripod and camera bag up to him. Henriksson clambered up the metal frame.

  ‘It’s full of tiny holes!’ he yelled.

  ‘For the gas,’ Annika said. ‘Can you see the stand?’

  He stood up and looked out at the stadium.

  ‘Can you see anything?’ Annika called.

  ‘Bloody hell, yes,’ the photographer said. He slowly raised his camera and started shooting.

  ‘What can you see?’

  He lowered his camera without taking his eyes from the stadium.

  ‘They’ve got floodlights on part of the stand,’ he said. ‘There’s about ten of them. They’re picking things up and putting them in small plastic bags. The paramedics are there. They’re joining in too. Looks like they’re being pretty thorough.’

  He raised the camera again. Annika felt the hairs on the back of her neck bristle. Fuck. Could this really mean what she thought it did? When Henriksson had finished taking pictures, they slithered and scrambled back down the hillside, shaken, slightly nauseous. What do medics put in small bags? Fragments of explosive devices? Unlikely.

  A couple of minutes before six they were down in the media throng again. Blue-tinted television lamps lit up the scene, making the snowflakes sparkle. The television crew was set up; the reporter was powdered and ready. Led by the officer in charge, a group of policemen was heading towards them. They lifted the cordon, but got no further.

  The wall of journalists was impenetrable. Silence fell as the lead officer blinked in the glare of the lights. He looked down at some sheets of paper, then raised his eyes and started to speak.

  ‘At three seventeen this morning an explosive device detonated at the Victoria Stadium in Stockholm,’ he said. ‘We do not yet know what caused the explosion. The explosion resulted in severe damage to the north stand. It is not yet clear if the damage can be repaired.’

  He stopped and looked at his notes again. Cameras clicked, microphones were poised. Annika was standing off to the side so that she could see if the ambulance left, while at the same time following the press conference.

  ‘The stadium caught fire after the explosion, but the fire is now under control.’

  Another pause.

  ‘A taxi-driver was injured when a piece of debris went through the window of his car,’ the officer went on. ‘He was taken to Södermalm Hospital where he is in a stable condition. The windows and façades of approximately ten properties on the other side of Sickla canal have been damaged. The buildings are still under construction and not yet inhabited. No other casualties have been reported.’

  Another pause. The officer looked tired and solemn as he went on.

  ‘This is an act of sabotage. The device that damaged the stadium was clearly extremely powerful. The police are in the process of securing evidence left by the culprit. We will use all the resources at our disposal to catch him. That’s all we have to say for the time being. Thank you.’

  He turned to retreat behind the cordon. A torrent of voices stopped him.

  ‘… anyone under suspicion …’

  ‘… other victims …’

  ‘… paramedics on the scene?’

  ‘That’s all we have for now,’ the officer repeated, and walked away. He and his colleagues went off quickly, their shoulders hunched. The media circus dissolved, the television reporter stood in the light from the lamps and ran through his text before handing back to the studio, while everyone else was busy with their mobile phones or trying to get their pens to work.

  ‘Hmm,’ Henriksson said, ‘that wasn’t much use.’

  ‘It’s time to go,’ Annika said.

  Leaving one of the freelancers on duty they walked off towards Henriksson’s car.

  ‘Let’s go via Vintertullstorget and get a few witness statements,’ Annika said.

  6

  They rang the doorbells of those living closest to the stadium: young families and pensioners, alcoholics and Goths. They all spoke about the bang that woke them up, how shocked they were and how awful it was.

  ‘That’s enough,’ Annika said at quarter to seven. ‘We’ve still got to pull this together.’

  They drove back to the paper in silence. Annika was writing introductions and captions in her head, He
nriksson was going through the images in his mind’s eye, sorting and organizing them, printing and fixing the light-levels.

  It was snowing properly now. The temperature had risen considerably and the road was dangerously slippery. On the Essinge motorway four cars had gone into each other. Henriksson stopped to check that no one was hurt.

  They reached the paper just before seven. The atmosphere was tense, focused.

  Jansson was still there, at weekends the night-editor looked after the second edition as well. Most Saturdays only one or two articles were switched between editions, but there was always the option of resetting the whole paper. Which was precisely what was happening now.

