Exposed (10 page)

‘Yes, I know.’ The girl, whose name was Charlotta according to the photograph, sniffed. ‘It’s so awful. We’re all so sad. The rest of us will just have to help each other through this somehow.’

Annika opened her eyes, grabbed her pen and made notes. This was much simpler than she had anticipated.

‘This is what we fear most,’ Charlotta said. ‘This is what young girls like us fear most of all. And now it’s happened to one of our friends, one of us. We have to do something about it.’

She had stopped sniffing and sounded pretty perky. Annika carried on taking notes.

‘Is this something you and your friends have talked about?’

‘Yes, of course it is. But no one actually thought it would happen to one of us. You never think that’s going to happen,’ she said.

‘Did you know Josefin well?’

Charlotta sniffed again, a dry, deep sigh.

‘She was my best friend,’ she said.

Annika could tell she was lying.

‘What was Josefin like?’

Charlotta had her answer ready.

‘Always happy, always kind,’ she said. ‘Helpful, fair, good at school. Liked going to parties. Yes, I think you could say that …’

Annika listened in silence.

‘Do you want a picture of me?’ Charlotta asked.

Annika looked at the time. Out to Täby and back, then tidying up the picture – no, it would be too tight.

‘Not tonight,’ Annika said. ‘The paper’s going to press soon. Can I call you again tomorrow?’

‘Of course, or you can call my mobile.’

Annika jotted down the number. She leaned her head on her hand and thought. Josefin still felt unfocused, distant. She had no real idea of what the dead woman was actually like.

‘What did Josefin want to do with her life?’ she asked.

‘What do you mean, do? She wanted, well, you know, to have a family, a job, and all that,’ Charlotta said.

‘Where did she work?’

‘Work?’

‘Yes, which restaurant?’

‘Oh, yes, um, I don’t know.’

‘She’d moved to Stockholm, to Dalagatan. Did you ever visit her there?’

‘On Dalagatan? No …’

‘Do you know why she moved?’

‘I suppose she must have wanted to live in the city …’

‘Did she have a boyfriend?’

Charlotta didn’t answer. Annika understood. The girl didn’t actually know Josefin well at all.

‘Well, thanks for letting me bother you in the middle of the night,’ Annika said.

After that there was just one more call she had to make. She looked up ‘Liljeberg’ in the phone book, but there was no Josefin listed at Dalagatan. She didn’t have time to get into the phone book, Annika thought, and dialled Directory Inquiries.

‘No, I haven’t got a Liljeberg at Dalagatan sixty-four,’ the woman said.

‘It might be a completely new listing,’ Annika said.

‘I can see all the lines that were connected up to yesterday.’

‘Is it possible that she was ex-directory?’

‘No,’ the Telia woman said. ‘I’d still have been able to see the information. Could the account have been under a different name?’

Annika leafed helplessly through the printouts. She found Josefin’s mother. ‘Liljeberg Hed, Siv Barbro.’

‘Hed,’ she said. ‘Can you check if there’s anyone called Hed listed at Dalagatan sixty-four?’

The woman looked.

‘Yes, a Barbro Hed. Could that be the one?’

‘Yes, that’s it,’ Annika said.

She dialled the number without pausing to think. At the fourth ring a man answered.

‘Is this Josefin’s number?’ Annika wondered.

‘Who is it?’ the man asked.

‘My name’s Annika Bengtzon, and I’m calling from—’

‘Bloody hell, you keep popping up all over the place,’ the man said, and now Annika recognized the voice.

‘Q!’ she said. ‘What are you doing there?’

‘What the hell do you think I’m doing? And how did you get hold of this number? Even we haven’t got it!’

‘It took a lot of work,’ Annika said. ‘I called Directory Inquiries. What have you found out?’

The man gave a tired sigh. ‘Look, I haven’t got time for this right now,’ he said, and hung up.

Annika smiled. At least she had the right number. And now she could say that the police had been searching Josefin’s flat during the night.

‘Okay, I need to know what you’ve got,’ Jansson said, sitting down on her desk.

‘This is what I’m working on,’ she said, and did a rough outline in her notebook.

