Without a Trace (Annika Bengtzon 10)

by Marklund, Liza

  He sighed again.

  ‘What is it?’

  He scratched his head. ‘That assault,’ he said. ‘Lerberg. It’s a really messy business.’ He let go of her and sat up. ‘Q briefed us this morning, I’ve just been for a drink with the minister to talk things through.’

  Annika waited patiently, and noticed the dark rings round his eyes.

  ‘We’re probably going to have to issue some sort of statement tomorrow, although there isn’t much to say. The police are fumbling in the dark.’

  ‘But they’re going to have to come up with something, surely. Nothing from Forensics?’

  ‘Well, obviously there are plenty of lines of inquiry, but none of them leads anywhere. Yet.’

  Annika leaned against him and listened to his breathing. ‘I went through the accounts of his old businesses today, the ones that went bankrupt,’ she said. ‘His reputation as a successful businessman is considerably exaggerated. The only thing he seems to have been really good at is wasting money.’

  Jimmy looked at her in surprise. ‘Really?’

  Annika nodded. ‘He had four bankruptcies in seven years. Nothing improper, just too many outgoings and too little income. His wife, Nora, wasn’t much liked among the neighbours. She kept to herself, didn’t want to join the cookery club or reading group.’

  ‘Have they set up an emergency therapy circle yet?’

  ‘More or less. I met her friends at Therese Lindenstolphe’s – she was bound to have a fancy name like that, obviously. We ate freshly baked buns.’

  Jimmy whistled.

  ‘The leader of the group is called Sabine. We heard about her children, husband and the first time she gave birth. I’d put money on her having applied to all those posh reality shows several times. Not Big Brother, the ones where people get to show off what they’ve already got …’

  He chuckled and pulled her closer to him.

  ‘And Ingemar Lerberg knows Anders Schyman,’ she mumbled. ‘They had dinner together at Edsbacka krog a few weeks before he resigned.’

  She unbuttoned his shirt and slipped her hands round his waist. Jimmy’s body was broad and rough, still enough of a miracle to make her feel giddy.

  ‘The minister wants to know …’ he said into her hair.

  Her hands stopped. ‘What did you say?’

  The rumour that Jimmy had been asked to take over the Migration Board wasn’t true. He had been offered the Prison and Probation Service, which was also based in Norrköping, and which, if possible, was an even riskier post.

  ‘That we haven’t decided.’

  ‘When does he need to know?’

  Jimmy kissed her.

  WEDNESDAY, 15 MAY

  At 04:46 Anders Schyman gave up. He had been lying there staring at the glowing red numbers on the clock-radio for more than an hour, and knew he wasn’t going to get any more sleep. He turned his head and looked at his sleeping wife, her lips parted, eyelashes resting on her cheeks, chest rising and falling under the duvet.

  She was right: a self-righteous blogger making aggressive and sweeping accusations about something he’d done eighteen years ago wasn’t worth getting upset about.

  He disentangled himself from the damp bedsheets and got out of bed, naked, and with cold feet. He ignored his dressing-gown and pulled on the previous day’s clothes without showering, then crept out of the bedroom and closed the door as quietly as he could. Not that it was really necessary: his wife could have slept through a nuclear war.

  Down in the kitchen he brewed some coffee, a whole jug, strong. It wasn’t good for him, but just then he didn’t give a damn about his health.

  He ended up sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the wall of the house next door. He had never had a sea view, no matter what the Light of Truth claimed.

  There was a cold draught over the floor and his feet were frozen – he’d never got used to it. He had sat there with his morning coffee for thirty years, and for at least nine months out of twelve he had to rub his feet against each other to warm them up. Adding extra insulation would mean pulling up the pine floor that dated back to 1912, and his wife was opposed to that. The house, in spite of everything, was mostly hers. She had grown up there, and had only ever lived in one other place: his two-room flat, the bathroom on the other side of the courtyard, in the outer reaches of Södermalm, for a few years in the early 1980s before they had bought her parents’ place and installed themselves in Saltsjöbaden for good. She wanted their children to grow up there, so they could have the same peaceful childhood she had had, as the only child of two ageing parents (they had been forty and forty-eight when she was born: ancient in those days). His eyes came to rest on the built-in kitchen cabinets – as much of the original furnishings as possible had been kept during the renovation.

  They had never had any children. Today they might have tried IVF or considered adoption, maybe even surrogacy, but it had never really felt terribly important. Not to him, anyway. They had each other, he had always been very focused on his work, she had her job at the health centre and all her friends from childhood, the cultural association, the theatre group, the book club and her Pilates class on Tuesday evenings.

  They had had a good life, a fantastic life, together.

  His salary from the Wennergren family had been the icing on the cake. He had to admit that the Light of Truth was correct on that point: he had sold his soul to buy the house on the island.

  Well, maybe not sold: he still had his soul (or part of it), and just rented it out to make the best of things at the Evening Post. He believed in democracy and freedom of expression, because what was the alternative? State-produced media definitely had its place, and he had done good, respectable work during his many years at Swedish Television, but without commercial competition all state-run media soon succumbed to the tyranny of power.

