‘What makes you think she’d want it?’
‘Jansson, then. Or Spike.’
He sat down on the desk with a sigh. ‘There’s no shortage of volunteers. But I need someone with decent judgement.’
She laughed in spite of herself. ‘And you’re asking me? That says a lot about the level of competence in this newsroom.’
‘The alternative is for you to be on a rota. You’d sit at a desk, make calls and do whatever the news editor tells you.’
She suddenly realized how uncomfortable the chair was and shifted to ease the strain on her back. ‘Doesn’t this need union approval?’ she asked.
‘The union’s no problem, believe me,’ he said.
‘Putting me on a rota would be crazy,’ she said. ‘You know I get far better stories if I look after myself.’
He leaned towards her and she stared at his knees. ‘Annika,’ he said, ‘the cutbacks we negotiated last autumn have all gone through. We no longer have the resources to support any reporters on special conditions. You’ll report to Patrik as your immediate superior.’
She looked up at him. ‘You’re joking.’
He folded his arms. ‘We arranged it between Christmas and New Year. As lead editor you’d be his boss. You could steer him, make sure he stays on the right track. If you start working as a reporter on a rota, you’ll have to do whatever he tells you.’
‘But I gave him a job,’ Annika said. ‘I can’t have him as my boss. And if you’re after someone with judgement, then Patrik’s pretty much the last person—’
‘We need good judgement further up the organization. At head of news level, I need someone with Patrik’s enthusiasm, someone who finds everything interesting.’
Annika stretched her neck and looked towards the decimated crime desk, where Patrik was sitting with his nose pressed against his screen, typing with his elbows in the air. He had managed to get the only comment from the prime minister the day the minister for business had resigned: he’d run after his cavalcade all through central Stockholm and had finally been rewarded with ‘Are you crazy, you stupid bastard?’ When he’d got back to the newsroom he had described the whole event as a triumph.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘if you’re after passion, you should certainly promote Patrik.’
‘You’ll be on the day shift, Monday to Friday,’ Schyman said, standing up. ‘No overtime and no antisocial-hours payments. We’ve been shutting down our local news teams around the country so you could be sent anywhere at a moment’s notice, even abroad. You’ll have to take over the series of articles about the Costa Cocaine that Patrik was planning, for instance. You can go and sit at the news desk and Patrik will be over to give you the papers.’
‘Wasn’t that just an excuse for Patrik to fly down, top up his tan and go swimming?’
‘You’re wrong. The Costa Cocaine is an exclusive series of articles. The initiative came from the paper’s editorial management. We’ve set up a collaboration with the Police Authority and the Justice Department to have access to privileged information. So we’re going through with it.’
‘What’ll happen to the day-shift desk?’ she asked, glancing at her workstation, with her computer, jacket, bag and an array of notes.
‘That’s going to be the features department,’ Schyman said, gesturing towards the plan on the floor. ‘The crime desk is turning into the discussion and opinion section.’
She got up and left the editor-in-chief’s glass box.
She really couldn’t care less which chair she sat in or which articles she had to write. Her husband had left her, taking with him half of her time with the children, her house had burned down and the insurance money couldn’t be released. She was living in a three-room flat in a building owned by the police association, arranged by her contact in the forces, Detective Inspector Q, under highly dubious circumstances: someone could appear at any moment and turf her out.
She gathered together her things and made her way to one of the cramped spaces around the main news desk. She hardly had space for the computer on the desk in front of her, so she dropped her jacket, bag and notes on the floor beside her chair. She sat down, raised the seat, checked that the computer was connected, and sent an email to Inspector Q: ‘I’ve moved into the flat, but I still haven’t seen anything that looks like a contract. And FYI I’m thinking about digging into the extradition of the kitty-cat. A.’
That would give him something to think about.
Then she reached for a telephone and called the Justice Department. She asked to be put through to the minister’s press secretary, who sounded very stressed when she answered.