Jansson nodded, pleased, and jogged back to his own desk.

Then she wrote her article about who Josefin was, the ambitious vicar’s daughter who dreamed of becoming a journalist. She wrote another piece about her death, her eyes, her screams, her chewed hand, how upset her friend was. She left out the silicone breasts. She wrote about the police hunt, the missing clothes, her last hours, the distraught man who had made the call, local resident Daniella Hermansson’s worries, and the press spokesman’s plea: ‘We have to stop this madman.’

‘This is really good,’ Jansson said. ‘Great style, full of concrete facts. God, you’re good!’

Annika had to get away from him quickly. She was no good at taking criticism, and even worse at accepting praise. She was superstitious about the magic
that seemed to be responsible for forming her articles. If she started to believe in praise, maybe the bubble would burst.

‘Come on, let’s go and have some hot chocolate before you go home,’ Berit said.

The minister was crossing the Bergnäs Bridge in Luleå. An old American car was cruising towards him, top folded down, with some ageing drunks hanging over the car doors. Apart from them he couldn’t see a single person.

Once he had turned into the narrow streets behind the green-plated bulk of the social services building he breathed out. The noise and whining had followed him for almost a thousand kilometres. Now it was almost over.

He parked the car outside the rental office and sat and enjoyed the silence for a moment. He could still hear whistling in his left ear. He was so tired he thought he was going to be sick. But he had no option. He sighed and climbed out of the car on stiff legs. He glanced quickly around him, then urinated behind the car.

The bags were heavier than he had expected. I’m not going to manage this, he thought. He walked up the main street, passing the police station, until he reached the old residential district of Östermalm. He could just make out his own house behind the birch trees, the hand-blown glass of the windows sparkling. The children’s bicycles lay abandoned by the veranda. The bedroom
window was open; he smiled as he saw the curtain sway in the breeze.

‘Christer …?’

His wife looked up at him, startled, as he crept into the bedroom. He hurried over to the bed and sat down beside her, stroking her hair and giving her a kiss.

‘Sleep a bit longer, darling,’ he whispered.

‘What time is it?’

‘Quarter past four.’

‘Was the drive okay?’

‘Yes, fine. Get some more sleep.’

‘And the trip went well?’

He hesitated.

‘I brought back some Azerbaijani cognac,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we’ve tried that before, have we?’

She didn’t answer, just pulled him to her and unbuttoned his trousers.

The sun had risen, hanging like an overripe orange just above the horizon, shining right in her face. It was already hot, at half past four in the morning. Annika was giddy with tiredness. Gjörwellsgatan was completely empty, and she followed the central traffic markings towards the bus-stop. She slumped down on the bench, her legs quite exhausted.

She’d seen the draft of the front page on Jansson’s computer before she left. It was dominated by Josefin’s graduation picture and the headline: S
EX KILLING IN CEMETERY
. She had written the front-page blurb with Jansson. Her articles were spread across pages six, seven, eight, nine and twelve. She had filled more columns tonight than in the whole of her first seven weeks on the paper put together.

Well, that worked, she thought. I managed to do it.

She leaned her head back against the Plexiglas of
the bus-stop and closed her eyes, breathing deeply and concentrating on the sounds of traffic. There wasn’t much, and it was far off in the distance. She was on the point of nodding off when she was woken up by a hysterical bird calling from inside the embassy compound.

Some time passed before she realized that she had no idea if a bus was coming. She got stiffly to her feet and checked the timetable. The first number 56 wasn’t due until 07.13 on Sunday mornings, and that was two and a half hours away. She let out a loud groan. There was nothing for it, she’d just have to walk.

After a few minutes she’d built up a bit of speed. It didn’t actually feel too bad. Her legs were moving automatically, making waves in the air around her. She followed the ramp from the Western Bridge towards Fridhemsplan. As she reached the Drottningholm road the vegetation loomed up ahead of her. Kronoberg Park was backlit, and looked oppressively dark. She knew she had no choice: she had to go up there again.

The cordons had been removed. Only the railings themselves still had plastic tape on them. She walked up to the iron gate, her fingers tracing the metallic curve of the padlock. The sun had reached the crowns of the lime trees, making the leaves glow.

