Exposed (5 page)

The man and woman from the police van opened the back doors and pulled out a collapsible trolley. They opened it out with calm, practised movements, and secured the various fastenings. Annika felt the hairs on her arms stand up. A bubble of carbon dioxide rose from her stomach, making her feel queasy. They were about to bring the body out. She was ashamed at her morbid curiosity.

‘Can you move aside, please?’ the woman pushing the trolley said.

Annika looked at the trolley as it rolled past. It shook as the wheels rattled over the rough pavement. On top was a neatly folded blue-stippled plastic sheet. The shroud, Annika thought, and a cold shiver went up her spine.

The pair crept under the cordon. The orange ‘Keep Out’ sign hanging from it carried on swinging long after they had passed.

They had reached the body. The little group stood there, discussing what to do. Annika could feel the sun on the back of her arms.

‘Why is it taking so long?’ she said in a stage whisper to Berit.

Berit didn’t answer. Annika pulled the Coke from her bag and took a few sips.

‘Isn’t it awful?’ the woman from
Sydsvenskan
said.

‘Yes, isn’t it?’ Annika said.

As the plastic sheet was spread over the trolley, it fluttered behind the foliage. They lifted the young woman onto the trolley and covered her in plastic. Suddenly Annika felt tears pricking her eyes. She saw the woman’s soundless scream, her clouded eyes, bruised chest.

I mustn’t start crying, she thought, staring at the worn headstones. She tried to read names and dates, but the inscriptions were in Hebrew. The ornate letters had been almost completely worn away by time and weather. Suddenly everything was very quiet. Even the traffic on the Drottningholm road seemed to have stopped for a moment. The sun filtering through the heavy treetops danced over the granite.

This cemetery was here before the city, Annika thought. And these trees were already here when the dead were buried. They would have been smaller, less sturdy, but their leaves would have cast the same shadows when the graves were freshly dug.

The gates opened, the photographers got to work. One of them forced his way past Annika, elbowing her in the stomach and making her gasp. She stumbled backwards in shock, and lost sight of the trolley. She took a few quick steps back towards the van.

I wonder which end her head is, Annika thought. They’d hardly push her feet first, would they?

The photographers followed the trolley along the length of the cordon. The cameras were clicking in an uneven rhythm, and one or two flashes went off. Bertil Strand was jumping about behind his colleagues, holding his camera either above them or between them. Annika was holding tight to the door of the van, the hot metal burning her fingers. Through the flashes she watched the bundle containing the woman’s body come
closer. The van driver stopped just a foot or so away from her. As he fiddled with the catches on the trolley, Annika could see how sweaty and stressed he was. She looked down at the plastic.

I wonder if the sun has kept her warm, she thought.

I wonder who she is.

I wonder if she knew she was about to die.

I wonder if she had time to feel scared.

Suddenly the tears started to fall. She let go of the van door, turned and took a step back. The ground felt unsteady, and she thought she was going to be sick.

‘It’s the smell, and the heat,’ Berit said, suddenly appearing at Annika’s side. She put an arm round her shoulders and led her away from the van.

Annika wiped away her tears.

‘Right, time to get back to the newsroom,’ Berit said.

Patricia woke up feeling stifled. There was no air in the room, she couldn’t breathe. Gradually she became aware of her own body on the mattress, completely naked. When she raised her left arm, sweat ran down her ribs and into her navel.

God, she thought. I have to get some air! And water!

She thought about calling for Josefin, but something made her decide not to. The flat was completely quiet, so either Josie was still asleep or she’d already gone out. Patricia groaned and rolled over, wondering what time it was. Josefin’s black curtains shut out the daylight, leaving the room in gloomy darkness. It smelled of sweat and dust.

‘It’s a bad omen,’ Patricia had said when Josefin came home with the heavy black material. ‘You can’t have black curtains. It means the windows are in mourning. It gets in the way of positive energy.’

Josefin had just got cross.

‘That’s crap,’ she had said. ‘Okay, go without, then. But I want my room to be dark. How the fuck are we going to work nights if we never get any sleep? Any better ideas?’

Naturally, Josefin had got her way, like she usually did.

