Exposed (49 page)

I went out there the next day and discovered twenty-six metres of shelving full of old invoices and other documents. After an hour or so I found it: the order form and receipt from Freys Hyrverk showing that a customer called Rosengren had booked a limo from Café Opera on 4 September 1991 at 3.22 in the morning.

After that everything happened pretty quickly.

Björn Rosengren had clearly not been telling the truth about that night at Tabu, but that wasn’t why he had to resign.

The board of the Confederation of Professional Employees had no idea that he had a contract with Freys. They didn’t know that their chairman, his family, and people at the top of the Social Democratic Party hierarchy had been travelling around for years in limos paid for by the union’s members. And that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

On 19 July 1994, Björn Rosengren resigned as chair of the Confederation of Professional Employees. The press conference where he announced his decision was well-attended, all the main media were there. I saw the union’s head of information go round greeting people: he smiled rather sadly as he shook hands with Peter Bratt from
Dagens Nyheter
and Bengt Michanek from
Aftonbladet
, and then he reached me.

When I said my name his face darkened, contorted with rage. He yanked his hand back and shouted:

‘HAVE YOU ANY IDEA WHAT YOU’VE DONE?!’

I took a couple of steps back and tried to say something,
but before I found the right words he had turned round and was marching off through the room, fuming.

Afterwards I thought a lot about this.

Why was the head of information so angry with me in particular? Bratt had written that Rosengren had been in a sex club. Michanek had written that he had disappeared into a private room with a naked Asian girl. All I had written was that the man had taken a few car journeys.

In the end I reached the conclusion that it was easiest to blame me. I was twenty years younger than the others, and I was also female.

But the worst was yet to come.

Once Björn Rosengren had resigned there was a campaign to distort the truth about the media’s coverage of the case. There was a rumour that Bengt Michanek and I had been the victims of ‘planted’ stories – that we had been tricked or bribed to write our articles. The rumour became more and more widespread until it ended up becoming the established truth.

Worst of all, as usual, was the radio programme
Studio Ett
(Studio One).

I was in Gothenburg, covering the murder of a young woman in a cemetery, when one of the programme’s presenters called me to get me to answer for what I’d done. Then they set loose a whole group of liars who made up stories on the radio.

At that point, Bengt Michanek and I did something that reporters on rival papers never usually do: we met and laid all our cards on the table.

And this is what really happened:

As early as the morning of 4 September, the day after the visit to the Tabu sex club,
Aftonbladet’s
editors already knew the whole story.

The girl with the tie was going out with someone who
worked on the paper, and she told him everything when she got home that morning.

An article was written, about the union boss going to a sex club, and it was considered for publication for several days, but in the end the decision was taken not to publish. The reason was that the story was thought to be too sordid and too private. Björn Rosengren had been drunk and not in full control of his faculties, and there was no public interest in exposing his personal misery.

Three years later, when it came out that he had paid for the whole thing with union money, the story looked completely different. The only problem was that the girl with the tie had moved to the USA and no one knew where she was. It took a couple of weeks to track her down, which was why the article was so slow appearing.

As far as my own articles were concerned, I didn’t speak to a single person about what I was doing or what I was thinking of writing. Not even my news editors knew who I was calling or what I was working on.

No one influenced what I wrote, not even my bosses at the paper. It was all the result of my own initiative, entirely my own work.

Together, Bengt Michanek and I wrote a long article for our union paper,
Journalisten
, where we explained exactly what had really happened. And after that the lies did actually stop.

Everything turned out okay in the end, but afterwards I thought a lot about the forces that had been set in motion during and after Björn Rosengren’s visit to Tabu. It was abundantly clear that men were prepared to do whatever it took to protect their power and influence.

I was able to withstand the pressure heaped upon me because I had been working for ten years and
knew exactly what I was doing. But what would have happened if I had written those articles during my first summer at the paper? How would I have handled the attacks and lies?