Annika introduced herself and said where she worked. ‘I’d like a comment from the minister about the extradition of an American contract-killer who goes by the name of the Kitten,’ she said.
‘A what?’ the press secretary said.
‘I know she was handed back to the US in exchange for us getting the cop-killer, Victor Gabrielsson, home from prison in New Jersey. I want to know why, and how it came about.’
‘The minister never makes statements on matters concerning national security,’ the press secretary said, trying to sound robotic and uninterested.
‘Who said anything about national security?’ Annika said. ‘I just want to know what you did with the Kitten.’
‘Can I get back to you?’
Annika gave the woman her mobile and direct line numbers, as if there was any chance of her calling back. Yeah, right! She hung up, then dialled Berit Hamrin’s mobile. Her colleague answered at once.
‘Have you been demoted as well?’ Annika asked.
‘With Patrik as boss,’ Berit confirmed.
There was the sound of traffic in the background.
‘Where are you now?’
‘I’ve just pulled out onto the E18.’
Annika could see Patrik sweeping towards her with a bundle of notes in his right hand, and moved the receiver closer to her lips. ‘Here comes the boss,’ she said quietly. ‘This is going to be interesting.’
As he sat down on her desk, she hung up and moved the computer aside.
‘Okay. Things are really going to start moving now,’ the newly appointed head of news said, leafing through his notes. ‘We’ve got a fire in a flat out in Hallunda, people gassed to death on the Spanish coast and a bus crash in Denmark. Start with the bus and check if there were any Swedes on board.’
‘Lilian Bergqvist is asking for a review of Filip Andersson’s case,’ she said, switching the computer on next to Patrik’s thigh.
‘Old news,’ Patrik said. ‘We all knew she was going to do that as soon as we revealed that his sister was the real killer. Berit can write a note about it.’
When I revealed who the real killer was, she thought, but said nothing.
‘The gassing in Spain sounds pretty grim,’ he went on, handing over the notes. ‘Looks like an entire family is dead, including the dog. See if you can make anything out of it, ideally a picture of them all, with the name and age of the dog. People are always interested in Spain – it must still be the biggest tourist destination for Swedes.’
‘Haven’t we got a stringer down there?’ Annika asked, remembering a picture byline of a suntanned man with a clenched smile.
‘He’s back home in Tärnaby for Christmas. The fire in Hallunda feels a bit thin, but maybe they had to evacuate and poor old Hedvig couldn’t get down in her wheelchair, or something else that would be good in the mix.’
‘Okay,’ Annika said. He’d already learned the vocabulary. Good in the mix. Bloody hell. ‘There’s a couple of other things I was going to check out,’ she said, making an effort to sound calm and composed. ‘I got a tip-off that the government was involved in a peculiar extradition case, and I’ve got a meeting at two o’clock that might lead to an interview about …’
But Patrik had already got up and was on his way over to Features.
Annika stared at him. She decided not to get upset. If he ch
ose not to listen to his … subordinates, then that was his problem. She leaned back in the chair. She was pretty much the only person in the newsroom.
She’d been called in by Schyman at eight o’clock that morning, and had assumed he would make another attempt to persuade her to accept one of the senior editorial positions. There were usually a few years between offers, but this time it was different. He’d tried before to push her into accepting head of news and head of supplements, and she had even accepted and become head of crime for a short time, but never before had he offered her lead editor.
She let out a sigh. The way he had described it, five days on, five days off, she would still have been sharing the job with someone, probably Sjölander. She wouldn’t just have been held responsible for all the idiotic things that would inevitably have arisen while putting together the news section, but would also have had to sit through interminable meetings about budgets, marketing plans and staffing issues. I’d rather cover fires in blocks of flats in Hallunda, she thought, as she rang the section head of the emergency services control room.
Smoking in bed, the section head told her, one dead, someone who’d taken early retirement. Fire extinguished. Limited smoke damage. No evacuation.