Patricia sat up with a sigh. The bottom sheet had wound itself up into a damp umbilical cord running down the middle of the bed. Suddenly annoyed, she tried to straighten it out.

It’s Josie’s turn to go shopping, she thought, so there probably isn’t any food in the house.

She got up and went to the bathroom. Then she put on Josie’s dressing-gown and went back to her room to open the curtains. The light hit her eyes like metal spikes, and she quickly closed the curtains again. Instead she opened one of the windows wide, wedging a flowerpot to stop it from slamming shut. The air outside was hotter than indoors, but at least it didn’t smell.

She wandered slowly out to the kitchen, filled a beer glass with tap water and drank greedily. She felt better straight away. At least she hadn’t slept the whole day away, even though she’d been working till five that morning. She put the glass on the draining board, between an empty pizza box and three mugs containing dried-up teabags. Josie was hopeless at cleaning. Patricia sighed and started to tidy up, throwing away the rubbish and doing the washing-up without really thinking about it.

She was on her way to have a shower when the phone rang.

‘Is Josie there?’

It was Joachim. Without realizing she was doing it, Patricia straightened up and made an effort to sound together.

‘I’m only just up, I don’t actually know. She might still be asleep.’

‘Would you mind getting her? Thanks.’ His tone of voice was curt but friendly.

‘En seguida
, Joachim. Hang on a moment …’

She padded along the hall to Josefin’s room and knocked gently on the door. When there was no answer she carefully pushed it open. The bed was just as it had been before Patricia went to work. She hurried back to the phone.

‘No, sorry; she must have gone out.’

‘Where? Is she meeting someone?’

Patricia laughed nervously. ‘No, of course not; unless she’s gone to see you? I don’t know. It’s her turn to do the shopping …’

‘But she definitely came home last night?’

Patricia tried to sound indignant. ‘Of course she did. Where else would she sleep?’

‘Exactly, Patty. Any ideas?’

He had already hung up by the time Patricia realized how annoyed she was. She hated it when he called her that. He only did it to humiliate her. He didn’t like the fact that she came between him and Josefin.

Patricia went slowly back to Josefin’s bedroom and peered in. The bed looked exactly as it had the previous evening, the duvet on the floor to the left of the bed, and Josefin’s red bathing suit on the pillow.

Josie hadn’t come home last night.

The realization made her very uneasy.

The air of the newspaper’s lobby hit the staff like a cold, wet flannel. The moisture in the air was making the marble floor shine, as well as the bronze bust of the paper’s founder. Annika shivered as her teeth began to chatter. Behind the glass of the receptionist’s booth, Tore Brand, one of the caretakers, was in a bad mood.

‘It’s all right for you,’ he called as the little group went towards the lifts. ‘You can go outside and thaw every now and then. It’s so cold in here that I’ve had to bring in one of the car-heaters to stop my feet freezing.’

Annika tried to smile, but couldn’t summon up the energy. Unlike most people, Tore Brand was having to wait until August for his holiday this year, and he seemed to regard this as a personal insult.

‘I have to go to the toilet,’ Annika said. ‘I’ll catch you up.’

As she went past Tore Brand’s little booth she could tell he had been smoking on duty again. After a moment’s hesitation, she went into the disabled toilet rather than the ladies’. She wanted to be alone, not to have to jostle with other sweaty women at the hand-basins.

Tore Brand’s complaints followed her into the toilet. She locked the door and looked at her reflection in the
mirror. She really did look terrible. Her face was blotchy and her eyes red. She turned the mixer tap to cold, bent over, pulled up her hair and let the cold water run over her neck. The porcelain was ice-cold against her forehead. A trickle of water ran down her spine.

Why on earth am I doing this? she thought. Why aren’t I lying in the sun by a lake up in Norrbotten reading a trashy magazine?

She pressed the red button on the dryer and held the neck of her top open, trying to dry her armpits. It didn’t really work.

Anne Snapphane’s chair was empty when Annika got back to the newsroom. There were two dirty mugs on her desk, but the Coca-Cola had gone. Annika assumed that Anne had been sent out on a job.

Berit was talking to Spike over by the newsdesk. Annika sank onto her chair and let her bag fall to the floor. She felt dizzy and exhausted.