These events and thoughts formed the basis for this book,
Exposed
.

When it was first published in Sweden, in 1999, a branch of the Confederation of Professional Employees, the Swedish National Union of Local Government Officers, named me Author of the Year.

It’s funny the way things turn out.

Liza Marklund
Stockholm, April 2011

This is fiction. The
Evening Post
newspaper does not exist, but it bears traces of many different actual media organizations.

The novel’s depiction of Swedish government departments, their areas of responsibility and geographic locations is largely based upon the situation that existed before 1999.

All the characters are entirely the product of the author’s imagination. Any similarities to real people are purely coincidental. However, a number of political figures appear under their real names. These names are taken from historical records of the Social Democratic Party’s espionage on the population of Sweden. The details of this activity depicted in the novel are based on previously published facts. The conclusion of the IB affair and its repercussions as shown in the novel are, however, entirely fictional.

My sources for information about the IB affair are:
Folket i Bild Kulturfront
(People in Focus) no. 9, 1973, by Jan Guillou and Peter Bratt;
Kommunistjägarna
(The Communist Hunters) by Jonas Gummesson and Thomas Kanger (Ordfront förlag);
Aftonbladet
, supplement 3/12 1990, ‘Sanningen om den Svenska neutraliteten’ (The
Truth About Swedish Neutrality), by Jonas Gummesson and Thomas Kanger; item on TV4 News broadcast during the 1998 election campaign.

Information about and interpretation of tarot cards is taken from Gerd Ziegler’s book
Tarot, själens spegel
(Tarot, the Mirror of the Soul) (Vattumannen förlag).

Details concerning the management of a sex club are taken from Isabella Johansson’s biography
En strippas bekännelse
(Confessions of a Stripper).

I would also like to thank the following, who have been kind enough to answer my occasionally bizarre questions: Jonas Gummesson, head of domestic news for TV4, for source material, proofreading and information about Swedish espionage, both domestic and foreign; Dr Robert Grundin of the Department of Forensic Medicine in Stockholm, for an introduction to the work of the department; Sven-Olov Grund, head of the technical unit of Stockholm Police, for his patient explanations of the department’s work; Claes Cassel, press spokesman for the Stockholm Police, for a guided tour of police headquarters; Kaj Hällström, a pattern-maker at Hälleforsnäs foundry, for a tour of the site and for advice on the terminology of forging and blast furnaces; Eva Wintzel, a district prosecutor in Stockholm, for legal advice and analysis; Kersti Rosén, press ombudsman, and Eva Tetzell, section head of the Broadcasting Commission, for advice and analysis of questions of media ethics; Birgitta Wiklund, head of information at the Ministry of Defence information department, for explanations of public access and postal routines within the ministry; Nils-Gunnar Hellgren, departmental secretary in the Foreign Ministry’s courier office, for background and regulations governing diplomatic couriers and bags; Peter Rösch, winner of
the Round Gotland race, for sailing terminology; Olov Karlsson, head editor of TV Norrbotten, for detailed information about Piteå; Maria Hällström and Catarina Nitz for details about Södermanland; Lotta Snickare, head of management training at FöreningsSparbanken, for ongoing creative discussions; Emma Buckley, my fantastic editor at Transworld; my agent Niclas Salomonsson and his staff at Salomonsson Agency.

And, last but not least, Tove Alsterdal, dramatist, who reads everything first of all: a genius sounding-board, reader and critic.

Any mistakes or errors that have crept in are entirely my own.

Name:
Eva Elisabeth Marklund (which only the bank statement calls her. To the rest of the world, she’s Liza).

Family:
Husband and three children.

Home:
A house in the suburbs of Stockholm, and a town-house in southern Spain.

Born:
In the small village of Pålmark in northern Sweden, in the vast forests just below the Arctic Circle.

Drives:
A 2001 Chrysler Sebring LX (a convertible, much more suitable for Spain than Pålmark).

