Exposed (28 page)

Patricia, Annika thought. She worked out that I wouldn’t be able to get in, so she wedged this in the lock.

She went up the stairs, they seemed endless. There was an envelope taped to the outside of her door, and the keys inside rattled as she pulled it off.

Annika unlocked the door. A fresh smell of detergent hit her, and the curtains were waving dramatically in the draught. She pulled the door shut behind her and all the curtains fell still. She walked slowly through the rooms, looking round.

Patricia had cleaned the whole flat apart from Annika’s bedroom. That was just as messy as usual. The fridge was full of different cheeses, olives, hummus, strawberries, and on the worktop there were plums, grapes and avocados.

I’ll never be able to eat all this before it goes off, Annika thought. Then it hit her: There are two of us here now.

She nudged open the door to the little maid’s room. Patricia’s mattress lay neatly in one corner, made up with flowery linen. Beside it was a sports bag full of clothes. On one wall hung Josefin’s pink dress.

I want to stay, she thought. I don’t want to go back to Hälleforsnäs. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in Lyckebo.

That night she dreamed of the three men from the
Studio Six
radio programme for the first time – the presenter, the reporter and the commentator. They were standing in silence, dark and faceless beside her bed. She could feel their cold, watchful antagonism like cramp in her stomach.

‘How can you say it was my fault?’ she shouted.

The men came closer.

‘I’ve really thought about this! Maybe I got things wrong, but at least I tried!’

The men tried to shoot her. The noise of their guns thundered through her head.

‘I’m not Josefin! No!’

They bent over her in unison, and as their ice-cold breath reached her consciousness she woke up to the sound of her own screams.

It was pitch black in the room. It was raining torrentially outside. The thunder and lightning came at precisely the same time. The bedroom window was banging in the wind, and the room felt cool.

She staggered up to close the window, the wind making it hard to fasten. In the silence after the rain she felt a trickle down her leg. She had got her period. The box of tampons was empty, but she had a few sanitary towels in her bag.

As the storm passed overhead she lay and cried, curled up into a little ball, for a very long time.

Anders Schyman got completely soaked over the short distance to his car. The rain was pouring down with furious force, trying to make up for all those boiling-hot days in one single, torrential downpour. The head editor swore and tried to wriggle out of his jacket as he sat wedged behind the steering wheel. The back and shoulders of his shirt were wet through as well.

‘Oh, it’ll soon dry,’ he said to himself.

His efforts to get his jacket off had made the windows steam up, so he set the heater on full.

His wife was waving from the kitchen window, and he wiped the side window and blew her a kiss, then sighed and headed towards the city. He could hardly see the road, even though the windscreen wipers were going at top speed. And he kept having to wipe the condensation from the windows to be able to see anything at all.

Traffic was moving relatively smoothly on the main road from Saltsjöbaden, but as soon as he hit the suburb of Nacka everything ground to a halt. An accident on the Värmdö motorway was causing mile-long tailbacks of motionless traffic. He groaned out loud. Traffic fumes were rising like fog through the rain. In the end he switched off the engine and set the air-conditioning to recycle the air inside the car.

He was having trouble getting to grips with the
Evening Post
. He’d been reading it scrupulously for four months now, since he first received the offer to take over day-to-day responsibility for its content. A lot of it was pretty obvious, of course, such as the way the paper was always balancing on the edge of what was morally and ethically defensible. That’s what a tabloid was supposed to do. Sometimes they crossed the line, but not very often, when it came down to it. He had studied reports and judgements from the Press Complaints Commission and the press ombudsman, and naturally the evening papers featured heavily in the statistics. They had far more complaints made against them than the other papers, which was entirely understandable. Their purpose was to be provocative and encourage debate. Even so, only a handful of rulings went against them each year. He was surprised to discover that the list of libellous articles was usually topped by the local press, small papers around the country that often seemed to have trouble working out where the boundaries were.

He had come to the conclusion that the
Evening Post
was a responsible media organization, and that its articles, flysheets and headlines were well judged, and were based on continuity, openness and discussion.

But he had already discovered that reality was light-years away from this idealized vision.

The
Evening Post
often didn’t have a fucking clue what it was doing. Sending that young temp out to deal with bodies and lynch-mobs, for instance, and expecting her to somehow be able to make clear and responsible decisions. He had spoken to the head of news and the night-editor the previous evening, and neither of them had actually discussed the paper’s coverage of the murder of Josefin Liljeberg with her. He regarded this as a prime
example of editorial incompetence and irresponsibility.

Then there was the peculiar story of the feminist terrorist group. No one in a position of any authority appeared to know where the story had come from. A temp waltzed into the newsroom with sensational pictures, and everyone was ecstatic and published them without a moment’s thought.

It couldn’t go on like this. If you’re going to balance successfully on the boundary of what was morally and ethically defensible, you had to know where that boundary lay. Disaster was only a short step away, and he had already felt its sour breath. That radio programme the previous evening,
Studio Six
, was only the first sign. The
Evening Post
was on the way to becoming a real target. If any blood was actually shed, the vultures would soon gather. Others in the media would start to tear the paper to shreds. And then it wouldn’t matter what the paper published, because it would all be seen as inaccurate and unreliable. If they didn’t get their act together soon, they were heading for disaster – in terms of sales, journalism and finances.