‘Well, how was it?’ Spike called, looking at her expectantly.

Annika struggled to pull out her notepad and went over to him.

‘Young, naked, plastic tits,’ she said. ‘A lot of make-up. She’d been crying. No signs of decomposition, so she couldn’t have been there long. No clothes nearby, as far as I could tell.’

She looked up from her pad. Spike was nodding encouragingly.

‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘Any terrified neighbours?’

‘One twenty-nine-year-old mum called Daniella. She’s never walking through the park at night again. She said: “It could have been me”.’

Spike was making notes, nodding approvingly.

‘Do they know who she is?’

Annika pressed her lips together and shook her head. ‘Not as far as we know.’

‘We’ll just have to hope they release her name sometime this evening. You didn’t see anything else – anything that might give an idea of where she lived, anything like that?’

‘What, like the address tattooed on her forehead, you mean? Sorry …’

Annika smiled, but Spike didn’t respond.

‘Okay. Berit, you take the police hunt for the killer, who the girl was, and check out the relatives. Annika, you do the scared mum and check the cuttings about the old murder.’

‘I think we’ll have to do a lot of this together,’ Berit said. ‘Annika has information from the scene that I haven’t got.’

‘Do what you want. I need you to brief me on how far you’ve got before I go to the handover meeting at six o’clock.’

He spun round on his chair, picked up the phone and dialled a number. Berit shut her notepad and went over to her desk.

‘I’ve got the cuttings,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘We can go through them together.’

Annika took a chair from the next desk. Berit pulled out a bundle of yellowing files from an envelope marked ‘Eva murder’. Evidently it had happened before the paper’s files were computerized.

‘Anything more than ten years old only exists in hard copy,’ Berit said.

Annika picked up one file. The paper felt stiff and brittle. She glanced through it. The typeface of the headline looked spiky and old-fashioned, and the print quality wasn’t good. A black-and-white picture of the north side of the park stretched across four columns.

‘I was right,’ Berit said. ‘She was on her way up that flight of steps, and halfway up she met someone on their way down. And that was as far as she got. The case was never solved.’

They sat on either side of Berit’s desk, immersed in the old articles. Annika noted that Berit had written a lot of them. The murder of young Eva was very similar to the new case.

One warm summer’s evening twelve years before, Eva had been on her way up the steep slope at the end of Inedalsgatan. She was found right next to the seventieth step, half naked and strangled.

There were a lot of articles right after the event, at the top of their pages, with big pictures. There were reports from the murder inquiry and the coroner’s findings, interviews with neighbours and friends, one article entitled, L
EAVE US ALONE
. It was about Eva’s parents, pleading, their arms round each other as they stared at the camera. There were articles about senseless violence, violence against women, violence against young people, a memorial ceremony in Kungsholmen Church, and the mountain of flowers left at the scene.

Why don’t I remember any of this? Annika wondered. I was old enough to have been aware of what was going on.

As time passed, the number of articles dwindled. The pictures got smaller, and they slowly crept down the page. A short piece three and a half years after the murder announced that someone had been taken in for questioning, then released. After that there was nothing.

But now Eva was back in the news again, twelve years later. The similarities were striking.

‘So what do we do with all this?’ Annika asked.

‘A short reference piece, that’s all,’ Berit said. ‘There’s
not much more we can do right now. We’ll write up what we’ve got – you take your young mum and I’ll take Eva. By the time we’ve done that, the crime unit ought to be up to speed and we can start phoning round.’

‘So are we in a rush?’ Annika asked.

‘Not particularly.’ Berit smiled. ‘The final deadline for copy isn’t until four forty-five tomorrow morning. But it would be good it we were ready before that, and we’re off to a good start.’

‘What will they do with these two articles in the paper?’

Berit shrugged. ‘They may not even get in, you can never tell. It depends what else is happening round the world and how much space there is.’

Annika nodded. The number of pages in the paper often determined which articles got in. That was certainly the case on the
Katrineholm Courier
, where she usually worked. In the middle of summer, management often cut back on paper, partly because July was such a bad month for advertising, but also because very little ever happened then. The number of pages always rose or fell in fours, because there were four pages on each print-plate.