  He had done Sweden a favour when he’d taken up his post as legally accountable publisher on behalf of the Wennergren family.

  He cautiously drank the dregs of his coffee. His stomach was burning ominously. Maybe he should try to eat something.

  He glanced towards the alcove behind the staircase, his study.

  Should he take a look now, or wait until he got to the office?

  He had received a few requests for interviews the previous day, all of which he had ignored. Hopefully, that would stop his colleagues publishing anything, although it was no guarantee. He hesitated for a moment, then pushed his chair back and went over to the computer. His hands were shaking as he typed in his password, a pulse throbbing in his neck. The office chair nestled snugly at the base of his spine. He went onto the Light of Truth and read the heading of the latest post. The same as yesterday evening. Nothing had happened during the night.

  He breathed out, and felt his shoulders relax.

  Then he leaned forward again and did a search of the established media. The other evening paper was at the top of the list. The result hit him like a punch in the stomach.

  New allegations:

  SCHYMAN LIED HIS WAY TO JOURNALISM PRIZE

  Took bribes to make documentary

  He couldn’t breathe. He got to his feet, staring at the screen. Linette Pettersson and Sven-Olof Witterfeldt, Viola’s embittered business partners, were quoted as reliable and objective experts, not as the interested parties they were. That they had served prison sentences for financial offences was described as an unfortunate consequence of their employment.

  The second result was the professional journal, Noted. They didn’t even bother to hide behind the alibi of ‘new allegations’, and had no hesitation in declaring that the Light of Truth was right:

  Blogger reveals

  SCHYMAN’S BLUFF

  Faked story about missing woman

  The aggrieved faces of Pettersson and Witterfeldt glared out at him from the screen. They claimed they had been ‘waiting twenty years for justice’, although it wasn’t immediately apparent why.

  And then there was the gossip sit
e, mediatime, whose opening page was adorned with a large portrait of him, and the heading:

  BRIBED AND LIED

  Rank hypocrisy laid bare

  He stumbled backwards towards the door and made his way through the hall, stubbing his big toe on the step before he threw up the coffee in the guest toilet.

  *

  Thomas walked with easy strides to Rosenbad’s main entrance. The bag containing his packed lunch hung from his hook, carefully tied on, while his right hand swung slightly with each step he took. Anyone who noticed him would see a civil servant on his way to work in the government chancellery, one of the select few who shaped society, a powerful man who made history every day.

  Unfortunately there weren’t many people to see him at that hour. From the corner of his eye he caught sight of a man in a small vehicle cleaning the streets, someone delivering papers, and a few losers in raincoats pushing shopping trolleys. This was the drawback of sneaking in to work before everyone else, but he still preferred it. His number-one nightmare was bumping into Jimmy Halenius, but he couldn’t bear sitting in that horrible flat any longer. This way he could avoid both the under-secretary of state and the sympathetic glances of his colleagues as he passed their doors in the corridor.

  He always kept his own door closed. Maybe that made his colleagues think he was working on something strictly confidential, but he was well aware that he wasn’t fooling anyone. His crap investigation into international financial crime would be stuffed into some archive somewhere and would never see the light of day. On the one hand, it was obviously a huge waste of taxpayers’ money, but on the other the government was getting off lightly.

  He reached the highly polished chancellery door, fished his passcard out of his right coat pocket with his right hand, slipped it through the reader and tapped in his code. The lock opened with a little click, he took a step backwards, tucked away the card and waited for the door to swing open.

  No one could see he had a hook in place of his left hand. He had pulled a leather glove over the prosthesis, and was wearing the matching glove on his right hand. It hadn’t been easy putting the right glove on with the hook but he had managed it.

  He passed the inner doors, walked up the short flight of steps to the marble foyer, greeting the guard with a light wave of his right hand, then repeated the manoeuvre with the card and code to get to the lifts.

  His own office was on the ground floor, but he always stopped briefly by the lifts. Anyone who saw him standing there would assume he was going up in the building, up to floor five or six, where the minister was based, or even all the way up to the Cabinet Office and the prime minister’s domain at the very top of the building.

  Then he quickly slipped into his own corridor.

  No one else had arrived, just as he had predicted.

  His room was cramped and sparsely furnished. As was everyone else’s, but that was no excuse.

  He put his packed lunch in the little kitchen area he had had installed in one corner: fridge, a small freezer, microwave and coffee machine. It was a practical arrangement. He didn’t have to eat or have coffee out in the communal area, and the cleaner took care of the washing up. After a moment’s hesitation, he decided to have some Roma, one of the stronger coffee capsules.

  With his cup in front of him (on the right, so he could hold and lift it), he sat down at his computer. He used to be pretty good at typing, fast, and his lying bastard of a doctor had said he could learn to do it with the hook, but it was utterly hopeless.

  International financial crime, under investigation for the umpteenth time.

  Yeah, yeah, he knew it was important, a cornerstone in the fight against organized crime. The criminals’ problem wasn’t smuggling drugs/dealing weapons/selling young girls into prostitution (delete as applicable), but making their money legitimate. They couldn’t just walk into a bank with a sack of money and imagine it could be deposited in an account of their choosing: the depositor had to be able to prove that he had acquired the money legally. Every bank and financial institution had now agreed to report suspicious behaviour, even in the Cayman Islands.