  ‘Will it hold?’ Jansson asked, jumping to his feet the moment he saw them.

  ‘I think so,’ Annika said. ‘There’s a body in the north stand. In tiny pieces, but I’m sure it’s a body. Give me half an hour and I’ll know for certain.’

  Jansson rocked back and forth on his heels.

  ‘Half an hour, no sooner?’

  Annika fired him a look over her shoulder as she shrugged off her coat, grabbed a copy of the early edition and headed off to her room.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, sitting back down.

  First she wrote the news article itself, which was really just an expansion of the work already done for the early edition. She added quotes from the neighbours and the fact that the fire was now under control. Then she started her I-was-there piece, complete with details of the sights and sounds. At two minutes to eight she called her contact.

  ‘I can’t say anything yet,’ he began.

  ‘I know,’ Annika said. ‘I’m going to do the talking, and you can either stay quiet or tell me I’m wrong—’

  ‘I can’t do that this time,’ he interrupted.

  Shit. She swallowed and decided to go on the attack.

  ‘Hear me out first,’ she said. ‘I reckon this is what happened: someone died in the Victoria Stadium last night. Someone is in tiny pieces in the north stand. You’re there right now trying to find the remnants. It’s an inside job; all the alarms were turned off. There must be a hundred alarms in a stadium like that: burglar alarms, fire alarms, motion detectors – they were all switched off. Someone let themselves in with a key and disarmed them, either the victim or the culprit. And right now you’re trying to work out which one it was.’

  She fell silent and held her breath.

  ‘You can’t go public with that yet,’ the policeman on the other end of the line said.

  She breathed out quickly.

  ‘Which bits?’

  ‘The suspicion that it was an inside job. We want to keep that to ourselves. The alarms were working, but had been switched off. And yes, someone did die. We haven’t got an ID yet.’ He sounded exhausted.

  ‘When will you know?’

  ‘No idea. It’s going to be hard to identify the body visually, if I can put it like that. But there’s other evidence. I can’t say more about that right now.’

  ‘Male or female?’

  He hesitated.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said finally, and hung up.

  Annika rushed out to Jansson.

  ‘They’ve confirmed one death, but they don’t know who the victim was.’

  ‘Mincemeat?’ Jansson said.

  She gulped and nodded.

  Helena Starke woke up with the mother of all hangovers. As long as she was lying in bed it was okay, but when she got up to fetch a glass of water she threw up on the hall rug. She kneeled on all fours panting for a while before she felt able to stagger into the bathroom. She filled the toothbrush glass with water and drank it greedily. Bloody hell, she would never drink again. She looked up at the mirror and saw her bloodshot eyes through the spatters of toothpaste on the mirror. Would she never learn? She opened the bathroom cabinet and pressed two paracetamols from the pack, and swallowed them with plenty of water, offering up a silent prayer that she would be able to keep them down.

  She stumbled out into the kitchen and sat down at the table. The seat of the chair was cold against her naked thighs, and she had a pain in her groin. How much had she actually drunk? There was an empty cognac bottle on the draining-board. She lay her head on the tabletop and tried to remember anything about the previous evening. The bar, the music, all the faces – everything was a blur. Christ, she couldn’t even remember how she got home! Christina had been there, hadn’t she? They left the bar together, didn’t they?

  She groaned, stood up and filled a jug with water, then went back to the bedroom. On her way back she pulled up the mat and threw it into the washing basket in the hall cupboard. She was on the verge of throwing up again as the smell hit her nostrils.

  The clock radio beside the bed said five to nine. She groaned. The older she got, the earlier she woke up, especially when she had been drinking. Once upon a time she had been able to sleep off the alcohol over a whole day. But not any more. These days she woke up early, feeling like death, then lay awake sweating for the rest of the day. She might drift off for a few brief moments, but she couldn’t sleep properly. With an effort she reached for the water and drank straight from the jug. She arranged the pillows against the headboard and settled down. Then she saw the clothes she had been wearing last night, neatly folded on the chest of drawers by the window, and a shiver ran down her spine. Who the hell had done that? Probably her. That was the worst thing about losing your memory when you drank: you could go round like a zombie and do a load of completely normal things without having any idea of what you were doing. She shuddered and switched the radio on; she may as well listen to the news while she waited for the pills to work.