She must have got here at about this time of day, Annika thought. She would have seen the same sun making the same patterns in the leaves. How fragile everything is. How quickly it can all change.

Annika walked round the cemetery and emerged on the eastern side, her hand dancing along the curves and bows of the railings. Her legs gave way and she slumped softly onto the grass. Without her consciously realizing it, she was in tears. They ran silently down
her cheeks and fell onto her crumpled skirt. She leaned her forehead against the railings, sobbing gently and quietly.

‘How did you know her?’

Annika flew up. Her arms flailing, she slipped on the grass and landed hard on the base of her spine.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.’

The young woman talking to her was red-eyed and messy from crying. She spoke with a faint but noticeable accent. Annika stared at her.

‘I … Not at all. I never met her. But I saw her when she was lying here. She was dead.’

‘Where?’ the young woman said, taking a step closer.

Annika pointed. The woman went over and looked down in silence for a minute or so. Then she sat down on the grass next to Annika, facing away from the cemetery, her back against the railings.

‘I saw her too,’ she said, fiddling with the hem of her blouse.

Annika looked for something to blow her nose on in her bag.

‘I saw her at the mortuary. It was her. She looked okay, fine really.’

Annika gulped and stared at the woman once more. Good grief! This was Josefin’s flatmate, the girl who had identified her. They must have been really good friends.

She found herself thinking of tomorrow’s front page of the
Evening Post
and suddenly felt ashamed. It made her start crying again.

The woman beside her started to sniff as well.

‘She was lovely, wasn’t she?’ the woman said. ‘She could be really lazy, but she never meant anyone any harm.’

‘I never knew her,’ Annika said, blowing her nose on a page torn from a pad of paper. ‘I work for a newspaper, I’ve written about Josefin.’

The woman looked at Annika.

‘Josie wanted to be a journalist,’ she said. ‘She wanted to write about children in trouble.’

‘She could have ended up working at the
Evening Post,’
Annika said.

‘What have you written?’

Annika took a deep breath, hesitating for a moment. Every trace of satisfaction she had felt about her articles had vanished. She wanted the ground to open up and swallow her.

‘That she was killed in a sex attack in the cemetery,’ she said quickly.

The woman nodded and looked away.

‘I warned her about this,’ she said.

Annika, busy screwing the paper into a little ball, stiffened.

‘What do you mean?’

The woman wiped her face with the back of her hand.

‘Joachim was no good for her,’ she said. ‘He was always hitting her. She could never do anything right in his eyes. She always had bruises. It sometimes caused trouble at work. I kept saying she ought to leave him, but she never did.’

Annika was listening wide-eyed.

‘Bloody hell!’ she said. ‘Have you told the police?’

The woman nodded, pulling a handkerchief from her pocket and blowing her nose.

‘I get awful hay fever,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got any antihistamines?’

Annika shook her head apologetically.

‘I should go home,’ the young woman said, standing
up. ‘I’m working again tonight, so I’d better get some sleep.’

Annika stood up as well, brushing the grass from her skirt.

‘Do you really think it could have been her boyfriend?’ she said.

‘He used to tell Josie he’d end up killing her one day,’ the young woman said, as she set off along Parkgatan.

Annika stared towards the graves with an entirely new feeling in her gut. Her boyfriend? Then the case ought to be solved pretty quickly.

Suddenly she realized that she didn’t know the young woman’s name.

‘Sorry, but what’s your name?’ she called across the park.

The young woman stopped and called back: ‘Patricia!’

Then she turned and disappeared towards Fleminggatan.

Annika had already reached her front door when she remembered that she had promised to feed Anne Snapphane’s cats. She groaned, then made a snap decision. The cats would probably survive, and the issue was really whether or not she would if she didn’t get some sleep soon. On the other hand, it wasn’t more than a couple of hundred metres away, and she had promised, after all. She hunted through her bag and found Anne’s keys at the bottom, stuck to a piece of old chewing-gum.

I’m just too damn nice, she thought.

As she went up the steps from Pipersgatan to Kungsklippan she could feel her legs getting weaker and weaker. And the bottom of her spine ached from the fall in the park.