  Everyone knew that, and everyone knew how the criminals got round it. (He wasn’t thinking of the simple practice of sending so-called smurfs to pay five hundred dollars at a time into different bank accounts.) Using companies protected by legislation on business confidentiality in various tax havens, such as the aforementioned Cayman Islands or the considerably more convenient Gibraltar, the money was circulated via fake invoices and phoney companies until eventually genuine accounts showed actual money and real profits, possibly some properties built using unregistered labour, the materials bought for cash (the cement supplier had no trouble proving that he had acquired the money in an honest, legal way, because he really had been paid for his cement). Then the properties could be sold and the business would make a profit and, hey presto, the drug smuggler had an account containing money that was pure as the driven snow.

  His task this time was to investigate the best way for police authorities in different countries to communicate in order to stop cross-border financial crime.

  As if that was going to take eighteen months!

  ‘Send an email, for fuck’s sake!’ he felt like shouting. ‘Or pick up the phone and call them!’ If the lazy fuckers learned to speak English, that would be an end to the problem.

  He chuckled to himself – it really was very straightforward. He drank the last of the coffee, then pulled a face: it wasn’t hot enough. He would have to replace the coffee machine: it clearly wasn’t up to the job.

  Then he made himself more comfortable on his chair and surfed the net, checking sites he usually followed, reading up on what had happened in his favourite debates overnight. The thread ‘Gossip about media bitch Annika Bengtzon’ was his favourite site and where he always started. It was on one of the shadier discussion forums, not as well trafficked as the more established ones. And he hadn’t started the thread, which meant that there really were people out there who hated her. Sadly, there wasn’t much activity in it, nothing for at least a week now, even though he had written several posts saying that she was having an affair with an overweight Member of Parliament. No one had picked it up and run with it. That evening he would come up with something juicier, something that would make people react.

  Sophia Grenborg’s Facebook profile had already been updated twice that morning – his former lover seemed to live the whole of her pathetic little life on Facebook. He clicked to like both posts, just to keep her simmering: he could have her back whenever he wanted. She had shown up at the hospital, crying and cradling him and kissing his cheeks until he had pushed her away. He hadn’t wanted her sympathy.

  He checked a few dreary feminist sites, but when he got to the Light of Truth he found reason to pause. The crazy blogger had put together an ambitious summary of that morning’s reactions to his revelations about newspaper editor Anders Schyman, and it was a pretty impressive list. Even the traditional media had jumped on the story now. They were hiding behind phrases like ‘it is being claimed online’ and ‘one critical blog suggests’, but the meaning was clear enough. The most recurrent accusations were that Schyman was a hypocrite, a liar and open to bribes.

  Thomas clicked his way quickly through the list of links. He had to make a real effort not to turn into Gregorius and join in with the discussions, but that would have to wait until he got home. Now that he actually thought about it, it seemed very likely that he might be feeling unwell after lunch.

  There was movement in the corridor as his colleagues began to arrive. He opened his work on the investigation and kept it in the background as he went through the websites.

  The most interesting comments weren’t anonymous, but signed ‘Anne Snapphane’, Annika’s arch-enemy and former friend who was now an editor at mediatime. She had written an account of the editor-in-chief’s hypocrisy that was magnificently sharp and to the point. She described what it was like working at the Even
ing Post, how reporters were pressured to exaggerate and lie (misrepresentation and distortion were described as ‘stylistic matters’), how Schyman had ruled the newsroom using nepotism and an iron fist. She also took the chance to give Annika a passing kicking, describing her as Schyman’s most prominent henchperson, the one most slavishly devoted to the Evening Post’s rancid policies …

  There was a knock on his door, and Thomas jumped so hard that his hook hit the keyboard. He quickly clicked to hide Snapphane’s embittered rant and leaned over his work on the investigation. ‘Come in!’

  Cramne, his boss, put his head round the door. He probably didn’t dare come in – perhaps he thought disability was contagious.

  ‘Hello, old man, how are you?’

  Thomas smiled weakly. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Well, things are moving forward. I’m waiting for a response from the Spaniards …’

  Cramne opened the door a little wider. ‘I mean with you … You were off sick for a few days?’

  He forced himself to swallow the angry retort that was on the tip of his tongue. ‘Just a cold,’ he said. ‘Nothing serious.’

  ‘Do you fancy lunch today? Fairly early? A few of us are thinking of heading to the Opera Bar.’

  Ah, so they’d decided to make a collective show of sympathy towards the cripple. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘That sounds really great, but I’ve got a conference call booked with the Greeks at half past eleven and then …’

  Cramne raised his hands in a gesture that showed he was both disappointed and disingenuously impressed. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Just say the word if it gets postponed or something. Those Greeks do have a tendency not to come up with the goods …’

  Thomas laughed politely at the lame witticism until the door was closed. Then he sighed. Now he was going to have to organize a bloody conference call. What could they discuss this time?