  The lead item on the news made her throw up again. And she knew at once that there would be no more rest for Helena Starke that day.

  Once she had flushed her vomit away down the toilet she picked up the phone and called Christina.

  7

  The paper’s news agency flashed up Annika’s findings at 09.34. Which meant the Evening Post was first out with the news about anyone being killed in the explosion at the stadium. The front-page headlines shouted: ONE DEAD IN OLYMPIC BOMBING and BOMBER WANTED FOR MURDER.

  They were taking a chance with the second one, but Jansson was convinced they had enough to support the claim. The cover was dominated by the picture Henriksson had taken up on the Olympic torch. It was a striking image: the circle of light below the hole made by the bomb, the men crouching over, the dancing snowflakes. It was deeply unsettling, but somehow not macabre. No blood, no body, just an awareness of what the men were doing. They had already sold it to Reuters. The ten o’clock television news was quoting the Post’s information, while the radio news bulletin was pretending that it was their story.

  Once the next edition was printed the crime reporters and news-editors gathered in Annika’s office. Boxes of her files and old cuttings were still piled up in the corners. She had inherited the sofa, but the desk was new. Annika had been in the office for two months, ever since she became head of the crime team.

  ‘We’ve got a lot to get through, and a lot of work to divide between us,’ she said, putting her feet up on the desk. As soon as the paper had gone to press and she had stopped to catch her breath, tiredness had hit her like a brick to the back of the head. She leaned back, reaching for her coffee.

  ‘One: who’s the body in the stand? That’s tomorrow’s main story, and it may turn into several stories. Two: the hunt for the killer. Three: the Olympics angle. Four: how could this happen? Five: the taxi-driver; no one’s spoken to him yet. Maybe he saw or heard something?’

  She looked at the people in the room, trying to read their reactions to what she had just said. Jansson was half asleep, he was about to go home. The news-chief, Ingvar Johansson, was staring blankly at her. One of the reporters, Nils Langeby, at fifty-three the oldest member of the crime team, was having his usual trouble concealing his hostility. Another one, Patrik Nilsson, appeared to be listening attentively. The third reporter, Berit Hamrin,
was sitting quietly.

  The only person missing was Eva-Britt Qvist, who was both researcher and editorial secretary.

  ‘I think the way we go about things like this is appalling,’ Nils said.

  Annika sighed and thought: Here we go again.

  ‘How do you think we should go about it, then?’

  ‘We spend far too much time on this sort of opportunistic violence. What about all the environmental crimes we never cover? And all the crime in schools?’

  ‘Obviously, it would be good if we could give more coverage—’

  ‘Of course it fucking would! This paper’s drowning in a swamp of tragic old ladies and bombs and motorbike gangs.’

  Annika took a deep breath and counted to three before she replied.

  ‘You’re raising an important point, Nils, but maybe now isn’t the right time to discuss it …’

  ‘Why not? Don’t you think I’m capable of working out the right time to raise an issue?’

  He shifted in his chair.

  ‘Nils, environmental and school crimes are your brief,’ Annika said calmly. ‘You spend all your time on those two issues. Do you really think we’re tearing you away from your particular area if we call you in on a day like today?’

  ‘Yes, I do!’ he thundered.

  She looked at the furious man in front of her. How on earth was she supposed to handle him? If she didn’t call him in he’d go mad at being left out of their coverage of the Bomber. If she gave him a job he would first refuse, and then mess it up. If she let him stay in the office on standby he would complain about being frozen out.

  Her train of thought was interrupted when the editor-in-chief, Anders Schyman, came into the office. Everyone, including Annika, said hello and sat up in their chairs.

  ‘Congratulations, Annika! And thank you, Jansson, for a phenomenal effort this morning,’ Schyman said. ‘We beat everyone. Excellent! The front-cover picture was brilliant, and we’re the only ones who got that view. How on earth did you get it, Annika?’