Five Interesting Facts About Liza

1. She once walked from Tel Aviv to London. It took all of one summer, but she made it. Sometimes she hitchhiked as well, sometimes she sneaked on board trains. When her money ran out she took various odd jobs, including working in an Italian circus. Sadly she had to give that up when it turned out she was allergic to tigers.

2. Liza used to live in Hollywood. Not because she wanted to be a film star, but because that was where her
first husband was from. In the early 1980s she had a two-room apartment on Citrus Avenue, a narrow side-street just a couple of blocks from Mann’s Chinese Theatre (the cinema on Hollywood Boulevard with all the stars’ hand and footprints). She moved back to Sweden to study journalism in Kalix.

3. She was once arrested for vagrancy in Athens. Together with fifty other young people from all corners of the world she was locked in a garage full of motorbikes. But Liza was released after just quarter of an hour: she had asked to meet the head of police, commended him on his work, and passed on greetings from her father, the head of police in Stockholm. This was a blatant lie: Liza’s father runs a tractor-repair workshop in Pålmark.

4. Liza’s eldest daughter is an actress and model. Annika, who lends her name to the heroine of Liza’s novels, was the seductress in the film adaptation of Mikael Niemi’s bestseller
Popular Music from Vittula
. Mikael and Liza have also been good friends from the time when they both lived in Luleå in the mid-1980s. Mikael was one of Liza’s tutors when she studied journalism in Kalix.

5. Liza got married in Leningrad in 1986. She married a Russian computer programmer to help him get out of the Soviet Union. The sham marriage worked; he was able to escape, taking his brother and parents with him. Today the whole family is living and working in the USA.

Liza’s Favourites

Book:
History
by Elsa Morante

Film:
Happiness
by Todd Solondz

Modern music: Rammstein (German hard rock)

Classical music: Mozart’s 25th Symphony in G-minor. And his Requiem, of course.

Idols: Nelson Mandela, Madeleine Albright and Amelia Adamo (the Swedish media queen).

Liza’s Top Holiday Destinations

1. North Korea. The most isolated country in the world, and the last iron curtain. Liza has seen it from the outside, looking into North Korea from the South, at the Bridge of No Return on the 38th parallel.

2. Masai Mara, Kenya. Her family co-owns a safari camp in the Entumoto valley.

3. Rarotonga, the main island in Cook archipelago in the South Pacific. The coolest paradise on the planet.

4. Los Angeles. Going ‘home’ is always brilliant.

5. Andalucia in southern Spain. The best climate in Europe, dramatic scenery, fantastic food and excellent wine. Not too far away, and cheap to fly to!

The woman who was soon to die stepped cautiously out of the door and glanced quickly around. The hallway and stairwell behind her were dark, she hadn’t bothered to switch on the lights on her way down. She paused before stepping down onto the pavement, as if she felt she were being watched. She took a few quick breaths and for a few seconds her white breath hung around her like a halo. She adjusted the strap of the handbag on her shoulder and took a firmer grasp of the handle of her briefcase. She hunched her shoulders and set off quickly and quietly towards Götgatan. It was bitterly cold, the sharp wind cutting at her thin nylon tights. She skirted round a patch of ice, balancing for a moment on the kerb of the pavement. Then she hurried away from the street-lamp and into the darkness. The cold and the shadows were muffling the sounds of the night: the hum of a ventilation unit, the cries of a group of drunk youngsters, a siren in the distance.

The woman walked fast, purposefully. She radiated confidence and expensive perfume. When her mobile phone suddenly rang she was thrown off her stride. She stopped abruptly, glancing quickly around her. Then she bent down, leaning the briefcase against
her right leg, and started searching through her handbag. Her movements were suddenly irritated, insecure. She pulled out the phone and put it to her ear. In spite of the darkness and shadows there was no mistaking her reaction. Irritation was replaced by surprise, then anger, and finally fear.