‘And who was the person who died?’ Annika asked.
He leafed through his papers.
‘The flat belonged to a … I’ve got it here somewhere … Jonsson … Well, no one famous, anyway.’
No one famous = no story.
They hung up.
The bus crash had involved a group of kids, a hockey team on their way to a tournament in Aalborg. The accident had occurred when the bus slid slowly off an icy country road in Jutland, and ended up on its side in a ditch. The children had had to scramble out through the driver’s window.
Annika emailed the details to the picture desk and asked them to keep an eye open in case any pictures of terrified children appeared. The story wasn’t worth anything except as a caption to a photograph.
The gassings in Spain was trickier to get to grips with. Patrik’s note had been a printout of a telegram from the main news agency, consisting of three lines stating that a family with two children and a dog had been found dead after they’d been gassed in connection with a breakin.
She started by going to the website of the only Spanish newspaper whose name she knew, El País, and was caught by the main headline: España es el país europeo con más atropellos mortales de peatones.
She squinted at the screen. She really should be able to understand it. Two years of Spanish at school wasn’t much, but online newspaper language wasn’t very demanding. She thought it meant that Spain was the European country with the highest mortality rate for pedestrians – 680 last year.
She closed the article and went on searching for something like Familia muerto Costa del Sol.
Nada, niguno, vacío.
But El País was a national paper, presumably based in Madrid. Maybe they didn’t bother with things that happened down near the edge of Africa. But surely a whole family dying ought to warrant a mention, at least in the online edition.
She stood up and went to fetch a plastic cup of coffee from the machine, returned to her desk, sat down with it and thought. Gassed in connection with a breakin? She’d never heard of that before. She typed the words into Google and got one hit.
Something wrong with the translation?
She blew cautiously on the coffee and took a careful sip. It tasted even worse than yesterday’s.
She went back to Google, tried ‘gas’ and ‘breakin’, and this time the results were better.
‘Driver knocked out with gas during breakin,’ was fourth on the list. The article was from Radio Sweden and had been published on 14 December 2004. Several pallets of flat computer screens had been stolen from a lorry at the Shell garage at Västra Jära on highway 40, just west of Jönköping. Neither the driver nor his dog, who had both been asleep in the cab, had noticed the robbery. When he had woken up the driver had had a headache and felt sick. The police suspected he had been knocked out with some sort of gas. They had taken blood samples to see if they could find any trace of it.
Here we go, she thought, and scrolled down the screen.
‘Thieves drugged dog with gas – rapid rise in burglaries in Stockholm,’ she read. The article was from Metro, and was only a week or so old.
She went into the paper’s archive and carried on looking.
‘Thieves used gas on tourists – Four people knocked out in campervan – Heavy doses of hexane gas can cause serious injury,’ and ‘Action-film director robbed with gas – The whole thing was terrible’.
The article was about a Swedish director whose home on the Spanish coast had been broken into. He and his girlfriend had woken up the next morning to find all the doors wide open and the flat empty.
‘So, we’re back to being foot-soldiers again,’ Berit said, putting her handbag down on the other side of the news desk.
‘Happy New Everything,’ Annika said.
‘How are you?’ Berit asked, hanging her coat on the back of her chair.
Annika’s hands hovered above the keyboard. ‘Pretty good, thanks. This year has to be better than last because anything else just isn’t possible.’
Berit put her laptop on the desk. ‘Is it just you and me left?’ she asked.
Annika looked round.
Patrik was talking animatedly into his mobile over by the sports desk, there were a few people from the online edition in what had once been Entertainment but which now produced copy for cyberspace, and one of the Sunday-supplement editors was hanging around the picture desk. Tore, the caretaker, was laboriously fixing that day’s flysheets – the newspaper’s yellow posters – to the notice-board.
‘Newspaper wars are just like any other,’ Annika said. ‘The ground troops are cut and everything gets spent on technology and smart bombs. When did Schyman talk to you?’