He sighed. The traffic started to move again in the lane next to him. He started the car, letting it run in neutral with the handbrake on.

There was no doubt that the paper employed a large number of very knowledgeable and capable people. The problems lay with the management team: there was no real sense of context, no notion of who was responsible for what. Every journalist on the paper had to know exactly what their job was, and what was expected of them. Their targets had to be made clearer.

This had made him realize yet another of his responsibilities in the newsroom. He would have to be the one who steered them all away from disaster. He would have to shine a spotlight on what the dangers
were, through discussions, seminars, daily meetings and new routines.

The cars to his left were sweeping past faster and faster, but he still wasn’t moving. He swore and tried to look behind him, but couldn’t see a thing. In the end he put his indicator on and pulled out regardless. The driver he forced to brake blew his horn.

‘Oh, get a life,’ he muttered at the rear-view mirror.

And the traffic stopped again. The lane next to him, the one he had been stuck in, began to move and was soon going nicely.

He leaned his head on the wheel and let out a loud groan.

Annika peered carefully inside the maid’s room. Patricia was asleep. She closed the door quietly, put some coffee on without making a noise, and went out for the morning paper. She tossed it onto the table, and by coincidence it fell open at the review of yesterday’s radio programmes. Annika’s eyes were drawn to the article, and she read the reviewer’s verdict with a growing sense of nausea.

Annika grabbed the paper and screwed it into a ball, then rammed it into the bin. Then she went into the living room and phoned to cancel her subscription.

She tried to eat half an avocado, but the green flesh seemed to swell in her mouth, making her feel sick. She
tried a few strawberries, but they had the same effect. Coffee and orange juice went down okay, but she threw out the rest of the avocado and a few more strawberries so Patricia would think she’d eaten something. Then she wrote a note saying that she was going down to Hälleforsnäs for the weekend. She wondered to herself whether she would ever be coming back. If not, Patricia could take over the flat. After all, she’d need it.

When she opened the door to the courtyard the rain hit her like a wall. She stood there for a moment staring out at it. She could hardly see the building facing the street behind the curtain of rain.

Perfect, she thought. There won’t be anyone about. No one will see me. Mum won’t have to feel ashamed of me.

She walked out into the downpour and was soaked before she’d even got to the bins. She threw away the half-full bag containing the paper, strawberries and avocado, then walked slowly towards the underground.

You reach a point where you just can’t get any wetter, she thought. She remembered that from some film she’d seen.

At the Central Station she discovered she was going to have to wait almost two hours for the next train to Flen. She sat down on one of the benches in the large, well-lit hall. The sound of passengers, trains, the electronic voices from the loudspeakers, everything merged into a cacophony of urban chaos.

Annika closed her eyes and let the sounds flow through her brain. They made her want to cry. After a while she felt cold, and went into the toilet, where she stood next to the hand-dryer until the other women started to get annoyed.

At least they’ve got no idea who I am, she thought. They don’t know that I’m the failure from the radio. Thank goodness I never got that picture byline.

The train was a small, local one that was soon packed. She ended up opposite a fat bloke who was wet with rain and sweat. He took out a copy of that day’s
Evening Post
and Annika tried not to look at it.

Berit had managed to get the speaker of parliament to admit his involvement in the IB affair.

I did my military service with Elmér
, he said on the front page.

Oh well, she thought. None of my business any more.

At Flen she had to wait another hour for the bus to Hälleforsnäs. The rain was still bucketing down, and a big pool of water had gathered on the road in front of the bus-stop. She sat in the station waiting room facing the wall, trying to avoid any form of contact with other people.

It was afternoon by the time the bus pulled up at the bottom of her road. The deserted supermarket car park was covered in puddles. No one saw her get off the bus. She felt tired and shaky as she headed to her flat on legs that ached from her run the day before.

Her flat was gloomy and smelled of dust. Without turning on any lights she pulled off all her wet clothes and crept into bed. She was asleep in minutes.

‘It’s only a matter of time,’ the Prime Minister said.

The press officer protested. ‘We can’t be sure of that. No one ever knows when they’ll decide to chase another story instead.’

The press officer knew what he was talking about. He had been one of Sweden’s toughest and most experienced political reporters. Nowadays his role was
to direct media coverage to the advantage of the Social Democrats. Together with a couple of election strategists from the US, he was one of the most influential figures in the governing party’s election campaign. The Prime Minister knew he voted for the opposition.

‘I have to confess, I’m worried,’ the Prime Minister said. ‘I don’t think we should just leave this to chance.’

The thickset man stood up and walked restlessly over to the window. The rain hung like a wet curtain outside, blocking the view over Riddarfjärden. The press officer intruded on his thoughts.

‘You shouldn’t stand there worrying in full view of the outside world,’ he said. ‘Pictures like that make excellent illustrations of a government in crisis.’

The Prime Minister backed anxiously away from the window. His bad mood was getting worse and he turned sharply to face the Minister for Foreign Trade.