Berit Hamrin pointed at Annika’s coffee. ‘On Friday. Is that drinkable?’
‘Negative. He called me this morning. Did he want you to join the management team?’
‘Head of news,’ Berit replied. ‘I said thanks but no thanks.’
Annika glanced at her computer screen. Schyman had offered her the more senior position. ‘I’m looking into a fatal gassing in Spain,’ she said. ‘A whole family was killed in a breakin on the Costa del Sol.’
Berit switched on her computer and went to the coffee machine. ‘Give Rickard Marmén a call,’ she said, over her shoulder. ‘I don’t know his number, but if there’s anything going on in Spain that’s worth knowing, he’ll know about it.’
Annika picked up the phone and dialled Directory Enquiries.
Engaged.
She went back into Google, thought for a moment, then typed buscar numero telefono españa. Was that the right spelling? Search telephone numbers Spain?
The first result was for something called Paginas Blancas.
Bingo!
She narrowed the search to Málaga and typed in ‘Rickard Marmén’, then pressed encontrar.
Who’d have thought it?
He lived on the Avenida Ricardo Soriano in Marbella; his landline and mobile numbers were listed.
Berit sat down with her coffee.
‘So who’s Rickard, then?’ Annika said, with the receiver in her hand.
‘An old friend of my brother-in-law. He’s lived down there for twenty years now, has tried his hand at pretty much everything you can think of and failed at all of it. He’s rented out sunbeds and bred stud horses and run a guesthouse, and once he had a share in a company selling log cabins.’
‘On the Costa del Sol?’ Annika said dubiously.
‘As I said, he always fails.’
‘What’s the dialling code for Spain?’
‘Thirty-four.’ Berit pulled a face as she tasted the coffee.
Annika tried the landline first. After five rings an electronic voice said something unintelligible in Spanish and sh
e hung up. She tried the mobile number, and two seconds later a male voice said loudly: ‘Sí, dígame!’
‘Rickard Marmén?’
‘Hablando!’
‘Er, my name’s Annika Bengtzon, I’m calling from the Evening Post in Stockholm. You do speak Swedish, don’t you?’
‘Course I do. What can I do for you?’
He had a strong Gothenburg accent.
‘I’m calling because I’ve been told you know about everything that happens on the Costa del Sol,’ she said, glancing at Berit. ‘I was wondering if you knew anything about gas being used in a breakin somewhere down there?’
‘Gas? In a breakin? Listen, love, we don’t have any other sort of breakin here these days. Every breakin uses gas. Gas-detectors are more common than fire-alarms in the villas of Nueva Andalucía. Anything else you want to know?’
There was a lot of noise in the background. It sounded like he was standing beside a motorway.
‘Er, okay,’ Annika said. ‘So, what exactly is a breakin involving gas?’
‘The thieves pump some sort of knock-out gas through the windows or air-conditioning. Then, while the occupants are asleep, they can go through the whole house. They usually take their time, have something to eat in the kitchen, open a bottle of wine.’
‘And this is the most common type of breakin, you say?’ Annika asked.
‘It’s an epidemic. It started five, six years ago, although gas was sometimes used before that.’
‘Why is it so common down there?’
‘There’s a lot of money here, darling. Thick bundles of cash under mattresses all round Puerto Banús. And there’s a significant criminal element, of course, and plenty of poor bastards who’ll do anything for a bit of cash. They caught a gang of Romanians last autumn. They’d cleaned out more than a hundred villas right along the coast, from Gibraltar up to Nerja.’
‘The news agency’s just let us know that a whole family’s been killed by gas in a breakin,’ Annika said. ‘You don’t happen to know anything about that?’
‘When? Last night? Where?’
‘Don’t know,’ Annika said. ‘Just that everyone died, including two kids and a dog.’
Rickard Marmén didn’t answer. If it hadn’t been for the traffic in the background she would have thought she’d been cut off.
The Long Shadow Page 2